Tyana Kelley Doesn't Think Your Truck is Sexy

Spokane urban transplant Tyana Kelley and Democratic candidate for the Washington state legislature has a lot to learn about the 9th District. Heck, she's only been here since last August.

For example, Kelley wrote on her blog about the Johnson and Albion 4th of July Parades:

The Republican candidates were out in force at both parades. Each candidate had their own vehicle: either a gas-guzzling truck, or car with an equally big engine. In Albion we were put in the line to walk right in between all these vehicles. It was a bit intimidating. My opponent, Joe Schmick, had the biggest truck, a Ford F-350.

I wonder if Tyana realizes that Joe is a farmer and needs that truck to farm? I wonder if she realizes that many of her potential voters also drive similar rigs for similar reasons?

She stated in an interview with the Moscow-Pullman Daily News that "We need someone in Olympia to work with the Democratic majority." God forbid. Do 9th District voters want a Democrat supermajority to hit us with the 2009 version of SB6900?

You remember SB6900. It was the bill proposed by a Seattle area liberal senator earlier this year that would have engine displacement and emission fees for motor vehicles according to a schedule tied to engine size in liters and CO2 emissions in grams per mile. That's just what area farmers need when the price of diesel is already at record levels.

Just tell Tyana, "No thanks." She can move out of the area when her husband finishes up at WSU. We don't need any more carpetbaggers around here.

Frost on July 11

Palousitics contributor Mattwi finally sent along these pictures of his car on the morning of July 11, 2008.


As you can see, the temperature in Colton that morning was 33 degrees Fahrenheit.


The official low temperature at Pullman-Moscow Regional Airport was 35 degrees, a record low for July 11. The following morning saw record lows as well. The Whitman County Gazette reported that the 33 degrees temperature at the airport was the lowest ever for July 12. The Gazette reported that crops and gradens were damaged by the unprecedented late freeze.

The ravages of global warming continue on the Palouse.

Mrs. Coggins Goes to Washington

April's mega-post about global warming, "Purposeful Manipulation of Temperature Data or Poor Practice?" is now linked on Senator James Inhofe's (R-Oklahoma) U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works press blog.

Senator Inhofe's blog is a great source of global warming skepticism information and I highly recommend paying a visit there.

Congrats April!

"Port turns to courts to settle debt with biofuels company"

Hopefully, the Losonoco fiasco will dissuade Whitman County from participating any further in the Great Biofuel Swindle, that has caused starvation and driven up food prices worldwide in the name of the Goracle and his Church of the Boiling Planet.

From Friday's Moscow-Pullman Daily News:

The Port of Whitman County is preparing to take legal action against Losonoco following the biofuels company's continued failure to pay off the remainder of its lease.

The Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based company had planned to construct a $10 million oilseed crushing plant at the Port of Wilma, but Port Properties and Development Manager Debbie Snell said it hasn't made a payment on its lease since January.

Losonoco signed a 10-year lease with the port in 2007, agreeing to pay $24,150 per year for rights to 10.5 acres, and an additional $2,300 a year for the right of first refusal on an additional 10 acres of land at the site. The company also expected to hire a local staff of about 20 full-time employees, in addition to employing many temporary construction workers to build its facilities.

Snell said the company still owes approximately $12,000 on the lease.

"Basically, we just have not been able to put the economics together to close out the lease," she said.

The port sent a default letter to the company in early May, giving Losonoco a June 30 deadline for payment. The port extended the deadline to July 8 after company officials indicated they would not be able to make payment at that time.

Snell said the company has now failed to meet the new deadline, forcing the port to initiate the legal process to recover the money.

"If they make payment soon then this will all mean nothing," she said. "They've assured me that they are trying to make the payment, but have to wait until they receive proceeds from an equipment sale before they can do so."

Snell said she believes the company has acted in good faith but that economic conditions in the commodities market have turned the Port of Wilma plans into an unrealistic option.

"They just got broadsided," she said. "Now it's just a matter of moving on and finding the right fit for a new tenant."

Daily News calls to a number listed for the company's Fort Lauderdale headquarters were not answered.

Kill Your Television

For the eco-chic who have been watching the new "Planet Green" channel, I hope you haven't been doing it on a flat-screen TV:

Booming demand for flat-screen televisions could have a greater impact on global warming than the world's largest coal-fired power stations, scientists warn.

A greenhouse gas called nitrogen trifluoride, used to make the TVs, is 17,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide, said Michael Prather, director of the environment institute at the University of California, Irvine.

So does that mean those of us without flat-screen TVs can sell carbon credits? Oh brother.

Global Warming Equals Bad Violins?

Now, even classical music has fallen victim to global warming.

"So why is the maple and spruce wood in a Stradivarius so different?

Part of the reason may be that trees grow slightly differently today than in the past.

"Climate difference could explain part of it but treatment of the wood could be another explanation. A third answer could simply be the ageing of the wood over the past 300 years," Dr Berend Stoel of the Leiden University Medical Center told Reuters."

Global Warming Story of the Day

Chilly spring delays strawberries, other local produce; The calendar may say summer, but it's still spring to crops confused by this year's unusually cold temperatures and rainy weather

And yet the Governor of Washington wants our farmers to grow food to burn as gas to reduce "global warming."

The Great Earthquake Hoax and Global Warming

As April noted the other day, the media are now blaming earthquakes on global warming. It turns out that the media were taken in by a hoax.

It's amazing, is it not, how the media are so easily fooled by an alarmist hoax if it advances a leftist agenda. On the other hand, if a conservative says something like, "Iran is dangerous regime seeking nuclear weapons," that news is largely ignored.

James Taranto puts the whole episode into a neat perspective. Scroll down.

Remember Alan Sokal? He's the physicist who, in 1996, submitted an article to the postmodernist journal Social Text in which he claimed that "physical 'reality,' " including gravity, "is at bottom a social and linguistic construct." The whole thing was a hoax aimed at exposing postmodernism as fundamentally nonsensical.

It appears global warmism has found its Alan Sokal, a man named Tom Chalko. Our friends at NewsBusters.org note a story that appeared on both the CBS News Web site and MSNBC claiming that global warming causes the earth to move:

The research proves that destructive ability of earthquakes on Earth increases alarmingly fast and that this trend is set to continue, unless the problem of "global warming" is comprehensively and urgently addressed.
The analysis of more than 386,000 earthquakes between 1973 and 2007 recorded on the US Geological Survey database proved that the global annual energy of earthquakes on Earth began increasing very fast since 1990.
Dr. Chalko said that global seismic activity was increasing faster than any other global warming indicator on Earth and that this increase is extremely alarming.
CBS identified this as an Associated Press story before pulling it from its Web site (it's cached here). The story still appears at MSNBC.com, identified correctly as coming from Marketwire, a press-release wire.

Is There Anything NOT Caused By Global Warming?

Well, last week global warming was killing Boy Scouts. And now, it's causing Salmonella contamination of tomatoes.

Is there anything carbon dioxide cannot do?

Consensus on Global Warming at WSU?

Not if you saw the June 10 edition of WSU Today online. The original headline of a photo story by Shelly Hanks and Robert Frank on Tuesday's Pullman snowstorm read "Global Warming? R-i-g-h-t." You can view the Google cache of that version here.

After the story was linked to Tom Nelson's blog (a well-known global warming skeptic site,) and a link to Tom Nelson's blog was surreptiously embedded into the WSU Today headline, the headline was changed to read "Global warming? Not today." See for yourself here.

As April commented on the Tom Nelson blog:

Recheck the headline at the WSU site. It's been politically corrected. I'm not surprised, just sickened. The writer probably has to go through retraining so as to embrace the "empirical evidence" that the morally corrupt leftists at WSU have to offer. We wouldn't want any dissent, now would we?

Global Warming Quote of the Day

Greg Koch, a forecaster at the National Weather Service in Spokane, said Pullman received 1.5 inches of snow [on June 10], which is the latest snowfall on record dating back to 1940, when weather records were first kept. It also was the first time measurable snowfall was recorded in the month of June.

-"'Crazy' snowfall causes problems in Pullman," Moscow-Pullman Daily News, June 11, 2008

Yep, It's The Year Without a Summer

As of 9:00 AM PDT, there is 1/2 inch of snow on the ground in Pullman and it is still falling hard.

Paging Mr. Al Gore, please pick up the white Frosty the Snowman courtesy phone....

UPDATE AT 10:00 AM PDT: Just got a call from home. About one inch of now there now. My daughter, who lives with her mom in South Carolina, is enjoying her "summer" vacation from school here in Pullman.

The Year Without a Summer?

My daughter, who recently moved from Virginia to Pullman, asked me the other day, "When is it going to get warm?"

According to an article in Sunday's Seattle Times, not until July...maybe.

Meanwhile, in today's Seattle Times, it is reported that:

Seattle just experienced the coldest first week of June, according to climate records dating to 1891, said Cliff Mass, University of Washington meterologist. Both 1999 and 2008 share the record, with 1917 falling in second place, he said. "Just wait until tomorrow," he said, when temperatures are going to be even colder.

<-snip->

"In 30 years I can only remember two other times when it snowed this late in the season," said Sam Krahenbuhl, Snoqualmie Pass assistant maintenance superintendent. "One time it snowed on a Fourth of July weekend. This is really rare."

While it won't snow in the Puget Sound area, records for the lowest high temperature may be broken today and Tuesday. Forecasters said the high temperature today should be 57 degrees, 1 degree below the record set last year. On Tuesday, under windy and rainy skies, the temperature should only get to 54 degrees, 2 degrees below the record set in 1972.

Mountains in Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho are also expected to see snow above 3,500 feet.

Remember, there's only 7 years, 7 months and 19 days until the The Goracle predicts the Earth will melt......

Headed Over to Western Washington This Weekend?

Might want to carry chains.

Summer starts in two weeks.

From the National Weather Service:

SPECIAL WEATHER STATEMENT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE SEATTLE WA
430 AM PDT FRI JUN 6 2008

WAZ513-518-519-062230-
OLYMPICS-WEST SLOPES NORTHERN CASCADES AND PASSES- WEST SLOPES CENTRAL CASCADES AND PASSES- 430 AM PDT FRI JUN 6 2008

...A STRONG LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM WILL BRING SIGNIFICANT SNOWFALL TO THE HIGHER ELEVATIONS OF THE CASCADES AND OLYMPICS TODAY..

RAIN AND SNOW WILL INCREASE OVER THE MOUNTAINS OF WESTERN WASHINGTON THIS MORNING...BECOMING HEAVY AT TIMES THROUGH THE DAY. THE MAIN SNOW LEVEL WILL HOVER NEAR 3500 FEET BUT TEMPERATURES WILL BE MARGINAL FOR ACCUMULATING SNOW BETWEEN 4000 AND 5500 FEET. THE HEAVIEST PRECIPITATION IS EXPECTED LATER THIS MORNING AND AFTERNOON WHEN UP TO 3 INCHES OF SNOW COULD FALL AT THE HIGHER PASSES. ABOVE 5500 FEET...COLDER TEMPERATURES WILL ALLOW ALL THE FALLING SNOW TO STICK WITH UP TO 2 FEET EXPECTED BY THIS EVENING. THIS WILL RESULT IN A HAZARD FOR MOUNTAINEERING AND TRAVEL IN THE HIGH BACKCOUNTRY WITH POOR VISIBILITY...WINDY CONDITIONS...COLD TEMPERATURES...AND THE POSSIBILITY OF RENEWED AVALANCHE ACTIVITY.

PEOPLE DRIVING OVER THE HIGHER HIGHWAYS INCLUDING STEVENS PASS..CHINOOK PASS...WASHINGTON PASS...THE ROAD TO PARADISE...AND THE ROAD TO HURRICANE RIDGE...WILL LIKELY ENCOUNTER SNOW...POOR VISIBILITY...AND SOME WIND. HOWEVER ACCUMULATIONS ON THE ROADS WILLGENERALLY BE THREE INCHES OR LESS.

Sarah Palin for President

Sandpoint native and University of Idaho graduate Sarah Palin, the Republican Governor of Alaska, has been mentioned as a possible VP candidate.

The thought goes that the young (44), snowmobiling, socially conservative, pro-life, former beauty queen would balance out McCain's stuffy, staid, grumpy old RINO image.

It turns out Palin may be too much of a maverick for Maverick.

Palin announced yesterday that Alaska will sue to challenge the recent listing of polar bears as a threatened species. Palin fears the listing will cripple Alaska's oil and gas industry, the bread and butter of the 49th State. She stated:

The listing of a currently healthy species based entirely on highly speculative and uncertain climate and ice modeling and equally uncertain and speculative modeling of possible impacts on a species would be unprecedented.

Predictably, the environmentalist wackos started an immediate ad hominem smear campaign as they do to all global warming heretics:

She's either grossly misinformed or intentionally misleading, and both are unbecoming," said Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity. "Alaska deserves better."

Siegel said it was unconscionable for Palin to ignore overwhelming evidence of global warming's threat to sea ice, the polar bear's habitat.

"Even the Bush administration can't deny the reality of global warming," she said. "The governor is aligning herself and the state of Alaska with the most discredited, fringe, extreme viewpoints by denying this."

On a side note, Palin participated last October in the grand opening ceremony for a Wal-Mart Supercenter in her former hometown of Wasilla, where she said:

But we are hard working, very unpretentious, just good, salt of the earth people that live here and are working in this store.

Forget about VP. An elected official gutsy enough to publicly buck the Global Warming Hysteria Express AND support Wal-Mart deserves to be President.

"Biofuels firm fails to make lease payments to port"

I wonder if nationwide we're going to see the wheels start to come off the biofuel craze as the starvation that results from burning food spreads.

I normally support any business in Whitman County, but I can't say I'm sad to see this deal fall through.

From yesterday's Moscow-Pullman Daily News:

Plans to construct a $10 million oilseed crushing plant at the Port of Wilma in Whitman County appear to be shelved for now.

Port Properties and Development Manager Debbie Snell said Losonoco, an international biofuels company based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., is nearly six months delinquent in its biannual lease payments to the port.

Losonoco signed a 10-year lease with the port in 2007, agreeing to pay $24,150 per year to for rights to 10.5 acres, and an additional $2,300 a year for the right of first refusal on an additional 10 acres of land at the site. Losonoco also was expected to pay a 12.48 percent leasehold tax to the state, which basically amounts to a renter's tax.

Snell said the company's most recent lease payment was due in January.

Losonoco's failure to comply with terms of the lease prompted the port commission to have port staff draft a default letter that was sent to the company last week, Snell said.

"We will be pursuing a close out of the lease in some way, shape or form," she said.

Snell said the port is waiting to hear from Losonoco officials before moving forward. It is likely that the two sides will negotiate a lease buyout or transfer to another company that would fit with the port's overall goals and vision.

"The ball's in their court," Snell said. "I am hoping the negotiations can come where it is a win-win for everyone.

"The process doesn't happen quickly," she added. "There's a lot of things to go through."

Losonoco Chief Operating Officer Don Markley declined to comment.

The potential loss of the tenant won't be overly detrimental to the port, although it will mean the county won't benefit from the company's estimated $100 million in expected annual sales.

Whitman County Commissioner Michael Largent said he always is disappointed when development in Whitman County fails, and the county stood to potentially benefit from increased tax revenues.

Largent said the county's budgets won't be affected by the situation.

"Whitman County certainly does not budget on what is expected to come," Largent said. "Certainly one would want to realize those local tax dollars before spending them."

Losonoco expected the plant to be capable of handling 12,000 tons of canola a day in its initial stages and producing 35 million to 40 million gallons of biodiesel per year once it became fully operational.

The company also expected to hire a local staff of about 20 full-time employees, in addition to employing many temporary construction workers to build its facilities.

"It is a disappointment," Snell said. "We lease land to companies like Losonoco to create economic development and jobs in Whitman County. It's unfortunate because what we really want is the increased business."

Wake Up and Schuss the Powder

From today's Seattle Times:

The last time Seattle-area residents contended with snow this late in the season was more than three decades ago, when Seattle-Tacoma International Airport reported snow on April 17, 1972, said Johnny Burg, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

[...]

"We've had powdery snow practically the whole season," said Duncan Howat, general manager at Mount Baker. "This is a great end for what's already been a record season for us."

[...]

Years ago, Mount Baker used to operate well into May — and even went until July 4 once during the 1970s, Howat said. But now its season concludes in late April, ending this year on April 27.

Eastern Washington will also be faced with snowy conditions this weekend.

It's interesting to note that the last time we had a winter this bad was in the Seventies. It was almost 33 years ago exactly, April 28, 1975, that Newsweek ran a story titled "The Cooling World."

Notice the graph in the Newsweek article of average temperature change from 1880 to 1970. It's a classic sine wave. Since then, the average temperature change swung back up again, peaking in 1998. It has remained stable since then, declining slightly. Could we be at the beginning of another downturn in temperature like in the Seventies? Who knows? The weather and climate are constantly changing. The only thing that is consistent is man's alarm and overreaction at the various trends.


One thing that does not exhibit sinusoid behavior is the amount of global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fules. It is steadily increasing. The level of atmospheric CO2 is now nearly twice that in the Seventies. But we still have a winter like this one? I'm skeptical that one climatological phenomenon (La Nina) could override all that CO2 if that truly was causing the planet to warm so dramatically.

Snow Job

The Seattle Times does have a way with the words. First, they refer to terrorists as "ecosaboteurs."

Now, in keeping with the precepts of the Holy Gospel of the Boiling Planet, the Slimes calls our recent winter (which is still not over) "unusual" with an "extraordinary amount of snow." In fact,

Because of the unusual winter, the Legislature appropriated another $5.25 million over the $35 million budget. That leaves a $3 million deficit that will be carried into next winter. State officials are hoping a lighter-than-normal winter could make up some of those costs.

Huh.

Meanwhile,

In Washington state, a new climate change law calls for reducing vehicle miles by 18 percent by 2020, 30 percent by 2035 and 50 percent by 2050, starting from a statewide baseline of 75 billion miles per year.

Go figure.

In Case You Were Wondering

That snow yesterday pushed this winter up higher on the all-time snowiest list. From the National Weather Service:

AS OF 1 AM SUNDAY APRIL 6TH...THE WINTER SNOWFALL TOTAL FOR SPOKANE WAS 89.4 INCHES. THIS TOTAL IS THE SECOND SNOWIEST ON RECORD. RECORDS HAVE BEEN KEPT FOR SPOKANE SINCE 1893.

Not many people alive have seen a winter this snowy, as the last one was in 1949-50. Of course, the NWS was quick to point out:

2007-2008 SEASON NOT YET COMPLETE. MORE SNOW IS POSSIBLE.

Calm Down Ted, Soylent Green Is Movie, Not People

Ted Turner was on Charlie Rose's PBS show the other night discussing not taking drastic action to correct global warming:

Not doing it will be catastrophic. We'll be eight degrees hotter in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals.

Apparently Turner's been watching too many old sci-fi movies on Turner Classic Movies. Is it any wonder people can't take all the global warming hysteria seriously? Celebrity nitwits like Turner couldn't do more damage to the environmental movement if they were paid saboteurs for the oil industry.