Weather Gone Wild...

As 2011 winds down we are inundated with the obligatory top ten lists and persons or stories of the year. More often than not these fluff pieces tell us more about the mindset of those proposing them then offering any meaningful perspective on the year that was. Time magazine declared "the protester" as person of the year in a poorly disguised attempt to keep the Occupy Wall Street debacle front and center as the U.S. enters an election year. The in the tank MSM so desperately want a grass roots movement of their own with which to support President Obama. Don't believe me. I suggest you compare the coverage of the Tea Party movement in 2010 to that of OWS in 2011.

In Canada, the MSM barely recognized the Conservative majority as the leading story. This despite the fact that a majority was realized for the first time without significant representation from Quebec. That coupled with the addition of thirty seats in Parliament spread between Alberta, B.C. and Ontario has dramatically changed the political landscape in Canada. But hey...How about those NDP?

And then there's Elizabeth May. Thin (on logic) Lizzie has declared the story of the year to be...Weather Gone Wild. Now when I first read the headline I must admit an image of a drunken Mother Nature pulling up her Che Guevara t-shirt to flash her sagging endowments came to mind. Not a pretty mental picture. Somebody needs to help Ms. May on her lede's and her logic.

Case in point:

But I think, for me, the biggest story is the one that never gets told. 2011 was another year of record breaking extreme weather events, most of which are likely the result of human-induced climate change. Of course, the single most devastating event, the Japanese tsunami and the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, were unrelated to climate change.

For years the climate alarmists have told us that weather is not climate, apparently 2011 marked the year that they became synonymous. I will however credit Ms. May for refuting the linkage between the Japanese tsunami and climate change that some of the moonbats claimed.

This moment of lucidity is fleeting as Elizabeth reverts to form with specious claims and out and out bullshit. I'll leave it to you readers to spot the howlers in the following:

For Canada, extreme weather events made 2011 the second most expensive year for the insurance industry. The prairie floods put more land underwater than ever in our history. And the flooding lasted from October 2010 until late July 2011. More devastating floods hit Quebec.

The wild fires brought on by extremely dry conditions destroyed one third of Slave Lake. Much of Canada was blanketed in record-breaking heat for much of the summer. Arctic sea ice hit a near record summer low.

There is more, but my biggest story of the year is the on-going refusal to connect the dots and describe climate change events for what they are. Not "Mother Nature" on a rampage; not some "wacky and wild curve ball."

Climate change events, fitting the pattern of increased extreme events one would expect due to, what is in human experience, the all-time high greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.

So for political story -- Canada filing legal notice of withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol. For biggest story of 2011, the ongoing, accelerating losses due to the climate crisis and the fact of, unlike a suicide bomber in a troubled region where media are keen to find who "claims responsibility," the amazing level of denial. These disasters are no longer "natural"--their causes are known and our government is charting a course to make them worse, year by year.

My advice for Ms. May in 2012...Keep your shirt on.