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.
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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.
@ur momisuglyJeff 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.
@ur momisugly 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.