With the looming headline “UN Confirms Global Warming Caused by Man” (I personally am looking forward to the conference on Continental Drift so species can get the rap for that one too!), I can’t help but think of another factor at play: Celebrity and the Climatologist.

Two or three decades ago, entering the discipline of climatology likely meant that you where lacking in what Adam Sandler’s mom in the comedy, The Waterboy, called “…the social skills”. Fast forward a couple of decades and you’ve gone from Julius Kelp to Buddy Love, the sexy-groovy guest of honour to an ever growing number of UN climate change symposiums, workshops and conferences. Suddenly your dandruff and halitosis has dissapeared, and that hot women from the conference secretriate is looking right at you! Heck, if you are a climatologist with more than 10 years of experience and can’t fill your dance card with a conference once a month, you are determined to stay a virgin. Of course, the price of admissionis simply to be on the “correct” side of of the issue, but that goes without saying. Silly me.

Climatologists are now the rising stars of the Environmental Movement, replacing, dare I say it, The Environmentalists. While the environmental priests can now only interpret climate doctrine, the climatology papacy can issue the Bulls.

Look, look, up at the sky! Do you see that? And that? The sky, the sky, it’s on fire! It’s burning, and can you see how it’s spreading? Look over there – those — over there, they look like clouds, but if you look closely, they’re not, they’re on fire! More and more of the sky is changing into fire! Everyone is looking up, and they see the same thing! It’s on fire, it’s burning, and it’s going to kill us all! I can feel the heat, it’s getting hotter and hotter, and we’re all going to die…Ohh, my God, we’re all going to die!

The key problem for global warming theories is that the sea level has not risen much in the last 150 years. A small rise may have occurred, but this may be attributable to the “tail end” of the last ice age. If sea level rises much more, we may be able to ascertain what, exactly, is going on. If sea level declines, then theories of human-caused global warming will probably be relegated to the dust-bin of history.

If a long trend of global warming is occurring, there are two ways it could be related to humans. First, humans might be causing the warming. Second, global warming might be causing the humans. That is, most land mass is in the Northern hemisphere, where warming would increase and improve arable land, growing seasons, crop yields, and available water supplies. We know that global warming was beneficial to humans when the last ice age began retreating, but we do not know if these benefits have stopped. World population is increasing, but GDP per capita is also increasing rapidly, which probably causes more energy use per person. In this way, global warming could CAUSE the CO2 in the atmosphere to rise, instead of CO2 causing global warming. CO2 is not the most important greenhouse gas– –water vapour is. CO2 levels may or may not be causing global warming, and global warming may have stopped in 1998.

The entire warming debate is based upon conjecture until any sea level changes can be clearly attributed to human activity. Science has not yet clarified this key issue.

Understand Al is in the running for an Oscar, too. This one, I don’t understand, I mean, he and Tipper already have kids. Why does he need an Oscar?

Speaking of Tipper. How does one get a name like that?

The Japanese found a monster plateau in the Indian ocean formed from lava (that’s still coming out). I rough calculated about 3 cubic miles worth based on their figures of its size.

Lava typically emerges somewhere in the range of 1800-2000 degrees Fahrenheit.

I’ve been trying to calculate how much energy is/was in that thing, but all I keep getting out of the online calculators are NaN’s (i.e. the number was frigging huge and blew out their floating point maximums ;->)

It’s all about the Polar Bear Defense Line. You see? That is all that stands between us civilizationized folk and the dreaded Alliance of Arctic Sea Mammals.

If the Polar Bear Defense Line is breached, then the arctic sea mammals will be able to invade and conquer the coastal areas all across the world.

The chaos would be enormous, economies, both local and global, would suffer. Civilian populations would be displaced and forced to migrate inland.

And worser than all that, there’d be a massively negative impact on choices for summer vacation spots.

I think that all the politicians and Rousseau followers who seek to achieve their wish to end the Industrial Revolution–which is what they’ve been after since its inception–ought to commit collective suicide, thereby immediately lowering the CO2 emissions made by man by prodigious levels. More than killing all the farting cattle, even.