Hit the park briefly for the first time this year on skis, was feeling good!

I stayed on the mid size jump for today as it was the second day skiing and the first day jumping this season for me and I didn’t have a helmet with me. And I am becoming sensible in my older age. Maybe time to take up golf properly soon.
Joking, joking, next time, big jump!

My Aunt out in California always does brilliant Christmas cakes, and even though I didn’t make it over this year, my bro and sister went to stay with my mum who lives there and got a photo of this years.

The little Obama even spoke and said part of his inauguration speech when you clicked on his front.

When Obama got elected everyone was so happy and kept saying why don’t you post something about how great it is, I just always said wait and see, I was skeptical that anything would change for the better for the majority of people.

Anyway, Happy Christmas!

New years eve, eve.

Man, I loved this car since I first saw it at a DTM race years ago, but in all black like this, wow. Hiroshi Fujiwara has model 1 out of 100 cars made. Via Mai Ikuzawa at Hiroshi’s Honeyee blog.

Flying up and down to Hamburg this week, there was cloud cover for almost the entire journey, with the occasional small window down to a frozen snowy Europe below. In the United States, at the same time, there was cloud cover from Canada all of the way down to Texas. Pretty heavy winter so far.

Let’s say just for arguments sake that global warming was a problem (it’s not), and let’s say that it was somehow possible, through the reduction of co2 (despite co2 levels FOLLOWING climate, and being essential to life) to stop the climate from warming, then what would happen if the earth started cooling? (it has already been cooling for 9 years). Would they then try and extract another few trillion from people to warm it up again? The whole politically motivated global warming debate is ludicrous, and many, many good people have been taken for a ride.

I don’t know if this is a record or not for Christmas coverage, but it is certainly reminiscent of the winter of 1977-78 where we had similar bouts of cold and snow. About 99% of Canada has snow cover also, with some parts of the Pacific Coast excepted, and it appears that all of Canada’s Lakes are frozen as indicated by the “yellow ice” in the photo.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/25/nearly-two-thirds-of-the-continental-usa-gets-a-white-christmas/

From Monsieur Treluyer. Nice ride/detailing.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1237235/ANALYSIS-Saved–trillion-pound-trade-carbon.html#ixzz0aQ9ptTQ7

The city of Copenhagen ‘is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport’. So said John Sauven of Greenpeace UK after the climate summit broke up. And he is right.

This is the biggest heist in history. As they poured carbon over snow-covered Denmark from their gas-guzzling jets, world leaders were congratulating themselves on securing a deal which will make their backers and financiers a trillion pounds a year. These riches will come from buying and selling permits, the so-called ‘carbon credits’ which allow industry and electricity generators in developed countries to emit carbon dioxide.

The frenzied negotiations we have just seen were never about ‘saving the planet’. They were always about money. At stake was this new ‘climate change industry’ which last year ripped off £129billion from the global economy and is heading for that trillion-pound bonanza by 2020 – but only if the key parts of the Kyoto treaty could be renewed.

The actual emissions don’t change, it’s merely a matter of how much you have to pay for them. For example, in 2006, the NHS spent £6million on carbon permits to keep patients warm.

It’s not just a snowboard or ski movie, or a skate flick, it’s a film about what the ridiculous Voleurz family does for fun on the West Coast of Canada. A smooth blend of snowboarding, skiing, skateboarding, tomfoolery and beer combines to create a one of a kind film that will keep you smiling and stoked no matter who you are, where you live, or what’s strapped to your feet. We hope you have as much fun watching Outdoor Graduation as we did making it.

Love that fakie to fakie with complete stall at 13.48. Classic. Actually it’s all ace, the riding, the filming, the editing. Respect.

On Dec. 13th, Earth passed through a stream of debris from extinct comet 3200 Phaethon. The encounter produced a surge of more than 160 Geminid meteors per hour.

815 new snowfall records, 304 low temperature, and 403 lowest max temperature records were set this week in the USA.

And they want us to pay how many billions (trillions?) to stop warming? What warming are they talking about exactly? How was that money going to be able to control the climate again? Personally, I like the cold (for half the year) because it makes the snow better, but overall, I imagine most people would be happier to have a little warming rather than extensive cooling (not that we control the climate either way, anyway).

Including those freezing their asses off in copenhagen. brrrrr.

The cold winner however is in Edmonton Canada, where they beat their old record by 10 degrees and recorded a frigid -46.1 C, or -58.4 C with wind chill. The old record of -36.1 C was set last year.

Maybe we should start a -273 Award for all the places which beat their previous cold records (modern times only).

One last point, If any of these record cold temps are at urban sites, then the natural variability has been enough to overcome forty years of Urban Heat Island effect (which a 6th grader here demonstrates has lead to temperature rises in the cities, whilst the rural areas nearby had no temperature rise).

You know when you are a kid and everything seems massive and then often, years later you see the same thing and it just looks really small?
That never happened to me with the mountains.

On that note, for some reason it seems fitting to say BIG UP to my brother and Flo, who are getting married today, on a remote beach in Fiji!
Best of luck to the two of you’s!

Set off this morning with no destination in mind really, eventually settled on Sportgastein which we had never been to before, just over an hour away. It had only one lift, but it went all the way up to 2650m and offered loads of offpiste. The most I have seen in 2 years here actually. I dont want to make all of you green, but it was kind of epic, the snow, the mountains, the sun and the light were so good, really made me feel alive : p

Hit some nice wide open lines, some tree lines, some windlips, some drop off’s and a few cliffs. It was quite cold, -12.5 degrees at the BOTTOM which meant it was tricky to take photos because your hands lost feeling pretty quick. We ended up blowing every jump photo due to malfunctioning fingers, but a few of the others came out ok:

In all, the print news media have warned of four separate climate changes in slightly more than 100 years – global cooling, warming, cooling again, and, perhaps not so finally, warming.

The cooling world in newsweek 1975.
In days past Time Magazine was predicting catastrophic global cooling too.
One more:

The question is again being discussed whether recent and long-continued observations do not point to the advent of a second glacial period, when the countries now basking in the fostering warmth of a tropical sun will ultimately give way to the perennial frost and snow of the polar regions.
- NYTimes, February 24, 1895, Wednesday

As a point of note, even though the graph on the right looks fairly dramatic, the actual temperature change over the 90 years fluctuates by less than 0.9 degrees. During the accelerated industrialization period of 1940-1970, when carbon emissions reached a crescendo, the temperature actually dropped.

Much recent attention has been paid to the email about the “trick” and the effort to “hide the decline”. Climate scientists have complained that this email has been taken “out of context”. In this case, I’m not sure that it’s in their interests that this email be placed in context because the context leads right back to a meeting of IPCC authors in Tanzania, raising serious questions about the role of IPCC itself in “hiding the decline” in the Briffa reconstruction.

The emails show that the late 20th century decline in the Briffa reconstruction was perceived by IPCC as “diluting the message”, that “everyone in the room at IPCC” thought that the Briffa decline was a “problem” and a “potential distraction/detraction”, that this was then the “most important issue” in chapter 2 of the IPCC report and that there was “pressure” on Briffa and other authors to show a “nice tidy story” of “unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more”.

Continued…

Never seen anything quite like this before. Love to give it a try! Outfit choice seems important. I’d have gone each-way on the orange/white bloke in the next post down. Not sure how to say each-way in Japanese though?

MP who used to work with me and sometimes post on derestricted, moved to tokyo and started his own blog. Lots of bikes and other delicacies from the land of the rising sun.

When i first saw this, I thought it was fake, but a spiral with a greenish blue light was witnessed and recorded this morning by thousands of people throughout northern Norway and the Trondelag.

Video and more photos here: http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/distrikt/nordland/1.6902336

Info via spaceweather.com.

Knut Jorgen Roed Odegaard, Norway’s most celebrated astronomer, said:
“This was seen over an exceptionally large area of the country – in all of north Norway and the Trondelag. My first thought was that it was a fireball meteor – but it lasted far too long. It may have been a missile from Russia – but I can’t guarantee that is the answer. I rang the Air Traffic Control tower in Tromse. They said it was over in two minutes. To me, that is far too long for this to be an astronomical phenomenon. This spiral shape is unique. It is definitely not a variation of the aurora borealis – northern lights.”

Another video of it here. And more info here. The most likely explanation so far seems to be that it was an out of control Russian rocket, but that expanding black disk is still a bit puzzling.