I have some other things to attend to this weekend, posting will be light from me. But I’ve arranged for some entertainment.
Willis will be posting some of his tales of the sea, which will appear below this posting.
Other WUWT authors are welcome to make submissions also.
Here’s Why So Many Russians Have Dash Cams
Russian car cams aim to drive out corruption
One more period and it’s a three day weekend that is badly needed. Fortunately that one last period is IB, so I’m getting off easy there.
Looking forward to more of Willis narrative!
There is a fair range of people who hang out here, and I wonder if one will put down his or her glass for a moment to explain something that has puzzled me a long time.
I live some 1,000 up on a hillside and as you might guess have a bit of a view to enjoy, perhaps forty miles depending on haze, then the view is inconsiderately blocked by high mountains.
The street lights in this village are of course rock steady, as are those of the hamlet perhaps a mile away.
The next village, say four miles off, their lights seem to flicker a little. At ten miles the village lights definitely flicker, and at the main town some thirty miles away, the street lights positively dance.
All this seems to apply regardless of temperature or atmospheric conditions, though I fancy that when there is a little mist the phenomenon diminishes. When hillwalking in my native Scotland (this is Italy now) I saw the same effect at night.
Is it my eyes, or is something real going on?
I would guess that what you are observing is refraction caused by the difference in air density (variation with temperature) at various points in the path between the light source and your eye.
… but I’m willing to bet that Al Gore would blame it on Global Warming! ;-))
There was a golden moment here in Australia a couple of days ago when the ABC Radio National breakfast show broadcast false claims made by a Labor politician, (Bob Carr) about rising sea levels on a local Pacific Island. Following complaints from listeners, next day they brought in an ‘expert’ to clarify that sea levels were indeed rising rapidly and that this was undoubtedly due to global warming.
CAST:
FRAN KELLLY…. Radio Presenter, Greenist, and aspiring Journalist.
PROFESSOR CHURCH…Professor of Sea Level Rising at The Sea Level Rising Institute/in
collaboration with the CSIRO.
(The CSIRO are Australian Government Scientists i.e. the people who brought us cane toads and advised that Wyvenhoe Dam should be kept full because it was probably never going to rain in
Queensland again!)
INT: Radio Studio, MORNING
FRAN: So Professor Church, how do you respond to the fact that the Tide Gauges of the American Physical Union show that there has been no significant sea level rise round Kirabatu since 1993 – when according to what you’ve just been telling us there should have been a rise of around 45mm…and how does that tie in with Bob (Golden tonsils) Carr’s statement that he actually saw the tide rising over a village?
PROFESSOR CHURCH: Uhm ah…uh.
FRAN: Ok well thanks for clearing that up so authoritatively….so moving on to my next question……
Echoing frazier, the greater the linear path the more likely there is going to be density changes on that path and in many different directions. As the index of refraction changes, the apparent position of the source appears to change thus giving you your dancing lights. It is more profound if there are particulates in the air and is definitely pronounced in high humidity – as the more the density varies, the more the index of refraction varies.
Jeff Wood February 15, 2013 at 2:03 pm
The same process that makes stars twinkle.
Hi Jeff Wood, I agree with frazer.
Air expands and changes density when it is heated. As light passes between mediums of different density it is refracted. The air between you and the lights you are viewing is probably slightly turbulent with some warm air pockets rising from the ground which had been heated during the day, with the cooler air falling to take its place. As the light passes through the interfaces between air of different temperatures it is bent or the rays converge or scatter. The farther away the lights are, the more opportunity for the light to be affected. Also the more distant lights take up a smaller angle of view, so it is easier for them to be totally obliterated momentarily by a small refraction of the light. Perhaps when there is mist the air is more stable..
I’ve previously espoused the virtues of the biofuels mandate (2007 Energy and Independence Act). My perception was the requirement to roll over to the cellulosic form of ethanol would spawn a strong and viable domestic ethanol fuel industry free from starch-based sources (corn/sugar beets/etc).
Unfortunately, even with the grand incentives to move forward on the table , the innovation has not kept up with the mandate or with the capability of the gut of a termite. The courts have rejected the mandate for this year.
http://www.agprofessional.com/news/Court-ruled-EPA-set-cellulosic-ethanol-mandate-too-high-189439311.html
15 Feb: BBC: Italy makes ‘Mafia’ arrests over Sicily wind farms
Police have arrested five people in eastern Sicily suspected of involvement in Mafia corruption over contracts to build wind farms, Italian media report.
The mayor and a councillor in the small town of Fondachelli Fantina, in Messina province, were among those detained.
The five face charges including extortion, fraud and Mafia association…
A total of 11 people were under investigation, including two managers from a firm that won the main contract to build one of the wind farms, installing 63 turbines.
The contract was worth some 120bn euros (£103bn)…
The proceeds from contracts are believed to have been channelled to the fugitive head of the http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21476916
watch your pensions, folks:
15 Feb: Bloomberg: Sally Bakewell: Canadian Pension-Backed Group Plans Wind Power for Prison
Partnerships for Renewables, backed with 100 million pounds ($155 million) of Canadian pension and infrastructure-fund money, will build as much as 500 megawatts of wind power at land owned by U.K. prisons and other bodies…
The London-based company is seeking unexploited land owned by government bodies such as the Forestry Commission and Coal Authority for renewable energy projects the U.K. is promoting to curb emissions linked to climate change…
The company received funding from Canada’s OPSEU Pension Trust and London-based Infrared Capital Partners Ltd., which each own a third of the company, to develop wind farms, Ainger said. The Carbon Trust, a London-based adviser to government and business on reducing emissions, owns the remaining shares…
A portion of the revenue from Standford Hill will go to the Ministry of Justice, responsible for prisons, he said. The company also plans to submit bids to supply power directly to prisons and has set up a community benefit fund, he said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-15/canadian-pension-backed-group-plans-wind-power-for-prison.html
How Green Thy Earth Day Expo?
Rochester, Michigan held an Earth Day Celebration Expo, on April 18 to 20. (www.earthdayexpo.org) The web site notes, “150+ covered exhibits of earth-friendly, healthy products & services.” and that, “Since its inception in 1970, Earth Day has grown into the world’s largest annual secular event, observed in 150 countries by over one billion people.” That is all fine with me, at face value I am all for it, but I sense something gone awry. This is the Rochester, Michigan where a million electric lights are hung on Main Street in the winter.
Some exhibitors use the words natural, earth-friendly, eco-friendly and herbal to describe their products or services. These words have no specific meaning and are vague marketing buzz words and cause warning lights to flash on the dashboard of my mind.
What caught my attention was the “Wellness Tent”. Whenever I see the words “wellness activities”, “holistic” or “well-being” I smell a scam. Be wary of the words “complimentary” and “alternative medicine”. Quacks who offer “treatments” that give a “sense of well-being” are by definition giving a placebo. You feel better for a few hours, but it is all in your head. Penicillin works even if the patient is in a coma, but with placebo treatments, the person must be awake and aware of receiving the treatment. Trick or treatment?
Three exhibitors, “Natural Awakenings”, “Healing Garden Journal” and “Mind Body Spirit Guide” publish free magazines chock full of nutty new age notions of every stripe; channeling, psychic readers, séances, magnet therapy, reflexology, reiki, energy balancing, ayurvedic, aromatherapy, naturopathic medicine, chi energy, spiritual healing, craniosacral therapy, chiropractic, quantum energy, therapeutic touch. All the popular quackery in one place. How does any of this rubbish connect to a “brighter, greener future” that the Expo touts?
One exhibitor, “The Biomat Company” (www.thebiomatcompany.com) has the most ridiculous claims for their electric heating pad products. The pads are claimed to offer “quantum healing energetics, negative ions, far infrared” and claim a connection to a Nobel prize awarded to Neher and Sakmann in cellular chemistry. The word “quantum” is a sure sign of a scam. When the pads can warm up without being plugged in is when they may use the word quantum. The organizers of the Earth Day Expo help legitimize quackery when they allow this kind of exhibitor to prey on people.
As a mechanical engineer, I know enough about energy, chemistry and technology to see past the hype. At least one electric car on display claimed “zero emissions”. That really insults my intelligence. To build a car makes emissions, and making electricity in the US means burning coal. I have nothing against making electricity, but here again the claims ring empty.
The expo should carry the notice “FOR ENTERTAINMENT ONLY”. A stellar example of this is the $19,000 Hammacher Schlemmer pedal car built for seven people, a nice gee-whiz gadget, but of no practical use. The Expo is a study in Greenwashing and irrational exuberance. Most, if not all offerings are placebos, ways to look and feel green, but without substance.
To be sure, people want a source for green products and services, where they can feel good about their purchases and think that they are making a difference. They want fast gratification without the work of digging past the claims. At the end of the day they get in their SUVs and return to their heated homes, air conditioning, electricity, plumbing, kids and dogs. I can’t blame them. As Americans, we are all oil addicts, no matter how “green” you think you are. One can do very little without giving up a comfy life style. It is virtually impossible to make anything or do anything in a meaningfully “green” manner; it will always use a resource and create carbon dioxide. You can not make an omelet without braking eggs. We can recycle some things, drive a smaller car, compost yard waste, but we don’t want to cause ourselves any pain. And it would take a whole lot of pain to make any difference.
If you really want to be green, live like the Amish. No phone, no lights, no motor car, not a single luxury, like 1793, it’s as primitive as can be.
The Big Picture Of USHCN Adjustment Fraud
Posted on February 15, 2013 by stevengoddard
NCDC is using the US temperature graph below, to influence government policy.
==============
They document that they do 0.5F tampering to the data, and that their tampering goes flat after 1990.
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But they actually do 1.5F tampering, and it increases exponentially after 1990.
==============
The graph below overlays the actual tampering, on top of the documented adjustments. USHCN tampering is almost 300% of their documented adjustments.
==============
The whole NCDC US temperature record is a complete fraud. The thermometer data shows no temperature increase since 1900.
==============
NOAA, NASA and CRU all acknowledged this, before they started cheating after the year 2000.
==============
Phil Jones and NOAA said there was no warming in the US.
February 04, 1989 Last week, scientists from the United States Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that a study of temperature readings for the contiguous 48 states over the last century showed there had been no significant change in average temperature over that period. Dr. (Phil) Jones said in a telephone interview today that his own results for the 48 states agreed with those findings.
New York Times
In 1999, Hansen said that he didn’t see anything happening in the US.
Empirical evidence does not lend much support to the notion that climate is headed precipitately toward more extreme heat and drought. The drought of 1999 covered a smaller area than the 1988 drought, when the Mississippi almost dried up. And 1988 was a temporary inconvenience as compared with repeated droughts during the 1930s “Dust Bowl” that caused an exodus from the prairies, as chronicled in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath…..
in the U.S. there has been little temperature change in the past 50 years, the time of rapidly increasing greenhouse gases — in fact, there was a slight cooling throughout much of the country
charts, graphs, and links at:
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/02/15/more-ushcn-adjustment-fraud/#more-68841
========================================================
Mr. Layman here. A slight updraft caused by heat from a building or a road, a breeze stirring up pockets of different temperatures will move the air and change the density of the air you are looking through. I suspect you are seeing the same effect that makes stars twinkle but at a much closer range.
Jeff Wood says:
February 15, 2013 at 2:03 pm
Look up heat haze. Note, it does not have to actually be hot for it to occur, just different temperatures between the air and the ground…
@Jeff Wood
I think there is little doubt that the flickering you see is refraction from the movement of air at slightly different temperatures and longer distances, coupled with the fact that the standard lights are visibly smaller from the more distant towns. Jupiter and Saturn don’t flicker nearly as much as stars simply because they subtend a bigger angle, even if still measured in arc seconds.
Seeing as how this is an Open Thread, I want to recount a story I read in elementary school that made an impact on me to this day. Some kid chose a science experiment to measure the curvature of the Earth. He lived near a mountain. Some 200 miles away was another mountain. He hypothesized from geometry that he would be able to see the distant mountain if he climbed the near one. One Saturday he sets out to climb the neighboring mountain. Half way up he stops to rest, sits down and looks around. To his great surprise, he sees his distant target mountain in full glory. This cannot be! But he honors his data, goes back to class and makes his oral report and concludes that the “Earth must be flat!” Naturally, he is ridiculed. People say he could not have seen what he saw. He knows what he saw and sticks to his guns. I don’t remember the story details of how, but the answer of course is that thanks to different air temperatures and densities, light between mountains doesn’t travel in straight lines, but is bent by refraction around the curvature of the earth through a diverse and non-uniform medium, the atmosphere.
Report what you see. Adjust theory to fit the facts. Don’t adjust facts to fit theory. I which I knew the Title and Author of the short story. That author made a difference.
Jeff Wood:
See this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_seeing
Astronomers deal with the same issue. Some nights, the atmosphere is relatively quiet, and astronomers enjoy good “seeing” conditions. Most nights they are not so fortunate.
Some large telescopes at observatories have “adaptive optics” in which the telescope mirror is mounted on a series of actuators, and small (sub-micron) distortions of the mirror’s surface can correct for the distortions in real time.
The main reason (only reason?) for putting the Hubble telescope in orbit was to get above the atmosphere.
A friend of mine, in Germany, made me aware of this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-16833204
A “wind harvester”, apparently a new type of wind turbine, which can function at low and high wind speeds, can be scaled down to fit on a roof, and is less likely to kill birds. Any thoughts?
pat says: watch your pensions, folks:
15 Feb: Bloomberg: Sally Bakewell: Canadian Pension-Backed Group Plans Wind Power for Prison
Too late.
From Heartland:
“Why Isn’t Peter Gleick In Jail?”
Good question.
@Jeff Wood
February 15, 2013 at 2:03 pm
Actually, What you are looking at is a Doppler effect, if the lights you are looking at are flickering at 50hz this means they will turn on and off 50 times a second, you wont notice this flicker until you travel some distance away from the lights, at about 10 miles from the lights the flicker appears to slow down. As there is a mixture of lights with different frequencies in a distant village the flicker will appear to make the lights dance about.
Twinkling lights from further villages, the solution is simple, use ‘simple’ logic!
The stars twinkle.
The stars are millions of miles away.
The further villages twinkle.
Conclusion, the problem is your map, these villages obviously must be millions of miles away.
Logic makes things so much easier 🙂
Jeff Wood – look up scintillation. Specifically terrestrial. The explanations above are what is going but the word is scintillation.
pat says:
February 15, 2013 at 2:44 pm
“15 Feb: BBC: Italy makes ‘Mafia’ arrests over Sicily wind farms
Police have arrested five people in eastern Sicily suspected of involvement in Mafia corruption over contracts to build wind farms, Italian media report.
The mayor and a councillor in the small town of Fondachelli Fantina, in Messina province, were among those detained.”
This should be a new golden age for mafias wherever they are located. When government bucks are flowing like rivers with no accountability, mafia with buckets line the rivers.
Open Thread, misc. info:
Dilbert must work at GISS
Don’t fool with Mother Nature
She’s got a cute young ass
Pick two
How cold is it?
On the bright side, not as permanent as a tattoo
You think you’re talented?
GW skepticism chart
Climategate, Harry_read_me file
Models, climatologist’s vs engineer’s
RyanAir CEO quote
Environmentalists’ vision of the future
California’s Senator vs a 6-year old
So that’s how it works
Jeff Wood says:
February 15, 2013 at 2:03 pm
There is a fair range of people who hang out here, and I wonder if one will put down his or her glass for a moment to explain something that has puzzled me a long time.
Taken to extremes, but look at the visual effect of the exhaust gases on the red an white stripes of the berm. You’re seeing heat rising.
https://picasaweb.google.com/FZ750Horse/ThunderbikeUKBrandsGP15th16thMay2010#5480109306993586018
Here is a proposal to discuss: Mandate that all climate models run on computer centers powered by the Wind.. hehe
@ Pat 2:245
‘To be sure, people want a source for green products and services’
I first read ‘To be sure, people want a source for green prophets and services’
http://i.imgur.com/KkscfO9.jpg
@ Jeff Woods;
The answers about variations in refractive index are correct, scintillation, or “seeing conditions” are the terms used. And some large telescopes do correct for this with adaptive optics.
Without going into too much detail, Earth imaging satellites do not suffer (as much) from this effect. That’s why satellite images you see are generally “crisp”. And yes one of the main reasons the Hubble is in space is to avoid these effect, at the time it was developed the adaptive optics technology was not as robust as it is now.
It is not exactly a Doppler effect (a moving object pushes waves (light or sound) ahead of it thereby compressing them), rather the changes in refractive index change the speed at which the light travels. These changes are on the order of a few hundred Hertz. The light frequency is in the Terahertz range and your eye cannot respond quickly enough to detect that.
Differences in the refractive index (warm air and cold air boundaries) “steer” (Snell’s Law) some of the light away from the straight line it would otherwise take. Thus more/less light arrives at your destination and you perceive this as “twinkling”. If the refractive index changed uniformly you would only see the light arrive slightly delayed (or sped up) and you would have no way to discern that.
And yes, when conditions are just right you can see farther distances (the other mountain) than normally. I live on the southern shore of Lake Ontario (We call it the North Coast of the USA) and a few times a year when the water and air temperature conditions are just right we can see lights from the town on the other side of the lake (36 miles away). Sometimes it’s clear enough to make out flashing red warning lights on the top of radio antennas and car headlights approaching the lake shore, turning and then driving along the road paralleling the shoreline.
With interferometry techniques it is possible to measure the “Optical Path Difference” between an optical path in air and another parallel path in a vacuum. Thus it is possible to measure changes in the refractive index of air. I varies with temperature, pressure and humidity.
Dust will also disperse varying amounts of the light and cause the received intensity to “twinkle”, but it’s generally a much slower effect, unless there is a dust storm.
Both of these effects get larger with increased distance.
Cheers, Kevin.
I would sure appreciate someone to bringing us up to date on Jaxa’s Ibuki gosat observtions http://www.jaxa.jp/projects/sat/gosat/index_e.html
I posted a couple dozen articles/studies in the comments to that Guardian piece. They were shocked to find out their own side is spending orders of magnitude more to promote AGW than the “dark money” the article cites. It’s also fun to ask them why the temperature for 1936 keeps changing, or why IPCC models can’t do better than a random walk.
The answer seems to be “but… but… consensus!” You can’t explain the difference between “science” and “the opinions of scientists about a certain set of predictions” to these people.
Theo Goodwin says:
February 15, 2013 at 4:52 pm
pat says:
February 15, 2013 at 2:44 pm
“15 Feb: BBC: Italy makes ‘Mafia’ arrests over Sicily wind farms
Police have arrested five people in eastern Sicily suspected of involvement in Mafia corruption over contracts to build wind farms, Italian media report.
The mayor and a councillor in the small town of Fondachelli Fantina, in Messina province, were among those detained.”
This should be a new golden age for mafias wherever they are located. When government bucks are flowing like rivers with no accountability, mafia with buckets line the rivers.
——
I believe the US mob leaders all hail from Chicago.
Go figure.
cn
Stuff from Google News
http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/Asteroid+blocking+satellites+might+Earth+only+hope+against+meteors+Sherbrooke+engineer/7973509/story.html
@S Mosher please include the electricity in the buildings they work in, especially elevators, climbing a few stairs to get to work every morning might clear their minds a bit,.
And BTW my wife and I have done observations for our gov on a Stephenson screen for decades the info is now computerized and available to anyone on “Cooltap” from the Canadian gov. It covers most of Canada although it is a fairly new and has not got a lot of historical data.
I have to add our yard has not changed other than removing all the black top to get a more “natural” reading 🙂 🙂 ( our house is in the middle of an orchard and has been the location for the screen for 50 years!!!
I have an observation and a few questions.
I have seen quite a few electrical furnaces that were used for annealing steel coils. The steel would be heated to red hot, then allowed to cool. Looked into such furnaces at the steel makers where my father worked many times.
I have never seen red hot air. Why isn’t the air in the furnace heated by bouncing of the walls of the steel to red hot?
How can I see red hot air?
Lets say I take 20 meter pipe, half a meter in diameter and with a 1o centimeter diameter hole all through. I surround in heating coils and heat the whole length to red hot. Looking down the length, will I see red hot air? If not, why not?
Now don’t do the flame thing, most of the red/orange of flames comes from heating carbon particles.
@clipe Just read the article. My question to the researcher would be where does your satellite get the delta V (if that is the correct term) force from to change it’s own orbit to mach the velocity of the asteroid in the first place? And how many “twin” satellites do you have to launch to put up any kind of “umbrella” to protect the planet? As today’s totally unexpected event shows we are at least decades away from satellites to protect us, I feel some kind of beam weapon would be more practical ( maybe Reagan’s “Star Wars” was not far of in it’s concept).
Many of you may be familiar with the works of George Orwell. You might know of 1984 and Animal Farm or seen a movie of one of the works. But if it has been a long time since you actually read both works, particularly if you were relatively young and in college and are now in your 40’s or older, I would suggest you re-read both works, particularly 1984. Reading them from the perspective of age and experience reveals things in a completely different context, particularly in this day and age.
Well, I tried to open up an OIMAB (Off Impact Area Betting) website on several domains and was promptly shut down, placed in moderation, banned and turned in to various government agencies, so that idea ain’t going nowhere. So I’ll simply ask the questions here:
What is coming out of the Russian meteorite craters (or lake bed) and how soon?
Section I
1. Green Climate Change Fanatics.
2. Alien Green Climate Change Fanatics.
3. Green Lefist Alien Climate Change Fanatics.
4, High Fiving White Guys including Bill Nye.
5. Zombie earthworms.
6. Zombie escargot.
7. Body snatching Environmentalists.
8. Triffids with attitudes.
9. Martian Department of Vehicle Registration with citations for unlicensed rovers.
10. Other.
Section II
1. Today.
2. Tomorrow.
3. The Day After Tomorrow.
4. Soon.
5. Not soon enough.
6. Before you read this.
7. Right after you read this.
8. They are already here…..aaargh…ackkk!
OK, I’ll bite – Since I’ve never done orbital change calculations.
1) Assume a empty but fully tested and ready-to-fill Saturn 5 on the launch pad. A 5, 50 or 500 ton asteroid is discovered coming in at nominal velocity, and will impact earth in 60 days.
How far out must the Saturn 5 hit the asteroid to give it enough delta v to miss the earth?
If that doesn’t work – which is likely seeing that the moon-trajectory mass of Apollo 11 was much smaller than the earth-launched mass – assume a fully loaded and prepped Saturn 5 in earth orbit. Could IT be sent to impact a 5, 50 or 500 ton asteroid far enough out to force a miss?
Why do the “scientists” studying asteroid impact missions ALWAYS reject nuclear blasts that would break up the asteroid/comet – so at least SOME of the asteroid/comet would miss earth, and do they think they can invent some drive or “anchor” on a spinning irregular mass of rock that would let them “propel” it to a different orbit?
Considering an open thread ~ Meteors matter eh?
Kinda put me back in place for a minute!
crosspatch,
That reminded me of this interesting picture. ☺
@DocMartyn;
Well, the steel is by its nature comprised of a lot of molecules with different sizes (iron in different forms, carbon, etc.). So when it vibrates it can give off light at many wavelengths. The peak wavelength is the “red hot” temperature (1000 degrees F or thereabouts). The air is comprised of only a few different molecules (Nitrogen and Oxygen mostly) and the spacing between these is much smaller and more uniform. The gases are also radiating but in a much more narrow band at a longer wavelength, beyond the visible spectrum. So they are also “hot” and radiating, but at a non-visible wavelength, like an invisible (to the human eye) “red hot”. IR viewing cameras can see it.
This is a bit simplistic, and I’m sure some folks may disagree, but everything is radiating all of the time and the wavelengths are determined by the molecule size(s). We have just evolved to see the most useful temperatures to survive.
Did you know that some small mammals (voles, etc.) have evolved so that their urine does not reflect in the visible spectrum? It’s only visible in the Ultraviolet spectrum. And some small hawks (Kestrels) have evolved to be capable of seeing UV light. That way they can track the trails that their prey are using and find a meal quicker.
Cheers, Kevin.
@DocMartyn;
Also the thermal capacity of the air is much lower than the steel, so there is much less energy in the air. So the intensity of the radiated energy is much less, but it is radiating just the same.
Kevin.
The Man-Made Global Warmists never thought they would have to deal with None of their alarmists predictions coming true. Thank you Solar Cycle 24.
That assumes it is one solid object. I believe that most are not. The one that hit Brazil in the 1930’s appears to have been at least three major pieces and probably several smaller ones. If you look carefully at impact craters on places like the moon, Mercury, and Mars you will notice that there actually seem to be in many cases two and once in a while three impact craters in a line. Once the object gets close enough, gravitational forces cause the objects to disassociate and it comes apart. Also, the object is likely spinning, so getting a grip on it is probably impossible until it is de-spun. I often hear farfetched ideas such as painting one side black or white … which does no good for an object that is rotating.
Also, if you look at places with a lot of craters, you will see a large number of craters at the poles, too. Not all of the impacts come from the ecliptic but that is about the only area where we look. We could have had several unnoticed close misses that we haven’t noticed from objects coming in perpendicular to the ecliptic plane. Chances are that is going to be the direction from which we are hit that causes the most damage. We are going to find something approaching Earth from due North or due South and we won’t even notice it until it is too late.
Oh, and I always have fantasized about doing a novel where a Jupiter sized object that has been cast out of another solar system flies through ours but comes from a direction perpendicular to the ecliptic. We think it is a comet at first … until we realize just how absolutely huge the thing is.
We have a local company that builds a different low elevation design; however, any design that is situated near ground has the disadvantage that airflow near ground is substantially slower than higher up. Power available is proportional to velocity cubed–the problem ought to be apparent.
S. Meyer. and S.
Mosher.
Meyer’s wind turbine ought to the mandated design to run the climate models.
How about this development?
http://www.pacificwind.co/index.php/how-it-work
Also, since the plane of the solar system is perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy, anything flying through interstellar space is going to likely arrive from a direction outside of the plane of the solar ecliptic.
@farmerbraun;
Well, when you get to their step #2; ”channeling the wind to increase its speed” you also get a thing called “back pressure” (NO climate science didn’t invent “back” anything, “back EMF” and “back pressure” effects have been understood for decades). And that eliminates any “amplification” of the energy in the wind. The venturi effect they appear to rely on DOES NOT AMPLIFY ENERGY.
So if they want to spend their money on this I say go ahead, just don’t ask for a taxpayer subsidy.
Way back when engineers where perfecting steam locomotives for railroads (1900-1940’s) they understood “back pressure” and tried to minimize its effect on the flow of steam through a system.
It always exists and all you can do is tradeoff it’s harmful effects on efficiency, you cannot eliminate it.
Cheers, Kevin.
RACookPE1978 says:
Crosspatch says:
How far out must the Saturn 5 hit the asteroid to give it enough delta v to miss the earth?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You guys are going to way too much trouble. Just have the United Nations declare earth orbit an asteroid free zone. I lived in a city that declared itself a nuclear free zone, and it was never hit with a nuclear blast, not even one. I think it has to pass in the Security Council though, so it has to be unanimous there. You never know what the Russians are going to veto and why, so for plan B, I say we dispense with all the calculations required for the Saturn 5 to get to the asteroid and instead simply move the earth out of the way. I have a concluding remark about moving the earth that I am assured would get snipped.
I have an idea: How about we drill a tunnel through the Santa Cruz Mountains in California at about Loma Prieta. The tunnel could gradually taper to the center where it would have a rather robust wind turbine. The tunnel could also carry infrastructure such as power and communications cables and maybe even pipelines. In the winter we can have rather furious storms and the wind would absolutely rip through that tunnel. During the summer, we have a “heat low” in the valley and air would be pulled in from the coast. In the fall, the wind reverses direction and we often get a gusty offshore flow. But there would be another advantage, too. In the winter the air that flows through that tunnel would not be forced over the mountains and made to drop its moisture. It would act as a conduit for additional moisture inland. A series of these tunnels could be made along those hills and a series of power stations so constructed from them. At the same time, it would allow a significant amount of moisture to reach farther inland that it otherwise would. The rain that currently falls on the Santa Cruz hills runs out to sea as there are no reservoirs to catch it. This would allow more of that moisture to move inland where there ARE places to catch it.
We could do the same with the hills in the East Bay between, say, Fremont and Pleasanton and more in the Diablo range between Livermore and Tracey. This would pump a LOT of water into the central valley AND provide a large amount of wind energy that is much more efficient than the current wind turbines on towers and they would not kill birds. The tunnel entrances could be screened. What we could end up with is a path for moist air from the coast all the way to the central valley and a huge amount of energy production at the same time.
The turbines I have in mind would more closely resemble jet engines than what people normally associate with a wind turbine with what looks like propeller blades.
Research program to examine using impact vehicle to affect an asteroid:
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Technology/NEO/Don_Quijote_concept
Why did they name the program “Don Quixote” when that name is usually associated with romanticized futility???
” DocMartyn says:
February 15, 2013 at 6:50 pm
I have an observation and a few questions.
I have seen quite a few electrical furnaces that were used for annealing steel coils. The steel would be heated to red hot, then allowed to cool. Looked into such furnaces at the steel makers where my father worked many times.
I have never seen red hot air. Why isn’t the air in the furnace heated by bouncing of the walls of the steel to red hot?
How can I see red hot air?
Lets say I take 20 meter pipe, half a meter in diameter and with a 1o centimeter diameter hole all through. I surround in heating coils and heat the whole length to red hot. Looking down the length, will I see red hot air? If not, why not?
Now don’t do the flame thing, most of the red/orange of flames comes from heating carbon particles.”
Gases unlike solids and liquids do not emit full blackbody spectrum.
Gases do emit parts of blackbody spectrum.
Most gases are transparent.
And If a gas emits a certain wavelength, then it absorbs this wavelength- so the gas would be less transparent to the wavelengths it emits [it would absorb them].
The color red is wavelength which part of visible spectrum, if the atmosphere emitted red light, it also would absorb the red light from the Sun.
If you compare air to water, water absorb red light fairly well. Sunlight passing thru around 15 meter of water will have most of the red light absorbed, which mean anything which is the color of red below 15 meter of water will not look red, it look grey or blackish.
So one knows the air does emit much of any visible light spectrum if heated, else our atmosphere would absorb them and we would not see these colors, but it’s possible air absorbs and emit some portion of the red spectrum. You would check the emissivity of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and H20 gas. And if any of these gases had part red light spectrum it absorbed and emitted, it would have to be rather insignificant, and human eyes might not even have evolved see it well.
Since it has to be fairly dim red light, you would also need to shield your eyes [or sensor] from the intense glowing metal [it will be a far more intense light] and the air between you and the glowing air would also absorb some this same spectrum of red light.
So at best you have some small portion of red light spectrum which will not very bright [it will be very dim] and air between you will absorb some of it.
Would 20 meter of pipe be long enough?
Should check the emissivity of the gases involved first:
http://astro.u-strasbg.fr/~koppen/discharge/
So apparently both nitrogen and oxygen would emit a portion of red light. Also:
So I would guess that 20 meters of pipe might work.
@John Bell: Not everything you do not understand is wrong. And also, the earth day is not all good… it stinks of the fake Green agenda… which is the opposite of what Green means. After all CO2 is green in that it supports the existence of all plant life.
Seeing as we’re asking questions, there’s something I’d love an explanation for that I saw on more than one occasion back in the summer of maybe 1973 or 1974. At the time I was keen on fly fishing by night for sea trout on the river Rheidol in Wales.
High in the sky, I saw what could have been taken as a star had it been stationary. Not a bright star like one might see in the major constellations, but one that you’d probably miss if it weren’t moving. It moved noticeably, but not in a straight line; not exactly zig-zagging, but certainly not straight, although in the same general direction.
Had that been all, my guess would have been that it was a satellite. However, there was another identical object that moved exactly in sync with it, maybe as far off as the apparent distance between the tip and ball of my thumb held at 18″ from my face. The one object was somewhat in advance of the other.
I thought about some kind of refractive phenomenon; after all, it was summer and the air nearer the ground would probably have still been pretty warm at that time of night. But then, I thought, why would I have seen two objects rather than one? Wouldn’t the whole sky have been refracted by the same air near the ground?
Any suggestions?
Ref
Charles Gerard Nelson says:
February 15, 2013 at 2:23 pm
Yeah Charles,
I heard this interview and I am sure that it raises a number of points that some of our more knowledgeable bloggers on sea level would seriously question.
Perhaps some of them would care to listen to the interview which lasts for about 5 mins or so:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/csiro-expert-responds-to-sea-level-sceptic/4517986
The main point to me was if the ABC had a listener who had hard evidence that what the Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr was saying about Kiribati was wrong why in heavens name did they not get HIM on and allow him to explain his case instead of getting a CSIRO “expert” to prove Bob Carr right and the listener wrong?
Not that I resent Australia helping the cash strapped Kiribati in repairing their main road but statements like “Without help in the fight against climate change, Kiribati could be uninhabitable by 2030” sound absolute b…..t to me:
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/15m-to-help-kiribati-fight-climate-change-damage-20130211-2e763.html
And as you say Dr John Church’s responses to the unknown listener’s specific objections sounded like absolute gobbledegook.
Maybe you saw the twin GRACE satellites:
http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/
“GRACE satellites were launched on March 17, 2002, on-board Rockot, from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Siberia.
The satellites were injected into a 500 km altitude, near circular polar orbit. ”
http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/operations/configuration.html
Recently watched part of this “Nova” program:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/earth-from-space.html
Did not get to see all of it, but what I did see was extremely interesting
NOAA are claiming hundreds of new temperature records in the US last year.
It seems like most stations have only been operating since the 1960’s though.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/noaa-deception-over-record-temperatures/
crosspatch says:
February 15, 2013 at 9:13 pm
“What we could end up with is a path for moist air from the coast all the way to the central valley and a huge amount of energy production at the same time.”
Well, and it would be very expensive due to all the tunnel boring. So, how many years for break even. Nobody doubts that PV panels and wind turbines produce energy; it’s the cost that makes it questionable. (And the bird killing in case of wind turbines in nature reserves)
(Adding energy storage is trivial, we just don’t do it because it doubles the cost AGAIN.)
Your idea reminds me of Technocracy Inc. (founded by M. King Hubbert et. al. in the 1920ies or 1930ies) who wanted to run all of America with hydropower (and replace capitalism with a centrally planned economy, and democracy with technocracy)
Please forgive a blatant piece of off topic advertising. My hobby, which I pursue with a passion, is counted cross stitch embroidery; usually associated with females. Please visit
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and specificly
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And with regards to the break even: Often this is just understood as greedy capitalist vulture nitpicking; but when I talk about EROEI instead of ROI, one could ask, how long does the turbine have to turn to produce the energy needed to bore the tunnel, make the cement needed in construction, and produce the steel etc needed for the boring machine.
If the Keynesian Obama regime decides that a payback time of say 500 years is worth it, have they already depleted the possible projects with an energy payback time of 350 years?
pat says:
February 15, 2013 at 2:54 pm
“15 Feb: Bloomberg: Sally Bakewell: Canadian Pension-Backed Group Plans Wind Power for Prison. Partnerships for Renewables, backed with 100 million pounds ($155 million) of Canadian pension and infrastructure-fund money, will build as much as 500 megawatts of wind power at land owned by U.K. prisons and other bodies…”
Perhaps prisoners should be put on stationary bikes that would be able to produce electricity. They could ride in shifts so that the power would be constant. It would keep them all busy for most of the day, it would release pent up energy that is used for plotting evil deeds and fighting. It would also eliminate the need for yard exercise, a place where lot’s of trouble takes place. In cases of large prison populations, they could use this method to power the nearby town.
RACookPE1978 says:
February 15, 2013 at 7:19 pm
“1) Assume a empty but fully tested and ready-to-fill Saturn 5 on the launch pad. A 5, 50 or 500 ton asteroid is discovered coming in at nominal velocity, and will impact earth in 60 days.
How far out must the Saturn 5 hit the asteroid to give it enough delta v to miss the earth? ”
The Saturn V is a staged rocket. The first and largest stage is used to lift fuel for itself and the two other stages and is then discarded. The second stage continues this mission. The result is only the third stage and the payload reaches orbit. The third stage was then used to put the payload into the lunar trajectory that would take it to the Moon. So only the payload would be available to deflect an asteroid, not the entire rocket.
FWIW, I saw two Apollo launches live, Apollo 12 and 13. To this day I consider the launch of a Saturn V rocket as the most awesome man made thing I have ever witnessed. The most awesome natural thing I have witnessed is the winter surf at Sunset Beach on Oahu, Hawaii.
Here’s an interesting picture from 1963 on the Atlantic website:
Admiral Richard Byrd’s “Little America III” station, built in Antarctic in 1940, was spotted by a Navy icebreaker sticking out of the side of this floating iceberg in the Antarctic’s Ross Sea, on March 13, 1963. The old outpost was buried beneath 25 feet of snow, 300 miles away from its original location. A helicopter pilot flew in close and reported cans and supplies still stacked neatly on shelves. (AP Photo/Official U.S. Navy Photo)
Link
I’m happy to report that my neighbor and I collected 80 gallons of maple sap from our little stand of maple trees this week. Conditions were perfect: warm during the day and below freezing at night. Sap is coming in at 2.75% sugar which is very good.
So yet another year of zero impact of AGW on our humble little maple operation.
It’s interesting that refraction has come up. I watched a documentary recently that followed the work of one scientist who spent years investigating the Titanic disaster, and concluded that the ultimate culprite was refraction.
Based on studying local ships logs for temperature readings, he noticed how an extremely abrupt temperature sheer was occuring exactly at the coordinates of the Titanic collision. Even the logs from a nearby ship, mentioned the word “refraction” several times.
Similar modern day examples of refraction lead to an optical illusion, in which the horizon appears to be raised above where it should be. In normal circumstances, the lookout on the Titanic would have seen the iceberg by virtue of it blocking the starlight as it loomed over the horizon. If refraction occurs, the horizon would have “lifted” to such a level that it would have blocked the stars. In effect, the iceberg would have been invisible as a dark object against the dark background of the ocean.
I was watching another tv programme which discussed how a doctor at the turn of the last century, tried to measure scientifically the existence of the soul. He did this by building a balance onto which he placed the death bed of tuberculosis patients. His experiment consisted of detecting if a weight loss occured at the moment of death, which would represent the departure of the immortal soul.
After carrying out 6 weighings, he found a weight loss of between 1 1/2 and 2 ounces immediately after the death of each patient. He concluded that this was the soul departing the dead. Nobody has ever tried this experiment since, and there are no explanations for the weight loss.
Of course, souls don’t exist do they, so why bother? We know there is no such thing as a soul because no scientific apparatus has ever detected one. No, a soul, if it exists, is completely undetectable, being invisible and having no interaction with matter, which makes it an article of faith, not science.
Look up into the sky at night, and you will certainly not see the dark matter that holds the galaxies together. You won’t see it, because dark matter does not interract with photons. Dark matter doesn’t interact with ordinary matter either.
Do you see where I’m going with this? You could have a block made out of dark matter right in front of you and it would be completely invisible – light would pass straight through it. Your hand would pass straight through it. The only signal that it exists would be in the minute gravitational attraction, since dark matter has mass.
If dark matter exists everywhere, why not in association with the brain? Could a soul made of dark matter be the thing measured by doctor McDougall all those years ago?
Sort of related to twinkling and refraction:
We’ve had a lot of fog this winter. Some days I notice a sharp veil or curtain in the middle of the fog. Close to me, about 20% opaque; beyond the veil, about 60% opaque. When cars pass through the curtain, they almost disappear. The line doesn’t correspond to a difference in altitude. Is this just perceptual? My log retina ‘recalibrating’ linear reality? Or do these sharp distinctions really exist?
Australian Labor government poll ratings plunge just a week or so after Al Gore virtually told Australians to vote for them.
The Curse of Gore again? I wonder whether he once heaped praise on our own UK ecoloon ex-minister and future jailbird Chris Huhne?
S. Meyer says:
February 15, 2013 at 3:52 pm
A friend of mine, in Germany, made me aware of this:
This is what really annoys me about science reporting these days.
Here we have story on the making of a prototype that hasn’t even been made or tested to see if it works!
That’s NOT a science story.
It is snowing right now in Raleigh NC.
Kevin Kilty says:
February 15, 2013 at 8:03 pm
S. Meyer says:
February 15, 2013 at 3:52 pm
A friend of mine, in Germany, made me aware of this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-16833204
A “wind harvester”, apparently a new type of wind turbine, which can function at low and high wind speeds, can be scaled down to fit on a roof, and is less likely to kill birds. Any thoughts?
We have a local company that builds a different low elevation design; however, any design that is situated near ground has the disadvantage that airflow near ground is substantially slower than higher up. Power available is proportional to velocity cubed–the problem ought to be apparent.
—————–
The closer to the ground, the more surface friction occurs with the wind, thus more turbulence and much less energy.
http://www.weru.ksu.edu/new_weru/publications/Andrew_pdf/78-128-J.pdf
Has anyone noticed that the BBC is covertly begging forgiveness for 28-gate?
If you have seen PBS version episodes 4 and 5 on Downton Abbey season 3, you may have noticed.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/programs/episode/downton-abbey-s3-e4/
If you like tear jerkers, you may enjoy the two hours.
My interpretation of this might be a little off, maybe 180 degrees off, but they are saying something in there of interest to the great debate of today.
On the Wikipedia, the episodes are numbered 5 and 6, so try not to get confused with the numbering at the link. The link will die in early March, so now is the time to watch the two hours!
I just came across this dude a week ago. I have no idea who is he is but his posts are a revelation to me. Some of you might know him, others not. Here are two examples:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0KJ_dxp170&feature=youtu.be
The guy in the utube is loopy. He seems to think that the stew of life can be read. The only thing missing in his presentation is the cup of tea and a sign outside his tent.
Vince Causey says (February 16, 2013 at 7:09 am)
——
Your musings on MacDougall and the soul reminded me (in an off-topic sort of way) of what may be an emerging new branch of science in this century – quantum mechanics (QM) applied to life. Although QM is the basis of molecular chemistry, only recently has some work been done to see if the ‘wierdnesses’ of QM show up in life and living things.
Although ‘quantum’ and ‘magic’ are interchangeable in New Age/ hippy / econut mythology (as John Bell points out at February 15, 2013 at 3:01 pm), this is serious scientific speculation. Photosynthesis in some plants seems to be optimised with QM coherence; enzyme catalysis may make use of quantum tunnelling (going from one side of an energy barrier to the other without needing the energy to break through it); QM entanglement (where one of a separated particle pair ‘knows’ when the other has changed its spin) may explain bird and insect navigation via the Earth’s magnetic field.
Professor Roger Penrose has also suggested that QM processes in microtubules in the brain may allow it to ‘quantum compute’ at times (that is, check vast arrays of possibilities and get an answer quickly). This might explain how minds can ‘intuit’ conclusions, while computers remain piles of junk if left without the clever human-constructed programs running in them.
Well, it’s all still speculation, but perhaps who dismiss AGW sceptics as anti-science could note that many of us are always looking for the next ‘Big Thing’ in science, wherever it lies. We just suspect it won’t be AGW, which will end up in the ‘Fads and Fallacies’ section of humanity’s advancing ideas.
New ideas are always fun and exciting. In my time we’ve had chaos, fractals, complexity, dinosaurs killed by ‘incoming!!’, startling discoveries in materials science, extrasolar planets, the accelerating universe, M-theory, etc, etc. It all makes AGW seem banal as well as thoroughly unconvincing. Let’s have more genuine scientific brainstorming and barnstorming, and less of the pseudoscientific Malthusian maunderings from the nattering nabobs of nihilism and their satraps in the media.
Refs:
Quantum Biology http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110615/full/474272a.html
Quantum Fluctuations & Life http://arxiv.org/ftp/quant-ph/papers/0403/0403017.pdf
Roger Penrose, The Emporers New Mind, 1989.
janama says:
February 16, 2013 at 7:46 am
“This is what really annoys me about science reporting these days.
Here we have story on the making of a prototype that hasn’t even been made or tested to see if it works”
———
For what it’s worth, there is prototype and it works… Sort of. 🙂
http://www.wind-power-innovations.com/the-idea.html
Well, yes, it would be expensive but there would be many benefits besides just power and water. There would also be air quality benefits as the Santa Clara valley often experiences a temperature inversion. Such a system of tunnels would also act to ventilate the valley and improve air quality. This is also why I suggested sharing the route with other infrastructure including power and pipelines. There is yet another potential benefit at least in the Santa Cruz hills area. Those hills are actually loaded with natural gas. Many years ago a group of workers building a train tunnel (that train route has long since been flooded by Lexington Reservoir and the old route and tunnels abandoned) were killed when natural gas seeps exploded while they were working. Now, 50MPH winds are not unusual in this area. Imagine a tunnel with about a 20 foot mouth on either side that narrows down to about 5 feet in diameter in the center. In that center you have what amounts to a jet engine sort of turbine system, much more efficient than a windmill. The tunnel might also serve as a natural gas collection system and that gas could be used and collected for other purposes such as municipal power production.
Sports illustrated on the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia: “to stage a winter games in a subtropical city in the age of global warming seems delusional”. Big bold white text on high contrast blue pulled from the story, repeated for emphasis.
I normally write to you under my real name, but today, just for fun, I am using an alias. I don’t think the cops are looking for me anymore but don’t want to tempt fate. I’m retired now due to bad nerves and increasing penalties but was once called ‘The Second Best Pot Grower Ever Seen!’ And that was by the Major Crime Unit. High praise indeed but I think they were just trying to get a rise out of me.
Up Close and Personal With CO2
A blog by: The Last Hippie (name and address withheld to protect the guilty)
Many times it has been asked ‘how much does carbon dioxide effect plant growth?’ and no one seems to know the answer so I will tell you of my ill-fated experiment.
The first question is ‘what is the normal level of CO2?’ and for that there is no clear answer. My first step was to buy a CO/CO2 meter and take it outside in January. Where I live, in a forest near a wetland and a river, it was snow up to my ass and -15C. The CO2 was 230ppm (parts per million). Then I took the meter inside and set it on the kitchen table to find it was 500ppm due to the pilot light on the gas stove. When four people came over for coffee and sat around bullshitting for a while the level shot up to 1,500. If you wonder why that plant over the sink near the gas stove blooms like crazy all winter wonder no more.
The level outside went from a winter low of 230, to a spring high of 450, to a summer steady of 320 with a sudden drop when the ground froze. After I saw that I really started to wonder about the global warming people and their insistence that the CO2 levels are increasing. How and where do they measure it? A forest or wetland nearby gassing off in the spring will upset any readings. Maybe they need to be looked at with the same critical eye as examining the veracity of the ground weather stations for temperature changes over time. Perhaps these are urban, or rural, CO2 islands.
Now back to the grow room. With the room vented to the outside my six light room produced 6 pounds during a winter crop. A poor but average performance but it did show me one important thing; plants are pigs when it comes to CO2. When the fans shut off the level plummeted to 200ppm in less than 20 minutes and at that level plants go dormant. The CO2 would barely make it across the room so the plants were only growing half time at best.
In the spring the outside air at 450ppm increased production to 7.5 pounds. When the fans shut off the levels again fell to 200 in less than an hour.
Next step was to introduce CO2 from a propane hot water tank to up the level to 500ppm and keep it there. This produced 8 pounds so although hardly stunning it was better than 6.
Finally, screwing up my courage, I upped the level to 1,000ppm not knowing what the toxic level of CO2 was. Turns out it is over 30,000ppm so I need not have worried.
Anyway, at 1,000 parts many things happened all at the same time. First off water consumption tripled as did fertilizer usage and putting all that water into the air now needed a dehumidifier. CO2 is hard to contain for being 1½ times as heavy as air will literally lay on the floor like a puddle and run down the drain like water so the room needed to be airtight especially along the base of the walls. Vertical circulation fans were needed to mix the air. A new air vent was needed exclusively for the hot water tank because it was sensitive to the CO2 level and suffering from the lack of outside air.
Bottom line on that was 12.5 pounds.
Next step was to bring in three aquarium aerators and bring the hydroponic nutrient up to 1,000ppm as well.
Bottom line on that was 14 pounds four ounces.
This proved to me that plants take up a lot of CO2 through their roots, use CO2 even at night, and preferentially use carbon monoxide as I found out when my propane burner got out of whack.
How long do CO/CO2 stay in the environment? If there is a growing plant nearby carbon is consumed in minutes if not seconds.
I really wondered how high I could get the CO2 level or if growth continued to increase above 1,000ppm.
Alas, disaster struck. The RCMP and the Major Crime Unit are no respecters of the scientific method and ruined my experiment.
The good news was it was Canada in the year 2000 so all that came of it was a $3,000 fine with no time or probation and a year to pay. If they could have proved over 12 pounds I could have received two years in jail but the judge did not believe that you could possibly grow more than 12 pounds with 16 plants, thank goodness.
So what I learned is this; if the nutrient and water are available plant growth will more than double. Also; although the wages of sin are good they are ephemeral.
The Last Hippie.
By the way, I like WUWT and how you go looking for facts and include the error bars rather than jumping to conclusions. But please don’t be so thin skinned when it comes to getting Gleeked, and the like. Rise above it for personal attacks prove they have no facts so are stooping to killing the messenger rather then facing the news.
Overall your comments section is well thought out and leads to interesting places. I don’t know how many comments end up in the trash but I can’t read any more than three of the ones that make it without finding my own point of view. To me this means your idea that we should clean up what we can, while we can, to prevent further environmental degradation and not worry about the CO2 so much is wide spread. Don’t let the collapse of the global warming alarmists throw out all environmental regulations along with the stupid ones.
re: pot. Got my first wif of the stuff in college. Yuck! Why does it have to smell like baby poop and why does it make brownies taste nasty?
How hard is it to put real gold, one molecule thick, on paper, also on the “paper” that is technically fabric we use for US “paper” currency? To impregnate it into the surface? Or perhaps do so with a suitable plastic?
With all the global economy worries, a lot of people are pushing gold, be it gold standard currency or actually possessing gold. But a gold standard requires the assurances of the currency issuers, ’nuff said.
Possessed gold, be it jewelry, coins, or bars, can be stolen, then melted down to hide its provenance. Fake gold, or gold plating on other metals, has also been used to scam people for millennia. Let alone the different purities of gold available with their varying worth.
But gold on paper? Hard to recover except chemically, uneconomical to do so except in bulk. At a measured single molecule thick, attempts at scraping are readily noticeable. You should also be able to tell it was real gold, as other similar-looking substances would readily oxidize at that thinness, and impure gold should also be detectable by an off appearance. Heck, get out the multi-tester and check the electrical resistance. There wouldn’t be much you could do with the gold paper but use it for trade, and all involved should easily know the gold really is there.
With economies of scale, price to make would only be pennies a “slip”. All slips get labeled with the weight and also the dimensions of the gold rectangle for that weight, easily measured with a set of machinist calipers, and also with the name of the “printer”. Makers would be vetted by reputation, backed by independent testing, anyone “going light” would get quickly shunned out of business.
For those who would like a real gold standard, this could be a backdoor version. Let’s say 24K gold is hovering around $1000 an ounce, and you want to set the price there. “Print” currency-sized strips with 1/50th of an ounce, labeled with the weight and also the dimensions of the gold rectangle for that weight, easily measured with a set of machinist calipers. In trade people like round numbers, that would become a default $20 bill equivalent. So the paper currency value would get tied to the desired value of the real gold slips, stabilizing it.
Can it be done? If such “gold slips” were available, would you want them? Would you use them as currency?
“OssQss says: February 15, 2013 at 7:23 pm Considering an open thread ~ Meteors matter eh? Kinda put me back in place for a minute! ”
I saw that episode of Cosmos when I was a kid back in the 1970’s. It brings back alot of memories. That particular segment has always stayed with me. Ever since that time I’ve always viewed our world as a pale blue dot. Most people I know beleive humans are important, that we are significant, that we matter but when you view the world as nothing more than a dot or a spec, it changes you somehow. It truly is humbling.
@The Last Hippie: Well done. I found your post very interesting. Often in you experiments you had changed more than one variable at a time. Especially, I’d be curious to know what caused the extra humidity when CO2 was raised. It seems more growth, more (triple) water usage, (maybe more light or temperature?). I’ve heard that if water levels remained limited, there would still be more growth for an increase in CO2. Anyway – fascinating findings!
Recurrence plot of wavelet phase of gaussian-integrated second order central differences of annual sunspot numbers:
http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/6541/72828663.png
It’s easy to substantially extend the methods outlined here in a single, short sitting:
http://www.recurrence-plot.tk/glance.php
The motivation for extension was a quick review of the following:
1. Ponyavin, D.I.; & Zolotova, N.V. (2004). Nonlinear analysis of climatic time series with
cross recurrence plots.
http://geo.phys.spbu.ru/~ned/Ponyavin_and_Zolotova_2004.pdf
2. Zolotova N.V.; & Ponyavin D.I. (2005). Recurrence and cross recurrence plot analysis of natural time series. Educational and methodical materials. St. Petersburg University
Press. (in Russian)
http://geo.phys.spbu.ru/~ned/ZP_methodology.pdf
If you can’t read Cyrillic Russian cut/paste figure captions to here:
Universal Cyrillic Decoder
http://2cyr.com/decode/?lang=en
Use the drop down menus to intuitively specify text appearance for the algorithm (because the autodetect option fails).
Then paste the decoded cyrillic text into the following:
http://translate.google.com/#ru/en/
This exercise may be useful for anyone trying to wrap their head conceptually around what this summarizes:
http://oi46.tinypic.com/303ipeo.jpg
It summarizes the distortion you see here:
http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/6541/72828663.png
S. Meyer says:
February 15, 2013 at 3:52 pm
A friend of mine, in Germany, made me aware of this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-16833204
A “wind harvester”, apparently a new type of wind turbine, which can function at low and high wind speeds, can be scaled down to fit on a roof, and is less likely to kill birds. Any thoughts?
I heard them say they have patented it – patent held by Heath …. I didn’t catch the surname but assume it is Robinson.
Did the BBC get the time stamp on this item wrong? They have it as 1st February, should be April.
” DocMartyn
February 15, 2013 at 6:50 pm
I agree with the explanation of “gbaikie
February 15, 2013 at 9:44 pm “
The Last Hippie says:
February 16, 2013 at 10:42 am
“By the way, I like WUWT and how you go looking for facts and include the error bars rather than jumping to conclusions. But please don’t be so thin skinned when it comes to getting Gleeked, and the like. Rise above it for personal attacks prove they have no facts so are stooping to killing the messenger rather then facing the news.”
Wise words; and I enjoyed your retelling of your growing experiments very much.
They measure CO2 at an active (though currently dormant) volcano in Hawaii that emits tons of CO2. The way they do it is that they have a model that tells them what they expect the CO2 should be. If they get a reading that is outside their expectations, they throw it away. Because the amount of CO2 can vary widely depending on wind direction and how much the volcano burps on any particular day, the readings are all over the place and they can usually be assured of getting enough readings within their expected range to validate their model.
It would be like having a model that expected temperatures to rise so you throw out every reading that shows that temperatures aren’t rising … or maybe throwing away every tree ring series that doesn’t show warming or something.
Personally, I think they need to measure atmospheric CO2 someplace else and not Mauna Loa. Here’s a measurement series from Antarctica. http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/graphics/Jubany_thru_2009_Monthly.jpg
Randall_G says:
February 15, 2013 at 7:12 pm
What is coming out of the Russian meteorite craters (or lake bed) and how soon?
Flatworms right now!
Hippie,
They suck up the co2 when the grow, but put it back when they are smoked. All of the co2 that plants absorb when they grow is given back when they die. The only way trees can reduce global carbondioxide is if the increase in the mass of living vegetation matches the net carbon dioxide released from burning gas and oil continuously or the stock of non living vegetation is prevented from decaying.. Unlikely. Should a Tuca mountain be built to store unspent toxic underbrush?
jabre says:
February 15, 2013 at 2:33 pm
I’ve previously espoused the virtues of the biofuels mandate (2007 Energy and Independence Act). My perception was the requirement to roll over to the cellulosic form of ethanol would spawn a strong and viable domestic ethanol fuel industry free from starch-based sources (corn/sugar beets/etc).
Unfortunately, even with the grand incentives to move forward on the table , the innovation has not kept up with the mandate….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Of course not. Monsanto holds the patent on corn and if you DARE to plant anything but Monsanto corn, Monsanto will sue the heck out of you.
As a result of the biofuels mandate, Monsanto has been posting record profits.
April 5, 2007 Monsanto Profit Up 23% on Corn-Based Ethanol Demand
June 29, 2007: Monsanto reaps ‘high-tech’ corn switch …Monsanto has gained market share from rivals
Oct 10, 2007: For the fourth consecutive year, Monsanto Co. reported record sales, the company said Wednesday. With fiscal year 2007 sales of $8.6 billion and net income of $993 million, Monsanto easily eclipsed last year’s record-setting sales of $7.34 billion and profit of $689 million.
Oct 8, 2008 – Monsanto Sees Record Sales in Fiscal Year 2008
April 2, 2009: Monsanto posts record sales amid downturn
6/29/2011: Amid Record-High Food Prices, Monsanto Grows Q3 Profits 77% …. Revenue jumped 21%
April 4, 2012: Monsanto raises outlook as profits surge … Monsanto, the world’s biggest seed producer by revenue, raised its outlook for the year as it reported record profits in the three months to the end of February…
Monsanto doesn’t just sue the little guy either:
Seeds market clash: Monsanto wins one billion dollars lawsuit to DuPont: Monsanto, the world’s largest seed company won a one billion dollars victory over its arch rival in a lawsuit concerning patents in the agricultural seed market.
And then there is Archer Daniels Midland Co.
June 11, 1998; Agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland Co. (ADM), the single largest beneficiary of a controversial federal ethanol tax subsidy, contributed more than $3 million in unregulated “soft money” to Republican and Democratic national party committees during the past 10 years
August 4, 2010: ADM profits soar 550 percent as ethanol margins improve
Dwayne Andreas, past CEO of ADM, was one of the most prominent political campaign donors in the United States.
Did you really think the Global Warming scam was about weather? It has been about MONEY from the get go. Enron, joined by BP, invented the global warming industry. I know because I was in the room.
…It’s not surprising to most people that Enron delivered truckloads of money to politicians in an attempt to influence the political process….According to an internal Enron memo, quoted by The Washington Post, the Kyoto treaty would “do more to promote Enron’s business than almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring the energy and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States.”
… it is common knowledge that Enron Corporation was lobbying the Bush administration for highly profitable policies relating to the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. In fact, the tatters of Enron still want the administration to place a cap on carbon dioxide emissions so the company can broker the trading of “permits” to emit carbon dioxide under that cap.
Enron may have wanted to broker the trading of “permits” but so did the World Bank.
Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after ‘Danish text’ leak. Developing countries react furiously to leaked draft agreement… The draft hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank
Every single one of those dollars come from the pockets of the laboring classes and finds its way into the pockets of the financiers with nothing given in return except the false promise that we are ‘Controlling the Climate’
Michael Larkin says:
February 16, 2013 at 12:35 am
Any suggestions?
I have deen similar objects that zig zag. When I looked through my telescope I could see they were weather baloons.
I also saw an object zig zagging and flashing on and off. It started to come down nearby. When I got close I was amazed to see it was just a plastic bag swirling in the wind. From a distance it looked like a large object a long way off.
The only thing I couldn’t identify was a light flying along silently at night high in the sky. It then stopped and slowly drifted backwards. It hovered above for a few minutes. It then set off forewards again at high speed. The further away it got the faster it was going. It was climbing into the distance. By the time I got my telescope on it it was far away and all I could see was a crescent of light.This was in the 1960’s.
world bank at work:
16 Feb; AFP: Climate change real economic risk, World Bank tells G20
The president of the World Bank on Saturday warned the finance chiefs of the world’s leading economic powers that global warming is a real risk to the planet and already affecting the world economy in unprecedented ways.
Adressing the G20 finance ministers at their meeting in Moscow, Jim Yong Kim called on the world powers to “tackle the serious challenges presented by climate change.”
“These are not just risks. They represent real consequences,” said Kim, calling the lack of attention to the issue by finance ministers and central bank chiefs “a mistake”…
“Damages and losses from natural disasters have more than tripled over the past 30 years,” said Kim, giving as examples the $45 billion of losses from the 2011 floods in Thailand, whose effects “spread across borders disrupting international supply chains.”
“Years of development efforts are often wiped out in days or even minutes,” Kim said, asking the G20 to “face climate change, which is a very real and present danger.”…
http://www.france24.com/en/20130216-climate-change-real-economic-risk-world-bank-tells-g20
obviously a climate expert:
Wikipedia: Jim Yong Kim…is a Korean-American physician and anthropologist who has been the 12th President of the World Bank since July 1 2012.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Yong_Kim
Open Thread? OK, check this out. Squares A and B are the same color…
How does that affect your perception of reality?
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
February 16, 2013 at 11:29 am
Wouldn’t it be easier just to allow people to cash in paper currency for gold whenever they wanted to? Instead of “Federal Reserve Notes” go back to Gold and Silver Certificates that actually represent the value of the precious metals. Of course the government would then have to actually have enough gold in reserve to cover the amount of currency in circulation and that would prevent them from just printing money. But I’m guessing the government spend thrifts would not like that situation very much so you can bet this idea will never go farther than a blog post on an open thread weekend.
Jabre, you write “I’ve previously espoused the virtues of the biofuels mandate”
You seem to be unaware of the history of cellulose ethanol. DOE in the USA, had some $3 billion to get cellulose into production. Congress made it mandatory to use cellulose ethanol. Unfortunately, of the $3 billion, some 300 million was wasted on Range Fuels, who failed to produce any product. So the courts, naturally, said that you did not need use what did not exist.
However, with private money, Poet/DSM are now buildigng a plant ot produce cellulose ethanol; it is my understanding it will come into production early in 2014 – 20 million gallons per year. The claim is made that it will be financially viable if the price of gas is over $2 per gallon wholesale; the current price is over $3. If you are interested, google Project Liberty.
So, dont write off cellulose ethanol. Wait until 2014, and let us see what happens.
Well, sort of but not quite. If they are burned, the carbon is quite stable and can remain sequestered for a very long time. You can dig through the ground and find charcoal deposits from thousands of years ago. They are used to date earthquake events along the San Andreas fault, for example. You dig a trench across the fault, note where you see events, take a sample from a charcoal deposit from a wildfire event, date the charcoal and you date the event seismic event.
would sure appreciate someone to bringing us up to date on Jaxa’s Ibuki gosat observtions
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I had E.M. Smith (ChiefIO) capture the image from last fall Just in case it vanished.
http://chiefio.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/jaxa-xco2_l2_201208010831average_v02_11.png?w=640&h=333
It was from here: http://www.gosat.nies.go.jp/index_e.html
And it is still up: http://www.gosat.nies.go.jp/eng/img/XCO2_L2_201208010831average_v02_11.png
Since this is an open thread, a few words on AGW:
Global warming has stalled. The facts are clear. It may resume, or not, or global cooling may follow. But whatever happens, most of us will follow the empirical evidence, rather than engaging in wishful thinking to support our beliefs.
Dr Irving Langmuir explained scientific wishful thinking in a series of lectures titled Pathological Science. Dr Langmuir would no doubt use the term today to describe the belief in AGW. Langmuir explained the symptoms:
AGW fits this template exactly. There is no measurable, empirical evidence of AGW. It is a conjecture. As atmospheric CO2 continues to rise steadily, the Null Hypothesis remains un-falsified: there are still no measurable effects that can be directly attributed to AGW. That may well be because there isn’t anything to measure.
KevinM says:
February 16, 2013 at 8:04 am
It is snowing right now in Raleigh NC.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It has been snowing all day ~ 50 miles South of Raleigh. The ground is too warm for it to stick though.
Re Tom in Florida on February 16, 2013 at 2:03 pm:
You have invoked that annoying word, “government”. Real gold slips would be a commodity item that (in theory) anyone could make and sell.
Plus you know the government would finagle things, like figuring they only have to have 5% of the gold on hand to cover possible (small) runs, if more currency/certificates were to be redeemed then the government, as they would promise to do based on a law, would then buy more gold. Of course in case of dire national emergencies they’d temporarily suspend the law, like wars in foreign countries, imminent threat of complete fiscal collapse and depression, or they need to fund “incentives” to special interest groups in return for election votes…
Major problem though, is our total money supply, adding up all of the digital bits and tally marks floating around the financial system that “proves” such monies exist, which “naturally” grew with assorted creative banking maneuvers and financial instruments that showed gains without losses elsewhere, etc, is actually many quadrillions of dollars. We could never afford to back even 1% with real gold.
I could make and sell gold jewelry. I could make and sell little gold beads and bars. As long as I’m honest, no deception, I’m selling what I say it is, no problem.
Now if someone who makes the slips wants to sell ones with 1/50th an ounce of 24K pure gold “printed” on them, and that’s exactly what they are, exactly as labeled, for $20.05 each (gold price plus charge to make) plus sales tax, why should the government complain?
They’ll gripe later, as it will be “bartering” to exchange one for $20 of goods and services, and they’re already upset people aren’t properly reporting barter deals on their income tax returns. Trade your chickens’ eggs for your neighbor’s corn, and someday you might go to jail for tax evasion!
kadaka,
It is not necessary to have 100% of physical gold backing a currency. That is because gold itself is far more clumsy to deal with; 10 ounces of gold weighs a pound.
What is necessary is trust in the currency issuer. So long as there is confidence that one can always exchange a note for gold, the ratio of currency to physical gold can be several times as much.
Of course, the trust that the populace had in government from the founding of the Republic until the early 1900’s is long gone, so maybe now it would be necessary to have a 1 : 1 ratio. In any case, a gold standard would be far preferable to what we have now — a private, secretive corporation controlling the money supply.
Jim Cripwell says: “So, dont write off cellulose ethanol. Wait until 2014, and let us see what happens.”
Cellulose ethanol is the wave of the future. And always will be.
Jim Cripwell says:
February 16, 2013 at 2:11 pm
“However, with private money, Poet/DSM are now buildigng a plant ot produce cellulose ethanol; it is my understanding it will come into production early in 2014 – 20 million gallons per year. The claim is made that it will be financially viable if the price of gas is over $2 per gallon wholesale; the current price is over $3. If you are interested, google Project Liberty.
So, dont write off cellulose ethanol. Wait until 2014, and let us see what happens.”
The problem with ethanol from cellulose is that you need to transport the plant material to the ethanol plant with all the water in it, and then remove the water. Both of which cost together more energy than the ethanol contains energy.
http://www.projectliberty.com/how-it-works/
All that they say about their process is that they will use the lignin in the biomass (the wood polymer) to run the process. Wait, you burn the wood component and that suffices to extract the water and separate the biomass into cellulose and lignin?
I have the very strong impression that they forgot the most important ingredient – taxpayer dollars. I don’t believe their process can deliver net energy. Maybe they have some new trick like encymes or GM bacteria but with the information they give I’d say this plant will run exactly as long as it’s subsidized.
@Jeff Wood
KevinK’s explanation sums it up nicely. For optical phenemena try ” Light and Colour in the Outdoors.” by M.G.J Minnaert. Has very strightforwrd expalnations for a whole host of things, some you never knew were there. It shows there is a huge difference between looking and seeing.
@ Micaeal Larkin
I saw something similar in the early 70’s in Northern England with a larger light was in front of a smaller one. Best explanation was either a resupply to a Soviet spacecraft or a miltary air-to-air refuelling ( tanker/fighter) as the smaller one seemed to join with the larger light
D.B. Stealey says:
February 16, 2013 at 2:01 pm
Unlike the human eye (and brain), a digital camera can only interpret what it ‘sees’ in terms of ‘shades of grey’. We can ‘see’ white snow as white, where the digital camera will interpret it as a grey shade of differing intensity (because nothing can be that white!). Which is, of course, why wintertime snaps of snowy scenes are mostly underwhelming, unless the camera operator adjusts to over-expose, and let in more light.
You present a very good example of this phenomenon.
D.B. Stealey says:
February 16, 2013 at 2:01 pm
Open Thread? OK, check this out. Squares A and B are the same color…
How does that affect your perception of reality?
——————-
Since I normally use a projector as my monitor, it’s easy for me to check this. I insert cards into the projected beam and can look at A and B out of context and thus check their actual darkness.
They are NOT equal.
Looks to me like it is sticking in Charlotte: http://www.wcnc.com/weather/neighborhood-cameras/hanger-cam/WCNC-Hangar-Camera-189715261.html
This paper draws attention to relative non-linear scaling of physically differing quantities sharing a common driver:
Lu, H.; Li, Y.; Clilverd, M.A.; Jarvis, M.J. (2012). Trend and abrupt changes in long-term geomagnetic indices. Revised for Journal of Geophysical Research – Space Physics 08-03-2012.
http://nora.nerc.ac.uk/18615/1/LuEtAl_2011JA017422_JGR_SpacePhysics.pdf
Here’s what they’re trying to say:
http://img853.imageshack.us/img853/1754/rxdimanim.gif
Those are cross-recurrence plots of:
1. (a) sunspot numbers and (b) square root of sunspot numbers. Remember that the geomagnetic indices have a power law distribution. And recall the V^2 term in BV^2.
2. 5.5-year full-width-at-half-max (FWHM) gaussian-smoothed second order central differences of (a) sunspot numbers and (b) the base 2 logarithm of sunspot numbers. This focuses attention on cycle components only — but note well that the same changepoint dates get emphasized as in (1).
This is an opportune time to remind everyone of the following:
Mursula, K.; & Zieger, B. (2001). Long-term north-south asymmetry in solar wind speed inferred from geomagnetic activity: A new type of century-scale solar oscillation? Geophysical Research Letters 28(1), 95-98.
http://spaceweb.oulu.fi/~kalevi/publications/MursulaAndZieger2001.pdf
Yes, for sure:
Seasonally-normalized annual & semiannual solar-terrestrial resonance persistence — measured from sunspot numbers via complex wavelet resonator:
http://imageshack.us/a/img692/3756/c1a6mo.gif
Note the switching of the annual track from boreal winter to boreal summer. Those patterns are measured from nothing other than sunspot numbers, confirming what Mursula & Zieger (2001) found in geomagnetic aa index. Their paper is a landmark classic.
By the way, here’s what happens when you tidy up the middle panel of their figure 3 by using multi-extent complex wavelets to summarize the hierarchically cyclically-structured volatility:
Solar-Terrestrial Magnetic Polarity Weave
http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/4232/solarterrestrialmagneti.png
Lu, Li, Clilverd, & Jarvis, (2012) were eminently wise to conclude as follows:
“The conclusion is made on the basis of our analysis, that a simple stepwise correction of aa around the time when instrumental change or site-relocation took place may not result in a proper correction of aa. A correction of this kind may introduce a large and uncalculated uncertainty, making it harder to detect and to understand the true cause of the discrepancy among geomagnetic indices.”
Background material:
a. Recurrence Plots at a Glance
http://www.recurrence-plot.tk/glance.php
b. Volatility Clustering
http://www.riskglossary.com/link/volatility_clustering.htm
c. Chandler Wobble Phase Reversal
There’s a lot more to this story — informally – a bit at a time as time & resources permit.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
February 16, 2013 at 3:22 pm
“You have invoked that annoying word, “government”. Real gold slips would be a commodity item that (in theory) anyone could make and sell.”
Perhaps locally but certainly not across the country or internationally unless some government entity certifies a standard. But there goes that word “government” again. Now I agree with your sentiment that government controlling the money supply with “good faith system” is a horrible circumstance but unfortunately it is what we are stuck with and there is no turning back without creating a financial disaster for the average person.
“I could make and sell gold jewelry. I could make and sell little gold beads and bars. As long as I’m honest, no deception, I’m selling what I say it is, no problem. Now if someone who makes the slips wants to sell ones with 1/50th an ounce of 24K pure gold “printed” on them, and that’s exactly what they are, exactly as labeled, for $20.05 each (gold price plus charge to make) plus sales tax, why should the government complain?”
Simple enough but for everyday use it would become a cumbersome procedure having to test every thing, every time to be sure you are not being cheated. Just think of restaurants, they must check all provisions they have delivered each and every time because if they don’t they will get shorted. So if I go to buy some groceries am I going to have to wait while every customer’s payment slip gets verified? How is a cashier going to be able to keep track of the multitudes of different slips that could be presented? And who do you complain to when the store tells you your payment type isn’t what you claim it to be and they demand more? Who decides?
Most people don’t realize that until the Federal Reserve was created in the last century, money was printed not by the Treasury, but by banks. You can buy Gold Certificates issued by banks in the 1880s. Like was mentioned before, it was about trust. Minnesota bank currency circulated largely in the midwest, SF bank currency circulated on the West Coast. The Treasury defined the dollar to be 1/20th of an ounce of gold. There was a fixed exchange rate for silver to gold to satisfy the silver mining companies. (OK, technically there were three National Banks which printed US currency, the first existing prior to Jacksons’ Presidency, and which he closed). Each time we get a National Bank, we get inflation.
Today debit cards could function as fungible gold proxies.
John Bell says:
February 15, 2013 at 3:01 pm
“……………….If you really want to be green, live like the Amish. No phone, no lights, no motor car, not a single luxury, like 1793, it’s as primitive as can be.”
John,
Not true. To keep themselves clean pure the Amish simply sub-contract for modern services (use cash they do) i.e they pay for shuttles to the shpping malls, use the neighbors phone or a borrowed cell phone on the train and go to the hospital when sick or injured just like the rest of us. Consider, it takes a Pittsburgh and a thousand years of industrial experience to make an axehead, let alone a Stihl chainsaw.
OK, here we go.
They are not ship-waves, they have no resemblance of one.
Yet we get:
“Ship-wave-shape wave clouds induced by Iceberg A62, South Atlantic Ocean”
For a lead to this link:
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/imagery/single.cgi?image=A62.A2013044.1150.500m.jpg
===========================
Why are ships even mentioned ?, they have no bearing upon the cloud formations.
Frederick Michael says:
February 16, 2013 at 4:08 pm
“Since I normally use a projector as my monitor, it’s easy for me to check this. I insert cards into the projected beam and can look at A and B out of context and thus check their actual darkness.
They are NOT equal.”
I used the pipette tool from MSPAINT.They looked equal. Might be tiny differences; the diffuse shadow of the cylinder leads to slight shading differences. The point is that the brain tells us that one of the squares is black and the other is white while the gray shade is actually equal or nearly equal.
pat says:
February 15, 2013 at 2:54 pm
watch your pensions, folks:
15 Feb: Bloomberg: Sally Bakewell: Canadian Pension-Backed Group Plans Wind Power for Prison
Partnerships for Renewables, backed with 100 million pounds ($155 million) of Canadian pension and infrastructure-fund money, will build as much as 500 megawatts of wind power at land owned by U.K. prisons and other bodies…
========================
Perhaps they should be advised of what happened at this UK prison. Apparently nuisance law suits and the like is a popular pastime in UK prisons.
“Turbine shadows ‘upset prisoners’
Whitemoor Prison
The sun hits the turbine blades at an angle and causes the shadows
A wind turbine near a top-security prison is being switched off in the early mornings because the flickering shadows it creates annoy inmates.
The £1m turbine next to Whitemoor Prison near March, Cambridgeshire, produces electricity for 4,000 homes.
But Longhill Energy has agreed to halt the turbine because of possible “security problems” if prisoners became upset over the flickering shadows.
The firm says the flicker only happens at certain times of the year.
Managing director Martin Adler said: “At this time of the year the sun hits the blades of the turbine at a certain angle and creates flickering shadows over parts of the prison.
Problem of angle
“We’ve discussed the problem with the prison authorities and agreed to turn the turbine off for a few hours in the early morning.”
He said eventually new technology would stop the turbine automatically when the sun was at a problem angle.
A Home Office spokeswoman said: “We can confirm that HMP Whitemoor is in discussions with the turbine company over the operation of their wind turbine.
“The Prison Service is reaching an agreement whereby the wind turbine does not interfere with the smooth running of the prison.”
The turbine was switched on five months ago.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/4424201.stm
Something to undemonise(?) CO2 ….
http://climateofsophistry.com/2013/02/12/carbon-positive-campaign/
(Supported by Dr Tim Ball …)
Gail Combs says:
February 16, 2013 at 1:32 pm
Well said.
john from DB.
I grew up in an area with a lot of Amish. They do use some electric stuff. For example, their milk barns have electricity by government regulation. They keep the milk in refrigerated tanks and use modern milking machines. They roller skate (not kidding) to the local corner store and use the pay phone or borrow someone’s phone. I can corroborate that they do pay people to shuttle them around. If they have a store, it has a phone, an electric cash register, refrigerators, etc. An Amish owned convenience store looks just like any other except for the proliferation of handcrafts that are often for sale.
Frederick Michael
I insert cards into the projected beam and can look at A and B out of context and thus check their actual darkness.
They are NOT equal.
===================
They ARE equal! The hexadecimal values for the Red Green and Blue registers for the pixels (picture element) in the rhombus marked “A” are 79, 79 and 79. The rhombus marked “B” has exactly the same numerical values — 79, 79 and 79. As you explained, you examined the two equal things “out of context,” performing an interpretation instead of a measurement.
It is worth noting that your brain not only correctly interpreted two different shades that are actually the same, based on real-word rules, but it also interpreted squares (4 sides, 4 right angles) that don’t really exist in the picture. In the real world, the squares on a chessboard, when viewed from an angle, project near-rhombus trapezoids onto the 2D surface of the retina. That is why we “see” squares on the 2D picture of a chessboard. That is also why the “squares” A and B appear “black” and “white” instead of the same shade that they really are. In the real world, you want to see a chessboard, not light levels.
We don’t actually see the world; we rebuild one in our minds from the 2D mess projected onto the retina.
D.B. Stealey says:
February 16, 2013 at 2:01 pm
Open Thread? OK, check this out. Squares A and B are the same color…
How does that affect your perception of reality?
————————————————————————-
I raise you one 🙂
Russia will probably go spending on bolide defenses.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/world/2013-02/16/c_124351175.htm
Bet the USA puts their 2¢ in.
Except for a biotech with an FDA fast track I’ve decided to lock in profits. REITS, MLP’s most everything else. Hate to do it but you cannot call it a profit if you don’t sell. Especially hate to sell Calumet, CLMT. When it was $20 or below and Jim Crammer @ mad money was saying don’t buy I was doubling down and doubling down again. He’s been the perfect reverse barometer on this one. Now it’s about got a $40 handle on it and all those big dividends were reinvested adding shares.
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/pimco-el-erian-equity-prices-artificially-high-time-193327198.html?desktop_view_default=true
A strange story unfolding at Bishop Hill’s website…
A whole lot of prominent people met under Bloomberg’s aegis to discuss matters climatological. Among them was David Rose of the Daily Mail..a sceptical journo at a sceptical mid-market newspaper. They swore each other to secrecy under ‘Chatham House’ rules…which mean that individual remarks cannot be attributed.
But now some of the participants wish the very existence of the meeting to be expunged from the record. Here’s what’s left…and which has now been ‘disappeared’.
‘On February 13th at a private dining room in a restaurant in London, the great and good met to discuss climate and energy issues. The meeting was organised by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), an investment firm involved in renewable energy, and was held to promote their latest idea of emissions reductions measures being designed around minimising emissions intensity (i.e. emissions per unit GDP). However, much of the evening seems to have been spent on climate science.’
See
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2013/2/16/closing-the-curtain.html
for some more discussion
Personally, whenever I hear of the toxic mix of financiers involved with ‘renewable energy’, journalists, BBC hacks, senior civil servants, MPs and other ‘public representatives’ gathered together in a room, then I am reminded of Adam Smith’s wise words
‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
True two hundred and fifty years ago. Still true today.
D.B. Stealey says: February 16, 2013 at 2:01 pm
Open Thread? OK, check this out. Squares A and B are the same color…
How does that affect your perception of reality?”
Yep, they are the same all right. I had to save it and open it in MS Paint, and then cut and pasted a little square from each to the other …can’t even see the joins. Amazing.
@Windmill Casey – Dowton Abbey is not a BBC show its’s from the commercial UK channel ITV
How does Climate alarmism compare with other MASS BRAINWASHING events ?
– Like this morning the phrase “and with the ever increasing effect of climate change” was injected into the end of a report on a BBC science programme.
– History is littered with BELIEFS which seemed absolutely “OBVIOUS” at the time, but then with the “enlightenment of time passing” seem absolutely ridiculous when we look back.
– It can be shown how with relentless “hitting the nail on the head”, the media can can create an beliefs which are obviously true e.g. “Do you remember when we all went crazy last year when Princess Diana died ?” said a journalist, talking about mass hysteria that the press had whipped up many of the public that Diana’s death was the saddest thing of all time.
– To the Nazis it was “obvious” that “The Jews” were responsible for all the bad things in their economy.
– To pre-1960’s USA it was “obvious” that black people were some kid of second class citizen and should not be allowed the same priviliges as whites.
– To many in the past it was “obvious” that homosexuals “are all predatory paedophiles”
How did such things become “obvious” in the mind of the public ? Is it that the media got a sense of urgency about some matters into their minds and decide that keep pushing a line banglng that nail on the head again.
I notice that this phrase “and with the ever increasing effect of climate change” is routinely injected into the end of many news/science TV/radio programmes, as if the presenter is sitting opposite a big poster in the studio which says “Remember to mention Climate change”.
– Again and Again in the past the media somehow found themselves unwittingly fertilizing such beliefs, which have caused so much harm.. Isn’t about time they learnt to be more enlightened and refrained from jumping on bandwagons.
I am in the middle of reading John Kehr’s book “The Inconvenient Sceptic” for the second time and am at a loss to understand why this book has not had more exposure and traction.
Not only does John make what seems to me by far the best analysis I have come across of how the long term climate actually works, but he also explains in some detail why climate science luminaries like Kevin Trenberth and Sir John Houghton got it dreadfully wrong.
Trenberth so far seems to be keeping his head down and has made no attempt to counter Kehr’s accusations which would perhaps suggest that John is on to something and is worth a lot more attention..
Is there anyone else on this thread who has read the book and has any thoughts on this?
Truthseeker says:
February 16, 2013 at 6:09 pm
Something to undemonise(?) CO2 ….
http://climateofsophistry.com/2013/02/12/carbon-positive-campaign/
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It is about time!
Latimer Alder says:
February 17, 2013 at 1:02 am
A strange story unfolding at Bishop Hill’s website…
But now some of the participants wish the very existence of the meeting to be expunged from the record. Here’s what’s left…and which has now been ‘disappeared’.
‘On February 13th at a private dining room in a restaurant in London, the great and good met to discuss climate and energy issues. The meeting was organised by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), an investment firm involved in renewable energy, and was held to promote their latest idea of emissions reductions measures being designed around minimising emissions intensity (i.e. emissions per unit GDP). However, much of the evening seems to have been spent on climate science.’
See
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2013/2/16/closing-the-curtain.html
for some more discussion…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
There IS NO MORE INFO except this.
This comment at BH expresses my view more eloquently and picturesquely than I can.
London247 says:
“I saw something similar in the early 70′s in Northern England with a larger light was in front of a smaller one. Best explanation was either a resupply to a Soviet spacecraft or a miltary air-to-air refuelling ( tanker/fighter) as the smaller one seemed to join with the larger light”
The satellite resupply explanation looks to be the best so far. I think if it had been aircraft refueling, I would have heard something. Also, the lights were tiny, little more than pinpricks. I’ve seen aircraft lights by night and they are brighter. The main things against it are that if the objects were at satellite height, the apparent separation would have represented miles and miles, and they seemed to be uncannily in sync as they moved despite the deviations from a straight line. There’s also the point that I saw it on more than one night: could it have taken several earth orbits, I wonder?
@Windmill Casey Firstly, please remember that PBS videos ( and much of any video content of a commercial nature ) is region specific and given that the US is only ( and I’m sure I’ll get this wrong ;)) 6% or so of the world then many people can’t use them.
But more importantly I’m confused to what you believe the BBC has to do with Downton Abbey. It’s made for and shown on the ITV network ( commercial advertising supported TV, Independent Television Network ). The BBC, like America in relation to the world, is just a small percentage of the TV available to us in Britain 🙂
“It is January 2017, four years hence. The harsh winter has pushed electricity and gas consumption to record highs. Britain’s antique power plants are struggling to cope.”
http://www.thegwpf.org/britains-green-energy-fiasco-running-empty/
“Faced with the prospect of having to impose part-time working, the government decides to risk angering Brussels instead. Miliband orders coal-fired plants, mothballed to comply with European pollution regulations, to be fired up again, even though it means hundreds of millions of pounds of fines for breaking our commitment to cut CO2.
Scaremongering? Not necessarily”
@D.B. Stealey and others. The squares are not identical ( does that mean the same as ‘not the same?’ )
Due to the graduation in the shadow ( which is the layer which is fooling the brain ) the squares are not even equal over the area of the single square, let alone the same at similar points on each other when the hexadecimal code is checked.
http://postimage.org/image/jc95zc0qn/
So I say, pedantically, NOT the same.
cui bono says:
February 16, 2013 at 9:16 am
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you are not familiar with the work of Louis Kervran they would interest you. Over a period of 40 years or so of meticulous observation and experiment he ‘proved’ that transmutation was occurring in animals and plants, i.e. residuals of certain elements were greater than inputs over time under very tightly controlled conditions, backing up observations going back two centuries or more by others. Without a mechanism to explain this, he and his work was ridiculed or ignored. Quantum tunnelling theory would have been a godsend to him !
@Stew Green at 2:08 am, Thanks. I didn’t really think of it as begging forgiveness as I watched it, but I feared I was just looking for the opposite message, a promotion of the noble lie, so perhaps that’s all it was.
D.B. Stealey says:
February 16, 2013 at 2:01 pm
Open Thread? OK, check this out. Squares A and B are the same color…
How does that affect your perception of reality?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As an artist I was not surprised, but fooled all the same. Checked by cutting two holes in opaque paper the distance of A and B apart, smaller than the squares. Might come in useful to check some of my own shadow values by the same method.
““and with the ever increasing effect of climate change” is routinely injected into the end of many news/science TV/radio programmes”
You’re right about that, it is routine for journalists and writers to toss a comment like that at the end of almost any media program, no matter what the subject matter. They can be talking about dishwasher soap and you might easily hear a remark like “and with the ever increasing effect of climate change” just added at the end. They don’t say anthropogenic climate change, they just say the generic climate change. I guess its merely assumed that they mean anthropogenic, otherwise there is almost no reason to ad the remark.
Its more than just annoying to hear this, because my children hear these comments and I notice they have no outwardly visible response when they hear it. I guess they hear it frequently enough they must believe its true. I know I would have beleived it when I was that age.
I find this a bit troubling.
As a shameless plug for my obscure site I’d like to announce that I’ve written a sort of spoof of Liberal’s attempt to legislate safety, and to bubblewrap childhood, called “OSHA Snow.”
http://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2013/02/16/osha-snow/
Stew Green says:
February 17, 2013 at 2:12 am
How did such things become “obvious” in the mind of the public ? Is it that the media got a sense of urgency about some matters into their minds and decide that keep pushing a line banglng that nail on the head again.
I notice that this phrase “and with the ever increasing effect of climate change” is routinely injected into the end of many news/science TV/radio programmes, as if the presenter is sitting opposite a big poster in the studio which says “Remember to mention Climate change”.
– Again and Again in the past the media somehow found themselves unwittingly fertilizing such beliefs, which have caused so much harm.. Isn’t about time they learnt to be more enlightened and refrained from jumping on bandwagons.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It is not ‘ unwittingly’ The media is the propaganda arm of the wealthy and has been for close to one hundred years here in the USA. For the details see my comment at Martin Cohen: New York Times has vested interest in climate alarmism
Remember:
The IPCC mandate states:
So it was never about the science of weather and climate, it was about figuring out how to manipulate people into accepting the planned society the wealthy wanted to implement and rob them blind while they were at it. Pascal Lamy Director-general of the World Trade Organization let that cat out of the bag.
The World Bank makes it clear what is in it for the bankers and Financiers:
The ‘Carbon Economy’ is just the newest twist on the old game of “cheating the laboring classes of mankind” ~ Sen. Daniel Webster, because every single one of those dollars come from the pockets of the laboring classes and finds its way into the pockets of the financiers with nothing given in return except the false promise that we are somehow ‘Controlling the Climate’
The Bankers, CEOs, Academics, and Politicians know exactly what they are doing, and that is the complete gutting of western civilization for profit. The lament “it is for our future children” has to be the vilest lie they have ever told, since their actions sell those exact same children into serfdom aka Agenda 21
Also see Follow The Money ~ Climate Quotes and Jo Nova’s Climate Coup — The Politics: How the regulating class is using bogus claims about climate change to entrench and extend their economic privileges and political control.
……..
Oh and about that comment
That is more Media drummed up brainwashing. We lived next door to a black doctor married to a white nurse and I baby sat for their kids… IN THE SIXTIES. There was discrimination but it was more in the south. Up north it was “the Old Boy Network” not racial discrimination.
As an example, in the 1980’s if you worked for Gillette and were not Roman Catholic you got crap for raises and no promotions. In my department we had a token female (me), a token black and a token Jew, the rest were white male catholics. The tokens did not even get the perks like payment for evening classes. That money was reserved for the non-tokens and most of our cost of living raises were diverted to the pets in the department. We got 1% and the ‘pet’ got 11%. The pet also routinely showed up late, took long lunches and left early. The tokens had to clean up his work left uncompleted and got the blame for his messes and that of the others. The tokens got together with tokens from other departments and compared notes. Last I heard before I left there was mutters of a lawsuit.
And that doesn’t even get into the snobbery of the Boston Brahmins. You really don’t know what the term ‘outsider’ means until you have lived in the Boston area.
In schools today you have the increasing problem of gangs
People are ‘Pack Animals’ and what is said of gangs applies to all groups of people. It is why the wealthy have exclusive clubs like the 1001 Club, the Club of Rome pro and con the Bilderberg Group and for that matter the The World Trade Organization It is why there is an “in-crowd” from the day your kid start school and bullies on the playground. ‘Discrimination’ is part of the human condition and will always be with us. Only the Rule of Law partially defeats it and as the Heartland-Gleick case and all the FOI cases show the belief in the Rule of Law is chasing a chimera.
I have on the CBS Sunday Morning show (9AM EST) for background noise, they’re running a piece about meteorites. At 9:13 they’re talking about the NASA mission that recovers and examines meteorites from Antarctica.
But at 9:06 they tried to severely disrupt and deform something I thought I knew. As they presented it,
It is now accepted my most scientists that 65 million years ago a large asteroid impacted the Earth which sparked massive wildfires which drastically altered the global climate, leading to dinosaur demise blah blah…
Extinction events tied to centuries to millennia of (Siberian) volcanism, the Oxygen Crisis biological shift, post-asteroid impact solar dimming and rapid global cooling… These I have heard.
But massive worldwide wildfires caused by asteroid impact? When did that enter the narrative?
How would that change the global climate? Would all the soot (black carbon) cause warming on the ground, or cooling by solar dimming while high in the air, or…?
There is also that CO₂ spike that would have happened, I guess. Ain’t that stuff supposed to raise global temperatures, and post-impact 65 million years ago there was global cooling instead?
fred houpt says:
February 16, 2013 at 8:56 am: “I just came across this dude a week ago.”
If anyone drops by Suspicious Observers/Observa’s videos, be sure and leave a nice well-reasoned comment about the importance of our energy and agriculture sectors in giving us the best and most prosperous standard of living the world has known. (: I am sure the comments by intelligent viewers will be most welcome.
The liberal idiots are now going to stage a push for Obama to act on “climate change.” I got this from the League of Women voters. They have been hijacked by the socialists. Climate has nothing to do with voting.
“League of Women Voters
Tell President Obama to Lead the Climate Change Fight
“Climate change is not a hoax. More drought and floods and hurricanes and wildfires are not a joke. They’re a threat to our children’s future. And we can do something about it.”
These are the words of President Obama during the 2012 campaign, and we couldn’t agree more. People are dying because of climate change. Our families, our communities and our planet are all threatened by it.
Join the League by calling on the President, to take the historically necessary step of controlling industrial carbon pollution from new and existing power plants. The President can use his existing regulatory authority to make this happen.
The world has known about climate change for decades, yet little has been done to address the issue. The U.S. came close to enacting a comprehensive climate change bill in the early years of your administration when a good bill passed the House, but it was blocked by special interests in the Senate. With the current gridlock in Congress, it seems impossible that any legislative action will be taken to protect our health and our planet.
If President Obama doesn’t do it, it won’t get done. If the United States doesn’t lead, the rest of the world cannot follow.
Tell the President that saving the world is a legacy worth fighting for.”
http://participate.lwv.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=6903
D.B. Stealey said on February 16, 2013 at 2:01 pm:
Falls apart on closer examination, thus no change. Using GIMP, the color picker (dropper) tool was sometimes giving different values on the same square. At a 1600% zoom, it’s easy to see the edge distortions and to sample pixels from large unbroken regions between the border and the letter.
For the left view, A is primarily HTML color value #6c6c6c, while B is #6b6b6b, a brighter hue. But with B especially, there is quite a mix, making it hard to actually find large isolated regions of one hue, with many specks and splotches of other hues. No wonder the color picker gives confusing results and can report the same color for both.
The outright fraud is on the right view. Now there’s a large unbroken area around the “B”, of #797979, same identical main hue as the framing vertical bars. Likewise A is now primarily #797979.
Thus the only time they are the same color is when they are trying to show they are the same color. The trick is in the “proving”, not in the original perception.
Don’t just watch the pea under the thimbles. Question if it’s even the same pea.
@ZootCadillac 3:43am, Thanks for the info on availability of video and Downton Abbey. I didn’t want to be specific to avoid preconditioning the viewer. Since the story is not from the BBC, my precise suggestion is not valid, but it still relates to the climate issue in a veiled way.
It seems to me now that to get the whole picture, information from previous episodes come into play. Lord Grantham looses his wife’s fortune in The Grand Trunk Railway. Their situation is similar to that of wind farm operators. Grand Trunk Railway made a deal with the government, but because their costs were higher than expected they went into bankruptcy, as we might expect wind farm operators to do down the road.
SPOILER ALERT, THIS IS A VERY DRAMATIC EPISODE, PBS VERSION #4 AND #5, YOU REALLY SHOULD NOT READ THIS NEXT PART IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT!
There is a debate in the episode I mentioned followed by the use of a noble lie. Lord Grantham made the wrong choice following the debate with tragic consequences.(he picked the guy with more credentials rather than the one who knew the patient better) It’s unclear if the right choice would likely have worked out. So Lady Grantham is like the aggrieved tax payer here. Not only did she lose her money, she lost her daughter. So perhaps we have an attack on the alternate energy scam! The use of the noble lie seems far more suitable than what the Warmists have been up to.
@ZootCadillac 3:43am, Thanks for the info on availability of video and Downton Abbey. I didn’t want to be specific to avoid preconditioning the viewer. Since the story is not from the BBC, my precise suggestion is not valid, but it still relates to the climate issue in a veiled way.
It seems to me now that to get the whole picture, information from previous episodes come into play. Lord Grantham looses his wife’s fortune in The Grand Trunk Railway. Their situation is similar to that of wind farm operators. Grand Trunk Railway made a deal with the government, but because their costs were higher than expected they went into bankruptcy, as we might expect wind farm operators to do down the road.
*******
Spoiler alert!! This is a very dramatic episode, PBS version #4 and #5, you really should not read this next part if you haven’t seen it!
I posted the above in all caps, but I think the spam filter may have swallowed it.
*******
There is a debate in the episode I mentioned followed by the use of a noble lie. Lord Grantham made the wrong choice following the debate with tragic consequences.(he picked the guy with more credentials rather than the one who knew the patient better) It’s unclear if the right choice would likely have worked out. So Lady Grantham is like the aggrieved tax payer here. Not only did she lose her money, she lost her daughter. So perhaps we have an attack on the alternate energy scam! The use of the noble lie seems far more suitable than what the Warmists have been up to.
The only Saturn 5’s are in museums.My bet is we are more likely to be hit by somethjing big before NASA ever again has a booster of that capability. Im not imagining they ever will, in spite of their grandiose projects being cyclically announced and cancelled these past thirty years. Thats leaving out the Dragon boosters.
The Space Age died with the Cold War.
Some comic relief from Harry and Paul. What really goes on at the G20 summit.
I don’t think Italy builds aircraft carriers but it is still funny.
Science, Politics and Global Warming
by Wal Thornhill
“In the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don’t know any better. That’s not a good future for the human race. That’s our past.”
—Michael Crichton, “Environmentalism as Religion,” (A lecture at the Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, CA, September 15, 2003).
Global warming
The Global Warming circus in Copenhagen was politics driven by a consensus that, by definition, has nothing to do with science. The apocalyptic nonsense that opened the meeting highlighted that fact. How many who attended or demonstrated at the meeting actually understand the (disputed) scientific grounds for the hysteria? Meanwhile, leading science journals allow skeptics of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) to be labelled “deniers” and refuse them the right of reply. It is doctrinaire denouncement, not science. It is the journal editors who are denying the scientific method by censoring debate. It is they who are peddling ideology.
Despite the glossy media image, modern science is a mess. When the fundamental concepts are false, technological progress merely provides science with a more efficient means for going backwards. At the same time, government and corporate funding promotes the rampant disease of specialism and fosters politicization of science with the inevitable warring factions and religious fervor.
“Science has become religion! ..although religion may have borrowed some of the jargon of science, science, more importantly, has adopted the methods of religion. This is the worst of both worlds.”
—Halton Arp
There have been several warm climatic periods documented in history that had nothing to do with human activity. There seems to be evidence that the Earth has actually been cooling since 2001, in line with reduced solar activity. So it would be more realistic to consider climate change as a normal phenomenon and to plan accordingly because despite all of the hoopla in the media, modern science is founded on surprising ignorance.
Whether the squares are the same color or not wasn’t my point. I was showing that our perceptions are often quite different from reality.
The squares appear to be very different colors, when in reality they are the same, or almost the same. [Folks can’t even agree on whether they are the same color. Some say yes, some say no.] But by simply looking at the squares, everyone immediately ‘sees’ that they are different colors.
but but but…..the consensus says we’re right
Drugs developed using mice models can kill you by making it worse…..
“The drug failures became clear. For example, often in mice, a gene would be used, while in humans, the comparable gene would be suppressed. A drug that worked in mice by disabling that gene could make the response even more deadly in humans. ”
..and the usual suspects Science and Nature…would not publish
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/science/testing-of-some-deadly-diseases-on-mice-mislead-report-says.html?_r=0
It appeared I was being argumentative. that was not my intent. i was engaging in a spot of harmless leg-pulling.
In the last six years, the surfacetemperature of the North Sea (53,5-58°N/ 1-8°E) has dropped by one degree Celsius.
Winters in Holland are colder than normal, summers are wet and cool.
Does anyone know why?
hi all thought you would all like to see this keeps spamming my u tube http://www.savethearctic.org/
leon said on February 17, 2013 at 11:59 am:
WHOIS info:
Got that? Greenpeace owned, Greenpeace administered, “webmaster” contact is fronting for Greenpeace. Fund for the Public Interest runs fundraising for a bunch of groups like Sierra Club, etc.
Save The Arctic dot-org. Has that nice touchy-feely “we’re here to help” vibe. Are they spamming you to ask for financial help with their scruffy start-up grassroots effort?
Nope just generally spamming me, thought it would be fun for a giggle!
Either way still funny!
And on a lighter note a good band from the 80`s all powered by co2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwV3LrUDqyg. Peace out!!!
I edited that League of Women Voters letter a little:
Frederick Michael says:
February 16, 2013 at 4:08 pm
ZootCadillac says:
February 17, 2013 at 4:18 am
Pedantic is the operative word.
The two squares range minutely but are both so similar in HSV that they could be switched and the illusion would appear the same. Essentially the hex number/triplet represented by 6b6b6b. The chances are that if you use a graphic program color picker and you get something other than H=0, S=0, V=42% then you are picking pixels that are part of a chromatic aberration from the text or the edges within the squares. Zoom in to about 1000% on either of the squares and you’ll see what I mean.
jim2 says:
February 17, 2013 at 8:07 am
….I got this from the League of Women voters. They have been hijacked by the socialists. Climate has nothing to do with voting…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
My Mother called them the League of Women Vipers and that was back in the 1960’s.
Julian Braggins says:
February 17, 2013 at 4:28 am
“If you are not familiar with the work of Louis Kervran they would interest you. Over a period of 40 years or so of meticulous observation and experiment he ‘proved’ that transmutation was occurring in animals and plants, i.e. residuals of certain elements were greater than inputs over time under very tightly controlled conditions, backing up observations going back two centuries or more by others. Without a mechanism to explain this, he and his work was ridiculed or ignored. Quantum tunnelling theory would have been a godsend to him !”
It’s a bit different
Most LENR researchers favor this theory at the moment. Widom-Larsen Theory
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Widom-Larsen.php
Radio interview with Lewis Larsen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVRLcC21F14
It’s not fusion, it’s weak interactions, already described by Fermi in the 40ies.
Surface-plasmons
I have to call bullshit on this one. The actual interview can be listened to at
this location . Having listened through the entire thing I did not hear anything like the exchange above. I suppose this short moment might have been edited out of the web version which would actually be most interesting if true. However at minimum the supposed quote as presented by Charles Gerard Nelson misrepresents the overall nature of the interview. Professor Church was clearly not at a loss for words. He was generally quite professional in the way he spun together his mixture of facts, half-truths, misleading implications and omissions to tell his story of ongoing sea level rise caused by warming.
I blame DB for starting the perception thing 🙂
Now, try this and think about it again {°~° }
Does it work with one eye?
http://beauproductions.com/golfswingsws/links/An%20amazing%20illusion.htm
CO2 causes milder storms.
First of all a storm is a heat engine and the amount of energy it uses to move air etc is proportional to the temperature DIFFERENCE between the input and the output not their absolute temperature .
Here is a simple explanation of the thermodynamics involved.
Notice that if the temperature out = the temperature in the heat engine STOPS !
CO2 makes the difference less so it slows down.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/heaeng.html
By spreading the heat more evenly CO2 tends to make storms milder.
Despite one extreme storm recently the TREND seems to b e FLAT without any more or less storms floods or droughts and here is the proof.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/climatic-phenomena-pages/extreme-weather-page/.
OssQss,
Good one. Really excellent. When we perceive reality… is it, really?
[And don’t even get me started on consciousness!]
Well it is still the weekend so:- “””””…..Stephen Rasey says:
February 15, 2013 at 3:19 pm
@Jeff Wood
I think there is little doubt that the flickering you see is refraction from the movement of air at slightly different temperatures and longer distances, coupled with the fact that the standard lights are visibly smaller from the more distant towns. Jupiter and Saturn don’t flicker nearly as much as stars simply because they subtend a bigger angle, even if still measured in arc seconds.
Seeing as how this is an Open Thread, I want to recount a story I read in elementary school that made an impact on me to this day. Some kid chose a science experiment to measure the curvature of the Earth. …..”””””
The refractive index of the atmosphere is anything but unity, and because of its variable density, it is a graded index material. Graded index materials are quite commonly used in specialized optics.By far the most prevalent use of graded index materials, is in the fibers of fiber optic cables.
Self focussing lenses are made from radially index graded materials. In graded fiber cables, there are effectively billions of graded index lenses in series. The optical path from one focus to the next is constant, regardless of the angle the ray makes with the fiber axis (when you do it properly).
As a result, the propagation delay through the fiber is more constant, than if you had a uniform index across the fiber, which would give a cos theta propagation delay. This gives a wider bandwidth to the fiber, so it can carry more data.
In the atmosphere the refraction of light due to the atmosphere graded index, is very significant.
When you are sitting on the beach at Waikiki drinking a Mai-tai and watching the sunset, when the magic moment arrives, and the sun’s lower limb just touches the ocean horizon, the sun itself is already completely set below the geometrical horizon. The effect increases the closer you get to the horizon, which is why the setting sun gets vertically squished.
At the zenith, the effect of atmospheric refraction is quite significant. The rays bend away from the zenith point, so that stars appear to be closer to the zenith, than they really are. And for small angles near the zenith, the refraction error is almost linear with the zenith angle. As a result, the speed at which the stars appear to move near the zenith is slowed down.
I haven’t done the calculation in many years, but when telescope clock drives were simply constant frequency driven, amateur astronomers, had their clock run slightly slower than the real clock time to enable them to track stars for long periods across the zenith, without manual correction. As I recall, the apparent speed is about 16 seconds per day slower than real earth rotation speed.
I had a very special GT cut crystal cut for me, to divide down digitally with a binary divider, to run a clock 26 seconds per day slower than true. This let me track for about three hours across the zenith with a constant frequency and never get the telescope more than one second of arc away from a star position, which was about the resolution limit of my telescope.
So atmospheric refraction does significantly displace the apparent position of things.
“””””…..D.B. Stealey says:
February 16, 2013 at 2:01 pm
Open Thread? OK, check this out. Squares A and B are the same color…
How does that affect your perception of reality?…..”””””
Well colors seem to have become highly inflated in this computer age. RGB screens often claim to have 24 bit color, and I think some systems claim 32 bits. So 24 bit RGB is easier to misunderstand, since it is presumably one 8 bit byte for R, G, B. which gives you about 16 million different colors doesn’t it ?
Well no; actually it doesn’t give you anywhere near 16 million colors. Maybe if, you are lucky, you will get 64,000 colors !
You see eight of those bits are “Brightness” bits, and don’t really affect the color at all.
Arguably the G bits set the brightness level with 256 different brightness levels, and the 16 RB bits set one of 64,000 colors.
Well I personally don’t believe that anywhere near 64,000 different colors actually exist.
I would say that two colors are different, if I can see a single pixel of one, in a screen full of the other. Some might argue for half a screen of one, and half a screen of the other. I might be persuaded to agree with them.
I don’t believe there are any more than 4096 colors; but that is just me.
My local paint store, has dozens of different paint chips, each supposedly a different color.
If you paint one room in one color and a non ajoining room in another, and they look different to an observer walking from one room to the other, then maybe they are different.
My paint store doesn’t have anything like 4096 paint chips, and many of those look the same to me.
The other scam in your expensive TV or computer monitor is the claimed contrast. The fancy monitor I bought a couple of weeks ago, has an 8,000,000 comtrast ratio (they claim)
Now the brightest level on most of these screens, is about 300 Lux; maybe some get to 400.
So if the white level is 400 lux, then the black level is 50 micro lux. So my screen doesn’t get that black even when I turn the power off to it. Just the room lights reflecting off the screen make it many times brighter than 50 microlux.
If you are unfortunate enough to own an HP monitor, then you actually have a very expensive mirror, and it won’t meet its own contrast specs unless you watch it in a completely darkened room with no lights to reflect offf the screen. In fact you will have to have non reflective walls in the room so the screen doesn’t light up your room.
Well in fairness to HP, lots of other monitor makers, also make expensive mirrors.
I already own a mirror, which is why I didn’t buy an HP monitor.
George,
I defer to you as the resident expert in colors, optics, wavelengths and photons. You are the man!
But I was only trying to show the disconnect between reality and perception — the same disconnect that appears when true believers in ‘catastrophic AGW’ assume that ‘climate disruption’ is occurring.
I’ve had my fill of hedonist talk story and am ready to get back to climate science. Hurry back, Anthony.
Parahandy, (feb. 17, 2:25am)
Read it. Made sense to me, too. I just happen to think it is not conveniently popular at this time.
Got another “general” question:
a) If Co2 in 1850 was 280 ppm and now is 395 ppm, then the difference is ( 395 – 280 ) = 115 .
b) If the anthropogenic part of all the Co2 increase is about 25% and the rest is natural, then
.25 x 115 = 28.75 ppm.
c) If “a” and “b” above are correct, is it not logical to assume that the whole debate is about 28 ppm, more or less?
Would we make the same calculation with water vapor?
crosspatch says:
February 17, 2013 at 1:15 pm
I edited that League of Women Voters letter a little:
Subject: Take The Lead on Climate Change Hysteria….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Sounds like a good letter/fax to send to a;; your congress critters too, state and federal. Heck, send it to all the politicians.
Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial think tanks
Anonymous billionaires donated $120m to more than 100 anti-climate groups working to discredit climate change science
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/feb/14/funding-climate-change-denial-thinktanks-network
Where’s my money?
ENSO meter fans:
Warmed up a bit, but still negative at -0.30
Opening http://nomad3.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_sst.sh?ctlfile=oiv2.ctl&ptype=ts&var=ssta&level=1&op1=none&op2=none&day=19&month=jan&year=2013&fday=18&fmonth=feb&fyear=2013&lat0=-5&lat1=5&lon0=-170&lon1=-120&plotsize=800×600&title=&dir=
Found target /png/tmp/CTEST136118880125901.txt
Opening http://nomad3.ncep.noaa.gov//png/tmp/CTEST136118880125901.txt
Data file
data from 00Z19JAN2013 to 00Z18FEB2013
“———-”
-0.561866
-0.114537
-0.481587
-0.476145
-0.302259
Length of data file 102, most recent value: -0.302259
file_last -0.476145
anomaly -03
FYI, I’ve posted a look at, and discussion of, the recent revisions to the GISS Land-Ocean Temperature Index (caused by the switch in sea surface temperarture datasets):
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/a-look-at-the-new-and-improved-giss-land-ocean-temperature-index-data/
http://grist.org/climate-energy/remembering-rebecca-tarbotton-head-of-rainforest-action-network-who-died-this-week/
On Dec. 26, Rebecca Tarbotton, executive director of the Rainforest Action Network, died while vacationing along the west coast of Mexico, north of Puerto Vallarta. In a freak accident at the beach, she got tossed around in rough surf, took too much water into her lungs, and asphyxiated. She was 39 years old.
Tarbotton had been at the helm of RAN since August 2010, and had worked with the organization for almost six years. Under her leadership, RAN has focused on the intersections between forests, fossil fuels, and climate change, and run aggressive campaigns pushing corporations to change the way they do business. Most recently, Tarbotton helped convince entertainment giant Disney to adopt a major new policy that will eliminate the use of paper connected to the destruction of endangered forests.
Was not there a post yesterday by Mr. Monckton? I don’t see it today.
Er, Never mind, found it.
I posted my question on dancing village lights a couple of days ago, then suffered an internet failure.
This is to thank everyone who took the trouble to comment. When my connection is stable, I will comb the tread again, taking notes on this and indeed other matters.
Best wishes to all here.
WillR Thanks for the update. It must be our fault.
>Why do the “scientists” studying asteroid impact missions ALWAYS reject nuclear blasts that would break up the asteroid/comet – so at least SOME of the asteroid/comet would miss earth
Because the area affected by an explosion scales as the cube root of energy.
Suppose we have an asteriod that on impact releases x energy and destroys and area y. Now break it into 27 pieces, all of which impact separately. Each piece has an destructive area equal to the the cube root of 1/27 or 1/3 of the original, but since there are 27 pieces the total area destroyed is 3 times the original.
So to reduce the damaged area, you have to ensure that 2/3 of the pieces miss the earth completely. That’s a high requirement to meet.
Additionally, even if all pieces miss on the first pass, you now have 27 fragments, each significantly descructive, to track. Their orbits will diverge over time, making a cloud of debris that is more likely to this the Earth on he next encounter.