Add to that Global Warming. We've had one of the coldest years in decades with snow covering most of the Continental US and record snowfall all over the globe. All of the so-called experts were wrong and all of the computer models which predicted melting snow and ice-caps were well off the mark.

Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd along with Bill Clinton are the reason Freddie and Fannie opened up lending to people who couldn't pay.

Lending to first time home owners and minorities is a great thing.

These guys had good intentions. I don't doubt that.

What was so infuriating and stupid was that this could have all been avoided.

Knowledgable people in the Mortgage industry knew that the program incentives for the execs at Freddie and Fannie and the ones that rolled out organizationally would generate horrible behavior, no checks and balances and would create a financial crater.

My prediction is that if we have Barney and Dodd predicting that things will be one way in 09, they will be wrong. No common business sense.

Ok, I feel better now.

Great dig out, AzX5!

I'm going to print that out & staple it to the cover of my investment
ideas folder; it will be a reminder that most of the fookin "experts"
could not find their fannies with both hands. And, most of these
"geniuses" are still making big dough and mouthing off...

LabGuy: I would hold off on your GW view; a month or season or a couple
years is not the tell tale of ol'MotherEarth who has been orbiting around
for 4 1/2 billion years. As for your polar cap melting stats: I would love to
see your links. No tree hugger, but whomever thinks the globe is not
undergoing some changes, regardless of who or what the catalyst or
instigator is, is delusional, imo.
BR,mD

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Quote:

December 26, 2008 New U.S. Geological Survey Report is Sobering A new report from the U.S. Geological Survey states that the United States faces the possibility of a much faster climate change by the end of the century than what earlier studies have indicated. Satellite data over the past two years shows the world's major ice sheets melting much more rapidly than previously thought, and based on this new information the global sea level rise by 2100 could be as much as 4 feet, according to the report. The earlier report from IPCC estimated a 1.5 foot sea level rise by 2100, but that report did not factor in the lubrication under the ice sheet. The other major point of this new report was that the Southwestern U.S. may have already entered a prolonged drought that could extend all the way to the end of the century. Nearly all of the 24 computer models that were used in this study showed this long term drought. ------------------------------------------------------------ But, the report also indicated that were also some global warming effects that are NOT likely to occur by 2100........ --An abrupt release of methane from the seabed and permafrost. --A shutdown of the Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation, which brings warm water north and colder water south. Thirty-two scientists from federal and non-federal institutions contributed to the report, which took nearly two years to complete. The Climate Change Science Program, which was established in 1990, coordinates the climate research of 13 different federal agencies, according to the Washington Post Article.

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The thread is about predictions in 2007 about the year 2008. Global Warming Alarmists lead by the brilliant thinker Al Gore predicted 2008 would be dry and warm due to the influence of man made global warming.

Fact is 2008 was one of the coldest in decades with record snowfall across the globe and thus the Global Warming Alarmists were wrong. Many factors which are currently beyond the control of man influence global temperatures the Sun being the primary factor in this determination. Meanwhile the media focuses on the experts quoted by the alarmists to sensationalize the issue while ignoring the 100's of climatologists and scientists who don't agree on the magnitude of human influence.

Quite a few different ideas going on in that paragraph.

Al Gore doesn't define global climate change.

One season is irrelevant in the history of the earth (see MD's comments)

You have introduced the concept of man-made climate change. That is a different subject than climate change. We can agree (or not) that the climate is changing while agreeing (or not) that man is a significant cause of it. I assumed that the first three posts were about climate change, not whether or not it was man-made.

Interested in your 'polar ice caps aren't melting' link. A US Geological survey report out this past week was included for your reference

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No doubt there are changes to the ice caps which have been growing and shrinking for hundreds of thousands of years without the help of mankind. Earths major swings in global temperatures fall in line with solar activity which would lead any reasonable person to conclude the sun has a much greater influence over global temperatures than man.

Surely, but even a small change of only a few degrees in worldwide temperature would lead to global changes which could very well leave the planet uninhabitable for life. There is a reason why most planets do not have life on them. It takes a very delicate blend of factors for life to exist, and even what may seem as "minor" changes to those factors could upset the balance very easily.

As MD pointed out, the earth has been around 4.5 billion years. What he did not mention, was that for the vast majority of that time, there was no life on earth.

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my experience on X5world when I spend too much
time posting in political threads in the lounge...

As a follow up to this thread, that veered onto the topic of Climate Change, here is a pretty good art. from the WSJ the other day.

Worth the <5min read, imo, as Hotz is a good writer and seldom
writes with an agenda. From the FWIW Dept.
BR,mD



JANUARY 2, 2009[/COLOR] The Warming Earth Blows Hot, Cold and Chaotic

Subtle Rises in Temperature Make for Wild Weather; 'Exceptionally Unusual' Becomes the New Normal

• By ROBERT LEE HOTZ

SAN FRANCISCO -- Three independent research groups have concluded that 2008 was a comparatively cool year on planet Earth -- a feverish chill on our warming world.

The year's average global temperature was the 9th or 10th warmest since reliable record-keeping began in 1850, and the coldest since the turn of the 21st century, according to separate surveys by the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization, NASA's Goddard Institute of Space

Studies, and the U.S. National Climatic Data Center. Each used slightly different methods to rank 2008 based on world-wide land and sea-surface temperatures through November.

For the time being, no one knows whether this temperature drop heralds a lasting retreat from global warming or a temporary dip. Last summer was relatively cool world-wide, for example, while global land temperatures in October were the warmest for that month in more than a century, government weather records show. Taken together, the result was a year that ran slightly less than one degree warmer than the 20th century mean.


In matters of climate, the unusual is becoming routine, as higher temperatures make weather patterns more unstable. "As a result of climate change," says Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the U.K.'s Hadley Center, which helped prepare the U.N. figures, "what would have once been an exceptionally unusual year has now become quite normal."

Despite the ups and downs of annual temperature swings, though, the planet has grown steadily warmer in recent decades, affecting everything from New England winters and the Siberian spring to western droughts and tropical cloud cover. That's according to eight new government and university climate studies presented last month during a meeting in San Francisco of the American Geophysical Union, an international scientific society of 50,000 researchers who study Earth and its environment.

Moreover, almost all of the warming in North America has taken place since 1970, says a team of government and academic experts at the U.S. Climate Change Science Program.

Looking beyond the variations of any single year, these studies chronicle growing evidence of climate changes and suggest the effects of rising temperatures are accelerating.

"I do believe we are entering a new state," says arctic researcher Julienne Stroeve at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. "Ice loss is happening faster than the climate models are showing."
Since 2003, for instance, more than two trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted, adding enough water to oceans to raise global sea level by one-fifth of an inch, NASA geophysicists reported at the conference.

Alaska's low-lying ice fields are disappearing at two to three times the rate of a decade ago, according to aerial surveys by researchers at the University of Alaska. Since 2000, Greenland alone has lost 355.4 square miles of ice -- an area 10 times the size of Manhattan -- Ohio State University researchers reported. Using data from two NASA satellites, they determined that Greenland's 32 largest glaciers lost three times as much ice last year as the year before.

"I wouldn't run for the hills," says glacier analyst Eric Rignot at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "But it might be time to start walking."
In another sign of polar thaw, researchers have detected new seeps of methane bubbling up from formerly frozen seafloor lodes along the Siberian coast. Methane, like carbon dioxide, is a potent greenhouse gas that helps trap heat in the atmosphere and could accelerate any warming trend. "We have enough data to worry," says Igor Semiletov at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who reported the methane leaks.

Warming temperatures also are influencing more temperate latitudes, several recent studies show.

By analyzing five years worth of infrared measurements from NASA's Aqua satellite, JPL researchers found that high-altitude tropical storm and rain clouds are increasing. At the present rate of warming, the scientists reported last month, tropical storms can be expected to increase by 6% every 10 years.

Last year, the Atlantic hurricane season was the fourth most active in 64 years and the first to have a major hurricane in each month from July through November, according to federal meteorologists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. There also were 1,700 tornadoes catalogued in the U.S. from January through November, ranking last year just behind 2004 for the most twisters recorded in a year. The tornado records date back to 1953.

The 2008 storm season across most tropical cyclone regions, however, was slightly below average, NOAA records show.
All in all, solar heat is the energy that drives the world's weather, and rising levels of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane are allowing more of that energy to build up in the atmosphere every year, experts say.

Overall, the world's atmosphere warmed by 0.72 degrees Fahrenheit during the past 30 years, according to a comprehensive analysis of monthly satellite temperature readings by John Christy, head of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, which was released last month.

But on the hot plate of planet Earth, that warming isn't evenly distributed. Changing sea ice, ocean currents and winds mute or accelerate regional temperatures changes by redistributing the heat in the atmosphere.
A quarter of the globe warmed at least one full degree Fahrenheit since the satellite readings started in 1978. The warming was most pronounced in northern latitudes. A few isolated areas in Antarctica actually cooled by at least half of one degree Fahrenheit.

Across North America, such regional variation is the norm, say experts at the U.S. Climate Change Science Program. They analyzed the continent's climate records for the last 56 years and, in a report released last month, showed that some regional temperatures rose sharply, and others showed no change at all. The yearly average temperature for the entire continent increased by 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Across the northern reaches of Alaska, the Yukon territories and Alberta and Saskatchewan, average annual temperatures increased up to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, they reported. But there were no significant yearly average temperature changes in the southern U.S. or eastern Canada.
In New England, rising temperatures have taken some of the chill out of winter.

After analyzing 40 years of wintertime data, researchers at the University of New Hampshire found that seasonal temperatures in the northeastern U.S. had risen about 0.42 degrees Celsius per decade, from 1965 through 2005.

The warming was most pronounced in the region's coldest months of January and February, they reported in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres. The number of snow days each winter dropped at a rate of 8.9 days per decade and annual snowfall decreased by about 1.8 inches per decade, the researchers reported.

So many subtle changes in so many different places, building up decade after decade, add up to something more than the weather's natural variation.

To a seasoned eye, day-to-day weather patterns now seem chaotic. Among the Inuit of the eastern Canadian Arctic, University of Colorado researchers reported last month, many elders are no longer willing to trust their forecasting skills, honed by a life in the field, to guide local hunting parties and travelers.


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1230...html#printMode