Seeing as we’re back onto our favourite topic, I thought I’d mention an issue that’s been buzzing around the Ozboy headspace for a while now. In the AGW debate, it’s clear the battle lines (for such they are) were drawn some time ago. It has long ceased to be a purely scientific debate, both sides drawing down issues of philosophy, politics and psychology. Trying to place myself in the shoes of a newcomer to the debate, it’s obvious that wading through all that to get to a scientific conclusion must be—at a minimum—a daunting prospect; the temptation must be there to write off all participants as cranks of one form or another.
That’s why it’s instructive to focus on scientists who have changed their minds on the issue: that is, those who have held one position publicly, and then recanted, again publicly. Looking through the web, there are many such scientists—and it appears the change of mind is almost entirely in one direction: believer to skeptic. Joanne Nova’s Skeptic’s Handbook has an eye-opening (if not downright eye-popping) selection of these, including Professor Ivar Giaever, winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize for physics, French geophysicist Claude Allègre, Israeli physicist Professor Nir Shaviv, British environmental campaigner Professor David Bellamy and the Russian Academy of Science’s Professor Andrei Kapitsa.
Typical of the positions of these scientists are public recantations such as those by oceanographer Dr Tad Murty,
I started with a firm belief about global warming, until I started working on it myself;
Professor Shaviv, who
…believes there will be more scientists converting to man-made global warming skepticism as they discover the dearth of evidence;
Professor Bellamy:
…global warming is largely a natural phenomenon. The world is wasting stupendous amounts of money on trying to fix something that can’t be fixed;
and IPCC expert reviewer Dr Richard Courtney:
To date, no convincing evidence for AGW has been discovered.
The efforts warmists appear to have gone to online, in order to distort or discredit these statements goes beyond staggering, into the realms of the sinister. For every one of the names and statements I have quoted above, there are articles claiming either the person in question was quoted out of context, or they hold some far-out belief on a totally unrelated topic, or they are they in the pay of Big Oil, or Big Pharma, or—
But why go on: you’ve heard it all before.
When I tried to find prominent scientists who have changed their opinion in the opposite direction—that is, from skepticism to belief in anthropogenic global warming—I found… the sound of chirping crickets. Googling skeptics who have changed their minds turns up just six names, over and over (and over): Bjorn Lomberg (not a scientist, and never doubting the anthropogenic influence on climate, as James Delingpole recently pointed out); Dmitri Medvedev (lawyer and politician, now President of the Russian Federation); Michael Hanlon (journalist and science editor at the UK Daily Mail); Michael Shermer (publisher and editor of Skeptic magazine); Gregg Easterbrook (journalist and editor of The New Republic magazine), and Stu Ostro (meteorologist with The Weather Channel).
The comparison between the two groups should be fairly obvious.
Of course, to cite such a prominent list of believers-turned-skeptics in isolation, as evidence that AGW is bunkum, is to fall into the same logical trap (argumentum ad vericundiam) as we so often witness the warmists do. Rather, it raises the more metaphysical issue of belief systems, and our attachment to them:
One of our number here at LibertyGibbert, a contributor whose opinions (I won’t refer to them here as beliefs) on AGW are diametrically opposed to those of most of us, has repeatedly stated his reasons for inhabiting what must be (for him) a hostile online environment, include challenging his own personal Morton’s Demon. To save you looking it up (I had to), Glenn Morton is an ex-creationist who recognized the existence of a personal demon (analogous to Maxwell’s Demon). Rather than admitting or refusing fast-moving or slow-moving molucules however, Morton’s Demon admits only confirmatory evidence to the mind of a believer in a theory, subliminally rejecting disconfirming or contradictory evidence. Morton’s Demon is thus a corollary of confirmation bias, and an impediment to objective, rational thought.
To challenge one’s own personal Morton’s Demon, therefore, is to profess a commitment to intellectual honesty. It is to hold oneself vulnerable to the possibility that one may be completely and utterly wrong on a deeply-held position; it is the sine qua non of the scientific method, and an altogether admirable thing. Well, here is a list of world-renowned scientists who have done just that—famed intellects who have each challenged, and ultimately slain, their own personal Morton’s Demon. It was the economist John Maynard Keynes who said when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
Indeed.
Be Responsible - Be Free! 
AGW, aka “manmade global warming”, is a scientific, intellectual, political, financial and moral scam. The climate has been changing for millions upon millions of years.
The IPCC is the biggest perpetrator of scientific fraud that the world has ever seen.
Individuals and organizations involved in this fraud should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Civil suits should be filed to recover grant money and subsidies given to individuals and organizations participating in the fraud.
Now is not the time to let up !
Amerloque
Thanks for post to ‘Beaker’ on Andrew Gilligan…… Perfect! (wide grin)
Thank you Amerloque, your clarion call cannot be repeated too often
Within LG both the contributors and the regular watchers, I believe, fully understand the detail and the corruption of the AGW scam. On the positive side the crime of subsidies and suits promoting renewables, is also well understood in terms of both efficiency and the effect on our lifestyles.
However my concern is not with the scientific community, but with the wider public. From my admittedly limited contact Joe Public has almost no understanding of what is going on and the great scam being perpetrated by the AGW plot.
In the UK the MSM and the BBC are still woefully biased towards AGW, and our politicians are only interested in their own glory and the EU gravy train. This is where documents like the Jo Nova ‘Skeptics Handbook’ is so useful in going back to basics with the background information.
AGW and the EU seem to have become a bottomless money pit and it is only when the public finally realise this and it affects their pockets in time of financial hardship and cutbacks, that they will finally turn against these abominations.
Put into simple terms we skeptics face the task of undoing years of indoctrination by the media and the education system. This will not be a five minute task but is slowly being achieved. We must explain our facts simply and clearly, whilst firmly challenging the bluster and so called settled science.
We are going to win
We will win
Right and common sense is on our side
Now is not the time to let up.
Man on the moor
My own feeling about man made global warming, can be summed up as ‘I don’t know’. There seems, in fact, to be much uncertainty on both sides of the debate….’I don’t know’ becoming increasingly common. There are concerns that this could lead to a runaway ‘don’t know effect’ effect. Although other arguments suggest that, over time, ‘know’ will become more common and a tipping point will be reached.
The ‘Don’t know’ increase, can be plotted on a graph, which is straight at the bottom, but leads to a circular argument. This has been compared to the ‘Tennis Racket’ And leads inevitably to all manner of scams.
It has been pointed out though, that the tennis racket graph is flawed, and does not accurately depict other events in history. Ignoring the Dark age period of ‘know’ and the following period of ‘can’t be sure…lets check it out’. During the roman period of ‘don’t know’ its possible that uncertainty reached higher levels than today allowing wine to be drunk as far north as York. (Some say it may have reached Glasgow)
The Minoan period of ‘Don’t know’ was so high, that events are regarded mainly as myths and legends.
There are those that say that the risks of getting this wrong are so great that we should build large uncertainty mills across the land. It is not known when these will work, or what they will produce if they do. Although it has been pointed out that this increases the ‘don’t know’ effect, others say we must do something, and it may be a partial solution to the problems of ‘not knowing’ if and when conventional fuels will run out.
“Another “unprecedented” decline due to Climategate”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/14/another-%e2%80%9cunprecedented%e2%80%9d-decline-due-to-climategate/
We’re not quite into the last phase of the Pathological Science lifecycle but we’re not too far off it either. A decline that can’t be hidden.
Pointman
All these scientists you cite (with cherry-picked and out of context quotes) do not work in climate science. Do you ask for an opinion of your GP about coral bleaching?
Perhaps you should be addressing your question to the IPCC. Next time you read the TAR, check out the backgrounds of the authors – Oz
I hadn’t heard of “Morton’s Demon” until two minutes ago, although I am extremely familiar with Maxwell’s demon. However, is this not just another name given to the “jelly” model of the brain (it may have a technical sounding classical name as well) beloved of psychologists? I think the idea was that if you trickle boiling water onto set jelly, it dissolves the places that, while initially random, tend to become reinforced as pits and hollows. The principle, AFAIR, was that if you start off believing one thing early on, it is harder to convert than if you held no view; in particular, if you achieve comfort and approval of peers and social networking, you will dig in even deeper and believe it even harder to get out of the “jelly pit”. This is all a bit 1950s so fashions in psychology may have moved on since my day.
@dweski asks at September 15, 2010 at 8:34 pm Do you ask for an opinion of your GP about coral bleaching?
(1) No, I ask him about my urine sugar levels. But if I find that he has been artificially reporting an increasing level of glucose in order to hide his predecessor’s misdiagnosis I might have words with him.
(2) I doubt if many climate skeptics can work in climate science. The funding is unlikely to be as easy to obtain as funding to corroborate global warming; one might meet all sort of “religious” bigotry; one might have difficulty getting papers published. Perhaps most climate skeptics work as farmhands or are retired with a private income.
(3) What is “climate science” anyway? It doesn’t seem to be a branch of physics, that’s for sure. It seems to have a lot more “proof by appeal to authority” or “proof by pressing tweaking a variable in a computer model and publishing the printout on the internet” than other science and less in the way of actually going out and measuring something in an attempt to overturn existing majority theory.
“Republican hopefuls deny global warming”
“Report reveals all bar one of party’s 48 mid-term election candidates are sceptical about climate change”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/14/republican-hopefuls-deny-global-warming
Ah, the good news just keeps rolling in. I just love the stench of outraged decency from the journoette. You’d think she’d just had her bottom pinched or something …
Pointman
I am ashamed to say I had never heard of either Maxwell’s or Morton’s Demons! I was thinking along the lines of “Morton’s Fork” but I was obviously completely wrong! I will read about them both and learn.
I noticed someone mention the fact that deserts get cold at night due to the lack of greenhouse gas effect from water over at the DT the other day.
So, IF CO2 is well mixed in the atmosphere, why does it not provide any greenhouse gas effect above deserts in the absence of water to do the job?
From Wiki “The Sahara desert is one of the hottest regions of the world, with a mean temperature over 30 °C (86 °F). Variations may also be huge, from over 50 °C (120 °F) during the day during the summer, to temperatures below 0 at night in summer”
So in the daytime, in the Sun, the desert gets very hot, in the nighttime with the immense heating effect of just CO2 (little water vapour) it gets very cold.
How can this be?
IF CO2 is well mixed then it doesn’t seem to do what it is supposed to.
IF there is perhaps NO CO2 in the desert then it cannot be well mixed in the atmosphere.
Why doesn’t the CO2 obey the law of airy warming?
NoIdea
Could it perhaps have something to do with “Water”? Just a crazy guess……
Meltemian
We are told that without GHG effect the planet would be 33C cooler, looking at the 50C down to less than 0C swing we see in the Sahara, WITH the benefit of CO2, it suggests that the math is iffy.
If CO2 without water is not a GHG then perhaps our green politicians should be trying to tax the evaporation of water.
Will they send the tax bill to the oceans or the sun though, or directly to us?
NoIdea
To us of course, if they can only find a way to do it! They’ll have to find SOMETHING to replace Carbon Trading eventually won’t they?
The problem seems to me to be more an issue of global cheque bouncing and kiting, with this never-ending Ernest Borgnine/Shelley Winters disaster movie which never materializes in real life dominating the discourse as a form of psychological displacement. Greentardism has everything banked on this third re-make of the Poseidon Adventure in the form of environmentally responsible investment funds because the mode of funds enrichment perfectly suits the white-collar unemployables’ standard tactic for fund raising: find someone with lots of the ready to create impossible rules for them to follow, then fine the daylights out of them if they do not obey their corrupt and lazy Suburban Magnificence. For now, those with the most splendid pile of money to loot are the power generation utilities who have mandated piles of cash stored away as fuel and maintenance procurement reserves and the energy exploration, development and processing industry who, like the power generation crowd, make real things from real products which people need, so as industrialists, they are both the enemy and an easy touch if you just thump them a couple of times.
Every hospitals’, church’s, and governments’ pension funds portfolios are at least 10-40% greentard extortion based. This money in turn is the primary source of funds for wind farm development, which projects in turn rely on extorting interconnection rights and financial support from utilities and the majors, and tax based subsidies ultimately make the portfolios’ dividend payout obligations, that and electric ratepayers’ electric charge increases.
drewski says:
September 15, 2010 at 8:36 pm
I personally don’t see the relevance of any form of scientific discourse to any public policy decision except in wartime when R & D is necessary to national survival on a real basis in coping with real threats. All the issues in real terms, not theoretical, are to be dealt with by licenced professional engineers with omissions and errors insurance and a long jail term before them if they screw up. If you wish to find out what real workers in applied thermodynamics think of this issue, you might look under “Engineers, Mechanical” or “Engineers, HVAC” in the Yellow Pages.
Being somewhat of two minds as to how things ought to sort out in a perfect world relative to the fate of civilization now as we know it, drewski, I don’t actually have much of a problem with the US and UK industrial infrastructure being completely shut down by the greentards, which is their aim and object and has been since the first T-shirt silk-screened with the words “Smash Industry” were printed…using an industrial machine (see how that works?). If that happened, it would take about 10-20 days before anyone even wearing a green tie would find themselves in critically dire straits, which is all to the good, to my mind. Having listened to their rubbish non-stop since 1968, it’s high time we had our own Sarkozy-style revolution to knock the soixante-huitards out of the drivers seats of our economy. They are not fit to lead, and the 68’ers are right up front about wanting to impose their own form of Stalinism to make their paycheques.
None of this has anything directly to do with drowned polar bears, and everything to do with whether or not everyone truly wants to get back to work building a genuinely better world. That the new medievalism based on the pseudoscience of the untestable and unprovable is having a difficult time gaining traction ought not to surprise anyone.
If a new Spanish Civil War type madhouse is on offer, and this seems very much to be the case, as all we need for this to happen is to allow the greentards to run everyone broke, I am up for that, too. I have been up for that since 1968. I’ve lots of experience in what nicey-wicey’s with attitude turn into when they run out of money and people to bully and parasitize.
Pointman said September 15, 2010 at 9:37 pm
“Republican hopefuls deny global warming”.
And a day later in the same site, we see
Aaron M McCright, an associate professor at Michigan State University […] found that “women tend to believe the scientific consensus on global warming more than men”.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/sep/15/climate-change-gender-divide-belief
Suffolkboy, I feel quite sure the list of intolerable sources of humour (for the greentards) shall be very extensive by the time this entire kerfuffle blows over. Greentardism is almost as hilarious as the early-Eighties alignment of the planets which evangelicals felt sure heralded the end of the world.
I’m wondering if there are enough risibilities out there to compile a jolly coffee table jokebook on greentardism.
New Weimar Republic Bear said at September 16, 2010 at 12:04 am: I’m wondering if there are enough risibilities out there to compile a jolly coffee table jokebook on greentardism.
Not specifically about greentardism or jokes, but I came across this book[1] a few years back. It is more scholarly than its coffee-table dust-jacket might have you believe, and is packed with references. One of the chapters is about how a substantial proportion of population developed mass hysteria at the belief that the world was about to be annihilated by a trace gas, and many astute businessmen sold them gadgets and potions which would allow them to survive. The hysteria subsided once the Earth had passed unremarkably through the cyanogen tail of Halley’s Comet, and was replaced by the belief that nursery teachers were hiding children in tunnels.
[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Panic-Attacks-Robert-E-Bartholomew/dp/0750937858/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1284559761&sr=8-1
suffolkboy says:
September 15, 2010 at 11:44 pm
You’re on dangerous ground Suffolk. Like yourself, I’ll take the 5th.
Pointman
@drewski
on September 15, 2010 at 8:36 pm
Sir or Madam:
///All these scientists you cite (with cherry-picked and out of context quotes) do not work in climate science. Do you ask for an opinion of your GP about coral bleaching? ///
Are you suggesting in all seriousness that we, the people, have no right to question the argument(s) of those dangerously ill-informed zealots of greeniac thermageddon psychobabble who are taxing us for their assorted scams – and who plan without compunction to tax us even more in the future so as to bring to fruition their half-baked counter-factual engineering-free “solutions “‘ to an imaginary problem ?
Perhaps I have misinterpreted your words.
Best,
L’Amerloque
@-Noidea
“We are told that without GHG effect the planet would be 33C cooler, looking at the 50C down to less than 0C swing we see in the Sahara, WITH the benefit of CO2, it suggests that the math is iffy.”
The ~33C figure is an average, over daily and season variation.
The comparison is with the moon. The maximum and minimum lunar temps are more extreme, but despite hte same solar input the average is lower than for the Earth.
The effect of CO2 in the Sahara is to prevent the nightime temp from dropping even LOWER.
But in the absence of any water vapour the CO2 has about 20% of the effect of water vapour.
It gets a little more complex because the distribution within the atmosphere matters, the stratosphere has little or no water vapour so the CO2 content is responsible for MOST of the ‘GreenHouse’ effect at that altitude.
In the troposphere the relative proportion of water vapour will to some extent overlap with the GH effect of the CO2 and in many cases dominate the process so that CO2 is only responsible for 5%-8% of the warming effect.
See Plass for more details.
Hello Big, Mean, Germanic Bear ! (aka as “Mack the Bear”),
Thabnks for the youtube link to La Diva Jenkins. (grin)
She is well and truly the nadir of song.
Best,
L’Amerloque
Amerloque:
You might also wish to check out Yoko Ono’s meisterwerk “Don’t Worry,” which we used to put on the jukebox 10 or 12 times in a row in the Wayne State U. student union to clear that place out so we could play cards in peace. It was so bad one of the canteen workers, after three days in a row of torture, came out of the kitchen, pulled the plug for the jukebox, and threatened us with serious bodily harm if we played it again.
I think it was the flip side to “Instant Karma.”
Pointman says:
September 16, 2010 at 12:19 am
If I drank, I’d take a fifth, preferably of Oban single malt. None of this climate rubbish is going to end up as anything other than a repeat on a megascale of the Discovery Channel HQ hostage crisis, which fortunately had a happy ending, though what a waste of a perfectly good police bullet.
Hello Lederhosen-clad singing mug-waving Bruin !
Over here in Belgium an France the beer “Stella Artois” is an average brew which usefully replaces kegs in what we used to call “keggers”. (grin)
We hear that Stella has repositioned itself as a top-rank luxury beverage in the USA. Have you tried it ?
Best German stuff IMHO was “Beck” but dunno if it ever made it to the USA. No additives in German brew, either, as Wiki points out:
“The Reinheitsgebot (literally “purity order”), sometimes called the “German Beer Purity Law” or the “Bavarian Purity Law” in English, is a regulation concerning the production of beer in Germany. In the original text, the only ingredients that could be used in the production of beer were water, barley, and hops. After its discovery, yeast became the fourth legal ingredient. For top-fermenting beers the use of sugar is also permitted.”
Greeny beer ? (wide grin)
Best,
L’Amerloque
Hi Oz
Splendid post as always…
I is computer less at the mo’….apart from this lefty Apple I is sad thingy.
Hope to be back soon (next brown envelope) for more com’ here and chat with NI and the crew over at founding sons.
Hi, Amerloque. Yes, Beck is here in force, but the regional beers are rather nice. Samuel Adams is highly popular here.
In Charlottesville, back in the day, I favoured a room-temp Samuel Smith on a cicada droning willow-scented hot summer afternoon on the Gravity Lounge veranda.
Attention all Stein-holders….. If ever in Greece DON’T try Mythos!
By the way it’s only September?
Understood, meltemian, but one has to make plans, ja?
Scud1! Long time no see.
Which reminds me, it’s time for my Gustav Mahler fix. A dash of the 9th, conducted by Bruno Walter, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, 1938, recorded during the Anschluss…
Und das Schiff mit acht Seigen
Und mit funfziegen Kanonen
Beschiessen die Stadt….
Wilkommen to the New Weimar:
Interesting not-so-trivia: Lotte Lenya is buried next to her lifelong bashertz Kurt Weill in New York state, and the tradition of Weimar Berlin cabaret skits and blackouts of that era persists in the form of NBC’s most popular TV show, provided by Weill Productions, known as “Saturday Night Live.”
Lotte would know what to do with the greentards, and she was a lifelong Red or the deepest scarlet, from the days when you didn’t work, you starved. As a corollary, there is no doubt in my mind that the Five-Year-Planners of the Stalinist regime would put all the world destroying greentards to work building ever-so-green hydrodams on the Volga LOL, then go have vodkas and a good laugh at Beria’s dacha.
suffolkboy says: September 15, 2010 at 9:02 pm
“I hadn’t heard of “Morton’s Demon” until two minutes ago, although I am extremely familiar with Maxwell’s demon. However, is this not just another name given to the “jelly” model of the brain (it may have a technical sounding classical name as well) beloved of psychologists? I think the idea was that if you trickle boiling water onto set jelly, it dissolves the places that, while initially random, tend to become reinforced as pits and hollows.”
I hadn’t encountered it in those terms before, but I like this physical metaphor (the same process occurs with meltwater and ice) that conveys the concept of the imprinting of small original variation into deeply engrained structures – of thought. It does capture the way we all tend to progress(?) from infantile agnosticism and credulity to adult certainty and the investment we have in our own POV which leads to the resolution of cognitive dissonance by rejecting the evidence in favour of our personal virtual reality.
If you deal with the public, one of the first thing you discover is that the variation in physical and psychological form is enormous. Life’s too short to learn all the diversity of every person you meet, so we tend to develop ‘common sense’ rules and aphorisms (common things are common!) to short-cut the process and enable us to get on with stuff. This is fine if the other persons’ wellbeing does not depend too much on your judgment.
Rather more dangerous when your first guess can result in a bad mistake if all you subsequently do is confirm that conclusion.
It is really REALLY difficult to avoid that fault, I’m still trying, but given the consequences, having as a basic assumption that the more certain you are about something, the more effort you should devote to finding a refutation or alternative explanation is a fair start….
-grin-
The bit I found interesting in Glen Morton’s description of the process however, and other work along the same lines, is refered to by Ozboy in his essay as the tendency of “subliminally rejecting disconfirming or contradictory evidence.”
Morton was surprised to find that when he presented his fellow Creationists with the evidence that had changed his mind about YEC, they not only actively rejected the information, often refusing to even look at it, but when he DID persuade some to examine it they apparently failed to notice the aspects that contradicted their view. When asked to recount or precis the information they had read, they would omit the crucial factors and often assert that such data or arguments were not present in the text.
The hot water/jelly metaphor does call into question the claim made by some of the scientists listed as having ‘converted’ from accepting AGW theory to ‘skepticism’.
In my perambulations among the Creationists, anti-evolutionists and ID proponents on various forums one common trope of those claiming some ‘forensic’ authority for their position is the claim that they were once ‘undecided’ or even ‘believers’ in evolution – until they closely examined the evidence…
Often there is documentary proof (in the legalistic sense!) that they were no such thing. That they have a consistent history of being on one side of the divide despite their claims of previous agnosticism. Their study of the subject was pre-ordained to confirm an existing – perhaps shallow – preference.
This level of psychology lacks much scientific rigour – by comparison AGW is a paragon of logical rectitude! – but I think it is a useful narrative about the human condition. Escaping the inherent tendency to form rigid views of the world is well nigh impossible. Evolution by Natural selection provides one pathway perhaps. Like biological phenology ideas about the world can be advanced onto a antagonistic environment, where its survival of the fittest, with benefit gained by commensual interaction with other successful ideas and concepts in the ideo-sphere…
But can ‘unfit’ species survive in such a system if enough people keep introducing them?
I have…. No idea.
-grin-
@-suffolkboy says: September 15, 2010 at 9:10 pm
“…(3) What is “climate science” anyway? It doesn’t seem to be a branch of physics, that’s for sure. It seems to have a lot more “proof by appeal to authority” or “proof by pressing tweaking a variable in a computer model and publishing the printout on the internet” than other science and less in the way of actually going out and measuring something in an attempt to overturn existing majority theory.”
The main links to ‘school’ science would be physical chemistry and thermodynamics. In my day, physical chemistry, the stuff about eutectic mixtures, reaction dynamics and thermodynamics was the last chapter in the textbook, a sort of afterthought in limbo with much emphasis on its vital connection to the rest of the chemistry or physics textbook, but very little actual attempt to make those connections…
The complaint that climate science has less in the way of actually going out and measuring something would seem to conflict with the enormous amount of effort that the rejectionista have devoted to pouring doubt on the instrumental temperature record (land and sea) the satellite record, the paleoclimate record (hockey stick!) the ice-core record, (Jarworski)…
Perhaps it is only because its importance isn’t widely recognised that the direct measurements of the downwelling radiation and outgoing IR are not attacked more vigorously.
The CO2 record and its anthropogenic origin are occasionally challenged, (Beck) but the science is so robust, that it has little traction.
Similarly the sea level rise data get questioned (Morner) but is confirm by too many independent sources to suffer any significant depredation.
Despite Noidea’s provocative interventions I don’t think there is any doubt at the basic science level of the thermodynamic implications of the absorptive properties of CO2.
Or the fundamental process of GHG warming.
One problem with this juxtaposition of ‘converting’ scientists is that the BIG conversion from AGW skepticism/rejection to acceptance among scientists happened at least 50 years ago.
It was the direct measurement of the increasing CO2 levels, and the discovery of the HCO3 buffering system in the oceans that limited its activity as a sink for atmospheric CO2 that turned many who dismissed AGW theory in the 30s-40s to acknowledge its significance and credibility by the late 50s.
Despite the start of a period of stasis in global temperatures!
@izen passim
Thanks for the Plass link and its portal into the Guardian Green network. This will take some time to digest. My first impression is that Plass says “I can’t handle convection currents and adiabatic warming and I know that conduction is insignificant, but I can do the maths for radiation, so we’ll do that as a start and ignore convection and see where I get to. O look, I can do absorption too!” Isn’t this like ignoring the wild elephant in the room because you can’t predict what it will do, and focussing instead on the pet white mouse?
Back at the school, I am less worried about kiddiz coming up from year 6 believing that we are drowning polar bears than I am about potential university entrants not understanding adiabatic cooling/warming. They seem to think that the only thing that can alter the temperature of gas is heat! I suspect they believe fridges work by magic or by constantly emitting flooriehooriecarbons. And the non-science teachers think that the atmosphere has a temperature above freezing only because of pollutants. I despair.
suffolkboy says:
September 16, 2010 at 8:00 am
From the standpoint of maths and sciences education, I do not know if the following if of use, but this is the way things are proceeding in the States:
I went to my alma neuter Wayne State University’s website to have a gander at its once world-class mechanical engineering college. It is now made up of guys named Abdullah or Bajinder with exactly one local Michigan-born and raised white Christian infidel on staff under the age of 70. Out in the burbs of Oakland County, Michigan, where Wayne State maintains its highly active management training campus in Nominoritiesville, it is like a Texas evangelical convention in terms of staffers.
Morlocks eat Eloi in the novel “Time Machine.” I think they will in real life, too. I’ve no idea how any management organization whatever its persuasion hopes to subvert and dilute the integrity of the engineering community to suit their nefarious means, but there are not a lot of greentards amongst registered P.E.’s and P.Eng’s. If you think you can get a P.E. to sign off on the spreadsheets for a performance bond relating to guarantees on returns on a stand-alone (apart from government subsidies) basis for a wind farm or solar array on the same basis they are required normally to do for conventional thermal sources of power, I suggest the green crowd re-think their implementation strategies somewhat.
Better yet, they should re-read “The Fountainhead,” usually the only novel besides science fiction most engineers ever read. Ayn Rand wouldn’t have been caught dead on a construction site, but you can bet she had her fair share of dates with architects and engineers, as the book neatly describes exactly how engineers think morally and ethically about their work and about manipulative politicians and financiers.
As we’re getting into the psychology of belief, it brings us quite neatly into what Irving Langmuir called Pathological Science.
Wiki for once is accurate-
“Pathological science is a psychological process in which a scientist, originally conforming to the scientific method, unconsciously veers from that method, and begins a pathological process of wishful data interpretation”
It has the following characteristics –
• The maximum effect that is observed is produced by a causative agent of barely detectable intensity, and the magnitude of the effect is substantially independent of the intensity of the cause.
• The effect is of a magnitude that remains close to the limit of detectability, or many measurements are necessary because of the very low statistical significance of the results.
• There are claims of great accuracy.
• Fantastic theories contrary to experience are suggested.
• Criticisms are met by ad hoc excuses.
• The ratio of supporters to critics rises and then falls gradually to oblivion.
If ever there was a thumbnail sketch of AGW ‘science’, it would be the above.
Pointman
Interesting factoid garnered in Boston: the Saudis are sending hundreds of kiddies with full scholarships to Hah-verd to learn how we do it, and the Bostonians’ response has been to send their kiddies to schools such as University of Michigan to get a proper education, even though it costs more to attend, on balance. The American Midwest has always been the home for thousands of ten buck an hour PhD’s, but that is drastically changing as qualified persons in anything are becoming a scarcity in the States.
As another for instance, Columbia has always been considered the font of American journalism and literature, but it is Iowa State in corn country with the real cred, curricula and alumni to prove it. Oddly but pleasantly, Boston U. still flies its scriptwriters’ training flag high.
Maybe this is because no high-profile rep means the students can learn in peace. Cranfield, Heriot-Watt or Nuffield seem more congenial to learning something that builds a better world than Oxford and Cambridge for that reason, IMHO.
In a recent article in Pravda, “Who Gains from the Global Warming Myth?”, our Russian friends tell this “joke”, almost spot on except that I would insert one word to sum up the whole “Post Normal” scientific method.
(as inserted in brackets below)
“the Chukchi came to their shaman and asked him whether it will be a cold winter. He replied that the winter will be cold, and told them to gather plenty of firewood. But after some time he decided to test his prediction, and went to the nearest weather station. Meteorologist looked out of the window, and told the shaman, that winter, no doubt, will be cold, since the Chukchi are actively collecting firewood.”
“Studies by many scientists who promise global warming are not much different from the observations of that meteorologist. If you analyze all the methods they use, it is astonishing that [ANYTHING] can be predicted on the basis of their findings.”
http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/13-09-2010/114905-global_warming-0/
As I previously demonstrated in an earlier post, with some fancy “number crunching”, published data can be made to show whatever result is required.
The data compiled by Post Normal science shows nothing particularly dramatic over the last few decades, only fluctuations well within the range of normal variability, and absolutely NOTHING that correlates with human emission of CO2.
The arguments of an unproven hypothesis are worthless in science, only Empirical evidence counts, guided by real data, NOT by the anecdotal clap-trap of scare-mongering, environmental propagandists.
D,E.
“O’Donnell Win in Delaware Puts All GOP Senate Hopefuls in Climate-Denier Camp”
“As a result of her win, every GOP Senate candidate now either denies any connection between human activity and global warming, denies the need for legislation to address climate change, or both.”
http://environment.about.com/b/2010/09/15/odonnell-win-in-delaware-puts-all-gop-senate-hopefuls-in-climate-denier-camp.htm
The Pols disengage and reposition …
Pointman
In the world of engineering where making the work pay at a profit is of paramount concern, coal to synthetic natural gas is making a massive comeback, regardless of AGW’s reality or otherwise. This is the lead article for this month’s issue of Chemical Engineering Magazine:
http://www.che.com/news/Substitute-natural-gas-déjà-vu_5885.html
The truly funny bit is that the state-subsidised unnecessary inflation of consumer and wholesale energy prices owing to greentard money-burning exercises in extortionate futility like windfarms, solar projects, and energy conservation retrofits which actually reduce energy efficiency overall have created the opportunity for this windfall for the coal community. Ripping news, lads. Drinks all round.
Had the pleasure of a personal call and a standing invite to attend the Cheminnovations conference from Rebekah Marshall the editor of http://www.che.com Ah, the power of the Web.
For more about this event, please see http://www.cpievent.com
I will be sure to harass Jason Hayes of the American Coal Council to attend with some of the Council’s members. This year’s soiree shall be entirely about how to beat the greentards black and blue and, of course, green. Time to get the job done so we can get on with our lives, though this has been and is a fun part of real life for me.
Your lot really have made a difference, all of you, even our resident smack-a-mole who shall forever remain unnamed. Every boxer needs a punching bag upon which to practice.
Good one Walt. I’m keen to see what emerges from the conference – Oz
Also sorry I hadn’t changed over to the Safari browser sooner. This little kit really works a wonder.
Good one Walt. I’m keen to see what emerges from the conference – Oz
Let’s see if I can’t get all three factions together, the American Coal Council, these chemical firms who would be massively pleased to receive invites from coal-fired utilities to set up plants onsite according to the Carnegie model (or Manchester, or Krupp, if you please), and some folks from both the USDA’s Foreign Agriculture Office and USAID’s Food for Peace fertilizer export division to stop by for drinks at this shindig.
Time to cobble together a battle plan…..
Izen
If CO2 is available and working in the Sahara as you would have us believe, then it is surely here that CO2 can demonstrate the full power of its “warming” effect?
If CO2 cannot keep one of the hottest places on the planet (daytime) even warm at nighttime, then I suggest that despite it being an alleged 20% of the GHG effect, its effect is almost negligible and most certainly useless at “warming, heating, insulating or blanketing”
How much CO2 will we have to add to the atmosphere to stop the Sahara from freezing at night?
The Sahara is almost as large as Europe or the United States, the potential for food growth in an area that size would seem immense if we can stop it freezing regularly.
Looking at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=43235
We can clearly see that the Sahara is apparently in places 12C hotter than it is supposed to be!
Or the map shows no independent witnesses with a thermometer and an internet connection…
IF the 12C land surface temperature anomaly is real, does this mean that the Sahara is already not freezing at night?
NoIdea
G’morning everyone !
From the DT this morning (Thursday)
///
Mysterious force holds back Nasa probe in deep space
A space probe launched 30 years ago has come under the influence of a force that has baffled scientists and could rewrite the laws of physics.
By Robert Matthews, Science Correspondent
Published: 12:01AM GMT 10 Feb 2002
Researchers say Pioneer 10, which took the first close-up pictures of Jupiter before leaving our solar system in 1983, is being pulled back to the sun by an unknown force. The effect shows no sign of getting weaker as the spacecraft travels deeper into space, and scientists are considering the possibility that the probe has revealed a new force of nature.
Dr Philip Laing, a member of the research team tracking the craft, said: “We have examined every mechanism and theory we can think of and so far nothing works.
“If the effect is real, it will have a big impact on cosmology and spacecraft navigation,” said Dr Laing, of the Aerospace Corporation of California. …/… ///
http://tinyurl.com/37dlvvk
Gosh, wasn’t the science on this “settled” ? (grin)
Best,
L’Amerloque
Amerloque 20100916 11h12 Paris time (CET)
Amerloque
Pioneer is travelling through the part of the map, where we traditionally draw dragons. Who knows what it might discover?
Water Water everywhere and not a drop to drink, unless you pay over the odds for it because of AGW see:-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/8005596/Householders-to-face-extra-charges-for-high-water-use.html
Is water tax the new carbon tax??
Hi fenbeagle !
on September 16, 2010 at 9:08 pm
/// Pioneer is travelling through the part of the map, where we traditionally draw dragons. Who knows what it might discover?///
Aw, shucks, guess the science really isn’t settled yet ! (wide grin)
Perhaps it will discover the Nirvana of Deceased Space Opera Heros ?
Best,
L’Amerloque
@Amerloque,
Scientists are now sure the satellite is caught in a tractor beam. The true question is whether the tractor is a Massey Ferguson, Case or Caterpillar LOL
Either that, or Ming the Merciless is up to his evil deeds again.
I’d forgotten how bad special effects used to be. It gets worse:
I don’t get it. These episodes were great in 1969 after three bottles of Mateus, a case of Budweiser, and three or four rollups of WW II abandoned Victory Garden roofer formaldehyde, plus Captain Beefheart or “Lumpy Gravy” on the Victrola.
motm 9:12
See…… We told you water vapour tax would be the next thing!
Where’s the “Starship Enterprise” when you need it?
Here’s some better special effects:
Siamese cats don’t need to be converted into machineguns. They are sufficiently lethal in unaltered form, especially to fine china or other heirlooms mounted on the mantelpiece.
Nahhh. You can’t do Flash Gordon without Brian Blessed & Queen!
Agreed, Meltemian.
At your command, Meltemenian:
Thank you Sputnik Bear …… Gosh I enjoyed that!!
Meltemian, you are very welcome. I like the horse avatar lots. Are you a rider, breeder, or like me, relegated to being either a stable lurker and aficianado? Dressage or Western?
That clip is what they call 2D animation, done a frame at a time in the mid-Eighties with a staff of probably two or three lead animators and 30 or 40 apprentices. It probably took 3-6 weeks per minute, not including post-production (transforming the 16 mm master to 35 mm theatre film stock, soundtrack overdubbing & editing, the editing of the master itself, etc.).
Now this grade of animation is done in Adobe Flash, though the number of people left alive who can do the interstitials (hand movements, etc.) manually starting with pencil sketches on a lightboard are diminishing, so this type work will become rarer and rarer. The new style 2D has a lot to recommend it, and is far better in many ways, not least of which is cost of production.
The same job done today would require two lead animators and just 10-15 intern/apprentices, and take around 2 weeks a minute or less, depending on the deadline LOL not including post-production, which is where the real cost savings come in, as there are spectacularly good editing software rigs out there available at very moderate prices.
The AGW thought police appear to be circling the wagons, preparing to make a stand.
Click to access we_are_thinking_the_wrong_thoughts.pdf
The collapse of the AGW bandwaggon is not going to be a quiet affair, but forewarned is forearmed and this is just another counter attack by the AGW brigade, based upon an unsustainable set of falsehoods called AGW.
Too late the die is cast we are winning
The power of communication via the internet has triumphed
AGW is a lost cause
All forms of renewables are uneconomic and insufficient.
Germany has extended life of nuclear we must do the same
Tell the EU we keep our coal generators before the lights go out.
This is the Sept 2010 pdf referred to in the above more general document.
Click to access Communicating_climate_change_to_mass_public_audiences_0.pdf
The up to date frightener dealing with us deluded anti AGW persons.
Right you are, MOTM.
Bit of an odd day, though. My mobile phone company did something today they hadn’t done in the past 5 years or so I have worked with them: they did some serious address confirmation for me, and asked all sorts of odd questions. Wouldn’t bother me but for the fact that A) we’ve a major election coming up B) it is becoming more than self-evident that we as blogasauruses (blogosaurae?) have made a highly successful go of it and C) I’m a late Sixties leftover, so I am paranoid by force of (at one time) very appropriate habit.
I remember the immortal line of Charles Bronson (my second favourite Hungarian) from the film The Mechanic: “Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean no one is following you.”
That’s a damned frightening document, MOTM. Essentially the Department of Energy is taking the policy position that anyone dissenting to their view of climate change is in need of clinic psychiatric services and they are setting up an office made of of clinical psych’s to implement the policy.
Interestingly, that is how anti-union pigsweat Chinese Communist fronts like MalWart deal with the disenchanted element of their workforce: refer the disgruntled workers who won’t dance to the daily corporate cheerleader routine called “The Squiggly” to shrinks who in turn will give them lots of STFU pills which they have to take or they lose their jobs. Charming, wot?
Comply with our will or submit to chemical imprisonment, Earthlings! Resistance is futile!
Should be up of instead of of of. :>p Pass the pills, please LOL
NoIdea says: September 16, 2010 at 4:17 pm
“If CO2 is available and working in the Sahara as you would have us believe, then it is surely here that CO2 can demonstrate the full power of its “warming” effect?”
The poles are likely to show the insulation effect of CO2 more, as the air is dryer and there is no solar input to take into account for 3 months of the year.
But the Sahara cools by up to 30C from day to night, so it only tends to freeze in the winter nights.
By comparison the moon surface cools by around 60C in 4 hours when the solar input stops. It hits MUCH lower temperatures than we see on Earth.
Why do you think it does not get as cold in the Sahara as it does on the moon in the absence of sunlight?
(yes, this is a trick question!)
Quote-“Looking at -link to NASA local anomaly maps –
We can clearly see that the Sahara is apparently in places 12C hotter than it is supposed to be!
Or the map shows no independent witnesses with a thermometer and an internet connection…”
I’m not sure what the significance is of this stuff about internet connections….
The temps on the maps were measured by satellite, not ground stations. The MINUS 12C anomalies in central Siberia are also out of internet/independent witness contact, do you view those data with the same dubiety?
Pointman
Pointman
P’s dime. Thinking about Pointwoman http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2Tef3IEWCM
Pointman
A kid who used to run around my yard and who I taught to fish, is now a full grown man. He and his woman now have a kid, so this one is for you Harry on your fourth day on Earth. I don’t know if the rules of inheritance will mean you’ll be a “real piano player” like your daddy but you’ve certainly inherited his schnozzle.
Pointman
M
I’m trying to read that pdf at the moment, but struggling. Maybe it is too early in the morning, but I just can’t seem to find a single sentence written in plain English.
OK, reddit.
Regarding the loss of quality of life that it says we may find hard to stomach, unless we fully enage in the positivity of the long term goals to benefit as yet ill defined future personages not yet conceived… I have another blog about train travel in China that should go up either today or tomorrow.
If before, I did not believe that this was a power grab and transfer of wealth, I do now.
Enjoy your community and social interaction in the coming low carbon lifestyle. I already live a low carbon life, and can assure you, humble readers, that life in the ghettos is under-rated.
Communal toilets, washing clothes by hand together in the rain and the sunshine, brushing teeth around a communal faucet, sitting together with friends outside your abode every night of the year because travel to places of fun is too expensive. I enjoy it.
It is very good to know that some aspects of my life can be considered futuristic. Got to go, the tardis is waiting.
Day of The….
You mean the Daleks, don’t you?
I had five years of communal living while wearing green-coloured everything, including my underwear, thanks. I’ll take a pass in favour of good ole selfish everybody else can kiss my personality solitary wastefulness.
Look! I’m turning on all the lights in the house! I’ve flushed the commode three times for no reason! I’ve turned up the thermostat even though it is 68 degrees F in my flat! What did I forget? Time to turn on the taps, hot and cold!
And now let’s open a window!
Walt,
The only sensible solution here is for the centralization of heating and air conditioning control units, and possibly toilet flushes as well. Unless we relinquish our right to control the comfort of our ambient environment, there are always going to be nutters like you spoiling it for everyone else.
Amerloque
I thought pioneer was dead. I know that the two voyagers are going through the heliopause at the moment, a place of crazy gravitational effects if I remember rightly.
Howdy, ya’ll.
Perhaps it’s rude of me to pull you away from your scintillating youtube videos of an ancient Frank Sinatra (who, by the way, is still dead), but I thought I’d keep you up to date with happenings here in the USA. Our President’s “science baby-daddy” John Holdren has decided that “climate change” is far too mild nomenclature. He wants us to refer to it as “Global Climate Disruption”.
The original article appeared in American Thinker but I prefer the discussion and link to the article offered here at WUWT:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/16/the-morphology-of-global-warming/
If you don’t who John Holdren is the comments to the article will enlighten you. Where I live my girlfriend is an avid gardener. About once a year she orders up a flatbed truck load of horseshit. Now, I don’t care if you want to call this a large unit of “biologically activated high-nitrogen content fertilizer”…it’s still a flatbed truckload of horseshit. And so is Holdren’s reasonong.
Izen September 17, 2010 at 7:01 am
Quote “The poles are likely to show the insulation effect of CO2 more, as the air is dryer and there is no solar input to take into account for 3 months of the year.”
What this tells me is that you are ascribing some of the negligible atmospheric warming effect in the Sahara to water vapor; this seems to show that CO2 is an even weaker warmer than first suspected.
IF CO2 (with a little water vapor) cannot prevent the equator from freezing, then CO2 (with less water vapor) will definitely not prevent the poles from freezing.
Quote “But the Sahara cools by up to 30C from day to night, so it only tends to freeze in the winter nights.”
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_Desert_%28ecoregion%29
The Sahara desert is one of the hottest regions of the world, with a mean temperature over 30 °C (86 °F). Variations may also be huge, from over 50 °C (120 °F) during the day during the summer, to temperatures below 0 at night in summer.
Using the Wiki figures rather than yours, gives us a drop of over 50C overnight in the Sahara (in summer!)
It seems you and Wiki have somewhat different versions of reality.
Quote “By comparison the moon surface cools by around 60C in 4 hours when the solar input stops. It hits MUCH lower temperatures than we see on Earth.”
Looking at http://www.universetoday.com/19623/temperature-of-the-moon/
Since the temperature of the Moon in the day can rise to 107°C. The temperature would drop 250 degrees in just a matter of moments.
Quite where or why you plucked a 60C figure from I am unsure.
Why do you think it does not get as Hot in the Sahara as it does on the moon in the Presence of sunlight?
(Yes, this is a trick question!)
Yes Izen, I do try to look at ALL data with the same dubiety.
Recently I have been looking at the claims of sea level rise.
Looking at sea level records from Liverpool.
http://www.psmsl.org/data/longrecords/lpool.annual.mhw.fig1.grl
1768 471.567
1867 495.300
1967 499.698
1996 504.026
The highest value of 514.585 was found in 1960. In 1992 it was 497.844 Units are cm.
Of course these are the actual measurements; the “adjusted” figures are to be found at
http://www.psmsl.org/data/longrecords/lpool.annual.mhw.adjusted.
This data shows us that sea levels had dropped from a high in 1960 to a level just 2cm different from 1867 in 1992.
The biggest rise in sea levels in Liverpool seem to have been from the mid 1700s when the sea level raised over 20cm way before the AGW thing is supposed to be doing anything.
The last date in this data is 1996 at 504.026cm which is 10cm less than it was in 1960.
Where and when is the alleged sea level rise supposed to be happening?
Why does the moon get so hot in the sun?
NoIdea
Sputnik Bear 4:35
Only just got back to the computer – I’m in Greece so the time is a bit confusing.
Glad you like the Avatar – yes he was my horse until he died last year at the grand old age of 32!! Used to ride a lot but hacking not dressage, he wouldn’t concentrate enough for that (brain like a butterfly – him not me, although come to think of it…..)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/17/friday-funny-new-climate-prognostication-machine-unveiled/#more-24987
This is obviously what the CC scientists have been using.
Hi, Dr. Dave.
But wait, there’s more! From the actual, not virtual and alternative, U.S. energy sector:
PROP. 23 DEFEAT COULD ENERGIZE ENVIRO FRINGE – NPRA CHIEF
Thursday, September 16, 2010
The head of an oil industry trade group described California’s landmark climate change law as “political correctness gone mad” and said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger appears “hell bent on becoming a real life Terminator” to the refining industry.
http://www.DownstreamToday.com/News/article.aspx?a_id=24047
Other than becoming a holy martyr to save the conventional energy sector which will not do one bit of good to anyone, not least of all me, I am at a loss as to what to do other than that which I am doing now, which includes voting in November and a run to Houston to bring a pack of chemical engineers up to speed, if I can (and hopefully get paid for it). Gone are the days when I conduct my business on the basis of sharing collective fear and outrage. Doing things right is a meal best served up cold.
My take on all this energy kerfuffle is that it is not about “en-jer-knee” at all, it’s how suburbanites express their rage and frustration now that the lazy pickings to be had from worthless kited dot.com and real estate frauds are gone, and now the bills have to be paid….and there is no more money! Waaaah! Please. My hands are already full dealing with fully mature adults with advanced degrees in finance with going businesses who actually think “2012” is journalism and is going to happen as per the film script.
Tell me what to do. I am all digital ears. I am as frustrated and baffled by the extent of human ignorance as you are. How I FEEL about it is MY business. If I choose not to get upset and instead spend my energies trying to sort out something lucid to do other than throw a Donald Duck fit, that’s my lookout. I respectfully submit that Frank Sinatra’s legacy is not so dead as the prospect of the U.S.A. turning its economy around anytime soon unless a really bright light goes on which illuminates the grim reality that nothing will change unless everyone decides to work as hard as they did in the 1970’s and 1980’s which, unless they are non-English-speaking immigrants working in the hospitality and restaurant trades, is hard to even imagine. A new crop of political liars will not change the economic or energy landscape one iota without a worthy and honest populace willing to roll up their sleeves. That corollary applies to both sides of the political fence. The party’s over, my friend.
A plague of ……, if the irony becomes any heavier you will squash me flat LOL. Time to turn on more lights and crank up MY thermostat, regardless of Chairman Mousey Dung’s (who is also still dead) Little Read Bookie Wookie. Just don’t get the commies upset or they will start jumping up and down in a synchronized manner and knock the planet out of alignment.
Meltemian, sounds like one heck of a horse. How old is 32 in human years?
Bear – Don’t know, but it was pretty old for an Anglo-Arab. Ponies live longer than horses and 32 is a fair age for them.
Many a truth is spoken in jest …
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/17/friday-funny-new-climate-prognostication-machine-unveiled/#more-24987
Pointman
Hi Locusts !
September 17, 2010 at 1:14 pm
/// I thought pioneer was dead. I know that the two voyagers are going through the heliopause at the moment, a place of crazy gravitational effects if I remember rightly. ///
Yeah, Wiki tells us that there is a shockwave:
///
When particles emitted by the sun bump into the interstellar ones, they slow down while releasing energy. Many particles accumulate in and around the heliopause, highly energised by their negative acceleration, creating a shock wave. ///
Perhaps that’s it ! One wonders why the scientists (and the reporter) didn’t speak of it …
OTOH, maybe the universe is attempting to send a message. Which message is anybody’s guess. (grin)
Best,
L’Amerloque
Hello Baikonur Cosmodrome Bear !
on September 17, 2010 at 12:55 pm
/// Look! I’m turning on all the lights in the house! I’ve flushed the commode three times for no reason! I’ve turned up the thermostat even though it is 68 degrees F in my flat! What did I forget? Time to turn on the taps, hot and cold!
And now let’s open a window!///
Yes, but … did you use more than one sheet of toilet paper ?!
Toilet paper use is crucial to making our planet greener ! (grin)
Now is not the time to let up !
Best,
L’Amerloque
Hi, Amerloque. Actually browner, but that’s really TMI before lunch LOL
Tough break, Meltemian. I’ll wager you miss the critter terribly from time to time. Horses and dogs are tough to part with. I think of them as people who can’t cheat at cards.
Having covered a couple of billion miles at 27,000 mph, I would be surprised if these space vehicles hadn’t whanged and klonked into a few molecules, weird electronic and gravitational effects and a flying saucer or two on the way out of Dodge.
It would be hilarious if the only math the washes respecting the flight of these tin cans requires that there be an ether for matter to exist at all. As if “dark matter” weren’t code for ether, or “space particles” in string theory.
the washes should be that washes
Looks like the peak-oil myth is busted.
http://climatechangedispatch.com/politics-propaganda/7694-what-the-adminstration-and-environmentalists-dont-want-you-to-know
Sputnik Bear,
Sadly my dogs DO cheat at cards. My Golden Retrievers did better on the SATs than most of the kids subjected to New Mexico public schools. These dogs are terrible tattletales and filthy liars. The last horse I had (a thoroughbred) was simply a spoiled brat…and dumber than a bag of hammers (but a sweetheart all the same). My dogs are as manipulative as any con man. They use those big brown eyes to great effect.
I’m looking forward to voting in November like no other time I remember in my adult life. Unfortunately, I have no Democrat Senators to vote against this time and our idiot Democrat House Rep for this district is a shoe-in because of the D after his name. But I CAN vote for a Republican Governor and every other Republican on the ticket. Our only hope is to incrementally vote out the eco-left at every opportunity.
I’m proud to say that I’ve never seen a wind turbine with my own eyes. I’ve traveled all over NM and used to rack up 1,000 miles/week behind the wheel. Nary a wind turbine in sight. Of course I haven’t been to Texas in over a decade and there’s little incentive to erect eyesore wind turbines in beautiful SW Michigan just miles from a 2,1000 MW nuke plant..
I think there is hope for our traditional energy sector. Nobody else does it better and at the end of the day we need energy more than we need to feel good about saving the planet for generations 9 decades in the future.
Best of luck in Houston.
Dave
Dr Dave
Lies Damn Lies!…. I would like to tell you, I hardly ever cheat at cards. (Golden Retrievers give us all a bad name). It’s true, I have been known to use the ‘eye thing’ but that’s a Beagle privilege, that I am fully licensed to administer. Lucky you on the wind turbine thing. I have a view of a wind farm from my home. And views all over the area, with very, very many more to follow, If they can get them past the protest groups. Although I do have a beach hut to retreat to, with views out to sea now of many more wind turbines, and many more to follow. Sometimes we are privileged to glimpse a seal. Less so, since 38 of our 200 breeding colony have been chewed up by ducted propellers, since they started to build the wind turbines with boats using ducted propellers. Although the seals do wash up on the beaches (hastily removed)
I will hound this thing until I lose, (but I haven’t lost yet.) Strangely, none of the new applications have been approved for a couple of years, hopefully it will stay that way. Efforts by the local Councils are helping greatly, and the RAF, who’s radar systems are compromised.
Most of my neighbours agree with me, but one doesn’t. His final argument (after all other arguments were disproved) was that, they are building them in America, and they must, therefore, be a good thing. And so, I am defeated because of the Americans.
Why Dr Dave, are they building them in America? My neighbour still awaits my reply.
Dr. Dave, I entirely agree with you on the power plant situation, and a little nukie never hurt anyone. I went through Fermi II when it was under construction and was astounded at the level of quality assurance then had to do a bit of CFR 10 Part B Section 50 QA/QC paperwork for a North Carolina machinery repair shop bidding on the machining of the shafts for the STG’s at another nuke facility. What was also weird is that those Fermi II STG’s are running at just 250 psig inlet pressure or so. Your local high school’s boiler runs at a higher pressure than that, usually.
I agree with you on both the horsies and the manipulative skills of pooches. Dogs are too smart. If you put one over on them, they will wait weeks to even the score, especially when it comes to messing with either their food or with walkies.
Beagles excepted, of course :>)
Yank nuke facilities are about as dangerous as a daycare centre, on balance, maybe less dangerous. Double redundancy on controls and monitoring was the baseline for everything.
What ticks me off is any nuke operator is usually a Navy veteran from the nuke sub programme and normally look and have the reflexes and common sense of a fully-articulated live-action figure, as well as possess more security clearances and shrink exams than your average politician. So where does the character Homer Simpson come from?
was should be is.
In the meantime, NI and I have been getting weirded out by a wave of synchronicity/coincidence attacks today, 4 or so all told. Part of it relates to vestigial media memory retention, no doubt, but the other bits are a little too eerie.
My suspicion is that there is a digital Mini-Me out there making it his personal business to mess with me.
Is dwarf-tossing still legal in Oz, does anyone know?
Only in Queensland – Oz 😉
Silly question:
@-NoIdea says: September 17, 2010 at 6:08 pm
“What this tells me is that you are ascribing some of the negligible atmospheric warming effect in the Sahara to water vapor; this seems to show that CO2 is an even weaker warmer than first suspected.”
The absorptive properties of water vapour and CO2 are as measured ever since Tyndall in the 1800’s
While the Sahara is dry, that does not mean that the humidity is always zero. It generally requires a relative humidity over 50% to get any rain, a RH below 10% is considered arid, but will still contribute around half of any ‘GHG’ effect.
I’m not sure how much effect you expect, the differences may be smaller than you imagine, but the existence of that back-radiation and a warmer atmosphere is a measured fact.
Quote- “Using the Wiki figures rather than yours, gives us a drop of over 50C overnight in the Sahara (in summer!)
It seems you and Wiki have somewhat different versions of reality.”
I saw the Wiki description, but note that it gives a maximum, extreme figure, and only implies that temperatures above 50C in the day is followed by frost at night.
Other sources (infoplease, geography/howstuff, climatetemp.info) also give the average Sahara temp of around 30C and state that frosts occur in the winter. They claim the average of regular day-night range is 20C-30C. The highest temp ever is 58C in Libya. it probably wasn’t followed by a frost, nighttime temps at that location in Sept are about 20C as far as I can ascertain.
Quote-“Since the temperature of the Moon in the day can rise to 107°C. The temperature would drop 250 degrees in just a matter of moments.
Quite where or why you plucked a 60C figure from I am unsure.”
I’m so glad you asked, or at least queried the source of the ~60C in 4 hours figure. -grin-
Talking about the temp changes on the moon is tricky. WHAT temperature is being referred to? – without an atmosphere the surface temp is the only measurable parameter. But as a material with low thermal capacity, low thermal conductivity and low albedo/emissivity its not a very good comparison with measurement on Earth which are of the air temp in a weather box, ie NOT in direct sunlight, and not of a dark, ceramic-like solid surface facing the sun.
Another problem is that with a 15day long lunar day, sunset on the moon is a slow affair so that the cooling of the surface has more to do with the rate of the sunset than the rate of cooling.
Indirect measurement of the lunar surface variations by measurement of the surface temp from Earth scanning from the lit to the dark surface across the terminator during the ‘half-moon’ phase. That gives the span of the surface temp, but not the rate.
Clearly it would be rather nice if a temperature gauge was on the moon, in a shaded container so that it was at a temperature more in line with Sahara temps when there was a cessation of sunlight more like a terrestrial sunset than the slow-mo lunar version.
Rather conveniently the Appollo 14 mission left a science package on the moon with a temperature guage which sent back data during a Earth eclipse of the moon. As a result the fall in temperature was recorded as the solar input was removed within a couple of hours. I suspect the rate of cooling has as much to do with the thermal inertia of the whole measurement package rather than for an exposed thermocouple, but it was the best I could get as some sort of comparable situation with a terrestrial weather station.
The graph is linked at –
http://www.workingonthemoon.com/WOTM-ThermalEnvrnmnt.html
Its just over half way down the page in section 4.
Quote-“Why do you think it does not get as Hot in the Sahara as it does on the moon in the Presence of sunlight?
(Yes, this is a trick question!)
The correct comparison is with the surface of the Sahara and the lunar surface, as that is the only medium common to both in which a temperature can be measured so that like can be compared with… well similar!
In no order of importance….
Greater heat capacity of the ground.
greater thermal conductivity.
Greater albedo.
In addition to the heat loss from surface emission the surface is also cooled by conduction into the gas immediately in contact with the surface. That carries away thermal energy by convection.
AS a result the amount of solar input that is absorbed by the Sahara surface is smaller than on the moon, heats up a larger volume of rock/sand by a smaller amount and shares a significant proportion of the solar energy with the atmosphere above it.
All of those factors also explain why the surface does not cool as much at night as on the moon.
Because the atmosphere radiates its thermal energy away omni-directionally half of it returns to the surface slowing its cooling at night.
The Sahara at night may drop below freezing – for water, but not below the freezing point of CO2, which the lunar surface rapidly exceeds.
I will try and respond to your tide-gauge and sea-level inquires later.
fenbeagle,
I only wish I could give you a good answer. Alas…I cannot. Can you spell SUBSIDY? The idiots in the USA build these stupid things for two reasons, 1) they’re doing it in Europe so it must be smart and 2) we make a buttload of taxpayer money off of each one, so why not?
The public has not yet awakened to the concept of energy density and the inherent intermittent nature of both wind and solar energy. They still believe in unicorns (taste just like chicken). Wait…that’s not true. Unicorns taste more like giant panda and not unlike whooping crane or spotted owl.
The American public is largely stupid but I wouldn’t say they’re any dumber than the general public in the UK or OZ. Why do we put up with this crap? In the US wind power receives a subsidy of $23.50 per MwH produced. They make as much (if not more) in subsidy than they make by producing actual electricity!
Well…beagle or not, if a Golden Retriever named Abbey suckers you into a game of blackjack you’re on your own. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!
Dave
Well, it’s the night the Kol Nidre is sung, so I better load up on the chow before sundown LOL
To those to whom I have given offence inadvertently this past year, I beg your forgiveness. To those to whom I have given offence advertently, you can count on more of the same and more in the coming year. Argh, aye.
@- criticalThinker says: September 18, 2010 at 2:44 am
“Looks like the peak-oil myth is busted.”
-link – climatechangedispatch. – link-
Quote from link -“The Bakken is the largest domestic oil discovery since Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, and has the potential to eliminate all American dependence on foreign oil. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates it at 503 billion barrels.”
The end of the article also gives a link to the EIA report with the excited claim –
“By the way…this is all true. Check it out at the link below!!!”
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911
Checking out the link, the first sentence is –
“North Dakota and Montana have an estimated 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in an area known as the Bakken Formation.”
503billion……
3.0-4.5billion…….. or perhaps ten years of US demand at present rates of oil use.
And that is TECHNICALLY recoverable. That includes oil that while technically recoverable requires MORE energy to recover than can be extracted from the oil. That is it needs more than a barrel of oil to get a barrel of oil out of the ground by present means – even though it is classified as technically recoverable .
One figure is in the climatedispatch article, the other is in the article it claims to be quoting from.
!!!
criticalthinker I read your article and followed up the link to the USGS in the article it states 500 billion barrels in the USGS it states about 3.6 billion a big difference. I am more inclined to believe the USGS… http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911
“Shanah Tovah” Bear.
Hope I’ve got that right – my sister married into the tribe of Levi, but I’m not all that educated on the subject of Yom Kippur.
Sort of Repentant Bear,
If I followed all the threads correctly it would appear you are quite familiar with Detroit, Michigan. I was born in Detroit but I haven’t visited the place in over 30 years. I grew up in the civilized western section of the state. Detroit is a perfect example of what happens when statists gain control and it should be a warning for the world.
It doesn’t matter if the issue is energy, food or water…the statist will bring you to your knees. Detroit was once America’s most productive city. After a few decades of union thuggery and political corruption it has been reduced to the wasteland you see today. Homes in Grosse Pointe are selling for dimes on the dollar. The only good thing to come of all this is that the solid Democrat voting base has been eroded. Michigan will have a Republican Governor next year and several new Republican representatives. In 2012 they will start to take out the trash in the Senate.
Poor Izen. There’s only one thing sadder than selling out and it’s when no one is even interested in offering. It’s toast Sunshine, toast.
Pointman
Since we’re talking about Sputniks, a number the Chief Engineer might like.
Pointman
@-criticalThinker
Ahh…
Things become a little clearer!
The article at climate-dispatch that declares there is PLENTY of oil and seems to exaggerate the USGS figure by over 100x is written by a Dr Ed Blick.
Apart from declaring the Global warming is a myth Dr Blick also warns against the teaching of evolution and presumably geology. He has written a book –
-“Dr. Edward F. Blick, a professor from the University of Oklahoma in his book A Scientific Analysis of Genesis says this: “There are over eighty scientific indicators of a young earth. Yet, there is no mention of these in most high school biology books. Instead they state that the earth is billions of years old.”-
And uses one of the silliest psuedo-scientific arguments against evolution there is – http://www.tccsa.tc/articles/entropy_blick.html
Evolution And The Second Law Of Thermodynamics
By Edward F. Blick, Ph.D.
I wonder where Dr Blick thinks the oil came from if he believes in a young Earth. Specially Created by G-d for Americans I suspect….
Its always nice to find another example of the common rejection of AGW theory and advocacy of a young earth/creationism. Tends to show which side of the debate the anti-science nutters are on….
-Grin-
A key concept in energy extraction and generation is EROI or ERoEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested), which, in its simplest sense is the ratio:
Energy Output / Energy Input
Any easy way to think of this is by reference to the ‘nodding donkey’ oil pumps often seen in films of oilfields. –
These are usually driven by an electric motor, but lets suppose that is supplied by a diesel generator.
If a barrel of diesel will pump up 50 barrels of oil then you make a profit, in energy as well as profit.
But if a barrel of diesel only pumps up 2/3rds of a barrel of oil then you make an energy loss….
Of course, it might be possible to supply the power for the oil pump from another source, or even drive it directly from something like a …. windmill !
( I might have to go and do some 3D modeling….)
Julia the Red set to use the excuse of our newly-hung parliament in Oz to renege on election promises…
This story from today’s Sydney Morning Herald:
All bets are off, says PM
KEY government promises made before the election no longer necessarily apply because of the ”new environment” created by the hung parliament, Julia Gillard says.
In an exclusive interview with the Herald, Ms Gillard said: ”It’s not business as usual for measures that require substantial legislation.”
The logic, she said, applied to ”big picture reforms – and anything associated with climate change is obviously one where we’re in this new environment”.
On Thursday Ms Gillard left open the prospect of a carbon tax as a way of tackling climate change, an option she ruled out before the election.
But with climate change policy to be shaped by a new cross-party committee comprising politicians and outside experts, all of whom believe in putting a price on carbon, Ms Gillard said that what she said before the election no longer applied
Climate change policy, I suspect, is merely the beginning.
Thanks, Meltemian, that’s sweet of you. I have a shelf of food beckoning me like the Sirens beckoned Ulysses, and I can’t sleep so I thought I would write.
Yom Kippur is like confession except it’s one day and night, plus you’re supposed to fast and if you can make amends or set things straight with people you’ve wronged somehow in the past year. For me this consisted of calling up my biz mentor and personally apologizing for my screw-up’s, dodgy prevarications, and not following his advice and suffering for it. Also a few other calls were made on this order, but you get the idea. My crowd are Modern Orthodox and Lubavitchers on a sort of “nose pressed against the glass” basis, as I am a mischling between two worlds, which my pals also agree works out pretty well, on balance, as often insight is needed into the non-Jewish world and intro’s into same from a biz standpoint, especially with power plant and mechanical contracting matters. We’ve been stealing horses together since I don’t know when, since high school, really. How Judaism seamlessly blends the otherworldly with the pungent earthiness of existence, and how that faith deals with strife and the trials of existence, is the font of strength for me.
Dr. Dave, having been through the entire slow plane crash of the fall of Detroit, my empirical observation, as lived if you will, was that there were two major screwups which we are not making now which made of Detroit an uninhabitable desert. One was evicting tenants or foreclosing on mortgages instantly for hundreds of thousands who all lost their jobs at once, which resulted in thousands of abandoned houses, and the consequences of same. Bankers and landlords are smarter now and have the government infrastructure in place to let a community down slowly; the Dodge Main workforce were pink-slipped on a blindside basis going out the gate at the end of the day, and lost their homes that same month. That did not happen with 2004-2008’s loan liars. Most still have their homes they lied to get, with the thinking on the part of the banks being that it is better to have a house occupied than empty and the copper pipe being torn out by marauding bums and winos. Also, the law now is that with a plant shutdown you have to give at least 90 days’ notice under Federal law, and also retraining and re-employment assistance has to be provided by the plant closure folks.
The shutdown of Detroit also started in 1971, and had nothing to do with auto manufacture per se, it had to do with de-indexing manufacturing and service employment from the CPI through shutting down the Prevailing Age Act for every form of employment except construction contracting (which still exists in the form of the Davis-Bacon Act). The CPI was a product of the Office of Price Administration which was set up on a bipartisan basis to enable us to win WW II through imposing voluntary price controls–which could switch to enforced if black marketeering and war profiteering seemed evident–on everything from rents to food to enable the establishment of a meaningful wage level. The Prevailing Wage Act was found to be a very stabilising post-war element of manufacturing landscape, so it stayed in place until Nixon made his deal with Red China. Can you add up the rest? Abolishing that very simple and honest tool for determining what constitutes a fair wage was what really has killed and continues to kill our economy. If you take a look at real-world wage levels adjusted for inflation for the States, they decline at a 45% angle downward from 1971 on. This is the social equity deal Nixon made with the commies: put us in the same ditch as the commies were then.
I have done about 700 manufacturing spreadsheets for production runs for defense and private sector machined metal parts assemblies and for electronic assemblies, too, and I can tell you with authority that no manufacturing facility can afford to open its doors if the labour component exceeds 8%. Labour costs are insignificant compared to management costs, which can run as much as 12 times the labour component on Federal mfg. contracts before the DCMA (Defence Contract Management Agency) audit team shows up to scope out the books for padding, then comes facilities costs (to include the building, utilities, machinery and tooling less production inventory), then things like insurance and subcontract admin thingies like design, legal and accounting costs, THEN production inventory, THEN finally labour costs.
My beef is that management has no genuine productivity standard nor workhour dollar yield per capita quotas nor “drop-dead” points, whereas labour does, yet they are the most expensive element in the loop, always. Labour also has no voice in sales, marketing, design, producton finance nor quality assurance standards enforcement, yet for some reason they are the sole whipping boy; there might be some justice in them being so if they were allowed onto the board of directors as in Germany, Sweden or France, but that does not happen in the USA except with ESOP-type firms, most of which are still doing famously well though standard model industrial firms are falling, not because of a lack of market, but for a lack of manufacturing workers LOL
Also, it is sort of disingenuous to promulgate the notion that most of Michigan’s folks have vacated the state when most stayed but moved to other parts like Traverse City, East Lansing, Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, and other not-so-invisibly gated neighborhoods, and all of which communities are still manufacturing and R & D driven. It is still the same if not worse arena of open class warfare it was in Father Coughlin’s and the Silver Shirts’ and the Deutsche Amerikanischer Bund’s day. I just got sick of the rage, turmoil and random expressions of social vengeance of which Michigan crime principally consists.
I have not been back to the state in 30 years except for a convention or two and some personal business. Also, it was annoying to have to drive twenty miles just to buy something from a convenience store when I now can simply walk to a venue or take public transport. Public transport in Michigan has always been somehow illegal or rive gauche, somehow something for the great unwashed, where anywhere else it is both interesting and democratic in the human sense of the word, not the political.
Why the schools are so good there yet the people are either demi-saints or so completely f**ked up you have to shoot them twice just to get their attention still mystifies me.
Izen, cycle-costing energy extraction is a standards-controlled financial tool which has been used since the 1920’s to justify every wellhead that had been drilled since then. People who do those calc’s are licenced and bonded by the US Federal government, specifically the Mineral Management Services of the US Department of the Interior, as entire budgets based on MMS certified exploration surveys and these calculations are floated using these numbers.
I’d rather read about what you know something about, like playing bars and honky-tonks for the rent. Sounds like fun. See any good fistfights?
Age should be Wage, and there are a couple of typo’s.
I’m starving. Waaah! LOL
Izen, it’s always a pleasure to lock horns with someone more full of biomass than I am, but really,the bit about cycle costing energy extraction really takes the cake. You done did out-biomassed yourself on that one, dude.
Give me 10 minutes, and I will give you their trade association Website.
Tell us something about brain surgery now.
Izen,
Prez Kablama re-named MMS to reflect its new focus on offshore drilling, but it’s the same old crew with a bigger budget.
Here are the Fed’s handbooks on wellhead energy extraction cycle costing, economic feasibility reporting, and associated payout calc’s and procedures. The very numbers you wanna play with are the basis for paying royalties to not only the Fed’s but to the landowners themselves where the wellheads are:
http://www.mrm.boemre.gov/FM/Handbooks/default.htm
You go mess with them, Izn’t. I am sure they will be all ears.
G’day Oz,
Errr….Global warming in Tassie?
Swells of 18 metres, good gawd!
And SNOW too!!
Must have been a bit rough Ozboy, thing is – is it not springtime now?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/09/17/3014645.htm
Still never mind mate, Joolya is gonna make it all right!
Is she off her rocker, or was she never on it in the first place?
Ed.
I’m still on the mainland on business Ed, I’m travelling back on the Spirit of Tasmania on Tuesday night. 18 metre waves may make for an interesting crossing – Oz
And another thing, what the effin’ hell is going on here? ……..
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/09/4-days-notice-the-thompsons-are-served-notice-of-eviction/#more-10310
Boondoggling bureaucracy gone bonkers, I thought our lot over here (in UK) were 8888ing mad but this takes some beating.
Ed.
Izen
Many thanks for the excellent link to the moon data.
I was hoping to find some data on tool temperatures, as then we may be able to compare like for like on the moon and the earth. Unfortunately I found this statement…
“In addition, rough temperature measurements are provided by Tempa-labels attached to various pieces of equipment. Each Tempa-label consisted of four patches of materials that changed color when its temperature exceeded certain values. We are not aware of any post-mission analyses, nor have we yet attempted a listing of Tempa-label report”
I noticed you say and I quote
“In addition to the heat loss from surface emission the surface is also cooled by conduction into the gas immediately in contact with the surface. That carries away thermal energy by convection… and shares a significant proportion of the solar energy with the atmosphere above it.”
By Jove I think you are starting to understand reality. Congratulations on this breakthrough, may many more be shortly forthcoming. -Beaming smile-
Keep grappling those demons!
Now, IF the atmosphere can absorb more heat from the land, then it will cool the land, IF CO2 can increase the rate at which heat is absorbed from the land, then this would (in conjunction with conduction and convection) provide a mechanism for greater thermal transfer from land to atmosphere.
IF CO2 is well mixed in the atmosphere as a result of turbulence and convection (or the Izen conjecture!) then heat from the ground is getting transported away from the surface in an increased fashion.
IF the alleged ability of CO2 to absorb the special colour of warmth (wave number 666!) and gain anti-gravity properties are correct then while it is warming the air it is cooling the Earth.
I remember a duet we wrote that encompasses many of the points raised.
Its is hot (no it is not!) by Izen and NoIdea
Izen: The sun beats down and heats the ground.
NI: (But misses all the air on its way down!)
Izen: Its spectra matching SB’s law.
NI: (Boltzman’s broken, its NASA you ignore!)
Izen: The earth emits its heat around
NI: (And in and down, in oceans flows abound!)
Izen: Matching SB without a flaw.
NI: (Except of course, the really big ones that you ignore!)
Izen: The air absorbs the surface glow
NI: (Dodging every sun beam, it seems, except rainbows!)
Izen: the water leads but there’s CO2
NI: (Tinsy tiny smidgens yes its true!)
Izen: Each warms the air by thermal flow
NI: (Everything warms everything, net flow is the goal!)
Izen: measurement shows that it’s all true.
NI: (And I still say that the sky is blue!)
Izen: Strange rituals using coats and fire
NI: (Much safer than naked or just call me a liar!)
Izen: Don’t make this wrong, you just perspire.
NI: (Unless it is winter, then they keep you cozy and alive it transpires!)
Do you think it needs a chorus?
NoIdea
Australians…….. What is going on in the Thompson case? Is this mainstream?
Sadly fen, it’s happening more and more often… and do you think the MSWM gives a toss? – Oz
Hello Aramaic-singing Bear !
On September 18, 2010 at 2:00 pm
/// Also, the law now is that with a plant shutdown you have to give at least 90 days’ notice under Federal law, and also retraining and re-employment assistance has to be provided by the plant closure folks. ///
…/…
/// … so if they were allowed onto the board of directors as in Germany, Sweden or France, but that does not happen in the USA ///
Um, they’re not really “allowed” in France unless they have a substantial shareholding, which they very rarely do …). I understand that things are different in Germany and the Netherlands.
Companies here in France have shareholders and so on (the capitalist model) who own them 100%.
However (and it’s a huge “however”), day-to-day governance is carried out under a plethora of rules and regulations, the vast majority of which are enshrined in written law. (Some are simply traditional, e.g. sack the guys with the fewest kids first, or “first-in, first-out” based on hiring dates, or married ladies with kids at home last out.)
Enforcement of these rules is carried out by “commissions paritaires” (organs having an equal representation of owners and union stakeholders) and what is euphemistically termed the “comité d’entreprise” (the “company committee”) which makes damn sure (they have extended legal rights to sue and whatnot) that the laws about sackings, mass part-timing and/or furloughing the personnel and plant closures are followed, no matter how far in advance the event is scheduled. There are many, many rules and it’s all a real can of worms, especially since different “comités” with differing powers, natch, kick in at various company sizes. Generally, the bigger the company, the bigger the power. A no-brainer.
So … French law mandates that the company provide retraining and re-employment assistance. Retraining allowances / schemes can run up to three years, depending on “personnel categories”.
Too, in order to move things along, the company can offer buyouts to individuals being sacked but they are another story (OK, OK, I’m reaching the part that might interest readers here, hang on – grin -). Obviously whatever amount is offered by the company is always too low for the workers on the various hitlists, so they do what they can to force the “bosses” to make a better offer. The usual methods are the tried-and-true ones: plant picketing, sit-ins and taking the managers hostage for as long as necessary.
These are the clips you probably see on TV when “France” is mentioned, if ever: stacks of burning tires dramatically ejecting acrid black smoke into the atmosphere, building facades defaced with multicolored, sometimes profane graffiti denouncing the “bosses” and the “exploiting company”, large oil barrels (empty, cynics like Amerloque suppose) barring gates and entryways in the event that the “bosses send in the capitalist-dominated instrument of repression (i.e., the cops)” to “stop social progress and justice for the downtrodden working classes.”
Most primetime newsreaders regurgitate the above tripe as long as the “occupation” goes on, which means that on every news program for months on end, the audiences are forced to listen to Marxist propaganda, since there are several “social conflicts” going on simultaneously.
When the workers go to town on an American company – usually by holding one or more US managers hostage – the US head office orders the French head office to sue the unions, to request police evacuation, and to keep negotiating with the strikers until a compromise is reached. This course of action has had mixed results, but one consequence is crystal clear: American firms are pulling out of France if they have to / can, while others are simply rethinking their plans for investing in the country.
The unions don’t seem to understand that when “bosses” sit down to lunch, share a few drinks, or play a few rounds of golf, one major topic of conversation just might be the unions’ activities against companies in France. In the circles that Amerloque frequents / has frequented, he is invariably asked about this. Maybe the unions –do- understand, but they don’t give a damn ?
The upshot of all this is that in some circumstances the workers negotiate and come to an agreement with the company on the size of the individual buyout (sometimes triple the original offer) , while in other cases (the Americans, Germans and Indians) the bosses say “Look, that’s our final offer. Take it or leave it.”
Sooo… (here we are, dear readers !) how have the unions reacted to these tactics ? By “getting tough”. About three years ago (just before Sarkozy’s election) Amerloque was flabbergasted to see and hear on TV:
“The workers at Suchandsuch Chemical Products Company in Northern Podunk, on strike for six weeks, are putting pressure on their bosses to increase the size of the buyout offer. The union leaders have declared that they have wired together barrels containing dangerous chemicals and chemical products. In the event the negotiations are unsuccessful, they will set off explosives which will ensure that the contents of the barrels are dumped into the nearby river as well as released into the atmosphere.” A, union official mouthing threats is then shown.
Wow ! (By the way, Madame Amerloque, a perfectly normal and reasonable French lady 99.9% of the time, took one look, was enraged and said “Who do these people think they are ? Send in the Army, with loaded weapons !”)
What was the Government’s reaction ?
The Minister for Industry went on TV and said “Now, now, let the negotiating process take its course.”
The Ministry of the Interior send a bus of robocop-clad riot police to park outside the factory.
The Company went to the Government and said “Help !”, and the Government responded “You’re on your own !”
The Company then went to court, which said that it had no “competence” in the matter.
That was it. (sigh) The Company caved in a few weeks later and offered a higher buyout, which was accepted. (When the explosives were subsequently checked by the bomb squad(s), they were found to be … live. Not fakes.)
Amerloque – sometimes in a “naïve American” mode even after over forty years here – was expecting to see enormous headlines in the daily newspapers and magazines, on the lines of:
“Environmental terrorism appears!”, or, in the rightwing press, “Marxist workers resort to environmental terrorism !”, or even on TV a documentary like “Why are the workers using such threats ? Are they really at the end of their rope(s) ? Are there no other alternatives ?”.
Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Softpedaled all around. Environmental blackmail has now become a “standard” union negotiating technique in France. It occurs with depressing frequency: sometimes the explosives are real, sometimes they aren’t.
How did some companies react ? Well, French law provides for job reclassification, right. If Amerloque recalls correctly, Mittal, the steel company, was the first to read the law very, very carefully … (grin)
As the “workers” were planning to occupy a Mittal Steel plant which was scheduled for closure, the company said: “In accordance with the law, we have a job for you ! We can offer you the very same position that we are eliminating, in one of our factories. You can be a foundry worker / administrative assistant / production technician in Mangalore / Cochin / Mumbai. You’ll be making, oh, about 1/8th or 1/9th of your current salary. Of course, we’ll be happy to throw in a few rupees for relocation costs.”
There were no takers – just a huge brouhaha in the press and on TV. The workers want to court – it’s legal, sez the court. Since then we have been subjected to reports about Renault offering redundant workers jobs in Romania and Bulgaria, or Peugeot offering Russia and Slovakia, all at about 1/6th or 1/7th or so of current salary. Other (both foreign and French, big and small) companies have been proposing Tunisia, the UAE, Vietnam, and other places in the Third World.
Yet, strangely enough, we haven’t heard – and do not currently hear – about unions resorting to environmental blackmail. Neither in the past nor currently. It’s always buried in the inside pages of the papers.
One asks oneself if it is a particularly French phenomenon. (sigh)
Best,
L’Amerloque
Amerloque 20100918 13h20 Paris time (CET)
“We’ve been through the dark days secure in the knowledge that our cause is great, our goal is true. We don’t need to fundamentally transform America. We need to restore America.”
– – – Sarah Palin, 17 September 2010
Hi, Amerloque. I have been a freelancer for 31 years now, and it is entirely immaterial to me whether management or the unions succeeded in blowing each others’ brains out. The former (if with larger firms) pay my bills when and if they have a dicey project to bid after they have already fired anyone who actually feels at home bidding the work at hand. The latter make projects easier to bid as they have stacks of historical workhour allocation data on file going back decades so that I know with a high level of exactitude how long any task on the jobsite will take and therefore how much such tasks will cost.
The Tom and Jerry cartoon of labour relations as playing out now in the West is having the same result as in the 1920’s: declining wages, relocation of Western firms to other lands (then it was Japan, Nationalist China, and the Third World country that was immediately post-Weimar Germany, Mexico, and Argentina). The net result is lower pay for all and destruction of national finances and infrastructure.
I don’t know what to do about it. Neither sides’ mythologies or doctrines do I find especially appealing. All I can speak to is what I have experienced, as both sides of the fence have been liars since Day One and care more about ideology than getting the job done and getting paid. This is one of the reasons I try to stick to smaller firms with no corporate culture whatever, nor possessed of interests beyond which football team is taking on which the coming Sunday. There is no reason why management personnel ought to be considered deserving beneficiaries of a living wage any more than should the people doing the work to get the goods out the door to the customer.
My upper-echelon manager little brother informed me his leadership position supplied non-quantifiable benefit to his employer and therefore the position was not subject to cost-benefit analysis on a yield per workhour expended basis. I informed him that therefore the logical and proper thing EDS should do is not pay him at all. I don’t know why he hung up on me.
It would seem to me that there is no basis for national loyalties if there are no corresponding corporate loyalties to such concepts as nationhood and putting the welfare of one’s one country before others. I therefore entirely applaud Ms. Palin’s comment, and also realize that faction has not the horsepower from a pragmatic standpoint to turn things around without getting lots of people injured, imprisoned and killed needlessly. As with Islamist Middle East radicals, I have as yet to see their plans for industrial development and raising the collective national standard of living. This owes to neither having plans or the capabilities for creating them except those based on revenge. The Dem’s have an industrial plan called “globalization,” the modus operandi of which you neatly described. If I could live well there on local wages and if I had the language and social skills, I think it would be super to work in the Czech Republic or St. Petersburg.
I feel exactly like the Indian chief at the end of “Last of the Mohicans” (there are plenty of Mohicans, they just moved to Canada with the Mohawks and Micmacs LOL): I don’t now what to do. I am not convinced any of the existing parties have any useful idea as to how to address the problem of providing necessary economic reparative action either. It is as likely that Sarah Palin gets communist Chinese bribe money as it was that Tip O’Neill along with Nixon and Agnew received the same (normalizing relations with Red China required bipartisan action, then as now, after all), so I am not optimistic about the prospect of reversal of current industrial prospects for the West. All that saves us is the communist world’s educational systems are totally useless when it comes to fomenting the capacity for innovation and creative thought, as typically educators in ideological dictatorships of necessity have to be stupider than a bag of hammers just to survive.
Edward, you might get a kick out of Viz’s “Simon’s Snowman.” He’s a chip off the old Himalayan glacier, ‘e is:
http://www.viz.co.uk/strips.html
(you have to scroll down then select; the others aren’t half-bad, either. They are totally bad LOL)
Aramaic?
So it is.
http://www.lohud.com/article/20100909/NEWS01/9100307/Pace-professor-s-film-traces-Kol-Nidre-s-origin-impact
Hello Questioning Bruin !
on September 18, 2010 at 10:42 pm
///Aramaic?///
Years ago a very good Jewish friend and I were comparing notes on religious ceremonials. We were discussing how much religion had influenced irredentism throughout the ages.
I, the Roman Catholic, pointed out that the “Kyrie Eleison” in the Roman Catholic mass was in Greek and meant “Lord have mercy.” The remainder of the Mass (at the time) was in Latin.
He stated that the “Kol Nidre” for Yom Kippur was in Aramaic.
All these years (that was in 1962 or so –grin-) I’ve though that and it didn’t come up until relatively recently (1995 or so) when Amerloque in his professional capacity was introduced to an originally Christian Franco-Syrian philosopher who writes about topics such as “solus ipse”. When Amerloque learned that he was one of the few living philosophers who is fluent in neo-Aramaic (due to his original religion) he asked him about the Kol Nidre. He confirmed Aramaic.
Just looked – Wiki says the same.
Very few Roman Catholics nowadays know that the Kyrie is Greek, if they even know what the hell Latin is, given the reforms in the liturgy made by Vatican 2. (grin) Current Pope Benedict’s “motu proprio” concerning the Tridentine Mass brings Latin – and its Greek components – back into the public eye.
Best,
L’Amerloque
Re previous post on the Bakken Formation:
http://climatechangedispatch.com/politics-propaganda/7694-what-the-adminstration-and-environmentalists-dont-want-you-to-know
“The Bakken Formation touted in a chain e-mail isn’t the world’s largest oil reserve. The amount of oil it contains, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, is less than one one-hundredth of the estimate cited in the e-mail.”
Looks like the rumours of an impending oil glut have been greatly extrapolated.
(And there was me thinking extrapolation was the preserve of the The Church of Global Warming.) 😉
http://www.factcheck.org/2009/03/us-offshore-oil-reserves/
JoNova has the latest on Matt and Janet Thompson who are about to loose their farm thanks to eco-fascists. Joanne has issued an appeal on their behalf for financial help – donations can be made using the PayPal button on the linked page.
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/09/4-days-notice-the-thompsons-are-served-notice-of-eviction/
Hi criticalThinker !
on September 19, 2010 at 3:53 am
While “factcheck” is probably right on this, one must remember that it is financed almost 100% by the Annenberg family foundations. (Check out Walter Annenberg in Wiki.) It relies far too heavily in the “New York Times”, in Amerloque’s opinion. (grin)
From here in Paris, the NY Times hasn’t the faintest idea of what’s going on. The vast majority of their articles about Paris contains at least one material error (which is rarely, if ever, corrected).
Ask them about the article they recently wrote about the Opposition leader here in France . The article repeatedly referred to the individual as “Martin Aubry”. It was only after a general outcry that the NYT corrected the name for, you see, the person was __not__ the male “Martin” but the female “Martine”. The leader of the Opposition is a woman not a man ! Some “fact checking”, eh ?
Or ask the NYT about the time a while back that they published a forged letter from the Mayor of Paris. Only after the Mayor’s office asked “What the f are you doing ?” did the NYT realize that it had been had, bigtime. Some “fact checking”, eh ?
As an American resident of almost five decades here in Paris, I can state with some certainty that it has very little idea of what’s going on in Paris and France.
So why should I believe anything they say about Catholics, or World War Two, or California, or Washington, or finance ?! Or Obama ? Ot global warming ? (grin)
The NYT is definitely not worth the paper it’s printed on. It’s parochial, racist, and partisan.
Best,
L’Amerloque
L’Amerloque,
You still have this vestigial belief in the professionalism of journalism. It died with all those kids doing media studies. Two sources? You gotta be kidding. We’re much too slick nowadays …
Pointman
As the man said, it’s not that they’re Shallow, it’s about the “appearance of worth”.
Pointman
Mornin’ ya’ll.
I suspect you folks are all over this story by now but just in case allow me to provide the link to it on WUWT:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/18/urgent-a-call-to-action-for-the-wuwt-community/#comments
Dr. Dave says:
September 19, 2010 at 5:23 am
Already there Dave but good to see WUWT is on board.
Pointman
Hi, Amerloque! I would feel more completely stoopid than usual about the language of the Kol Nidre, but a lot of my Jewish buddies don’t know it is in Aramaic, either.
I am about three hours from chow, so my outlook is becoming somewhat brighter regardless LOL. Haven’t fasted specifically for this holiday in years, either, which is something else a bit weird about this time of year for me. So….
How about a spooky scarey Jewish folk tale from Poland ?
http://www.kazunderworld.com/animation/hungryhorse.swf
Think of the hungry horse as an allegory for industrial development….
Amerloque, I think the Pope is on to something. Also, other traditional churches are enjoying something of aa resurgence after so much domination in the spiritual marketplace by what I call the “flying saucer” churches. Young people want for their children now what their WW II era grandparents had.
The glut’s been on for nearly a decade now, criticalthinker. The only thing supporting prices now is the cost of money floated by derivatives traders associated with the trades and government taxation to support renewables LOL
You might want to follow fluctuations in the spot and futures prices at http://www.downstreamtoday.com instead of the New Yawk Kite Exchange.
By rights, the spot price of a barrel of Brent light crude should be at $17/barrel whereas natural gas is already where it was in 2002, under 4 bucks a dekatherm.
NoIdea
Just thought you might like to see this from JD’s Blog by RR
Troll comments must be deconstructed just in case normal folks think that they are correct.
Ridicule is one of their weapons and it also works well against them as gizzard found out recently [Thanks to Scouse Billy] Report Recommend
realityreturns
55 minutes agoRecommended by
2 peoplehi msher
To put it the other way round, we win here but this is our territory. We are now winning hearts and minds of the people……one important thing is to try to keep our many sympathetic lurkers well informed. The trolls are an impediment to our message thus, both debate and battle with them is needed to keep them losing.
I do not believe that one can debate with a bigot like bje or a green activist like aphid but I admire you for trying and you do it extremely well. I don’t always have time to have a long debate BUT I will not let the evil trolls get away with their B/S.
I believe that the loss of noidea was very sad as he used to wind the trolls up in knots in the nicest possible way. I wish I had that skill!!!
Tevye the Milkman Bear
Loved it all bear, thanks!
Mazal tov, bejabbers!
Ed.
Hiya Meltemian.
Thank you for the kind words reposted from RR at the DT.
Its is a shame that the format at the DT was ruined with the disqus thing, it no longer lends its self to long discussions on interesting topics. It doesn’t inspire one to write poems only to see them slide of the front page and into the depths of obscurity.
I have noticed other DT pages now have proper timestamps, I have noticed other disqus pages with 100 comments per page.
Why does JD still have all the worst features of disqus…?
GLOBAL CLIMATE DISRUPTION (anagrammatically)
Inspired by AJB in the comments at:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/16/the-morphology-of-global-warming/
I mount radical bilge plots
Carbon militia gulped lots
Guilt balanced oil imports
Liar’s gambit uncoiled plot
Total carbon pugilism lied
Stall looming pubic tirade
Giant custom billiard pole
Blip ousted magician troll
Limping coot radiates bull
Mortician adopts gullible
Gloom slid turbine capital
Balanced stimuli grip tool
Imploding ritual obstacle
Marital lip bung diet cools
Gumption reload ballistic
Meatball droop linguistic
Unit proclaimed globalist
Political blaming dourest
Tabloid replications glum
Totalling periodicals bum
Dourest obligate pill Manic
I slim grout balloted panic
Al god multipliers Botanic
Bulldog elitist panoramic
Ignoble dictatorial slump
Despotic orbital mulligan
Global idiot cultrine spam
Bungle politics drat, lo I am?
NoIdea
“The state of Texas today sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in a federal appeals court in Washington DC, claiming four new regulations imposed by the EPA are based on the ‘thoroughly discredited’ findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and are ‘factually flawed,’ 1200 WOAI news reports”
http://radio.woai.com/cc-common/news/sections/newsarticle.html?feed=119078&article=7606198
Walt, we had a kid at our school who was half Catholic, half Jewish. He ended up being nicknamed OyVayMaria and wore it with pride. He was one of the good guys.
Pointman
Pointman, that wouldn’t be me. It was a massive fight for me from 9th grade until graduation and beyond. I’ve not touched base with the Wyandotte crowd from that era since the early Eighties. The number of times the other kids set me up for either a beating or for committing (almost) an imprisonable offence are beyond counting. If it weren’t for the protective after-school job courtesy of the Shugol and Rose families at a small Jewish haberdasher, I’m sure I would have come to a bad end long ago.
Got lots of them back later as a narcotics informer for the old Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and at college for the Michigan State Police “Red Squad.” That “saga” isn’t over with yet. I had lots of incentives for enlisting during the Viet Nam conflict not least of which was relative physical safety LOL
Bit of a different world now. I don’t want the old days back. It wasn’t “American Dreams” or “The Wonder Years” back then. If I learned anything at all from those years, it is that upward mobility does not necessarily make people better persons. Usually quite the opposite is true. You end up with triumphalist idiots with budgets for expanding their capacity for inflicting chaos onto the masses instead. Also, people don’t normally grow into their responsibilities. They shrink them to suit their whims and near-nonexistent commitment to due diligence, such as they are.
Shrinking one’s responsibilities to suit one’s whims are exactly what all this communist “anything goes” crap was and is about. If one is ever invented, don’t ever let me near a time machine, especially if I appear to be armed.
Half the psychological drive in support of AGW horsepoop is ethical displacement in the monds of grotesque secular monsters seeking expiation for their sins with the last shred of decency which remains in their addled brains, but surprise! even that urge is defective. One of the most irritating aspects of listening to AGW’ers spittle-spew forth on how we have to clean up our act is that most I’ve met are alcoholic dopefiend divorced wifebeating child support skipdebt court-ordered 12-step unemployables on state support or worse, at college with student loans they never intend to repay. Many of them, it seems obvious to me, also are using their greentard affiliation to maintain and channel their dopedealing activities in the more lucrative professional, governmental and university markets.
They say, show me someone who enjoyed their schooldays and I’ll show you a bully. In a sense, I suppose it’s true but it’s not really. Imagine what a mess the bullies made of their adult lives. If you learned to stick together, it was fun. Friends for life.
Pointman
In other words, if you want to eliminate Greenwar altogether, make the continuance of their 501 c3 tax exempt status contingent on their membership being able to pass a standard prison-style urine test LOL That would do for them in about three tests or so.
I also don’t know why they remain as a registered charity on a not-for-profit basis anyway. They seem to me to be a political action committee or PAC, so they ought to be paying taxes, right? Maybe they have a fix in.
Nah. That never happens.
Okay Walt, the time approaches. Where are you going to break fast and what exactly are you going to have?
Pointman
G’day All,
Chapter 12 and Chapter 13 of Pointman’s Line of Descent are out now.
Thanks once again Pointy – a cracking read!
Pointman, to be fair, the upheaval of the time put all us kids in the position of being ants on an anthill visited with a very large firecracker. All of us were under massive duress so it was a five to ten year run of sauve qui peut. Some came through it better than others. None of us came through unscathed, at least not from Detroit. It has been a non-stop mess since at least 1967 there, and even in that, it was a bit of a special case of how not to do anything governmentally.
Stunning disaster, really. It’s an abject lesson to the world in urban disaster with our lot as the lab rats for the demonstration test run.
Walt, when you step back from it, who’s ideal life would you rather have had? Rather be me with some baggage than someone I don’t know.
Pointman
This is sort of cool. Mickey Mousified, but an attempt at integrity in portraying the reality:
http://www.palladiumboots.com/explorations
I would rather have taught music as I was training to do up until the ’67 riots when all that became beyond meaningless to me.
What is so funny about the above Palladium footage is you can’t really grasp just how effing dangerous Detroit is without having been there at least once. It isn’t like Manhattan or London where scores are settled between people who know each other, it has in addition its own background noise of random chaos which seemingly can arise out of the most mundane and harmless circumstance that is distinctly and solely Detroit.
My flesh crawls just watching the above cutesy footage of what potential Detroit has for the future. Um, not if there are not police to witness that future, guys and gals. That was the problem even back when Detroit had money and people.
Morning All,
I’m going to be quiet for a while – I’m off to read “Line of Descent”
Hooray – I’ve been waiting for this.
The alleged changing seasons
IF warming is happening then according to many sites and Izen we should be noticing an increase in the amount of frost free days.
What is happening this year?
It seems that winter (we seem to have skipped autumn/fall) is here very early in the UK, with snow reports from the north.
Spring is very cold and late in Tasmania.
It is also snowing a month early in India.
Just where are all the warming seasonal increases that we are told ARE happening?
Is it unusual for it to be snowing in both hemispheres and in the middle?
NoIdea
From
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/16/the-morphology-of-global-warming/#comment-486443
AJB says:
September 18, 2010 at 11:09 pm
Inspired by NoIdea’s verse IV …
The Balloonist’s Daughter
Bald unripe climatologist,
bilingual competitors lad.
Subtropical model tailing,
collapsible tritium gonad.
Platinum bridal ecologist,
boasting coral multiplied.
Marital bodices polluting,
coastal troubling implied.
Timorous billing placated,
collating polarities dumb.
Glamor biscuit pollinated,
dialing courtliest aplomb.
Abrupt oscillated moiling,
logistic ballad importune.
Cordial lumpiest bloating,
pleading altruistic bloom.
Glum pediatric balloonist,
lubrication galled impost.
Placid tribunal gloomiest,
impartial beclouding lost.
Modulating calibre pistol,
ballistic proton lug aimed.
Diabolic seating rump toll,
lusting lip oil cobra tamed!
For AJB with many thanks.
[i] Inspired inspiration inspiring [/i]
Anagrammatically awesome and perfectly defined
Ideally metered, superbly writ and lovingly rhymed
That you inspired me, to inspire you, is truly sublime
Ashamed to think outside the box, it becomes a crime
If our thoughts are not green and warm inside our mind
Then we must be eradicated by the brain cops to be kind
Or it is time to get like them? Talk hot air from our behind!
NoIdea
Pointman
I have to say I am hooked on your book. Unlike many action thrillers there is no need for the reader to allow artistic license (to kill?) to interfere with physics or reality.
Each chapter leaves me waiting and wanting the next, if I had the book, it would have been read cover to cover long ago.
NI
Pointman
Two great chapters!
Keep them coming.
Hi NoIdea
on September 19, 2010 at 6:01 pm
Wonderful poetry !
Should these be reminding Amerloque of Datsuzoku ?
Is this what Bashō meant (for haiku, at any rate) by “becoming” vs. “making”. ?
Best,
L’Amerloque
I take the worthwhile liberty of repeating a post from the current Booker piece related to government energy policy. This is consistent with repeating good posts for the new starters. Enjoy……. We are winning
scott_east_anglia
9 hours ago
Recommended by
73 people
The climatology field has not yet developed to the point where it can make reliable predictions about future climate change with enough warning to allow time for useful proactive adaptations. It is therefore ludicrous to give credence to alarmist predictions over the next century.
Around the 17th century we had a cold spell (the Little Ice Age – LIA) when the Thames and other bodies of water froze in cold Winters, allowing ice fairs to be held on them. Such ice fairs have not been possible since the early 19th century. Therefore it is indisputable that there has been a period of warming over the last couple of centuries as we recovered from that cold spell. It is alarmist shroud waving over the cause of the warming that has caused such a panic.
There appears to be a longish cycle of the solar magnetic field that has just peaked. It oscillated through the warmer bronze age, a cooler iron age, the warmer Roman empire, when the Romans brought vineyards to England, the Dark Ages, the Mediaeval Warm Period when there were vineyards in England during Chaucer’s time, the Little Ice Age as mentioned above, and now our little warm spurt which according to satellite data has, temporarily at least, ceased.
The IPCC computer models did not predict the cessation of the warming trend, which illustrates that something is driving the climate that the models do not know about. In addition, we are once more starting to hear predictions of cooling and maybe a repeat of the Little Ice Age. Deja vous anyone?
Computer models do not produce evidence – they only produce whatever their programmers want them to produce, in what is therefore a circular argument. So far the models have only proved that the computers are working, and that the output outside of their training data sets has been wrong every time, so far.
Furthermore, there is no evidence, despite every effort to finesse it, of an increased greenhouse effect in the atmosphere (hot spots in the troposphere) that was predicted by the computer models. However, we don’t hear much about that from the warming industry.
Meanwhile the case for the AGW hypothesis remains an argumentum ad ignorantium fallacy where it is claimed it must be true because they (the warming industry) allegedly can’t think of anything else. This is equivalent to blaming witches for crop failures in the middle ages.
Unfounded fear of man-made global warming, rather than the climate change itself, is the problem.
It had been common knowledge for a couple of years before Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’ came out that over geological time periods the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere lagged behind temperature changes, typically by 800 years, so was driven by temperature rather than causing it. His graph was therefore a falsehood. CO2 has never driven climate change, or the Earth would not have cooled as it has after every past warming episode – runaway warming would have occurred instead, a long time ago.
Temperature and other data do not say anything about their causes. In addition correlation is not the same as causation, so neither settle anything either way
CO2 is already absorbing almost all of the energy that there is to be had in the relevant bands. Moreover, it does so fairly close to the Earth’s surface. The effect is logarithmic so increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere now only has a slight effect. In addition, CO2 and the other trace gases are pretty unimportant as greenhouse gases go. The warming industry has been concentrating on the wrong atmospheric processes. Water vapour and the atmospheric processes associated with it, especially negative feedback from the cooling effect of low level clouds, seem to be a more fruitful line of research.
Svensmark, a Danish physicist, has found empirical evidence in support of his hypothesis that a weaker solar magnetic field allows more high energy cosmic particles to reach the lower atmosphere, where they enhance the conditions for low level cloud formation, leading to cooling, and vice versa. This has been covered in the book ‘The Chilling Stars’ by Svensmark and Calder.
Any calculation of greenhouse warming based on CO2 alone does not come up with an alarming figure. Hence the assumption of positive forcing from water vapour, which is the only thing producing a ‘doomsday’ scenario. There is no empirical evidence to justify such an assumption.
Furthermore, there is no correlation between temperature and CO2 concentration over geological time-scales that supports the contention that CO2 drives climate change. Even if there was, it would not be the same as causation.
In addition, the homogenisation of the surface temperature data was not peer reviewed and there are allegations of the adjustment of data to fit theories rather than the other way round. This is part of Dr Bellamy’s, “Fiddling while the Earth doesn’t burn.” The best example was the hockey stick, which was one of the most spectacular scientific blunders of all time.
There appears to be a roughly 60 year oscillation superimposed on the upward trend in the homogenised surface temperature data, which is explained by the Pacific and Atlantic decadal oscillations. On the last down-swing that ended in the mid 1970s (while CO2 levels continued to rise) we heard portents of doom about an impending ice age. The last upswing that ended over 10 years ago according to satellite readings triggered the current scare about global warming. One thing that stands out is that there is no anthropogenic warming signature in the temperature oscillations since the end of the LIA.
Without real (empirical) evidence of more than an insignificant amount of AGW due to CO2 the warming industry remains dead in the water.
Unheralded in the MSM, solar observers predicted a reduction in the sun’s magnetic field about now, which has come to pass as evinced by a paucity of sunspots. In the past the phenomenon has coincided with cooling periods, including the Little Ice Age, as per Svensmark’s hypothesis. We could therefore be looking at some real cooling during the next few decades.
In addition, the very low sunspot level might be the start of another Maunder Minimum, and a precursor to a repeat of the LIA. There also appear to be additional longer cycles which are linked to ice ages and warm periods.
Incidentally, there may be evidence that the iron age started because a temperature downturn disrupted the flow of tin to the Middle East, forcing metalworkers in Cyprus in particular to seek alternatives to bronze.
The agrarian and industrial revolutions occurred in Britain while the world recovered from the LIA. The industrial revolution was predicated on two things in particular. The first was an increase in access to energy from burning fossil fuels instead of wood and charcoal, and the second was the development and application of scientific and technical knowledge to harness and make use of energy, where steam power in particular was the major enabler, along with technical ingenuity that led to power weaving looms, blast furnaces, and today’s computers, for example. One direct outcome is our ability to support a large increase in the world-wide human population, an increase that is directly dependent for its existence on our increased energy consumption and our artful application of it.
Some people are determined to ignore the bigger picture and to link the slight global warming since the 19th century to the industrial revolution, extrapolating a doomsday climate scenario despite a total lack of real evidence that one begot the other in any significant way. In particular they tend to focus on the years since about 1975 and to ignore all else, primarily because it doesn’t fit their theory. They have built an entire industry on the hypothesis. However, they cannot find empirical evidence to support their increasingly threadbare theoretical conjecture.
A false perception was created in our society that there was a defined, legitimate job to do, based on sound science. In fact the carbon dioxide global warming concept had become fixed in people’s minds as a result of relentless propaganda generated by those with a great variety of pre-existing agendas – some legitimate, some less so, for example: energy efficiency, reduced dependence on Middle Eastern oil, dissatisfaction with industrial society (neo-pasteralism), international competition, governmental desires for enhanced revenues (carbon taxes), and bureaucratic desires for enhanced power.
The whole western lifestyle is predicated on burning fuel to produce a lot of energy. Take that energy away and our lifestyle would collapse. Without electricity, for example, everything stops – literally. By claiming that we could be destroying the world by pumping combustion products from burning fossil fuels into the air, anti-west movements can attack us at the roots.
Various groups that would not normally give each other the time of day banded together in an unprecedented manner behind the CO2 flag, some good, some bad, some, like HRH Prince Charles, well-meaning but mistaken, but all with their own agendas. This has generated political implications.
Once politicians were involved, especially from the left, money followed in huge quantities. This created a ‘positive forcing’ and blew the whole structure out of all proportion. A lot of people now depend on the AGW industry for their living, creating a vast vested interest. Worse, the EU has bought into the illusion, which is dangerous since it is not subject to democratic control. There are also a lot of ex-communist apparatchiks seeking new ways to power since the USSR collapsed, and who see democracy as a problem, not a solution.
Unfortunately, after a huge campaign over decades, including in the education system, by many organisations with many different agendas (mostly anti-west or anti-industrialisation) there are a large number of brainwashed voters out there who erroneously believe that mankind has some control over these natural climatic changes, and where the voters go, the politicians follow, and they are not all benign beings under democratic control.
It now appears that the cover was recently blown on a covert ‘Moriarity’ organisation intent on imposing a non-democratic New World Government on the West initially through carbon rationing. It was hidden the the text of the draft Copenhagen treaty document. Similar intentions were revealed in the document published with a restricted circulation for the recent Bali conference. Such a mindset would suit ex soviet bloc apparatchiks intent on punishing us for the collapse of their beloved Soviet Union, and, of course, it was attractive to Bottler Brown and his kind.
Reducing energy consumption willy nilly in the short term appears to mean that the size of the world-wide human population that we can support must also reduce. An analogy would be forcing agriculture back to wooden ploughs, thus reducing the food supply, and therefore the number of people that can be fed. If so, then those who talk about short-term carbon saving measures (ie reducing overall energy consumption) are also talking about sentencing people and their children to death in their millions or perhaps even billions, while dismantling western civilisation and wasting trillions of money, all for a negligible impact on the climate. Without real evidence of significant AGW, and since the climate appears to be about to cool anyway, if enacted this could eventually land our beloved leaders into the dock at somewhere like the Hague.
As a final note, if the UK stopped CO2 production tomorrow, then China’s increasing CO2 production would cancel out the sacrifice within a year. We would have destroyed our country for nothing. Other countries are laughing at the west and its AGW illusions all the way to the bank.
Reality is dawning in the corridors of power, and in academia. Face and reputation saving exits are being sought, and taken. We are seeing the beginning of a paradigm shift away from the IPCC alarmism, and towards an approach of adaptation to climate change (if any) rather than the hubris that we can control it.
However, politically it is too soon just to to dump the Zeitgeist of CAGW due to CO2 . That will have to be fed in gently as perceptions gradually change in the electorate as it dawns on them that writing computer programs to produce alarmist output does not affect the climate. So meanwhile we can pretend to blame the Chinese for warming, floods and all the rest of the alarmist stuff, while slowly withdrawing from the nutty renewable energy sources ideas, especially as the odds are that we heading for a cooling phase.
That’s a good post m
Hiya Amerloque
I had never come across the term Datsuzoku before. I did a little search and I found…
Datsuzoku – Freedom from habit or formula. Escape from daily routine or the ordinary. This principle describes the feeling of surprise and bit of amazement we feel when one realizes they can have freedom from the conventional.
Surprise is the immediate effect of an expression involving Datsuzoku. It involves a transcendence of conventional ideas and traditional usage. One should be astonished in its presence and realize a freedom from restrictive laws or any kind of bondage in its use. It may be the seed-bed of ultimate creativity.
I am astonished and surprised that my poems should remind you of such a wonderful concept that I had never heard of.
Many thanks for the introduction to Datsuzoku and Bashō.
NI
Practically speaking, renewables of the wind and solar variety are well overdue for the long drop as the public realizes that a slow plane crash of declining oil and natural gas futures on a wholesale basis and invariance on coal prices corresponds directly with an at-the-meter rate increase only because of the uneconomic subsidies being paid to support renewables out of the ratepayers’ bills.
As it is, there are between 40 and 80 large crude and CNG vessels at any given time anchored in the Arabian Gulf fully loaded for no other reason than to artificially keep futures and derivatives returns in existence at all. India was quite right in banning such futures and derivatives tomfoolery. This has been going on since –surprise!–2006-2007. Eventually, international law of the sea will catch up with these ships’ captains and shipowners: for now, the IMO is stumped as to which jurisdiction these racketeers and market manipulators should be busted.
Again, by rights and in a non-manipulated market, wholesale Brent light should be at 17 bucks US/bbl. Natural gas is already at 2001-2002 levels.
Should be “in which jurisdiction”
Amazing poetry, NI. Many thanks for sharing!
I am still stunned on reflection at who has a voice now in energy policy development versus the bad old days when competence and experience were still part of the decision-making loop LOL I vote for a licenced HR professional conducted triage on who gets to put their two bits into the argument versus who cannot.
From a legal point of view, no scientist ought to have a voice. If a group of illustrious Nobel Prize-winning climatologists got together to pull a permit to build their own nuke plant, they would be laughed out of the regulators’ offices.
Why bother to go to the trouble of getting credentials and gathering experience when some talking head on the Greenturd Channel can destroy thirty years’ work with but a clever remark dropped by a photogenic guest celebutard?
Conducting it should be instead of conducted. Time for more coffee….
Don’t worry – scientists have now found the answer to all that nasty warming!
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geoffreylean/100054264/herbal-cure-for-wind-may-lessen-global-warming/
manonthemoor says:
September 19, 2010 at 10:35 pm
A remarkable piece and ties in Politics, geology, climatology, history……..Chris Huhne should be made to read it again and again till he has it verbatim and then be able to quote it backwards………….then we can begin teaching him the meaning of the piece!
Thank you Scott, through Motm!
Is Scott……..suffolkboy? and if he isn’t………………….they’re not all thick in Fenshire are they…………………..from smart aleck northerner.
:>)))))
Ed.
NI, Mel – really glad you’re enjoying it.
Pointman
Great cattle methane limerick, NI. Goofry Lean’s on the loose again, innit he?
Hello Clown !
With the namechange, shouldn’t thr avatar image have a red nose ?!
(grin)
Best,
L’Amerloque
Thanks Walt, have another…
Loony Lean is on the loose
Is it a man or duck or goose?
ManBearPig is out of luck
Goofy is now ManGooseDuck
Windy, smelly and obtuse
20 or 30 hits of 4-way California sunshine would probably do a lot to reduce cattle methane emissions too, but it wouldn’t keep them from calling out for takeaway pizza.
Actually, we had a black and white TV when Bozo cartoons were on the telly. We kids even then wondered about the sexual dynamic between Butchie Boy and Bozo, such as it was. I’m not one of them, either LOL
Good news on the carbon market in Oz here from Point Carbon. I’d be dumping the environmentally responsible investments from the governmental pension fund portfolios now, methinks:
Click to access 1.1469458!CMANZ20100827.pdf
RGGI’s bottomed at a buck eighty six a tonne year reduction, while the European based tonne years of carbon reduction are still where they were in 2004. Heh, heh.
Even with all those taxpayer subsidies and insurance company underwriting, such a pity.
Well, following BHP CEO Marius Kloppers’ announcement he would accept a carbon tax, its likelihood in this country goes up. It’s a cynical move really: “Go ahead then Julia, impose a tax if you must. Oh and by the way, we own the world’s biggest uranium mine”
Oz 🙄
Now both France and Canada are totally out of carbon emission reduction credit trading officially, too. Oh, no! There goes the main financing option for windfarm and solar development! Bwoo hoo hoo!
WTF? on the link to the Oz carbon trading doc? Just copy and paste into your browser location slot, and the PDF download should work.
There’s something about guitarists …
Pointman
ESSAY IN A FEW PARAGRAPHS: On the ethical mentality of the “Family Guy” Obama-ite
Here is the at-present voluntary emissions and carbon and weather trading exchange in Chi-town. Interesting bit is the betting on disasters and their outcomes in terms of dollar amounts of incurred damages. Event trip points per billion dollars of damage reported yields a dividend to the investor. Cute, eh? Aren’t you happy your church invests in this type of thing, or your government employer pension fund?
http://www.ccfe.com/ccfe.jsf
Here’s the type clown I feel like being when I grow up.
http://www.nickbakay.com/archives/evil_clown/04/01
BTW, Mr. Born Again Libtard who made these priceless gems in the late Sixties and early Seventies (not Eighties and Nineties) then decided to marry a Mormon or somesuch after he made his nut is worth reading just for the sake of understanding in depth just who is actually behind these futures trading organizations. ALL these eco-twits, if not current substance abusers, are post- court-ordered 12-steppers.
“Officer, I am so sorry I got drunk and with my pen drove my intellectual bus into that school bus of children (which was us).”
Well, then why did he do it in the first place, right?
This stuff is funny and real and too right, and no one should have to apologize for describing things as they were, are, and will be, if that is how their own minds saw it at the time. The plain fact of the matter is that on balance, freedom of speech has to be Constitutionally defended at gunpoint against exactly this type of person who “reformed” himself, as they are the ones cruising through libraries checking out John dos Passos and Howard Fast and David Reitman then losing the books and paying for them out of their carbon trade earnings.
Or…you can hit the remote and go to the Disney Channel Futures Exchange where you can place your bets on the magnitude of the economic damage to be inflicted on Borneo or Sumatra or NYC by the next major storm or tidal wave.
This type trading/betting is nothing new. Just in case it is in the back of your mind, yes, Virginia, some disaster traders made bundles on 9/11. THOSE are the guys I want a piece of, any time, anywhere, any place.
Come to think of it, it probably would be no great shakes to track the bettors down. Take a few hours or so, maybe 40 to 80 poking through who was disaster futures trading at the time, who was playing the ponies then, who was the NASD registered dealer of record, and a quick consult with some IRS records.
Every SEC affiliated stock exchange has a closing agent of record who keeps track of this stuff.
Captain Sherlock, where are you? All is forgiven!
Not that it was a “conspiracy.” Some individual or group or individuals or corporate investors just did their daily thing and posted short or long against weather/disaster futures and made a bundle on a certain day in 2001.
Reminds me of W.C. Fields buying government bonds in the Third Reich, just in case the Nazis won WW II. My point is the carbon trader sorts play on everyone’s conscience when their investments are expressions of depths of cynicism which exceed the limits of my gallows humour….and they cannot see it. They are blind to their own iniquity.
Pointman says:
September 19, 2010 at 9:16 am
I had chili with lots of veggies and hot pastrami on black bread with Space Shuttle booster fuel otherwise known as horseradish and mustard, orange juice, raisin salad, half a truckload of insanely crunchy “natural” rockhard but tasty potato chip-o’s, pecan pie without the pectin (hartshorn for the crust), several pounds of raw carrots and celery while miking the chili, and half a gallon of vanilla soy milk.
Why there is no such thing as soy ice cream is beyond me. Silk makes really tasty soy milk which already tastes kinda sorta like ice cream.
G’day all,
Locust’s latest instalment in his China Blog is out now; you can view it here
Walt,
There is soy ice cream in China. I like it.
The hole in the ozone layer is shrinking!
Well that’s a relief:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1313599/Ozone-layer-longer-disappearing-return-strength-2048.html
Locusts, I wonder why there is none in the States or the UK. You would think someone would at least take a poke at frosted sherbets or somesuch. Maybe someone has already tried it on, and the Ninja cows got to ’em.
Hadn’t been to the Daily Mail for awhile. I fink I’ll take another shower, thanks LOL The critics are right, the Delirium Tremens is morphing into Viscount Rothermere’s monstrosity.
The DT has been running the footage of a spider eating a bird now for 8-10 months. How about running a video of several dozens of spiders eating one DT editor?
People get upset if you tell them you don’t “do” soda pop or ice cream here, for some reason. Both are nice, once or twice a year.
Nice piece, Locusts. It’s really more the Thirties for the Chinese than for us, innit? They’re just drilling themselves out from under, but they can see the light above. If the Chinese do get a chance at the New Jerusalem happening for them, I wonder if they will throw it away with quite the mindless abandon we did.
You should try on sleeping with full kit with a dozen other lads in a canvas-topped lorry (a Diesel “six-by” with turbocharger) driving around in circles all night. That’s a laugh riot, too, especially after the third night or so of it.
We’d pass a certain point several times a night and the local kids would step out and toss rotten mangoes at us. We got to tossing them back until there were twenty or so kids involved. Our C.O. finally got fed up with it and got us re-routed farther away from the wire. Having fun wasn’t authorized, apparently.
The C.O. had a point. They could have been grenades as likely as rotten mangoes.
Soy ice cream is all over the place. :>p Here’s a listing:
http://www.vegblog.org/archive/2001/04/23/a-rundown-of-soy-ice-creams/
“Go ahead then Julia, impose a tax if you must. Oh and by the way, we own the world’s biggest uranium mine” Oz
I’ll wager Julia’s regime will end up gutted like pigs by the time the dust settles on all this nonsense. Carbon taxes are all part and parcel of socialism’s relentless war on upward mobility so that they have an eternal supply of slaves to do their bidding, like lottery tickets and illegal drugs, the Red revolutionary’s mainstay for financing weapons purchases.
Sorta like if you want the “best” dope in the city, you go to the right social worker at the local men’s divorce shelter. Jobsworth job security is what Reds “invest” in, never mind if destroys the host civilization’s children en masse.
Do you fink that’s what the Bananastan war is about, keeping democracy safe for heroin dealers? I still don’t geddit. Not one poppy field has been plowed under. They are all intact.
Of the 48 Republicans seeking a seat in the coming mid term elections, only one was publicly pro AGW, Michael Castle. After nearly two decades and as the incumbent candidate for Delaware, he was seen as unbeatable. He just lost the nomination to another Republican, Christine O’Donnell, a very junior politician indeed. Politically, this is seismic.
There are a number of lessons to be learnt from this but the important one for every astute politician on either side of the left right divide is quite simple. Being pro AGW will lose you votes and being publicly anti AGW will gain you votes. In the run up to the first anniversary of Climategate, it shows how radically the political landscape has changed.
Pointman
“Climate Change Skeptics Sweeping GOP Senate Primaries.”
“This year, a host of Republican Senate hopefuls are trumpeting their rejection of climate science on the campaign trail.”
http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2010/09/20/20climatewire-climate-change-skeptics-sweeping-gop-senate-75251.html
Considering this report originates from the NY Times, the space given it to people who refuse to acknowledge the change in politics is understandable but it also hints at the previously unthinkable – the Democratic candidates are distancing themselves from CAGW too. Political survival trumps planetary survival …
Pointman
Here is a pungent and forthright response to Democratic anti-energy industry cant and kerfuffle from the seismic folks at “Finding Petroleum” Magazine.
http://network.findingpetroleum.com/profiles/blogs/so-long-its-been-good-to-know?xg_source=activity
Here also is THEIR take on underground carbon sequestration,complete with honest-to-Pete spreadsheets, designs and evaluations of long-term impact in PDF for you to download and read:
http://www.findingpetroleum.com/event/Carbon_capture_and_storage/365.aspx
Surprise! It’s not economic.
Why isn’t this type of definitive info referenced in the MSM? (sigh)
And who cares as long as there is “Kitty Throw?”
http://www.quickflashgames.com/games/kittythrow/
Both these optiions sound lucid and do-able. Interesting bit is that the Cambridge kid confirms crownarmourer’s and my earlier suspicions, that calcium carbonate is formed fairly quickly all on its own when too much CO2 is underground. Sez here it forms on its own in mine tailings LOL Ta-ra-ra- BOOM-dee-ay! No wonder the Dutch don’t want CCS in their backyard.
Click to access ccc.pdf
The Durham folks have a grand idea as well, get the North Sea producing again:
http://www.findingpetroleum.com/files/event15/durham.pptx
Odds are neither will happen.
Every crisis an opportunity eh, Walt? Deserves a thread on its own, that one… hmmm – Oz
Hello Kuma !
/// … like lottery tickets and illegal drugs, the Red revolutionary’s mainstay for financing weapons purchases.///
I have been given to understand that, after a hiatus of several years, “blood diamonds” are back in circulation in Europe. Dunno what they’d be financing, though. (grin)
/// People get upset if you tell them you don’t “do” soda pop or ice cream here, for some reason.///
Sno-cones ? (wide grin)
Cotton candy ? (wider grin)
Best,
L’Amerloque
Looks like the Chicago thug Obama’s buddies in Cambridge are pulling out the stops for the November elections:
“Economic panel says recession ended in June 2009
Panel declares recession ended in June 2009, marking longest downturn since World War II
WASHINGTON (AP) — The longest recession the country has endured since World War II ended in June 2009, a group that dates the beginning and end of recessions declared Monday.
The National Bureau of Economic Research, a panel of academic economists based in Cambridge, Mass., said the recession lasted 18 months. It started in December 2007 and ended in June 2009. Previously the longest postwar downturns were those in 1973-1975 and in 1981-1982. Both of those lasted 16 months. …/… ”
http://tinyurl.com/24e79wq
More lies from people who have never worked in their lives ?
How stupid do they think the American people are ?
A.I.O. !
All Incumbents Out !
Remember in November !
Howdy, Amerloque! Here’s some more gooder doo-doo about that there Cuccinelli-Mann lawsuit at University of Virginless.
http://www.c-ville.com/index.php?cat=141404064432695&ShowArticle_ID=11802308103825267
There’s even room for comment there. Ooooo. I wonder if they will run mine about the Hindenburg being filled with CO2 when it exploded. Hyulk!
Erm, any ideas on how to insert an umlaut over a letter?
Oom-pah-pah:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newsvideo/weirdnewsvideo/8013757/Oktoberfest-marks-its-200th-anniversary.html
Also:
Oops. Sorry, Ozboy.
Curses, foiled again! Cuccinelli is temporarily sidetracked…
http://www2.dailyprogress.com/news/2010/aug/30/11/judge-sides-uva-climate-case-dismissing-cuccinelli-ar-479678/
Hi Ursus !
///Erm, any ideas on how to insert an umlaut over a letter?///
(grin) On my French keyboard, it’s on the same key as the cincumflex.
Hit the diacritc, then the letter. ü/û
Keyboard reads, FWIW, (start in center, read right) T-Y-U-I-O-P-circumflex/umlaut-pound sterling/dollar
Probably not much help if you have a US keyboard, though. (sigh)
Best,
L’Amerloque
Various programs take over the keyboard with their own keyboard combinations. In MS Word, CTRL+SHFT+; then type u will do the trick. Otherwise, just hold down ALT and type 0252. For a full list, see here – Oz
@- Noidea
Congratulations on the poems at WUWT – nice to see some creativity there rather than the usual claque-fest.
I haven’t forgotten about the tide-gauge sea level rise issue. I expect you saw the commentary on the data at the Pangea site that I tracked the Liverpool data back to.
The point being that if you have many data sources, each with its own local variation, but all sharing a common inherent trend, then it IS possible to extract that trend from the multiplicity of data in a manner that isn’t possible if you only have a few sources.
I see the zombie facts are back again, the scott-anglia piece is well written, but the refrain of-
Its all natural cycles
Co2 is saturated / a minor component of the GHG effect
The magnetic Sun/Cosmic rays and Svenmark
No empirical evidence…..
Are stumbling around the block once more.
Needs a lot of comfirmation bias to flesh those old skeletons….
When did Bellamy become a credible source?! I thought he was most remembered in Lenney Henry’s early impressions…..
Anyhow…
Had a frustrating weekend. Modeled and animated a whole sequence inspired by Fenbeagle’s question of WHY windmills and the claim there was LOTS of technically recoverable oil and the computer I was using died in mid-render.
So started from scratch on the (slow, tiny screen) laptop….
The one advantage of repeating something is that you learn from all the mistakes and problems you encountered the first time.
Sometimes you learn it is quite easy to make some of them again….
So as inspired by Fenbeagle – his question and his drawing style –
|
Suggestions welcome..!?
We’ll forgive the geology… I think you may have just cracked a solution that’ll satisfy everyone – Oz 😀
Soy Bear says: September 20, 2010 at 10:23 pm
RE:- Soy ice-cream
“Locusts, I wonder why there is none in the States or the UK.”
Evolution.
Western agriculturalists domisticated cattle at the end of the ice age. Since then there has been a dietary advantage in retaining the infantile ability to digest milk.
As a result most Europeans can enjoy dairy products and alternatives are of interest to vegans only and the small percentage who are/become lactose intolerant.
Without the availability of milk from domesticated animals most Asians do not retain lactase and eating a milk-based confection would cause digestive problems.
Not quite that clear-cut, there is some overlap of digestive abilities… but thats the general reason.
Hi, Isn’t. It’s not that there isn’t lots of soy based ice cream out there, I basically haven’t lots of vegan pals. Tofutti has been around for ages, apparently.
There are LOTS of really huge milk-fed Chinese and Japanese Americans, some of whom are of my direct acquaintance, so it isn’t a matter of lactophobic genetic tendencies. Maybe….they just don’t like dairy. I know the most unusual angry remark a Japanese girl ever tossed at a fellow Marine at Iwakuni when she left him was that he smelled like spoiled cheese, which I catch a whiff of now and then, not being a milk or cheese person much anymore. Not lactophobic…just not big on it. Tastes change.
Even in 1972 Japan, home refrigeration of food was a bit of a novelty except for Marines living off base. Folks forget just how recent all this prosperity is that came into being for the West and Western-affiliated economies. It has only been fifty years or so of the welfare state anywhere. More like 40, really.
If you don’t mind, Izen’t, I will forward on your animation to the seismologist guys and gals at “Finding Petroleum.” I am sure they could do with a laugh. Niced work.
Is that you on the keyboard, BTW? Also, what was the Annanuki Invasion, please?
Thanks, Amerloque and Ozboy! I will write that down.
Is this the moment we’ve been waiting for, or am I reading too much into it ?
At 19.59 BST George Monbiot posted that ‘CLIMATE CHANGE ENLIGHTENMENT WAS FUN WHILE IT LASTED, BUT NOW IT’S DEAD’ He goes on to ask ‘How should we respond to the reality we have tried not to see : that in 18 years of promise and bluster nothing has happened ?’
G’day Bufo mio. As I said to you over at DT, it’s just a feint; Monbiot and his kind are zombies: they just keep on coming back to life. Look out for Anthropogenic Ocean Acidification, coming soon to a populist blog near you.
Remember the days when newspapers were leaders of public opinion? Now they’re just slavish followers – Oz 😦
Soy Bear says: September 21, 2010 at 7:41 am
“Is that you on the keyboard, BTW? Also, what was the Annanuki Invasion, please?”
No, a memory of my Father. Not much recorded because he viewed it as a paying live job. When cornered into recording he would indulge in extremes of harmonic complexity and ornamentation, just for the fun of it and to irritate anybody that want to hear the ‘nice chune’.
-grin-
The Annanuki invasion is the supposed arrival of aliens from the outer planet Nubaro(?) of the ‘angels’ who interbred with hominids giving humans cognitive powers and self-awareness. Its all derived from the Summarian Creation myths, Gligamesh and Eniki. Its where the idea of the power of the WORD came from…
L Ron stole the idea for a couple of books and bits of a religion to I think.
But if you ever meet a real Strichen nutter you might hear about how the rhesus gene marks those who are, and are not descended from our higher masters….
The world is full of people who believe strange things….
Izen’t, your Father must have been George Shearing. Damned good work, that. More, please. Ten mp3’s to this site of that quality and I’ll convert to AGW.
Well, maybe not…LOL Still, awfully nice work, sir. Also, if you get a case of Oban from the petroleum exploration seismologists’ union, it’s because they all saw your animation, as I posted it to “Finding Petroleum” in my personal blogspace there.
Old Toad, from your lips to the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s ears. Maybe Moonbat will be found dangling from the rafters on the morrow at the Grauniad.
Izen now has his own section in the Rare Scribblings section. Navigate from the menu at the top, or just click here – Oz
Thought it might have been the invasion of the Needmorenuki tribe.
Here’s my favourite piano piece. This is what it felt like to be 21 in 1971:
5 bucks cover charge at the Grande Ballroom (and the Eastowne) to catch the Peroxide Rooster and Friends, and we thought we wuz gittin’ ripped off LOL. Epic shows, good times.
I think the Grande is on sale now for 5 dollars and a tiny portion of back taxes, plus the entire 4 surrounding abandoned city blocks.
Izen
That was brilliant!…. And they do have a use after all. Intermittent oil for intermittent oil users. This would also help congestion problems. (Although we would be able to store the oil.)
…….We don’t have any oil on the Fens though?
Sorry Ozboy ‘Ocean Acidification’ is already ‘dead in the water’ (pun intended). If it’s to be trotted out by the same discredited people. It also much easier to contest as the oceans are here on earth, now. So bogus ‘computer models’ are more difficult to contrive.
As the always excellent ‘huroner’ (Your Honour ?) says in reply to Monbiot -‘There comes a time where the sales pitch is so unconvincing that there are simply no buyers’.
NoIdea:>>>If CO2 cannot keep one of the hottest places on the planet (daytime) even warm at nighttime, then I suggest that despite it being an alleged 20% of the GHG effect, its effect is almost negligible and most certainly useless at “warming, heating, insulating or blanketing”<<<
It is patently obvious that CO2 is not a 'storage heater'.
This is like my related experience of driving into Hungary in late July '09. It was about 42C during the day, from South Austria, into Northern Italy, Slovenia, and then into Hungary.
From about midnight, as I got further East from Budapest, the temperature plummeted. By 1:00 am, it was sub freezing, the heated grips on the bike were on full power, and I had to stop to put on my suits thermal linings, thermal glove liners, and wind proof overgloves.
There was plenty of H2O in the atmosphere as well. That much, that the previous night, a Hotel in Austria had been snowed in, and another motorcyclist I met that had been staying there, couldn't get out until almost mid day when the snowplough got to them. There were massive rainstorms all over Europe as well, with people kille dby lightning in places like Poland.
Plenty of H2O for sure then.
CO2 is not a 'storage heater' it passes out heat as fast as it receives it. Which is why it was used as a COOLANT in the Advanced, Gas Cooled, Reactor. 'Gas Cooled' by CO2.
This means CO2 can't possibly be a 'Greenhouse Gas'. Never was. Never will be. Scientists wouldn't have used it for its superb heat transfer properties otherwise.
Would they?
The whole CO2 scaremongering is a massive scam.
If heat wasn't using the CO2 to transfer 'through', then that heat would be hitting the ground at almost the same speed. Once heat hist the ground, what happens to it? Well it warms the ground, of course!
Where does it go from there?
Why back into the atmosphere and the water vapour of course! The exact same places it would have ended up anyway.
No gain, no loss, nothing exciting, nothing to see, and nothing worth taxing people trillions and trillions and trillions for anyway.
The whole thing is a Ponzi Scheme from start to finish.
Which isn’t to say CO2 can’t be used in actual greenhouses of course. It can be, and is.
As that essential building block for life, plant food.
Oz, the eco-fascist greenshirts don’t even understand where limestone comes from, or what is used to make it, let alone what it’s ph is.
Anthropogenic Ocean Acidification, my arse.
These people are a joke. A sick joke, but a joke none the less.
Hi Everyone !
The jerkoffs runing Disqus over at the DT are either nuts or incompetent, or both.
Just tried to connect and coment and ” … undergoing maintenance …sorry !”
Must be having problems. (grin) ‘Way back in BBS days, every BBS in the world stopped for “maintenance” at 02h00->03h00 GMT.
“Maintenance” at Tuesday lunchtime is a bit much !
Best,
L’Amerloque
Amerloque
Disqus comments are down, I think
Monbiot’s blog is a right bloodbath in the making. Fun and games there, and their censorship seems to have capitulated.
I’ve not had a single posting deleted yet.
From the Monbiot blog:
antipodean1
20 September 2010 9:11PM
@batz is right; we need more major & clearly climate related catastrophies to alert the media into panic mode, and raise the clamour – “something must be done”.
Of course by then it may be too late, and even then people will call for symptoms to be ameliorated rather than causes to be addressed…..
Can someone ask him who he wants to die, I’m a little busy at the moment.
rastech says:
September 21, 2010 at 7:03 pm
In fact, CO2 is routinely used as a refrigerant. It is preferred as a refrigerant in the food processing industry as its toxicity rating by the US Department of Health and the USDA is GRAS (generally recognised as safe). Am I the only person blogging here who has ever been in a canning plant, industrial-scale fish market or abbatoir?
It also has a specific range of applications for which it is suited that other refrigerants cannot do as well, and it is much cheaper that the R-series refrigerants by far but with similar characteristics overall.
Maybe 20-30% of the market for industrial-grade CO2 is for refrigerant applications. You might wish to check out the Compressed Gas Association website at http://www.cganet.com/
I still do not see how journalists or even scientist can hold forth on any of this stuff without getting laughed out of existence. Shows how toadyishly programmed the masses have been by being raised in daycare concentration camps for kiddies and crap educational systems.
It’s like the biofuel wheeze. In the Sixties and earlier, every Diesel lorry in the US military’s inventory could run on peanut oil or Mazola if you adjusted the injectors and could put up with the stench. You had to do an oil change and flush the fuel tank pronto after the Mazola run, though, or the fuel and lube systems would lock up from the “biofuel” solidifying, just like cooking oil sets up on your fry pan.
…or in your arteries, come to that LOL Fried foods are good, though.
Here’s the skinny, Rastech:
http://www.coldsystemsllc.com/co2-refrigeration.html
Really nice Website, this.
For someone who grew up in an area with terrible discos an abbatoir sounds like a fate worse than death.
Locusts says:
September 21, 2010 at 10:33 pm
“abbatoir”? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85yMOPKR94M
Pointman
rastech says: September 21, 2010 at 7:03 pm
“CO2 is not a ‘storage heater’ it passes out heat as fast as it receives it. Which is why it was used as a COOLANT in the Advanced, Gas Cooled, Reactor. ‘Gas Cooled’ by CO2.
This means CO2 can’t possibly be a ‘Greenhouse Gas’. Never was. Never will be. Scientists wouldn’t have used it for its superb heat transfer properties otherwise.”
It is BECAUSE CO2 is capable of high IR emission and absorption that it was used as a coolent. And it is the same properties that confer its GHG effect.
The greater thermal capacity of CO2 over oxygen and nitrogen and its ability to absorb and emit IR energy (in common with water vapour) is what makes it a key though minority player in the warming of the surface along with water vapour.
If you accept that water vapour has a warming effect then it would make no sense to claim that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas when it shares the same physical properties that confer that effect on water vapour.
The thermal energy emitted from the surface fails to escape straight to space because H2O and CO2 intercept it, transfer the energy to the rest of the atmosphere by direct conduction, and re-emit the energy omni-directionally, so that half is returned to the surface.
To dismiss the role of CO2 in this process indicates either that you have failed to understand the mechanism of warming from ‘Greenhouse’ gasses, or you deny it even exists.
Which would raise the difficult problem of explaining the fact we don’t live on a ‘snowball’ Earth.
Which would raise the difficult problem of explaining the fact we don’t live on a ‘snowball’ Earth.
The sun?
Locusts says:
September 21, 2010 at 10:33 pm
Beef doesn’t grow on trees in shrinkwrap containers. If it’s any consolation, based on my experience, most meat-packing operations are more sanitary than hospitals. Any epidemiologist will tell you that. The work’s not bad, if you don’t mind the lifting and the low temperatures.
Never cleaned a chicken? Never been on a working farm, either, I expect. Poor you.
On balance, even if pigs, cows and chickens talked, I still wouldn’t mind doing for them. Barnyard animals are nasty pieces of work from a personality standpoint. They’ll do for you in a thrice if you don’t know what you’re about. The term “domesticated” applied to animals is as accurate as referring to an ex-convict as “reformed.” Both are as labeled only for lack, self-imposed by wisdom or otherwise, of the opportunity to unleash their true inner selves.
Locusts says:
September 21, 2010 at 10:33 pm
Isn’t, you’ve missed your true calling as a comedian. Remember Professor Irwin Corey?
No one is more murderous than an animal rights activist, either. I worked with and for a security firm which mainstay was simply tracking the beggars for those who interdicted them, when necessary. You’ve little idea what mayhem both urban and rural based has been averted in the past two decades which animal rights activists had underway, but for several law enforcement agencies’ well-spent freelance budgets.
One put a Tennant through the blades of their gyrocopter at a fox hunt not too long ago in old Blighty yet walked scotfree. Few families have done more for England for 200 years running than the Tennants in terms of putting forward and advocating UK-saving legislation and policy, even as if not especially as Madame de Stael-type salon hostesses. Guess that counts for nothing anymore.
There’s certainly been a change over at the Guardian and I’m not talking about climate change either. People are being allowed to make dissenting posts. Soon it’ll be less censored than the DT. Maybe I can get myself unbanned there.
Pointman
Hiya Rastech
As a carbon based bag of mostly water (i.e. human) I could never see why they would pick on CO2 (or H20) as “pollution”, it just does not make sense, unless you hate humans…
I am guessing they chose CO2 simply because it is invisible to the human eye.
Izen
Thank you for another interesting animation.
Nibiru was a term used by the Babylonians and is sometimes referred to as planet X.
From Wiki…
“According to Sitchin, the Sumerians relate how 50 Anunnaki, the inhabitants of Nibiru, came to Earth approximately 400,000 years ago with the intent of mining raw materials, especially gold, for transport back to Nibiru. With their small numbers they soon tired of the task and set out to genetically engineer laborers to work the mines. After much trial and error they eventually created Homo sapiens: the “Adapa” (model man) or Adam of later mythology. Sitchin claims the Anunnaki were active in human affairs until their culture was destroyed by global catastrophes caused by the abrupt end of the last ice age some 12,000 years ago. Seeing that humans survived and all they had built was destroyed, the Anunnaki left Earth after giving humans the opportunity and means to govern themselves.”
From the same wiki page…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts
I found this statement…
“That this book in turn was heavily influenced by the Cthulhu Mythos, and that the core of the ancient astronaut theory originates in H.P.Lovecraft’s short stories “The Call of Cthulhu” and “At the Mountains of Madness”.”
Perhaps you could tell me more about the shoe event horizon?
Would this be based on the fact that Cthulhu had many legs (tentacles)?
NoIdea
Izen the point (as ever) is that CO2 doesn’t ‘store’ heat – it is an efficient transfer medium, and the stuff being transferred, would be ending up where it ends up ‘anyway’.
That is doesn’t ‘store’ heat (i.e. is indeed not a storage heater) means it is not and cannot be, a ‘greenhouse’ gas (the whole emphasis of which, is heat storage capability, with slow acquisition and slow dispersion of heat, and CO2 does not have that capability – if it did, it would be entirely unsuitable as a coolant or refrigerant).
I really don’t see what problem you are having with this?
@- Locust
There have been several epochs when there is a strong suspicion a ‘snowball’ EWarth event occurred when the ice-caps just about mety at the equator.
The best candidate is around 650mya.
The end of the snowball Earth epoch conincides with evidence from geology that vulcanism had over millenia raised the atmospheric CO2 (no open oceans/biosphere to ‘sink’ it) until the ‘Greenhouse’ effect could melt it.
“The end of the snowball Earth epoch conincides with evidence from geology that vulcanism had over millenia raised the atmospheric CO2 (no open oceans/biosphere to ‘sink’ it) until the ‘Greenhouse’ effect could melt it.”
Wouldn’t it be more logical to conclude that supervolcano’s going off dumped large amounts of volcanic ash onto the ice and that caused the melting?
Pointman:”There’s certainly been a change over at the Guardian ”
There sure has. I don’t think it is Monbiot alone that has had the start of an ‘epiphany’?
and hiya all. *grins*
rastech says: September 22, 2010 at 12:45 am
RE:- CO2 – GHG
“That is doesn’t ‘store’ heat (i.e. is indeed not a storage heater) means it is not and cannot be, a ‘greenhouse’ gas (the whole emphasis of which, is heat storage capability, with slow acquisition and slow dispersion of heat, and CO2 does not have that capability – if it did, it would be entirely unsuitable as a coolant or refrigerant).”
The GHG effect has NOTHING to do with the storage of energy, and everything to do with its absorption when it is in the form of IR, and CONVERSION to thermal (kinetic) energy.
That, along with the unidirectional nature of IR energy from the surface converted to the omni-directional emission from the atmosphere are the key factors in AGW theory and the GHG effect in general.
Not storage.
Quote-“I really don’t see what problem you are having with this?”
I see what problem you are having.
You don’t understand the effect you are denying exists.
rastech says:
September 22, 2010 at 1:06 am
They’re hoping to pick up the online refugees from the Times now it’s behind a paywall. I suppose they’ve been told to lighten up on the ecofascist censorship or maybe they’re in dispair …
Pointman
rastech says: September 22, 2010 at 1:04 am
“Wouldn’t it be more logical to conclude that supervolcano’s going off dumped large amounts of volcanic ash onto the ice and that caused the melting?”
No. We know from direct observation and historical records that major volcanic eruptions COOL the planet in the short term due to the addition of SOx to the stratosphere.
The ash/albedo effect and the cooling effect are temporary. New snow covers the ash and rains out the SOx.
Only the CO2 has the geological persistance to accumulate and change the climate.
Izen,
Even Monbiot’s heading for the exit. Who’s in denial now …
Pointman
Izen,
I just asked my Nan, she said there was no extensive glaciation back then.
Izen,
What exactly was the Shoe Horizon Event, please? Anything to do with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers? Or the consequences of Pee Wee Herman’s Big Shoe Dance?
IMHO, the Delirium Tremens went too far into the realm of three-headed Elvis shaped carrots which is the more proper domain of the Daily Mawl and the Sunk. They are losing market share over it, too. Only thing keeping it afloat are the biz/finance sections and as ever Hilary Alexander’s stunning workload of fashion coverage.
I still don’t “get” the Shell/DT energy supplement thingie, either. I had always thought it impossible to actually create an information-free article over 1,000 words in length, but the DT has done it in 5,000 and more….
Pointy,
I am sure Moonbat can get a job if fired at BOH (Bag of Hammers) , otherwise known as the University of Virginless, the school which makes Dook University look like Oxford by comparison.
Hello Aircooled Four Cylinder Vacuum Advance Bear (Sans Blaupunkt ?) !
On September 21, 2010 at 11:04 am
We lovingly keep our tattered and oil-stained copy of “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot” in the “trunk” of our vintage Beetle.
‘Way back when, it was a Godsend ! (grin)
Best,
L’Amerloque
izen says:
September 22, 2010 at 1:54 am
The CO2 is in intimate contact with a large expanse of cold water, which is extremely effective at dissolving it and re-liberating it as the water temperature varies. Surely that alone would be a factor tending to prevent accumulation, even before the dynamics of light-activated green algae cut in?
suffolkboy says:
September 22, 2010 at 3:19 am
Suffolk, you’re dealing with a practitioner of Pathological Science. Wait for the ‘Yebbut’ post …
Pointman
Amerloque says:
September 22, 2010 at 3:17 am
Later on I had a VW Rabbit Diesel which was a pleasure to drive once the plugs heated up LOL Never had to worry about tailgaters, as all I had to do was to rev the thing at speed to engulf anyone too close to my bumper in clouds of black smoke. It was also good exercise working one’s way through the gears. Every time the clutch caught, another smoke cloud.
Autos requiring that level of effort just to function have convinced me you could halve highway fatalities by making vehicles less convenient and quiet to drive. One hardly knows whether one is on or off the pavement in today’s rolling four-poster komfort kars until one is wrapped around a telephone pole.
suffolkboy says: September 22, 2010 at 3:19 am
“The CO2 is in intimate contact with a large expanse of cold water, which is extremely effective at dissolving it and re-liberating it as the water temperature varies. ”
Yebbut….
SNOWball Earth.
What large expanse of cold water?
@-Pointman says: September 22, 2010 at 2:01 am
“Even Monbiot’s heading for the exit. Who’s in denial now …”
Lomberg?
@-Noidea
“Perhaps you could tell me more about the shoe event horizon?”
@-Walt
“What exactly was the Shoe Horizon Event, please? ”
Its an economic theory of societal collapse from the Hitchikers guide…
Inspired by Douglas Adams visiting Oxford street where, quoting him, “You can’t throw a brick without breaking a shoe shop window”. Despite every shop stocking thousands of shoes, none had a pair which was the right size, price, or colour, or which was comfortable, durable or stylish without being outrageous.
Izen
Snow is an apt description of cold water.
A snowflake consists of roughly 1018 water molecules.
Thank you for the Douglas Adams information. I have read many of his works, I must have missed some.
As a big foot I find shoes hard to find, yetI manage somehow…
Some words from Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath
Crystal world with winter flowers
Turns my days to frozen hours
Lying snowblind in the sun
Will my ice age ever come?
NoIdea
Whoops, 1018 should be 10 to the power of 18 (10^18)
NI
The interest in the geological layers is very flattering, but I do warn that the geology may not be entierly accurate.
For reasons of space and time a number of geological layers were omited.
These are, –
The Plasticine
The Shale is resting atop the Sharnt
Along with the Sandstone is Mudstone and Rollingstone
Granite is accompanied by Grampite
Immediately above the Bedrock is the Glamrock (full of gold and diamonds),
Punkrock, rough and messy, and a thin layer of metamorphically transformed Folkrock.
I have to say Izn’t’s epic creations far outdistance in lucidity and integrity the following, premiering on ABC:
http://abc.go.com/shows/detroit-1-8-7
Again, the State decides to re-write history in pursuit of its own agenda. Pathetic.
Sort of like the AGW greentards.
Izen,
You’ve obviously been sitting there fretting. Any direct answer or am I being too cruel? I’m not really -just enjoying the moment. Perhaps you need a new raison d’etre …
Pointman
Hi Walt, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tlou_2lMLAc
Pointman
Pointman, Chi-town is where most of the kids from my town who knew how to work and got tired of wasting their money on giveaway programmes to creepy parasites finally went to get a life when the bottom fell out of the Detroit money machine. The Detroit story DID have a happy ending…just not for Detroit LOL
The deal with Illinois is…you gotta work if you live there or you get yer arse kicked, both then and now. Even people you stridently disagree with, including the Prez, work and work hard. If ALL the Dems has anything approaching his work personal ethic, I would be sweating the November elections.
You were the enemy if you worked in Michigan. I had jobs all through high school and while at college (I HAD to) and all the dates I got were freeloaders except for the Jewish girls or out-of-towners. You can still live there on the dole or on a government job (same deal) and get so big you explode.
Has should be had. Digitarditis again :>p
Found the 40th class reunion site for my high school class LOL I realize now the wisdom of my not keeping anything in the house more lethal than a spatula and cheese grater. Talk about flashbacks. The horror, the horror.
Hot damn, that was a mighty good a-pickin’ and a-singin’, Pointman.
Y’all moved to the States? Y’all vote now, ya hear?
Here is the ACTUAL state of wholesale electric and natural gas markets for the USA, which includes as a corollary coal and oil supply issues, as –surprise–oil is still part of the generation scene for peaking, startup, etc.
Click to access som-rpt-2009.pdf
This is from the heavies in Enforcement at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. This together with the slow plane crash in pricing for oil and natural gas as reported daily by http://www.downstreamtoday.com makes mincemeat of the lies promulgated by Huhne and the Beak Oil dead ducks. If there is any price volatility exhibited in NG or pet product, it shall be entirely due to governments putting their greasy thumbs on the scale in order to generate fraudulent excise tax revenue increases.
The Fed’s made a fortune in 2006-2008 off the racketeering in the futures derivatives market manipulation in excise taxes. My guess is they worked with the market players to create just such a crisis (Dem’s play the futures markets too, guys) to cover the bills.
Happy news concerning the imminent demise of OPEC, too:
http://www.downstreamtoday.com/news/article.aspx?a_id=23989
My nieces and nephews will live to see those bar stewards spreading their petroglunk on their camel turdburgers.
Life is good, even if I can’t get a permit for a Blish-action Thompson with a windup 50-round drum magazine in time for my high school reunion LOL!
Melancholy Holy Melon
Our CO2, which art in heaven
Manmade be thy name
Thy kingdom warms
Thy heat will come
On earth as it is in heaven
Give us this day our daily climate
And forgive us for breathing
As we forgive those whom also breathe
Lead us not into chilling
But deliver us from cold
For thine is the kingdom
The logarithmic power
And the warmy glory
For ever and ever
A man
Is this sacrilegious or heretical?
Insane and terrible?
Sarcastically hysterical?
Sciosophy untenable?
NoIdea
G’day Oz,
G’day Lads and lasses,
Any of you in Sydney, on Oct 1st?
Seems like an interesting (very interesting) bunch of people are having a get together, it would surely be an eye-opener that’s for certain.
Dr. David Evans is a very interesting bloke, in the class of Dr’s. Lindzen and Spencer but all are truly worth an audience, it would be an honour to be able to attend.
I would sit there in starry eyed wonderment…..
12,000 miles is a bit too far tho’:>)…….think of all those Jet engine emissions!!!!!!!!!
(Why don’t the British government send Huhne and notable emissaries of the Dept of E & CC – they went to Bali in 2007 for a climate UN/ IPCC – “we’re all doomed!” cos of AGW (at £350/night) bun-fight/Oral fartfest?
…………BUT GLORY BE………..He effin’ might even learn something, the arrogant pr**k – that is; if you can educate a cabbage!)
We could all learn something, it’s never too late:-
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/09/join-us-in-sydney-friday-october-1/
Ed.
Noidea,
Rather apt, I’m sure the Pope will forgive this transgression.
NI is going to be hot forever, when he shuffles off his mortal coil…………
He will be joining up with yours truly…………….at least ‘metal’ will be permitted……………………YEAH!
Ed.
Hiya Ed.
A tune that springs to mind is AC/DC’s Highway to Hell
Ain’t nothin’ I would rather do
Going down
By the time
My friends are gonna be there too, eh?
NoIdea
Mornin all!
Spotted this linked on tickerforum
I would hardly call myself a RAP fan, but wow!
Things are sinking in all round, it seems . . . . . . . . .
Izen, nobody knows what happens when ‘one’ Supervolcano goes off, let alone ‘more than one’ going off at the same time . . . . .
Sure, there’s a cooling effect from the SOx, but it’s easy to visualise circumstances where that effect can be hugely overwhelmed by the net gain. You just have to think of big enough effects, and a Supervolcano or three, can easily provide the big enough causes.
That’s just the atmospheric effects too, and isn’t counting the potentially huge direct heat transfer to the Oceans from undersea volcanic activity. Or even under ice activity for that matter.
Heck the recent relatively minor undersea activity has even been having an effect, from what I have come across.
NoIdea says:
September 22, 2010 at 6:35 pm
We’ll be well away from glaciation forever mate!
Ed.
rastech says:
September 22, 2010 at 7:27 pm
Mornin’ Ras!
It is true of Britain too, not a rap fan but I like this one:>))
Ed.
rastech says:
September 22, 2010 at 7:27 pm
That is a telling rap, and it does reflect the working majority of the black American view of things.
There has always been a core black community of conservative business owners and community builders completely divorced from and contemptuous of the media-perpetuated image of the black middle class as leftards, but they rarely get any airtime or exposure. The black cliche and stereotype is of them as Kablamma bootlickers on the government-job-based free-degreee dole, which is more offensive really than the old cliche of the lot of them being welfare-subsidized single parent crackheads. You never hear from the American black small business person or black conservative nuclear family crowd, but they outnumber the leftard skeezos maybe three to one.
You can’t shout down television or the other media, though. Cliches rule as long as the media which perpetuates them can raise the advertising revenue.
If one had the capital, I think you could globally market profitably a part-humorous, part-serious documentary on the real black America that is ignored by the press because it is drama-free for the most part. I would have someone like Ludicris as tour guide, or Ali G.
People really are more a pack of ignoramuses about how others live than back in the bad old days, and it is entirely the fault of media agendae.
Latin speakers, work with me: is agendum the singular case of agenda? Wouldn’t you think? Speaking of ignoramae LOL :>p
Huhne and out?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/sep/21/chris-huhne-fights-treasury-attacks
Hi Irish Bear !
On September 22, 2010 at 11:49 pm
“An agenda is a list of meeting activities in the order in which they are to be taken up, beginning with the call to order and ending with adjournment. It usually includes one or more specific items of business to be considered. It may, but is not required to, include specific times for one or more activities. An agenda may also be called a docket.” (Wiki)
“Usage notes
Agendum is a word now so common in the plural that its plural form agenda is now generally taken to be a collective singular form, with the special meaning of a list of tasks which are to be done. A similar case is datum and its plural data which is now commonly taken to be a collective singular and synonymous with ‘information’.” (Wiktionary)
No, on to the real question …
“Does Latinity confer profundity ? ”
(grin)
Best,
L’Amerloque
izen says:
September 22, 2010 at 5:15 am
This one, and a bit more on the other side of the screen:
(or, respectful of the landlord, this one:)
The CO2 seems to track the temperature, about 800 years later and “smeared out”.
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/news/nol/shared/spl/hi/uk/09/bbc_online/800000.xls
I was out last night at at the opera; they were very good: even the ignoramuses could understand the agenda. But didn’t we have an agendum on one of these threads to write a film about the AGW debunking, or was that on an old Delilog? Is somebody still on that one? I am more of an oratorio boy, and I think that Elijah could be re-worked and scaled down to 20 min. (See Green Scam… thread in this blog around 7th Sep.) But I do not have the creativity or latinity or profundity to follow it through.
Locusts says:
September 23, 2010 at 12:28 am
Had a scan at yo’ link and picked up this gem, from ‘what few brain cells I had are now completely fried by GHG forcing temperatures ‘ aka Cazbo Lucas.
And I quote:
‘ The Green party leader, Caroline Lucas, said that climate change should take priority over cuts.
“Nobody who understands the urgency and the seriousness of the climate crisis could even contemplate decimating the department that leads the effort to deal with it,” she said.’
Nobody understands the urgency?
We do, the Dof E & CC should cease to exist forthwith, if not sooner!
Caroline Lucas (inane MMidiot grin) – thank the lord she isn’t one of twins or God forbid, triplets…….. .
Ed.
Walt O’Bruin says:
September 22, 2010 at 11:01 pm
That is the shame of it Mr. O’Bruin, the splurge freaks of the Media/politicosphere/idiotsvilleDC – are unaware: of all of the decent conscientious, hard working Americans of all faiths, colours and creeds.
The silent majority, its’ voice is not heard.
I can think of another country across the pond, where (the silent majority) is similarly taken for granted/ignored/pilloried/poked fun at……………..there will be a reckonin’ eventually (wishful thinking or not?).
Ed.
Amerloque says:
September 23, 2010 at 1:01 am
Latin used to serve the function of shorthand expressions for otherwise difficult things to express in the Angle-Celt derived argots. Then it became a way of making technical papers on dicey or ludicrous subjects seem more profound (starting around 1965 or so) to the extent there is still a list of editorial fings-to-do-first when blue- or red-lining like “strike out the latinizations and substitute something identifiable.”
“Agenda” does sound cooler than “list of things to do.” I fink I will start pointless contention and crank up the blood pressures next time I use the former term through using agendum, though.
Suffolkboy, Compboard three has been in the works since I believe April or so LOL I need the players to play out their roles in real life first. I await a murder or suicide or the usual cowardly pointless spray of leftist bullets in a public place by a greentard “activist” terrorist to make it worthwhile, which I have no doubt is coming. We already almost had that at the Discovery Channel but for the marksmanship skills of one of those loveable lugs in blue on the local police SWAT sniper team. No doubt as greentard frustration mounts and the inevitable budget cuts hit, forcing them to apply their skills suite to where they are truly needed, flipping burgers and greeting buyers at MalWart, someone will go berserk and do the deed.
Actually, that nasty little pig who slaughtered all those students at Virginia Tech was one of those sorts of larval greentards: he went after the mechanical engineering department and the seat of Western rationalism, the French department, just as the Weather Underground and other leftard creepos went after the chemical departments in their dynamiting and fire setting activities at places like University of Wisconsin Madison and Kent State.
Don’t really think that the greentards will relent until there is some sort of watershed event which discloses in full their core idiocy, just as Kent State did for the leftards of my g-generation. You can say what you like about the National Guard’s actions, but that was the last time a US university facility was firebombed or dynamited though PETA buttwipes took a poke at same with nil results, and the last time National Guardsmen had to put up with airborne bricks. If you don’t think bricks kill on impact, have your kid throw a couple of half-bricks at you from 25 or 50 yards away.
When they make their move, I’ll finish up the compboard, thanks. We’re still in holding patterns as there has been no shift in pension investment levels respecting “environmentally responsible” portfolios. It is too early to crow about victory. The swine can still shred Western civilization’s finances through boomer retirement fund buffoonery, which on balance, really would be apt and appropriate except that the new kids deserve better, as a large portion of them are better folk than boomers would even deem reasonable or sane.
Besides which, where is David Grocott, I wonder? He was the star attraction for compboards one and two. No doubt he is out looking for sellers of Semtex as I write this. Any guesses which of the trolls at the DT are him/it/her now?
Vince Cable and Huhne are for the long drop, in any event. I give both two weeks at the outside. I vote for Lord Browne of BP as new energy minister LOL Either that, and this I mean seriously, Lord Soames of Aggreko. He’s had to do with the installation of more generator plants than 2,000 of me. Huhne couldn’t find the fire exit at a major power generation facility.
As well as Aggreko has done, may as well make Lord Soames business minister, too. It’s past time another Churchill walked the halls of Parliament.
They’d never let Lord Browne in. He’s got an engineering degree LOL
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G’day folks,
This thread is getting a bit long; here’s a new one for you.
Cheers
Oz