“Mike DiPiro clearly seemed to feel he was the luckiest man alive.
DiPiro co-owns an accounting firm, Guilmartin, DiPiro & Sokolowski, at 505 Main St. He was on the second floor when he heard something crack on the floor above. He and an employee, Chris Conley, went up to investigate.
The century-old brick building, a former school, had a gym on the third floor. DiPino and Conley got there just in time to see 2-foot thick ceiling beams bending and cracking. “I said ‘Chris! Run!’ and we grabbed our jackets and ran in front of Luce where we called 911.”
DiPiro and Conley were the only ones in the building. At around 10 a.m., as they watched firefighters string caution tape along the front of the building, they heard another crack. The third floor crumpled into a cloud of brownish dust.
“A fire guy said ‘Run!’ and we ran; we were lucky we didn’t get hit by bricks.” A fireman’s helmet fell off and was crushed in the rubble…”
The 120 year old structure was solidly built; some details of the construction including the two foot thick ceiling beams can be seen in the above photos.
Unlike veteran field birder and blogger Brownstone Birder I don’t feel comfortable with field I.D. of many smaller birds. However, this year’s harsh Winter season has provided many occasions to view birds at close range at my feeders. I have managed to photograph birds that I have seldom, or perhaps never, seen in field and wood. Attached herein are several photographs of birds seen through my back window here in Middletown. (Note: a loss of image clarity is the inevitable result of shooting through window panes; oh, and please correct me if I have misidentified any bird) (All photos: click to enlarge)
This article appeared in National Review Online’s Planet Gore page (Jan 30, 2009)
Al Gore’s Climate of Extremes [Patrick J. Michaels]
Ho-hum. On January 28, in the midst of a pelting sleet storm, Al Gore told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the end is nigh from global warming.
He told the Senate that “some scientists” predict up to 11 degrees of warming in the next 91 years (while failing to note that the last 12 have seen exactly none), and that this would “bring a screeching halt to human civilization and threaten the fiber of life everywhere on earth.” Hey folks, this is serious!
Besides having a remarkable knack for scheduling big speeches on remarkably cold or snowy days (it’s known as the “Gore Effect” in journalistic circles), Gore has been incredibly ineffective in bringing his message home.
According to the New York Times, Gore told the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last November, “I feel, in a sense, I’ve failed badly. . . . [T]here is not anything anywhere close to an appropriate sense of urgency [about global warming]. This is an existential threat.”
And fail he has. The Pew Foundation recently asked Americans to choose which of 20 prominent issues is of most importance. They included the economy, crime, education, and, of course, global warming, which came in dead last….(read the rest here)
The video above is part 1 of 3 (be sure to watch all three parts) in which scientist Patrick J. Michaels is interviewed by Jon Caldara, president of The Independence Institute, a Colorado think tank. Patrick J. Michaels and Robert C. Balling, Jr. are the authors of Climate of Extremes, published by The Cato Institute in Jan 2009. Patrick J. Michaels is Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies at The Cato Institute in Washington D.C. Michaels is a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and visiting scientist with the Marshall Institute in Washington, D.C. He is a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. Michaels is a contributing author and reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change….
In the Preface to Climate of Extremes former Virginia State Climatologist Michaels describes how he and other state climatologists were stripped of their titles, and jobs, and told by their governors to “shut up” about the global warming hoax. Something about, in the case of Oregon’s Climatologist, contradictions interfering “with the state’s stated goals to reduce greenhouse gases.’’
Continuing from the Preface:
David Legates, at the University of Delaware, was told by Governor Ruth Ann Minner (D) that he could no longer speakon globalwarming as State Climatologist. His faculty position is a regular tenured line in the geography department. He’s free, as State Climatologist, to say anything about the weather, so long as there’s no political implication…..
Out West, things got even uglier. The Assistant State Climatologist for Washington, Mark Albright, was fired because, despite his boss’s orders, he refused to stop e-mailing—to journalists, to inquiringcitizens, to anyone—the entire snowfall record for the Cascade Mountainsrather than the cherry-picked one. For e-mailing that record,the assistant state climatologist in Washington lost his job.What had started with Oregon’s George Taylor had migratedacross the Columbia River.
Also see Michell Malkin, June 2008: In Praise of Carbon Dioxide
Here is a You Tube interview with Ann McElhinney, producer and director of “Not Evil Just Wrong”, a feature length documentary now in release:
A new book, Sun Cycle 24, just out by Australian scientist David Archibald
“….details how the Sun, not carbon dioxide, controls climate and predicts a significant cooling for the next two decades. At the same time, the heating effect of carbon dioxide will be minuscule. Combined with its positive effect on plant growth, increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is shown to be wholly beneficial….
“If carbon dioxide didn’t cause the warming of the 20th century, what did? Well, a good place to start is the sun. In the 20th century, the sun was more active than at any time inthe previous 8,000 years…..The way that Solar Cycle 23 is declining, combined with the very weak ramp-up of
Solar Cycle 24 sunspot activity, suggests that the month of solar cycle minimum will be July 2009. If that transpires, the cooling will amount to over 2 degrees….
That last time that something like this happened was a period called the Dalton Minimum from 1796 to 1820.”
“If the sun remains this quiet for another a year or two, it may indicate the star has entered a downturn that, if history is any precedent, could trigger a planetary cold spell that could bring massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere..”
What could be better than the Liberty Bell to ring in the New Year!
We had a delightful snowfall most of today in Middletown leaving us with a bitterly cold night to begin 2009. Mid afternoon found us socked in downtown:
Sufferin’ Cats!
The Jonah Center for Earth and Art will be hosting a public meeting Tuesday evening Dec 9, 2008, at 7PM in the Memorial Room at First Church, 190 Court St, Middletown. The subject: “What You Can Do About Global Warming and Energy Policy in Connecticut“. The speaker:
Roger Smith, Coordinator of the Connecticut Climate Coalition and Campaign Director of Clean Water Action will tell us what energy- and climate-related legislation is coming up in the January 2009 session of the Connecticut General Assembly.Roger has a wealth of information and experience in this area.
In what will certainly be another tough budget year, citizen action will be critical in order to pass progressive energy-related legislation and help consumers hurt by high fossil fuel prices. This is your opportunity to help shape our energy future and slow global warming.
A slight shift of gears is called for here as we mention one of our favorite bloggers on the subject of climate change; Gateway Pundit. Their post today presents a huge array of sources and stats that gives credence to the notion that the earth is cooling not warming. Read about it here…..
Of course cooling has been mentioned before; remember Newsweek from April 25, 1975? (PDF)
SANFORD, Fla. — Homeowners in neighborhoods still flooded from Tropical Storm Fay continue to battle high waters and other problems, like huge committees of buzzards.
I don’t have my copy of “An Exaltation of Larks” handy but I have consulted some other sources and can find no reference to “committees” as a name for a group of “buzzards”, or more accurately, vultures. Here’s a link to a drawing from Florida show one such “committee” awaiting the decomposition of an alligator. In another photo we see the “committee chairman” at lunch. More “buzzard” news:
Quote:
BARTOW (FL) | A flock of about 200 black vultures has invaded southwest Bartow, picking the rubber casing around car windows and shingles off roofs.
ConservaCity 
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