Tea at Trianon: Warming and Cooling

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, December 28, 2017

Warming and Cooling

From No Tricks Zone:

In assessing the global-scale trends in near-surface (0-20 m) ocean temperatures between 1900 and 2010, Gouretski et al. (2012) determined that the world’s oceans warmed by about 1.1°C between 1900 and 1945 (~0.24°C per decade), but then only warmed by an additional net 0.3°C between 1945 and 2010 (~0.046°C per decade), including a cooling trend between 1945 and 1975. The early 20th century warming was therefore about 4 to 5 times greater both in magnitude and rapidity as the post-1945 warming. Interestingly, Gouretski et al. (2012) also point out that large regions of the oceans have been cooling since the 1990s.

“Decadal mean SST and 0–20 m layer anomalies calculated relative to the reference decade 2001–2010 give evidence of the general warming of the global ocean since 1900. However, large regions of the oceans have experienced cooling since the 1990s. Whereas cooling in the tropical Eastern Pacific ocean is associated with frequent La Nina events in the past decade, the cause of the cooling within the Southern Ocean remains unknown.”
According to Riser and 26 co-authors (2016), the globe’s oceans have warmed in some places, cooled in others, and the overall net change has been a warming of a little less than 0.2°C (0-1000 m) since about 1950, or about 0.03°C per decade. (Read more.)

From The Daily Wire:

In an address to the American people on Monday, President Donald Trump outlined his administration's new national security strategy, summed up as "America First." Missing from the "National Security Strategy" document posted on WhiteHouse.gov and from Trump's address was a classification of "climate change" as a national security threat, as the Obama Administration had, notably, done. Moreover, President Trump made it clear that the country's sovereignty and economic interests will come before adherence to international environmental regulations tied to climate change.

This is not exactly a surprise; President Trump boldly pulled the United States out of the economically crippling Paris Climate Accords this summer, much to the distress of his predecessor. "At the moment, we have a temporary absence of American leadership on the issue (climate change)," said Obama while attending a gala in Paris earlier this month.

As noted by The Daily Caller, "Obama’s 2015 national security strategy prioritized climate change as a national security threat. Obama’s strategy devoted more space to the threat posed by climate change than to the threat posed by North Korea." Yes, you read that correctly: President Obama classified ambiguous climate change as a greater threat than North Korea. (Read more.)