Dim, so very dim

Everywhere one looks this morning there are huge pictures of Cho Seung-hui. Newspapers, television screens, the internet. He's everywhere. I suppose that going berserk with a gun warrants this kind of media attention, but I find it disturbing. I notice that no one wants to take any responsibility for the incident. Students are blaming the university because there was no information given. The university is blaming the police because they didn't close down the campus after the initial incident. At least one university lecturer has claimed that she referred Cho for counciling after seeing his disturbing creative writing.

There are plenty of lighter stories in the media today. Apparently crematoriums (crematoria?) are having to spend huge amounts of money upgrading to accomodate fat people. I think this is odd. You'd think crems would always have had to deal with the odd huge person, even if there are more now. Why is it only suddenly becoming an issue?

According to the Woodland Trust, "Spring is the new Summer". This meaningless comment is actually just a dramatic way of explaining the apparent early onset of Summer. This conclusion is based on research which clearly shows that hawthorn bushes are blooming several weeks early, and that migrating birds have been spotted back in the UK before May.

I'm going to take this slowly because I may have some Woodland Trust people reading this, and they are clearly very dim indeed. Global warming is by no means a foregone conclusion, and even those meathead scientists on politicians' payrolls who do make apocalyptic claims about temperature rises, are only claiming rises of fractions of a degree per decade. In simple terms, even if you believe all the BS in the media about global warming, we're talking about a rise in temperature so small that it's barely detectable over the space of a human lifetime. We can therefore disregard anecdotal evidence of bird sightings and hawthorn blossom in April, because it means precisely nothing. A Spring temperature 1 or even 2 degrees above average isn't going to move summer forward. Springs have varied by far more than that quite naturally, before we started belching greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, for centuries.