Winter is coming to Australia, but that’s definitely no reason to avoid planning a Down Under trip, especially not with the crazy off-season airfare sales going on. Half the country’s still warm in winter anyway, and if you’re a snow enthusiast, then you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the ski resorts in the states of New South Wales and Victoria.

This year in particular looks fantastic for the Victorian snowfields. The Mount Buller resort region has already had a weekend opening for skiers, making it the earliest start to the season in history, and five weeks ahead of the usual schedule.

The official season (along with all the appropriate celebrations) will launch on June 6, 2009, with a big festival over that weekend. The fact that the resort website mentions free hot chocolate during the opening weekend is enough to entice us, without hearing how snowfalls should make for some excellent skiing and snowboarding this winter.

You can reach Mt Buller most easily from Melbourne - it’s a three and a half hour drive, or a bit longer on the bus, in the Alpine National Park. We like it because it’s not quite as corny as going to the snow in the Snowy Mountains further north.

A new Australian record was set on 29th April 2009 with a temperature of minus 13 degrees, at Charlotte Pass in the Snowy Mountains. This is the lowest temperature recorded anywhere in Australia in April and is 13 degrees below the average. Nearby at Perisher it dipped to minus 11 degrees and at the top of Thredbo it dipped to minus 10.  After 10 years of global cooling, we can now expect explanations as to how man-made global warming can at times cause global cooling.

And as Planet ski reports, skiing will begin early in New Zealand too. New Zealand has received record amounts of snow and some resorts are opening early. Could they have a winter like Europe and what’s it like skiing there anyway? In New Zealand skiers and riders can look forward to hitting Mt Hutt’s slopes later this month as ski area staff work to open two weeks early. Mt Hutt has received more than 170cm of snow over the past 12 days resulting in a 110cm snow base and a decision to work towards opening on Saturday 30 May (conditions permitting).

Paul Creswick, from the Mt Hutt Marketing Group said the news was fantastic. “This is spectacular news for every tourism operator in town. The early opening and reports of lots of snow coupled with the soft New Zealand dollar and some great airline deals bodes well for everyone in Methven and the surrounding area this season.  Many operators are already reporting a significant increase in domestic and international enquiries from last year”.

Cap & Trade is rearing its ugly head again, this time its being called The American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES). President Obama revealed it on earth day April 22, 2009, and its got all of the usual suspects including Al Gore and Goldman Sachs, and they stand to make billions off this tax.

They are trying to push through a very serious, very burdensome carbon tax. Fashioned after the Enron model, a new derivatives bubble that could easily reach $700 billion per year! . Plus there is in fact no scientific consensus on the issue, no matter how hard Al Gore tries to tell us there is.

ACES promotes renewable energy, carbon capture and sequestration, low-carbon fuels, electric vehicles, and smart grids; increasing energy efficiency in buildings, appliances, transportation, and industry. Plus it is supposed to create millions of new jobs, in fact a whole new “Green” economy. And oh yeah… stop global warming.

It Sounds To Good To Good To Be True!

Like most Ponzi Schemes if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is. Because the way they want to achieve these goals is through carbon offsets, remember Enron?  In general, under cap and trade, the amount of carbon that energy producers emit is capped. They can exceed that cap through the purchase, i.e., “trade,” of carbon permits. The money for those permits would be collected by the government and presumably redistributed under a system still being crafted.

“The reality is the cap-and-trade legislation offered by the Democrats amounts to an economic declaration of war on the Midwest by liberals on Capitol Hill,” Chairman of the House Republican Conference Mike Pence (R-Ind.) told CNSNews.com. “We are going to increase costs on every American with this plan—and the other thing we need to keep in mind is the millions of American jobs we are going to put at risk if we impose this new tax on American industry when our competitors around the world will not,” House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) told CNSNews.com in a press conference on Thursday. “It’s pretty clear.” Both Pence and Boehner have said they estimate that, in total, the Democrats’ cap-and-trade legislation could cost each American family up to $3,100 a year.

Today marks the 10th anniversary of NASA’s Earth observatory educating the public with beautiful images of earth and space. In the celebration, NASA asked it’s readers to vote on the best images.  To view the top 10, click here for the slide show.

There have been thousands of images of earth and space, along with a tremendous about of information shared. I am a big fan of this program, and have shared many images here on Examiner.com.

From space, the aurora is a crown of light that circles each of Earth’s poles. The IMAGE satellite captured this view of the aurora australis (southern lights) on September 11, 2005, four days after a record-setting solar flare sent plasma - an ionized gas of protons and electrons - flying towards the Earth. The ring of light that the solar storm generated over Antarctica glows green in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, shown in this image.

-------------------------

Also now available some items that will gore your alarmist friends (part of the proceeds go to support Icecap):

See full size display here.

And “My carbon footprints are bigger than yours and plants love me for it” items here and here

By Anthony Watts oN Watts Up With That

This Quote of the Week is from Congressman Henry Waxman, who is pushing (or maybe bribing) the carbon cap and trade bill through congress. The statement made by Waxman can be corrected by a third grader; it is that bad. From an interview on NPR as relayed by Tavis Smiley:

“We’re seeing the reality of a lot of the North Pole starting to evaporate, and we could get to a tipping point. Because if it evaporates to a certain point - they have lanes now where ships can go that couldn’t ever sail through before. And if it gets to a point where it evaporates too much, there’s a lot of tundra that’s being held down by that ice cap..”

That’s probably the scariest statement on “science” ever uttered by a Congressman.

Let me go on record by saying Waxman is stunningly and stupidly misinformed and intellectually inadequate for the tasks at hand that bears his name: The Waxman-Markey bill

This is what Waxman works on in Congress:

Committee on Energy and Commerce (Chairman)

* Subcommittee on Health
* Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality
* Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations

Write or call your US representatives now.

-------------------------

Also now available some items that will gore your alarmist friends:

See full size display here.

And “My carbon footprints are bigger than yours and plants love me for it” items here and here

At today’s House platform for Al Gore to push the investment portfolio for which he is so aggressively lobbying, we just saw something of great import, affirming what I have been telling thumb-suckers for a while now.

Former Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Dingell said: “cap-and-trade is a tax and it’s a great big one.”

Remember what MoveOn said last week: “If Republicans convince voters that clean energy legislation amounts to a new tax, Obama’s plan is toast.”

So, it seems that Mr. Dingell is convinced, and his party’s cap-and-trade rationing taxes are now toast.

--------------------------

Also now available some items that will gore your alarmist friends:

See full size display here.

And “My carbon footprints are bigger than yours and plants love me for it” items here and here

World cooling has set-in warns astrophyicist -

“Official data shows the world passed its peak temperatures 10 years ago, but sadly the BBC and ‘Global Warming apologists’ are now attempting to cover up the facts” said Piers Corbyn, ‘climate realist’, astrophysicist & long range weather & climate forecaster, 24 April, in response to the BBC’s ‘Quiet Sun baffling astronomers’ report.

“In timely backing of the UK Government’s 1billion pound Carbon budget and similar moves in the USA, the BBC and Prof Lockwood of Southampton University distort the facts in an attempt to cover-up the proven centrality of the sun in controlling world temperatures”, said Piers. 

“They make the ignorant and loaded claim that ‘...Current slight dimming of the sun was not going to reverse the rise in global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels’.  This is treble confusion because (1) the world is already cooling even though CO2 is rising; (2) there is no evidence that the burning of fossil fuels ever did or ever will drive world temperatures and (3) reputable and informed solar scientists know that there is a lot more to the sun’s influence on the world than its dimness or brightness.”

“It appears the BBC and Prof Lockwood hope to coax the public into believing coal burning drives climate by telling us that another discredited theory - that of solar dimming - doesn’t work. This approach is disingenuous. It is astounding that such arguments as bizarre as ‘It’s not a dog so it must be a cat’ emanate from a member of the UK Natural Environment Research Council.

“It is well known that world temperatures primarily follow the sun’s magnetic cycle of 22 years, so obviously half the time temperatures will move oppositely to the 11 year cycle of tiny solar dimming and brightening. Prof Lockwood has been reminded of this fact on a number of occasions yet he is still recycling this old chestnut. With scientific leadership of this calibre what hope has the UK of clawing its way out of recession on the back of sound investment in science and technology?”

“The latest advances in Sun-Earth relations show not only the primacy of magnetic-particle links between the sun and the earth but that these are modulated by lunar effects to give the observed 60 year cycle in both world and USA temperatures. This means that the world will continue general cooling at least to 2030 (see ++). Neither the 60 year cycle, nor the 22 year cycle nor any fluctuations in world tempertaures over the last 100 years, thousand years or million years can be explained by changes in CO2. Furthermore advances in understanding of Sun-Earth magnetic and particle activity are being applied to succesfully predict dangerous weather and climate change events months and years ahead; whereas all predictions of the CO2-centred theory have failed and will continue to fail and anti-CO2 taxes and measures will never stop a single extreme weather event. The UN’s Climate Change committee (the IPCC) have still failed to respond to requests from an international group of scientists to provide data evidence for the CO2 theory (see+*).

“Tragically the BBC is driven by a political agenda to propagate failed science rather than report on front-line advances in this field of key scientific and political import. The BBC and NERC boycotted the International Climate Change Conference New York 8-10 March which is a great pity because they missed sound refutations of the theory of man-made global warming and many world-class reports on scientific advance”

“One wonders if Prof Lockwood’s place on the Natural Environment Research Council and the well-known opposition of its Chief Executive to ‘Climate Sceptics’ are not dimming his scientific faculties” queried Piers (See NERC-Register of interests )

--------------------------

Also now available some items that will gore your alarmist friends:

See full size display here.

And “My carbon footprints are bigger than yours and plants love me for it” items here and here

AS BBC reported this week, Sir John Maddox, whose two terms as editor of the premier science journal Nature brought the magazine to international fame, has died aged 83.

After studying chemistry and physics at Oxford and King’s, he spent six years lecturing in physics at Manchester. He became the Manchester Guardian’s first science correspondent in 1955, going on to edit Nature from 1966 to 1973, and again from 1980 to 1995. Sir John was knighted in 1995 for services to science, and was made an honorary fellow of the Royal Society in 2000.

As Kendrick Frazier wrote in Science News in 1972 about John Maddox, “In the United States, in 1972, one ventures a criticism of the environmental movement with the trepidation of those who in past years might have questioned the concept of motherhood or the virtues of apple pie. He is sure to be misunderstood or maligned.

Environmentalism (notice how the movement has even added another “-ism” to our vocabulary) has become the issue that every right-minded citizen
seemingly can support. In this social context then, one can hardly imagine a book addressing a more fashionable subject while taking a less fashionable point of view than John Maddox’s The Doomsday Syndrome(McGraw-Hill). Maddox’s arguments, however, deserve the thoughtful attention of all who profess concern about the environment and the future of planet earth.

Maddox is the editor of the respected British journal NATURE, and what he has put together is an attack not on the environmental movement itself but on some of the more extreme elements of the movement or, as he puts it, an attack on pessimism. In fact the word “attack” is perhaps ill advised, for one of his main goals is to substitute calm, scientific analysis for some of the more strident emotional rhetoric surrounding environmental issues. In this sense, his work espouses moderation. I do not agree with everything Maddox says, but as one who is annoyed by exaggeration and overstatement, especially on important subjects having scientific content.

--------------------------

Also now available some items that will gore your alarmist friends:

See full size display here.

And “My carbon footprints are bigger than yours and plants love me for it” items here and here

Demography: The great British broadcaster Sir David Attenborough has become the latest in a long line of illustrious people to say we need to cut population growth sharply or face a grim future. Is he right? We have nothing against Attenborough, but in supporting Britain’s Optimum Population Trust, a group that advocates reducing human numbers, he’s put himself on the wrong side of one of the great questions of our time.

Today’s world population is about 6.8 billion, give or take a hundred million or so. By 2050, most estimates show the population will be about 9 billion - roughly a 35% or so increase. That’s the equivalent, population-wise, of adding seven new countries the size of the U.S. to te world population. When you say it that way, it does sound dramatic and, as Attenborough put it, “frightening.” The problem is, numbers lie. Past estimates of population growth have virtually always overestimated world fertility rates, and underestimated social trends that led to fewer babies.

This time will be no different. If fertility rates decline just a little more than predicted (and the decline in fertility rates over the past four decades has been faster than almost any estimate out there), the population actually begins to shrink in 2040. By 2050, at the low end of fertility expectations, U.N. forecasts show just 7.96 billion people in 2050. And by the end of the century, the population will actually drop below its current levels.

Worrying about population is an old preoccupation. Ever since the Rev. Thomas Malthus warned in the early 19th century that population growth would surely outstrip our ability to feed people, gloomy population prognosticators have been consistently wrong. The late, great U.S. economist Julian Simon had it exactly right: Human beings aren’t a “cost” to the planet, or to human society. They are in fact its only real asset. Their intelligence, creativity and ability to learn make the Earth a beautiful place. Those things helps us to use fewer resources to create more wealth. That’s why the environmentally cleanest nations on earth are also the richest.

Thanks to the Green Revolution wrought by Nobel Peace Prize-winning agronomist Norman Borlaug - who is responsible for saving more lives than any person who ever lived - no child needs to go hungry today. The only reason for hunger today is political. Pushing for population decline is a fool’s errand. Our biggest problems in the next 100 years won’t be too many people; it will be figuring out how a shrinking base of younger workers will be able to pay for our fast-expanding population of elderly retirees. To do this, we’ll need to have more babies, not fewer. Attenborough is wrong, but then so are all those who want to shrink humanity.