Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The box, a steel and granite monolith, will be filled with hard drives to record everything we say right up until our civilisation falls, so future civilisations can learn from our mistakes.
Earth is getting a black box to record our climate change actions, and it’s already started listening
ABC Science / By environment reporter Nick Kilvert
On a granite-strewn plain, surrounded by gnarled mountains, sits a giant steel box.
Incongruous in the landscape, much like Kubrick’s black monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame, its alien presence suggests it was put there with intent.
And if those that discover it can decipher the messages it contains, they could get a glimpse of what caused the fall of the civilisation that was there before.
This is Earth’s Black Box.
‘First and foremost, it’s a tool’
When an aeroplane crashes, it’s left to investigators to sift through the wreckage to recover the black box.
It’s hoped the recorded contents can be used to help others avoid the same fate.
And so it is with Earth’s Black Box: a 10-metre-by-4-metre-by-3-metre steel monolith that’s about to be built on a remote outcrop on Tasmania’s west coast.
…
If that sounds unhinged, it’s worth remembering that we’re currently on track for as much as 2.7C of warming this century.
Ask any climate scientist what happens when warming breaches 2C, and they’ll almost invariably tell you it’s not worth thinking about.
…
Those who have discovered the black box — now the colour of rust, its solar panels long since dead — have got no frame of reference for what they find inside or how to decipher it.
So now what?
…
Gaining access to the box’s interior through its three-inch-thick steel casing will already require some ingenuity.
The developers presume whoever is capable of that will also be able to interpret basic symbols.
“Like the Rosetta Stone, we would look to use multiple formats of encoding,” they said.
…
Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-12-06/climate-change-earth-black-box-recorder/100621778
Tasmania, despite its remote location, is an interesting place. Tasmania has an abundance of fine wine and food, an extraordinarily delicious native honey, tribes of radical environmentalists who rarely leave their campsites deep in the woods, and a really potent variety of hallucinogenic mushrooms which only grow in Tasmania.
And now Tasmania is going to have a black box to record the fall of our civilisation from climate change.
No Comment 🤯😱
I find science fiction to be more believable.
Something tells me that the “Black Box” will only “Record” exactly toy what THEY want it to record. Any “Inconvenient” information will be PreDacted so they don’t beclown themselves…Oops, Too Late
Ditto.
I don’t remember who said it:
Of course truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.
Is it hardened against intense radiation and radioactive dust?
If I touch it, will it emit a sharp PLONG and make me wise?
Probably, but you might also need a tetanus shot.
If I ever make it to Tasmania, should I wish to avoid these hallucinogenic mushrooms, where do they grow and how many would I want to avoid eating?
Ha 🙂
Lots of global warming here today (Colo.), front came through and the temperature has dropped from 63F at noon down to 26 so far at 7pm. Forecast low is 19F.
I kept waiting for the wind to die down for a nice bike ride this afternoon and when I finally went outside it was freezing cold. The forecast calls for 16F by morning.
We had even more global warming in Tweed on Saturday. While I was on pre-poll duty at a local school the advertising banner on the opposite school recorded temperatures rising to 42 Celsius. It was very comfortable sitting in the shade, feeling like 28 Celsius. Came to conclusion that the thermometer on the opposite school was laying flat on concrete in the direct sun! Still we all enjoyed ourselves.
Gotta go for those BIG numbers!
We’ve got “global warming” here in Hawaii as well, tons of rain, colder than normal temps, and blizzards on top of the Big Island.
I hear Tasmania is a great place to pick up 4-leggers called Tasmanian Devils as Household Guard Critters. Not sure if they like pepperoni pizza, however.
Too good!
Asking for a friend?
Wait a minute. They’re expecting the current civilization to collapse, but a future civilization to find the box and open it. Apparently, then, civilization will revive. So what’s all the fuss about?
Oh no, it’s for extraterrestrial visitors in the far distant future. Now of course the disk drives probably will be unreadable within twenty years, but never mind! This is a political art exhibit, not really intended to be practical. You sip wine and eat cheese while gazing at it and clucking about how the deniers are destroying the planet.
Those extraterrestrials have already arrived and are living in Tasmania
“Oh no, it’s for extraterrestrial visitors in the far distant future.”
They are probably already here.
oops someone set the hard drives up for encryption
A very big “IF”!
G’Day Clyde,
“… can decipher the messages …”
As long as they have the latest updates for Windows 53 they should be in great shape.
I have three old computers and a couple of laptops. I also have media and old files dating back to about 1991 that none of them will read. Not to mention the older Atari and Amiga files from when I was doing a lot of BASIC programming.
Thanks for the memories Clyde. The good old days. Atari 800XL in the late ’80’s. My boss lady at the time had a TRS 80. We both liked watching defrag’ing. By ’91, a 286 ‘clone’ and discover the differences between various BASIC’s. Sure do miss share ware.
Was at a friend’s house in ’95, “You can play on it”. DOS. Noticed a Directory without a name. (Alt 255) I’d found where their son (a university student) hid ‘stuff’ from his parents. He didn’t think a 50+ year old would know things like that.
Right now, a laptop – W 8.1. The next – a desktop with Ubuntu or similar – the heck with Microsoft.
I have a bunch of paper tape, punched cards, and magnetic reels from the 1960s when I started programming using FORTRAN II. I wonder if future aliens would prefer starting their deciphering with these earlier computer storage media?
Let’s see, I seem to remember “Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate”.
And yet cards just might be a better way of communicating to an alien. A series of repeated symbols in columns, with holes punched in various locations – even a clipped corner for alignment. A lot easier to start with than a tape or disk with an unknown method of recording.
In ’62 I missed out on a job with Drug Houses of Australia (pharmaceutical wholesalers) in Brisbane. Their operator/programmer needed an assistant. The chap explained later, “You’re young and single.” They had 50 young girls plucking cards. They transferred a married man from their Sydney office.
(I was a sales rep for a printing company at the time, and DHA was a very good customer. I was in there every month or so. We did talk about electronics – my dad was a radio amateur, VK4ZT. The computer was – yep – vacuum tubes.)
“This is a political art exhibit, not really intended to be practical.”
Yes, it’s all about trying to send a message to the rest of us.
No mention of the government art grant money
Maybe it’s Artificial Intelligence Mechas. (See Global Warming movie of same name.)
I’m still trying to figure out how temperatures that are still cooler than what the earth enjoyed during the Medieval Warm Period, is supposed to bring civilization to an end.
The great prophets, Hansen, Gore and Mann said it would. So there!!
That must be the climate “scientists” the author was referring to who would freak out if the temperatures rose by 2C.
The Holy Trifecta.
I posted this link on another thread here but it is also relevant to this one.
“King David was very keen on his pears, apparently. He gave the land in the valley to monks, who would grow him pears, apples and plums,
“He also wanted figs, which did grow here but we know the weather was different then.”
https://www.scotsman.com/whats-on/arts-and-entertainment/how-clyde-valley-was-once-fruit-basket-scotland-613747
Well. You said it yourself – global cooling.
https://ourfiniteworld.com
Worth a read don’t see any people able to open a 3″ thick box without oxy acetalyene torches and the use of hydrocarbons
As hard discs have a defined life this will be worthless in any more than 50 years
once again Tasmanians are proving the comment about them been inbred
A shaped charge? Might not agree with the hard discs though
And what powers the start-up and run sequence for those hard discs etc?
Unicorn farts…
But do they have a half life?
just knock it over and get in from underneath ?
simples
You mean they didn’t think to put a door on it?
How do these people survive?
Is clinical stupidity a thing now? Do these people expect to be taken seriously?
Rory,
Look into mass formation; the psychological phenomena responsible for mass hypnosis and psychoses like the old witch trials or the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century!
It seems to clearly explain much of the insanity occurring in our “modern” societies, like the cults of Climastrology or ForeverCovid!
Bloody scary prospect … and it seems to be growing worse. Hmm … if I didn’t know better I might guess we’re being tested. Around here we’ve got biblical level floods. What’s next … boils, frogs? What gets me are the number of people who don’t see the theater in all this.
Rory,
Yeah, I know! It’s sad, but the partial lobotomy and humorectomy seem to mandatory surgeries for most Progressives now! Reversibility is dubious!
Yeah … that’s what it looks like alright.
They take each other seriously. They don’t care what the little people think of them.
They all sit about pulling themselves. They meet the criteria to be scheduled.
Trouble is, Mark, we didn’t take them seriously soon enough until they got into everything. I must poke around under my bed every night with a sharp stick.*
Here are my preferred interrogative pronouns: whence / what / whither. This is how I sign all of my work emails now.
At first, I was going to program a random word generator, but my boss pointed out that the words are supposed to be pronouns. I settled on these because they express the universal existential angst of people. They are also the informal title of Paul Gauguin’s self-titled last artwork before he attempted suicide.
Good to see people getting into the true spirit of this absurdity.
I’m going to have mine randomly assigned on a daily basis. Just to keep things interesting.
You’ve got a random pronoun generator? How admirably wokish.
It sounded like such a good idea when the students were on a bender at the local pub .
Hopefully they’ll be able to read between the lines and determine the ecoloon socialist insanity that caused civilization’s downfall and avoid the same mistakes
Yeah, this all involves a lot of assumptions and cognitive dissonance.
Anyway, the megalithic civilizations took many secrets with them. I’d like to know how not only did ancient peoples of Egypt make precisely shaped granite boxes weighing tens of tons but also how did they moved them up and down through narrow tunnels.
They put the boxes in there while the pyramids were being built so no need to move them through tunnels.
he is talking about : The labyrinth of tunnels is called the Sarapeum of Saqqara in Egypt. Look it up, what he says is correct, no one knows how they were made, seems a distant civilisation made them, the Egyptians only found them and claimed them as their own. They probably date well before the Younger Dryas. A civilisation wiped out by a comet strike. And no I’m not a conspiracy theorist, just a realist who has done the research over the last 30 years.
Yeah, that’s what I was referring to, though I didn’t know the detail that you mention.
I’ve not been to Egypt but I’ve seen and marveled at many of the granite artifacts on display at the British Museum. The ancients had a level of stone-working skill that is not even easy to achieve today.
Maybe that is why it is called the “Stone Age.”
That’s true for pyramids, but some are found in tunnels that were carved out of bedrock.
How about the recently built Coral Castle.
Yes, another interesting mystery.
Policies. From Climate Change ™ policies.
Exactly. This will teach the aliens that they need to reign in bureaucracy lest they be destroyed by it.
Until civilization falls, the story won’t be complete. Once the event takes place, how are the archivists going to move their hard drives to the remote locality without the infrastructure to move heavy loads. It might make a good movie, similar to Mad Max, with the trials and tribulations of the ‘priests’ trying to get to the monolith with their hard drives, carrying the Last Acetylene Torch to seal the monolith, before they drink poison hemlock (or overdose on Tasmanian Magic Mushrooms).
Please don’t take this ridiculous article as an indication we are all eco-loons down here, many of us are skeptical and ardent followers of WUWT. This is an embarassment to our beautiful state.
Fair point.
Wasn’t a crack at you Eric, I meant the ABC article. Don’t know what the hell the ABC are playing at these days.
All good 🙂
Meant to be humorous?
I wish that was the case, if it was then I missed it.
they are a leftist communistic cult that is full of FOS reporters
DrVague,
My condolences!
I think that I have a pretty good understanding of how you feel, since up until about ten years ago I was a proud, fifth-generation Calizuelan! Now I am reluctant to return to the Land of Fruits and Nuts, because of the proliferation of fruits and nuts!!
Everyone doesn’t need to be an eco-loon. There just needs to be a enough to give the elections to eco-loon politicians. Like the US, in Australia the loons seem to be winning.
Not all though. Just had first results from the voting for Tweed Shire on Saturday. Liberal Group won more votes than the ALP and Greens combined!
Remember, in Australia the Liberals are (mostly) either conservative or radical as per Milton Friedmann/Fredrich Hayek progressives not the socialists that have usurped the name in the USA. Admittedly we do have a few nutters as well!
thats because the politically correct systems allow econuts to control the outcome with one or two members holding the swing vote
Get rid of proportional representation – if you are only voted in because your econut party got 2% of the vote you should not be there
Yea, what about the Tasmanian Devil?
Don’t see many around now sadly, used to have them come up to our back deck looking for lunch. Endangered species like us skeptics.
Yes, I have to admit, I am a Tasmanian, and ardent skeptic unlike the alarmist ABC, which spouts out all sorts of man made climate change rubbish like this.
The west coast is a wild place with a very high rainfall and abundant cool temperate rainforests. Unlike the east coast where I live which is usually dry and as Eric said, award winning vineyards abound.
Sorry, but you sound… vague.
Have to be vague lest my employer sees how I really feel, sad but true
“Ask any climate scientist what happens when warming breaches 2C, and they’ll almost invariably tell you it’s not worth thinking about.”
He’ll tell you a bunch of made-up alarmist baloney that’s based on nothing.
‘Not worth thinking about’. True—With observational ECS about 1.7C, cannot happen.
And sea level rise isn’t accelerating. And Arctic summer ice hasn’t disappeared. And the modeled tropical troposphere hot spot does not exist. And children still know snow… All stuff we were told to think about.
Plus, it’s been much warmer than that many times before, for thousands of years in a row, and the planet survived just fine. The ice survived as well, as it’s still here to tells us.
If no one tells them that the climate has warmed 2C, they won’t know or care. It’s been both warmer and cooler before now and will be at some point in the future.
“Ask any climate scientist what happens when warming breaches 2C, and they’ll almost invariably tell you it’s not worth thinking about.” Warming of 2 C above the Little Ice Age temperatures will further enhance the benefits of a slight warming, minor increase in rainfall and increased greening of atmospheric CO2 enrichment. That’s what they should say if they are climate scientists. Since the government only funds CliSciFi practitioners, they will say something else.
In some far distant future someone will get a government grant to study the data.
No, people will have learned by then not to trust government corruption of science.
fat chance! Most people believe whomever speaks the loudest.
The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the greatest liars; the men they detest the most are those who try to tell them the truth.
— H. L. Menken
In some far distant future someone will get a government grant to haul it away and destroy the whole embarrassing monolith without a trace left.
If civilization falls to the level of Mad Max, the box will likely be broken open and the contents destroyed. All that work for nothing!
They’ll determine that for no apparent reason, this civilization stopped using cheap, abundant energy, and even ignored an even more abundant energy source (nuclear), in favor of expensive, inefficient, intermittent, and fragile forms.
They will conclude: Stupid is as Stupid does.
Giant fiberglass pinwheels dotting the landscape like the giant statues of Eater Island
Hold on. They’ll note the 3 inch thick steel and conclude that these ancient people had a robust coal industry for smelting of steel. By the time they have advanced enough to find the steel they’ll probably melt it down and float the contents of the original box off the top of the molten product.
“… to record everything we say…” That’s a little hard to grasp …..unless they know things we don’t….
Oh, no.
It won’t be “…to record everything we say…” it will be “…to record everything we want history to remember us for. We will be remembered as heroes, visionaries and valiant crusaders…”
These people don’t want to solve a problem or build a better future, they just want to have approval and for the world to acknowledge that they were right all along. It’s truly pathetic the lengths they’ll go to.
it should record all the comments on this blog site to exhibit the highest form of wit in the 21st century
Well they might have to conserve space, so they will probably just record whatever St Grrrrrrrreta puts on YouTube.
Death Metal by Greta would make a good intro.
Thank you, Scissor!
That has to be in the pantheon of Death Metal! I wonder if the hallucigenic mushrooms are a good side dish with her meaty arguments!
I wonder.
what arguments
I hate
I hate
I hate
AAAAAAAAha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Made my day!!
The frantic solo at 1:06 really gets the how dare you for causing the climate emergency catastrophe message across…..
One can cite German philosopher Georg Hegel: ““The only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.” Humanity will make the same mistakes over and over again, black box or not …
Maybe on Tasmania one could think of the Rolling Stones: “Sympathy for the Devil”
I’ve been hearing all my life how we “learn from our mistake”, as though it was some great wisdom. If you walk out in front of a bus and get crushed, what have you learned? We learn from success, not mistakes. Of course mistakes are inevitable whenever learning takes place, but it isn’t the mistakes that are important.
“If you walk out in front of a bus and get crushed, what have you learned?”
Nothing … but then you are the teacher …
Most (but not all) the observers will work out it’s easier to get on a stationary bus through the hole in the side, than than to make a new hole in the front with your head.
Always easier to learn from other peoples mistakes !
Upon seeing someone fail, the correct way isn’t always obvious. I guess I’m not all that bright. I’d much rather watch their successes and learn from that.
But surely they had failures they learned from. They weren’t instantly successful.
That’s true. I’ve been very fortunate, I suppose. There’s a lot to be said for being in the right place at the right time.
Nevertheless, pain is often effective in preventing one from repeating the same mistake.
In my experience, it’s more effective concerning cacti than alcoholic beverages.
Ouch …
When younger and confronted with failure of an enterprise my children usually said “well that was a waste of time”. To which I’d say “Not if you learnt not to try it again, in which case it was a valuable use of time”
This guy learned that he needed a drink after being hit by a bus. Luckily, he didn’t have far to go. That’s a bar he walks into..
But we’re not always so lucky there’s a bar available when we need it.
The first guy on the scene after the incident must be a barrister
“If you walk out in front of a bus and get crushed, what have you learned?”
You took an extreme form of mistake. I learn from my mistakes all the time. So far, I haven’t been stupid enough to die from one.
Well … that’s where the skill comes in. Perhaps I’m looking at this wrong. I suppose if you survive, it’s a kind of success and you learn not to shave it so closely next time.
Skill — or luck! I’d say that most of the close calls I’ve survived in my life have been due to the intervention of Sherlock Holmes smarter brother — Shear Luck.
Chuckle … 🙂
My point of view is that history is nothing but one darn thing after another…..
It’s always something.
Who is funding this? The article says it’s “completely non-commercial” and that it’s being worked on by researchers at the University of Tasmania, “among others.” Who is going to build it? Who owns the land? This will require endless funding to maintain it. Are the taxpayers footing the bill? Can they put a stop to it?
A billionaire ?
-there’s a few candidates – it’d be shame if they didn’tget just credit for their philanthropy.
I suspect though that you’re on the right track with some goon with his/her hands in the public purse who’s spaffing it on this nutery.
I hope they put in an Australian to English translation guide.
“Are the taxpayers footing the bill?”
I would bet money on it. Especially if it is originating at the University of Tasmania.
This is what climate change hysteria leads to.
It’s full of Jawas.
ROFL 🙂
“These are not the data you are looking for!”
They’re using hard drives for long term storage.
Which means that their data storage will be dead and mostly unusable within ten to twenty years. That’s if the computer running the thing is still working. SSDs will extend that time, but will lose their data if the power goes off for too long.
The batteries will probably be useless in a shorter time without someone maintaining and replacing them.
The solar cells will be dead in two or three decades without similar maintenance.
There’s no such thing as “geologically stable” when you perch an extremely heavy steel box on top of a hill, even if that hill is mostly a granite outcrop.
Then, of course, they talk about expanding the storage… but if they make it so they can get into the box to add storage, then it’s not that well sealed, is it?
They could have arranged for cloud storage.
That’d be environmentally friendly . . .
Climate models don’t do clouds
Ha ha ha ha, well said.
Yes, that was funny. Zig Zag, I know a few late-night “comedians” who need your talents.
Unfortunately, they are alarmists, so they might not get your jokes. But I got it! 🙂
they can’t use the cloud, the clouds raise the albedo, block / reflect solar radiation, cool things, prevent the whole problem. They won’t need their rusty keepsake box then.
There it is in a nutshell.
We love negative feedback. It keeps us in the ballgame.
Of course there is the Bathtub curve, which is leaking:
They ought to inscribe all this on copper sheets. Those will last a lot longer than a harddrive.
It would have been more interesting to know how, where and from whom.
I liked this double entendre:
“Ask any climate scientist what happens when warming breaches 2C, and they’ll almost invariably tell you it’s not worth thinking about.”
Indeed!
Indeed, indeed. And focus will gently and imperceptibly shift to the next tipping point because the world is really going to cop it then. Manbearpig will be really angry. You better believe us because this time we’re super cereal.
But then again we have Dr Rosling’s 120,000 HUMAN data points over the last 200 years to compare with these religious fanatic’s WISHFUL thinking.
GOSH 200 years of actual DATA compared to their religious APOCALYPTIC cult. What could possibly go wrong?
“If that sounds unhinged, it’s worth remembering that we’re currently on track for as much as 2.7C of warming this century.” That comment is even more unhinged.
“Kubrick’s black monolith of 2001”? Don’t think so. That was supposed to be the work of a superior intelligence. This thing is more like the pods in “Idiocracy”. Sooner or later some superior intelligence will recycle it, or a least react to it as a piece of “challenging” avant garde art like that thing by Serrano.
A cargo cult version of the black monolith. Perhaps containing a coherent explanation of the end of the film.
Jonathan Kneebone, co-founder of artistic collective the Glue Society
ahhh… I was wondering who dreamed this up …
The superglue crowd – will the box be covered with skeletons stuck to it?
The warmunists beclown themselves yet again. Every time I think their ridiculae cannot be topped, it is.
Rud,
Remember that Einstein believed human stupidity to be infinite; this black box may be just the next step on the devolution of humanity back to the lowly amoeba!
One thing is for sure- they will not be powering this with a fusion plant to last for eternity.
We will be all dead within 30 years due to hot air.
“If that sounds unhinged, it’s worth remembering that we’re currently on track for as much as 2.7C of warming this century.”
5 C warming, doesn’t get us out of our ice age.
It might change our perception that we no longer in the coldest time in the 34 million year long Ice Age.
Though this change in our perception could be mistaken.
To know we are as warm as warmest time just within the Holocene, the Sahara Desert must have large rivers and lakes.
” around 10,500 years ago, a sudden burst of monsoon rains over the vast desert transformed the region into habitable land.
This opened the door for humans to move into the area, as evidenced by the researcher’s 500 new radiocarbon dates of human and animal remains from more than 150 excavation sites.
“The climate change at [10,500 years ago] which turned most of the [3.8 million square mile] large Sahara into a savannah-type environment happened within a few hundred years only, certainly within less than 500 years,” said study team member Stefan Kroepelin of the University of Cologne in Germany.”
Sahara Desert Was Once Lush and Populated | Live Science
That earth has about 1/3 of total land area as deserts, indicates how cold Earth is.
The ocean having average temperature of about 3.5 C, and global surface temperature
of about 15 C, also tells you how cold Earth is.
And 15 C is a cold air temperature.
{even for ice monkeys}
Yes, the 3.5C average of the oceans is problematic for those trying to claim that there’s hidden heat in the oceans. In fact, only the top 100 or so meters participates in the planets thermal mass and is why the planet responds to change much more quickly than they need to support the idea of warming not yet manifested from current emissions. Otherwise, we would hardly notice any difference between the seasons.
If anything, the ocean is a source of cold, i.e. a sink of heat with the capacity to sink enough surface heat to send the surface temperature plummeting into the low single digits C. It’s a good thing water at a sufficient thickness is an insulator that forms the thermocline insulating the deep ocean cold from warm surface waters. Even at the equator, the deep oceans is less than 4C.
Well about 40% of world is tropics/tropical ocean. Tropics have large slabs of warmer surface waters. The tropical ocean heats the entire world. The tropical ocean is roughly constant regardless of any “global climate change”.
Or there no kind runaway effect of the tropical ocean- it has known mechanisms of governing its temperature. Or Tropical Ocean gets the most sunlight [more than 1/2 of all sunlight reaching Earth’s surface AND has the most amount of greenhouse gases {water vapor being the strongest greenhouse effect and roughly Tropical Ocean is about 4% and rest world average less than 1% or sometimes rounded to 0%, Or in terms ppm 40,000 ppm of water vapor and rest of world somewhere around 3000 ppm}],
But point is that 60% of the remaining ocean doesn’t have constant large slabs of warm water. And because of this the average temperature of entire ocean being 3.5 matters.
Or doesn’t matter in regard to the tropical ocean.
Or would be basically no effect upon the tropical ocean, if ocean was 10 C warmer or 1 C colder {or about 13.5 or 2.5 C average temperature of the entire ocean]- but an enormous effect upon 60% of the entire world. 10 C ocean is not an icehouse global climate {or can’t be in an Ice Age}. And it’s thought Earth oceans have been warmer than 15 C- but much longer than 35 million years ago. Though that long ago, one could say Earth was geologically, a different Earth – due to the plate tectonic activity.
Ocean temperatures top out at about 300K, or else Hurricanes form and shed any excess heat, but they do not heat the planet, the Sun heats the planet. It’s an important semantic difference, just like GHG’s don’t heat the planet, they simply moderate cooling.
The solar energy stored in the oceans moderates temperature swings. You could even say they cool the planet as tropical ocean surface temperatures are cooler than they would be if it was land, although the opposite can be true for polar oceans.
Not hurricanes:
“Tropical Convective Clouds Deep convective cloud systems in the tropics provide the primary mechanism whereby solar heating of the ocean is moved upward into the free troposphere where it can be transported poleward and eventually emitted to space.”
Tropical Convective Clouds (washington.edu)
Do Flanders and Swann, in their song on the First and Second Law of Thermodynamics, not make a mockery of climate alarmism?
Nah . . ain’t never gonna happen.
Mad Max is going to cut that steel up, weld it to the front of a truck, drive across the continent to live happily ever after with Tina Turner.
Raven,
While Mad Max might indeed find the Black Box useful for producing more weapons, I doubt that he wants to make Tina Mrs. Rockatansky; especially now that she is 82!
If he wanted to live happily ever after, he would be wise to choose someone like Lalela Mswame of South Africa; the newly crowned Miss Universe!
I’m absolutely positive the world has gone mad….. why is half the planet so damned stupid????
99%, FIFY
Just think of the average person and remember that roughly 50% are more stupid than average. And they tend to breed faster too because they can’t figure out what is causing the babies to appear.
When you consider the affects of alcohol abuse, recreational drugs, and traumatic brains injuries from combat and vehicular accidents, more than half of the adult population have IQs less than 100.
“why is half the planet so damned stupid????”
The Media they listen to is telling them stupid things, and the gullible of the world buy it.
If the Media told them the truth, the people who listen to them might not be so stupid.
Many people are easily influenced. It’s more of a social thing than an intellectual thing.
This is obviously an academic’s hare brained scheme. No engineer would even entertain it, not even for fun. There is no consideration for the fact that such an idea can’t possibly work using even present day technology let alone 20th century hard drives. Clark and Kubrick would be laughing out loud if they still could at this pathetic plagiarism of their moon based monolith. It is just one more Greenie thought bubble from the home of Green idiocy. They’ll say anything to keep people’s attention on their “impending” climate apocalypse.
They really should have chosen stone tablets.
Yes, as gravestones aptly demonstrate, properly chosen rock can withstand the elements for hundreds of years, and as demonstrated by the pyramids, protected from the elements, rocks can survive for thousands of years with negligible degradation.
With modern slabbing and polishing machines, and laser etching, stone tablets can be produced quickly and relatively cheaply. These nitwits have demonstrated that they know little about technology or nature. Perhaps that is why they believe in AGW.
“Clark and Kubrick would be laughing out loud if they still could at this pathetic plagiarism of their moon based monolith.”
I see where the Chinese lunar rover has spotted a cubed-shaped object on the horizon. The rover is planning on getting closer, for a better view.
Maybe something beat Tasmania to it.
https://www.space.com/china-yutu-2-moon-rover-cube-shaped-object-photos
Tasmania has another claim to fame.
The black box could become a focus of pilgrimage for eco-loons worldwide, similar to the Kaaba in Mecca.
Maybe everyone could take a shit on it and make it a good place for growing mushrooms.
Actually, it’s not for nothing at the end of the world.
There are many “time capsules” buried by high school graduating classes. Most of them never get recovered because a new school is built over them, and construction companies don’t report old junk they find that might delay their work. …good chance this is headed for the same fate….
Maybe, but they seem to have picked a really desolate stretch of emptiness, so I suspect it will stay until it rusts away (probably a few hundred years).
I first heard about a place called Tasmania as a kid, watching Looney Tunes. Now I understand.
When I was at school, one of my fellow students showed me her map of Tasmania. I was an instant fan, I can tell you!
It’s beautiful country to be sure, Zig.
cheeky!
Of the country or the girl?
I think this went over everyone’s head?
http://www.slang.com.au/m/map-of-tassie/
Did you think I meant country matters my lord Hamlet? Or whose head did this go over?
Well this is money well wasted. . Any future civ will not care a bit what we did or said.
Clearly you are not an archeologist.
Okay… let us have a brief look at this.
Surface area of this 10x4x3m box is nominally 164m2
The article states 3in thick steel plate.
Let us round down to 75mm which gives us a volume of steel of 12.3m3
Density of mild steel 7870kg/m3 which means this puppy is about 96800kg JUST for the box.
These people plan to shift a 100 ton steel box to a ‘remote outcrop on Tasmania’s West Coast’ HOW exactly?
(also, steel alone will produce about 179 tons of CO2. In real terms this is about 1/600th of a COP, but still a lot of CO2. Apparently.)
Craig,
Just think of the carbon footprint of the heavylift helicopter they’re going to need to get it to a properly remote location! With any luck sudden high winds will cause them to have to jettison the box enroute! That’d be a supreme moment of the Al Gore Effect, and karma!
Does Tasmania even have a mill capable of producing 75mm steel plate?
It appears there is a Liberty Steel plant in Tasmania but I don’t see heavy plate as one of their products — primarily bar, rod & tube; they claim 160 plants in Australia and the map shows a facility in Hobart (?):
75mm plate would have to come from the mainland at least.
The max payload of the US CH-53E heavy-lift helicopter is 30,000 lbs (13,636 kg) — less than one seventh of the estimate weight above. Russian MI-26 helicopters have a max takeoff weight of 123,000 lbs (55,900 kg), but I don’t know how much of that is the helicopter itself and how much is left over for payload, but I the Wikipedia article states that the MI-26 used to lift a 25-ton block of frozen soil containing a mammoth carcass had to be returned to the factory to “check for airframe and rotor warping caused by the potential of structural over-stressing”. In any case, there is nothing in the way of available helicopters that could lift even half the calculated weight.
Trying to transport the individual plates separately and weld them on site would present other interesting challenges.
Maybe this is metric/english unit confusion? It seems a bit odd they give the dimensions in metric but the thickness in inches. So perhaps the real object is 10 x 4 x 3 feet? That would bring the weight down to something that could be transported to remote location.
Nope. The original article has all dimensions in metric and gives the thickness as 7.5 cm.
The first thing to go will probably be the batteries, followed by the solar panels.
I sure hope it isn’t literally a black box — the interior temperature of a closed steel box exposed to summer sunlight is going to be a problem for electronics in any case, but much worse if black.
Supposedly this will be operational in “early 2022”. Interesting to check back and see what if anything actually gets built.
Let’s put this climate change thing into perspective for Tasmanians. If we’re looking at 1,5 deg C warming, and we’ve done 1.4 deg C already, then we’re worried about another 0.1 deg C.
Annual average temperature in Hobart, Tasmania, is 13 deg C. https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/australia/hobart/climate
Annual average temperature in Launceston, Tasmania, is 12 deg C. https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/australia/launceston/climate
People in Hobart are already suffering WAY more warming than Launceston will get in a very long time. Have people been flooding out of Hobart for the last few decades? Not exactly: “Through the year to 30 June 2018, the majority of population growth was in the Hobart and South East region (Table 1). Over the past decade, this region has grown at a faster rate than the other two regions, contributing the majority of growth at a state-level (Chart 1).” – https://www.treasury.tas.gov.au/Documents/Regional-Population-Growth.pdf
This climate change scam would be just a joke, if only the media didn’t take it so seriously.
Its really strange, for some reason a warmer climate caused by global warming is not the same as a warmer climate caused by moving towards the equator, even though millions of years of paleo evidence suggests that it is.
But, but, how then can we correct past temperatures to conform to current wisdom?
Not to worry, IMO hard disk drives won’t stand the test of time. So when it becomes necessary to “homogenize” the data, the original data will be conveniently lost.
(If they really want to keep data long-term, they need to use M-Discs. It is hoped that they will last several hundred years.)
The Alarmists were very happy with 1998, during 1998, because the temperatures were doing just what the Alarmists said they would do: go higher, and they said the reason the temperatures would go higher was because humans were addding more CO2 to the atmosphere.
But then Mother Nature threw the Alarmists a Curve Ball.
Instead of the temperatures continuing to climb after 1998, the temperatures actually cooled and so to explain the discrepancy in correlation between temperature and CO2 increases, the Alarmist Data Mannipulators started bastardizing the temperature record with their computers and started cooling the past to make the present look warmer than any time in recorded history.
Hansen started out saying 1934 was 0.5C warmer than 1998, which also makes it warmer than 2016. Then, after the cooling off period after 1998, Hansen kept lowering the difference until by 2007, he was still saying 1934 was warmer, but was saying it was just barely warmer, and then in subsequent years they cooled 1934 to show to be cooler than today.
And they did the same thing to 1998. In order to proclaim “hottest year evah!”, the Data Mannipulators had to cool 1998 with respect to subsequent years, and they ended up declaring something like 10 different years between 1998 and 2016, as being the “hottest year ever”.
As you can see from the UAH satelite chart below, going by it, you could not declare even one year between 1998 and 2016, as being the hottest year ever. None of those years were warmer than 1998.
The Data Mannipulators are lying to the world with the computer-generated science fiction called a global temperature record. The written, historical temperature record refutes the Alarmist view of the world.
For some reason, the latest UAH satellite chart has no link to it, so I’ll use last month’s chart, since it makes no difference to this argument. Hottest year ever? Not if they are honest.
Maybe Australia should spend more time opening its society & economy post COVID instead of wasting time on SciFi nonsense like this. Government has an endless supply of money for solutions were there isn’t’ a problem to begin with.
wait, didn’t the real monolith teach fire?
real, for some definitions of the word
And they were Clarke’s, not Kubrick’s, and more than one. But I guess illiterate journalists are par for the course.
“ Ask any climate scientist what happens when warming breaches 2C, and they’ll almost invariably tell you it’s not worth thinking about.”
Correct , it’s not worth thinking about, because it’s rubbish.
I hope no fossil fuels were used in construction of that monolith. Wouldn’t want to risk melting that steel with the increased global warming that would result.
Well,, in my mind they should just back-up the way-back machine — and store everything — not just stupid CliSci nonsense, which will be selectively archived according to the biases of the nuttiest of climate alarmists.
A full WayBack Backup would have some utility at least.
Another “too much money” and not an iota of common sense.
The trouble with the phrase ‘more money than sense’ is that if you give these idiots your 2¢ worth, then it immediately applies to them.
Environment reporter Nick Kilvert is a nutter.
Every time I think they can’t possibly get more insane, they prove me wrong.
Have any of you heard the news? The science is now settled. “Fact Checkers” have determined that Climate change theory is compatible with laws of thermodynamics…/sarc>
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/12/03/fact-check-laws-thermodynamics-support-climate-change-theory/8796217002/
Anyone care to “Fact Check” the “Fact Checkers?”
They’ve used SkS as a source ROFL
Most mainlanders, that is anyone except Tasmanians in Australia, Have the view that Tasmanians have 2 heads. This is reinforced by very cute bears on sale In Tasmania with 2 heads. It’s a lovely place to visit. The food and wine are excellent but I am not sure that they are the brightest people on the block. However, I do encourage Australians and foreign tourists to visit. It is beautiful and, despite the emissions from those nasty aeroplanes and boats using fossil fuels, Tasmania rather does rely on the tourist economy for its better times.
I note the article is via-
ABC Science / By environment reporter Nick Kilvert
Says it all really and London to a brick there’s a taxpayer grant in there somewhere. Not that the ABC are saying anything about that.
It will record the fall of civilization due to climate change mitigation. Ironical.
Assuming those future survivors can recognise a hard drive for what it is and can read them, they will have a hell of a job finding the few nuggets of truth in a mountain of nonsense and falsehoods.
On a different note. Only cuneiform clay tablets have a proven record of surviving thousands of years.
The interiors of Egyptian tombs have survived well, especially the metal and rock artifacts.
“ tribes of radical environmentalists who rarely leave their campsites deep in the woods, and a really potent variety of hallucinogenic mushrooms..”
Reminds me of the American draft dodgers I encounter along BC’s Skeena River
Ah, the museum of the moties. From ‘The Mote in God’s Eye’; Jerry Pournelle and Larry Nieven.
From the article: “If that sounds unhinged, it’s worth remembering that we’re currently on track for as much as 2.7C of warming this century.”
The current temperature trend is 1.4C. I don’t know where this writer gets this 2.7C. Probably the same place they get all their crazy ideas about the climate.
From the article: “Ask any climate scientist what happens when warming breaches 2C, and they’ll almost invariably tell you it’s not worth thinking about.”
Yeah, those Romans just hated that it was so warm during their time as Ruler of the Medeterranean.
If you touch it, will it make a painfully loud shrill noise, or will it beam a signal to Jupiter?
2.7 C is nothing. In the temperate zones, that’s the temperature change from going up or down in altitude by 2,400 feet, A temperature zones is roughly defined as the vast region between the tropics and the poles where the coldest average month winter temperature falls within a 21 C band. The zones are 3,000 miles wide. So if you want to see how devastating a 2.7 C increase is, just drive 380 miles closer to the equator.
Oh I didn’t realize Tasmania had solved the bit rot problem.
Good on them!
The only understanding that “Those who have discovered the black box” will learn from this will be that wasting time and effort on such folly is a good indication of why those who built it died out.
How much carbon was released into the atmosphere to manufacture 3″ thick steel plates?
idiots
Expensive dumpster
I can tell. Judging by the people running our civilization today it appears to be their major export crop.
How much C02 to make all that steel??
More information here. Including these interesting tidbits.
This has about as much chance to still be operating in 30 to 50 years as any of Paul Ehrlich’s doomsday predictions from 30 – 50 years back.
You’re lucky to get 10 or 20 years out of a hard drive used intermittently. What happens if it tries to spin continuously for 50 years? Nobody has experience with drives over that length of time. Does anyone still have a functioning HD made in 1971? What will happen to internal lubricants? Will the motor and electronics still work after that amount of time?
Last year I decommissioned a pair of SunFire X-2100 servers that were originally deployed in 2007. They were rebooted due to a power failure in 2008 and had been up and running continuously from then until final shut down.
The article does not say what kind of storage technology is used; I tend to doubt they are spinning drives, but given industry history whatever storage technology is deployed today is unlikely to be still functioning in 30 years, let alone 50. And it is pretty much guaranteed that today’s storage systems will not be serviceable 30 years hence.
From the above-quoted text of environment reporter Nick Kilvert:
I think a reference to the computer Deep Thought would be much more realistic; you know, something along the lines of:
“As with Deep Thought, those that finally gain access to Earth’s Black Box many millennia from now, will be unable to determine the basic question that the internal computers and memory banks were asked to record data on.”
With a tip-of-the-hat to writer Douglas Adams.
Getting rid of old hard drives finally solved. just in time for SATA to be replaced by USB and m2.
Hard drives used to use a wide ribbon cable. Do you have any equipment that can read these drives? Why would the current generation of drives be any different? Try and read a 5 inch floppy or an old backup tape.
Optical drives used to be all the rage. Almost limitless storage. Now few PCs are sold with one. Who uses DVDs? What about CDs?
I wonder how it will survive under a mile or two of glacial ice?
“Tasmania, despite its remote location,”
It’s not remote to Tasmanians. As I learned in high school physics, it depends on your frame of reference.