Ski-Blog.com

May 06, 2008

MSNBC Global Warming Story - Penguins in Danger at North Pole

Check at about the 46 second mark. Story about vast expanses of water now present at the North Pole.

I feel sorry for those penguins. Not only are their ice shelves collapsing as evidenced by the dramatic photos used in the story, but they must be extremely lonely SINCE PENGUINS DO NOT LIVE AT THE NORTH POLE, THEY LIVE AT THE SOUTH.

The 15 year old Arctic explorer is kinda cute though. Some kind of fur collared coat wearing Hannah Montana. I like the accent. Her "bum gets cold" when going to the bathroom in the Arctic Circle. And she needed to learn to use a gun to protect against Polar Bears. She would be the bell of the ball at a party in Bitter America where we cling to our guns, except that she is an immigrant and most of us cling to anti-immigrant sentiments.

First, this is problematic because I didn't think Brits were allowed to own or shoot guns. Second, SHOOTING AN EFFING POLAR BEAR? AREN'T THEY ALREADY ABOUT TO ALL DIE FROM GLOBAL WARMING? Sounds like she needs to join the NRA and hunt humans like the rich folks that hunted Ice-T. I want a polar bear coat lined with baby seal fur personally or maybe lined with Eight Belles skin. Shooting Polar bears. My word.

Top notch reporting there MSNBC.

UPDATE:

MSNBC edited the video just about an hour ago. Nice. Solid touch.

Posted by Justin at 12:24 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) | Categories: Politics (Rare), Weather

May 05, 2008

End of SSOL Era in PHX

This article said it best about the PHX Suns and almost made me cry in doing it:

I made my friend Chris Connelly appear on this week's B.S. Report to discuss "critically acclaimed sports teams," following up on a discussion we had right after Game 2 of the Suns-Spurs series, when things were looking bleak for Phoenix and the end of Mike D'Antoni's reign seemed imminent.

"Well, that's OK that they didn't win the title," Connelly cheerfully said at the time. "At least they were critically acclaimed!"

From there, Connelly unleashed his theory of "critically acclaimed" sports teams (check the podcast for the full details) and how these Suns teams would be cheerfully remembered some day like we remember Coryell's Chargers and the Fab Five. In other words, it didn't really matter that they never won a championship, just like it didn't matter that "Pulp Fiction" didn't win an Oscar, "The Wire" never won an Emmy and "Arrested Development" bombed in the ratings. We would always remember them fondly and feel like they were more successful than they actually were.

And I was sitting there thinking, "Why didn't I think of that?"

You couldn't come up with a better two-word eulogy for the Seven Seconds or Less Era (or S.S.O.L. Era) in Phoenix: Critically acclaimed.

Maybe the Suns didn't win a championship, but we'll remember them 100 times more fondly than the brutally efficient and hopelessly bland Spurs, who taught everyone over the years that the regular season doesn't matter, transformed the NBA playoffs into a flopathon, revived the vile and fan-unfriendly Hack-A-Shaq strategy and did everything short of sending Bruce Bowen out on the court with a chainsaw and a taser. If the Spurs were the Team of the Decade, no wonder ratings dwindled until the league's big comeback this season. The real shame is that all the mugging, acting, eye-rolling, flopping, rule-bending and hysterical shrugging obscured what should have been remembered as a throwback sports team, a shrewdly assembled roster of well-coached guys who played beautifully together, didn't care about credit and revolved around the best power forward who ever played. Instead, we'll remember them as the team that turned the NBA playoffs into the World Cup. Congratulations, fellas.

And I sit here and wait for the new Arrested Development movie to come out and watch my re-runs fondly (including all of seasons 1 and 2 on my recent road trip to bury my grandfather). Four seasons of having season tickets, a game 7 against LA and the Clippers, two Western Conference Finals Appearances, and close to 250 wins...

And 53 episodes of AD.

I hope this is not the end of fun. I like basketball games that are decided 123-118.

Posted by Justin at 11:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Categories: Phoenix Sports

May 01, 2008

Next Ten Years will have No Global Warming

This article is rather interesting:

April 30 (Bloomberg) -- Parts of North America and Europe may cool naturally over the next decade, as shifting ocean currents temporarily blunt the global-warming effect caused by mankind, Germany's Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences said.

Average temperatures in areas such as California and France may drop over the next 10 years, influenced by colder flows in the North Atlantic, said a report today by the institution based in Kiel, Germany. Temperatures worldwide may stabilize in the period.

The study was based on sea-surface temperatures of currents that move heat around the world, and vary from decade to decade. This regional cooling effect may temporarily neutralize the long- term warming phenomenon caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gases building up around the earth, said Richard Wood, a research scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre, a U.K. provider of environmental and weather-related services.

``Those natural climate variations could be stronger than the global-warming trend over the next 10-year period,'' Wood said in an interview. ``Without knowing that, you might erroneously think there's no global warming going on.''

The Leibniz study, co-written by Noel Keenlyside, a research scientist at the institute, will be published in the May 1 issue of the journal Nature.

``If we don't experience warming over the next 10 years, it doesn't mean that greenhouse-gas warming is not with us,'' Keenlyside said in an interview. ``There can be natural fluctuations that may mask climate change in the short term.''

Hmmm. Well, OK, so no global warming for the next ten years. I guess that is good news. Because Climatology is such an accurate science. Let's check this article from January 2008:

THE STARK headline appeared just over a year ago. "2007 to be 'warmest on record,' " BBC News reported on Jan. 4, 2007. Citing experts in the British government's Meteorological Office, the story announced that "the world is likely to experience the warmest year on record in 2007," surpassing the all-time high reached in 1998.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the planetary hot flash: Much of the planet grew bitterly cold.

In South America, for example, the start of winter last year was one of the coldest ever observed. According to Eugenio Hackbart, chief meteorologist of the MetSul Weather Center in Brazil, "a brutal cold wave brought record low temperatures, widespread frost, snow, and major energy disruption." In Buenos Aires, it snowed for the first time in 89 years, while in Peru the cold was so intense that hundreds of people died and the government declared a state of emergency in 14 of the country's 24 provinces. In August, Chile's agriculture minister lamented "the toughest winter we have seen in the past 50 years," which caused losses of at least $200 million in destroyed crops and livestock.

Latin Americans weren't the only ones shivering.

University of Oklahoma geophysicist David Deming, a specialist in temperature and heat flow, notes in the Washington Times that "unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007." Johannesburg experienced its first significant snowfall in a quarter-century. Australia had its coldest ever June. New Zealand's vineyards lost much of their 2007 harvest when spring temperatures dropped to record lows.

Closer to home, 44.5 inches of snow fell in New Hampshire last month, breaking the previous record of 43 inches, set in 1876. And the Canadian government is forecasting the coldest winter in 15 years.

Now all of these may be short-lived weather anomalies, mere blips in the path of the global climatic warming that Al Gore and a host of alarmists proclaim the deadliest threat we face. But what if the frigid conditions that have caused so much distress in recent months signal an impending era of global cooling?

"Stock up on fur coats and felt boots!" advises Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and senior scientist at Moscow's Shirshov Institute of Oceanography. "The latest data . . . say that earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012."

Sorokhtin dismisses the conventional global warming theory that greenhouse gases, especially human-emitted carbon dioxide, is causing the earth to grow hotter. Like a number of other scientists, he points to solar activity - sunspots and solar flares, which wax and wane over time - as having the greatest effect on climate.

"Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change," Sorokhtin writes in an essay for Novosti. "Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind." In a recent paper for the Danish National Space Center, physicists Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen concur: "The sun . . . appears to be the main forcing agent in global climate change," they write.

Given the number of worldwide cold events, it is no surprise that 2007 didn't turn out to be the warmest ever. In fact, 2007's global temperature was essentially the same as that in 2006 - and 2005, and 2004, and every year back to 2001. The record set in 1998 has not been surpassed. For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming. Even though atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to accumulate - it's up about 4 percent since 1998 - the global mean temperature has remained flat. That raises some obvious questions about the theory that CO2 is the cause of climate change.

Yet so relentlessly has the alarmist scenario been hyped, and so disdainfully have dissenting views been dismissed, that millions of people assume Gore must be right when he insists: "The debate in the scientific community is over."

I guess the next ten years may not be so dire for ski resorts. All their efforts and the extra cost of Wind Energy programs must have been what reversed Global Warming and saved the ski industry.

More inconvenient truths. Nobel Prize anyone?

Posted by Justin at 05:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Categories: Weather

April 27, 2008

Brian Head Still Has Plenty of Snow

I was at Brian Head this last week and it is amazing that on the 24th of April, the resort could easily remain open.

I spent two nights in Brian Head on my trip to Wyoming, one up and one back. I took my grandfather's body to Lovell for his burial service and spoke at another funeral. We did two funerals since we have so many family and friends that could not make the Wickenburg services. It was a little odd to haul him 1500 miles in the back of my truck, but if you knew him, you would understand how much he would enjoy the mere thought of me and my two uncles hauling him back home.

I spent the last three years hoping to take him to my place in Brian Head. The back of the truck in the parking garage was as close to my condo as he got, but I got his old ass up there.

I am slowly settling in to the groove of things again. Sorry for the slow blogging, but it takes a while to recover.

Posted by Justin at 05:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Categories: Brian Head, Personal

April 13, 2008

Donald Asay Blackburn

I haven't written here much recently. I was asked to speak at the services and write his obituary:

Donald Asay Blackburn left this earthly life April 12th at his family home in Wickenburg with his wife Victoria by his side. He was born December 1, 1932, in Lovell, Wyoming to Hyrum and Gladys Blackburn. June 11, 1985, he married his wife Victoria Watson of Chinook, Montana. On February 4, 2003, he was sealed for time and eternity in the Mesa Temple in Arizona. Throughout his life, he showed a deep love for his family.

Don was preceded on his journey by his three sons Steve, Danny, and Lynn Blackburn. He awaits the reunion with his loving wife Victoria; Marilyn Witt and husband Kelly; Jeffrey Blackburn and wife Linda; David Blackburn and wife Velma; Teri Lee Benoit and husband Kenny; Troy Hunter; Harley Blackburn and wife Jodi; Brenda Lorash and husband Eddie; Derk Hunter and wife Katrina; Brent Bowen and wife Alison; grandchildren Natalie Rallo and Justin Blackburn of Wickenburg; and over 60 grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Don grew up in Lovell where he was an outstanding athlete in football and basketball before leaving for Korea as an Army soldier in 1951. Upon his return from Korea, he worked the jobs no one else would. He worked setting concrete forms for the Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona. He owned and ran a large Uranium mine in his mid-20’s. He worked as a salesman for FMC selling agricultural products to some of the largest farms in the US near Stockton, California.

His business ventures included owning and managing various gold mines in Montana, Wyoming, and Arizona; consulting work for the governments of China and Vietnam; Uranium ventures in Arizona, Utah, and Wyoming; Blackburn Drilling that operated across the United States and in Australia; Bear Creek Coal Partners of Montana; Titanium Resources Corporation; Vanadium Partners, Inc.; and other projects too numerous to recount.

His character, humor and personality will be celebrated at the Wickenburg LDS Church at 6:00 PM, Thursday, April 17th, and at the LDS Stake Center in Lovell, Wyoming, at 11:00 AM, Wednesday, April 23rd. All are welcome to attend.

I spent Friday with my grandfather at Chemo in Phoenix and was with him just hours before he passed. I already miss him as do many others.

Posted by Justin at 10:16 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0) | Categories: Personal

April 03, 2008

E-mail Exchange on Global Warming

I sent a couple e-mails back and forth with a long time reader and friend Jon Wade at Steamboat Springs Blog about Climate Change. Just wanted to post the text of one of my e-mails to him for public view:

We can keep the world from heating by forcing gas prices to $10 a gallon with Carbon taxes, increasing the cost of every single thing that we consume, and putting the entire world into a recession. If the earth cools, that is great, but even if it doesn't, it is still good for the ski industry and for John Kerry, Algore, and the Kennedy families because the massive recession will not affect their billions and will simply provide less crowded slopes by getting rid of the riff raff like us from their billion dollar playgrounds.

Every time that some ski resort talks about how global warming will impact the sport by shutting down ski resorts that don't get enough snow, they are speculating on Climatologists not having their heads up their ass. But when they talk about the solutions they propose to global warming that are little more than rebranded collectivist ideas under the guise of "saving the environment", we need not speculate on how that will affect the sport. It will increase costs and decrease the number of people that can ski with absolute certainty. We are right at the price point that my wife and I can barely afford to ski with our kids and all the resorts are running round bragging about being "wind powered". How about bragging about being affordable for families?

Ted Turner had this to say about global warming:

Failure to address global warming will have us all dead or eating each other by mid-century.

So says Ted Turner, the restaurateur, environmentalist and former media mogul whose controversial comments have earned him the nickname "Mouth of the South."

If steps aren't taken to stem global warming, "We'll be eight degrees hotter in 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow," Turner said during a wide-ranging, hour-long interview with PBS's Charlie Rose that aired Tuesday.

"Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals," said Turner, 69. "Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state — like Somalia or Sudan — and living conditions will be intolerable."

One way to combat global warming, Turner said, is to stabilize the population.

"We're too many people; that's why we have global warming," he said. "Too many people are using too much stuff."

Turner suggested that "on a voluntary basis, everybody in the world's got to pledge to themselves that one or two children is it."

8 DEGREES! In light of this, I better stop skiing, driving, breathing CO2,... Or else get ready to start eating people. EATING PEOPLE! This Global Warming crap is just going beyond what can even be considered reasonable. Having to eat people sounds like a pretty inconvenient truth to me.

Posted by Justin at 11:52 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) | Categories: Weather

April 01, 2008

Opening Day, NBA Playoffs, and the End of the 2007-08 Ski Season

A little time to reflect on the last ski season. This year, I skied Beaver Creek for the first time, skied Wolf Creek for the first time in three years, and got my usual days in at Brian Head. I got in about half as many days this season as last--12 versus 25--but enjoyed it far more.

Couple great memories for me. First was
Jarrett skiing his first black diamond. He isn't even in the same ballpark as Jake, but that is a function of being 7 versus 11. But he discovered a love for skiing this season and now looks forward to it. I am excited about this year and looking forward to going from having two skiing boys to having three kids that rip it up when Lindsey gets a couple years older.

Second was Jake and me going to Wolf Creek with Tim, Erich, and JP. It has been far too long since I took at trip to Wolf Creek and this trip magnified how Jake has improved from our last trip three years ago when he was a Wolf Pup. When we hiked Alberta Peak and he left me behind, I had a new sense of humility and some pride that all the time and money that I have spent on gear and passes and gas and hotels and condos has paid off. We have something that both boys enjoy and that helps us bond.

Finally, there was my trip to Beaver Creek. I have rarely enjoyed a ski day that much.

I am going to try to get one more weekend in before the season is over.

Posted by Justin at 02:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Categories: Brian Head, General Skiing, Vail/Beaver Creek, Wolf Creek