Finally there is empirical evidence showing climate change

One of my biggest gripes about the global warmingistas is that they have never attempted an vetted, provable, reproducible and justifiable study of temperature change over a long period of time. Professor Jan Esper undertook a painstaking review of tree ring data from fossilized trees in the Finish Laplands dating back to 138 BC.  Sure enough, he found measurable climate change over time.  Yup, that right.  The earth has been steadily cooling since the Roman and Medieval times.  

 

Real photographic evidence of Greenland's glaciers retreating dramatically

In 1932, that is.  And far more dramatically than today.

What a shock

The smarter the person, the less likely they are worried about global warming.  At least that is what a Yale law professor has concluded based upon his recently published study.

"As respondents’ science literacy scores increased, their concern with climate change decreased," the paper, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, notes.

So let me get this straight, the more a person knows about science, the less concerned they are about AGW.  Sounds right to me.

I do not think Leon Panetta is stupid

There are a lot of other things I would probably say about him, but not stupid.  So I figure he does not believe in the whole global warming crap.  I am, therefore, pretty sure he does not believe it when he says:

"The area of climate change has a dramatic impact on national security," Panetta told the Environmental Defense Fund last night. "Rising sea levels, severe droughts, the melting of the polar caps, the more frequent and devastating natural disasters all raise demand for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief."

My only question is how he can say it with a straight face.  Climate change is a danger to our national security, huh?

Finally some good science that proves man causes global warming

Many years ago when I first heard about global warming caused by man's carbon emissions, I thought it made sense.  But something in the back of my mind kept bugging me about the theory.  Then it dawned on me: carbon is a lousy thermal insulator.  I even dug out an old P-chem text book from college and sure enough, I was right.  Carbon only resonated at a very few radiant frequencies.  Far more radiant energy passed right through than was ever caught to excite the carbon molecules.  The more I started asking questions, the more sketchy the answers--feedback loops and all kinds of tricks and "scientific" concoctions to try to explain in a very complicated way what was really very straight forward science.  Well, I call them as I see them.  And I have to tell you, I have finally seen real evidence proving a viable theory of made caused global warming.  By wind turbines.  Seems that those honking big propellers roil the stratified air in the atmosphere to cause warm air to rise and pull cold air down to the earth's surface where it warms up.  Yup.  This science is logical and the data looks pretty strong to me.

Heh.

There now, that wasn't so hard, was it?

James Lovelock's green cred is unparalleled.  He invented the Gaia theory of Earth as one living and dynamic organism, of which we were but a small part. He predicted billions would die thanks to global warming.  Time magazine named him one of 13 Heroes of the Environment in 2007.  He was a buddy of algore.  So it is of note when the 92 year old professor changes his mind.  He says now that he, and his buddies like algore, were being climate "alarmists".  He does say that he thinks we are still getting warmer due to man's carbon emissions, but not enough to be alarmed over.  Maybe algore should take the hint.

But wait a minute, won't that cause MORE global warming by putting carbon up in the air?

Wing nut alarminista Steven Zwick who writes a column for Forbes, has called for eco-terrorism.  He wants everyone to burn down the homes of global warming skeptics.  Really?!  I could see maybe bulldozing them, but burning them?  That will just spew a whole bunch more carbon up to warm us some more!!!  What is he thinking?

Global warming is causing the glaciers to . . .

GROW! No really!

It just isn't as fun to kick the global warming nuts because of how long they have been down

But I still can't resist it...  So first we had the Medieval warm period.  You remember, the hockey stick would've looked like it had been broken over the cross bar if they had actually shown what happened 1,000 years ago--long before our coal power plants and SUVs.  Then, when the GW proponents were called on it with too much irrefutable evidence, the warmistas change course and admitted to the warm period but said it was localized to just Europe.  Must have been a flukey current that caused a temporary and geographically limited effect.  In fact, the present position of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as much as admits that they need the effect to have been local and not world wide for their theories about anthroprogenic global warming to hold water.  Only one problem.  It is not all that hard to go get the data to determine if the Medieval warm period was localized or global.  And Professor of Geochemistry Zunli Lu of Syracuse University has done just that.  Dr. Lu went down to Antarctica and did a whole bunch of coring samples.  He looked for several things.  One of which is ikaite, an icy, crystaline version of limestone.  Ikaite is not terribly stable.  Water, when frozen, holds it together.  It comes apart when the water melts.  Dr. Lu's corings showed lots of ikaite from 2,000 year old sediments.  And more from 3-500 years ago during the "little ice age".  The only problem is that he could not find much from about 1,000 years ago.  So I guess it got a little balmy down on the bottom of the Earth back then, at the same time as it got a little balmy in Europe.  Maybe my ancestors were lighting a WHOLE lot more campfires.  Can't wait to see how IPCC shifts to ignore this bit of data.

Move over Climategate, welcome Fakegate

Post Climategate, the desperate and increasingly few global warmists need a reverse "hide the decline" climategate and climategate II in order to staunch the bleeding.  Of course, there wasn't one handy.  So what did one of the true believers do?  He made it up out of whole cloth.  So what, you say, if one outlier goes rouge?  Should that paint the whole warmista movement with a scarlet letter?  I don't know and I don't have to think about it.  The guilty party Peter Gleick, and Gleick is the Chairman of the American Geophysical Union's Task Force on Scientific Ethics!  Robert Tracinski nails it, and nails Gleick, in his article on Realclearpolitics.com:

This was supposed to be a scandal that would undermine the global warming skeptics. In fact, it was supposed to be an exact parallel of Climategate, but this time discrediting the Heartland Institute, a pro-free-market think tank in Chicago that has been a leader in debunking the global warming hysteria.

Someone calling himself "Heartland Insider" released a series of internal documents from Heartland. On the whole, the documents were unremarkable. They revealed that a think tank which advocates the free market and is skeptical of global warming was raising money to, um, advocate the free market and promote skepticism of global warming. As Delingpole put it, "Run it next to the story about the Pope being caught worshipping regularly in Rome and the photograph of a bear pooping behind a tree."

But there was one document, a "confidential strategy memo" that provided more inflammatory material, including an admission that one of Heartland's programs is aimed at "dissuading teachers from teaching science." See, those evil global warming deniers really are anti-science!

But if you are an actual global warming skeptic, this is a big red flag, because we skeptics view ourselves as the defenders of science who are trying to protect it from corruption by an anti-capitalist political agenda. We never, in our own private discussions, refer to ourselves as discouraging the teaching of science. Quite the contrary.

This is the dead giveaway that the "confidential strategy memo" is a fake, and that is what the real scandal has become. The Atlantic blogger Megan McArdle helped break this open with aninitial post raising questions, as well as a detailed follow-up. McArdle gets a little too far into the weeds of information technology, not to mention grammar and English usage, but the basic issue is that the "meta-data" in the Heartland files—data marking when the documents were created, on what machines, in what format, and in what time zone—don't match. Most of the documents were created directly as PDFs from a word-processing program, while the supposed "confidential strategy memo" was printed and then scanned. The genuine Heartland files were created weeks earlier in the central time zone, while the incriminating memo was created very shortly before the release of the documents and in the Pacific time zone. This corroborates Heartland's claim that the document is a fake.

McArdle also points out that the "confidential strategy memo" consists almost completely of facts and wording lifted from the other files, with the inflammatory quotes pasted in between in an inconsistent style. Moreover, some of the facts from the other files are used inaccurately. For example, the memo claims that money from the Koch brothers—central figures in any good leftist conspiracy theory—was being used to support Heartland's global warming programs, when it was actually earmarked for their health-care policy work. That's something a real Heartland insider would know; only a warmist creating a fake document would get it wrong.

So it was pretty obvious that the "confidential strategy memo" was not a Heartland document at all but a fraud pasted together after the fact by someone who wanted to discredit Heartland, but who didn't know enough about IT to cover his tracks.

Note one other thing: how this fraud self-consciously tries to recreate every aspect of the Climategate scandal, projecting those elements onto the climate skeptics. Climategate had: a) an insider who leaked information, b) private admissions of unscientific practices, like misrepresenting the data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, and c) discussions of attempts to suppress opposing views. Further scandals that followed on from Climategate included one more element: d) using material from non-scientists in activist groups to pad out scientific reports for the UN.

The fake Heartland memo tried to re-create all of this. It was posted to the Web by someone who called himself "Heartland Insider." It contains admissions of things like opposing the teaching of science. It includes discussion of attempts to exclude global warming alarmists from the media, particularly an attempt to oust a fellow named Peter Gleick, described in the memo as a "high profile climate scientist," from his Forbes blog, because "This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out." And it describes a program to hire a "paid team of writers" to "undermine the official United Nation's [sic] IPCC reports." So this has all of the elements of Climategate, but in mirror image.

But it is all a lie. It took bloggers mere days to spot the document as a fake and less than a week to find the person who posted it and the other Heartland documents. He turns out to be...Peter Gleick, a climate scientist who is president of the left-leaning Pacific Institute. It's actually kind of pathetic, when you think about it. What gave Gleick

So the "leaker" wasn't an insider, Heartland has not been exposed as anti-science, and it is not conspiring to silence opposing voices. In fact, days before the documents were posted, Heartland had asked Gleick to participate in a debate, and he refused the invitation. Oh, and those "paid writers" who were supposed to "undermine" the UN climate reports? They were actually a team of distinguished scientists who were compiling their own independent climate research.

After he was caught, Gleick confessed, but he's still trying the "modified limited hangout": confess to a small crime in the hope that this will mollify investigators and they won't dig up evidence of your big crime. So Gleick has confessed to obtaining the genuine Heartland documents through deceptive means. (He called Heartland posing as a member of the institute's board and talked a gullible junior staffer into sending him the handouts for an upcoming board meeting.) But he still maintains that the fake "confidential strategy memo" was sent to him by an anonymous source, and that he only obtained the Heartland documents in an attempt to verify the memo.

This won't hold up, because Gleick still doesn't understand the meta-data that tripped him up. The fake strategy memo was created about a day before the documents were released, which appears to be well after Gleick pilfered the genuine documents. That fits with McArdle's impression that the fake memo was created by cutting and pasting facts from the other documents. Which implies that Gleick was the forger.

All of this will come out, and in a much fuller way than in the Climategate scandal. With Climategate, the victim of the fraud was the public, which pays the salaries of the scientists who have been fudging the facts. But this means that the government and its scientific institutions were put in charge of the investigation, and they had a vested interest in whitewashing the story. In this case, the victims are Heartland and other independent scientists whose reputations were impugned by the forged document. They have a good criminal and civil case against Gleick for identity theft, fraud, and defamation, and they will be able to use the courts' subpoena power to dig into Gleick's computer records and get to the whole truth. So he's now going to suffer the same fate as John Edwards: admit part of his wrongdoing but cover up the rest, then be forced to admit more, then a little bit more. It's the most ignominious way to go down.

Which means, for us skeptics, that it's time to pass around the popcorn and enjoy the show.

Oh, and it gets better. Some global warming alarmists are lining up to defend Gleick. Judith Curry points to the blog where Gleick posted the fake memo, which is now declaring, "For his courage, his honor, and for performing a selfless act of public service, [Gleick] deserves our gratitude and applause." Another warmist adds that Gleick "is the hero and Heartland remains the villain. He will have many people lining up to support him."

I certainly hope so. A lot of people deserve to go down along with Gleick.

Even many of those who deplore Gleick's fraud are still willfully blind to its implications. In Time, Bryan Walsh laments that "Worst of all—at least for those who care about global warming—Gleick’s act will almost certainly produce a backlash against climate advocates at a politically sensitive moment. And if the money isn’t already rolling into the Heartland Institute, it will soon." So yet another warmist has been exposed as a fraud—and the worst thing that can happen is that this will reduce the credibility of the warmists? But they deserveto lose their credibility.

Fakegate shows us, with the precision of a scientific experiment, several key truths about the global warming movement. It shows that most warmists, both the scientists and the journalists, will embrace any claim that seems to bolster their cause, without bothering to check the facts or subject them to rigorous investigation. (Anthony Watts notes how few journalists bothered to contact him before reporting the claims about him that are made in the fake memo.) And it shows us that warmists like Gleick have no compunction about falsifying information to promote their agenda, and that many other warmists are willing to serve as accomplices after the fact, excusing Gleick's fraud on the grounds that he was acting in a "noble cause." It shows us that "hide the decline" dishonesty is a deeply ingrained part of the corporate culture of the global warming movement.

Gleick wasn't just an obscure, rogue operator in the climate debate. Before his exposure, his stock in trade was lecturing on "scientific integrity," and until a few days ago he was the chairman of the American Geophysical Union's Task Force on Scientific Ethics. So this scandal goes to the very top of the global warming establishment, and it compels honest observers to ask: if the warmists were willing to deceive us on this, what else have they been deceiving us about?

I have no problems with wind turbines to generate electricy

Not that I think we need to pop the suckers up on every rooftop to stop AGW.  That's been proven to be a load of (profitable to a select few) crap.  I nonetheless have no problem reducing emissions from power plants, notably sulfur and volatile organic compounds, that ruin my air quality.  However, before I support wind turbines or any other alternative energy, I have a few considerations for siting any such project.  For example, there are other valuable resources that need protection.  For example, it is idiotic to stick a wind farm as proposed in Martha's Vineyard sound which would ruin the aesthetic of one of the more beautiful stretches of coastline and water around.  It also cannot turn out to be an environmental disaster by killing migratory birds or leaking into the water.  Most importantly, it has to make some economic sense without a huge subsidy.  And few big scale wind farms do.  Now you can add one more negative into the mix.  It turns out that here is one more very important factor in any economic model for off shore wind farms--the wind.  By that I do not mean will there be enough wind to make the farm viable.  I mean will there be too much wind.  As this article in the New Scientist entitled "Hurricanes Deliver Fatal Blow to Wind Turbines" explains, an average hurricane will wipe out about half a wind farm.  Since they each cost about a quarter of a billion largely tax and rate payer subsidized dollars, I'm thinking hurricanes are an important variable that maybe ought to be included in any cost projections.

It's Friday and I know you need a little humor to pick you up

So let's revisit those bumbling fools one more time.  The Three Stooges? No.  Laurel and Hardy? Well, no again.  Let me be more specific.  The REALLY bumbling fools.  That's right Rajendra Pachauri and his laugh a minute UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  Remember the good one he through out there about the Himalayan glaciers all melting away by 2035?  I will remind you:

The IPCC report had indicated that the total area of Himalayan glaciers would shrink from 500,000 square kilometers to 100,000 square kilometers within 25 years. The study cited a 2005 report by the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental advocacy group. The WWF study cited a 1999 article in New Scientist magazine that quoted another expert, who speculated that Himalayan glaciers could disappear within forty years. 

Well, it turns out that the whole thing was a joke.  A big joke.  Whereas an honest to to goodness actually peer reviewed article in Nature using orbital satellites (the first truly comprehensive study of the issue) has shown no loss of ice over the past ten years.  Now, granted, this isn't based upon a report issued by an advocacy group that cites a non-peer reviewed article quoting the speculation of a third source, but I think it will probably suffice.  Oh, and by the way, all of the data is published so you and everyone else can review it and draw your conclusions.

Enjoy the mild winter

Because everywhere else in the world it seems like this winter has been incredibly bad.  Snow on the Colosseum:

Want to escape to a sunny beach in Spain?

Or maybe run your hands through the fountain in Trafalgar Square?

I blogged earlier about the all time record setting cold reading in Alaska and the European cold snap has been so severe, that it has killed 150 people so far.  No thanks!  I'm sticking with my little corner of Al Gore's world right.

Record setting winter

It has been great in my neck of the woods this 'winter'. Although it started out rough with measurable snow before Halloween - in fact, a bunch of towns had to cancel trick or treating. By and large, though, I have barely seen snow and it has topped out north of 50 in three of the four weeks in January. With all of the anomalous weather, I was not surprised to learn that a new record temperature was recently set. Negative 81 degrees Fahrenheit in Jim's River Alaska. Better them than me.

Another one bites the (really expensive, paid for with your money) dust

Following in the great green porkulus tradition established by Solyndra, three more "green energy" con jobs backed by Obama with your money bit the dust last week. Globalwarming.org has the scoop:

Earlier this week, Stimulus beneficiary Evergreen Energy bit the dust. Then, Ener1, a manufacturer of batteries for electric vehicles and recipient of Stimulus largesse, filed for bankruptcy. And today, the Las Vegas Sun reports that Amonix, Inc., a manufacturer of solar panels that received $5.9 million from the Porkulus, will cut two-thirds of its workforce, about 200 employees, only seven months after opening a factory in Nevada.

I admit I am not too bright, but . . .

I think common sense is with me on anthropogenic carbon based global warming.  The Romans called it lex parsimoniae.  William of Ockham named a razor after it (not really, but you get my point).  Either way, mankind has intuitively known since the dawn of civilization that the simplest explanation will be the most plausible and should be assumed to be correct unless and until evidence is presented to prove it false.  Enron, Soros, Gore and everyone else who hoped to, has and is profiting tremendously from the global warming fraud has convinced people to buy into a Rube Goldberg theory about man's carbon output causing the world to warm.  Being not too bright, I think that the earth's temperatures are more likely directly correlated to, oh I don't know, maybe the source of heat energy--i.e. the sun.  The boys at the Met Office and the University of East Anglia very quietly released data from 30,000 measuring stations showed that global warming stopped (even by their interpretations of the data) in 1997.

 Their explanation for this inconvenient truth is that the solar cycle is waning, but do not worry!  By their model, atmospheric carbon has a greater influence on temperatures that the radiant energy from the sun.

Even the rats appear to be jumping off of the AGW ship, or at least they are questioning which side of Occam's Razor things are falling on.  The Daily Mail has a great piece:

Dr Nicola Scafetta, of Duke University in North Carolina, is the author of several papers that argue the Met Office climate models show there should have been ‘steady warming from 2000 until now’.

‘If temperatures continue to stay flat or start to cool again, the divergence between the models and recorded data will eventually become so great that the whole scientific community will question the current theories,’ he said.

He believes that as the Met Office model attaches much greater significance to CO2 than to the sun, it was bound to conclude that there would not be cooling. ‘The real issue is whether the model itself is accurate,’ Dr Scafetta said. Meanwhile, one of America’s most eminent climate experts, Professor Judith Curry of the  Georgia Institute of Technology, said she found the Met Office’s confident prediction of a ‘negligible’ impact difficult to understand.

‘The responsible thing to do would be to accept the fact that the models may have severe shortcomings when it comes to the influence of the sun,’ said Professor Curry. As for the warming pause, she said that many scientists ‘are not surprised’.

Allow my simple, not too bright mind to translate: Earth's temperatures are driven primarily by the source of the heat.  

Washing global warming's dirty laundry in the courts.

Being a Brother at the Bar (and no, Borepatch, not that kind of bar--well maybe that one too, but that isn't what I mean here), I have great faith in our unique judicial system.  Truth and justice will largely and eventually prevail.  One could quibble about costs and efficiency, but it works.  And as exhibit "A" I give you the freedom of information lawsuit against the University of Virginia to force the disclosure of all of the (publicly funded) emails sent or received by UVA climate 'scientist' Michael Mann.  Great editorial by the Washington Times excerpted below:

The American Tradition Institute (ATI) is going after 12,000 emails sent or received by Michael E. Mann while he was on the staff of the publicly-funded university. Mr. Mann is famous for coming up with one of the “tricks” used to “hide the decline” in global temperatures. On Wednesday, ATI released a small selection of emails it hopes will convince a Prince William County judge that full disclosure of the rest is in the public interest.

In March 2003, for example, a trusted colleague of Mr. Mann’s emailed to find out how the UVA professor arrived at his conclusions. Mr. Mannadmitted he was missing crucial data and “can’t seem to dig them up.” Though he was working on this project on the taxpayers’ dime, he provided the information for the researcher’s personal use only. “So please don’t pass this along to others without checking w/ me first,” Mr. Mann wrote. “This is the sort of ‘dirty laundry’ one doesn’t want to fall into the hands of those who might potentially try to distort things.”

David Schnare, a scientist and lawyer who runs ATI’s Environmental Law Center, said he was shocked that anyone claiming to be a scientist wouldn’t keep a detailed log of his research activities. “In science, there is no dirty laundry,” Mr. Schnare told The Washington Times. “Science progresses by proving to yourself that you were wrong, that your hypothesis was in error. Every time you’re wrong, it means you can cut off some area of research and start on a better one.”

OK, enough is enough, this global warming crap has gone too far

I like Ben Stein.  I actually have a signed Ben Stein picture in my office (long ago birthday gift from Borepatch).  Maybe I like him because he is a lawyer, a conservative and has a good sense of humor (two out of three is hard enough to find and he is all three!).  He was a speech writer for Nixon and Ford.  And he shoulda won an Oscar for Ferris Bueller's Day off (Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?).  Ben Stein is not just a pretty face either.  He graduated with a degree in economics from Columbia and was valedictorian of his law school class at Yale.  Apparently he is also someone you do not screw with.  Ben has filed suit against Kyocera Corporation and the New York ad agency Seiter & Miller.  He has alleged, among other things, breach of contract, wrongful discharge and the intentional infliction of emotional distress.  It seems that Kyocera terminated the contract for him to be featured in an advertising campaign after they found out that he isn't sure that humans are responsible for climate change!  Ben is bright, but I think he should amend his pleading to add a civil rights claim.  Obviously they fired him for holding a different religious belief than they do because the definition of faith based belief systems is acceptance of scientifically unproveable hypotheses. 

Assume for the moment that you really believed in AGW



If you did, then wouldn't you support an experiment to demonstrate a way that could relatively cheaply and easily counteract all those nasty warming effects caused by evil man-kind spewing up tons of carbon every second?  A bunch of good hearted but misguided egg heads in England certainly thought so.  They noticed that after the large volcanic eruption of Pinatubo in 1991, the planet cooled by as much as .7 degrees Fahrenheit for the next two years.  The cause is explained nicely in this article by Livescience.com:

While the larger particles of ash fell out of the sky fairly quickly, the sulfur dioxide became fine droplets, or aerosols, of sulfuric acid. These prevented inbound solar energy from reaching the planet's surface, which caused global cooling. The cloud of aerosols created by Pinatubo created spread around the globe in about three weeks and ultimately caused a dramatic decrease in the amount of solar energy reaching the planet, according to the researchers.

So our intrepid do-gooder eggheads came up with the bright idea that they could easily create a few artificial pseudo volcanoes to do the same thing as Pinatubo.  And it could be done for less than pennies on the dollar, to say nothing of having no adverse social or geo-economic impacts, as compared with the impossible task of reducing the world's carbon emission.  They called it Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering or "SPICE" for short.  You can read the details in the paper they presented to the Royal Society, but the idea is fairly simple.  They propose tethering a helium balloon with a flexible but strong tube about 25k up in the atmosphere.  Water would be pumped up to form droplets that would be coated with sulphur.  Voila! Instant and cheap artificial volcanic emissions.

Obviously, they were welcomed by all of the global warming alarmists as conquering heros for coming up with a solution that cost only a tiny fraction of the carbon reducing scenarios and none of the associated economic and social disruption, right?  WRONG!  They have been opposed by the very thermagedden establishment whose lopsided alarmism caused the scientists to try to find a workable solution, from the Obama Administration's National Weather Service to the British Natural Environment Research Council.  Why, one would ask, would these institutions be against tests to devise a simple and cheap way to counteract the evil forces of man made air borne carbon?  Simple.  They don't really believe in carbon based global warming, either.  They believe in making money, getting funded, social engineering and going on annual vacations at our expense in Durban, Copenhagen, Bern and other wonderful destinations.

If weather is evidence of global warming . . .

. . . then does a white Christmas in Texas mean that we now have to worry about global cooling? 

By mid-afternoon on Sunday, at least 4 inches of snow had fallen in Amarillo, making it the second snowiest Christmas in that city's history, National Weather Service forecaster Stephen Bilodeau said.

And with winter weather advisories in effect until 6 a.m. on Monday, there was a chance that Amarillo's record for snow accumulation might be broken before midnight.

Bilodeau said he would have preferred that the snow quit early and left the afternoon safer for Christmas Day travel.

"It's a little bit too much," he said. "The white Christmas through the beginning of the day was good, but now these poor people are getting out into this stuff. There have been a few accidents, and it's ruining a few people's day today."

Not so for native Texan and conservationist Don Alexander, 55, who was spending the holiday with his wife's family in Midland, and enjoying his very first white Christmas.

"The snow is a nifty bonus," Alexander said, as his college-aged daughter posted snow pictures on her Facebook page. "The snow will certainly make this particular Christmas memorable. Winter isn't very scenic in West Texas, so the layer of snow is a nice effect. The bad part is having to wipe down the dog's paws every time he goes outside and then back in."

Just wondering.