Rumor has it that we are going to have a very snowy December that will help but supposedly the rest of the winter is going to suck Where'd you hear that? I thought this was "supposed" to be a good winter via La Nina effects? --------------------------- Leigh replies (and grabs his flak jacket): FWIW, I believe that I started the "rumour" about this winter by merely repeating in an earlier column what this year's Farmer's Almanac has to say. However, Skip's earlier comments are very interesting, and corroborate some extensive research done by Dr. Jim Ball of the University of Winnipeg. Being a farmer, I've followed the weather to such an extent that if you asked me what the weather was like during, say, the third week of May, 1985, I could rattle it off the top of my head (I'm not kidding). Ball is probably Canada's best known spokesperson on climate and agriculture. Back to the point, Dr. Ball postulates that both the short and long term climate changes indicate cooling, not warming, temperatures. The eastern arctic temperature for example, which foreshadows climatic change for most of NA, has been actually dropping for about a decade or so. Ask any Newfie what their summers have been like recently. Ball's view, which I agree with totally, is that so called "global warming" is nothing more than the latest "sky is falling" rallying cry of the enviro-nazi movement. This guy has some impressive statistical models to back up his projections. Frankly, I don't believe a word of the "junk science/flavour of the month" that the enviros spew seemingly weekly about catastrophic global warming, GM food, etc.....etc... and etc. Climate cycles will come and go long after we are around to watch them. Our contributions are absolutely trivial compared to say, a volcanic eruption on the scale of a Mt. St. Helens or Mt. Pinatubo. The latter eruption alone released enough ash and "greenhouse gas" into the air to account for somethng like the next 100 years of US auto emissions. Sure enough, the summer temps during 1984 were down more than 300 growing degree days as a result of the ash filtering the light hitting the earth. It is almost laughable that some people are so niave as to think we humans count for much in the grand scheme of life. However, I stop laughing when I read about, for example, Vail getting busted for mistakenly driving through a half(!) acre "wetland" because it was too dry to tell it was a wetland. Now they have to leave about 5 million board feet of timber to rot down on the mountain because the access road is blocked. What a bloody cryin' shame. Multiply this by any number of similar incidents every day, and no wonder ski tickets cost so much. Leigh [and damn proud of it]. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SkiVt-L is brought to you by the University of Vermont. To unsubscribe, visit http://list.uvm.edu/archives/skivt-l.html