Lighthouse of the Week, December 11-17, 2016: Point Abino, Ontario, Canada

Because there's going to be a lot of lake-effect snow right about the time I'm writing this and tomorrow, I thought of the Great Lakes, and a quick investigation of past Lighthouses OTW indicated that I had only one previous one from the great province of Ontario, Canada.   So I did what I usually do, searched, and came up with a very classic example of a lighthouse, the Point Abino light, which is located quite near Niagara Falls, as the map shows.

Now, Point Abino has an interesting history.  Rather than copy it all here, read the whole thing on the Lighthouse Directory Southwestern Ontario page.

One of the results of the interesting history was the Point Abino Lighthouse Preservation Society.  It has pictures of the lighthouse, pictures of the restoration, information about tours, everything you might want to know.

Now for a short summary of info about the lighthouse.  It was built in 1917 and operated from 1918 to 1995.  Then it was deactivated, and the sage of getting it renovated began.  The Greek Revival tower is 98 feet high.

I went a little overboard (nautical term there) with pictures, so enjoy them.  I've got a couple of winter ones, since it's winter right now.  A couple of them are attributed to the photographer.

Under construction 

by Dale Roddick

A big boomer stirs

We may talk about civilization-ending catastrophes, like an asteroid impact, or nuclear war, or Donald Trump as POTUS, but there's one thing that has happened before, and we know it can happen again, and which if it did happen would put a serious hurt on human society.

That's a supervolcanic eruption.  Now, we've had biggies, the biggest in recorded history being Tambora, and Krakatoa was impressive, Katmai was big, the Laki fissure eruption caused problems, and El Chichon and Pinatubo were big enough to be geologically noticeable.  Further back, we've got Toba and Mazama (Crater Lake) and Huaynaputina and Kuwae and Vesuvius and Thera (Santorini). There have been large eruptions, clearly.

But never a real supervolcano.

That might change.

Unusual Chile volcano activity sparks interest, worries

"We have so little experience with this kind of data, but the uplift is the biggest seen anywhere on the planet," said Bradley Singer, a geoscientist from the U.S. University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is leading an international research effort to understand what is happening under the surface.

I think continued monitoring is in order here.

Queen Demi

More about this later.  What I have below will suffice for now.

Emmanuelle has a new show

I'm going to have to try and track this new show down  (it isn't hard to find).  Emmanuelle Chriqui, one of my favorite actresses of all time, has a new show.   She's just plain one of my all-timers.

Emmanuelle Chriqui takes the plunge in holiday red as she steps out for AOL Build

"The actress attended the AOL show to promote her new crime drama, Shut Eye*. The show tells of a scammer who is in the business of fortune-telling."

* The Daily Mail called it Shut Eyes, but it's actually Shut Eye.

Shut Eye (IMdB)

Shut Eye on Hulu

It is getting worser and worser

Hard to believe, but Donald Trump's selection to head the Department of the Interior is worse than his pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

Her name is Cathy Anne McMorris Rodgers.  And she is NO friend of the environment, conservation, our national parks, monuments, seashores, lakeshores, and historical sites.

Great pick.  Can you hear the sarcasm?

Trump expected to pick oil drilling advocate to head Interior

Part of the problem is excerpted below.  But not all of it.

"On her website, she also touts her support of the recent repeal of the decades old ban on oil exports, and for a bill to reject the EPA’s Waters of the United States Act as some of her key achievements on energy and environment.

She has also expressed skepticism about climate change, consistently opposing Obama’s measures to combat it, and once arguing that former Vice President Al Gore, a longtime advocate for steps to combat global warming, deserves an “F” in science and an “A” in creative writing.

The League of Conservation Voters, which publishes a score card ranking the environmental record of each member of Congress, gave McMorris Rodgers a zero in its most recent ratings."

Like I said - great pick.  If you want to pave paradise and put up a parking lot, that is.  She apparently does.

Telling it like it really is

Let's lay out the steps.

The Daily Mail publishes a misleading piece about how La Niña will cool off the Earth, thus disproving global warming and discounting all the temperature records set over the past two years.

Breitbart News picks up the piece and republishes it in a piece written by idiotic twit James Delingpole, and a link to his Breitbart article about it gets tweeted by the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology - headed by arch climate science critic Lamar Smith.

But the piece in Breitbart included a clip from the Weather Channel, and this clip had the Weather Channel logo, thus potentially implying that the Weather Channel stood behind the story.  (And note here that misbegotten climate change skeptic John Coleman founded the Weather Channel.  And he can't answer simple questions about the climate system.)

Well, the Weather Channel wanted to make sure that everybody knew that the Breitbart News piece written by Delingpole, with their clip in it -- was utter claptrap.  (I thought about using a short word starting with "c" and ending in "ap", but decided to be circumspect.)

Here's what they said:

Note to Breitbart: Earth Is Not Cooling, Climate Change Is Real and Please Stop Using Our Video to Mislead Americans

And that includes this:

"The Breitbart article – a prime example of cherry picking, or pulling a single item out of context to build a misleading case – includes this statement: "The last three years may eventually come to be seen as the final death rattle of the global warming scare."

In fact, thousands of researchers and scientific societies are in agreement that greenhouse gases produced by human activity are warming the planet’s climate and will keep doing so."

Alert President Trump. And John Coleman, while you're at it.

Climate change and fake news go together

Donald Trump believes what he's told.  The problem is, a lot of what he's told isn't true.

When he acts on things he thinks are correct but aren't true, that's inconvenient if it's just him.  It's bad if he uses his misguided knowledge to make decisions as the President of the United States.

More terrifying than Trump:  the booming conspiracy culture of climate science denial

"The problem is not that these [fake news, conspiracy theory, and climate change denial] sites exist but that not enough people seem to know the difference between actual news, fake news, partisan opinion and conspiratorial bullshit. One of those people is the president-elect of the United States.

Either that, or people don’t even care to differentiate between fake and real, especially if what they read taps into their own prejudices."

I've seen a lot of that in action.  If you don't question the news you hear, and you only get it from sources with particular points of view, your thinking becomes very, very biased -- and your mind becomes very, very hard to change, even if real facts and hard evidence are all in opposition to what you think is correct.