Massive storm buries central US in snow

**FL Patriot** · 12-10-2009

CHICAGO (AFP) â€“ A massive storm buried much of the central United States in dangerous ice and snow Wednesday, stranding scores of motorists with massive drifts that shut down major roads and defeated plows.

Strong winds created drifts as high as 15 feet (4.6 meters) as the storm dropped as much as four feet of snow (1.2 meters) in some areas, said Pat Slattery, a spokesman for the National Weather Service.

"This has been a really big season opening storm," Slattery said.

Hundreds of flights were cancelled, schools were closed and the freezing rain that preceded the snow in many places created hazardous road conditions.

Blizzard warnings were issued across the midwest as the storm moved eastward across the country after pounding Utah, Nevada, Colorado and Arizona.

The storm was expected to move across the Great Lakes into Canada, sparing much of the East Coast.

But flash flood warnings were issued for the Mississippi and Tennessee River valleys and midatlantic and southeast states due to heavy rains from the southern part of the system.

Officials told people to stay home if they can, pack an emergency kit of blankets, food and water if they have to drive somewhere, and to avoid rural side roads.

"It may be a while for somebody to find you if you get hung up," Slattery cautioned.

Stranded motorists were waiting a couple hours to be rescued in Iowa, where the National Guard was called in to help after the state was blanketed with nine to 16 inches (22 to 41 centimeters) of snow.

"We are snowed in. It's not good," said Courtney Green, a spokeswoman for the Iowa Department of Public Safety.

"It's bitterly, bitterly cold. It's just been gusting all day. When you have the volume of snow and the high winds, there are just huge drifts."

Snow plows were pulled off the roads for part of Wednesday because visibility was so poor and the storm was so bad that they weren't making much of a difference, she said.

Even the military Humvees were having trouble, and large truck drivers were also getting stuck in the snow.

A man who was found behind the post office in Yale, Iowa died en route to hospital. He had been there for at least a couple hours, Green said.

Wisconsin declared a state of emergency, shut down government offices and also activated the National Guard after the storm dumped up to 17 inches of snow across the state.

With classes cancelled, meanwhile, students at the University of Madison planned to make the best of the deluge with a massive snowball fight, in their second attempt to beat the world record.

**FL Patriot** · 12-10-2009

If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.

Although the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish.

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But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel MÃ¶rner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr MÃ¶rner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by
Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.

The reason why Dr MÃ¶rner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world".

When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.

Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. The only evidence the scaremongers can cite is based on the fact that extracting groundwater for pineapple growing has allowed seawater to seep in to replace it. Meanwhile, Venice has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr MÃ¶rner.

One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC's favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a "corrective factor" of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they "needed to show a trend".

When I spoke to Dr MÃ¶rner last week, he expressed his continuing dismay at how the IPCC has fed the scare on this crucial issue. When asked to act as an "expert reviewer" on the IPCC's last two reports, he was "astonished to find that not one of their 22 contributing authors on sea levels was a sea level specialist: not one". Yet the results of all this "deliberate ignorance" and reliance on rigged computer models have become the most powerful single driver of the entire warmist hysteria.

â€¢For more information, see Dr MÃ¶rner on YouTube (Google MÃ¶rner, Maldives and YouTube); or read on the net his 2007 EIR interview "Claim that sea level is rising is a total fraud"; or email him â€“ morner@pog.nu â€“ to buy a copy of his booklet 'The Greatest Lie Ever Told'

Fined, frozen and now jailed

The Marine Fisheries Agency was certainly onto a winner when it enlisted the aid of the Assets Recovery Agency in its ruthless war against our fishermen. In December 2007 Charles McBride and his son Charles, from Kilkeel in Northern Ireland, were fined Â£385,000 for under-declaring catches of whitefish and prawns in the Irish Sea, threatening the loss of their homes and boat. But the Assets Recovery Agency, using powers designed to recover money from drug dealers, also froze all their assets. To pay the fines, the McBrides tried to borrow against their assets. Now, for this effort to pay the fines, Liverpool Crown Court has sentenced the two men to two and three months in gaol for â€œcontempt of courtâ€.

Blown away

The Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, timed his jibe impeccably last week when he said that opposing wind farms is as â€œsocially unacceptableâ€ as â€œnot wearing a seatbeltâ€. Britainâ€™s largest windfarm companies are pulling out of wind as fast as they can. Despite 100 per cent subsidies, the credit crunch and technical problems spell an end to Gordon Brownâ€™s Â£100 billion dream of meeting our EU target to derive 35 per cent of our electricity from â€œrenewablesâ€ by 2020.

Meanwhile the Government gives the go-ahead for three new 1,000 megawatt gas-fired power stations in Wales. Each of them will generate more than the combined average output (700 megawatts) of all the 2,400 wind turbines so far built. The days of the â€œgreat wind fantasyâ€ will soon be over.