I Can See Clearly Now the Snow Has Gone ...

The storm largely passed in the night and I was able to swamp my way into Liberal University and this is the view out the Liberal Lab Window this morning. Pretty, but getting pretty old. There is enough heat to the ground and the Sun now that this should all be a passing bad memory within a couple of days.

For me this is the last week of classes. I have been getting frantic emails from the students, especially the marginal ones, asking Me (!) what lab reports they haven't submitted and what the late penalties would be for late work. This is my own fault since my late penalties bottom out at 45% and that means anything submitted late retains some value until the end of semester. And some of them need the marks.

I also have some students that have gotten some quack MD to back date medical excuses for when the students were sick earlier in the semester. This means that I will either have to set the labs that they missed for them this week or come up with an equivalent replacement. Two weeks, one fortnight, 13 sleeps and the madness will be over.

Then I have to get ready for my Science Camp for Homeschooled High School students in early May. Win!

Greetings of the Day

Hello everyone, we had 30 cm snow last night and have 20 cm more coming today. At least we had a week of warmer weather to cut down on the accumulated snow and ice. The old farmers said that a spring snow was "the poor man's fertilizer". But still, it is hard to celebrate the day when you have to shovel your driveway.

This is what Liberal House looks like today.

Anyway, life goes on so as a shout out to Homebrew I give you the ... ETHER BUNNY!

So now we will know ...

We are all pretty much aware of the the study relating airplane contrail clouds to global warming and the way that the study was advanced by the clear skies following the 9-11 attacks and the grounding of all aircraft over the continental United States (LINK). It was a dreadful cost to reveal the truth about a link that would not have been revealed in any other way. Of course there are those that dispute the correlation (LINK).

A recent column in the Globe and Mail got me thinking in the same direction (LINK). In the column it was pointed out that the world econopalypse was going to accomplish what no manner of evangelical environmental preaching had failed to do. With the collapse of the world economy the entire world will reduce, re-use and recycle out of necessity. The generation of green house gases linked to industrial activity will also be dramatically reduced.

My question is if we are going to be able to use this dreadful window of opportunity to both measure and test the accuracy of our climate models. I have been looking to see if anyone is thinking this way but am not seeing it. Of course, it all depends on how deep and long this financial crisis lasts but more than any other factor it will cause the world to do exactly what Gore and the environmental catastrophists have been saying we need to do. I can only hope that we will never have this chance again.