Open thread weekend

I would like to say thank you to all skeptics for their efforts in battling the CAGW multi-headed hydra. Those on this side know how little financial gain there is in fighting for quality, unbiased science. It is a windmill that necessarily has to be tilted.

I’m not making a prediction, but a horse named “Sir McIntyre” is about to run at Woodbine Racetrack in Toronto.
Current odds 45-1, it won its last 2 races.
There are 2 minutes to post, right now.

The other horses had better models…….. 🙂

uh-oh, Japan is dumbing down too…
To Expand Offshore Power, Japan Builds Floating Windmills
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/business/international/to-expand-offshore-power-japan-builds-floating-windmills.html?_r=1&

pete says:
October 27, 2013 at 11:49 am
uh-oh, Japan is dumbing down too…

No need to dumb down. In strategic issues Japan was always pretty clueless. In 1941, for example, they figured destroying the US Pacific Fleet would buy them naval superiority. Instead, they bought into utter destruction of their own homeland.
Well, they simply failed to have a look at US industrial capacity, not a difficult task at all.
Anyway, we have learnt a lot from the Japanese since then, so we are getting as crazy as they are in despising common sense.

CO2 is Wunderbar
Having followed and read many articles about the benefit of CO2 for plant life, many of them from http://www.co2science.org/ I have wanted to experiment with CO2 enrichment here at the golf course I work at. The big problem is having a way to provide the gas to the plant in an economical and practical way. As I looked around the internet I may have found one. The company http://greenfield-fertilizer.com/ has recently arrived in Canada and is based in Europe, Germany I think, and has been marketing their material for a few years.
The material is very finely ground up minerals, carbonates of Mg and Ca. When sprayed on the plant the fine materials enter the stomata break down and give off CO2. With this enrichment the stomata can close a little which reduces water loss and so you get better growth with a more drought tolerant plant. Well at least that’s the idea which seems to make sense and the company offers a number of studies with very good results.
Just received a pail of the material and am amazed at how fine it is, 25 pound pail is $150 which is quite cheap considering some of the other adjuvants we routinely spray on our greens. Pail will last for six weeks and we will test next year spraying bi-weekely with other nutrients. Even if there is a 10-15% improvement in turf growth/hardiness it is a big improvement on greens that are cut at .100 inch every day. Would be great for gardeners to try and it is completely non toxic, just mind the fine powder.

Is the solar magnetic input negligible ?
I’ve been monitoring daily solar magnetic input due to solar eruptions – CMEs and the Earth’s response via its own field. The Earth’s response averages about 1% of its field’s intensity:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Tromso.htm
This may be considered as a negligible; but lets look at it in another way. The Earth’s field is generated by thermal convection within liquid outer core , the energy involved must be huge considering the core’s volume, pressure, viscosity and temperatures.
I would suggest that 1% of something very very large is not exactly negligible.

@David Ball –
And fighting for quality science is also fighting for liberty when the faux science is being used as a pretext to suppress liberty.

Yet another of those time lapse videos, clouds and stars this time:
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/83620535/

Anyone notice how the Arctic from bearings 20-70E are seeing more ice compared to the last few years? Or is it just me? http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/satellite/index.uk.php

RE: Japan floating windmills
Facts from the article:

1. 350-foot-tall windmill
2. to generate over 1 gigawatt of electricity from 140 wind turbines by 2020.
3. The Japanese government is paying … $226 million, cost of building the first three wind turbines off Fukushima
4. Fishing Trawlers, in particular, would no longer be able to operate around the farm.
5. Each of the three turbines is a different design
6. Three test turbines come to about $20,000 a kilowatt, about eight times as much as the cost of building a wind turbine on land.
8. Consortium says it hopes to bring that cost down to about twice the cost of land-based turbines.
9. turbine’s blades have been designed to last at least two decades.
10. The 2,500-foot long chains on the three initial turbines… use a total of 20,000 tons of steel…

Energy Return on Investment looks to be the Achiles Heel of this crony capitalist project.
if 140 wind turbines = 1 GW, then 1 wind turbine delivers 7 MW. That is probably the name plate rating. 7 MW (at 40% utilization) has the energy equivalent of 39 barrels of oil per day: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/01/giant-7-megawatt-sea-fan-announced/#comment-634470
A proposal to build a semi-submersible offshore platform to produce an oil field for 39 bpd, or 390, or even 3,900 bpd would be laughed out of the room.

Otteryd at 1.13pm:
Lord Oxburgh wants to amend the new UK Energy Bill to require total decarbonisation of the UK energy industry by the year 1230. The Bill is being debated in the House of Lords tomorrow and I hope that (Lord) Matt Ridley speaks and slaughters the idiot (In a Lordly sort of way of course).

Old’un
Apart from a few charcoal burners I suspect the UK was decarbonised already in 1230 so the debate seems pointless
Tonyb

Old’un says:
October 27, 2013 at 2:22 pm
Brilliant if it was on purpose, and brilliant if it wasn’t !!

I really like the Met Office Hadley Centre graph at http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/ – even better is if you click on download data, and choose the Monthly HadCET mean and Seasonal HadCET mean from 1659 to date, where you can see lots of warming and cooling events.

milodonharlani says:
October 27, 2013 at 2:39 pm
It was only 300 hundred years before that the Co2 pollution from a large populations of Mayans created a drought that decimated their numbers.
/SARC

Sorry everyone, I should have typed 2030!

polski says:
October 27, 2013 at 12:46 pm
—————————–
Lawn, golf course grass is a C4 pathway plant and doesn’t benefit that much from increased CO2. Some, but not by large amounts. No harm in trying I guess. And it might work better in areas that don’t get much water and are susceptible to drying out. Increased CO2 will help with that on a C4 plant. Let us know what the results are since there are fellow golfers here (me) and many have a lawn as well.

Here’s a Mother Jones story about How 9 Major Papers Deal with Climate-Denying Letters. Some of it is the expected gatekeeping, but some surprisingly shun such censorship…or at least that’s what they say publicly.

As I understand it Admiral Yamamoto actually said that Japan can not win the war. Further more, many times you don’t go into action because you have calculated that you will win but because you must go into action regardless.

From David Martin’s review of
Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor
by Robert B. Stinnett

[…]
Stinett has gone far beyond Toland through use of the Freedom of Information Act and years of digging in the archives and hunting down U. S. military personnel and foreign diplomats who knew with great precision exactly when and where the Japanese would attack. They had duly relayed the information to Washington, but, as it turned out, Kimmel and Short were systematically kept in the dark.
The case, as Stinnett lays it out, is open and shut. We had broken all the Japanese radio codes. We knew what the commanders were telling the ships at sea. We knew what Tokyo was telling its diplomats around the world. We even knew what a spy in Hawaii was reporting back to Tokyo. Even without having broken the codes, we knew from directional analysis that there was a large fleet in the North Pacific poised to strike Hawaii. The Japanese attack fleet had been forced to abandon radio silence when a fierce storm had separated the ships beyond the reach of light signals.
Honor bound to protect their men, Kimmel and Short might have taken pre-emptive measures that would have deprived Roosevelt of the dramatic national affront that he needed to persuade the country to join in the battle against the Axis powers, particularly Germany. Germany and Japan had signed a mutual defense treaty which obligated each to go to war against the belligerent opponents of the other. That Germany would oblige Roosevelt and declare war on the United States as soon as the U.S. was at war with Japan was therefore a given.
[…]
Had he waited a couple more years to publish his book, Stinnett would not have had to lean so heavily upon this document to show that Roosevelt was determined to bring the U.S. into the war against Germany, whether by provoking Japan or by any other means. He would have had the new book by Thomas E. Mahl, Desperate Deception, British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-1944, to refer to. The British certainly wanted the United States to join the war, and whatever the Brits wanted, Roosevelt was more than willing to deliver, even if he had to subvert American democracy to do it.

http://www.dcdave.com/article3/000910a.html

Richard
Glad you liked that met office graph.
I had a meeting at the met office Last week with David Parker who created it.
M courtney
That wind turbine that fell over is very close to me. Quite why it should fall over on Saturday night is a bit of a mystery as it wasn’t especially windy here then
Tonyb

Climate Change is the sceptical position. This is because that’s what the climate always does. What many Warmists don’t realise is that the climate has over the last 15 years changed. No extreme weather trends over 30 years, global sea ice ‘normal’, Antarctica sea ice record extent, the Arctic BAD crumbly rebound, temperature hiatus, lost deep sea heat, record polar bear numbers, double number of Emperor Penguins, cold, snowy winters are not a thing of the past. THIS is climate change in action.
PS: No matter what happens it will be blamed on man’s heathen greenhouse gases. This is a founding pillar of their religion.

M Courtney says:
October 27, 2013 at 3:06 pm
“In lesser news, it’s a bit windy here in Britain. So do our windfarms generate oodles of electricity?
No, of course not. They are all locked down.
And one has fallen over anyway. One, so far.”
Has nobody told the Brits that you need thousands of tons of energy intensive to produce, CO2-outgassing concrete as foundation.

@polski, bill. About 25 years ago I used “rock” or then called “Glacial” dust as a project on a vineyard compared to a few other fertilizers and composting efforts to see which ones had a real effect on LONG term improvements. We had 8 test plots and 2 controls. I was very surprised ( not nowadays anymore) with the long term effect of the really fine rock dust. Vines were hardier, sugars and acids much more balanced but the cost in those days for a 45 acre vineyard were prohibitive.

vukcevic says:
October 27, 2013 at 1:00 pm
Is the solar magnetic input negligible ?
I’ve been monitoring daily solar magnetic input due to solar eruptions – CMEs and the Earth’s response via its own field. The Earth’s response averages about 1% of its field’s intensity:…
_______
Not to mention that in the SAA there would be more “irridiance’sss”
But you may find this to be of interest.
Changes in the Earth’s magnetic field over the past century: Effects on the ionosphere-thermosphere system and solar quiet (Sq) magnetic variation
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2012JA018447/abstract
Ingrid Cnossen1,2,*, Arthur D. Richmond1 7 FEB 2013
[1] We investigated the contribution of changes in the Earth’s magnetic field to long-term trends in the ionosphere, thermosphere, and solar quiet (Sq) magnetic variation using the Coupled Magnetosphere-Ionosphere-Thermosphere (CMIT) model. Simulations with the magnetic fields of 1908, 1958, and 2008 were done….
…The simulated Atlantic region trends in hmF2 and foF2 are ~2.5 times larger than the estimated effect of enhanced greenhouse gases on hmF2 and foF2. The secular variation of the Earth’s magnetic field may therefore be the dominant cause of trends in the Atlantic region ionosphere.
They have an earlier version of this that is available as a full pdf from Dr. S. and was critiqued by Dr. S. as well…
The dependence of the coupled magnetosphere-ionosphere thermosphere
system on the Earth’s magnetic dipole moment
http://www.leif.org/EOS/2012JA017555.pdf
Ingrid Cnossen,1 Arthur D. Richmond,1 and Michael Wiltberger1
Received 23 January 2012; revised 27 February 2012; accepted 19 March 2012; published 3 May 2012.

Sam Grove says:
October 27, 2013 at 2:48 pm
“Well, they simply failed to have a look at US industrial capacity, not a difficult task at all.”
Actually, they did look at US industrial capacity and planners calculated that the US had 600 times the production capacity of Japan. They also figured that war with the US was inevitable, as FDR was maneuvering to get the US into the conflict. FDR had actually sent US warships into Japan territorial waters and pressured the Dutch to cut Japan off from petroleum imports.

Not quite 600 times, no, the US was more like 10 times more capable than Japan. But that’s plenty. And no, there is no inevitable war, the Japanese would just had to negotiate their terms of withdrawal from China (but not from Manchuria and Korea). For a while. Later on the Americans themselves would have urged them to re-enter China to fight the Communist threat off. This way there was no one left to be used for that purpose.
Building utterly uneconomic offshore floating windmills so that people can consume overpriced electricity not when it is needed, but when it is available is not less insane than starting a war which was lost from the beginning.

Bill Illis says:
October 27, 2013 at 3:47 pm
C3 and C4 plants do seem to react differently. Bruce Kimball did pioneer work on CO2 in growth chambers and then open field tests. Here he gives a long explanation on different factors and often big benefits by adding to the CO2 concentration of test plants…not the best quality but interesting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52UJLpBCssU If you can stay with the video wait till you get to the effect on oranges!Also a C3 C4 comparison http://www.co2science.org/articles/V2/N21/B3.php
What I find interesting is the almost universal improvement in plant growth when they are under stress. For me it would be Sunday afternoons with temps around 30C and greens browning off waiting for us to syringe them. We want slow growth,uniform density and firm conditions for quick greens which means that the low cut turf is usually under stress

Herewith a cautionary tale about greenie weenie legislation.
A while ago I met an old friend and ex colleague for a rather grand not to say bibulous lunch at a very smart London venue which he paid for.
He seemed very prosperous which surprised me since he is the business of making and supplying incandescent light bulbs. Which I imagined would have been hard hit by the EU legislation banning them.
Quite the contrary. Apparently the supermarkets had taken over the business for common or garden incandescents, 100 watts and the like, supplied in packs of four or six many years ago. These used to come from Eastern European manufacturers at very cheap prices and later were imported under various brand names from India, China etc. which put many EU makers out of business.
This trade has ceased since the import of such to the EU is now banned. And the supermarkets have stopped supplying them.
Moreover my friend could not compete and so did not make such items, he specialised in rarer designs which sold through wholesalers to small retail outlets.
But now the world is upside down, he imports these standard 100 watt and the like from Poland, part of the EU, and repackages them for the UK market supplying wholesalers who in turn supply small retailers. And in very considerable amounts.
How so? well the EU directive does not apply to rough service bulbs so they are sold as such. When i queried that he chortled and assured me that the bulb was exactly the same one I could have bought before, the difference was each bulb was packaged in a glossy little carton which said it was ‘Rough Service’ but otherwise there was no difference except that he added a few pennies on the price as no doubt did the wholesalers and retailers. And said business had never been so good.
I was amazed. Prior to the ban i had bought up stocks of 100 watts etc, and haven’t needed to buy since.
So I hied me down to my local ironmonger, you call it a hardware store, where they keep all sorts of things including light bulbs. And inquired of the owner, an old friend, who in response showed me racks and racks of incandescent bulbs of every shape and size, every one in a little glossy carton quoting its EU number and ratings and displaying the notice ‘Rough Service’. Can’t get enough of them it seems.
So as my old schoolmaster used to say, read, learn and inwardly digest.
Kindest Regards

@H.R.
Think it is hilarious that you still have a functioning copy of TurboCAD dating back to v.3 which is the first Windows one. I started with 1.8 for DOS back when it was owned by Pink Software in Johannesburg. You have to have v.3 to convert the DOS files and v.15 to convert v.3 to anything above v.15. You can guess that I throw IMSI a little money each year to provide (my own) drawing capability for work.
Yeah, real world engineering needs models that work first time round. Climate models are sort of like a drawing programme where you enter the dimension 5mm and it enters 22 instead, but puts the arrows 5mm apart. It is only 5 but claims it is 22. They should revisit the scaling and Constraint Manager.

ObamaCare sign up has been a huge success, contrary to the news reports. On track to exceed the half million enrollment goal for October. In spite of all the glitches that are… ahem… primarily occurring in Red States where the Federal website is having problems interacting with state databases. Imagine that! 500,000 new policy holderss might not sound like that many out of the 40 million folks who need coverage, but enrollment isn’t counted until the first premium is paid, and the bulk of enrollees have been deferring that first payment until December. So we really don’t know how many people have actually signed up. Obama’s mother spent her last days fighting with an insurance company and now others won’t have to die that way. About Christmas time there will probably be lots of celebration.

milodonharlani said @ October 27, 2013 at 11:50 pm

Ed Mertin says:
October 27, 2013 at 11:39 pm
You forgot your sarc tag.

Oh, I don’t know. I expect “About Christmas time there will probably be lots of celebration” is almost certainly true 😉 Especially chez Git as is very favouritest brother-in-law and sister spend Christmas here…

William Astley says:
October 27, 2013 at 4:52 pm
This is a very interesting paper.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818112001658
This has been discussed over and over for the past years. What the authors have done is extrapolating the short term variability which is temperature related to the longer term increase which is pressure related without much connection between the two.
Humans emit 9 GtC/yr as CO2 in a slightly quadratic increase (a 3-fold) since 1960, or about ~140 ppmv since 1960, if there were no sinks active. The increase in the atmosphere is ~4.5 GtC/yr (also a 3-fold) or 70 ppmv since 1960:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/temp_co2_acc_1960_cur.jpg
All what the near-linear increase of 0.5 K in temperature since 1960 has done is increase the atmosphere with maximum 8 ppmv, according to Henry’s law of the solubility of CO2 in seawater and the fast temperature variability (from seasons to a few years) causes a 4-5 ppmv/K variability around the increase rate:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/dco2_em2.jpg
where human emissions are twice the average increase rate and temperature is modulating the sink rate (NOT the source rate!).
Further, their figure 11 is highly misleading, as they use different units for CO2 release from fossil fuel burning (kiloton carbon) vs. ppmv for the increase in the atmosphere. That gives the impression that the emissions are only halve of the increase in the atmosphere, while it is the reverse, as can be seen in the above graph, where the same units were used.
Analyses of a pole-to-pole transect of atmospheric CO2 records suggest that changes in atmospheric CO2 are initiated south of the Equator, but probably not far from the Equator, and from there spreads towards the two poles within a year or so (Fig. 13).
Again, that is right for the short-term variations (up to 2-3 years) in sink rate caused by temperature variations, partly in the oceans, partly (also drought related) in the tropical forests.
That the main release of CO2 is in the NH can be seen in the plot of yearly averaged CO2 levels of different stations:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/co2_trends_1995_2004.jpg
The S to N propagation of the year-to-year variability around the trend doesn’t prove that the SH is the main cause of the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, only that it is the main cause of the variability around the increase…

Notrickszone got drudged due to Pierre posting on the EU’s plan to ban vacuum cleaners; first the bigger ones then the smaller ones.
http://notrickszone.com/2013/10/27/another-european-directive-that-really-sucks-eu-now-banning-energy-hungry-home-appliances/#comment-832020
Which led to interesting tips from commenters and send me on a search where I found the central planning for the living standard of EU serfs.
http://www.eup-network.de/product-groups/overview-ecodesign/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Ecodesign_Directive
For instance, from July 2014 on, the performance of graphics cards / GPU’s will be limited.
http://www.eup-network.de/fileadmin/user_upload/REG_617-2013_Computers.pdf
But they basically have plans for all kinds of electrical appliances.

William Astley says:
October 27, 2013 at 4:52 pm
There was a direct response to the article of Humlum e.a. in Elsevier’s, but that is behind a paywall:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818113000891
From Troy Masters and Rasmus Benestad (one of the more reasonable people over at RealClimate)
I suppose that it is the same article as this one here:
http://troyca.wordpress.com/2012/08/31/comment-on-the-phase-relation-between-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-and-global-temperature/

dbstaley says October 27, 2013 at 5:48 pm
For goodness sake, Herman Wouk’s Winds of War is a fictional novel. I’ve read it years ago, and also watched the series.
Relying on novels, TV series, or Hollywood movies for one’s historical perspective is a recipe for false knowledge, but I did it once too.
milodonharlani says: October 27, 2013 at 6:27 pm
Some sources view the Tripartite Treaty differently:

But the key to America’s early involvement occurred on September 28, 1940, when Japan, Germany and Italy signed the Tripartite Treaty. This treaty required that any of the three nations had to respond by declaring war should any one of the other three be attacked by any of the Allied nations. This meant that should Japan attack the United States, and the United States responded by declaring war against Japan, it would automatically be at war with the other two nations, Germany and Italy.

http://www.threeworldwars.com/world-war-2/ww2.htm
ARTICLE 3. Japan, Germany, and Italy agree to cooperate in their efforts on aforesaid lines. They further undertake to assist one another with all political, economic and military means if one of the Contracting Powers is attacked by a Power at present not involved in the European War or in the Japanese-Chinese conflict.
http://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=84
Whatever the case, the United States Navy was already shooting at German submarines in the Atlantic well before Pearl Harbor:

In August 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill met at the Atlantic conference. Churchill told his Cabinet “The President had said he would wage war but not declare it and that he would become more and more provocative. If the Germans did not like it, they could attack American forces. . . . Everything was to be done to force an incident.”
After the U.S. had officially entered the war, on February 15, 1942, in the House of Commons, Churchill declared, of America’s entry into the war: “This is what I have dreamed of, aimed at, worked for, and now it has come to pass.”

https://mises.org/daily/1450
Hitler didn’t bag the BEF because he was still harboring the vain notion that he could enlist the British in his crusade against the Bolsheviks. Not long thereafter, Hess flew to Scotland, where Churchill had him thrown in jail. Blighty is not known as Perfidious Albion for nothing.
~
Just as egregious and even more decisive than the destruction of old battleships at Pearl was the annihilation of MacArthur’s air force in the Philippines.
Disobeying standing orders, MacArthur had refused to launch air missions against Japanese air bases on Formosa after word arrived of the attack at Pearl Harbor. As a result, these same Formosa-based Japanese air squadrons later caught MacArthur’s entire air force on the ground, crews having lunch, and destroyed some 45 P-40s, and 35 B-17s.
The loss of this powerful force facilitated the Japanese conquest of the Philippines, but it was by no means”Dugout Doug’s” only failure there. More than anything else, it was the loss of MacArthur’s air force that allowed early Japanese success in the war.
Far from ever being held accountable for these enormous defeats, MacArthur was instead awarded the Medal of Honor for the defense of Bataan, just seven days before Gen. King ‘s surrender there.
And so it went.
Finally, I too have a rather substantial nose, which I try to convince myself is somewhat aquiline in appearance, if not spirit.

I know that this thread has now gone cold but if anyone is interested, the proposed amendment (to adopt a decarbonisation target for 2030) to the UK energy bill, was NOT carried in the House of Lords debate yesterday.
(Viscount) Matt Ridley did not disappoint, making a powerful speech in which he likened the UK’s unilateral approach to carbon reduction to building a flood dam at the bottom of ones garden when your neighbour isn’t. More importantly, he cited all of the elements of the IPCC report that indicate less certainty over earlier warming projections.
Although the vote went very much along party lines, his speech may well have swayed some doubters to vote against the amendment. Apart from the vote, It was good to hear the facts spelt out so clearly in such an important venue, and I am sure that it has given a number of our lawmakers food for thought.
In the UK, the debate is on BBC Iplayer for the next five days and it is worth hearing Matt Ridley. He speaks about two thirds of the way through (skip the rest).

Re:Patton murdered.. . That’s just nuts. His wife was at the hospital. Had he been shot by something powerful enough to break his neck an equal concern would be bleeding to death and she sure didn’t say anything about that or attempted murder. People die of pneumonia in hospitals. Staff infection, fungus and all kinds of things can take your life quickly.
People trying to get rich selling books. Just like the Fox News book promotion scam.