Funnin' With Al Gore

Sitting here at my computer, swathed in woollies, I find myself with an impulse to ease the chill with a jest at the expense of Mann-caused global warming alarmists, especially those currently within reach of winds screaming south from the North Pole.

Enter, James Delingpole, with just what the doctor ordered: his announcement of the winner of the Al Gore Poetry Prize. Delingpole published the winning verse and a number of the runners up.

One of my favorites:

Haiku from Mark Adams

Fake data buries
Science settled like the snow
Outside my window

You might prefer one of the limericks, the Gilbert and Sullivan take-off, a more serious effort, or, the actual winner. Check them out.

Just so U.S. readers of this blog don't feel alone in our chill, here's a satellite view of the UK entirely covered in snow:

And then there's this satellite-imaged temperature anomaly map made during the Copenhagen Climate Conference. The temperatures shown below are not the actual surface temperatures but, instead, the differences between actual temperatures and recent average temperatures. Blue areas are below average in temperature and red areas are above average.  (Thanks to Watts Up With That?)

This image shows the impact of the cold snap on land surface temperatures across the region from December 11–18, 2009, compared to the 2000–2008 average. The measurements were made by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. Places where temperatures were up to 20 degrees Celsius below average are blue, locations where temperatures were average are cream-colored, and places where temperatures were above average are red. Light gray patches show where clouds were so persistent during the week that MODIS could not make measurements of the land surface temperature. The biggest anomalies were in northern Russia, but a swath of below-average temperatures stretched across the countries around the Baltic Sea as well.

Baby, it's cold outside! The silver lining of this year's crop of winter storm clouds is further weakening of the "catastrophe" argument for global and domestic cap-and-tax and further strengthening of common-sense arguments for domestic drilling.


__________