RUSH: It’s Open Line Friday, we go back to the phones. This is Roger in Fallbrook, California. Nice to have on you on the program, sir.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, thanks for taking my call.
RUSH: Yes, sir.
CALLER: About this matter of ice falling from the sky and global warming —
RUSH: Hey, hang on just a second. You’re on a cell phone, right?
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Slow down just a little bit. I have more trouble with cell phones and my hearing than I do with others.
CALLER: Okay, the ice in the sky and the global warming story.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Whoever did that is obviously ignorant of history, because I’m kind of a student of out of the way knowledge, and this stuff’s been going for a century, long before there were SUVs, long before there were airplanes, even, although I imagine most of it today is airplanes.
RUSH: Wait a minute, you are a student of, what did you say?
CALLER: Out of the way knowledge.
RUSH: Out of the way knowledge.
CALLER: Useful facts.
RUSH: So you’re a student of trivia?
CALLER: Well, among other things, yeah.
RUSH: (Laughing.)
CALLER: Well — (laughing.)
RUSH: Well, look, here’s —
CALLER: But if you read history about this stuff, it’s been going on for centuries. You know, during warm climates, during cold climates —
RUSH: Yeah, I know.
CALLER: — forever.
RUSH: Yeah, I know. But I’m going to give you some not out of the way knowledge about this.
CALLER: All right.
RUSH: It’s funny because here you have falling blocks of ice, and it’s based on something that happened in Dubuque, Iowa. ‘Large chunks of ice, one of them reportedly about 50 pounds, fell from the sky in Dubuque, smashing through a woman’s roof and tearing through nearby trees. Authorities were unsure of the ice’s original but have theorized the chunks either fell from an airplane or naturally accumulated high in the atmosphere, both rare occurrences.’
CALLER: Were they attributing it to global warming?
RUSH: No, they don’t say global warming here. There’s a Spanish scientist, and he’s the guy that’s chalking this up to global warming.
CALLER: I see.
RUSH: But here’s the bottom line. Scientifically, there is no way, it is not possible. I have this on the authority of scientists. There is no way that large ice can grow outside of cloudy air. You have to have cloudy air. People that are reporting that balls of ice are falling out of a crystal clear blue sky, and no doubt that it happened, but it didn’t just form up there by itself because it can’t. For water to form into ice up there, it must be surrounded by super cooled water, unusually raindrops in the upper atmosphere that have not frozen. Super cool means below 32 degrees but it has not solidified. There is no way, it is impossible to keep a basketball-sized chunk of ice aloft long enough to grow that big. It’s this thing called gravity. Even the largest hail clusters that fall from thunderstorms have extreme updrafts, maybe as strong as a hundred miles per hour. They occur with lots of other hailstones, not by themselves. We’re not talking hailstones here.
What this scientist in Spain’s theory is that more turbulence, quote, unquote, generated by climate change can do something like this is just ridiculous. It’s fear mongering and it’s just pure panic. There’s literally no way that ice can form from a clear sky, certainly not this big and it’s not going to stay up there long enough to get that big. It just can’t. You don’t have hailstones that are that big, why is this? All kinds of reasons. Now, the thing that’s probably right and the caller agrees to it is, you have these airplanes and you’ve got leaking lavatories and ice forms on the fuselage outside the airplane and eventually breaks off, and by the time the ice reaches the ground the plane’s long gone. So nobody sees the airplane. When it’s flying at an altitude 37, 39,000, feet you’re not going to hear it, even. So if you’re not looking up and you don’t see the airplane and all of a sudden — well, how could you if you’re in our house waiting for it to get bombed by a falling blob of ice from an airplane — you’re going to look up there, what’s up there? Airplane is long gone. So it becomes a mystery. Of course, guys like this scientist over in Spain try to take advantage of people’s fear and ignorance. It’s turbulence up there, things are happening that we can’t explain, has to be global warming. Roger, thanks much for the phone call.