There is so little good news from Iraq, this should be the top story on every newcast and blog around the world.

The Iraqi National Soccer team (The Lions) has won the Asian cup in a major upset. They beat Australia, South Korea and finally Saudi Arabia today in the final. (See the link for great pictures).

The team is made up of all Iraqis, Sunni, Shia and Kurd.

All of Iraq rejoiced today, even as bombs went off.

This is the type of thing that can truly revive a nation and allow it to remember the pride it always had.

May Iraqis revel in this victory.. and may it help them continue being strong in the face of terrible, terrible circumstances.

(It was so very special today, to see my RSS feed for Iraqi blogs, and every single one was positive and cheering… wonderful wonderful day)

So this past Wednesday it was nearly 40C (over 100F) in the Alberni Valley. We manged pretty well cconsidering, by staying inside with the blinds down… then going to Sproat lake in the aftrernoon and evening.

Since I have a personal weather station, though, and a website for it at alberniweather.ca, I got called by one of the local news channels, CH Channel 6 in Victoria, for an interview.

It was fun.

i’ve posted it below.

I think the best part was when they showed my cat!

Be Amused… (as of 8:30PST YouTube is still processing it.. it should be up within the hour).

The BBC reports on a study to be published in the Proceedings A at the Royal Society.

It shows that for the last 20 years, the Sun’s output has declined, yet temperatures on Earth have risen.

“All the graphs [sun-link proponents] showed stopped in about 1980, and I knew why, because things diverged after that,” he told the BBC News website.
“You can’t just ignore bits of data that you don’t like,” he said.

(I went to the Royal Society website but it appears the study is not yet online)

Hopefully the entire report will be published in a publicly available place… but just the Summary would go a long way towards countering the cosmic ray theory. Hopefully this will also encourage other scientist to conduct similar studies.

The co-author had this to say about the cosmic ray theory.

I do think there is a cosmic ray effect on cloud cover. It works in clean maritime air where there isn’t much else for water vapour to condense around.

“It might even have had a significant effect on pre-industrial climate. But you cannot apply it to what we’re seeing now, because we’re in a completely different ball game

So perhaps further studies can be done to nail down that pre-to-post industrial change on the cosmic ray effect on cloud cover (which is said to cool the earth).

Just to let you know… I’ll be upgrading my version of Wordpress software here for the blog tonight, so if you can’t connect, that is the likely reason. Don’t worry, it will be back up by morning.

UPDATE: Upgrade Successful

Today on the Scientific American blog there is a great article from the Editor talking about the different meanings of the term “Scientific Consensus.”

I highly recommend reading this article. It explains very well why precisely why the “debate” about human caused climate change is “over”. But in brief, it’s not because every scientist in the world agrees, but rather because a very large majority agree on a few key general principles and, in the words of the editor, “If I get one answer and everyone else gets a different one, my first inclination should be that I’m wrong, not that everyone else is.”.

Please read the rest and may it settle your mind.