Tamara,there are still states that don’t have a license requirement for salt water. The CCA’s director in Fla favorite saying is “economic rent” when a user group takes from a public resource.

That there is one regulation striped type bass. Looks to be a good ten-pounder.

Pamela, I hear you. I never hunted, but I fished quite a lot back in the day.

I wanted to “hunt”. My cousin from Texas asked me out to shoot some deer. I decided that I had a considerable desire to bruise and terrify, but not to kill. So I asked if I could haul along a paint gun and “mark” a deer or two. He said he’d check. He got back to me and said it was legal to shoot deer with a rifle or a crossbow. But to nail it with a paint gun was “inhumane”.

The end result was that I didn’t go–so I went back to hunting . . . people!

I got my own regulations: You gotta release anything you don’t eat unharmed (minus what you seine for bait) and you gotta clean what you keep. (I never went for anything that was limited.)

But it looks as if the times they are a-changing and my fond memories have (yet again) been adjudicated as thought-crimes . . . (your taxpayer dollars at work).

Simply: No.

Hansen’s smoking gun of a large “heat bucket” that lay in a temporal pipeline as a latent reservoir of buffered heat in the seas has not only not been found, but the principal researcher Kevin Trenberth at NCAR thinks that the missing heat radiated back out into space.

Yes the seas have warmed, but not as much as was feared. If the heat has radiated back into space then the oft-cited heat budget imbalance must not be an accurate measure. The fact of the matter is that there could well be heat escaping back into space without our knowing it, perhaps via the ENSO phenomenon.

Likewise studies are showing a generally drier mid- and upper-atmosphere as well as a drier Antarctic, all demonstrating that without the humidity we will not experience a dangerous warming.

Some warming? Yes. Dangerous warming? There will be no “tipping point.”

The current temperature trend reveals this in the ongoing temperature plateau continues: That despite the increasing levels of CO2, temperatures have stayed about even since 1997 (excluding the ’98 el Nino outlier).

Meanwhile the warming-only scientists are predicting a near-exponential catch-up rise in temperatures by 2015. This is patently absurd … where’s the latent heat hiding if not in the seas? If it’s supposed to rise almost exponentially to catch up to the head-start from accelerated CO2 concentrations why aren’t we then warming now?

Sea temperatures, however, DO lag behind one large natural driver of temperatures on the Earth: The Sun. The seas heat content lags by about 6 years ( 2- 10 ), warming takes about 2 – 4 years and offloading the heat another 4 – 6.

Until the early 1990′s the sun had been at its most brilliant in nearly 10,000 years, and the hottest year we had was the 1998 el Nino!

Since then the sun has dimmed sufficiently to lend to a -0.1 degrC reduction in average solar irradiance, and we’re due for another -0.1 to -0.2 degrC decrease in solar influence. That’s a lot, a potential -0.3 degrC (nearly an entire watt per sq. meter) which was modeled as the requisite low-end temperature decrease that drove the onset of the Little Ice Age.

Considering we’re nearly 0.8 degrC above the temperatures of the early 1800′s, a modest -0.3 degrC net decrease by 2020 mightn’t bother people too much.

If natural variations are sufficient to mask the CO2 signal then the CO2 signal isn’t that strong, is it?

Serious? American recreational deep-water anglers DO NOT catch 100′s of millions of game fish every year.

Perhaps the time grows ever closer.

The best way to vote for the president is to take a sticky toy and throw it at the touch screen.

Reply: You can just call me jeez. I needed a different username for this gig as my normal nom de plume was not available.