The coldest month since Dec 89 by my reccolection and a rise in fuel oil
from 1.06 to 1.59 a gallon in January (Vermont Public Radio) has many
digging deeper into their wallet to stay warm. A certain percentage can
dust off the woodstoves and chainsaws put away in the recent glory days of
60 and 80 cent oil. Some have to give up their champagne and twinkees.
Others suffer. Me? I am digging deep into the woodshed, low grading hardwood
scrap around the woodshop, and eyeing the standing dead trees close to my
cottage and planning an assault on them.
While on the subject of climate change, I reccommend "Sudden Climate Change
through Human History" by Jonathan Adams and Randy Forte, a paper in www.
dieoff.org. It is based on isotope and gas analysis of ice cores of the
Greenland and Antartic Ice sheets of the last 200 000 years. Lets remember
that Quartinary Geologists maintain most of the last half million years has
been ice age with only brief interglacials for about as long as the one we
now enjoy. They conclude that while the earth's weather is too complicated
and delicate to project what rising CO2 levels will do, the record of
climate changes in the last two interglacials point to dramatic decade long
shifts rather than gradual trends and that the current gloom and doom
warnings of global warming might actually be quite optomistic.
