Coss

Given that a lot of the ice that is melting is ice over water, the sea doesn't rise when it melts, it's already floating you see. The sea level rise from melting ice has to come, from melting ice that's over land, like Himalayan glaciers. Al told us they'd be gone by 2015 as did Prince Charles, why are they still there? Recent thoughts are that Glaciers, come and go relatively quickly, never really disappearing and that those that do go, often are compensated for by new ones arriving or old ones re-appearing and all of this is like rainfall, quite local in effect. I've posted this before, but I'll restate. People are keen to say that if all the ice melted on Greenland, the seas would shoot up a lot 30 feet or more. Studies have indeed shown Ice cores from middle and northern Greenland that show pollen and insect fragments from about 30~40,000 years ago, showing that Greenland did have less ice coverage in the past, when the world was about 5 degrees warmer. But the key here is, they are ice cores. There was Ice for the pollen etc to fall on in middle and northern Greenland when the world was 5 degrees warmer, so even at 5 degrees warmer, Greenland still had substantial ice coverage. This of course is at odds with Al Gore's views. Not for me to say, but no one has been able to demonstrate that Greenland has been Ice free or predominately Ice free, less ice yes, but not no Ice. (good engrish that)

Firstly, I recognise and support his right to his own views and the voicing of them. But, A long time ago, on this board, in numerous posts, he accused me of involvement in the underaged, enforced and trafficked, sex industry, because of my trip reports that talked about adult P4P in Cambodia. No-one, according to him, could pay an adult woman for sex in Cambodia, without actually being up to the eyeballs in underaged, enforced and trafficked children for sex. Of course I differed, I've yet to receive any apology. I think he was asked to leave the board for this and other matters. I once likened him to someone who could get arrested, by simply walking down the road and encountering a policeman, so provocative and offensive he could be. Whilst we're on the subject of his failings, I wonder who wrote the glowing Exhibition Notice at the link. I'd like a spin doctor like that. I'll give him that he's a good photographer, but he certainly is no hero.

Very cool!

This next is a real story, not me taking the piss, read on... Relatives of a French tourist who hanged himself did not doubt the nature of his death, Surat Thani police said. Surat Thani police commander Pol Maj Gen Apichart Boonsriroj said the police were in touch with the French embassy after a French tourist, Dmitri Pofv, was found hanged in a rented Bungalow room in Koh Tao on January 1. The embassy has said relatives did not doubt his death after they were explained of the investigation procedure of the Thai police and the autopsy result. But the police commander said the relatives have not yet said whether they would fly in to take the body back for religious service, or want the embassy to send the body back home. Source The Thai Police are obviously miffed, at others poking fun at them and have decided, to take this role more seriously and ridicule themselves more often. Note the lack of any quote or source or any attribution to any relatives.

Nice tv show, and it's worth restating: All of the things that people are doing or want to do, in the combat of climate change, are great! (with the possible exception of taxes) I hate pollution and rainforest clearing and shark finning and excess use of resources. I love renewable energy, less chemicals in the food supply, peaceable debate and women who shave. But that still doesn't mean that man is responsible for, or can reverse, Global Warming, if there is any.

Kong, if you're still there when I'm back in The Glorious People's Republic, I'll come and visit. My experiences with a trip to Hanoi and Ha Long Bay, were that, people who were involved with the Buses and Tourism and Accommodation on the travel and tours we did - absolute c*nts, I've never been so close to losing it and just decking one of the little bastards. But! The people who weren't in the aforementioned categories, the locals in local restaurants, shops and so on, the normal non-tourism people, perfectly lovely. If only I could find away of travelling in Vietnam that didn't involve the tourism industry. I am told by an Old Timer, that when Vietnam was opening up to the tourism industry, the people thought this was great, but they just took the punters money and offered little in service or value, the Viet Government then had to "Educate" the industry as a whole and it got a lot better, but now its slipping back into it's old ways, time for a little bit more "Traditional Cultural Communist Education:.

Cant see it outside Australia, it says. You have to remember that for every beach that's washed away, every coral atoll that disappears, another beach is formed and another atoll appears. There are studies of Pacific atolls with photos showing coral atolls that have happily grown in size since the seventies and beaches do form by wave action. Indeed, my favourite fishing spot at Piha in Auckland, which is accessed by a walk around the rocks and through a hole in a headland, has become much more accessible recently. For the 25 years prior to 2011 that I've been fishing this place, access was dangerous at mid to high tide due to the beach being under the surf and the erstwhile fisherman having to rock climb around several precipitous areas. Now in 2014/15, the beach is, by my estimation at least 5 metres higher, a huge volume of sand has been deposited, making access, mostly, an easy walk except at the highest of tides. The sea is not retreating, the beach is advancing, oh no! If this trend continues NZ will be covered by sand by 2075, give me a Nobel prize please !

Maybe it's the snow that's causing the rising sea levels. I remember one argument that goes - the colder it is, the less moisture the air can hold, see dry Antartica, ergo the water ends up somewhere, in the sea. Conversely, the warmer it gets, the more moisture there is in the air. Not my argument, just one from the seventies...

BANGKOK — The number of foreign tourists who visited Thailand in 2014 is down 6.6 percent from the previous year, a Thai government official confirmed. "24.7 million tourists visited Thailand in the year 2014, which is a 6.6 percent decrease compared with 2013," said Kobkarn Wattanavarangkul, Minister of Tourism and Sports. "They generated 1.13 trillion baht in revenue, 5.8 percent less than [the previous year]." Kobkarn attributed the decline in tourist arrivals and revenues to the political crisis in Thailand during "the first half of 2014," in which parts of Bangkok were paralyzed by street protests that aimed to topple the government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra. The protests, which occasionally turned violent, came to an end when the military staged a coup and declared nationwide martial law in May 2014. The military junta also imposed a 10 pm - 6 am curfew in Thailand for several weeks. Tourism experts and economists also say that martial law, which remains in place today, has dissuaded many potential foreign tourists from visiting Thailand. More recently, the dramatic fall of the Russian ruble has further damaged tourism in popular destinations for Russian tourists such as Pattaya and Phuket. Full Story Meanwhile, TAT either has its head in the sand, or is on another planet: TAT expects Jan 14-18 tourism event to generate 250 million baht BANGKOK, 8 January 2014 (NNT) -- The Tourism Authority of Thailand expects that 250 million baht will be spent during a five-day Bangkok event held to spur Thailand's tourism in 2015. Source and TAT: New Year tourist number jumps across country BANGKOK, 7 January 2015 (NNT) – The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) has indicated that the tourism sector has enjoyed an arrival jump across the country during the New Year period, generating more than six billion baht in income. Source

Police say further investigations show no sign of foul play in suicide. Several other foreigners had also killed themselves using this method, it is very popular, police said. Police Colonel Commodore Flight Leader Fullback Major General Chakrii Montree Klahan Panit Chaow Somporn Punyaa, of the 4th floor Information Desk at Pier 21, said police investigators, medical staff and rescuers were dispatched to the hotel after an employee reported a foul smell coming from a room. "We didn't find any sign of a struggle," said Police Colonel Commodore Flight Leader Fullback Major General Chakrii Montree Klahan Panit Chaow Somporn Punyaa, who is now heading the investigation. The computer and other belongings were left untouched. "We found a window open. The window was very small so it was not possible that he would have fit through. He would have had to climb through the window to fall out, this he could not do, because he was a big man. From my initial investigation I believe he resorted to using ropes. The reason he used different kinds of rope was that he was not prepared to kill himself with rope and hung himself when he found he could not jump through the window, using whatever rope he could find in the room". The police found a note, written in French, which they had translated into Thai. In the Thai version, new information has been discovered that clearly states that the victim died from suicide and that no Thai persons were involved. Police have also released CCTV images from the area, one of which shows what police said was the victim walking towards his hotel. Another image clearly shows two foreign women walking away from the hotel, clear evidence if any other persons were involved in the victims death, that they could only be cunning foreigners.

Circa 10,000 years ago sea levels were approximately 35 feet lower than today. We know this because with the advent of SCUBA, university types can now excavate human villages at approximately 35 feet under the water around the Mediterranean. So the sea levels have risen say, 34 ft over 10,000 years, and a little bit more since we started using coal, gas and oil. I guess the sea levels were rising, as a result of all the carbon dioxide, being exhaled into the atmosphere, by the legions of religious types preaching salvation .

Baa99, not my errors, but the errors Christopher Walter, says Al Gore's movie made. And I still want another 100 yrs of data before I decide whether or not the world is warming over more than the short term. ​As for Anthropogenic warming, I reckon this is the same arrogance that religions have, to think that we really do have an effect that is major and controllable, on nature is the height of arrogance. The similarity between Religions and Climate Change believers is becoming quite plain, that's why if you don't believe in Climate Change, you are called a "Denyer", not someone who has a different view. Remember the Spanish Inquisition?

Well, in the most gentlemanly way, I have to disagree, all I was hearing from the media and science community was the likelihood of an ice age in as little as 11 years.

Benevolent dictatorship, me at the top.

you forgot PETA

And they'd run out of Clams

PARIS ATTACKS Charlie Hebdo editor-in-chief: “I would prefer to die standing than to live on my knees†"Charb died free"(Reuters/Gonzalo Fuentes) from qz.com WRITTEN BY Emma-Kate Symons The world is rallying around satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the French people today, after masked assassins—uttering the prayer ‘God is Great’ and invoking vengeance for the prophet Mohammed—massacred 12 in central Paris. But the global solidarity with the heroic cartoonists, writers and editors of this struggling weekly publication, targeted and murdered by terrorists during their weekly news conference, and victims of years of attacks on their offices and death threats from Islamists, comes far too late. Charlie Hebdo, which has published on and off since 1969, is proudly anti-organized religion and congenitally politically incorrect. On a shoestring budget it has been fighting the good fight for freedom of thought and expression and a secular public space for years when many were ambivalent. For its courage it has run into frequent trouble with local and international Islamofascists, having been forced to move its headquarters several times following threats and a fire bombing, notably after it published an edition in 2011 called ‘Charia Hebdo.’ Its editors had also annoyed and irritated political leaders in its native France, in Britain, and the United States. When it bravely republished the infamous Danish cartoons mocking the prophet Mohammed in 2006, even as fundamentalist leaders incited demonstrators to violence around the world, it earned a notorious rebuke from president Jacques Chirac who condemned its ‘‘overt provocation.’’ As I reported from Paris at the time, then Charlie Hebdo publisher Philippe Val hit back at Chirac, saying he was â€shocked†the French head of state would accuse the magazine of inflaming passions. “It is not a provocation. The provocation began well before—the fire was sparked on September 11 in New York, and in the attacks on London and on Madrid. “When there were the attacks on Madrid, on London, did we see the Arab street demonstrating because some assassins had committed horrible crimes in the name of Mohammed? We cannot leave it to religious groups to dictate the laws of freedom of expression.†Some in the Bush administration, wary of violence across the Islamic world, joined in the chorus calling for limits on press freedom. The British foreign secretary Jack Straw deplored newspapers’ “insensitivity and lack of respect.†The elite media in these two countries was also far from unanimous in its support. Even in Paris over the past week, leading figures in the French fourth estate have been condemning the novelist Michel Houellebecq for allegedly bringing extreme right wing ideas into literature with the publication of his incendiary novel Submission. The book depicts a France in 2022 governed by an Islamist political party. But Houllebecq is now part of this drama having been featured on the cover of this week’s edition of Charlie Hebdo. So what do editors like Laurent Joffrin at Libération newspaper now have to say? Should the novelist, like the editorial staff at Charlie Hebdo, have held their tongues and their pens? Horribly, the scene at Charlie Hebdo is worthy of an excerpt from a novel by Houllebecq, and eerily echoes his reading of the Koran: ‘‘The obvious conclusion is that the jihadists are bad Muslims… an honest reading will conclude that a holy war of aggression is not generally sanctioned, prayer alone is valid.’’ But this is not fiction and it is too easy to dismiss the role of religion and, yes, jihadi prayer in this horror. France has Europe’s largest Muslim population, rising support for the anti-Islam extreme right, a growing problem with homegrown terrorism, fueled by hundreds who have fought alongside ISIS and al-Qaeda in Syria and elsewhere, and also the strongest commitment to the secular separation of church and state of almost any Western democracy. It has a huge job on its hands trying to manage all its internal conflicts, and the sheer shock and fury this attack has created. This is a tipping point akin to the violence that followed the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in 1989. Beyond the immediate political fallout, the ‘‘greatest’’ to emerge from this crime expressly motivated by religious fanaticism are not God, the ‘avenged’ prophet, or Islamist extremism—even if the death cult we associate with ISIL and al-Qaeda has come to the heart of the city of lights, and the Enlightenment, for centuries a refuge for intellectuals, writers, and artists. Despite the murderers’ prayers invoking God and Allah, the heroes in this horror are the creative minds of this noble publication. Atheistic agitators, they fought literally to the death for freedom of thought and expression, the liberty to offend, and the right to be iconoclasts. Their fidelity to the fundamental values of democracy, even as many around the world and in France found their editorial line too “provocative†or “offensive,†will long endure after these killers are brought to justice. They died as they lived: standing up for their principles, the principles the French first fought for in the 1789 Revolution. Their only “weapons†were their illustrating pens and their words. The martyred editor-in-chief and beloved illustrator “Charb†said it best in 2012, after years of attacks against his magazine: ‘‘I am not afraid of reprisals. I don’t have kids, I don’t have a wife, I don’t have a car, I don’t have credit. This may sound a bit pompous but I would prefer to die standing than to live on my knees.’’ Charb and his compatriot illustrators known as Cabu, Wolinski, and Tignous stood their ground while so many urged them to calm down and in the name of tolerance to stop offending deliberately. But that was the whole point. No wonder Voltaire is getting such a good run on Twitter today! The free speech absolutist is still utterly relevant. The French launched revolutions to uphold freedom, notably liberty of expression. The rest of the democratic world owes this nation a debt as a result. We should have stood with Charlie Hebdo and others like the Danish cartoonists much earlier, as should have leaders like Chirac. There is no guarantee it would have stopped the terrorists. Charb had no match for the killers with his small police bodyguard security detail. The magazine’s offices were, incredibly, accessed by a simple doorcode. But there can be no compromising on freedom of speech. For the killers there is no compromise. Now, all we can do is say #JeSuisCharlie.

“He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.†Rudyard Kipling

Steve, I'm with you on this, the cops in the USA seem to have decided that, if in doubt, shoot. And if the victim doesn't look like Bill Clinton, forgo the doubt. But also, this is a problem that Maori in NZ have been complaining about for a long time, not that we shoot many people in NZ, but Maori are the main prison populace. It could be that Maori do commit most of the jail-able offences, certainly the three robberies I've been subject to were by Maori. However, there is a growing feeling in NZ that people get into serious trouble by making their own luck. I've known people, of different colours, that have been arrested, because they confronted police, rather than being docile and doing what was asked. In the USA it seems the police substitute death for arrest. Terrible state of affairs, if means the police think they are justified when they shoot people, but then if I was faced with an aggressive meth fuelled nutter, going off in my face, and I had a gun, I don't know if I'd sacrifice myself, rather than shoot the nutter. The irony of all of this, is the HUGE amount of Christianity in the USA, not much goodwill amongst men...

I think that statements like 'entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.' implies that entire nations would be running away from the water, like Holland all turning up in Germany, for example, which now is easier due to EU travel arrangements...

Telling jokes to mirrors

I'd still like to meet him and punch him on the nose.

There is a shot of the corpse looking quite intact. The guy shouting, then hysterically screaming, Allahu Akbar, throughout the video, sounds like he's having his faith tested...

Yes for Warmists to say Denyers are wrong because they are right wing, is to imply that the left wing is always right