Do you have plenty of warm clothes?

In response to a previous post here Nephew David wrote a question on my wall at Facebook about the probability of serious global cooling. Fortunately Facebook sent me an email about it because I don't know how to get to the damn wall to read what's on it. And I wanted to read what's on it a couple of weeks ago because I got an email that made me think a young gal who should have her mouth washed out with soap also wrote stuff there after seeing my cowboy hat picture, although David told me he didn't see what she wrote when he went to this supposed wall.

Have I mentioned that my cowboy hat picture is the very best child's picture in the known universe. I would post it here, but I don't know how to post pictures here. Facebook is very easy to post pictures on. Maybe too easy, because like, Dude, some of the young folks who have posted pictures there are seriously going to be like embarrassed in ten or twenty or forty years when their like kids and grandkids find those pictures.

Anyway, here's a post by Edward John Craig on National Review's Planet Gore blog that talks about sunspots and the little ice age and why the way out there in the heliosphere scientists think we should be thinking about it. As a surprise bonus it also explains why you have straight black hair if you are one of the so-called "black Irish;" but you have to read kind of between the lines to get the joke about that, and you have to know where Spain is, and what kind of people live in Spain and what kind of people mostly live in Ireland and so forth, headsplittingly boring stuff they don't teach in schools nowadays. Anyway, even if you don't know where Ireland or why Spanish rice is kind of pink the post is very interesting because it explains why you might like freeze your ass off this winter or next winter.

http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTk4YjBkMDk5NDM4Zjk5YmIzN2UxNGVjNTVmMTQ1Mjk=

The Grinches who plan to steal Christmas

Edward John Craig over at NationalReview.com's Planet Gore blog noticed that the Bronx Zoo has cancelled it's Christmas Light display for this Christmas to save energy and supposedly preserve the planet. Treehugger.com says the Wildlife Conservation Society cancelled the Christmas lights because running them for 33 nights used as much electricity as a three person household uses in a year.

Treehugger didn't calculate the effect on all the tens of thousands of children in New York who enjoy the light show and whose lives will be just a little bit poorer for their lack. It also didn't mention that all the thousands of people who won't be going to the zoo on any given evening to see the Christmas lights will either be staying at home on that night with the lights and TV, or they will be out somewhere else doing something that will be using electricity. Finally, Treehugger didn't mention that one of the reasons people who earn enough money to support themselves choose to live in expensive, dangerous, cramped, smelly, ugly and noisy cities is because of the excitement of institutions like zoos and family oriented special events like Christmas lights at the zoo which can only be done when you have lots of people nearby to enjoy them and pay for them.

And, guess what, people who choose to live in dense cities, like the Bronx, are much more efficient users of energy than those of us who have abandoned the cities for all the reasons I listed above. That's because people who live in cities use mass transit a lot more than suburbanites and they tend to live in smaller and more energy efficient homes and apartments than suburbanites. If one or two families out of all the millions of families in New York is pushed over the edge and decides to move to the suburbs because of this kind of stupid, meaningless, self-righteous, nanny-state kind of stuff their decision will probably result in far more energy use and harm to the environment than this dumb decision will save.

Electricity usage is ubiquitous in our modern culture. A far better use of Treehugger's and The Nature Conservancy's time would be to convince people one person at a time to go back to living in caves and cowering in the dark under animal skins from when the sun goes down until it comes up again in the morning.

All treehuggers are not imbeciles, but the folks at The Nature Conservancy who made this decision certainly are. Another thing, I bet they made this decision after a long meeting in an air-conditioned conference room where they drank coffee shipped from South America, tea shipped from India and bottled water shipped from France.