A conference in Portland
Report by Rod McLaughlin
I attended the “Cascadia Confluence” on April 20th in Portland. The idea is, human beings should organize themselves into “bioregions” instead of nation states. For example, Vancouver, BC, is in the same bioregion as Seattle, WA, though they are in different nations. San Francisco, CA, is in the “Shasta bioregion”, which overlaps with the “Cascadia bioregion”, where you can find Portland, OR.
The speakers and attendees mixed sensible concern about logging, pollution, and so on, with mystical ideas about “ecology” and “the water web”. One of the speakers claimed “people of color” would suffer from “climate change” because of what “we” are doing. What is it about America that produces this self-hating nonsense?
I went to the talk on “Climate Chaos”. Much of the talk consisted of one of the two speakers asking questions like “what is your favorite place in the Willamette watershed?” and “have you ever seen a wolverine?”
The speakers made various claims about the increasing problems which would be caused by “climate change”, without saying why, or from where they got their data.
The speakers did use statistics, but only those which seemed to confirm their hypothesis. Someone mentioned the retreat of the Athabasca glacier in Canada. I’ve visited this glacier, and at the time, was convinced by the global warming hypothesis. Government signs shows how far the glacier has retreated since 1880. What it doesn’t show is where it was before then. Perhaps it was further forward in 1780, and further back in 1280. If there was a medieval warming period, whose temperature was higher than today, and it was worldwide, the argument that we are going through an exceptional warming period, caused by anthropogenic carbon dioxide, falls to the ground.
The speakers used some scientific observations: the ones which supported their alarmist claims.
I asked: “you mentioned the computerized models used by the IPCC. Are you aware of the increasing divergence between the actual measurements of temperature from weather balloons and satellites and the predictions of the IPCC’s computer models over the last 20 years?”, and held up this graph:
One of the speakers answered: “I’m intimately familiar with climate change denial – it’s not really the subject of this panel… it’s not worth wasting time with”. I responded “that doesn’t really answer my question”.
CAGW is kind to the Stakeholders, not so much to the public:
20 April: Irish Independent: Nick Webb/Roisin Burke: Windfarm owners were paid €10m not to produce energy
Energy suppliers paid up to €10m last year to wind-farm operators to power down, freedom of information documents supplied to the Sunday Independent reveal…
The cost of broken or shut-off wind turbines was up to €10m in 2013 and could be passed on to Irish consumers in their electricity bills, communications between EirGrid and the Department of Energy suggest. “The suppliers can, of course, pass this cost on to their consumers,” an EirGrid executive said in an email on the subject to a senior civil servant at the Department of Energy…
However, that cost looks set to soar as the power-down rate of 3 per cent for 2013 is estimated to rise to 10 per cent in 2014, according to EirGrid, suggesting a cost to conventional energy companies of over €30m and a knock-on cost to consumer energy bills. An EirGrid graph on wind curtailments shows them rising 50 per cent further by 2016, which would cost utility companies €40m.
Irish wind-farm operators receive payouts from other electricity providers in respect of “constraints” or “curtailments” where a transmission or distribution line is down for maintenance or where there is a local fault, or when there is high wind at a time of low-energy demand (for example, in the middle of the night) and turbines are shut down due to over-capacity. The same policy is applied internationally.
European energy regulators decided last year that wind farms would receive compensation from the energy market for these shutdowns and it is part of government policy as a way to stimulate the wind energy market.
http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/windfarm-owners-were-paid-10m-not-to-produce-energy-30200656.html
“””””…..Jack Simmons says:
April 21, 2014 at 12:58 am
george e. smith says:
April 21, 2014 at 12:22 am……””””””
Well Jack, I just knew, that someone would ask for a reference.
But tell me; since you doubt the story (why else would you want a reference); why on earth would you believe the author of any reference I might cite ?? Isn’t that tantamount to demanding that I respond from some position of authority. You are asking me to prove something; you know what Einstein said about proof versus disproof.
In any case, I don’t have a reference; It is all I can do with my limited brain capacity, to remember things; I don’t have space to remember where or how I learned it.
But in this case I can tell you what YOU can search for.
It’s in a book by a rather well known historian; whose name I don’t remember (short term memory disfunction), The book is a World history as it was dictated, by major medical calamities; see I can’t even think of the word; Epidemics, that’s it.
It’s at least five years since I read it. I recognized the author’s name; but was not familiar with him. Right now, I don’t even remember who loaned me the book, but somebody did, and I know very few somebody’s, so I’ll think of it sometime.
But I’m sure giggle or wikileaks, or one of those compendia of all knowledge, can instantly point you to it.
I remember stuff, I don’t care, or care to know, who came up with it, unless I want nto know more about it.
I do know that Napoleon’s army froze to death in Russia, because their warm overcoats had tin buttons; who can afford to make buttons, out of pure tin (besides the French) ??
Tin is in the same column of the periodic table, as carbon, silicon, and germanium, the group-4 semiconductors, which crystalize in the cubic diamond lattice. Well strictly speaking, it is only alpha tin, which crystallizes in the diamond lattice. And in the cubic form, it is only stable at room Temperature. At low temperature, it reverts to beta tin, which is a completely different crystal structure, and when that happens, the alpha tin turns into a crumbly powder, and so did Napoleon’s troops buttons.
Their overcoats all fell open, while sleeping on the snow, and they froze.
WHOOPS , HIT SOMETHING WRONG
anyway here is the poem
PORTLAND
Here, beneath these existential skies
The river joins the land and sea
As commerce hurries urgently
Through old streets found filled with new surprise
Great nations in vanquished millenniums
Foretold their fall with one same cry
When its arts begin to die
A civilization soon succumbs
But here and now in this working place
The boldest of creative hearts
Pursue that glory in the arts
To which all else is a lesser chance
This is our home! Port where new sails appear!
Peddlers hawk at a knockdown price
The novelties of paradise
That give invention bold expression here
Eugene WR Gallun
Crazy behaviour of marmots sound more like rabies to me. But the remedy is just as effective.
And, The Diggers? I remember them. They were considered “out there” even by the standards of the day. I imagine most of their members eventually got jobs, had families etc. Sounds like a severe case of perpetual adolescence in this instance.
A Bioregional Confluence?
One of the speakers answered: “I’m intimately familiar with climate change denial – it’s not really the subject of this panel… it’s not worth wasting time with”. I responded “that doesn’t really answer my question”.
To which they clasped their hands over their ears and answered “La la la la la la la la la la. Next?”
george e. smith says: April 21, 2014 at 1:44 am
At low temperature, it reverts to beta tin, which is a completely different crystal structure, and when that happens, the alpha tin turns into a crumbly powder, and so did Napoleon’s troops buttons.
Their overcoats all fell open, while sleeping on the snow, and they froze.
Tin buttons. That’s as good as the marmot story, George. Did they have tin whiskers, another crystal structure?
Incidentally, your spell checker thought you meant to put the ‘ly’ on the adjective ‘incidental,’ rather than the noun ‘incident.’ Personally, I always spell check after I hit the ‘Post Comment’ button.
🙂
We tried to create south eastern bioregion in 1861. It turned out very bad. Very, very bad.
Sounds like a classic case of: ‘Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up.’
There is an awful lot of that going around, especially amongst the alarmist faithful.
Sounds like the Panel speaker is not aware of reality or science. Such a waste of time.
Tin whiskers can be a very serious problem for satellites and spacecraft, causing short outs on electronic circuit boards.
In the extreme cold of space pure tin solder can change allotropes forming tin whiskers, the solution is a adding a small amount of copper and/or silver as alloying metals.
NASA does not like to talk about the number of satellite and spacecraft failures that may have been caused by the use of the wrong type of tin alloy in electronic circuit boards.
In the UK the Greens and the Left (most of whom live in towns and cities) have taken over the environmental debate, time for everyone else to reclaim it. Farmers and country folk are the ones who really care for and understand the countryside, but are being demonised by an ever more political environmental agenda (e.g. farmers are to blame for floods).
Time for some fight back, based on a sensible balance of environmental science and economics.
“I attended the “Cascadia Confluence” on April 20th in Portland. The idea is, human beings should organize themselves into “bioregions” instead of nation states. ”
Sounds a lot like the TechNat of Techocracy Inc. (a movement founded by Peak Oiler Hubbert and some other guy). Who wanted to run all of America on hydropower, the panacea of the day.
Typo:…Technocracy, not Techocracy
Patrick Wood, presentation on technocracy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul5oQ3wbstQ
The idea is, human beings should organize themselves into “bioregions” instead of nation states. For example, Vancouver, BC, is in the same bioregion as Seattle, WA, though they are in different nations. San Francisco, CA, is in the “Shasta bioregion”, which overlaps with the “Cascadia bioregion”, where you can find Portland, OR. It would appear to be the case that the looni left are now planning to atack borders as well as seperate countries. They have been demanding that undesireables from every other country be settled in western countries, just bcause. Although not a single country that those wannabies would even consider taking the same action. They would probably just have you shot for having the damn cheek to even suggest it. But the destruction of the borders appears to be on the agenda, better start fighting against it now before those wierdos get another stupid and unworkable idea through.
I bet if you’d asked a question along the lines of; “Have you considered using dowsing rods and ley lines to map the flow of the bioforce and find the boundaries of bioregions.”; you’d have been given a respectful and polite answer. They would have thought you were nuts. But they would have been respectful and polite.
Sort of off-topic, but in response to an earlier post – thingadonta@1:03 AM
“We have already organised ourselves into ‘bioregions’, they are called:
– cities, where there are either deepwater ports for trade and commerce, (or about junctions of rivers, or road networks, etc)”
…
“There is no need to reorganise all this when it already works”
Just to play devil’s advocate a bit and put in a plug for one of my favorite non-fiction authors – James Dale Davidson… (look him up on Amazon and browse the reader comments if at all interested in the topic of nation-states – how they formed and why their run is likely ending)
Davidson examines how past societies organized themselves and the technologies that enabled and caused the transformations between them. What brought on and ended the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, the Medievil period, the Industrial/Modern age and now the Information Age and where the Information Age technologies are likely to lead.
Yes, we have organized into cities within nation-states and for a long while that did work well. But this is just the most recent framework for how societies organize and there is no reason to expect it to last forever. The forces (technologies) that have enabled the information age are different than those that enabled the Industrial Age. Each of the other major periods in modern human history lasted about 500 years and Davidson makes a convincing case that the Industrial age is now transitioning into the Information Age.
A string of bankrupt cities and localities, Detroit being perhaps the most notable, support his theory. Obama has now pledged an aid package of I forget how many millions to help Detroit meet it’s obligations to union pensioners, a mere drop in the bucket to our 17 trillion dollar debt. I live near Baltimore, a port city in decline for 5 decades.
There are no doubt many factors leading to these bankruptcies but the two that Davidson makes a strong case for are the microchip and democracy itself. Note th at neither he or I are radical leftists. I’m rather fond of our founding documents and the government they created, much more so than the one it has morphed into. But our founders left some holes in their attempt to protect citizens from the power-hungry and the power-hungry have found their way through them to the seats of power. I won’t dwell on this here but he provides an interesting take on how democracies and republics provide a better framework for the accumulation and confiscation of wealth than any other form of government, enabling us to accumulate a 17 trillion dollar debt, Detroit to go under and Obama to easily bail it out. Not to mention Greece, Spain and much/most of the rest of Europe’s financial woes. In short, society’s modern organizational framework, which once worked very well, really isn’t working all that well anymore.
Technologically, the microchip is the central player in his theory and conclusions. In short, cities formed when and where they did because of the technologies of the time – the growth of mass industrial production. This required easy access to raw materials, large manufacturing plants and a concentrated low-skill work force. Cities near ports, rivers, roads and rails were the logic result. The cities and nation-states prospered and grew because once established, these manufacturing plants are very costly to move. Local and national taxes could be raised with little consequence other than an increase of tax revenue.
Enter the microchip and “the information age” – instant communication nearly anywhere at any time for video, voice and data. Since its inception there has been a continuing shift in the proportion of jobs requiring a concentrated centralized low-skill work force to those requiring more brain power that can be done anywhere, both by users and developers of the technologies.
I live in Maryland (but might not for much longer). Three or four years ago a “millionaire tax” was enacted here projecting an increase of I forget how much in taxes. After tallying everything up they found out they now had fewer millionaires and less taxes. NY recently decided NOT to raise taxes on the wealthy to prevent this very thing from happening there.
I don’t have statistics on how many cities are healthy and how many aren’t. But given the technologies that led to their creation compared to today’s technological innovations, the organizational framework of cities and nation-states is under stress and offers less advantage to the growing number of decentralized workers.
With the abiity of more and more people, wealthy or not, to vote with their feet, whether leaving a city, a state or a country, one doesn’t need a fancy model to see that high tax rates are unsustainable. Low taxed areas will emerge and attract the high wage earners who can work anywhere. Davidson mentions one such area in Sweden, I believe, or maybe it was the Netherlands, that has a flat tax of 40,000 krona or gilders. Not a good deal if you only make 50,000 but compared to most other areas, a great deal if you make 400,000 or more. Davidson has some interesting ideas on where this will lead but this post is already too long.
Bottom line: Whether we voluntarily “reorganise all this when it already works” or not, if history is any indication, it will in all likelyhood get reorganized in the near future anyway, though I doubt it will be within the framework the organizers of this event are proposing. And governments try but ultimately fail to stop it. One take-away from his examinations is that governments don’t change the course of history, only the rate of change. Technology controls the steering wheel of history, governments the brakes and gas pedal.
Davidson is a great read for anyone interested in such things. I recommend “The Great Reckoning” and “The Sovereign Individual.”
People may laugh at this but it has always been the goal to unite America in to one country and the world under one government. Global governance and the destruction of sovereignty is the end goal. The environment is the basis for their world governance infrastructure, they will create economic/governmental environmental regions that will gradually take over from the traditional sovereign boundaries and the advantage with environmental regions is they can be adjusted arbitrarily according to ‘biological/biodiversity’ requirements. First the North American Union then pretty soon the whole country will be one nation.
‘One of the speakers answered: “I’m intimately familiar with climate change denial – it’s not really the subject of this panel… it’s not worth wasting time with”.’
I was going to comment that a correct translation of that speaker’s statement would be: ‘I’m intimately familiar with computer fallibility denial.’ My translation harkens back to when I transitioned from a drawing table to a computer graphic program and the trainer said that computers don’t make mistakes and I thought to myself, ‘Oh yes they do.’
But I thought to myself I’m wrong. Computers really don’t make mistakes. And they certainly don’t make the mistake of correcting a mistake that’s been fed into them.
WMASAW says:
April 21, 2014 at 4:47 am
“But the destruction of the borders appears to be on the agenda, better start fighting against it now before those wierdos get another stupid and unworkable idea through.”
Was already on the agenda of Hubbert et al in the 1930ies with Technocracy Inc.; as their “TechNat” was meant to include the territories of USA, Canada and Mexico. For sheer necessity, as their hydropower-only scheme would not have been viable otherwise – as they claimed. And who would dare to argue with experts?
Perhaps this can shed some light on the thought process at the heart of this meeting.
It is not fiction folks.
http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/index.php?menu=1252;
“What is it about America that produces this self-hating nonsense?” In order to enjoy one’s good fortune, one must constantly apologize for it?
“””””…..Mike McMillan says:
April 21, 2014 at 3:42 am
george e. smith says: April 21, 2014 at 1:44 am
At low temperature, it reverts to beta tin, which is a completely different crystal structure, and when that happens, the alpha tin turns into a crumbly powder, and so did Napoleon’s troops buttons.
Their overcoats all fell open, while sleeping on the snow, and they froze.
Tin buttons. That’s as good as the marmot story, George. Did they have tin whiskers, another crystal structure?…….”””””””
That Napoleon story, was in the news just in the last few months. I don’t remember whether I read it in a scientific Journal , (like Physics Today or Optics & Photonics News, which I get) , or whether it was a T&V or Radio story. I’m guessing the former, since it explained the crystallography part in some detail.
I have been aware of alpha tin as a supposed semiconductor for 50 years, when I first got involved in III-V semiconductors (gallium arsenide) at Monsanto’s Central Research labs, in St Louis (County), Mo.
If you think about the change in character going from carbon (diamond) to silicon, then germanium and on to alpha tin; there’s an obvious morphing from highly insulating, to metallic, with the tin.
Carbon too, goes through a change in crystal structure, from diamond to graphite. Diamond is not the thermodynamically stable form of carbon, at STP; it takes high T&P to make diamond, but it is so damn densely compact, that the room temperature thermal jostling of the atoms, is not enough to morph it to the preferred graphite phase.
Part of the Titanic story, appears to be, that the grade of “steel plate” and/or rivets, becomes brittle at icy Temperatures, which led to the fracture of plates by an iceberg collision, that was not all that serious an impact.
I imagine that satellite folks, have to become razor sharp in Metallurgy over extreme Temperature range. I have a pair of Texts; “The Composition of Binary Alloys” which contains the phase diagrams for every possible combination of binary alloy that can be formed from the 92 elements.
Naturally, there are NO binary alloy diagrams for Noble as components, although evidently, some compounds do form.
In the 1970s, I worked strenuously trying to solve a tin solder joint issue between a Gold over Nickel coated ceramic (package), and a gold over Chromium (I think) plated glass lid, to form a high vacuum seal. It was a quartz tuning fork crystal for digital watches, that could be laser tuned after sealing by blasting gold off the tines. The tin solder film would dissolve the gold off the glass and ceramic, so we had to find a tin/gold alloy for the solder preform.
It’s amazing what suff happens in the technology world.
For Pete Miller, ref ” the solution is a adding a small amount of copper and/or silver as alloying metals.” NoNoNo please don’t do that for tin whiskers! For instance, SAC305 solder (96.5%Sn, 3Ag, .5Cu) is a very good solder, but sometimes forms all kinds of tin whiskers. Use 3%Pb (lead) to suppress whiskers. SEE https://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/ .
Any bioregion advocate who imagines that Portland is in the same bioregion as San Francisco but not with Seattle obviously has no clue what a bioregion really is. Any rational Pacific NW bioregion would stop at the Klamath River watershed.