Missouri Woman Accused of Child Endangerment

Brittany Mugrauer
(Kansas City, Missouri) A 24-year-old mother, Brittany Mugrauer, has been accused of child endangerment. Her two young children, 4 and 6, were found living in a wooden shipping crate in an underground cave.

Jackson County detectives were serving a search warrant for an alleged stolen car operation in the caves on the city's east side Thursday when they found the children, alone, in the 8-by-10-foot crate furnished with vehicle bench seats.

Prosecutors say the children were poorly clothed, barefoot and covered in dirt, and the younger one was eating from a cup of dry ramen noodles.

Mugrauer faces two counts of felony child endangerment.

Another Greenie romanticizer

It's not easy to tell what would be the ideal state of affairs for a Greenie -- probably because there isn't one.  There is no such thing as a happy Greenie.  They have antipathies rather than  goals.  Insofar as they do have goals, however, the leading candidate would be "sustainability" -- but what that means is not at all clear.  Modern industrial civilization would have to be regarded as highly sustainable because of the way it goes from strength to strength and creates new resources all the time.  A lot of the oil and gas presently in use was not a resource until fracking made it so. But one does get the rather strong impression that modern industrial civilization is NOT sustainable from a Greenie viewpoint.

But with its kneejerk opposition to anything that is modern, Environmentalism does give the strong impression that some sort of primitive rural economy from the distant past would be the Greenie ideal.  And that ideal goes back to 19th century Germany.  And in the early 20th century it found a vigorous exponent in the world's first Green party -- Hitler's Nazi party.  And other Fascists such as Benito Mussolini and Australia's B.A. Santamaria were also rural idealists.

So the appeal of a romanticized rural past is obviously great, particularly to Fascists of various kinds, with the modern-day Ecofascists now being the prominent exponents.

But what this ideal past is like is very unclear.  It seems to correspond to no known period in any civilization.  It is a blurry dream rather than an historical reality.  Usually, however, some sort of primitive farming seems to be the dream.

But there is an even more extreme faction that even disrespects farming.  The hunter-gatherer life is the ideal.  The fact that  modern day hunter gatherers have a rather thin time of it seems to be dismissed with a wave of the hand.

Every now and again, however, someone does attempt a systematic exposition of what a more primitive life would entail -- and presents arguments for its desirability.  And a recent book that idealizes the hunter/gatherer life has recently appeared. It is reviewed by historian Martin Hutchinson below.

Hutchinson refers below to the recent discoveries at Gobekli Tepe -- in modern-day Turkey -- which have been held to suggest that it was religion not farming that gave birth to civilization.


[Some] Modern commentators, including Yuval Noah Harari in his interesting book “Sapiens – a brief history of humankind” (Harper, 2015) believe that the coming of agriculture around 10,000 years ago was a disaster for humanity, forcing people to work much harder than the previous hunter-gatherers for a less stable and reliable subsistence. Yet when you look at the transition in depth, it was rational for those who undertook it, as well as being to the immeasurable benefit of their descendants. The hunter-gatherer existence was not some Arcadian paradise, and without leaving it, civilization’s advance would have been impossible.

Harari, whose writing is elegant and witty yet whose attitudes are a dreadful intolerant blend of the Millennial (for which chronologically he does not quite qualify), the leftist, the militantly secular and the urban, describes the transition to agriculture as “History’s Biggest Fraud.” He points out that, although agriculture enabled the planet to support many more people, the living standards of the early farming peasants appear to have been far inferior to those of the hunter-gatherers who preceded them. He rhapsodizes about the good fortune of the first hunter-gatherers who crossed the Bering Strait about 12,000 BC, and had the entire continent of North and South America to forage from, filled with beasts that had never seen humans, and therefore became easy prey to their Stone Age weaponry and cunning.

That’s all very well, but the transition to agriculture did not first occur on the American continent; indeed it had still not fully occurred there when Columbus arrived 10,000 years later. According to Harari, it first occurred near the village of Gőbekli Tepe, today in southern Turkey. By 8,000 BC, that wasn’t virgin land, full of juicy prey, it was among the planet’s most heavily populated areas.

A little application of Thomas Malthus will tell you that the hunter-gatherers around Gőbekli Tepe were not enjoying an idyllic existence of plentiful prey and easy living. Population expands until it comes up against the constraints of the food supply, at which point starvation prevents it from expanding further. By 8,000 BC humans had been living around Gőbekli Tepe for tens of thousands of years and the population had therefore reached its theoretical maximum, so the locals were living on the edge of starvation. Theoretically, they could migrate to a more fertile, less populated region, but with Gőbekli Tepe at the center of humanity’s overcrowding problem, the nearest area that was not overpopulated was several thousand miles away – too far for the locals even to know about, let along migrate to in a single lifetime.

There is another problem with the Malthusian force in a hunter-gatherer society, as distinct from an agricultural society – it acts both ways. In an agricultural society once the land is fully cultivated according to the technology of the time, there is no more food and so the population begins to starve if it keeps growing. But a growing population doesn’t actually diminish the amount of food available (or not significantly – new laborers’ huts take up little land area) – it may even increase it somewhat, through switching to more labor-intensive crops.

However in a hunter-gatherer society, not only does population growth increase demand for food, it also decreases supply, as herds of prey become first depleted, then extinguished. Harari points out how many species were wiped out by our hunter-gather ancestors, even without population pressure; one can imagine that in the area around Gőbekli Tepe, where population had been close to capacity for millennia, the Malthusian population pressure must have been exceptionally severe, on both sides of the equation.

Switching to agriculture was not therefore an irrational decision in the short-term, destroying the lives of those who undertook it, but a decision rational in both the short-term and the long-term, that was essential to keep alive the people around Gőbekli Tepe as their traditional hunting grounds depleted even the smallest, least edible game. Harari describes with a sneer how Gőbekli Tepe is also the site of the first temple complex, built even before the inhabitants settled down to agriculture. Maybe this too was a rational response; these desperately hungry people, for whom further hunting was futile because of the lack of prey, asked the gods for help and the gods responded, providing them with the means and the know-how to feed themselves, free at last from the worsening Malthusian pressure that had blighted the lives of previous generations.

The long-term benefits of agriculture were immense; apart from enabling a gigantic population increase, from 5-10 million in 10,000 BC to 500 million by 1500 it allowed that larger population to develop civilization. As hunter-gatherers, they had no possessions; hence could develop little art, no writing (where would they keep the heavy scrolls or books?) and no significant music. Also, as Harari points out, without temples they could enjoy only the simplest of religions.

To see the long-term benefits of agriculture, I take you forward almost 10,000 years, to an ancestral portrait I have just inherited, which is of my great-great-great grandmother Mary Kenworthy, the wife of a modestly prosperous Yorkshire farmer, dated 1833. They were not by any means rich, but they were literate; Mary’s husband used to read the newspaper to the villagers in the kitchen every Sunday evening.



They had art – the portrait, painted by Mary’s cousin, is no masterpiece but it is very competent and clearly influenced stylistically by contemporary high culture, a long way after the fashionable painter Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830). They had a fair range of reading matter; I have Mary’s daughter’s childhood copy of John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” which I can recommend to those who haven’t read it. Musically they were luckier than us, being influenced by high rather than low culture, although apart from church hymns and anthems Mary’s exposure to professionally produced music was probably confined to the occasional touring performance of Handel’s “Messiah.” Religiously they were especially fortunate, attending their local parish church of St. Chad’s Uppermill, Saddleworth, a fine structure with a graveyard full of family headstones and a gallery erected by an especially prosperous Kenworthy ancestor in 1711.

In short, my Kenworthy ancestors, neither rich nor prominent, had a lifestyle that hunter-gatherers could not have enjoyed in their wildest dreams, at a far higher civilizational and cultural level, none of which would have been possible but for the move to agriculture (and which was only modestly touched by the more recent Industrial and Scientific Revolutions—the railways had not yet reached Saddleworth by 1833.)

They were of course on the cusp of another change. Twenty years later, with the family fortunes badly damaged by Sir Robert Peel’s economically suicidal 1846 Repeal of the Corn Laws, Esther’s daughter was compelled to join the Industrial Revolution, marrying a moulder, son of a spindle forger, unquestionably proletarian (albeit skilled proletarian) toilers in the textile mills of nearby Oldham. For fifty years the family was thereby proletarianized, before a subsequent generation managed to scramble its way back into the middle class around 1900.

Like the Agricultural Revolution of 8,000 BC the Industrial Revolution of 1800-1900 imposed unpleasant short-term costs. But I am today materially considerably richer than was Mary Kenworthy, and have already lived much longer than she did. Moreover, with TV, the Internet, cheap books, CDs and DVDs, my cultural and intellectual life is much richer than hers, provided I have the sense to avoid the culture imposed on me from below, whereas she could rejoice in the culture imposed on her from above.

The central conclusion is clear: the traditional 19th Century view is correct that hailed the advent of agriculture as a major advance in civilization, without which nothing else would have been possible. Whatever the short-term costs (which lessened only as agricultural technology began to improve) the switch was necessary for survival to the unfortunates attempting to be hunter-gatherers while their prey was becoming extinct.

More important, without the advent of agriculture we would by now have lost the orally transmitted Homer and there would have been no Aristotle, Shakespeare, Newton or Einstein. Far from being defrauded, the early farmers toiling all week and worshiping in their new temple at weekends could rejoice in their survival and in their contribution to the future of humanity.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Colorado Woman Accused of False Rape Claim

Jasmine Burlingame
(Denver, Colorado) A 26-year-old local woman, Jasmine Burlingame, has been accused of making a false claim of sexual assault. She faces counts of false reporting and attempting to influence a public servant.

Burlingame was booked and released on a $5,000 bond.

Carolina Woman Accused of Castrating Man

Martinne Patricia Delavega
(Jacksonville, North Carolina) A 51-year-old local woman, Martinne Patricia Delavega, has been accused of malicious castration of a man.

Delavega is accused of biting and tearing open a man’s testicles, maliciously maiming and disfiguring them as well as inflicting permanent damage, according to warrants.

Delavega paid $10,000 bond and was released from custody.

NEW WORD FOR THE N.Y. TIMES: 'FASMUNISTS'

Lord Monckton reacts below to Snyder's 'climate scam' piece in the NYT, warning of a 'next genocide'.  I thought I was pretty acerbic at times but Monckton leaves me far behind.

There is a small coda to this Snyder nonsense that I would like to mention: As Monckton documents below, Snyder explicitly compares climate skeptics to Hitler.  In my comment on Snyder yesterday I pointed out that was actually Snyder who was comparable to Hitler!  Fair enough?  Apparently not. I got a tweet about that from someone who calls himself The Tracker -- @IdiotTracker .  His  tweet in full was:

"@jonjayray @ClimateDepot That is possibly the dumbest attempt at guilt by association I've ever seen. And I've read @JoanneNova's blog. #sad"

He shows absolutely no awareness that it was Snyder who was attempting to create guilt by association.  Selective vision at its finest! Only Leftists are allowed to talk about Hitler, apparently.  I don't in fact think I was attempting to create guilt by association.  I think I was making an accurate historical comparison, while Snyder certainly was not

The Marxstream news media have always been champions of every passing totalitarian fad, however murderous. Hitler only got away with the slaughter of 6 million Jews because the Western news media fawned upon him and demanded appeasement almost until the first shots were fired in the Second World War. Likewise, the totalitarian press fawned upon Communism, even as it killed 100 million in the 20th century alone, to such an extent that some papers could scarcely bring themselves to cheer when the Berlin wall was torn down.

Naturally, therefore, they all signed up dutifully to the climate scam, the new and ingenious but false and intrinsically genocidal pretext for the global government centered on the U.N. that, barring a miracle, will be established in Paris this December. In support of this ghastly endeavor, the New York Times ran an outstandingly repellent opinion piece on Sept. 12 by a useless professor of tiddlywinks and raffia work at Yale, one Snyder (by name and nature) describing those of us who dare to question the climate scam as adopting “an intellectual stance that is uncomfortably close to Hitler’s.”

Let us put that revolting and stunningly inapt comparison into its context. This is what the evil Snyder wrote and the New York Times(“all the junk that’s fit to debunk”) published, under the headline, “The Next Genocide”:

“Hitler spread ecological panic by claiming that only land would bring Germany security and by denying the science that promised alternatives to war. By polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, the United States has done more than any other nation to bring about the next ecological panic, yet it is the only country where climate science is still resisted by certain political and business elites. These deniers tend to present the empirical findings of scientists as a conspiracy and question the validity of science – an intellectual stance that is uncomfortably close to Hitler’s.”

I have no idea how much taxpayer money this egregious waste of space has accumulated over the decades. Every cent of it was wasted.

Let us take apart Snyder’s tortuous attempt not only to deny that Hitler was a greenie but also to make out that he was somehow “anti-science.” First, Hitler did not “spread ecological panic”; he exploited environmentalism as a method of ruthless control.

The National Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany was the first in the world to adopt the “green” mantle, for Hitler and his goons were ahead of the pack in appreciating what Snyder and his overpaid, under-educated fellow goons in the batik and tie-dyeing department at Yale kindergarten well understand: If you are arrogant enough to want to control the populace, the “green” agenda – let us call it “Agenda 21″ – is the very best program to provide nonsensical excuses for the governing elite to interfere expensively in every tiny detail of our lives.

And Hitler’s problem was not that he “denied the science that promised alternatives to war.” He wanted war, and he embraced the science that made it possible.

The reason for Snyder’s more than usually dumb comparison was, of course, so that he could clamber onto the “global-warming” bandwagon just as all the wheels are coming off. Snyder, plainly no scientist, labors under the elementary delusion that CO2 is “pollution.” For what does a communist need to know about science? One thing and one thing only – the party line. And Snyder knows the party line all right, for it is spouted interminably in the knitting and crochet-work department at Yale and Harvard and other places where they used to think and now merely chant currently fashionable hard-left slogans.

Snyder is, in effect, accusing the Republican Party and the few business interests not yet profiteering monstrously from the climate fraud of being as genocidal as Hitler. The truth, of course, is that the real genocide is happening unseen every day in Africa, where for a tenth of what we are already squandering on the non-problem that was “global warming,” we could give everyone cheap, reliable, clean, fossil-fueled electric power, lift them out of poverty, disease and death, and hence stabilize the population, minimizing its environmental footprint.

To get the scare going, the climate communists made certain definite predictions that have just as definitely not come to pass. Those first predictions in 1990 were to the effect that by now there would have been almost three times as much global warming. It is legitimate, therefore, to raise questions about why there has been negligible global warming in the oceans throughout the entire 11 years of systematic measurement, and none at all in the lower atmosphere for 18 years and eight months, according to the satellites.

It is Snyder, then, who is anti-science – or would be, if he or anyone in the origami and card-tricks department at Yale were bright enough. All the predictions of doom in which he believes because they constitute the party line have been proven utterly false. All the ice gone in the Arctic by 2013: Nope, it’s still there. Droughts increasing (Snyder’s hate speech is illustrated with a photo captioned to the effect that droughts are worsening): Nope, the area of the globe under drought has been declining for 30 years. Sea-level rise accelerating (Snyder’s article has a photo caption alleging that “in Bangladesh millions of people have been displaced by floods and the rising sea level”): Nope, sea level off Bangladesh has actually fallen throughout the recent record. Storms increasing: Nope, there’s been no land-falling hurricane in the U.S. for longer than at any time since records began, and global storminess has remained much the same throughout the satellite era.

Should Snyder have been allowed to preach so much malice and hate so openly, so mendaciously, and with so scandalously little intellectual rigor or moral justification? One might have hoped for better from the coloring-by-numbers department at Yale. Your Constitution, though, says hate speech is fine, and the Supreme clots will uphold it as long as the speaker is left-wing.

However, the New York Times,though it takes full advantage of the constitutional right of free speech, has shown itself to be culpably determined not to allow any point of view but its own to be argued in its pages, particularly on any question – such as climate – that lies at the heart of the communist party line that it espouses. Do not hold your breath for an early reply to Snyder’s goose-stepping in that once-great paper’s shabby columns.

Let us hope that the Grand Old Party will remember Snyder’s words of sheer, hate-filled wickedness and make absolutely sure that every penny that might otherwise have gone to the face-painting and dressing-up department at Yale in funding for any purpose is cut off and put straight back into the pockets of the hard-pressed taxpayers from which it was wrenched.

It is Snyder who is the little Hitler here. Like Hitler, he believes that only one point of view is permissible on the question of the hour. Like Hitler, he espouses what history will reveal to have been entirely the wrong point of view. Like Hitler, he accuses his opponents of genocide while advocating it himself by demanding that the U.S. should adopt the brutal, genocidal climate-communist party line. Like Hitler, he uses the environment as a threadbare cloak for rank totalitarian advocacy. Like Hitler, he hates his own country enough to spit upon it and to wish to do it harm for absolutely no good reason. Like Hitler, he distorts the scientific truth and exploits it in an unprincipled fashion for the sake of spreading hatred. Like Hitler, he knows little or no science himself. Like Hitler, he flagrantly, knowingly, repeatedly, hatefully states the direct opposite of the objective truth.

What, then, to do about Snyder? No doubt there are still a few red-blooded Americans at Yale, mingling among the etiolated, apolaustic epicenes who mince about the place. Let them, passing Snyder as he scurries earnestly toward the stenciling-and-crayons department, throw him a mocking Nazi salute and, at the tops of their voices, yell “Heil Snyder!”

The odious Snyder deserves the minting of a new word. For there are two species of totalitarian socialism on this planet, alas, and that shambling, bleating wretch is the very embodiment and quintessence of both. There is communist socialism, which believes that everything that moves should be nationalized and that everything that doesn’t move should be arrested or left to rust, and down with the United States. And there is fascist socialism, which believes grinding the poor under its jack-booted heel and cozying up to big business and allowing it to be independent just so long as it toes the party line, and down with the United States.

The New York Times and its dismal professor of silly walks and cupcake-baking are communists and fascists rolled up into one. They are fasmunists. It’s an ugly word for ugly people. Heil Snyder!

SOURCE

Texas Educator Gets Probation for Sex with Student - Update

Amanda Askari
(Grayson County, Texas) Amanda Askari, 36, has been sentenced to eight years probation.

* * * * *
Texas Educator Guilty of Sex with Student
[Previous 7/18/15 post]
(Grayson County, Texas) A 36-year-old teacher's aide, Amanda Askari, has pleaded guilty to improper relationship with a student.

Askari confessed to sleeping with a student.

Investigators say they were tipped off by someone who called Child Protective Services in April.

Askari and the student were arrested two days later after her husband came home to find the two together and a fight broke out.

Sentencing is scheduled for September.

NYT says Hitler was right!

Predicts disastrous food shortages

There is here an article in the NYT under the heading "The Next Genocide" by Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University -- who knows nothing about economics or anything much modern.  So he is a Warmist. It's such an easily summarized load of old cobblers that I am not going to reproduce any of it for once.

What he says -- correctly -- is that Hitler's Drang nach Osten was motivated by a fear of running out of resources, food resources, in particular.  Hitler wanted Eastern European farms to produce the food needed to feed Germany's growing population.

And I acknowledge that I did learn one thing from our historian about that.  He says that concern about food supplies was motivated by the food shortages that occurred in Germany during WWI. I had never made that connection but it is obviously right.

All the rest is amazingly uninsightful and ill-informed, however.  He misses the obvious point that Hitler's modern successors in having panic fits over things running out are the Greenies. A reasonable person might have concluded that since Hitler was wrong about things running out, one should also question the Greenie fear of things running out.  That is too obvious for our one-eyed historian, however.  Greenies as Hitler's successors?  Perish the thought!

Instead he basically argues that Hitler was right!  He says that food shortages are a real possibility if we do not do something about it.  He asserts without proof that various wars in Africa were caused by competition for resources and that resources everywhere are in danger of running out because of global warming.   That tribalism in Africa causes a lot of conflict he acknowledges but he thinks he can see more deeply than that.

So what will happen when global warming creates worldwide food shortages?  China!  The millions of troops of the People's Liberation Army will descend on us all and take our land.

So what is wrong with that argument?  Just about everything. To take the searingly obvious, global warming would be GOOD for crops. Crops thrive in warmth.  I come from the tropics and I can assure you that vegetation there almost leaps out and grabs you, it is so lush and vigorous.  Leave your car outside untended for 6 months and at the end of six months you could find it covered with creepers.  I have seen it happen.

It's true that many pest species also thrive in warm weather but now that DDT has decisively been shown to be harmless to humans and birds, a widespread revival of DDT use would cope with that problem very easily.

And warming would be greeted with frabjous joy in both Canada and Siberia. And note what a big place Siberia is. It is 5 million sq. miles versus 3 million sq. miles for CONUS. The cropland that would be produced by a warmer South in Siberia boggles the imagination.

And clever Canadian farmers already produce a great bounty of grains from the chilly North.  How much more they would produce if the land just beyond present useability warmed up!  They would start cropping there very rapidly.

And already in the world as we have it, the characteristic problem of agricultural productivity is glut, not shortage.  Governments all over the developed world do various things to discourage their farmers from farming.  In the USA, the Agriculture Department pays farmers to leave part of their land fallow.  Why?  Because, left to their own devices, farmers would produce so much that food prices would fall greatly and thus trap farmers in a sort of Malthusian trap.  They would get poorer by producing more.  French farmers right at this moment are mounting big anti-government protests over the fact that they get so little money for what they produce.

So the whole basis of Prof. Snyder's scare is total crap.  Food has never before been so plentiful and hence cheaper -- and there is no end to that in sight.  The French government would fervently hope that it were but they are not going to get so lucky.

And Snyder's portrayal of China's present food situation would appear not to have been updated since Mao.  Under capitalism, those incredibly productive Chinese farmers have turned China from a net food importer to a net food exporter -- to the considerable grief of Australian wheat farmers.  Under Mao, Australian wheat put bread on the table for a lot of China.  That is no more.  China now has a surplus of grains -- among many other farm products.  Look at the origin of bargain cans of almost any food in your local supermarket and you will find that it mostly comes from China these days. As well as making most of the world's electrical goods, China now to a significant extent also feeds the world.  It's an amazing example of what capitalism can do.

One small thing that Snyder gets right is that there has been a distressing corn shortage in poorer countries in recent years -- thus bumping up the price and tending to make poor people go hungry.  He shows no knowledge that it is precisely his Greenie friends who are behind that, however.  Mandates to add ethanol to gasoline supplies in the USA have diverted much of the huge U.S. corn crop from export and into distilleries producing alcohol.  It's an inefficient way of producing alcohol but that's another story.  So Greenie meddling with the market can produce food shortages but even amid some shackles the market still produces plenty.  

Snyder is a complete ignoramus -- JR.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Oklahoma Woman Accused of Slashing Corpse

Shaynna Sims
(Tulsa, Oklahoma) A 27-year-old local woman, Shaynna Sims, has been accused of slashing the corpse of her boyfriend's ex-girlfriend during a funeral viewing.

She's pleaded not guilty to felony charges of unauthorized removal of body parts from a body, larceny, knowingly concealing or receiving stolen property and first-degree burglary.

Sims was arrested at the dead woman's apartment.

First pick your glacier

Sarah Palin pointed out that Obama had picked out one of the Alaskan glaciers that seem to be shrinking while ignoring others that are growing.  The story below is a reply to that.  

In the reply, however, they made a crucial and damaging admission:  Glacier mass is primarily a function of precipiation (snowfall, mainly) rather than of changes in air temperature. So much so that glaciers can in fact GROW amid a warming climate.

That makes their chart below doubly amusing.  It shows that glaciers have overall been losing mass right up to the present time.  Since there has been no global warming during the last 18 years of that time, the chart proves that overall glacial mass proves NOTHING about global warming.  The shrinkage is due only to reduced snowfall/rainfall.

But why would precipitation be reducing?  Hard to say for sure.  But there is one easy answer:  Reduced precipitation is due to COOLING. Cooling reduces evaporation off the sea and so there is less moisture to come down as rain/snow.  So the seas in most areas adjacent to glaciers are likely COOLING!  Logic is pesky stuff, is it not? -- JR


Glaciers normally grow through snow accumulation in the winter and then recede by melting in the summer. But lower levels of snow accumulation or higher temperatures will lead to an imbalance in that process and the glacier will retreat and lose mass over time.

But Palin pointed out that not all glaciers are losing ice. In a post on the opinion website IJ Review, she highlighted the Hubbard Glacier in Alaska. According to NASA, the Hubbard has indeed been advancing since measurement of the glacier began in 1895, at rates ranging from 13 meters to 36 meters per year. Here is how Leigh Sterns, a glaciologist at the University of Kansas, explained the glacier’s growth for NASA: “Hubbard’s advance is due to its large accumulation area; the glacier’s catchment basin extends far into the Saint Elias Mountains. Snow that falls in the basin either melts or flows down to the terminus, causing Hubbard to steadily grow.”

In short, regional variations and increasing snowfall thanks to climate change could cause some glaciers around the world to grow, even as global temperatures rise. In fact, the pace of the Hubbard Glacier’s advance has increased since 1984, which coincides with a period of increased precipitation rates.

Just as overall global temperatures are more relevant than what happens in individual areas, the overall trend for glaciers is more relevant, too. The global and Alaskan glacial trends are toward massive loss of ice as the world has warmed. The World Glacier Monitoring Service, which runs under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Meteorological Organization and other partners, reports that the latest data continue “the global trend in strong ice loss over the past few decades.” This general trend is apparent in the chart below, from the WGMS.



On CNN, Tapper pushed back at Palin, saying that “90 percent of glaciers, according to scientists, 90 percent of them are—are shrinking, are melting.” According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, based at the University of Colorado at Boulder, that’s true for alpine glaciers, which are most susceptible to retreat: “Over 90 percent of the measured alpine glaciers in the world are retreating, in almost every major glaciated region.” The NSIDC explains that the causes are “varied,” but “the underlying primary causes are a warming climate and the effects of increased soot and dust in areas of higher agricultural and industrial activity.” Both the Exit and Hubbard glaciers are alpine, of differing types—the former is a valley glacier, with its flow confined by valley walls and the latter is a tidewater glacier, which terminates into the ocean.

According to the most recent WGMS data, only 22 of the 126 glaciers it analyzed were adding mass, while 104—about 83 percent—were losing mass.

In spite of that trend, a minority of glaciers, such as the Hubbard, will likely continue to expand even with warmer temperatures. For example, a study published in 2014 in Nature Geoscience described the stable or growing glaciers of the Karakorum region in Asia. The reason for those glaciers’ deviation from the global trend has to do with localized changes to winter precipitation—snowfall, essentially, helps the glaciers stay stable or grow. The authors concluded that “[o]ur findings suggest a meteorological mechanism for regional differences in the glacier response to climate warming.” In other words, local weather patterns play a role in how glaciers respond to climate change.

Most glaciers in Alaska and around the world are losing ice as the world warms. Palin suggested that Obama was cherry-picking his glacier to make a point, but she was guilty of that trick herself.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

O.J. Simpson Appeal Rejected

O.J. Simpson
(Las Vegas, Nevada) The Nevada Supreme Court has rejected the latest appeal by 68-year-old O.J. Simpson.

Attorney Patricia Palm said Friday that she's trying to talk with Simpson at Lovelock Correctional Center about the Thursday ruling by a three-member panel of the state high court.

The justices issued a 16-page ruling saying there's no reason to overturn a lower court judge's decisions in the case and give Simpson a new trial.

So, Simpson will return to prison.

Arkansas Teacher Charged with Rape

Brittney Breedlove
(Harrison, Arkansas)

A former teacher at Valley Springs is charged in connection with the sexual assault of two juvenile boys.

Twenty-nine-year-old Brittney Breedlove was taken into custody Thursday following a three-week investigation by the Boone County Sheriff’s Office.

Breedlove has been charged with rape and sexual assault. Her bond was set at $25,000.

Kansas Woman Accused of Murder

Jammie Dannielle Hatfield
(Hutchinson, Kansas) A 27-year-old local woman, Jammie Dannielle Hatfield, has been arrested on charges of first degree murder and conspiracy to commit first degree murder. The victim has been identified as Mary Ann Arnett.

Hatfield was booked into custody with bond set at $500,000.

New Mexico Woman Charged with Embezzlement

Myca Ross
(Farmington, New Mexico) A 28-year-old local woman, Myca Ross, has been arrested for embezzlement of more than $15,000 from the parent-teacher organization.

Arrest records show that an audit revealed $15,000 was missing from the bank account of Northeast Elementary School's parent teacher organization.

Two members of the organization had alleged that Ross has spent $12,000 from the PTO's bank account on personal items, including gasoline, a pizza party for her child, groceries and a birthday party.

Ross has been charged with embezzlement, forgery and tampering with evidence.

A foolish feminist: Or how to destroy your career with one short message

When a pleasantry gets vitriol as a reply, who would want to work with such a b*tch? She is a barrister (trial lawyer) and, as such, depends entirely on solicitors giving her work.  Few will now. How can she have been so stupid?  A case of raging hormones, maybe

Step forward young Charlotte Proudman, 27, an award-winning barrister at the chambers of Michael Mansfield QC and a PhD student at Cambridge.

Clever girl, our Ms Proudman. Good at her job, too. Because, of course, the key to success as a barrister is knowing how to spot your enemy’s weaknesses — and having the guts and chutzpah to exploit those weaknesses ruthlessly.

In the dock, ladies and gentlemen, one Alexander Carter-Silk, a middle-aged, married father of two and a senior partner at the London office of solicitors Brown Rudnick.

Mr Carter-Silk, 57, stands accused of the most heinous of crimes. Of an act so foul that I hesitate to share it with you, dear reader. But share it I must. For this is a salutary tale of our times.

You may or may not know that there exists on the internet a tedious website called ‘LinkedIn’. It’s a networking site designed for thrusting professionals to be able to interact and do business with other thrusting professionals.

Being one of these creatures, Ms Proudman ‘reached out’ (as I believe it’s called these days) to Mr Carter-Silk, whom she didn’t know. He, being an accommodating sort, replied that he would be happy to ‘connect’.

He then took the liberty of expressing, by way of an ice-breaker, admiration for her photograph.

Now, most normal women would have thought: ‘What a nice man.’ Indeed, many of us would be delighted; compliments are few and far between these days.

But not Ms Proudman. ‘Alex,’ she typed, by way of reply (note, not ‘Dear Alex’, or Mr Carter-Silk, just ‘Alex’, as though she were his superior, and not a junior speaking to a seasoned expert). ‘I find your message offensive. I am on LinkedIn for business purposes, not to be approached about my physical appearance or to be objectified by sexist men.’

Warming to her theme, she continued. ‘The eroticisation of women’s physical appearance is a way of exercising power over women. It silences women’s professional attributes as their physical appearance becomes the subject.’

Signing off with a feminist flourish, she concluded, ‘Unacceptable and misogynistic behaviour. Think twice before sending another woman (half your age) such a sexist message.’

Blimey, you might think. What exactly did he say? What could this repulsive specimen of the patriarchy possibly have done to her? What vile and perverted acts did he suggest to earn such a passionate rebuke?

Er, he said he liked her picture. Specifically, he wrote: ‘I appreciate that this is probably horrendously politically incorrect but that is a stunning picture!!!! You definitely win the prize for the best LinkedIn picture I have ever seen.’

That’s it. That is the extent of his indecent proposal. Of his ‘eroticisation’ of her physical appearance. A simple, straightforward compliment: you look nice in your picture.

If that is what counts as ‘objectification’ and ‘misogyny’ these days, then the human race is in deep trouble. Not only does it beggar belief that Ms Proudman could have inferred any slight from such an innocuous missive, it also makes me fear for the next generation of women.

After all, heaven help the poor man who actually tries to ask her out on a date, let alone try to get her into his bed. He’d have better luck propositioning a porcupine.

As if her *hysterical and laughably pompous* reaction weren’t bad enough, she then decided to post their exchange on Twitter, thereby escalating the entire debacle to a state of war.

Instantly, the armies of Feminazis, permanently stationed at their computers ready to pounce at the slightest hint of a politically incorrect utterance, mobilised. Righteous indignation and sisterly solidarity streamed forth from their keyboards.

‘Will endure misogynistic backlash that accompanies calling out sexism in hope it encourages at least one woman to feel she doesn’t need to take it,’ Ms Proudman went on to declare on Twitter, her *self-righteousness* gathering steam as she labelled the networking website nothing more than a white-collar dating agency.

Poor Mr Carter-Silk. He may be beginning to know how Tim Hunt feels — Hunt being the Nobel Prize-winning professor booted out of UCL after making a supposedly sexist joke about female scientists during a conference speech earlier this year.

For hell hath no fury like the feminist mob in full cry. No doubt there will be calls for Mr Carter-Silk to lose his job. He’ll certainly have to issue some sort of grovelling apology, and his poor wife and family will be hounded. And all for daring to pay a woman a virtual compliment.

In fairness, he must bear some responsibility for the pickle he currently finds himself in. Because if he’d bothered to check Ms Proudman’s Twitter profile, he’d have known she might be trouble.

A fearless feminist is how she describes herself — ‘because rape, prostitution & pornography are problems of male dominance’. Indeed. But paying a woman a compliment — surely that’s not yet a crime?

Let’s face it, it’s not as if he sidled up to her in a bar and pinched her bum, or thrust his unwanted attentions on her on a bus. This alleged act of sexism happened in the ether. Even if it had been genuinely fruity, it was definitely harmless.

Some women might even have found it a little bit funny. I certainly would. Men, especially men of Mr Carter-Silk’s vintage, can be such clots when it comes to women they find vaguely attractive. It can even be rather endearing.

A few weeks ago, for example, I received an email from a gentleman reader in response to something or other I’d written. Quite a long disquisition, as I recall, and rather serious. He made several good points. And then at the end of it, a P.S: please could he have a picture of me in my nightie.

Sadly I was unable to oblige (I’m more of a pyjama girl); but was I offended? Certainly not. Tickled pink, in fact. After all, what’s not to like about a harmless compliment?

But then Ms Proudman is a different creature from me. Women my age had to learn how to roll with the punches fairly early on in our careers. We never had the luxury of equality legislation to protect us, or quotas to ensure we got ahead in the workplace, regardless of our actual ability. We did not grow up in the era of state-sponsored entitlement.

We had to work hard and without much recognition to be taken seriously — which, somewhat ironically, meant not taking life too seriously. Something that women like Ms Proudman just don’t understand.

By demonstrating such a monumental lack of humour and making such a gigantic fuss about something so trivial, she just makes herself look weak and pathetic. Isn’t she supposed to be some hot-shot feminist human rights lawyer? Well, go and defend some real victims of inequality, dear, instead of bleating on about some slighty off-colour message.

But then this is not really about helping other women overcome sexism, is it?  It’s about Ms Proudman making sure she’s the absolute centre of everyone’s attentions.

Perhaps Mr Carter-Silk was being a bit racy. Perhaps he should not have commented on her photo (although I can see why he did: she’s an attractive woman who’s clearly made a huge effort to look her most enticing); but if Ms Proudman thinks she’s doing anything other than indulging in a show of self-promotion at his expense, she’s deluding herself.

And if you want proof, I shall leave you with a quote from an interview she gave to a newspaper yesterday. Yes, Ms Proudman, so shy and retiring she could not even bear to suffer a compliment from a colleague — but perfectly willing to be interviewed by a newspaper.

‘My partner gets messages asking if he wants a job at hedge funds, I get propositions from men asking me out. I want a public apology.’

One thing’s for certain, Ms Proudman. You’ve sure got the public’s attention. Job done.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Carolina Woman Booked for Stabbing Man Multiple Times

Brittany Heath Killins
(Raleigh, North Carolina)

Brittany Heath Killins, 29, was arrested late Saturday night in connection with a domestic-related dispute that resulted in a man being stabbed multiple times, as well as a hit-and-run crash that occurred on Glenwood Avenue, police said.

Killins has been charged with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill or inflict serious injury and felony hit-and-run resulting in serious bodily injury or death.

Killins was booked and jailed on $1,003,000 bond.

Is a meritocracy closer than we think?

I am putting up below just the first part of a very searching essay on the implications of meritocracy.  The most interesting claim is that our society may already be very meritocratic.  In Britain, the 7% of the population who go to private schools end up running just about everything in the whole country.  They even make up about a third of Britain's Olympic team.  

This leads Leftists to claim that inherited social class governs one's opportunities in Britain.  But that may not be so.  Toby Young argues  below that those who go to private schools are already genetically advantaged.  They are by and large the children of economically successful people and such people tend to have higher IQs  -- which they pass on to their children genetically.  So the issue of social class and private schools is a red herring.  It is actually higher IQs that are easing the way for that top 7%

So schemes to improve education for the hoi polloi will not work unless the pupils concerned are already intellectually gifted.  And it was precisely that precondition that made Britain's "Grammar Schools" (academically selective schools) so successful at elevating children from poor families.  They were bright to start with.

Toby Young does not want that now nearly extinct Grammar School system to be revived but he does want marks and awards in existing schools to be strongly achievement-based.  He wants real ability recognized and rewarded -- just the opposite of the "dumbing down" that has for some time been the existing tendency.  In his system, those with genuine ability will be eased in their upward path, regardless of where they come from.

So it is possible to argue that MOST people already end up at a level within society that is commensurate with their innate intellectual abilities.  And even if that is not already so we are well on the road towards it.

My own experience bears that out.  I have a top 2% IQ but was born into a very humble and not very congenial family.  But, despite that background, I cruised through life mostly doing what I felt like and ended up as a well-paid university teacher.  I ran from one end of the occupational status scale to the other.  And I hardly worked at it.  What I did came easily and was fun.  Education for me was like solving a series of easy puzzles.  So I ended up where my IQ placed me, not where my birth placed me.

But society's responsiveness to IQ creates a problem.  What will happen if it becomes known that society has already placed just about everyone where they belong in the staus hierarchy and that there is no real possibility of an aspiring person cracking that?  Will it not lead to social unrest among the less gifted and maybe  even a bloody revolution against the existing order?

If that is a possibility, the present Leftist myth that it can all be solved by better education is in fact highly beneficial.  It gives hope and diverts attention from the "unfair" reality -- JR


The left  loathes the concept of IQ -- especially the claim that it helps to determine socio-economic status, rather than vice versa -- because of a near-religious attachment to the idea that man is a piece of clay that can be moulded into any shape by society

In 1958, my father, Michael Young, published a short book called The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2023: An Essay on Education and Equality. It purported to be a paper written by a sociologist in 2034 about the transformation of Britain from a feudal society in which people’s social position and level of income were largely determined by the socio-economic status of their parents into a modern Shangri-La in which status is based solely on merit. He invented the word meritocracy to describe this principle for allocating wealth and prestige and the new society it gave rise to.

The essay begins with the introduction of open examinations for entry into the civil service in the 1870s—hailed as “the beginning of the modern era”—and continues to discuss real events up until the late 1950s, at which point it veers off into fantasy, describing the emergence of a fully-fledged meritocracy in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. In spite of being semi-fictional, the book is clearly intended to be prophetic—or, rather, a warning. Like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), The Rise of the Meritocracy is a dystopian satire that identifies various aspects of the contemporary world and describes a future they might lead to if left unchallenged. Michael was particularly concerned about the introduction of the 11+ by Britain’s wartime coalition government in 1944, an intelligence test that was used to determine which children should go to grammar schools (the top 15 per cent) and which to secondary moderns and technical schools (the remaining 85 per cent). It wasn’t just the sorting of children into sheep and goats at the age of eleven that my father objected to. As a socialist, he disapproved of equality of opportunity on the grounds that it gave the appearance of fairness to the massive inequalities created by capitalism. He feared that the meritocratic principle would help to legitimise the pyramid-like structure of British society.

In the short term, the book achieved its political aim. It was widely read by Michael’s colleagues in the Labour Party (he ran the party’s research department from 1945 to 1951) and helped persuade his friend Anthony Crosland, who became Labour Education Secretary in 1965, that the 11+ should be phased out and the different types of school created by the 1944 Education Act should be replaced by non-selective, one-size-fits-all comprehensives. Crosland famously declared: “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f***ing grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland.” Today, there are only 164 grammar schools in England and sixty-eight in Northern Ireland. There are none in Wales.

But even though my father’s book helped to win the battle over selective education, he lost the war. The term “meritocracy” has now entered the language, and while its meaning hasn’t changed—it is still used to describe the organising principle Michael identified in his book—it has come to be seen as something good rather than bad. [1] The debate about grammar schools rumbles on in Britain, but their opponents no longer argue that a society in which status is determined by merit is undesirable. Rather, they embrace this principle and claim that a universal comprehensive system will lead to higher levels of social mobility than a system that allows some schools to “cream skim” the most intelligent children at the age of eleven.[2]

We are all meritocrats now

Not only do pundits and politicians on all sides claim to be meritocrats—and this is true of most developed countries, not just Britain—they also agree that the principle remains stillborn. In Britain and America there is a continuing debate about whether the rate of inter-generational social mobility has remained stagnant or declined in the past fifty years, but few think it has increased.[3] The absence of opportunities for socio-economic advancement is now seen as one of the key political problems facing Western democracies, leading to the moral collapse of the indigenous white working class, the alienation of economically unsuccessful migrant groups, and unsustainable levels of welfare dependency. This cluster of issues is the subject of several recent books by prominent political scientists, most notably Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (2015) by Robert Putnam.

Unlike my father, I’m not an egalitarian. As Friedrich Hayek and others have pointed out, the difficulty with end-state equality is that it can only be achieved at too great a human cost. Left to their own devices, some men will inevitably accumulate more wealth than others, whether through ability or luck, and the only way to “correct” this is through the state’s use of coercive power. If the history of the twentieth century teaches us anything, it is that the dream of creating a socialist utopia often leads to the suppression of free speech, the imprisonment of a significant percentage of the population and, in some extreme cases, state-organised mass murder.

Having said that, I recognise that a lack of social mobility poses a threat to the sustainability of liberal democracies and, in common with many others, believe the solution lies in improving our education systems. There is a consensus among most participants in the debate about education reform that the ideal schools are those that manage to eliminate the attainment gap between the children of the rich and the poor. That is, an education system in which children’s exam results don’t vary according to the neighbourhood they’ve grown up in, the income or education of their parents, or the number of books in the family home. Interestingly, there is a reluctance on the part of many liberal educationalists to accept the corollary of this, which is that attainment in these ideal schools would correspond much more strongly with children’s natural abilities. [4] This is partly because it doesn’t sit well with their egalitarian instincts and partly because they reject the idea that intelligence has a genetic basis. But I’m less troubled by this. I want the clever, hard-working children of those in the bottom half of income distribution to move up, and the less able children of those in the top half to move down.

In other words, I think the answer is more meritocracy. I approve of the principle for the same reason my father disapproved of it, because it helps to secure people’s consent to the inequalities that are the inevitable consequence of limited government. It does this by (a) allocating wealth and prestige in a way that appears to be fair; and (b) creating opportunities for those born on the wrong side of the tracks, so if you start with very little that doesn’t mean you’ll end up with very little, or that your children will. If you think a free society is preferable to one dominated by the state, and the unequal distribution of wealth is an inevitable consequence of reining in state power, then you should embrace the principle of meritocracy for making limited government sustainable.

Much more HERE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Texas Teacher and Male Student - Update

Tanya Ramirez
(Corpus Christi, Texas)

A grand jury indicted Tanya Ramirez, a 30-year-old former teacher and coach at King High School, last week on a second charge of inappropriate relationship between an educator and student, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times reported.

OK

* * * * *
Texas Teacher Accused of Inappropriate Conduct
[Previous 7/30/14 post]
(Corpus Christi, Texas) A 29-year-old teacher formerly at King High School, Tanya Ramirez, has been accused of engaging in sexual conduct with a male student.

Ramirez faces a charge of suspicion of improper relationship between educator/student.

The allegations relate to conduct that was sexual in nature, district spokeswoman Lorette Williams said in June, but declined to elaborate.

Ramirez was booked into custody at the Nueces County Jail and later released on $10,000 bail.

Kentucky Clerk Jailed and Released

Kim Davis
(Morehead, Kentucky)

A jailed Kentucky clerk asserted that marriage licenses issued without her authority Friday to gay couples in Rowan County are void and "not worth the paper they are written on" because she didn't authorize them, her attorney said.

Kim Davis now wears an orange jumpsuit and "has already been doing Bible studies with herself" in jail, her attorney Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel told reporters after meeting with her behind bars. He said Davis is in very good spirits, and is prepared to stay as long as it takes to uphold her religious freedoms.

Davis was released from jail today.

Moron-talk from Australia: Global warming plays havoc with Auburn cherry blossom festival (?)

What complete rubbish!  For a start, there has been no statistically significant global warming for 18 years.  So observed variations in seasons over that period cannot be attributed to that.  All that is being observed is that seasons vary from year to year -- as they always have.

Like many Brisbane people, I like crepe myrtles.  I have eight of them in my back yard.  There must be millions of them in Brisbane.


I have 17 metres solid of blossoming trees in my back yard in January -- in three colours

In tropical North Queensland, where I originally come from, we used to call them Christmas bushes, because they began flowering in early December.  In sub-tropical Brisbane flowering normally begins in January.  It can be early January or late January.  And in some years you can get some blossom in late December.  It's just a natural cycle.  It always has been variable and it always will be.  And there is no doubt that the flowering times of cherry trees will also vary by weeks


Cherry blossom festivals bring to mind beauty, tranquillity and the traditional Japanese song Sakura Sakura: "Cherry blossoms, cherry blossoms, Across the spring sky, As far as you can see."

But the flowering of 180 trees at Auburn's annual cherry blossom festival has sent many young women into a giddy spin. "It's not quite like an Acca Dacca concert," said Greg Hodges, the curator of the Botanic Gardens with the Auburn City Council.

"People go crazy, it is like watching an old Elvis movie. There are girls jumping up and down screaming; it is not the sort of thing you expect in a garden," he said.  "It is such a quaint beauty in this day and age, and people get very excited."

A record 10,000 people visited last Saturday, and similar crowds – those wearing kimonos or Cosplay costumes get in free – are expected to visit the Botanic Garden's Japanese Garden cherry blossoms this weekend too.

Signs warn visitors not to shake the trees, even though catching a petal or capturing a photo with falling blossoms is a good omen in the eyes of some Asian visitors.

For organisers of cherry blossom festivals in Washington DC, Tokyo and Auburn, the trickiest part of the annual event is forecasting when the trees will flower, and hoping they bloom during the scheduled dates.

Specialists at the Royal Botanical Gardens Sydney say global warming is affecting when traditional late-winter and early-spring plants – from wattles to jacarandas –are flowering. Seasonal variations in rainfall and temperature can complicate timing, too.

Contrary to what most people think, a warm winter causes the cherry trees to bloom later. Mr Hodges said the trees – a mix of  flowering pear, apple, cherry and apricot trees – required a prolonged cold period in winter before they will bloom.

Because this winter was cold, about 70 per cent of the  trees are already past their prime, making him wish he had started the festival a week earlier. The white cherry and the flowering pears are still coming on, he said. Last year, he had the opposite problem. A warm 2014 winter meant there were "hardly any blossoms" in the first week.

Because these festivals are so popular, environmental groups such as WWF in the United States use them to highlight the impact of global warming. During the annual cherry blossom festival in Washington DC, WWF held a public talk on "A Blossoming Problem: The Disruptive Impacts of Climate Change on Nature's Calendar" to discuss how global warming affected cherry blossoms and other plants and animals.

A Japanese study also studied the impact of climate change on culturally significant events such as the timing of flowers on the trees.

It found 92 per cent of festival organisers said global warming was occurring, and it was affecting when trees burst into bloom. Organisers dependent on income from these festivals were more concerned about climate change than others.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

NASA says sea levels will rise by a metre over the next century

And what is the basis of that prophecy?  It's not an academic journal article.  It's just a press release, which is here.  And the whole scare is based on one alleged fact: "Seas around the world have risen an average of nearly 3 inches since 1992".

One writer has looked carefully at the data concerned and concludes:

"There is nothing abnormal about sea level rising by 3 inches over a 23-yr period.  Nor is a 3 mm/yr sea level rise over a multi-decade period unusual.  There is simply no anomaly requiring an explanation.  The claim that the 3 inches if sea level rise from 1992-2015 is inline with 3 feet of sea level rise in the 21st century is patently false and demonstrably disprovable.  The accurate statement that sea level is rising faster now than it was 50 years ago is cherry-picking of the highest order."

EXPERTS fear an ice sheet the size of Queensland is melting so quickly it will cause massive storm surges capable of decimating Australia’s coastal cities within the next century.

Satellite images recently captured by NASA show large sections of Greenland and Antarctica are vanishing at a much faster rate than previously thought.

Because of this scientists now believe sea levels will rise by a metre over the next 100 to 200 years. And this is not good. Dr Steve Rintoul from the CSIRO told news.com.au if the NASA predictions prove true Australia could expect more devastating flash floods similar to the one suffered by Brisbane four years ago.  [The Brisbane floods were due to negligent use of Brisbane's big flood-control dam (Wivenhoe).  They were not a "flash flood"]

He said as the average sea level rose, so did the risk of destructive storm surges. “What that means is that the frequency and severity of coastal flooding increases and those floods are more serious as the average sea level rises,” he said. “Most Australians live along the coast, and this is where we are going to feel the impact of sea levels rises.

“There is also about 150 million people that live within one metre of present day sea level, and so if sea levels rise by one metre, those people will be displaced. Many of our major cities around the world are close to sea level and also much of our industry and infrastructure is also close to the coast.

The implications of rising sea levels are quite serious because a one metre rise would cause serious disruption not just to people on low level islands but to infrastructure and the economy in countries that have a coastline.” ... blah blah blah

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).