Speaking of cracked

OK, so a large chunk of ice from the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf near Canada's Ellesmere Island has cracked off according to CNN, who says the ice researcher at Trent University who recognized it was careful not to blame global warming. And why not? That's probably what caused it.

After all, it was warming that caused the ice to break free from Ellesmere Island at the turn of last century. Yet this is news, not because Arctic temperatures might be warming but because the conventional wisdom says that man has caused this warming:

Ellesmere Island was once entirely ringed by a single enormous ice shelf that broke up in the early 1900s. At 170 square miles and 130-feet thick, the Ward Hunt shelf is the largest of those remnants. Mueller said it has been steadily declining since the 1930s.

Emphasis added.

No wonder the scientist was reluctant to mention 'global warming' since by doing so he'd be linking exhausts from SUVs and jet aircraft to an event that occurred 100 years ago and before the birth of Dick Cheney or Karl Rove.

Proof? Link? OK, from muzzled NASA scientist James Hansen's GISS site, here's the record from an actual weather station in the NW Territories, one of few with data back into the 1800s. Unfortunately it stops around 1980 but provides enough to get a feel for the warming that caused Ellesmere to begin losing its ice before McCain was even around.

So...does anyone really think Nancy Pelosi could have saved that precious ice were she alive and Speaker back then? Not rational folks, but it seems nutbars are now gaining more and more power, with others arriving soon if Obama sweeps in. To point out the ludicrousness, Jerry Brown is now harassing(and I pronounce that hur rass) a bottled water company for trying to bring jobs to an old lumber town in California called McCloud for having the audacity to suggest a plant there.

If bottled water is ripe for ridicule as an unnecessary climate change-causing luxury item then the door is wide open for anything depending on the whims of the nutbars. Consider California's recent ban of trans-fat and Los Angeles's ban on new fast food joints and it certainly looks like the hippies are making their final stand.

Just call it change.

MORE 7/30/08

Well, I guess McCain would not be happy with me for the above. It's a mad, mad, world, folks.