The Old Farmer’s Almanac, which was founded in 1792, says that the upcoming winter “will be remembered for strong storms” featuring heavy rain, sleet, and a lot of snow. The periodical actually used the word “snow-verload” to describe the conditions we can expect in the coming months.

“The 2020 Old Farmer’s Almanac is calling for frequent snow events—from flurries to no fewer than seven big snowstorms from coast to coast,” explains the press release.

In addition to excessive precipitation, below-normal temperatures are expected with “frigid and frosty conditions” lasting well into the spring for some parts of the country.

“This could feel like the never-ending winter, particularly in the Midwest and east to the Ohio Valley and Appalachians, where wintery weather will last well into March and even through the first days of spring,” says Almanac editor Janice Stillman.

If you’re planning to escape the cold weather, the forecast notes that “even typically tropical Hawaii will feel the chill” and experience cooler temperatures and heavy thunderstorms—so you might want to hold off on that beach vacation.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac was 80.5% accurate in predicting last year’s wild weather, and its report for the upcoming season is very similar to that of the competing Farmer’s Almanac. In other words, the chances that we’ll escape this winter without a few snowstorms and freezing temperatures are *very* slim.

We all love Greta Thunberg, some for different reasons. But some of us worry about her.

The autobiographical Scenes from the Heart (“Scener från Hjärtat,” 2018) by Melana Ernman, climate activist Greta Thunberg’s mother, recounts the medical difficulties and the events that led to Greta Thunberg’s now-famous “school strike for climate,” in which hundreds of thousands of children have refused to attend school to protest about government inaction over climate change.

Greta is eleven years old and has gone two months without eating. Her heart rate and blood pressure show clear signs of starvation. She has stopped speaking to anyone but her parents and younger sister, Beata. After years of depression, eating disorders, and anxiety attacks, she finally receives a medical diagnosis: Asperger’s syndrome, high-functioning autism, and OCD. She also suffers from selective mutism—which explains why she sometimes can’t speak to anyone outside her closest family. When she wants to tell a climate researcher that she plans a school strike on behalf of the environment, she speaks through her father.

Greta herself strikes every Friday and spent three weeks sitting outside the Swedish Parliament at the beginning of the school year.

It is a story of “a family in crisis and a planet in crisis”—two phenomena that are presented as linked. The book notes that the oppression of women, minorities, and people with disabilities stem from the same overarching root problem as climate change: an unsustainable way of life. The family’s private crisis and the global climate crisis are simply symptoms of the same systemic disorder.

Greta’s sister Beata, who was 12 when the book was written, also lives with ADHD, Asperger’s syndrome, and OCD. She is prone to sudden outbursts of anger, during which she screams obscenities at her mother. What would normally be a 10-minute walk to dance class takes almost an hour because Beata insists on walking with her left foot in front, refuses to step on certain parts of the sidewalk, and demands that her mother walk the same way. She also insists that her mother wait outside during class—she isn’t allowed to move, even to go to the bathroom. The child still ends up weeping in her mother’s arms.

Like many parents of children with similar diagnoses, Greta and Beata’s parents fight hard for their daughters to receive the right care and assistance in school. When Greta refuses to eat they do everything they can to save her from starving herself. Her father begs their doctor to save Beata from whatever it is that plagues her.

It has been less than a year since Scenes from the Heart was published and, during that time, Greta has become a global celebrity. This week, she was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time Magazine. She has briefly met the Pope, who encouraged her to “Keep doing what you’re doing.” She has received numerous awards, including, most recently, the German Golden Camera award. She has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has been featured and interviewed in most of the world’s leading media. She has appeared on a panel with the UN Secretary General António Guterres, addressed the European Parliament, and lunched with the Financial Times.

But it this really appropriate?

In Scenes from the Heart, when Greta eventually starts eating again, she only allows herself certain foods. Her mother has to prepare the same food every day for Greta to bring to school and keep in the school refrigerator: pancakes filled with rice. Greta will eat them only if there is no sticker with her name on the container: stickers, paper, and newspapers trigger Greta’s OCD against eating.

“I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day,” Greta said when she addressed the world’s leaders in Davos.

Given the child’s history of precisely that—fear and panic—the adult response should perhaps not be “You go, girl” (the words of Madeleine Albright when she was asked what she thinks of Greta’s school strike), but something considerably more cautious and reflective.

Greta was recently named ”Woman of the Year” by a Swedish newspaper. But she is not a woman, she is a child. Is it time we stopped to ask if we are using her, failing her, and even sacrificing her, for a movement?

WASHINGTON – The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee today passed Congresswoman Elaine Luria’s (VA-02) bipartisan bill to protect and preserve the Chesapeake Bay, recommending the legislation for a vote in the full House of Representatives.

“Our beautiful Chesapeake Bay is a critical economic and recreational resource that we must protect and preserve for future generations,” Congresswoman Luria said. “It’s been a privilege to lead this effort, gather support from both parties, and push this bill through committee. I urge House leadership to stand up for one of North America’s greatest natural resources by scheduling the bipartisan Chesapeake Bay Program Reauthorization Act for a floor vote.” 

The Chesapeake Bay Program Reauthorization Act (H.R. 1620) is a bipartisan bill that would fully fund the Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay Program by authorizing an injection of$455 million into the Program over the next five years. The Chesapeake Bay Program Reauthorization Actalso provides funding for local projects.

Congress has not formally reauthorized the Chesapeake Bay Program since 2005. Despite the current administration’s efforts to reduce or eliminate Program funding all together, Congress has acted in a bipartisan manner to continue funding the Program in annual appropriations bills.

The Chesapeake Bay Program coordinates data collection and distributes grants to states for Bay restoration efforts. By fully funding the Program over the long term, Congress would ensure that states get the resources they need to comply with their obligations to protect and preserve the Chesapeake Bay.

Original House cosponsors of the Chesapeake Bay Program Reauthorization Act include Chesapeake Bay Watershed Task Force Co-Chairs Rep. Bobby Scott (VA-03), Rep. Rob Wittman (VA-01), and Rep. John Sarbanes (MD-03). Senators Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) are leading the effort in the Senate.

CNN and the field of Democratic Candidates proved once again that we are indeed living in clown world. For seven hours, the brainy individuals engaged in a forum discussing climate change and the coming end of the world. The big takeaway: stop eating meat and we all must drive electric cars.

Left out of course were a few key details like how do people in emerging countries find sustenance, and what will all of this do to the economy? Like, what happens to the trucking industry, the airline industry, the boating industry, and really just about every other industry. Exactly, how many dreamy windmills and solar panels will it take to light up Topeka… not to mention Chicago?

These clowns talked about everything except empirical data. Well, here’s some:

All proxy temperature data sets reveal that there have been cyclical changes in climate in the past 10,000 years. Climate has always changed. And it has changed in both directions, hot and cold. Until at least the 17th century, all these changes occurred when almost all humans were hunters, gatherers, and farmers.

Industrialization did not happen until the 17th century. Therefore, no prior changes in climate were driven by human emissions of carbon dioxide. In the last 2,000 years alone, global temperatures rose at least twice (around the 1st and 10th centuries) to levels very similar to today’s, and neither of those warm periods were caused by humans.

Polar bears and the ice caps are actually doing fine. The 10,000-year Holocene paleoclimatology records reveal that both the Arctic and Antarctic are in some of their healthiest states. The only better period for the poles was the 17th century, during the Little Ice Age, when the ice mass levels were higher than today’s. For the larger part of the past 10,000 years, the ice mass levels were lower than today’s. Despite huge losses in recent decades, ice mass levels are at or near their historic highs.

Polar bears are one of the key species in the Arctic. Contrary to the hype surrounding their extinction fear, the population numbers have actually increased in the past two decades.

Last year, the Canadian government considered increasing polar bear killing quotas as their increasing numbers posed a threat to the Inuit communities living in the Nunavut area.

And it is not just the polar bears in the Arctic. Other critical species elsewhere, like tigers, are also making a comeback.

Carbon dioxide does not have a huge effect on climate.

While most of the current climatologists who collaborate with the United Nations believe anthropogenic CO2 emissions have exacerbated natural warming in recent decades, there is no empirical proof to support their claim.

The entire climate cabal was in for a rude awakening when global temperature between 2000 and 2016 failed to rise as anticipated. The scientists assumed that rising CO2 emissions from human activity would result in a rapid rise in temperature, but…they didn’t.

This proved that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are not the primary factor controlling global temperature. Consideration of a much longer period (10,000 or more years) suggests that CO2 had no significant role to play in temperature increases. CO2 never was the global thermostat.

W. W. Soon in Geophysical Research Letters(2007) has reviewed much of the literature on air temperature-CO2 relationships. He concludes, “there is no quantitative evidence that varying levels of minor greenhouse gases like CO2 and CH4 have accounted for even as much as half of the reconstructed glacial-interglacial temperature changes or, more importantly, for the large variations in global ice volume on both land and sea over the past 650,000 years …changes in solar insolation at climatically sensitive latitudes and zones exceed the global radiative forcings of CO2 and CH4 by severalfold, and that regional responses to solar insolation forcing will decide the primary climatic feedbacks and changes.”

A real worry is the impending solar minimum that NASA has predicted for the next two solar cycles between 2021 and 2041, ushering in a period of global cooling like it did during the solar minimum of 17th century.

There has been no increase in the frequency or intensity of floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, droughts, or other extreme weather events. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported low confidence that global warming—manmade or not—was driving increases in extreme weather events.

So, stop listening to these people. As we speak, California is planning to add climate change fear to the school curriculum. We are raising a generation of kids who are living in fear, like the poor girl from Holland that says every day she wakes up afraid for her future, so much so that she had to sail to New York. All of this is based on theory, and not empirical evidence, or as some call it, science.

Do you really want to be a punk driving around in a Prius? Screw that, crank up the Harley, and get that Dodge Challenger if you want it.

Keep Calm and Chive on.

This month’s VIMS seminar features Dr. Martin Skov, Senior Lecturer in Marine Biology, School of Ocean Sciences, Bangor University, Wales, UK.

From Dr. Skov, “Ecologists formulate fundamental ideas (paradigms) to reason the shape of the natural world they see. Yet, all ecologists, myself included, have favorite locations where they work, and so big ideas about the world can be shaped from small viewpoints. Here, I show how some paradigms about mangroves and salt marshes are challenged when crossing continents (US to Europe), oceans (Gulf-Caribbean to Indo-Pacific) or smaller geographic regions (across the United Kingdom). I look to differences in biology, geology, weather and people to explain this world of differences.”

Wednesday, September 4, 2019

7:30 PM

Seaside Hall

Virginia Institute of Marine Science

Wachapreague, Virginia

The seminar is free and open to everyone.  Coffee and light refreshments will be provided.  For further information call VIMS at 757-787-5816.

The seminar is available as a real-time webcast you can view online. 

Please go to: http://vims.adobeconnect.com/afterhours  and log in as a guest at the time of the event.

A “dead zone” in the Chesapeake Bay has grown to one of the worst in decades.

Data from the state’s Department of Natural Resources indicates the dead zone – an area of water with little to no oxygen – was covering 2 cubic miles at the end of July. That makes it the second-largest late-July dead zone since 1985, according to the DNR report. The average size for that time period is 1.34 cubic miles.

The worst section of the dead zone includes the lower Potomac and Patuxent rivers, as well as much of the bay, from Baltimore to the mouth of the York River, the Associated Press reported.

Air temperatures around the bay reached 100 degrees for several consecutive days in July, which heated main bay waters to temperatures as warm as 90 degrees, the DNR report said. Warmer water holds less oxygen and compounds hypoxia.

This week Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg began her journey to the United States for the United Nations Climate Conference. While this young girl believes that the planet is headed for an ecological catastrophe, this type of eco-pessimism is not new.

30 years Julian Simon published his article in Science magazine: “Resources, Population, Environment: An Oversupply of False Bad News.”

Juxtapose this with The Limits to Growth and the Silent Spring, each over 40 years old, and try to really see which has turned out to be more accurate.

FromThe Limits to Growth: “Will this be the world that your grandchildren will thank you for? A world where industrial production has sunk to zero. Where population has suffered a catastrophic decline. Where the air, sea, and land are polluted beyond redemption. Where civilization is a distant memory. This is the world that the computer forecasts.”

As Simon noted, the models are just that, and they have turned out to be not that accurate. In many cases, just the opposite of what the eco-pessimists proposed.

It was Simon’s contention that eco-pessimists ignore history, misunderstand finiteness, thinks statically, has a vested interest in doom and is complacent about human innovation.

Almost everything we read about the environment now is ignoring the poor track record of eco-pessimists–this should produce some skepticism about global warming claims today.

The reality is, it’s hard to find actual data – and not models that show either unprecedented change or change is that is anywhere close to causing real harm.

Returning to Simon’s argument that “Incredible as it may seem at first, the term ‘finite’ is not only inappropriate but downright misleading in the context of natural resources…Because we find new lodes, invent better production methods and discover new substitutes, the ultimate constraint upon our capacity to enjoy unlimited raw materials at acceptable prices is knowledge.”

Simon is talking about human engineering and creativity, and in an argument that seems odd, renewable resources such as whales, pine forests, bison are the ones that tend to run out.

Humans are the only creatures that use fossil fuels. Because of this, we are not competing or stealing resources from other animals. When the energy source is hydro, wind, timber or crops, you are directly competing for resources with other creatures. The use of bio-energy, whether in the form of timber or ethanol competes with wildlife for land, or wood or food.

Simon’s argument is based on history. In the past, we relied on the biosphere (crops and wood), then we discovered that there was something under the ground that actually works better, and doesn’t rob from the surface of the planet and the creatures that inhabit it.

That is the industrial revolution.

Simon’s view is dynamic, and not static. The economy, culture, and prices cause the substitution of resources.

While it was argued several years ago that malaria would drastically increase as the world got warmer, it actually has disappeared from North America, Russia, and Europe and gone down in South America, Asia, and Africa. This downtick is not because mosquitos dislike warmer weather. This is due to people moving inside, controlling standing water, and the use of chemicals and malaria medications. Design, engineering, and creativity are the forces of change.

Human beings are dynamic, not static. We adapt, that’s what we do.

Simon was also critical of the environmental movement and the scientific community. He understood that they are competitive free markets in which there is intense competition for donations, grants, and subsidies. The so-called Green movement generates billions of dollars annually, basically by scaring people. If they said that climate change is a very slow, gentle process that takes hundreds of years to affect anything, I doubt the donations would be as generous.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s October 2018 report says that we need to cut global carbon emissions in half in ten years to have any hope of staving off a climate crisis that would existentially threaten human society. Seriously? And this is based on what?

In July, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a resolution asking Congress to declare that global warming is an emergency demanding a massive mobilization of resources to protect the U.S. economy, society and national security.

This, of course, has nothing to do with climate change. This is about the distribution of wealth, power, and enhanced government control. The IPCC report declared that preventing runaway global warming will require “far-reaching transitions in energy, land … and industrial systems” for which there is “no documented historic precedent.” Oxford University climate scientist and report author Myles Allen explained, “It’s telling us we need to … turn the world economy on a dime.” The IPCC says that to make this turn happen, there needs to be a carefully planned and democratically administered emergency program for ecological reconstruction. None of this is reconcilable with capitalism’s imperatives of profit maximization and growth, as well as private ownership of the means of production. In other words: The system must change to beat climate change.

When hearing climate change mentioned, what they really mean is a transition to socialism. People like Sanders and AOC, and 70% of the Democratic party are using fear about climate change as a means destabilize the economy and to force what they dementedly call social justice. However, they never offer any real data or historical precedents to back up their wailing.

Simon understood just how dangerous eco-pessimism is. There is an idea that the risk from increasing carbon dioxide calls for cutting emissions by 90 percent or we’re all going to die. But, cutting emissions by 90% might do more harm to the poor and the rain forest than anything the emissions themselves might do.

The idea that we can decarbonize the economy without severe ecological and economic harm, that we can shut down world trade without starving the poor, that we can grow organic crops for seven billion people without destroying the rain forest is a very dangerous proposition.

Simon understood how miserable this world still is for so many, and how much better we could make it. We need to stop being so fearful, need to keep inventing and developing new and more powerful technologies that can actually do what we need to keep getting better.

Organic tomatoes are not going to feed the world, genetically modified crops will. Wind and solar will never produce enough power, small nuclear will.

Simon believed the greenest thing we can do is innovate. The most sustainable thing we can do is change and adapt.

We need not fear the climate, only fear itself.

New research from the University of Delaware suggests there is a ghost crab pot problem in the state’s Inland Bays, with almost 3.5 abandoned crab pots per acre just along the Bay Cove section of Rehoboth Bay near Dewey Beach.

The lost or abandoned pots can cause injury to swimmers, damage boat propellers and have the potential to create a cycle of trapping and killing area sea creatures.

The researchers used a side-scan sonar device to explore the area, opting for a low-cost, consumer-friendly system—one that could be found at outdoor stores and are usually utilized by recreational fisherman. In addition to getting an initial scope of the problem, they sought to develop a method of tracking the pots that could be used by agencies, private citizens or civic groups to help aid in future mapping and removal efforts. 

“We did 21 acres in Bay Cove and saw more than 75 ghost pots, so that’s 3.5 per acre,” said Art Trembanis, associate professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy. “Once we ground truthed the sonar data and knew that we were seeing pots, it was a crestfallen sort of shock.”

You can learn more about their work here.