The weathermen can’t tell us for sure if it will rain not next Tuesday, but some people claim they can predict temperature patterns for the coming years and even decades. The arrogance of some scientists and journalists is appalling.

Bats are just pre-cut chunks of the roll stuff. Standard width and length. (16 inches by 4 foot?) The thing you care about are the clips. They are just a chunk of (about 10 ga?) iron wire that gets put at each end to support the bat. I don’t remember how they were put in (pointy or had friction fit ends) and don’t really want to go under the house and look!

They were standard stuff in the installers van. I’d expect them to be sold by the gross at the same places that sell insulation. If you can’t find them, just cut some iron wire of thick enough gage (coat hanger wire) about 2-4 cm longer than the space between the joists. Slap insulation in, then sweep wire in between joists toward the end until the tips of the wire enter the space between the joists and ‘drag’ on the wood. Stop. The wire ought to now be wedged in and holding up bat. You may need to play a bit with the wire length (longer lets the wire be angled more or have greater spring tension, shorter makes it more precise looking but harder to fit..) I think it was 3 or 4 of these for most bats, but your weight may need more / less.

Lift bat, slap clip, slap clip, slap clip, slap clip. Next bat, slap …

Oh, so the problem is not global warming, it’s been water diversions all along!

Thanks for clarifying that…

You said
“We put fiberglass bats under the floor (they just clip in)”

What are they?

I am currently tucking insulation into our crawl space. Previously I would have used glass fibre rolls-very itchy and unpleasant but now I use material made from recycled plastic bottles. However because it is being tucked into what is in effect the ceiling of the undehouse it doesnt always stay there-something about obeying Newtons law of gravity. So any link you can give to your bats would be interesting.

TonyB

It’s hard to close. Folks can always bypass the controls. The original purpose of the DARPA project was to create a robust self healing system that could not be shut down by an adversary…

Example? I can have my computer call your computer and exchange data… you now have to shut down all dial up telecommunications. Google “stunnel” . That lets me tunnel secure links through the public domain, now you have to shut down all IP traffic. The list goes on. I can hide on the other side of a non-IP link…

As long as there are folks wanting to exchange information, they can make a meta-internet hidden in plain site on (or under) the ‘approved’ internet and the ‘approved’ telephone system (or even in packet radio or spread spectrum or.. )

Example? In the hills above Sacramento there was no provider of high speed internet. Some locals got tired of waiting and built their own wireless system… One guy got a leased line and the rest piggy back off of him via home brew (legal!) low power wireless. Another? I know a guy in the Santa Cruise mountains with an 802.11 (sub whatever) link in a home brew ‘coffee can’ focusing mount that gets his network from a friend a few hundreds of meters away.

And I’ve set up many commercial private networks between sites using encrypted tunnels (VPN) through the public internet. It’s very common. I’ve had hundreds of folks with the ‘corporate’ network in their home, or on their laptop wherever they were.

The only thing that would be a ‘tricky bit’ would be getting folks vetted for participation on the clandestine net and getting them up to speed about how to have their own DNS server with the private domain in it and maybe having a tweaked search engine to service it. Keeping the DNS ‘right’ would be the biggest issue, especially if you used dynamic swapping of servers.

Any serious attempt to curtail freedom of speech will not work. Not when I can put 8 GB on an SD card and have a $100 disposable server pop up in the local free WiFi access point (from a wireless connection from the bushes outside the store… or that smoke detector in the hallway…) then stunnel that to a portal somewhere else that makes it ‘public’ … also from a disposable server… but in another jurisdiction…

It’s whackamole on an unimaginable scale. And a bit of dynamic routing on the private network can keep the actual sources and the actual portals in constant flux and their real IPs hidden. Make the Borg look manageable…

And don’t even get me started about cryptographic distributed file systems and cluster servers based on distributed home machines… think of a DDS attack but instead of a Distributed Denial of Service it’s a Distributed Provider of Service… It might have some stability and reliability issues from time to time, but information would flow. All they can stop is the casual discovery of information by the uninitiated.

(Then again, maybe I spent too much time working computer security and forensics. It leaves you with a certain cynical paranoid view… then again, again never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck load of DVDs… it’s a long time between packets, but boy, when that packet arrives! )

Final sidebar: Remember the DeCSS shutdown attempt? Folks ended up printing the code on T-shirts and begging for a 1st amendment suit? I actually published a link to the DeCSS code at the time the court had ruled it (temporarily) illegal to put it on the internet (via restraining order I think). The target of the link? The courthouse web pages where the suit was filed… the code was in the online version of the suit in public court documents ;-) Sweet…

You could always do what I do… I root for beer ;-)

I thought there was typically an initial increase (bare land) then a reduction as regrowth establishes and takes its due…

and Adelaide is fast tracking a desalination plant

Recent advances in pressure recovery have made desalination much cheaper. It’s now cheaper to desalinate in California than to put in a dam and pipes from the mountains. This is a good thing. I like having pristine mountains and don’t at all mind having a desalination plant in / near the city… You say desalination like it was a bad thing ;-)

as the Murray River (it’s main source of water) is now below sea level in its lower reaches and at severe risk of hyper salination and acifidification.

Isn’t that called ‘normal’ for brackish estuaries? Unless the river suddenly sunk into the ground I don’t see how it could be ‘now below sea level’ unless it was also below sea level a few years back too… San Francisco bay / delta region has frequent oscillations from salty to brackish to fresh as the seasons and climate cycles turn. There are specialized species that inhabit those fluctuating environments. If you left it ‘fresh’ all the time, they would die out from fresh species competition… your hypersalination is their relief.

It isn’t hard, but frankly I like seeing the whole URL. I sometimes cut/paste them into a new browser window rather than just click and I get to inspect them before taking the link (so I can skip things that look suspicious… old admin habits…)

So please, don’t feel sorry! To some of us it’s a feature 8-)

Pamela, thanks for the insight. It is valuable. JJG a grains composite exchange traded fund, is hard up off of a bottom. This confirms your expectation for grains to be rising. Why don’t the locals plant more barley? I understand there is a shortage of it in Germany for beer making due to biofuels demands… Or heck, just make more of those nummy local brews!

Ranchers will sell down their herd, raising market prices at the grocery store.

COW a beef, pork, etc. composite exchange traded fund was laying on a dead money bottom, but blipped up almost 4% last trade day. Is it possible that the herds are already sold off? IFF COW continues the blip into an up run (crosses 25, then 50 day simple moving averages) this could be the start of those higher grocery prices for meat… Unfortunately, I don’t know of any ETFs for hay, sheep, wool, etc. Those are specialty markets (i.e. futures, not ETFs) in the U.S. though BAL (cotton) after a 6 month drop from $50 to $24 looks like it’s started a reversal upside. Similar, though sloppier, chart for SGG (sugar) that still looks a bit ‘bottomy’. Guess the tropics haven’t cooled off as much yet ;-)

By the way, the kerosene space heater I bought works great! Very quiet and warms a large room right up with no kerosene smell! No worries about burning oxygen up.

Having grown up in a similar leaky house, I can relate! I would encourage you to get a CO alarm, though. They are cheap and effective. It’s not the loss of O, it’s the production of CO. Once bound to hemoglobin it stays bound for a very long time so small concentrations can cause ‘issues’. And the drowsy / headache feelings don’t always warn in time… (I use a generator with an electric heater in emergencies, along with the fireplace insert. The waste heat from the generator can warm the garage (or barn or whatever needs it…) outside the house.) And you get lighting and TV to boot.

With 4300 sq ft of house, 10 foot ceilings, poured glass windows, single layer old wood floor over a deep and breezy crawl space, and a century-plus old framing with no insulation, I have plenty of ventilation. For those of you caught in storms with no electricity, these heaters are just the ticket.

We put fiberglass bats under the floor (they just clip in) and blown cellulose into the walls and it worked well (and was cheap!). Took three guys one Saturday. Oh, and blown cellulose into the attic. I think the payback period was about 2 years(!). I was pleasantly surprised at how much it cut down on the draftiness that a heater could never fix. The cold air sheeting down the walls headed across the floor to the heater just ended. That alone made it worth while. No more cold feet and hot head! One of the best things I ever did.

Um, no. Bacteria happily eat hydrocarbons. One must add agents to Diesel to prevent things growing in it. It is food to many organisms. It is also a natural part of the environment. There have been colonies of specialized organisms found living on the oil and natural gas from long term seeps. It takes a long time to evolve into a niche so this has been going on for a long time… While we don’t like bathing in oil, many other natural organisms do. Your assertion of foul is seriously self centered.

Oh yes, secondary benefits – we can say ‘adios’ to those oiligarchies;

Something I’d very much like to do, and that we could do immediately, if we were free to use our coal for coal to liquids. The AGW thesis makes us more dependent on oil, not less, since oil has more H per C than coal does, so it becomes forbidden to use coal to replace oil…

gain the ‘first mover’ benefit by building an alternate energy driven economy; re-deploy our rustbelt industries to mass produce the simple solar technologies that can’t compete with cheap oil and dirt cheap coal.

And just what is that ‘first mover’ benefit? Please note that the first company to exploit a new technology almost universally dies. It is replaced by a later entrant who can do it better given what is learned by the failures of the early adopters. That is the major risk in stock trading in development stage or early production companies. They typically pop, then drop hard to zero as a later entrant eats their lunch… Buy the IPO, then sell as soon as the stock ‘fails to advance’ to the upside.

How, exactly, do you use an old steel mill to make silicon ingots? How do you use a car assembly plant to make thin film flexible solar cells? Hmmm? The ‘re-deploy’ canard is a dead duck. You can’t. At best, you can bulldoze the site and rebuild from the ground up, but it would be much cheaper to do a ‘green field’ development in China with cheaper labor, lower taxes, and less regulation. (That’s why many of the hot solar stocks have Chinese addresses… and those that don’t often have an overseas assembly area with only the R&D in the U.S.)

I do agree with your conclusion that these technologies can not compete with dirt cheap oil and coal. Absolutely correct. IMHO, the only reason to make them artificially more competitive is to offset the monopoly power of OPEC. THAT means an import tax on OPEC oil (not on NAFTA origin oil and not on ‘fuel at the pump’ that hits all sources including alternatives) and a specific exemption of such taxes on fuels from coal, biomass and natural gas (that we in the US have in abundance).

The AGW agenda wants to kill coal use and gas to liquids. That is a serious mistake. Why? Because you can’t put electrons into our existing vehicle fleet. It takes over a decade and up to 2 decades to do a fleet turnover to a new fuel if we were already doing it, which we are not. The decision not to use coal to liquids and gas to liquids in favor of {solar, wind, hydrogen, whatever funny fuel} is by definition a decision to stay substantially dependent on oil for at least a decade and probably two for transportation. Think about it. Please.

You may all be right, but where is your vision for the future?

My vision: Put an import tariff on OPEC oil (or all oil outside NAFTA, CAFTA type agreements) such that OPEC oil retail price can not drop below $80/bbl. (Tariff = Greater of( 0, $80 – market price of oil) i.e. no negative tariff… This provide protection of ALL the alternatives from OPEC market manipulation by putting a floor on oil of $80/bbl but not taxing the alternatives.

The government does nothing else and leaves a level playing field for all the alternatives to compete in the market. Markets are far better at picking winning technologies than governments…

What I expect would happen: GTL, CTL, biomass/trash to liquids plants would sprout all over the place to provide non-OPEC fuel to the exiting fleet for the next decade+ while NAFTA source oil (i.e. Canada / Mexico) would go up in price a bit with sales diverted from non-U.S. buyers to the U.S. ) OVER TIME folks would choose to replace their present vehicles with hybrids, all electrics, hydrogen, dedicated CNG cars, whatever comes along as the domestic prices for the competitors jockey for position.

After 15 to 20 years most of the fleet would IMHO, be a mix of flex-fuel hybrids and electrics with some high efficiency Diesels running on synthetic fuels. All with minimal economic disruption and without government screwing things up with mandates. See Brazil and South Africa as existence proofs of the ability to run modern economies while telling OPEC to go pound sand.

Reminds me ever so much of a gambler on a losing streak… “I just know I’ll win on the next roll. I’ve got to. I know I’m right. Put another $20 on hard way 8! ” repeat until broke.

I added the bold on “result”. This is an unsubstantiated assertion of causality where at most there might be a correlation.

How do you know that reduced rainfall (and thus, runoff) did not ’cause’ the warming? How do you know that they are both not covariant with some other cause (such as PDO et. al. or solar variation)? How do you know they are not completely independent and it was coincidence? You don’t.

Here’s a recap of 2008. Enjoy!

The species has not been seen in Cornwall since 1948 and it is not clear why the bird has ended up so far from its natural arctic home.

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7806501.stm

Hmm, maybe it fancied some GW for a change :-)

How about telling them something else, “Vanessa”?