Friday 17 July 2015

The Ice Age Story

There were several news reports this week over a University of Northumbria project, which suggests that in roughly fifteen years.....we will enter a mini Ice Age.

Naturally, this got people hyped up a bit.

The details come mostly from sun activity and cycles.  What they can generally say....is that the sun absolutely has cycles and it's proven over and over by the data that they collect.  Unlike the model data for environmentalists which usually is proven to wrong.....the sun data goes through a cycle and you can note the impact or variations of the cycle.  For a climate change guy.....it's pretty tough work to disprove this stuff.  Naturally, it bothers the climate change folks because this means conflict with carbon efforts and warming efforts.

Naturally, if you got to the point of believing this....then you'd ask a question or two.  If we enter such a harsh winter-like period.....won't we use more carbon to warm ourselves?  Oh my....yes.

What we end up with?  Well....from the 1700s....winters typically started earlier and ended later.  You had a shorter spring and fall.  Heating?  Well....you can figure if you live up in New York or in the upper part of the US.....around twenty-five to fifty percent more heating than you currently use.  This might disturb some folks.

As we get closer to the anticipated period.....my humble guess is that environmentalists and climate change folks will argue that this is related to their mess, and has little to do with the sun.  After a year or two of extremely long and harsh winters.....they will lose the bulk of their believers....IF all of this comes to pass.  I'm not a hundred percent in belief over this, but I tend to believe in history repeating itself, and I know the consequences of the last mini ice age.

My humble suggestion is that you might want to get into some solar heating cells in ten years and wisely invest in more insulation for the house.  It might be worth it.

The Snake Story

I noted this morning in the news.....cops in Austin are saying they have a problem of an unusual nature.  Some kid died, and from the evidence at hand.....they say he had a pet cobra snake.  The snake bit him and he died within minutes.  The snake? Well.....he wandered off.  So far.....no one has found him.  There's an intensive search to be mounted by local authorities on Friday.

From time to time.....you will note news items like this where people build up some collection of dangerous snakes because of a fascination.  Occasionally, they get bit, and some live....some die.  It's a fairly dangerous hobby.

Back around 1984, I was briefly in Colorado and we had this episode to occur with a couple.

Authorities found them dead on some hilltop....mutual suicide deal.  They both had various issues and it didn't take much work to establish facts over the case.  The one odd thing were all these empty canvas bags in the back of the car.  So they went back to the house of the couple and noted these empty glass cages.

Cops asked questions of the neighbors.  The neighbors noted around twenty-odd poisonous snakes in the private collection that the couple held.  All were gone.

What the head cop ended up summarizing for the reporter....was this theory that the couple had released all of these poisonous snakes there on the hilltop....in the midst of the Rockies....into the wild.  This included a couple of cobras.  The snake expert included a comment or two into the story that winters are severe and he didn't have a lot of faith that these particular snakes would survive.  Course, he suggested this......he couldn't be sure.

It's been thirty years since that summer and one has to wonder.....if he was right, or if there's a whole hilltop infested with cobras in Colorado.  One of those things that you'd rather not ask about.