It has been an up and down year but we are thankful for our many blessings. Thank you for your much needed and appreciated support in 2019. 2020 is a very critical year in our effort to get the science back on the right track. The AMS and AGU are celebrating their 100th Anniversary but after decades of laudable work, they have with off the rails climate folks at NOAA and NASA are presenting dodgy attribution work to keep the money train on the track which endangers our energy dominance/affordability and near full employment. Many companies, even energy and auto, and politicians (democrats and some republicans) are pushing some form of carbon taxes if not abandonment of fossil fuels with plan for unreliable renewables.

Icecap has been here now for 13 years - with 122 million page hits. Be sure to use the Search Icecap function to find previous posts on any topic.

See also our sister sites:

Alarmist Claim Research is a site where a team of scientists has fact checked the 12 common alarmist claims. Be sure to click on the link to the detailed write-ups after the summaries with more detail and graphics here. 

THSResearch which started with an analysis of the failed GHG climate models projection of the Tropical Hotspot here and the GAST report has been followed by many more analyses here. 

Then there is a site developed for a roommate engineer at Wisconsin - mainly focused on technology and energy issues (here).

Of course, my focus has been on Weatherbell.com since 2011 - with daily posts on weather and climate and commercial posts and video. We have an excellent model and video service for weather enthusiasts.

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Here is a holiday story:

It’s that time of year for favorite old holiday movies

The movie “It’s a Wonderful Life”, like A Christmas Story are perennial favorites.

It’s a Wonderful Life was produced by Frank Capra who produced many classic movies. The snow scenes look like upstate New York or New England in winter.

It may surprise you that the Bedford Falls set was in warm and sunny California: It covered four acres of the RKO ranch [in Encino, Calif.] and included 75 stores and buildings, a tree-lined center parkway with 20 fully grown oak trees, a factory district and residential areas. Main Street was 300 yards long, or three full-length city blocks.

The snow was fake snow. Frank Capra -who trained as an engineer - and special effects supervisor Russell Shearman engineered a new type of artificial snow for the film. At the time, painted corn flakes were the most common form of fake snow, but they posed a bit of an audio problem for Capra. So he and Shearman opted to mix foamite (the stuff you find in fire extinguishers) with sugar and water to create a less noisy option.

Here were the fans that blew the snow over the set.

Watch animation.

The film was done in the summer I was born and filming at times occurred during a heat wave, which forced them to shut down for days. Though they were romping in what looked like snow, they were perspiring.

Though not popular in its day, the movie became a holiday favorite on TV and ranked number one on its list of the most inspirational American films of all time.

One more note: when I was watching It’s a Wonderful Life last week and saw someone playing the rent collector for Potter (Lionel Barrymore) who looked very familiar.

It was Charles Lane - here was a photo of him.


Charles Lane was an amazing man who appeared in 250 movies over 80 years and lived to 102 years of age!!!! He is very much the actor extraordinaire. See the incredible list here

It occurred to me, he was the spitting image of John Podesta, Clinton and Obama advisor.