Unhappy New Year for Poor Al

Since the New Year has started, the usual pastime is to re-evaluate where your life priorities are going. Things are looking up for me and mine because, finally, the science is catching up with the rhetoric and the hysteria surrounding global warming. Before I continue, I should disclose that I hold a bachelor's degree from Virginia Tech in Forestry and Wildlife Management. The gist and training involved in this discipline is maintaining a healthy and contributing natural environment, managing all of the forests' assets and maintaining their productivity for the foreseeable future, ususally planning for the next one hundred years. Sensible stweardship and conservation of renewable natural resources is the goal.

I could go on but I refer you to a link on the FOX News webpage, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,318686,00.html. I can tell you from my own humble experience that my little corner of the world is warmed by the sun. We all know sunspots have an effect on our weather. Why wouldn't we look to the sun for any changes in its surface activity when things change here? Real scientific research is reported, repeatable, and not filled with rhetoric or feelings. Just the way we like it.

I sincerely hope none of you are falling for the carbon offset scams that are going around the country. Sit down and think about just what these people are saying to you. They are trying to tell you that by buying a carbon offset that can't be shown to exist, you can feel better about your very existence which, of course, is contributing to global warming. They will show you all kinds of "data". Have you seen Al Gore's travelling maps? The ones that have hundreds of years of data showing no great changes in surface temperature and that end up with a wide spread of a few years so that it looks like the temperatures have sky-rocketed? Don't buy into this! All you'll get out of is is a wise-up lesson in not wasting your money.

It is true that we live on the blue planet, the only living planet in our solar system. Of course there will be changes on its surface. There are changes in its "undersurface" layers too. That's where tsunamis and tidal waves come from, isn't it?

Sleep well this year. You didn't cause global warming. None of us did.