President Obama To Go Skiing? Doubtful. But The Kennedys Need To Take Their Grandchildren -- It Could Be The Last Time They See Snow -- September 21, 2015

Seriously, this is incredible. I am thrilled. The ski industry might have a great year in Montana.

Over at IceAgeNow: sixteen (16) inches at Montana ski resort.

“The iconic shred zone located just south of Bozeman, Montana, is reporting over 16 inches (40 cm) of fresh snow at the top of Lone Peak and 12 inches (30 cm) of snow in the bowl, mid-mountain on Lone Mountain. The clouds have dissipated and the storm is moving along, but this is a great first start to the winter season for the resort. Big Sky is one of North America’s largest resorts with 34 lifts, 5,800 shredable acres, and 4,350’ vertical drop.”

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For The Granddaughters

Whitefish Ski Resort, Montana

Not Bozeman. This is Whitefish Ski Resort up near Glacier National Park.

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A Lesson For Warmists

From The Vital Question, page 269:

This black-and-white view of free radicals and antioxidants is still current in many glossy magazines and healthfood stores, even though most researchers in the field realized it was wrong long ago. A favorite quote of mine is from Barry Halliwell and John Gutteridge, authors of the classic textbook Free Radicals in Biology and Medicine.

"By the 1990's it was clear that antioxidants are not a panacea for aging and disease, and only fringe medicine still peddles this notion."

The free-radical theory of aging is one of those beautiful ideas killed by ugly facts (think global warming). And boy, are the facts ugly.

Not one tenet of the theory, as it was originally formulated, has withstood the scrutiny of experimental testing. There are no systematic measurements of an increase in free-radical leak from the mitochondria as we age. There is a small increase in the number of mitochondrial mutations, but with the exception of limited regions of tissue, they are typically found at surprisingly low levels, well below those known to cause mitochondrial diseases. Some tissues show evidence of accumulating damage, but nothing that resembles an error catastrophe, and the chain of causality is questionable (again, think anthropogenic global warming).

Antioxidants most certainly do not prolong life or prevent disease. Quite the contrary. The idea has been so pervasive that hundreds of thousands of patients have enrolled in clinical trials over the past few decades.The findings are clear. Taking high-dose antioxidant supplements carries a modest but consistent risk. You are more likely to die early if you take antioxidant supplements. Many long-lived animals have low levels of antioxidant enzymes in their tissues, while short-lived animals have much higher levels.

Bizarrely, pro-oxidants can actually extend the lifespan of animals. Taken together, it's not surprising that most of the field of gerontology has moved on. I discussed all this at length in my earlier books. I'd like to think I was prescient in dismissing the notion that antioxidants slow aging as long ago as 2002, in Oxygen, but frankly I wasn't. The writing was on the wall even then. The myth has been perpetrated by a combination of wishful thinking (think Algore), avarice (think Algore), and a lack of alternatives (think gullibility and group-think).

That in parentheses are my comments, not the author of The Vital Question.