If you work in the Chem Lab building you’re probably hot.

I just thought that was funny coming from the head of maintenance at UTSI. The air conditioner is broken, so the temperatures were high there, but it's the implication that I'm sure never crossed his mind that made me chuckle a little.

Sorry about the lack of update yesterday, these pirated wireless signals are a little tricky sometimes. I was trying to reconnect and post, but without any luck. I'm still on a good pace for the month, even if I've been a little off since coming home.

In case anyone wonders, the time of this post is going to be way off, too. I started writing it at the time Blogger says, but then I went to lunch and stayed gone about 3 hours, so I won't post this until more than 4 hours after I started writing. Oh, well.

Onto some news stories I liked:

Forecasting Bet
Last week we told you about an expert in forecasting who challenged Al Gore to a $10,000 bet over who could more accurately predict global temperature increases.

Professor Scott Armstrong contends that most climate change forecasts use bad methodology, and that global temps will not rise dramatically as Gore predicts.

Now the professor has received his answer from Gore — thanks, but no thanks.

A Gore representative said the former vice president is too busy to take on any new projects at this time.

Environmental Concerts
Gore's Live Earth concerts are set for tomorrow at several sites across the globe.

But now thePeople for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is furious that the concerts will feature vendors who sell hamburgers and hot dogs.

PETA says selling meat at an environmental concert is like selling cigarettes at an anti-cancer fundraiser. PETA campaigner Yvonne Taylor says in Life Style Extra — "There's no such thing as a meat-eating environmentalist. It would be hypocritical to be serving meat at an event for the environment, and if you really cared about the environment, you wouldn't be eating meat in the first place."

A U.N. report says the meat packing industry, with transportation, preparation of feed and then all the methane emitted by the animals creates more greenhouse gases than all the cars, trucks, ships and planes in the world combined.

(copied from http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,288492,00.html)

The first one isn't really news, and I won't even knock Gore's people for not accepting the bet, but it does show that not everyone thinks it's going to be as bad as Gore says it will. The second one is fun because I love liberal in-fighting. I also love the fight over greenhouse emissions such as methane. Do you know the #1 greenhouse gas? Water vapor. By quite a sizeable margin. I also heard a quote over the weekend (maybe it was in the paper), that 'the planet is dying, anyone who says it isn't is lying' (possibly a paraphrase). First, that supposes that you cannot honestly disagree with an opinion, whether widely held or not. Second, even taking anthropogenic global warming as a fact, that does not mean the planet is dying. We have seen periods in the Earth's history where it was warmer and cooler. There is some type of cycle to this stuff (ice ages, etc.). I remember being told in elementary school that Earth was coming out of an ice age (in geologic time). That would have been in the early 90s sometime. If an ice age (by definition a time when the Earth was colder) is ending, would a period of warming not be expected? One of my favorites, I was reading a book on global warming for an Honors seminar in undergrad where the author (an "expert" in the field) said that in the last century, there was an average temperature rise of 0.1^o per year (I don't remember the scale used, but it doesn't matter in this case), but in the past decade, there had been a monumental total rise of 1^o. For readers who don't want to do the math, that's 0.1^o per year, or exactly what it has been. I'm no expert, but it doesn't sound to me like they can get their story straight. I'm up for a debate if anyone is interested. I haven't changed the comments setting, so I assume they still work. Knock yourself out.

I'll try to write more tonight.