McCain, ANWR, and the Grand Canyon

John McCain has said he will not let drilling for oil start in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge because of it's pristine beauty: "As far as ANWR is concerned, I don’t want to drill in the Grand Canyon, and I don’t want to drill in the Everglades. This is one of the most pristine and beautiful parts of the world."

The "pristine beauty" part depends on what part of ANWR you are talking about. Pictured below is part of the coastal area that has been reserved for oil drilling. Of course, the environmentalist wackos have successfully blocked our country from drilling there and achieving any kind of energy independence.

The following pictures (from other parts of ANWR) are what environmentalists show the simple-minded people, like John McCain, when trying to convince them of the damage and loss of habitat that will occur when drilling eventually commences in ANWR:

As far as comparisons with the Grand Canyon, ANWR gets under 2,000 visitors annually. Why? "For most of the year, ANWR is unbearably cold and dark. For several weeks, the sun doesn't even rise and leaves the windswept landscape a very inhospitable environment. Only a few hundred people visit ANWR each year."

But the Grand Canyon, pictured below, gets an astounding 5 million visitors annually. I guess that our country's energy independence and national security will have to be set aside so that John McCain and the Marxist environmentalists can have their pristine ANWR that they never will visit.

Arctic ice traps "climate tour" icebreaker

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This is an interesting article about a tour ship for those who want to see the Arctic ice cap before it melts as a result of man-made global warming. Things went awry when the icebreaker tour ship became trapped in the ice that is supposed to be disappearing.

I am on the bridge of the massive Russian icebreaker Kapitan Khlebnikov, and the tension is palpable. We have hit ice - thick ice.

We are travelling from the northeastern corner of Russia, across the Bering Sea and the top of Canada to Resolute Bay in Nunavut. At least that's the plan. We haven't even reached Canadian waters and we are already in trouble.

The ice master studies the mountains of white packed around the ship while the 24,000-horsepower diesel engines work at full throttle to open a path. The ship rises slowly onto the barrier of ice, crushes it and tosses aside blocks the size of small cars as if they were ice cubes in a glass. It creeps ahead a few metres, then comes to a halt, its bow firmly wedged in the ice. After doing this for two days, the ship can go no farther.

The ice master confers with the captain, who makes a call to the engine room. The engines are shut down. He turns to those of us watching the drama unfold, and we are shocked by his words: "Now, only nature can help this ship." We are doomed to drift.

What irony. I am a passenger on one of the most powerful icebreakers in the world, travelling through the Northwest Passage - which is supposed to become almost ice-free in a time of global warming, the next shipping route across the top of the world - and here we are, stuck in the ice, engines shut down, bridge deserted. Only time and tide can free us.

No apology necessary for Koran shooting

Today, President Bush apologized for an incident in which an American soldier in Iraq used the Koran, the holy book of the Muslims, for target practice.

Although I wouldn't waste a perfectly good bullet on a Koran, for our government to treat the Koran as something sacred when we don't even gaurantee that kind of respect for the Holy Bible is a spectacular display of weakness and political pandering. In some Muslim countries, even those considered to be our allies, our soldiers and citizens are not even allowed to bring a Bible with them.

Writers and cartoonists around the world who have "insulted" Islam have been killed or recieved death threats.

It is truly amazing that in the 6 1/2 years since 9/11 Islam and Muslims have become a special protected class in our country and that this special protection even extends beyond our borders. Islam and the Koran have been elevated by our politicians to a protected status that Christianity and Judaism have never attained. Muslims are given special consideration in airports, schools, and other government run institutions.

Our Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, not the politically-correct favoring of one religion over the other. It's time to elect leaders who will honor the Constitution and not a backward, misogynistic, hate-filled religion like Islam.

The truth about "climate change"

On Mike Huckabee's website, Mike asked his readers and bloggers to comment on the following question: Should "climate change" be part of the GOP platform with issues such as less government, lower taxes, a strong national defense and real border security? The following is my response:

The earth has been warming and cooling in natural cycles for thousands of years, long before man ever had a chance to leave a "carbon" footprint.

To think that we are powerful enough to affect the global climate, particularly the temperature, is secularist in philosophy and is a tribute to the sinful man's ego as he tries to put himself on par with Almighty God, the maker of the sun, which drives temperature change, and the earth, that receives the sun's energy.

Stopping a hurricane or a volcanic eruption would be easier than trying raise or lower the temperature of the earth an iota.

I normally do not voice my Christian views in these political forums, but this issue of the climate boils down not to just political posturing, but also to very nature of man and the Creation.

The Bible is replete with examples of the Lord controlling the weather, using it to save His people, destroy His enemies, punish a wayward people, bring blessings to his faithful servants, or to demonstrate His awesome power, such as when the Lord spoke to Elijah as he hid in a cave.

When Jesus calmed the storm that frightened his disciples in their small boat, He demonstrated again that it is not man who influences the earth's weather, but it is under Almighty God's control.

Liberals, particularly socialists and Marxists, have been trying to supplant God with humanism. Man-made "climate change" is a part of that philosophy, as they indoctrinate our children in school and adults through the media with their secular "alternative" to God.

After all, if humans can control the earth's climate, then what can't they control? The liberals will have built their own environmental Tower of Babel, and unfortunately will have suckered many God-fearing people into their illusion that man has the power to affect the environment.

Add to this the political and economic implications, which we are just beginning to see with high food and energy prices, and we will have an even worse mess later if we do not get the government out of the subsidy, tariff, energy, and weather business.

In short, man has not changed the earth's temperature one bit, and to base government policy on a philosophy so short on science and out of harmony with God's laws will only lead to further ruin of our great country.

Unstoppable solar cycles

This video is absolutely brilliant and should be seen by every person in America.

Scientist: Forget Global Warming, Prepare for New Ice Age

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Sunspot activity has not resumed up after hitting an 11-year low in March last year, raising fears that — far from warming — the globe is about to return to an Ice Age, says an Australian-American scientist.

Physicist Phil Chapman, the first native-born Australian to become an astronaut with NASA [he became an American citizen to join up, though he never went into space], said pictures from the U.S. Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) showed no spots on the sun.

He said the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7 degrees Centigrade.

"This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930," Chapman wrote in The Australian Wednesday. "If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over."

[Critics quickly pointed out that Chapman may have been "cherry-picking" the data. A strong La Nina formation in the Pacific pushed down January temperatures over much of the Northern Hemisphere from where they had been a year earlier, but average global temperatures are still much higher than the 20th-century average, and the NOAA said last week that last month was the warmest March on record.]

The Bureau of Meteorology says temperatures in Australia have been warmer than the 1960-90 average since the late 1970s, barring a couple of cooler years, and are now 0.3 degrees Centigrade higher than the long-term average.

A sunspot is a region on the sun that is cooler than the rest and appears dark.

An alternative theory of global warming is that a strong solar magnetic field, when there is plenty of sunspot activity, protects the Earth from cosmic rays, cutting cloud formation, but that when the field is weak — during low sunspot activity — the rays can penetrate into the lower atmosphere and cloud cover increases, cooling the surface.

But scientists from the U.S. National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Bolder, Colorado published a report in 2006 that showed the sun had a negligible effect on climate change.

The researchers wrote in the journal Nature that the sun's brightness varied by only 0.07 percent over 11-year sunspot cycles, and that that was far too little to account for the rise in temperatures since the Industrial Revolution.

Chapman proposes preventive, or delaying, moves to slow the cooling, such as bulldozing Siberian and Canadian snow to make it dirty and less reflective.

"My guess is that the odds are now at least 50:50 that we will see significant cooling rather than warming in coming decades," he writes.

Earth Day Toon from Dale

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