Update – January 16, 2010: Arizona State Parks to Close 13 more parks by June

According to the Arizona State Parks Foundation, a special session of the State Legislature has cut funding for the state parks system to the point all parks will close. The cuts are part of a $205 million budget reduction to mitigate an estimated $1.5 billion budget deficit.

In an Urgent Call to Action, the foundation is asking for help.

URGENT CALL TO ACTION!
The Arizona State Legislature has acted on House Bill 2001. It eliminates the ability of our Arizona State Parks system to operate. All parks will ultimately close as a result of this action. If you or your children wish to ever visit such extraordinary places like Kartchner Caverns State Park, Tonto Natural Bridge State Park or Tubac Presidio State Historic Park, you must act today. It is our last hope.

Call, email or write (sample letter at right) Governor Jan Brewer and urge her to veto the parks cuts listed in the article below.

Phone: 602-542-4331 or 800-253-0883
Email via Governor’s Contact page at:
www.governor.state.az.us/Contact.asp
Mail: The Honorable Jan Brewer, Governor of Arizona,
1700 West Washington, Phoenix, Arizona 85007

Read more at the Arizona State Parks Foundation website.

This post is being simultaneously published on Exit78 and Haw Creek Out ‘n About

It appears that the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has significant conflicts of interests with ventures and connections associated with climate change. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri is accused of making a fortune through links with carbon trading companies.

Telegraph.co.uk, 20 December 2009

No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.

Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.

What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.

read more at Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri

In the online research I’ve done on climate change, I learned early on to stay away from Wikipedia.  All of the information on climate change and anthropogenic global warming was presented as proven science rather than hypothesis and theory.  As well, Wikipedia was virtually useless when looking for information that didn’t fit the “consensus view” on global warming.  It was almost as if there was a Wikipedia climate change censor.

That may in fact be the case.

How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles by Lawrence Soloman, December 19, 2009

The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history.
(and….)
Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.

All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.

Read more: How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles by Lawrence Soloman, December 19, 2009



I’ve learned to only use Wikipedia for non-controversial topics – and, even then, back it up with other material, if I can.

See also The Opinionator, by Lawrence Solomon, May 3, 2008

September 15, 2009 – Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado

On our last full day in Colorado, we toured the six-mile Mesa Top Loop Drive, visiting most of the archeological exhibits and overlooks.

Square Tower House cliff dwelling is named for the four-story-high structure standing against the curved back wall of the alcove.  About 60 of the original 80 rooms of Square Tower House remain.

All of the cliff dwellings, including Square Tower House, were part of the final Mesa Verde building phase.  People lived here between AD 1200 and 1300.

Small lizard on a ruin wall

After spending the morning among the ruins, we took a drive in the afternoon.  At one point, we found ourselves on open range, with the road blocked by a herd of horses.  As I very slowly eased the car forward, the horses parted and let us through.

Commentary and images from the road

image and information from September 15, 2009

This post is being simultaneously published on Exit78 and Haw Creek Out ‘n About

Pithouse – For thousands of years, native peoples were living in the surrounding areas before coming to Mesa Verde.  As with people all over the Southwest, Ancestral Puebloans lived in modest dwellings  — shallow pits dug into the ground, covered with pole and mud roofs and walls, with entrances through the roofs.

In this excavation (above), what appears to be one pithouse is actually two.  The larger one, built first, around AD 700, was destroyed by fire. The smaller one, which looks like an antechamber to a larger room, is actually a second pithouse built soon after the first one burned.  It contains a new feature, a verticle ventilator shaft in one side, which appears in pithouses from then on — innovation!

Above is an Ancestral Puebloan kiva – an undeground religious room.  The small circular hole in the floor is a sipapu, a symbolic entrance into the underworld – the Pueblo place of origin.  This early kiva design was continued in the Mesa Verde villages and cliff dwellings.

Many fires have swept across Mesa Verde over time.  Recent fires have exposed previously undiscovered Puebloan sites.

At our campsite on our final afternoon in
Colorado, 2009.

From Copenhagen – The Climate Pool on Facebook

Emily Beament, Press Association Environment Correspondent, assesses the situation from inside the Bella Centre…

What was supposed to be the final day of talks, in which leaders arrived to sign off on a political deal to tackle global warming that negotiators and ministers had drawn up, seems now to be endless hours of chaos and confusion, with press conferences getting cancelled, meetings postponed and a lot of people just milling around.

The closing hours of international climate conferences tend to be fluid, but as UK officials said a little earlier, things don’t look good.

Siberian climate change statistics were manipulated by the UK Met Office, according to a leading Russian think-tank founded by a former Vladimir Putin advisor:

The Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) claimed the Hadley Centre used statistics from weather stations in Russian and Siberia that fitted its theory of global warming, while often ignoring those that did not.

The report was seized on by media with close ties to the Kremlin, which is opposed to rigid new curbs on carbon emissions demanded by many Western countries at the Danish summit.  Russian meteorological station data did not substantiate the global-warming theory,’ stated semi-official RIA Novosti news agency.

It went further in saying the Hadley Centre ‘probably tampered with Russian-climate data’ by using statistics from only a quarter of available weather stations in its report.
(Mail Online – UK)

The United nations allowed over 40,000 people to register and the Bella Center’s capacity is only 15,000. Did they remember it was going to be cold?

With U.N. security letting in only those cleared last week, hundreds of accredited delegates, journalists and NGO representatives were left to stand for hours in near-freezing temperatures before being let through. “It was crazy,” AP’s Seth Borenstein said. “You couldn’t leave the line. You couldn’t go to the bathroom, you couldn’t eat. Then snowflakes started falling. One woman even said, ‘if lightning strikes me, would they take me out of line?'”

People started handing out food — one gave out tangerines, another croissants. A man screamed “I don’t need food. I need socks! I’m freezing my ass off out here.” At one point, a U.N. official announced the wait would be longer, prompting the crowd to boo and chant “Let Us In!”

Speaking at the opening ceremony of the ministerial segment at the Copenhagen climate conference, the Prince of Wales says the ‘survival of the species” is in peril.  (telegraph.co.uk)

… and his expertise is …..?

“The allegations of intellectual and scientific fraud like those made against Dr. Mann are serious against anybody involved in academics, but the impact in this case is significantly elevated. The work of Dr. Mann and other scientists at the CRU is being used to develop economic and environmental policies in states and countries across the world. Considering the saliency of the work being conducted by the CRU anything short of the pursuit of absolute science cannot be accepted or tolerated.”

From a letter sent to the President of Penn State University by State Senator Jeffrey Piccola.  (click on image for readable page)