Tugboat pushing tow upstream against heavy flows downstream of the Big Dam Bridge – Pulaski County Pedestrian & Bicycle Bridge – Murray Lock and Dam – on the Arkansas River May 12, 2007.
For more information on the bridge, see, our Big Dam Bridge page.
See the photos in our Big Dam Bridge Gallery
See more of our Image Galleries at Haw Creek.
I’ve finally gotten around to completing the photo galleries from Rocky Mountain National Park and the Estes Park area. There is one gallery for each day, to keep the galleries from being too large.
The two newest galleries are Moraine Park Elk and Estes Park area and Fern Lake Trail.
Below is the full listing as it appears on the Haw Creek Image Galleries page:
Rocky Mountain National Park and Estes Park
This post is being simultaneously published on Exit78, Haw Creek and Haw Creek Out ‘n About
Claims by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the Himalayan glaciers are threatened appear to be based on little more than a short telephone interview for a news report over ten years ago. According to an article in the TimesOnline, the world has been “misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown.
Last week the IPCC refused to comment so it has yet to explain how someone who admits to little expertise on glaciers was overseeing such a report. Perhaps its one consolation is that the blunder was spotted by climate scientists who quickly made it public.
The lead role in that process was played by Graham Cogley, a geographer from Trent University in Ontario, Canada, who had long been unhappy with the IPCC’s finding.
Cogley said: "The reality, that the glaciers are wasting away, is bad enough. But they are not wasting away at the rate suggested by this speculative remark and the IPCC report. The problem is that nobody who studied this material bothered chasing the trail back to the original point when the claim first arose. It is ultimately a trail that leads back to a magazine article and that is not the sort of thing you want to end up in an IPCC report.”
For the rest of the story, read the article in the TimesOnline.
According to major news sources, including the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, major budget shortfalls in Arizona will result in the closure of 13 state parks by June. Eight others have already been closed.
The Los Angeles Times:
The action represents the largest closure of state parks in the nation, although several other states are considering similar moves.
“It’s a dark day for the Arizona state parks system,” said Renee Bahl, the system’s executive director.
“We have 65,000 acres around the state and the majority of them are closing.”
The Arizona parks receive about 2.3 million visitors per year who bring about $266 million into the state, Bahl said.
The Arizona State Parks Board has voted unanimously to close 13 parks in response to budget cuts.
The Arizona State Parks Board is closing some of the state’s iconic Old West landmarks, including the Tombstone Courthouse in one of the West’s most storied towns, and the Yuma Territorial Prison, which housed hundreds of Old West outlaws and was portrayed in the film “3:10 to Yuma.”
The decision also closes parks such as Red Rock State Park near Sedona that draw tens of thousands of tourists a year.
The Legislature has cut 61 percent of the state parks budget since July.
In a Huffington Post editorial, Chad Campbell, the House Democratic Whip in the Arizona State Legislature, describes the reappropriation of a quarter of a million dollars meant for state parks:
GOP legislators recently pilfered a nearly $250,000 gift left by an elderly woman – now deceased – for the Arizona State Parks system.
The severity of budget cuts in Arizona is quite disturbing, but the cuts to State Parks have touched an especially raw nerve. In 2003, 82-year-old Asta Forrest left nearly $250,000 to the Arizona State Parks Board. This Danish immigrant’s gift to Arizona was inspired by her love of its beautiful natural surroundings.
It’s ironic that, in today’s rough economic times, state parks are being closed. During the Great Depression, construction of state parks provided need work for thousands of young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps.
UK weather forecasters are admitting they failed to see widespread snow storms that recently hit Britain, according to a Telegraph article.
Even when the full extent of the threat was realised, flaws in the Met Office’s bad weather warning system meant that the public were not adequately informed, officials said. The system will now be reviewed.
Thousands of Britons endured nightmare journeys to work after waking up to several inches of snow despite reassurances that their regions would escape the worst of the latest flurries.
Hundreds of flights were cancelled at Heathrow, Gatwick and regional airports, while schools that had only just reopened were again forced to shut their doors.
Accident and emergency departments reported "unprecedented" numbers of patients, many suffering suspected fractures after slipping on ice.
Read the rest of the article at the Telegraph.
Typical farmer group of Prairie City, Missouri, in Mississippi County
1936 Mar
Carl Mydans, photographer.
Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress)
A major insurance industry trade group warns, in a letter to insurance regulators (pdf), about the high risk for companies to blindly accept scientific conclusions on anthropogenic global warming, basing it’s conclusion, in part, on the unauthorized release of email and files from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Group – Climategate.
The unauthorized release in November 2009 of thousands of e-mails containing correspondence among scientists affiliated with the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) makes clear that insurers, regulators, and anyone else with a serious interest in climate change cannot afford the luxury of simply assuming that the “reports and studies” to which the Task Force white paper alludes present an accurate and unbiased picture of what is known about climate change.
The CRU e-mails show that a close-knit group of the world’s most influential climate scientists actively colluded to subvert the peer-review process (and thereby prevent the publication of research by scientists who disagreed with the group’s conclusions about global warming); manufactured pre-determined conclusions through the use of contrived analytic techniques; and discussed destroying data to avoid government freedom-of-information requests.
Viewed collectively, the CRU e-mails reveal a scientific community in which a group of scientists promoting what has become, through their efforts, the dominant climate-change paradigm are at war with other scientists derisively labeled as “skeptics,” “deniers,” and “contrarians.” The insularity and non-collegiality of these climate scientists had previously been noted in a 2006 report to Congress prepared by a committee of statisticians led by Dr. Eugene Wegman of George Mason University. The Wegman Report examined the body of research behind the widely-publicized “hockey stick” graph, which purported to show a dramatic and unprecedented increase in average global temperature during the twentieth century. After thoroughly discrediting the hockey stick graph, the report observed that “authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface.” The report further noted “the isolation of the paleoclimate community,” concluding that “even though they rely heavily on statistical methods, they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community.” When members of paleoclimate community were asked to explain and defend their work, “the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done.”
In short, because serious questions have been raised about the integrity of contemporary climate science, NAMIC believes it would be exceedingly risky for any insurance company to make important business decisions based on an uncritical acceptance of the dominant scientific paradigm on climate change. Put differently, we believe there is considerable risk involved in an approach to assessing “climate risk” that assumes the validity of any particular theory or set of beliefs about anthropogenic global warming.
The politics of climate change is changing, according to an editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal. One of the biggest blows to climate change activism came in last month’s rejection of an emissions trading scheme by the Australian Senate. Tom Switzer, a research associate at Sydney University’s United States Studies Centre and editor of the Spectator Australia, writes:
In the United States, Democrats, nervously facing midterm elections, are calling on President Obama to jettison the cap-and-trade bills before the Senate. In Canada, the emissions-trading scheme—another term for cap-and-trade—is stalled in legislative limbo. In Britain, Tories are coming out against David Cameron’s green stance. In the European Union, cap-and-trade has been the victim of fraudulent traders and the carbon price has more than halved to $18.50 per ton. In France, the Constitutional Council has blocked President Nicolas Sarkozy’s tax on carbon emissions that was set to take effect in the New Year.
In Copenhagen, meanwhile, the United Nations’ climate-change summit went up in smoke. And in Mexico City later this year hopes for any verifiable, enforceable and legally binding agreement to reduce greenhouse gases—and to bring in developing nations such as China and India that were, insanely, omitted from the Kyoto protocol in 1997—are a chimera.
Add to this that Washington was buried by record-breaking snowfalls last month, that hurricane activity is at a 30-year low in the U.S., that London is bracing itself for its coldest winter in decades, and that there has still been no recorded global warming this century, and it is no wonder public skepticism is rising across the world.
Read the rest of Switzer’s Wall Street Journal editorial
Some top climate scientists are suggesting that this winter’s cold may only be the beginning a cooling trend that may last two or three decades, according to a Daily Mail report.
Among the most prominent of the scientists is Professor Mojib Latif, a leading member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has been pushing the issue of man-made global warming on to the international political agenda since it was formed 22 years ago.
Prof Latif, who leads a research team at the renowned Leibniz Institute at Germany’s Kiel University, has developed new methods for measuring ocean temperatures 3,000ft beneath the surface, where the cooling and warming cycles start.
He and his colleagues predicted the new cooling trend in a paper published in 2008 and warned of it again at an IPCC conference in Geneva last September.
Last night he told The Mail on Sunday: ‘A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles – perhaps as much as 50 per cent.
‘They have now gone into reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer.
Read the rest of the Daily Mail report
The thermometer has not gotten above freezing for over a week.
While we get snow here almost every year, it’s usually melted within 2 or 3 days and, even if we get as much as a foot like we did 2 years ago, it’s gone within a week.
A week ago we had a trace of snow, not even enough to measure. It’s been so cold that some of that trace of snow is still on the ground in areas that are shaded all day long this time of year.
I’m not complaining. We’ve lived in colder places. One winter in the 70s, when we lived in a high mountain desert town in Idaho, it didn’t get above 0°F for a month and was below -20°F for a week.
And, in the almost 30 years we’ve here, we’ve had had other long cold periods.
But, that was then, and this is now.
Brrrrr!
