New paper finds West Antarctic glacier likely melting from geothermal heat below

◼ Via the Hockey Schtick – A paper published today in Earth and Planetary Science Letters finds evidence that one of the largest glaciers in West Antarctica, the Thwaites Glacier, is primarily melting from below due to geothermal heat flux from volcanoes located along the West Antarctic Volcanic Rift System, i.e. not due to man-made CO2. - Watts Up With That?

...The West Antarctic Volcanic Rift System is illustrated by JoNova below, and just so happens to correspond to the areas of notable glacier melt and alleged warming. In contrast, East Antarctica, which holds > 80% of Antarctic ice mass and does not have any known underlying volcanoes, is significantly increasing in ice mass.

The paper joins several others finding geothermal heat largely if not entirely responsible for glacier melt in multiple regions in both Antarctica and Greenland, i.e. not anthropogenic....

"What we really want to ban is murder, violence and insanity"

◼ In this segment of his Virtual State of the Union, the Virtual President talks about why politicians want to talk about gun control rather than crime control, and delivers the factual evidence and historical truths that make the case for the Second Amendment self-evident. - mrvirtualpresident.com

Mom could have shown the idiots in Washington what it means to make do

◼ She was able to balance the books in the real world never once going off the fiscal cliff - Denis Hamill/New York Daily News

Fiscal cliff.

Every time I hear that phrase ricochet in the Washington, D.C., echo chamber, I think of my mother.

There she is with the bills piled on one side of her at the Formica kitchen table and a thin pile of currency — singles, fives and tens — in another stack.
When House Speaker John Boehner said that “God only knows” where these “fiscal cliff” talks between him and President Obama were heading, I could see my mother rushing to now defunct St. Stanislaus on 14th St. in Brooklyn to kneel and light a candle before the statue of St. Anthony.

“St. Anthony, finder of all things lost, please find me a way through this terrible mess,” she'd whisper, before racing to work as a cashier at the RKO Prospect to help feed five of her seven kids still at home in a chilly tenement flat....