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.
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.