It's the little things that illustrate the big problems with the common evidence that the Earth is heating up rapidly. Take this picture I took yesterday afternoon, as I hiked on out to Wal-Mart to check on after-Halloween cheap candy*:
I always get a kick out of seeing these little guys running around. You see, when I first set foot in Moreno Valley almost a quarter century ago**, I didn't see this kind of wildlife running around. We're at the edge of the desert, and as the town was first being developed, the only things I saw were the big old tumbleweeds rolling down the street on every windy day. Brown, dry, and prickly, they weren't very friendly to little guys like in that picture above.
But now, years later, the town's different. All the dry, empty spaces full of tumbleweeds are gone, replaced with buildings with lots of grass, trees, and bright green landscaping. The plants are different, the animals underfoot are different, and even the birds are different. Long ago the only birds I'd ever see are big, ugly blackbirds. Now there's a variety around, and I hear all different kinds of bird songs in the mornings instead of just the honking of those blackbirds.
This is all anecdotal, and proves little, but it illustrates a greater point: it is not in dispute at all that human development changes the local climate. When people move into a desert area, the area gets wetter, greener, and friendlier to life that can move in afterward. Likewise, as a town builds into a bigger, older, more populous city, all of that greenery starts getting replaced with heat-absorbing concrete and asphalt, raising temperatures in the vicinity.
That last part is called the Heat Island effect. It's real, it's known, and it's why the traditional temperature records going back 100 or more years are virtually useless for tracking the greater climate of the world. The only valid records we have for temperatures, therefore, are the satellite records that avoid such local effects. Those only go back 30 years or so.
And that is so little time on a geological scale. Too little to confirm any theory as the truth, inconvenient or otherwise.
* Wal-Mart is too efficient and had none left, sadly.
** Yes, I feel old writing that.
What do you get when you combine an ISP active in Internet filtering with a left-wing group that is essentially the online ACLU? You get the broad, bipartisan opposition to the FCC's plans for Internet regulation that are being sold as Net Neutrality.
It was remarkable enough when Governors left and right all wrote to the FCC against Net Neutrality. But now when Comcast is on the same side of a dispute as the Electronic Froniter Foundation, that's a sign that nobody who is aware of the technical issues wants any part of what Barack Obama and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski are planning.
Comcast has been a leader in, well, taking things away from its customers. They are routinely booed on the Internet by active users because of the steps they take to cap and restrict the heaviest users of their resources. And it now comes out that as the FCC has challenged Comcast over some of those restrictions, Comcast has fired back by challenging the legitimacy of the FCC's expansion into regulating the Internet.
By itself that is not surprising, as Comcast has much to lose from large-scale FCC meddling. However what is surprising is to find that the Electronic Frontier Foundation appears to agree. Says Ars Techinca:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls the agency's proposed rulemaking a "Trojan Horse" which is "built on a shoddy and dangerous foundation." Since Congress didn't give the FCC specific authority in this area, what's next, worries EFF—an "Internet Decency Statement" pushed by conservatives, or an "Internet Lawful Use Policy" urged on the agency by the Hollywood studios? That's why the group calls the move "a power grab that would leave the Internet subject to the regulatory whims of the FCC long after Chairman Genachowski leaves his post."
The EFF is one of those left-leaning ACLU-type groups, so when they agree with a big telecommunications firm on the impropriety of a regulation action, that's notable. It's a sign that Obama's FCC is far out of bounds in its Net Neutrality plans, and that only the farthest left-wing radicals are in favor of what Genachowski is planning for us.
We have to stop him. We have to stop the Obama drive toward Single Payer Internet. It's the mainstream, common sense position.
Club Nintendo 2010 Calendar
My Club Nintendo Original Calendar 2010 came in today. It's a spiffy little thing with 13 attractive cards, one for each month plus a cover getting me through to next year:
Now I just need my posters to come in.