UPDATE: This is now an archived page. New “Tips” ought to go onto the “T2” page here:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/t2/
Just a place to post interesting things you notice that are of interest. While I’m mostly interested in things having to do with:
Making money, usually via trading
Weather and climate
Quakes, Volcanoes, and other Earth Sciences
Current economic and political events
(often as those last three have impact on the first one…)
And just about any ‘way cool’ interesting science or technology
You can also look at the list of “Categories” on the right hand side and get an idea of any other broad area of interest.
This ought not to be seen as a “limit” on what is “interesting”, more as a “focus list” with other things that are interesting being fair game as well.
At some point (probably in the far future) the comment list here may end up longer than WordPress handles gracefully (about 1000 IMHO). When that happens, I’ll “retire” the thread and name it something like “T1” and open a new one.
The reason for this is simple. Folks like to point out interesting things that are not the topic of a given posting. Then later when I have time to “follow up” I can’t always find what posting it was on… so I lose the link. This will be “interesting ideas” in one place where I can find them more easily.
With that in mind, I’d like to keep the “chatter” about a given “tip” to a minimum (so the thread takes longer to fill up… and I can put off that “archive” day). Things like “Gee, that’s interesting” are “chatter” on this thread (while may be encouragement on others ;-) while things like “Oh, and this link too: http… ” are “added tips”… (No, I won’t be enforcing this with a giant hammer… and folks making comments of the form “I think that’s broken because of FOO as noted here: http…” are not “chatter” so much as “depth”.
OK, if I’ve not totally confused the whole issue with that, we’ll see how this works out…
Musings from the Chiefio 
The radiometric property of Tradescantia ohiensis seems to have been forgotten over the years. But I bet you w’ll like it. The stemen hairs, depending on somatic mutation rate, change color from blue to pink, practically acting like a natural dosimeter down to (possibly) 1 milli-Roentgen/h. With gamma radiation, 1 mR/h should equate to 10 µSv/h in dry air.
Seeds are difficult to get here, but in your country (especially in Ohio), this shouldn’t be a problem. Here is a link to the original paper:
Click to access 04-2865.pdf
Crop failures in North Korea. China reinforcing border fences to curb economic refugees:
http://www.nkeconwatch.com/2011/03/30/china-building-higher-fences-in-dandong/
Looks like China believes things might get weird in North Korea soon. The spring is the worst possible time as last year’s food is almost gone and this year’s food hasn’t sprouted yet.
It is going to be a hard spring in North Korea.
@Hugo M:
Absolutely amazing…. Only the Japanese would think to use individual hair cells in flowers of a potted plant for radiation dose meters… Just spectacular tidy thinking….
@George:
Famine mixed wth Nukes is a very bad idea… I’ve often suggested that an axis of instablity exists with the Middle East at one end, drawn trough Afghanistan / Pakistan over the India / China border and ending in North Korea. My expectation is that a nuclear war breaks out somewhere on that line sometime in the next 30 years Having a major crop falure would be a likely “trigger event”…
“Bears Watching”…
Piers Corbyn: MAJOR EARTHQUAKE DANGER PERIOD 6-9th April IMMINENT
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=7496
Dr. Gray’s April Atlantic tropical activity report. Calling for a busy year:
Click to access apr2011.pdf
How not to engineer a network:
Woman takes entire country of Armenia, portions of Georgia and Azerbaijan off the internet …. with a shovel.
Her name must be Chucknia Norrisov.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-woman-cuts-web-access
@George:
I like how they say the fibre cable was “well protected” yet it must have been weather or something that put it inside reach of an old lady and a shovel ;-)
Superbugs found in Delhi drinking water. Resistant to even “last resort” antibiotics:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/07/uk-bacteria-superbugs-india-idUSLNE73600F20110407
@George:
Yup. There have even been some of the “subject to last resort” superbugs found in the USA from folks who visited India… All because they would use antibiotics in a stupid way. Take just some, and then save the rest. Perfect genetic selection environment for developing resistent bugs.
IMHO, long before any of the other “issues” we face is a prolbem ( population, nuclear exposure, resource shortage, food shortage, whatever) we are going to have a new world pandemic and kill off a few billion people. All because we’ve treated antibiotics like candy instead of sniper rifles…
We have squandered the greatest gift nature ever gave to human kind, and billions will die as a result. It’s just a matter of time…
Apparently, if you have an atmosphere that has a lot of water vapor in it, adding CO2 acts to cool the atmosphere, not warm it:
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2011/04/determining-the-total-emissivity-of-a-mixture-of-gases-containing-overlapping-absorption-bands/
E.M.
Have you seen this comparison of Tmax, Tmin and the AWS temperature plot?
@Ian Beale:
Not before today, but “now I have” ;-)
UPDATE: OK, I’ve read it. Yup. That’s ONE of the problems with temperature as recorded…. There’s a long list of others. Temperatures as fractals – the size you get varies with the size of your ruler… So place 12 Stevenson Screends in different areas, you will get different H/L sets, and a different mean. Take just at an airport where most of our thermometers are now located. One right next to the runway and jets, 1/2 mile of tarmac in all directions (solar heating pad…) another on top of the passenger lounge, one under a patch of trees out by the long term parking (and just as the air drifts in off the bay, before the tarmac starts). You can easily get 10 C of range in the readings. So “What was the REAL temperature at the airport?”. All of them… That’s the problem, they are all correct, and equally all wrong at telling you anything about climate change… And then averaging them together gives you an interesting number; but it’s not a temperature. It just isn’t temperature anymore… the list goes on…
Just thinking, these space based tsunamis happen a lot more frequently then thought. Could these be related to bond events in any way?
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2006/s1788687.htm
Mega Tsunami from Space happens relatively commonly, and is much more dangerous then CO2, of course narrow minded climate scientists won’t agree on this because they won’t get any money to study it till one happens.
http://es.ucsc.edu/~ward/2004MN4%28a%29.mov
Also 1500AD a Mega Tsunami hit Australia/NZ
http://www.earth2class.org/k12/w8_s2004/content.htm
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9160-tsunami-risk-of-asteroid-strikes-revealed.html
http://bigthink.com/ideas/37696
Nevada stirring again
Keep an eye on this blog tomorrow:
http://randymelchert.com/
@Scarlet Pumpernickel:
The biggest was only a 4.2 so not much of an issue. That it was a swam just means a block is falling as things stretch out and, well, it’s doing it in bits.
This is a block drop streching grabben area and, well, they do that…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graben
Oh, and Bond Events are a 1470 year periodicity. If it’s not a periodic function on that time scale it is most likely not related to Bond Events.
@Scarlet Pumpernickel:
Got time to look at the bolide links. Neat stuff. One of the scenarios I tend to ponder is “What happens to all the ships at sea and island populations when a rock fall happens?”.
It isn’t at all clear that a large asteroid strike in the ocean would make a tsunami that is ‘gentle on boats’. It ought to sink a lot of the shipping. There is a very long lead time on building new ships… So what happens to all the folks who are dependent on that shipping for food, fuel, etc. during the 4 to 8 years it takes to rebuild the fleet? How large a rock does that take? And who will do the rebuilding if it falls where the tsunami hits the boat building centers in Japan, Korea, etc.?
At any rate, glad to see someone is looking at it.
I don’t think the boats will be that effected, because most of these waves are actually not that big in the sea, its when they reach the shallower water. I think more of the problem is the larger wave it produces. 1/3 of the globe is the Pacific ocean, so it’s a big catching area. Small asteroids like the one that hit Russia early last century can produce large tsunamis. There is in Australia evidence of Tsunami in Sydney, and it looks like just 1500 years ago one hit the western Australia coast. There are stories of how the Aboriginals didn’t like to live near the coast because the giant waves used to hit lol. But you are right, it depends how big it is, but it probably happens a lot more often then people predict, and is more dangerous then global warming pseudoscience. It would be interesting how the sea buoys would react and if people would work out that there is a wave even though there is not earthquake, unless the asteroid produces an earthquake on impact? http://www.universetoday.com/8221/huge-asteroid-crater-in-antarctica/ we keep finding more and more of the big ones everywhere, but small and medium ones would hit more often http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ and http://www.greatdreams.com/near.htm
E.M.
Check out
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/04/13/abandoning-the-tide-guages/#comments
http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/3907/titan-like-exoplanets
Dinosaurs live all over the universe, because dinosaurs produce oil, it’s never Abiogenic… :P
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=18410
http://www.viewzone.com/abioticoilx.html
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/20222
http://freeenergynews.com/Directory/Theory/SustainableOil/index.html
http://www.gasresources.net/index.htm
Interesting page
BTW
Peak oil 1919 LOL
http://www.chemcases.com/fuels/fuels-07.htm
Here is a far out “precession of the equinox” theory and as far as finding people both qualified and open minded to look at it, you da man!
I have neither the mathmatics or orbital mechanics skill set required to evaluate this, so on the surface it looks logical, and if precession is excluded, (not observed) when plotting objects within the solar system and only included when plotting objects outside the solar system, it is perhaps inevitable.
Here is the link, the evidence heading is interesting and Occam’s razor may be sharp.
http://binaryresearchinstitute.org/
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2011/04/14/ironically-wet-year-may-push-up-south-bay-water-rates/
This is so bad, I can’t even comment.
Have a look at these:
Greenland:
Extending Greenland temperature records into the late eighteenth century
B. M. Vinther,1 K. K. Andersen,1 P. D. Jones,2 K. R. Briffa,2 and J. Cappelen3
Received 24 October 2005; revised 11 January 2006; accepted 28 February 2006; published 6 June 2006.
“the warmest year in the extended Greenland temperature
record is 1941, while the 1930s and 1940s are the
warmest decades.”
Greenland (and Danmark)
http: //www.dmi.dk/dmi/index/klima/klimaet_indtil_nu/temperaturen_i_groenland.htm
Norway
http: //eklima.met.no/metno/trend/TAMA_G0_0_1000_NO.jpg (!)
Sweden
http: //www.smhi.se/klimatdata/meteorologi/temperatur/1.2430 (sinificant warming since 1990?)
Finland
http: //i55.tinypic.com/1174sb7.jpg
http: //en.ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/normal-period-1971-2000 (significant warming since 1990?)
Iceland
http: //en.vedur.is/climatology/clim/nr/1213 (1930-1940)
England (CET)
http: //hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/ (significant warming since 1989?)
http: //hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/ssn_HadCET_mean.txt (all wnters coler than 1989)
Netherlands
http: //www.knmi.nl/klimatologie/lijsten/jaar_xtr.html (year ranking; significant warming since 1990?)
http: //www.knmi.nl/klimatologie/lijsten/jaar_xtr.html (winter ranking; all winters colder than 1990)
Spain
http: //www.aemet.es/documentos/es/elclima/datos_climat/resumenes_climat/anuales/res_anual_clim_2010.pdf
(significant warming since 1990?)
France
http: //www.onerc.org/category/classification-indicateurs/atmosphere-et-climat (signifgicant warming since 1990?)
Belgium
http: //www.meteo.be/meteo/view/fr/5321173-2010.html
`
Italia
http: //www.climatemonitor.it/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/ispraVSNOAA.jpg
Alaska
http: //climate.gi.alaska.edu/Climate/Location/TimeSeries/index.html (no warming since 1978)
Canada
http: //www.ec.gc.ca/dccha-ahccd/default.asp?lang=en&n=1EEECD01-1 (some work to be done; a mess)
New Zealand
http: //www.niwa.co.nz/our-science/climate/news/all/7-station-series-review (no warming since begin 70)
Australia
http: //www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi (no warming since 1980)
Antarctic
http: //junksciencearchive.com/MSU_Temps/RSSSPol.html (no warming exept for the peninsula)
http: //i56.tinypic.com/ohshms.gif
Could be the end of the Euro, this week True Finn in Finland could come into power, if they do they promise to veto the Portugal Bailout :)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/09/us-portugal-finland-idUSTRE7381LK20110409
Sugar is very toxic. It is like Cocaine really. Coca leaves are fine to chew, but if you concentrate and denature it, it becomes Cocaine. The same applies with sugar. Especially HFCS. Which is the reason for the obesity crisis.
http://www.boston.com/news/health/articles/2010/03/29/high_fructose_corn_syrup_fuels_obesity_in_rats/
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090716113247.htm
Cancer, Diabetes, everything. Tooth decay.
@David, George, & LDLAS:
The bad news is you’ve given me a day worth of reading and i have a lot of things scheduled for today.
The good news is that I’m not going to do any of them as we’re back at Kaiser with “granny” again, so I’ve got some reading time…
Lemons, meet lemonade and lemon squares and …
@George:
Yes, too much, too little or just right rain are all reasons to raise rates…
So is too much growth (need to expand) and too little (need to maintain profit / revenue in dropping market… )
@Scarlet Pumpernickel:
Interesting thing about the Finns. A “no nonsense” people most of the time… Wonder why they get a vote and others don’t… (No don’t tell me, I can guess… they had the backbone and brains to demand that “concession” as the price of the noose…)
But good to know. As the PIIGS come for “more please” that’s when the “Euro hits the wall” and we roll the dice on that European Zone future…
@Scarlet Pumpernickel:
Ah, the sugar and fat wars….
Some personal points:
I was in a NASA study used to set the criteria for selecting shuttle astronauts… we “lived in a box for NASA” for 3.5 months. 11 foot x 17 foot with 3 people. No windows. No going out doors. All the food you could eat.
Literally. Food was all “on demand”. Just ask and it was sent (from a fairly decent menu).
I spent most of my time laying in bed reading. Occasionally few the flight simulator (usually once a day for testing our skills… sometimes at exactly our lowest body temp and heart rate…)
My weight DROPPED from a bit over 200 lbs to 156 lbs. Lowest I’d weighed since before high school and never matched since.
Low activity is NOT a cause of weight gain…
Over the years, many family and friends have gone on whacky diets and I’ve joined them for “moral support”. Eating the Atkins diet of protein and fat I lost weight. Going on a high carb diet, I gained weight (and had a mild hypoglycemic episode at the extreme case).
I was raised eating fat in modestly large degrees ( look at the Amish recipe for things like cakes, biscuits, breakfast… many start with “take 2 pounds of lard…” but the sugar cookies are do die for ;-) My granddad lived to 90 something… My Dad ate fat in giant amounts (bacon and eggs, bacon grease soaked toast, beefsteak) and though he died at 56, it was from smoking induced cancer. The autopsy showed no signs of significant heart or blood vessel issues…
My weight holds “about 205”. I can drive it up, or down, about 15 lbs with some effort. Has been since highschool. If I eat foods with fats in them, I drop a little and eat less. If I eat suggary stuff I gain a little and want to eat more.
THE biggest “oh oh” is Transfat. If I eat anything with trans fat in it, my hunger goes up significantly and I eat more and more and gain a load of weight. My thesis is that it plugs up the fat metabolizing enzymes and knocks them out of action.
At the end of the day, “The poison is in the dose” and for fats other than trans fats they satisfy hunger very quickly and self limit the dose. For sugars they do not so self limit. Transfat is just evil. I have a “zero dose policy” for any food with the word “hydrogenated” on the label.
(Yes, even “fully hydrogenated” as I don’t know if it is the ‘trans’ kink or simply the non-natural chain length of a fully saturated 22 long plant lipid that’s ‘the issue’…)
At any rate, I use “Palm Oil Vegetable Shortening” from Whole Foods for any baking and it works great, taste is great, and it digests and metabolizes fine. (Coconut oil is even better for you and makes great cookies with a coconut aroma ;-)
Oh, and I ought to add that I rarely drink sodas or eat candies and generally avoid anything very sweet (just because I’m not that fond of it) other than the occasional b’fast cerial and sweetened tea / coffee. I like simple foods where I can tell what is in them, so a typical meal is “protein starch and vegetable” cooked via any of the usual means (bake, roast, boil, steam, raw, and sometimes fried). Mostly because it’s easy to do and I like it… steamed veggies with butter? Yum! Baked trout? Yum! …)
So my exposure to high fructose corn sugar is nearly nil unless I’m on the road…
So I’m from the “Live in the middle zone of doses of each and don’t eat anything in the way of synthetic fats and glycerides” group. Seems to be working fine…
My wife has started using “Palm Oil Vegetable Shortening”. We have been using olive oil. I must say that I like the palm oil for its high temperature ability and the “mouth feel” and taste. I must see how well it works as a replacement for lard in baking.
We often cuss and discuss sugers and sweeteners as well as that toxic “high fructose corn sugar”, hell if you have to have sweet use real suger, cane if you can get it. Sweet makes fat regardless of the origin or calories and makes you want to gorge your self.
Hi Chiefio, just a kind and gentle reminder that to a hammer, everything loooks like a nail, and to a trend analyst, all silvery rises look like bubbles. Love the graphs though!
@NZ Willy:
What you, and Luis, have both missed is that the CHARTS said “BE IN”, it was not the “trend analysis” that said “bubble”, that is my personal opinion.
Now, that opinion is formed from comparing the movement of one metal vs all the others, but it is also formed from observing the advert rate for “buy gold” and “buy silver now!!” and from prior personal history. (It is also formed in full awareness of the new uses of sliver in nano-particles in clothing and in RFID tags and… though with the dropping use in photography as an offset).
So you see, there is far more than “a hammer” in the toolbox. And, in fact, the “hammer” of trends on charts said “be in”.
Why folks have regularly accused me of the “exactly wrong thing” I’ll never understand.
What is a correct statement of any potential error in the position I’ve taken would be “The trend analysis from the charts says to stay in the trade, yet you have arbitrarily said it is a bubble and are going to step out. What factual basis is there for that opinion?”
As you can see, that statement of potential error is exactly the opposite of the assertion that I’m seeing a bubble because of trend analysis….
(In fact, it’s even a bit worse than that as I have a “rule” that says “Trust The Tools”, and I’m specifically choosing to NOT trust the tool…)
So what do you think of this?
I think the fat is not that of a problem, it’s the sugar in particular the denatured highly processed type.
Interesting study, 3 months wow, did you get any Vitamin D supplement?
It seems from the studies coming out though, you don’t need very much HFCS to activate these pathways which make you fat. This is why the Atkins diet work, though they have it wrong, complex COH are fine, but the simple carbohydrates get cut out if you eat protein all the time, so hence the HFCS is all cut out. Everything in American supermarkets is almost corn based now. When I was in the USA last year, I found it was really hard to just buy a natural muesli for breakfast. Everything is the super sweet preloaded breakfast cereals.
BTW it will be funny when the Monsanto crops fail at some stage, the massive monoculture :P Though Bill Gates was buying the stock recently…
http://www.wfsb.com/news/27541598/detail.html
Chevy Volt sets garage on fire.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/gates-backs-gm-crops-with-177m/story-e6frg6so-1226039354140
Running out of food Scam Coming, it’s the 1970s all over again!
http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?symb=mon&insttype=&freq=1&show=&time=9
Bill Gates is preloading for the monoculture scam, yummy I love eating Roundup
http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/greenland/
Why are there so many farms under the ice from the 10th century?
“Climate change” killing bats in unprecedented numbers but not in the way you might think:
http://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/bye-bye-bats
No good can come from giant wind turbines. pg
Good summary
E.M. How’s This With Carbon Tax?
“SCIENTISTS have built the smallest petrol engine – tiny enough to power a
WATCH.
The mini-motor, which runs for two years on a single squirt of lighter fuel, is set to revolutionise world technology.
It produces 700 times more energy than a conventional battery despite being less than a centimetre long – not even half an inch. It could be used to operate laptops and mobile phones for months on end – doing away with the need for recharging.
Experts believe it could be phasing out batteries in such items within just six years.
Engineers at the University of Birmingham have produced the engine; minute enough to be balanced on a fingertip. Dr Kyle Jiang, lead investigator from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, said: “We are looking at an industrial revolution happening in peoples’ pockets.
“The breakthrough is an enormous step forward. Devices which need re-charging or new batteries are a problem but in six years will be a thing of the past.”
More at
[http://led-world.blogspot.com/2009/04/worlds-smallest-new-nano-petrol-engine.html]
Oh Boy, just as we are being told batteries are ready to replace the petrol engine in our cars, folks come out with a tiny petrol engine touting how much better they are than batteries…
This could get interesting, especially watching the 180 degree advertizing messages ;-)
In the ‘Things that make you go h’mmmm’ league (to echo the post heading), James Annan notes –
http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2011/04/things-that-make-you-gohmmm.html
and a useful link from Eli in the comments.
http://thegwpf.org/energy-news/2834-oil-and-gas-forever.html
Unlimited oil?
http://www.suite101.com/content/greenhouse-gas-theory-discredited-by-coolant-carbon-dioxide-a365870?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4da9b576db11c2b0%2C0
CO2 a coolant?
@Chuckles:
OMG! That really does “cry out” for folks scared of radiation to take a look.
One also wonders what the radioactives level might be in other “volcanic baths” around the world. For example, has anyone measured the radiation level at the hot baths in New Zealand and / or Calistoga California? One would hope.
@Scarlet Pumpernickel:
While it’s nice to to see LNL catching up, it’s been known for a long time that carbonate rocks under heat and pressure would make hydrocarbons and that it is accellerated by various rocks, metals, etc. Basically the FT or Zeolite processes are variations on that.
Per CO2 cooling: I think I just covered that a while ago…
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/04/17/uk-saudi-oil-idUKTRE73G14820110417?rpc=401&feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&rpc=401
Oil cut, the price obviously too low and their is no peak oil this week :P
Apparently that Chevy Volt that caught fire in that garage will just not stay put out.
http://www.courant.com/business/hc-hybrid-car-possible-fire-20110418,0,94353.story
Energy density, meet leakage current…
Oh, and guess they are finding out that carbon is a conductor of electricity, even if the key is off… ;-)
http://www.mynews4.com/story.php?id=41187&n=122
Some info on the volcano in USA that’s coming?
@Scarlet Pumpernickel:
Well, nice to see it’s not just me thinking “Volcano in Nevada”!
Would be great, I’d fly to see, it, we have not seen a new volcano for while now, the last was that one in Mexico that appeared in the corn field…
Vit D is really the super vitamin :P
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s805444.htm
E.M. You might appreciate this!
From
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/4/20/ozone-hole-is-back.html#comments
“UEA people are thick (cont’d)
In today’s news, we have a new survey of UK university quality. From this, I note that the average undergraduate entrant to Cambridge, my old place, had 559 UCAS points.
http://www.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk/league-tables/rankings
An A at A-Level is worth 120 points; a B is worth 100; and so on, with an E worth 40. If we divide the average by 120, and treat the remainder as a separate grade, we can, in a crude way, work out what you needed to get into Cambridge, by expressing these scores as number of A grades plus leftovers.
It turns out that 559 UCAS points are equivalent to 4 As and a C.
What is the comparable data comparison for the University of Email Annihilation? The average UEA entrant had 386 points, which is equivalent to 3 As (the remainder of 26 points is worth less than an E, i.e. nothing).
In reality, one suspects that probably very few UEA entrants had any As at all. The tariff to read Climate Science is three Bs. None of the Bs needs to be in Maths and even if it were, Maths A-Level these days no longer includes calculus. How a Climate Science “graduate” from UEA can be equipped to do any kind of statistics, with our without a Maths A-Level, I couldn’t say,
The UK used to have 55 universities. This year as last, UEA is right there in the bottom half of the old 55 proper universities.
So, on the basis of the warmists’ argument from authority, CAGW is wrong because
1/ I went to Cambridge, where people are smart, and am a sceptic
2/ people at UEA are wamists and are stupid because they have 31% fewer UCAS points than Cambridge entrants.
3/ Climate Science entrants need have only 54% of the A-Levels a Cambridge entrant has.
4/ therefore because I am smarter than them, I must be right.
This is the kind of argument ecofascists can understand.
The science is settled.
Apr 20, 2011 at 2:20 PM | Justice4Rinka “
@Another Ian:
Nicely Played! Well done! Well done!
As my Son did Honors Calculus in high school (to get a BS in Business, of all things) I find it astounding that someone could “do science” and not have a decent grade in calculus.
Heck, if you want to be an Engineer and design cell phone plastic cases you need a few calculus classes and with good grades in it, too.
Just amazing…
(Then again, I aways liked math, got a math award (with money!) in high school, voluntarily took extra calculus and statistics in college and especially enjoyed an elective of “symbolic logic” that is the first cousin of math… so maybe I’m biased ;-)
Maybe I ought to apply to UEA for an “easy A” … ;-) or to Cambridge for a real degree…
E.M.
I’ve found in life that an easy A in anything probably wasn’t worth having!
Fallout weather for the day ;)
This year:
http://www.nohrsc.noaa.gov/nsa/index.html?region=National&year=2011&month=4&day=21&units=e
Now compare that to the past two years. The difference is amazing. There is so much more snow this year than last over most of Canada and the upper Midwestern US.
The important thing is hat all of that snow is a major increase in Earth’s albedo. We are a month past the equinox already so there is some serious sunlight being reflected away from Earth by all that snow.
That will be light that gets reflected before it has a chance to be absorbed by the surface, converted to IR, and then trapped by the atmospheric water vapor to warm the planet. The sunlight is just shining in, and reflecting out, no IR to be had.
And here it is almost May.
http://www.america.gov/st/energy-english/2011/March/20110225163055nirak0.7719385.html?CP.rss=true
Use clothes to wipe blood, don’t use disposable ones
Don’t use plastic for infection control
Hey that 1/2 gallon a day of coolant water is too much, use no water and let the tooth die
Move the chair into the light, you don’t need the operating light anymore
Is the world insane??
http://www.ncgt.org/newsletter.php?action=download&id=88&PHPSESSID=ae52370c38a5f2fbb55d30671a6cdae4
p74 NASA/Global Cooling
95% CO2 on Mars can’t Warm, but on earth 0.0390% causes a runaway effect
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2011/apr/HQ_11-118_Mars_Atmosphere.html
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/04/mars-south-pole-holds-nearly-an-atmospheres-worth-of-co2.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/mounting-evidence-of-rebel-atrocities-in-libya/?singlepage=true
These are the people the west are helping lol
Libya new central bank
http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-mainmenu-26/africa-mainmenu-27/6915-libyan-rebels-create-central-bank-oil-company
ummmm???
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/WylieSD/libya-rebels-flee-gaddafi-assault_n_842343_82568195.html
Getting costly lol
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/foreign-policy/6924-libya-the-600-million-war
Another $25 million from the Chinese borrowed by USA to Libya
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/foreign-policy/7200-obama-sends-25-million-in-nonlethal-aid-to-libyan-rebels
LOL sounds like Bosnia
http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-mainmenu-26/africa-mainmenu-27/6855-un-obama-fighting-alongside-al-qaeda-in-libya
Why can’t we have sugar anymore? This corn rubbish is silly
http://blog.banofhfcs.com/2011/04/interview-with-dr-andrew-siegel-on.html
Hmm!
Check http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=carbon%20cockprint&defid=2956222
I wonder if the various greenhouse counters have ststistics?
Hey Chiefio, just to get you in my corner, I’m seeing a misconception out there that silver is “going parabolic”. But this is just a result of using a y-axis of integer dollars. Of course a rise of $1 is not as significant when silver is $40 as when it was $20. So the “parabolic rise” is just an artifact of the y-axis.
If, instead, the y-axis is logarithmic, then the rise is seen to be steady-slope all the way. I wonder if you might produce such a graph, cheers.
I typically do graphs as a ‘race’ with at least the SPY as benchmark. That puts them as “percentage” graphs instead of dollar graphs. I find that the best way…
E.M. This might be worth a ponder
From comments at
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/04/billions-of-dollars-sneaks-out-the-door-through-un-committees/#comments
“Rereke Whakaaro:
April 23rd, 2011 at 7:26 am
Lionell Griffith: #5
The USSR feeding frenzy took 70 years to collapse because the free world kept propping it up. This frenzy has no free world behind it to hide the fact the UN is nothing but a cannibalistic fraud.
I totally agree.
The raison d’etre, for the UN, from a geopolitical perspective, was to ensure that the USA did not develop into a hegemony.
People today do not appreciate that the amount of raw power unleashed by the USA, when they entered WW II, in terms of men and materiel in Europe and the Pacific, and in the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, was orders of magnitude greater than anything seen before.
The smaller nations were scared stiff. The Atomic Programme had been a closely guarded secret until the bombs were dropped in anger. The psychological impact on leaders in the rest of the world was profound. Had America declared itself to be the world ruler on VJ Day, it would have been a done deal. What prevented that happening was the United States Constitution.
The USSR was the only viable counterweight to the might of the USA, so the smaller nations in the UN “engineered” tension between the two, and thus the Cold War began.
The UN also set up the various Aid Programmes, originally in an attempt to genuinely help, but later as a way of rewarding or punishing nations who did not go along with the UN “consensus”. The term “Rogue State”, is actually defined as a nation that does not toe the UN line.
Now of course, the UN has moved into the area of managing “Global Issues”, of which climate change is the most visible. And it is these “Global Issues” that has taken our attention, and the attention of the world media. But in and of themselves these programmes are immaterial in the longer view.
For now, some sixty years (and three or four administrative generations) further down the track, the UN is seeking to become the very hegemony that it was designed to prevent.
And it will succeed, unless the United States, Russia, and a majority of smaller nations have the courage to become “Rogue States”.
“The odds don’t look very good right now.”
“
Pingback: Gaia shaking… | pindanpost
You recently had a debate on MMR and the impact of the immune system on the brain. The claim had been that MMR was bad for the brain as the measles part of the vaccine affected the gut and take up of nutrients. You were connecting the potential problem with the ability to make/metabolize etc Vitamin A.
I thought that this new research might provide an interesting adjunct to the mix of potentials that could affect vitamin uptake or metabolism.
See http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20401-each-human-has-one-of-only-three-gut-ecosystems.html
Especially the impact that the gut flora have on vitamin absorption.
E.M. FYI
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/04/the-moment-to-test-what-we-are-made-of-is-here/
@Ian W.
Interesting. That link also threw up a further link
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19011-gut-bacteria-may-contribute-to-autism.html
This may be obliquely of interest due to the Magnesium/ sulphate thread https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/take-a-bath/#comment-16930
@Ian W:
Interesting article. I know for certain that I have two different stable states of gut flora, and one of them is much better than the other. To “fix it” I’ll eat a fair amount of yogurt and get things back to the good side. Excess alcohol and antibiotics can put in the more “fermenting” mode. It is a stable mode, but has more headaches, lethargy, mental sloth, and some other symptoms including “sulphurous farts”… That seems to lead to colonic slowing (stagnation?) that exacerbates things (in extreme cases). So a bit of fasting, then some yogurt, then add back in a low protein diet for a day or two and things get back to the good side pretty quick.
I suspect when they look into it more they will find the “3 types” are more related to what bugs play well with others and gut residency times than any more complicated things.
@Verity Jones:
One of the supposed “issues” is “leaky gut”, that would alow a lot of “bad stuff” into the blood. Now if you have “leaky gut” along with “more bad bugs” …
@Another Ian:
Yes, I’m aware of it. Just don’t know how to get OSU and the incredibly obvious power politics being done to those innocent kids “fixed”. In the long run that kind of thing will result in it’s own demise, but for now, absent a congressional investigation, I’m at a dead end.
There are times when even a strong head shaking will not clear the anti-informational WACK delivered by the works of the befuddled.
I saw this cartoon over at WUWT. I do not think the technical advisors can pass the Turing test.
Anyone who watches this will need a magnesium salts bath afterward.
E.W, please have a look at this:
http://www.haw-system.jp/English/indexE.html
And this:
http://www.byronwine.com/files/Philippine-1.wmv
Looks to me the oil era is over with these applications don’t you think so?
That cartoon is incredibly nausiating, as well as incredibly wrong…
Even has the dinosaurs as Diesel meme that’s just wrong. Where are the bones in the oil? Try algae…
Just so wrong. Yeah, it has the “power of poop”…
@R. de Haan:
It isn’t hard to make things that run on H2. The problem is:
Show me the hydrogen mines.
Hydrogen is just a chemical battery (and not all that good a one either). We still need a primary energy source, and those are basically nuclear (including solar fusion) and fossile fuel. Everything else is derivative.
@E.W,
Have a look at the second video.
The guy claims he derives the hydrogen on board.
There are no hydrogen fueling stations in the Philipines.
I just combined the Japanese and Philipin applications.
So hydrogen and water injection (steam) of the Japanese application combined with the on board hydrogen generation of the Philipine inventor.
He claims no tank is needed.
As for fossil fuels:
Another abiotic origin claim
http://www.evolutionaryleaps.com/A_Different_Origin_for_Hydrocarbons-No_ancient_swamp_sludge.htm
@R. de Haan:
I did look at it. He has a battery that is used to break down water into H2 and O2. Maybe he has some more efficient electrolysis (though I doubt it) that lets him somehow suck some heat from the ambient into the reaction, but at the end of the day, it is still the electrolysis that is the creator of the hydrogen… so that then takes a primary energy source to drive it.
At that point you run smack into the 3 laws of thermodynamics…
So whatever power is used to charge the batteries that break down the water could just be used directly to turn a motor… and thermodyanamics says the more transformations you send it through, the less will be left at the end of the journey…
So it still comes back to “what primary energy sources are there to power this hydrogen creation device?”. Those remain nuclear, or fossile. (With a minor nod to the latent heat in the planet that, while mostly nuclear decay heat, has some left over small percentage of gravitational / compression heating)
There are no hydrogen mines.
There are no hydrogen wells.
You must make the hydrogen.
The laws of thermo mean you could have more advantage from running that power directly to the wheels..
@ E.M. and R. de Hann
Regarding hydrogen, it really does make a pretty decent fuel — if you can get it cheap enough! While I would seriously love to see someone find a clever way around the thermodynamics of making hydrogen from water, that is one of those subjects that I would have to see for myself before I could believe it. It would be nice. However…
We all know why the greenies like hydrogen. You can make it from water, it only produces more water when oxidized, you can use it in an IC engine, or in a fuel cell for electricity, if you spill some it goes straight up into the air and blows away, etc.
As E.M. points out though, there are no hydrogen wells. Or maybe there are. What if we took low grade petroleum, or even natural gas, and stripped off the hydrogens? The bond between hydrogen and oxygen in water is quite strong and takes a lot of energy to break, but the bond in long chain hydrocarbons is much weaker. That is why stripping hydrogens from gasoline and combining them with oxygen is a net energy output. Perhaps it would be practical to pump the low grade petroleum, take off the hydrogen, leave the carbon behind in an easily buried form (for the greenies who believe in carbon sequestration) and then use the hydrogen in our sparkling new, (and somehow paid for!) ecologically sound infrastructure?
Please note that I am being rather tongue in cheek on the practicality of this idea. Honestly, there are some fairly obvious issues. But for those who REALLY want to go to a hydrogen economy, the answer may not be in deriving hydrogen from water, but rather from traditional fuels, and then hiding the carbon.
By the way, one thing that got me thinking about this was a story I heard some decades ago. Anyone here remember carbide lamps? The old miners (and frog giggers down South) used them. You combine calcium carbide with water and they react to produce acetylene gas. The gas burns to light the lamp. Anyway, a caver had purchased a carbide lamp and was a little unsure of the process for using it. After his first use, he called the supplier and told him that the lamp was defective and that instead of a normal one inch flame, it was shooting out a six inch flame and could not be adjusted any lower. Some conversation revealed that the new owner had filled his lamp not with water, but with lantern fuel. Let us guess that the calcium carbide found it FAR easier to snatch the hydrogens off the lantern fuel than it would have with water! So the story goes…
Remember this video from awhile back about Keynes and Hayek?
Well here is the next installment from econotories.com
Bacterial hydrogen production…
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2011/February/11021103.asp
Numerous other examples, but seemingly still mostly at lab scale.
Scientist’s from China….
I would double check any story from about green inventions in from the US and Europe but triple check if it comes from China.
They are real scam artists
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/todays-chinese-fraud-du-jour-sino-clean-energy-scei-complete-hoax-alfred-little
@Verity:
Very interesting tech… but it just means we’re turning acetate or glucose into hydrogen. We’ve still got to get the organic stuff from somewhere at good / great energy efficiency or $/watt…
@R. de Haan:
Unfortunately, I’ve worked closely with enough Chinese operations to know that if you have not tested every single spec, then you have been fooled on at least those plus one…
The entire moral compass seemed to consist of “Not caught? Then OK!”.
However, the tech that Verity is talking about is attested elsewhere too:
http://www.engr.psu.edu/ce/enve/logan/bioenergy/research_mec.htm
Then again, it is Penn State…
They’ve “had issues” with their “green science” before… i.e. Mann et. al.
@E.M and Jason Calley
Thanks for your responses.
I know about the process to generate hydrogen from water. The guy from the Philippines without any doubt will need to recharge his battery after some time.
Not only does it take at least as much energy to split the hydrogen molecules from the oxigen molecules as it generates power released by burning the hydrogen. It also takes additional energy to turn the hydrogen into a liquid state. These pressure pumps draw lots of power.
Something that is often forgotten by those who are enthusiastic about the automotive application of natural gas which is also in need of compression. Besides that, you need a costly isolated pressure tank for hydrogen storage. This makes a hydrogen car conversion very costly compared to LPG or natural gas.
However, what I liked about the Philippine application (if all that was shown is correct) was the fact that he produced the hydrogen onboard without any storage tank. Hydrogen on demand.
What I liked about the Japanese application is that it combines hydogen with water injection maintaining
the original engine performance.
Two years ago I had the opportunity to test drive the 12 cylinder BWW and the Mazda RX-8 (rotary engine) both fueled by hydrogen. The problem was that the hydrogen took 50% of the engine performance turning really fast performng cars into lame ducks and both came a very limited range, despite huge hydrogen tanks.
The japanese car conversion however is fast and is still able to make it’s maximum speed of 180 km/h, thanks to the water injection.
So if you could combine the on board hydrogen generation of the Philipines inventor with the hydrogen-water injectin of the Japanese application and the only price is battery capacity, the only offset is that you have to recharge the batteries after some time and fill up the water tanks (one for the hydrogen generation and one for water injection)
recharging a battery is similar to any electric car which doesn’t have a better range than the Japanese hydrogen car but is much more costly because of the battery pack.
As I said, there are no hydrogen fueling stations in the Philippines but this guy is driving his care for years just pouring water and most probably recharging his battery.
He doesn’t have gasoline bills, just the costs of recharging his battery.
In fact he has a very cheap electric car.
Of course he states his battery doesn’t need any recharging and that makes me doubt the entire credibility of the concept. Pepetum mobilee and so on.
Don’t buy that stuff.
@ R. de Haan
I pretty much agree with your assesment of hydrogen in cars — with one minor addition. One more practical use of hydrogen is not so much as a primary fuel, but as a boosting agent. This is a situation where a conventional or even lower grade petrochemical is the main fuel, and hydrogen is added at a rate of something in the neighborhood of 5, 10 or 15% to facilitate combustion. Hydrogen has one of the fastest flame front propagations known, burns hot and also burns at a very wide range of hydrogen to oxygen ratios. This makes it very good at helping lower class fuels burn efficiently in engines that normally need more refined fuel. Since the hydrogen used for boosting is not being used at such a high rate, smaller tanks or perhaps even on-board generation become much more feasible.
Oh! Do remember to retard the timing on your engine to top dead center or even a tiny bit past. The hydrogen burns fast!
@Jason Calley,
We use LPG now to inject into the fuel pump of diesel engines.
It cleans up the the particle emissions quite well, provides more power to the engine and the overall fuel
consumption is reduced significantly = costs.
Two disadvantages: two tanks to fill and the installation of the extra tank, injection system and control box but it works perfectly.
http://www.iwemalpg.com/Diesel_LPG.htm
@ R. de Haan
Very nice LP/diesel design! Yes, that is the same sort of thing as using hydrogen for boosting The figures on increased fuel efficiency and decreased particulates look quite good! I hope it makes it to market. Would be good for stationary applications also.
I have learned something today! :)
E.M. FYI
@Jason Calley
They make it to the market all right.
Regulations in Europe have been adapted and now it is allowed to operate a car with 2 different fuels.
This was not possible 2 years ago.
For stationary applications I personally prefer a gasoline engine converted to LPG/propane over diesel anytime.
Gasoline engines run very smooth with LPG/propane at much lower decibels and vibrations compared to a diesel.
In case of an exhaust leak there is no risk people get poisoned by emissions.
Low maintenance costs.
An ideal combination for power generation: Wankel rotary + propane
http://www.der-wankelmotor.de/Motoren/Ingersol_Rand/ingersol_rand.html
Unfortunately these engines are no longer build but a US producer of big refrigerator systems makes use of the Mazda B13 engine with ceramic seals that make 60.000 hours of non stop stationary running.
But if you run diesel generators and you have the opportunity to place an additional propane tank I think it could be a good investment.
@ R. de Haan
Good information! Thanks! Still, one of the old, one cylinder, very low RPM diesels would be nice. A thousand pounds of iron at 600 rpm will last a long time!
By the way, for anyone interested, I will be gone for the next couple of weeks and will not have web contact available. Thirteen miles of dirt road and no power grid. Hence the interest in alternative fuels, engines, generators and power. :)
@R. de Haan:
Very Nice! I want one of those LPG systems for my old Mercedes 240D !
FWIW, you could also just “fumigate” propane in the air intake. As long as it is below about 75% of stochastic mix, the Diesel injectino acts as a ‘spark plug’ to ignite it.
I’ve thought of doing this with Natural Gas too.
FWIW, I’ve run diesels on hand fumigated propane this way and on hand “fumigated” ethanol. Any very high octane fuel works. (It works best in “old style” indirect injection Diesels with a precombustion chamber…)
With Diesel presently at over $4.40 / gallon I’m thinking of dusting off my old “fumigaion” experiments again…
I did some work on this in about 1982. Later Caterpillar came out with a computer controled version of it. I like to think their inspiration came from my postings in sci.energy; but there is no way to know.
My present “muse” is a charcoal to CO converter / scrubber ane then fumigate the gas into the air intake at up to about 50% of full power. That, believe it or not, ought to eliminate about 80% of my remaining fuel needs (that are under 100 gal / year as it stands…)
Unfortunately, it’s now not enough total dollars to get me worked up enough to actually do it…
@Jason Calley:
Sounds nice!
Remember that you have power available as long as your car is there and you have an inverter along…
BTW, as a “back to the land” solution, I’d use one of these on home grown plant oils:
http://www.generatorsales.com/order/Vegetable-Oil-Lister-Generator-6600-Watt.asp?page=L09989
Though this one looks cleaner:
http://www.triplecmarine.com/14kwlister.html
FWIW, I’ve been “lugging and chugging” my 240D. Not much over 2000 RPM and upshift to 4th gear by 25 mph.
I’m at 120 Miles on the odometer and still not below the 1/4 tank mark… Run “way slow” a Diesel is just an astounding bit of efficiency. I’ve done 450 miles / tank on the car before, but I think if I keep doing this “coast whenever possible / upsift as soon as possible” I may be able to break 500! (IIRC it’s about a 16 Gal tank…)
R. de Haan said:
Much to the contrary of what you suggest here, it appears to be almost impossible to die from Diesel exhausts. The reason is that Diesel engines burn fuel in an oxygen rich atmosphere far away from the stoichiometric point. Depending on engine load, the CO concentration in exhaust gases is therefore very low, with measured O2 concentration around 5%. You can go to pubmed.org and look for Diesel exhaust. The last time I did that, there were exactly zero documented cases with fatal outcome.
@Hugo M
You’re correct but I am talking long term.
Diesel produces lot’s of particles.
That’s why forklifts operated indoor are always electric of LPG. It’s the only clean fuel and the bottles can be exchanged very quickly.
@ E.M Smith
If you really want an LPG system for your Diesel get in touch with Iwema. Just send them an e-mail.
Maybe you can make a deal with them signing an import contract which enables you to supply the US market with their systems.
You can set up a conversion station, train people to convert cars and trucks to LPG (dual fuel and bi-fuel solutions) and Iwema takes care of the conversion packages which you could also sell via the internet.
The US economy needs jobs and every solution that reduces particle emissions and lowers the fuel bill is hot at this moment.
I am sure they will be interested in a potential US partner.
As for natural gas, forget about it. You have the problem of high pressure storage in order to liquify the gas and you still lack range. We say natural gas is for cooking, LPG is for driving.
I am currently in the process to convert an aircraft engine to LPG.
The engine, a 4 stroke 80 HP boxer (Rotax) which comes standard with 2 Bing carburators is now converted to electronic fuel injection.
http://www.silent-hektik.com/UL_912_1.htm
The idea is to inject liquid LPG into the engine instead of vapor.
This is only possible with a sequential LPG injection system.
I am now working on the production of two external tanks made from aluminum, each holding an internal pump to pressurize the tanks in order to maintain the liquid state of the LPG at low pressure and low temperature conditions.
The tanks will get a composite streamline body and they will be attached at the hard points under the wing which I prepared when I build the plane.
With full gasoline and full LPG tanks I will get a range of 2.500 km with at a cruising speed of 270 km/h.
I am used to long flights. My personal record is 11.5 hours with a glider.
@Jason Calley
If you’re in the bush with no cell phone network available you can still access the web, receive tv programs etc. with a 2 way mobile sat system.
See: http://www.tempestcom.com/guide/guide.aspx?Id=161&view=3
I am sure there is lot’s of competition in the US so I think you can buy similar services at an even lower price than I pay.
I use such a system in Middle America and only miss connection during with very thick CB’s and dense rain.
But it is always temporary.
All you need is the hardware, a lap top and a transformer hooked up to your car battery.
For energy supply at your location you could consider to build a big propane tank on a trailer chassis or find a supplier who is prepared to drive a tank truck to your location to fill up your tank.
You run a generator on propane for electricity but also have the propane available for a fridge, hot water, cooking and if necessary for heating.
In Europe there is a big price difference between propane and LPG for automotive use (taxes)
The fuel is alway’s a mix of butane and propane = LPG
I don’t know if this is also the case in the US but if so, you have another opportunity.
It is possible to install a very big tank which is filled up by a propane supplier.
You have one fuel line to fuel the generator, one fuel line to run your household aplliences, warm water, cooling, cooking, heating and a manual pump at the tank to fuel up your car with propane.
Believe me that it pay’s to convert a gasoline car to LPG. We now have gasoline prices of 1,65 Euro per liter. Porpane however only costs 0.48 Euro per liter.
You can find an example of the tank here:
http://www.propan.de/boote_tanken/boote_tanken.html
I use such a solution in Germany where I have such a tank in my garden. It’s fueled up every three months.
I will use a similar tank stationed at the airport to fuel up the plane.
As for the one cylinder diesel, know what you’re asking for.
We had one at my first gliding club which was situated in the middle of a natural park with no grid connection available.
When the diesel was running you could hear it 2 miles away. Bang, bang, bang, so no sleep for you when you have such a machine running on your premises.
I have a three cylinder car engine converted to generator in my basement fueled by propane and it runs like a sewing machine.
When I close the fire door you hear nothing.
It drives the electric engine I took from a fork lift, also from the scrap yard.
Even the batteries came from the scrap yard.
You can get a long way if you have a good toolset and two right hands.
Anyhow, what’s nice about Middle America is the lack of regulations which allows you to do what ever you want to do.
What’s nice about a country like Germany is the every day challenge to sail around rules, regulations and the officials which are all set to suffocate progress and independence.
Hopefully the US is still somewhere in the middle of both worlds and geographically it is.
But with 5 US dollar a gallon fuel prices (and rising) the time has come to get inventive. So screw conventions, screw regulations and go your own way.
I know I am not aloud to fuel up my car with propane in Germany. But I also know there is no way to check it. Many people here drive tax free diesel but this fuel is pigmented with a red color and if authorities catch you by taking a sample from your tank you’re screwed. They impound your car and give you a fine for which you can buy a brand new car.
So I don’t do such things.
However it is always nice to find the edge of the system and try to beat it.
@E.M Smith
If you have problems with kidney stones, the rule we have here is to stay away from everything that’s produced from milk.
So no cheese, no milk, no yoghurt’s.
There are also vegetables which are on the ‘forbidden’ list like purselane. In fact everything with a high calcium content is on the no go list.
Baking meat only with olive oil, no margarine or butter and no fast foods.
Kidney stones here are combatted with high concentrations of vitamin C, the daily intake of a few tablets of asperine for children (from Bayer), the orange tablets, which by the way is excellent to maintain a good heart condition and the regular drinking of beer with a high acid content like white beer and wine (three glasses a day)
Eating grapes is also ok.
My father was put on such a diet when he got kidney stones and he was a much more pleasant company thanks to the obligatory consumption of the beer and wine (he never dunk alcoholics before) and never had a kidney stone again.
@R. de Haan:
As most of my driving these days (in my car) is about 5 miles to the store and back, I was thinking more of a low pressure N.G. bladder on the roof rack. Just enough for about 10 miles.
Cheap. Easy. Moves me to about $1 / gge fuel for 90% of my driving and with the “spigot” already in my garage. (It was done in some of the various World Wars…)
It’s also good for stationary generators. You run on NG as long as it holds out, but in a very bad quake, just open the Diesel more and you still have full emergency power, just with less run time from the Diesel tank.
For anything over about 100 km, I’d go with LPG over CNG… but it’s not cheap over here…
OH, and it’s a family member who’s got the stone issue, not me, and she is religiously disposed to never touch alcohol… IMHO it’s a consequence of the shift to a vegetarian diet. (Nothing wrong per se, but it included a big jump in oxalate rich foods like: spinach, nuts, wheat bran) So now I’m working up a ‘low oxalate vegetarian” diet for that part of the family… (Me, eating meat and drinking beer, and doing fine… Folks avoiding alcohol and meat going to the hospital a lot… I think it’s God telling me to have another beer with that fried chicken ;-)
EM:
I believe you wouldn’t mind the price of Diesel so much if your car was getting the mileage this one does:
http://green.autoblog.com/2011/04/22/ford-focus-econetic-europes-most-fuel-efficient-compact/
@boballab
I really wonder why there is so much difference in milage between the EU and the US testing cycles.
Is the difference caused by the test protocol or is the US version different from the EU version?
As for the milage specifications, the never match the numbers in praxis.
This car must be a hybrid with a small battery pack just enough to provide some support with acceleration and storing the breaking energy.
If you drive high way the electric engine and the additional battery pack is just dead weight.
Besides that, the electronics make the car less reliable.
Just look at the problems with the Honda Hybrid.
I also think that this car has a higher amortization and comes with a higher purchase price compared to a standard diesel.
The fuel consumption is low but after three years it will be as reliable as of a second hand lab top.
I would be interested what a new battery pack is going to cost and how the electronics look like.
Even the electronics in conventional cars is causing problems so I wonder what has been done to improve
the printing circuit boards. Failure of the printing boards caused by cracks becomes a major problem in all modern cars overtime.
There are new production methods which solve this problem but as far as I know they are not implemented by the car industry.
@R. de Haan
The difference is in the way they conduct the test:
http://blogs.wsj.com/drivers-seat/2011/04/07/focus-econetic-fords-80-mpg-car/
The price is yet to be determined, however a couple of years ago (2008) Ford did this to their Fiesta Sub Compact and got 65 MPG out of it, with the price being around $25,000:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_37/b4099060491065.htm
There is more at the link about how Ford would have to spend 350 million to build a plant (in Mexico) to get the car made over here and how they don’t think North and South America would buy enough of them to pay off the plant.
Found this video about the 2010 version:
OK, if you guys are going to run off to the land of Diesels:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/02/the-opel-eco-speedster.php
And yes, I want one….
For a while I’ve had the urge to drop a 2.4 L Diesel Mercedes (with turbo- hard to find but there were a few in England…) into an SL chasis and have a way cool looking slippery shaped highly efficient luxury sports car…
Would probably be able to get about 50 MPG out of it on the freeway. (Not at 80 mph though… though I’d expect top speed to be well over 110 mph as I can hit that in my 300 TD square shaped station wagon so drop 600 cc and go with a slippery v^3 drag shape ought to be a net win)
Unfortunately, finding the 2.4 L Turbo-Diesels is basically inpossible and then putting one into an SL would run me about $3000, then I’d get to try licensing and insuring it. (And dealing with exactly what I’m allowed to license in which years…)
Maybe I’ll just put a carbon composite sports car body on my 240 D and see how that does. Cut the weight about 1000 lbs. Make the drag about 1/2 of present… It tops out at about 90 mph ( 86 on a bad day with the wind or hills against me) so I could likely get it to 100 MPH and about 50 mpg… but that would take about $5000 of custom work to get a body and about $3000 to get it put on and working…
Oh, for what we could do if it were not for all the stupidity frozen into “regulations”…
Some useful tips and documents here on matters survivalist. Ignore the post title…
http://alfin2100.blogspot.com/2011/05/tips-for-surviving-zombie-apocalypse.html
As an aside, R de Haan above wonders on the differences in mileage obtained in US and European tests. Might it not simply be the different gallons being used?
E.M.
Check the model at
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/05/climate-model-finally-produces-meaningful-results/
and this gem in comments
jorgekafkazar:
May 3rd, 2011 at 2:43 pm
By “information flow,” I assume is meant proctoganda.
@Another Ian:
Nice, very nice… You do realize I’ll never be able to type “news flow” into another financial posting without thinking “yellow journalism” in a hole new light?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20436-strange-cosmic-ray-hotspots-stalk-southern-skies.html
Global Cooling to be higher in Southern Hemisphere? Cosmic rays stronger there?
@Scarlet Pumpernickel:
I notice that they are clinging to their idea that the cosmic rays must be scattered if from far away… Seems to me that if you have a known cosmic ray source (old nova) in the same place as cosmic ray hot spot, and a theory that scattering / smearing ought to happen; the reasonable thing to do would be to question that theory…
But instead they go looking for some other source…
That they put at closer than 0.03 LY, which this site:
http://www.onlineconversion.com/astronomical.htm
puts as about 1896 AU (if I picked out that nearly invisible decimal point correctly… where are those glasses…)
And from this posting:
we found that Sedna orbits out to about 1/2 that.
but inside the Oort cloud that is supposed to run out to about 50,000 AU.
So they would rather have a point source for cosmic rays well inside our local neighborhood and with nothing visible; then suspect their theory about scattering might be a bit off… Hmmm….
Could the ozone hole in the south be associated with more cosmic rays in that area? Do they affect ozone?
Some rather bad news here:
http://www.weatherbell.com/jd/?category_name=blog_home_page
I seem to remember a thread a while ago about cold == wet
In the mean time Joe Bastardi on the other side of that site is forecasting another busy week for tornadoes next week.
I am reasonably well educated with respect to statistics, but feel like all we ever see in public are so fully homogonized that they have lost much meaning. Drilling down in Temperature records has been fascinating. Two questions have my interest, heightened by the election cycle. Our government seems to provide huge volumes of data on its inputs, but very little on its outputs, much less comparisons over time between the two. Looking for thoughts on the ouput value of public services and how to measure them? Also, the recovery doesn’t feel right on the ground. I think we measure economic activity mostly with goverment activity folded in to the GDP, a distortion if you believe the multiplier of a dollar into government is less that 1.00. Are there stats comparing recoveries net of government activity? I don’t think this one is very positive, if at all, for the private sector?
EM:
Check this screencap taken from MSN and tell me what you notice about the caption.
http://tinypic.com/r/2a5axoo/7
Meanwhile, on the shores of the Mediterranean ….
http://www.businessinsider.com/greece-considering-leaving-euro-2011-5
Its already being volubly denied so there must be some truth in it ;-)
If your health permits, don’t miss the launch. It is a once in a lifetime experience. We have the good fortune to be able to see them from the roof of the hanger, though we’re too far away for the noise. The night launches are truly amazing. We’ve also picked up a couple of landings with binoculars, and one glorious day, before 9/11, we were vectored by a kindly controller for an air view of the shuttle returning to Canavral on ite 747 carrier. So large in the air, it seemed to be almost at blimp speeds as it went by.
@Richard Ilfeld – I agree. Having watched several from the Beach 20 miles North of Canaveral. At night even there the entire scene lights up – it is a must see.
An inexpensive DIT geiger counter.
Winter is not all bad:
She who must be obeyed (apologies to rumpole) has decreed: we must have earth boxes. The issue is nematodes. When one gardens in the ground in Fla, the first year is good, the second fair, and the third mediocre, at best. The reason is nematodes, tiny parasitic worms. Once you feed them, the population grows and waits for a new meal. Commercial growers down here typically form the earth into row mounds, cover it with plastic, and pump a gaseous insecticide down the rows before planting. After the crop they plow, air out the soil and do it again. But a homeowner putting pesticides into a fixed garden location will see a serious buildup of chemical stew in the garden, and if one lives near the water a nasty runoff. A bag of soil destined for an ‘earth box’ ; can be rendered nematode free in one’s oven. And the watering system can both deliver nutrients and provide optimum watering. When I am schooled in the virtues of something like this my pocketbook usually suffers, but the near zero yield of veggies this past year has me pretty convinced.
E.M. This might be of interest
“The New Science of Climate Change” at
@Another Ian:
Very nice find… I’m not shure how to do a posting on it for here, but folks ought to take a look at it..
http://opencrs.com/document/R41419/
China is going to moon for this. Obama has no rockets :P
EM:
According to NCDC GHCN ver 3 is now live and no longer in Beta as of May 2:
E.M.Smith, can you increase the “recent comments” side bar to 20 from 10. I only check your site morning and night and at times I miss some of the comments. thank you. pg
For what it’s worth: Rapid atmospheric heating prior to Japan Quake
http://www.geekosystem.com/japan-earthquake-atmosphere-heating/
Asteroid 2010 SO16 has an interesting “C” shaped orbit with a 175 year periodicity…. mmmmmm
But the Earth must repulse the asteriod…
R. de Haan
For what it’s worth: Rapid atmospheric heating prior to Japan Quake
http://www.geekosystem.com/japan-earthquake-atmosphere-heating/
Interesting Ron. Do you know if this was observed in other recent large quakes, or if false signals often appear?
R. de Haan
For what it’s worth: Rapid atmospheric heating prior to Japan Quake
http://www.geekosystem.com/japan-earthquake-atmosphere-heating/
One wonders if this could be the reason for ‘earthquake clouds’
Malaga…
Very interesting, but the second link I think the guy is out there somewhat. Rather than doing an about face I would say the asteroids orbital velocity changes and not by much. For a while (175 yrs) it is going slower than Earth then for some reason as it gets closer to us it gains orbital velocity until it once again approaches from the back side. Maybe the solar wind compression as it gets closer slows it down on the back side and speeds it up on the front. WAG on my part…
Here is an article that EM might find interesting:
http://www.observer.com/hedge-funds-running-farms-05172011
@boballab; “Kansas and Nebraska reported farmland prices 20 percent above the previous year’s levels and are on pace to double values in four years.”
As a farmer of several decades experience, I have seen this a number of times. “Cheap” money and the threat of food inflation is followed by financial people throwing money into farm land. this causes land prices to rise quickly. Then they pencil in the price rise to show that it is a great investment and more money pours in. It always ends as money gets expensive and runaway food prices fails to happen. Real farmers will always produce food cheaper then financial people can. Farm land prices go down as well as up. And there is that small problem of yearly taxes based on the purchase price.
Good farm land with water can be a good place to invest for long term safety, but make sure you are penciling in real ROA and not blue sky. And rent it to a real farmer or you will lose more money than you can believe. pg
The “horseshoe orbit” is fairly well understood:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_orbit
It doesn’t take any special ‘repulsive force’, just an understanding of orbital mechanics.
Most folks don’t “get it” that if you add thrust in the direction of your orbit you do not ‘catch up’ to something in front of you, instead you “rise” to a higher orbit (that can cause you to drop behind as you are traveling a longer distance). At the other end, if a ‘big thing’ is catching up to you and slows your orbital speed, you will drop to a lower, shorter, orbit and that lets you pull away from the object. (or with thrusters, trusting toward an object behind you in the orbit slows your orbital speed and you drop to a lower orbit… which is shorter, and you slowly pull away from the object you ‘thrusted toward’…
(To actually get to the objects you apply thrust toward the center of the planet you are orbiting or away from it. That either pushes you to a higher orbit – but without adding forward speed – so you drop back; or if you put thrust ‘down’ it pushes you to a lower shorter orbit, but without a loss of speed, so you ‘catch up’. There can be impacts on the circularity of the orbit, so you end up needing ‘recircularizing’ maneuvers… but you get the idea.)
So:
To go forward and catch up, thrust “down”.
To go backward, thrust “up”.
To go “down”, thrust directed in front of you (“slowing down”)
To go “up”, thrust directed out the back…
Aren’t you glad you are not trying to fly something on orbit?
Typically one uses computers to sort this all out…
We won’t even talk about combined thrusting on mulitple axis… and circularization burns… or transfer orbits… or 3rd body perterbations, or …
A basic starting introduction:
http://www.braeunig.us/space/orbmech.htm
Of course, in a solar system full of many large gravitational bodies, there are a lot of interesting places where that “circular orbit” stuff is meaningless… (yet another reason to let a computer keep track of it all) and you get truly bizzare orbits with unexpected thrust vectors needed:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2002/release_2002_147.html
(Look at the picutre…)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network
So yes, due to the really amazing way n-body gravity acts and the unexpected physics of orbital mechanics, there are a whole lot of strange things going on out there…
For a really “fun time” try to figure out the net gravitational dynamics going on in the Trojan asteroids:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_trojan
” The total number of Jupiter Trojans larger than 1 km in diameter is believed to be about 1 million, approximately equal to the number of asteroids larger than 1 km in the main asteroid belt. Like main belt asteroids, Trojans form families.”
So there are these giant swarms of rocks just sort of wandering around in a few batches sort of in the Jupiter orbit and being “nudged” by all the other large planets too. Sometimes whacking into each other.
Makes you feel real secure, doesn’t it? ;-)
@P.G. Sharrow:
It’s always fun to watch non-farmers try to farm….
Every-so-often some would try to do that in my little farm town. They would buy all sorts of expensive toys (new equipment) and expensive “stock” (we did mostly fruit then, so it was often the expense of establishing an orchard). Then stand back with open basket waiting for the money to fall in…
Then they would learn about things like “bud loss”. And August “brown rot” mold after the “unexpected” rains expected every few years. (And having not contracted with the crop duster for standby sulfer dusting services would be surprised to discover that he could not be rented on the ‘spot’ market as he had established clients…) And they would learn that their hired farm manager on a 40 hour work week wasn’t quite the same as a “living on the farm farmer” (usually the ones with animals … when they learn that “bloat” has to be treated inside hours with the direct application of a knife as the vet is called… or your ‘rent a farmer” shows up in the morning and reports a few $1000 of animal is no longer an asset…)
One of my favorites were the guys who would buy a farm and immediately dump all the old farm gear, putting their shiny new tractor in place instead. (Locals buying up the “junk” very cheap). Then discover that there were some “odd places” that needed that old small tractor, or that didn’t grow their planned main crop well, (which was why they had that equipment for the “stupid” small crop of something else…and were not “capturing full economies of scale by mono-cropping”)… Especially fun to see a ‘too heavy” rig being pulled out of a mud sink by an old small lite “junk” tractor… especially delicious if it was the same one they had sold…
Sad were the ones who knew the annual return would cover all their payments and were running on debt service. Then would hit the one bad year and have no ability to service the debt on all that new farm and equipment.
My Dad sold farms for a living for a few years (well, most years. We had the restaurant for about 4 – 5 years and he sold stuff both before and after). I sat in the corner listening to a lot of farms being sold. You knew inside of an hour (sometimes in minutes) who was going to make it and who was not.
The guys with suits and spreadsheets rarely did. The guy with overalls and a mix of grease and dirt under his fingernails who asked things like “Old Joe selling all that junk with his land?” or “How much of the creek is mine?” or even just “The folks living in that old house, they want to stay?” (Often the old house had an old “manager” who would watch things for low rent. Mechanized city farmers would always want them gone and the house torn down. Got to hear one of them screaming holy hell as a couple of very large Cat Tractors of his ‘went walkies’ one night. Likely on a flat bed truck to Mexico before morning… He’d have been better served leaving “that old house” standing…) We’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment…
When a “boom” would happen, the “old hands” in town would unload the bad dirt that had “issues” to the newbies. About a decade later they would buy it back for cheap. Keep the dark loam bottom land near the inputs suppliers and with a short haul to the cannery (fuel costs) and sell the less productive land ‘way out there’ with marginal water and red dirt… It makes money in good years, but not in bad… when you can buy it back at auction real cheap…
Ah, well. Times have changed.
The cannery is gone now (wonder who they sold all those peach orchards to… and if the buyers just expected the cannery to always be there ;-) so it’s a long haul to the out-of-town cannery. Kiwis have gone in. The big money is in Rice.
Oddly, rice caused a great upheaval in the town social structure when that happened. The “established” folks owned all the “good land” inherited from the 1800s, and the later poor folks had to make do with very large plots of ‘crappy adobe land’ on the other side of town. Then someone ( I think it was “Hindu Dean” – that’s the only name I ever heard for him) moved to town and planted rice on that “crappy wet land”. Soon all the “poor folks” had rice planted and were worth far more than all the “established folks”. Social order got turned upside down as all the adobe land shot up in price per acre AND the “poor folks” had a lot more acres…
At any rate, it’s all about knowing the dirt, and what lives in it and on it. The place. The weather. What it takes to mix it all together and pull something of value out of it. Then you get to learn about “price inelastic supply” as you try to sell in “good years” and find prices collapsed or see prices rocket up in “bad years” when you have little to sell….
Ah, the joys of farming… (Or, in my case, watching farming…)
@P.G.
I’m guessing you didn’t read the second page of the article linked:
The reason the Hedgies are doing this, is that they went Malthus on us:
I though EM might get a chuckle in how the Hedgies want to “get into” farming because the world is going to end, while at the same time screwing the price of food up for the rest of us.
@David
“Do you know if this was observed in other recent large quakes, or if false signals often appear?”
I don’t have any other case available.
What I do have is other quakes where Northern Light was sighted shortly before it struck.
I also know of scientific reports about ionization events of the atmosphere prior to a quake like this:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0905.3313
@Ian W,
I wonder too.
I have seen the graph’s from Vukcevic from the Japanese quake, I’ve read several scientific studies on the subject and many eye witness reports about animal behavior, northern light, etc. etc.
All very interesting but still no clear mechanism, at least for me, that makes us understand the processes involved.
@Boballab:
And I do get a chuckle out of it… but the hedgies lose it on the very first part of their Malthusian Story:
“Additionally, there isn’t much arable land out there, it’s not increasing”
The reason it isn’t increasing is because we don’t need any more. Just about ANY dirt can be made ‘arable’ if you need to. Right now I’ve got a plastic pot sitting on a concrete “stone” filled with “soil” that was bought at Lucky’s Supermarket … advertized as the composted leftovers from the produce that doesn’t sell….
Every week I watch large “scoop trucks” pick up “yard waste” by the ton from each and every block around me. They compost it (it used to go the landfill). Now they have the “problem” that they are creating more compost than they can sell. And most cities are not doing composting yet.
The simple fact is that nature cranks out one heck of a lot of “biomass” every year. Typically about 5 tons / acre, but up to 50 tons / acre. It does not all “go away” the next year… So it piles up as “dirt”…
And don’t even get me started on aeroponics and hydroponics…. You can set up shop on top of just about any substrate you like (even bedrock) and go into the farming business. Most “fancy lettuce” today is grown hydroponically for major urban markets. Essentially zero bugs, zero defect lettuce. Each head uniform. You can find “butter lettuce” individually packaged in plastic cartons with the roots still attached in some places.
So, essentially, these guys are going to be cornered into the “mass field crops” market. Corn, wheat, soy, sorghum, barley, rapeseed (oh, sorry, how un-PC of me “Canola”), rye, sugar cane. Markets where they simply can NOT control the prices they are paid. So they will have fixed costs (rising as inflation rises) and variable income. Oh Joy.
BTW, you can buy some farms already as stock tickers. Many of them are feeding operations (i.e. they farm meat) so Sanderson Farms, Smithfield for hams, etc. My personal favorite is CZZ that is in Brazil (the presently with a new more Socialist President of Brazil depressing their prospects). They grow sugar cane on an area of land about the size of the old West Germany IIRC. Oh, and HOGS is a China hog farmer…
Chart here:
http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/charts/big.chart?nosettings=1&symb=czz&uf=0&type=4&size=3&sid=2814579&style=320&freq=1&time=8&rand=365581568&compidx=SP500&comp=tsn+sfd+hogs&ma=4&maval=24&lf=2&lf2=4&lf3=1024&height=820&width=720&mocktick=1
At one time Del Monte foods traded in the US. Now I only see a German ticker for it.
PCL gets you Timber Farming as a REIT.
TRC gets you the Tejon Ranch Company (on the Tejon Pass from the central valley of California into the L.A. basin, that has started growing more houses lately… they have just shot up in the last few months. No idea why…
I think you get the idea.
There are stock tickers out there for farms. But most of them are in specific (more profitable) lines of business. Often a “value add” feedout operation or a specialty product. The “competative commodity pricing” on things like rice and wheat are not really attractive to share holders… and having your annual balance sheet flip and flop from profit to loss beyond your control is not attractive to professional managers.
But that’s OK. They can run in with they Story and their Spreadsheets and they can get burned just like everyone else…
I’d much rather buy stock in a company with a “vertical pig feed lot” (they are planning ‘pig skyscrapers’ for some places in / near the Netherlands IIRC) or with a hydroponic “specialty vegetables” operation going in near a major urban center. (Most of the decent tomatoes here are from greenhouse operations, especially in winter, and with decent margins too…)
At any rate, the “running out” meme has a lot of strength to it, so if a market starts running under that whip, hop on and ride…. Just remember to hop off as soon as the Story starts to get a little old and the upward velocity starts to fade…
I wonder how many of those hedgies understand that strapped States can just crank up the property tax as they see fit to pay off all those welfare bills? … Even California with Prop 13 limits has a 1% or so escalator built in. We just slow the rate rise, not stop it. Basically, you get to rent your land from the State and pay for it again and again and again and … Some counties in Texas have a 1% tax rate. So you have a 1% “bleed” every year just for the privilege of owning the land… And if it DOES go up in value, you get a larger assesment… and if you ever sell it, you get hit for capital gains… and …
Ah, well, it’s fun to watch ;-)
@R de Haan:
One of the best “hypothesis” ideas I’ve seen is that the rock is piezoelectric and as the stresses bend it, a voltage spike is created just before the break…
No idea if it’s valid, though…
@E.M.
I’ve heard about the peizoelectric effect too.
Maybe it’s part of the process.
The Northern lights observed short before the Japan Quake (and several others), the storty about the sudden heating of the atmosphere (see previous link posted) and the electromagnetic registration (Vukcevic)
all could be connected.
We see a similar electromagnetic effects during a volcanic eruption.
The Germans even have installed a new detection system last year for field testing purposes.
I am not sure but I think it was installed for the first time at the Stromboli Volcano, Italy.
I’ll see waht I can find on the subject.
A 6.0 and a 4.3 has hit Turkey and a 4.9 Crete.
We’re waiting for the big one there.
The one that will turn Istanbul into rubble.
The sun is as good as dead again.
Chiefio, you are interested in earthquakes. I found this article about forewarning interesting and potentially useful. http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1105/1105.2841.pdf
The other thing, about it, is exactly why did the OLR increase over the earthquake site and is there more energy from the earths centre than has been assumed by all the “climate scientists” particularly the AGW believers.
keep strong
Those above that are interested in quake precursers must check this link;
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26773/
heat signature caused by cloud formation many hours before the Japan quakes. pg
@boballab
Here is an article that EM might find interesting:
“Hedge Farm!”
There are three trends globaly that effect land prices.
1. The mandates for the use of bio fuels set by the US and Europe
2. The subsidized promotion of bio gas electricity generation
3. private investors putting their money in real estate
If one would think the bio fuel mandate only would result in a competition between food and bio fuel farmers, think again.
The push for bio gas electricity generation has caused a hike in agricultural land prices and rents.
In Germany a food crop farmer pay’s about € 450,- per hectare per year.
The subsidized bio fuel and bio gas plant farmers however pay over € 1.000 rent per hectare per year.
You can imagine what this trend has done to land prices. In the US prices may have hiked by 20%.
Here in Germany they doubled over the past year alone.
If this trend continues the Germans will have very expensive electricity and nothing to eat.
The bio gas plants come with a whole strain of problems which include “chronical botulism” which is not only a threat to wild life and life stock but also for humans and food security.
http://notrickszone.com/2011/05/19/biogas-plants-producing-deadly-botulism-could-be-catastrophic-to-wildlife/
Also read the comments which provide some interesting links and video material.
Since I have read this article “Energy Security” has entered a totally different dimension for me.
The more facts are revealed about the so called Green Energy Revolution and “sustainable power generation” the more I have become convinced that it’s even a bigger scam than the AGW scare.
In the news now.
The Turkish quake has caused damage and casualties and over 50 after shocks.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8554857.stm
P G Sharrow the link I gave above is for the paper mentioned in your link. Very interesting
I would be interested on a post on the subject by Chiefio if he has time. A three day forewarning surely must be some benefit to those living near faults in Calefornia.
keep strong
I’m running a bit behind, but trying to catch up… so I’m going to be reading the quake articles “soon”…
The Turkey quake was not particularly large, they just had some really crappy buildings. When the Big One hits, it will be a world scale disaster.
Per Botulism:
That is rather interesting. As clostridium botulinum is incredibly hard to kill in the spore stage already, I doubt that there is anything new going on here (i.e. not a new evolutionary strain). It takes over an hour at 240 F / 115 C to kill all the spores in canned meat / fish, for example. In highly acid environments you can get that down to 20 minutes at 212 F / 100 C (the ‘boiling water bath’ canning of tomatos).
As biogas is made with modest ph ( near 6.8 – 7.5 for one class of ‘bugs’) that higher temp / long time would be needed just to do in the normal garden variety botulism.
And yes, it is literally “garden variety”. Take just about any farm soil in the world and sample it, you will find boluism organisms. (That’s WHY it is so essential to can ALL foods at those temperatures and pressures).
The potential for an “over exposure problem” is of interest. You can always overwhelm an immune system with enough innoculant.
So I don’t see that so much as a “kind” problem (as C. Botulinum is already everywhere) as a ‘degree’ problem (in more ways than one… 70 C / 158 F is more like “incubation for thermophiles” than sterilization temperature… )
To me, the solution is likely pretty simple too. Use the sludge on crops that are NOT for animal grazing. Use it on crops that will be canned (as that process already kills spores).
A simple technical solution would be to acidify the sludge prior to the heat treatment. Make it acid enough and you can kill the botulinum without a whole lot of heat. Then neutralize the ph with some lime and spread your fertizlier. If you used sulphuric acid to acidify, then dolomite to neutralize, your end product would be a greatly enriched fertilizer with “Calcium Magnesium Sulfphates” in it… something plants like…
@ E.M,
Thanks for the info.
I will repost your reply at Pierre Gosselin’s blog.
Major eruption underway in Iceland at Grímsvötn. Plume currently estimated to be at 18,000 feet.
More here:
http://bigthink.com/blogs/eruptions
Webcam here (not pointing directly at the eruption at this time, eruption is off the left edge).
http://live.mila.is/jokulsarlon/
Also have a look at Iceland’s quake map.
Some pretty busy times in other places but Grimsvötn as well.
http://en.vedur.is/earthquakes-and-volcanism/earthquakes/atlantic/
They are saying the ash cloud has reached 18KM in height but I have not verified that number. If that number is true, that would be a stratospheric injection.
Anecdotal evidence of residents is that this eruption is larger than the 2004 eruption.
The sky in that webcam has gone from blue sky to jet black while I have been watching it.
@E.M,
What do you think about the BPA ban as presented by Alan Caruba here:
http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/2011/05/bogus-sex-scares-used-to-ban-bpa-bpa.html
@George
It has been a stratospheric eruption all right.
The Spanish have given the Socialists a severe spanking in the latest provincial and municipal elections. The Socialists lost virtually every single race, even being tossed out of seats they had held since Franco was in power.
I sense a disturbance in the force, Luke. I believe some “green” policies are about to be changed in a major way.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/43129781
@R. de Haan
It will be interesting to see what, if any, impact this will have on ice ablation this summer. According to what I have read so far, this eruption is stronger than the previous three eruptions of this volcano.
This eruption comes as sun angle is approaching maximum for the Arctic region and anything that would reduce solar energy might have a significant impact. We will have to wait and see.
@George
Joseph D’Aleo wrote a few nice articles on the subject.
You will find a recent article about the current eruption and a link to an older article here:
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog
As for the Arctic Sea Ice Melt I don’t sea any problems besides the usual alarmism from the warmists which should be ignored.
Something that is worth watching once every year or so is Ronald Reagan’s 1981 inaugural address. If you have 21 minutes of time to spare, it really is worth watching. I believe it is just as pertinent now as it was in 1981:
Reagan’s heroes were the average Americans. You and me. We got the sense he really did want us to succeed. He was also an economics major. We could use another one like him.
Unfortunately we have no candidate available right now.
Just fence hoppers, ego tripper’s and scam artists
@R. de Haan:
Per BPA, this kind of thing is about all I know:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1280330/
it acts as an estrogen like chemical. It’s been demonstrated many times. I don’t see a lot of evidence that those studies are wrong. Hormones (natural and synthetic) work at extremely low doses, so the “it’s just not enough to do anything” arguments are hollow.
Seems pretty simple to me. Pick some place, say a tropical island like Tahiti, and ban BPA. If you see any postive results, there’s your answer…
(Or do the equivalent with a population study… but I’d rather have a reason to go to Tahiti for a couple of years ;-)
Denmark: legislation forbidding the sale of food products with added vitamins as threat to public health
Now I happen to like Marmite, which is why this caught my eye.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/foodanddrinknews/8533896/Marmite-made-illegal-in-Denmark.html
Hawthorne quake swarm is still with us:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqscanv/FaultMaps/119-38.html
@Verity:
So, vitamins are now a threat to health? And folks wonder why I think governments are stupid…
@George:
I’m still hoping for a minor volacano ;-)
Hekla in Iceland may also be lining up for an eruption:
http://notrickszone.com/2011/05/25/gateway-to-hell-under-extreme-pressure-eruption-expected-soon-writes-der-spiegel/
Ouch! now this just hits too close!! :)
http://www.xkcd.com/903/
Is it legal for a Senator to do what Martha Stuart went to jail for?
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-to-beat-market-follow-trades-of-19.html
@David:
Wow!
I didn’t know they were exempt from the law. I just figured they knew when the info would become “public” and have given their broker a “buy at 3:34 pm and not a moment before” order…
I guess “It’s good to be the King” and exempt from all those petty insider trading laws…
@ David
I fear that instead of a bicameral legislature we now have bicameral legislation. One set of laws for royals, another set for serfs.
Oh noes, we’re all going to die!!! An earthquake measuring 1.5!!!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-13599161
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9501000/9501838.stm
Gotta stop that shale gas at any cost you know…
Golly, a 1.5 … That’s less than a truck driving past:
http://library.thinkquest.org/C003603/english/earthquakes/earthquakestrength.shtml
Mercalli Scale
Reading Intensity
I Although people cannot feel the tremor, machines are able to record it.
II Resting people can detect shaking, especially if they are on a building’s upper floors. Suspended objects may swing back and forth.
III When indoors, people can feel a small vibration, as if a light truck has passed by. Hanging objects will swing. It is difficult for people to realize that it is an earthquake.
http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=4892
So that’s about what, 2 orders of magnetude or 1/100th the strength of a truck on the street…
Or about what you get when a Honda drives by…
A small Honda…
Maybe a motorcycle Honda…
Small Japan update here –
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/03/fukushima_iaea_preliminary_report/
Major eruption in progress in Chile (Puyehue)
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/photo-gallery/gallery-e6frf94x-1226070116594?page=1
Oh, and it looks like another stratospheric injection from looking at some of the cloud formations. Looks like a significant amount of material above the tropopause. It tries to “sink” but hits the colder tropopause and can’t so it just flattens out.
@George:
Oh Boy! Just in time for my “nothing happening” posting to show ;-)
Whoops, lookout, the engineers are getting in on the act –
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2011/06/05/columbia.engineering.team.makes.major.step.improving.forecasts.weather.extremes
Hmmmm.
The green killer: Scores of protected golden eagles dying after colliding with wind turbines
Still, we need more windmills, but……
but we just found a ‘new’ endangered lizard in the permian basin. No oil for sure…gotta protect nature.
However, a sceptic should always be sceptical. Is there actually a census of bird kills by windmills, or do they just sweep up any carcassas and dispose of the evidence?
It’s pretty easy to imagine gliders, like eagles and condors, who spend a lot of time hunting using ridge lift to stay aloft without using much energy, to want to track the same locations that are optimal for windmills —
Maybe they could put noisemakers on the things.
@Richard Ilfeld:
I think it would be interesting to count the number of wolves and coyotes camping under the turbines… “Mana” ;-)
The bread that changed Britain: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13670278
But for some bread lovers, particularly the “artisan bread movement” anything Chorleywood is simply not real bread.
“This stuff is like cotton wool,”
Thought this might interest you – The cotton wool white bread is ‘Miracle Bread’ – water standing up. The ‘YUK’ bit really kicked in for me after a holiday in France.
@Verity:
I always wondered where the “white foam bread” was invented… Now I know…
Here we have a brand of bread that is the epitomy of “white sponge”. It is sold as something to make soft sandwiches with for children’s lunches. It is named Wonderbread and the joke is that “That’s because you wonder what’s in it!”…
I typically buy a different loaf. “Roman Meal”. One of the very first “multigrain” loaves (that only recently put “multigrain” on the lable) that is just perfect for things like french toast and making sandwiches with flavor in them.
Well, at least now I know…
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110607121525.htm
Ok can someone debunk this “increase of CO2″ 55 million years ago, is that that little blip up on the chart when it was already much higher then today?
CO2 has no relationship to temperature on the that chart, it was always higher then today, and the blip today is so loaded with the words in that article.
The key to me is that they talk about the “rate” not the quantity.
As near as I can tell, there is zero evidence that the first deriviative of CO2 makes any difference to anything…
From the EPA:
What’s more, officials said that just one of the rules to cut sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions will would yield up to $290 billion in annual health and welfare benefits in 2014. They say that amounts to preventing up to 36,000 premature deaths, 26,000 hospital and emergency room visits, and 240,000 cases of aggravated asthma.
I am reminded of the words of my algebra teacher 50 years ago …. I won’t count your answer if your don’t show your work.
@Richard Ilfeld:
I’ve done that kind of “estimation”… It comes under the heading of:
“Given these conclusions what assumptions can we draw?”…
We’ve already long ago left behind any “benefit” from smog reduction. We’re in the zone now where you need special instruments to even meaure the smog.
As the Federal expenditures for health care were about $750 Billion, that’s over 1/3 of Federal health care. Remember that The Feds pay for things like Medicare, Medicaid, Federal Pensioner health care, etc.
I think just on the face of it the number of $290 billion is bogus…
Frankly, if they would just put the CFCs back in the asthma inhalers we could cut most of those “aggravated asthma” visits…
RE: Grand Coulee Dam
Bet all those wind farm operators in Oregon are singing the blues. Hey, are our electricity rates going down because there is “too much power” in the grid?
Dangit, forgot the link:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110602/ap_on_re_us/us_western_flooding
And it looks like we could be in for a “domino” failure of a series of large earthen dams on the Missouri river.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/article_2b1eeca2-e701-51dd-83c2-f7bcc81845a4.html?mode=story
The double whammy
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/37349
And the sad part is that as more of our government monies are spent paying checks to people for benefits, we will have a decreasing amount to spend on repairing or replacing 1930’s infrastructure. We won’t be able to replace those dams 20 years from now even if they break.
People forget that a “100 year flood” does happen…
http://www.abc.net.au/local/audio/2011/06/09/3240161.htm nice article
CO2 up because it got warm and life went up
CO2 down because it got cold and life went down
Baja rumbles again.
Interesting times ahead short term.
http://www.iris.edu/dms/seismon.htm
People forget that a “100 year flood” does happen…
About every 20 years here, it seems. And, of course, somewhere, every year, drawing news folks and politicians like flies. Natural disasters are one of those crisis where the resistance to government’s being “required to act” is very low. And they do. So now, we no longer fear the river, we fear the failing infrastructure.
Was this a warning to the coming earthquake?
http://www.iceagenow.com/Ocean_Around_Japan_Warming_Fast.htm
@ all ; you may find this article on super solar flare interesting,
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Did_A_Massive_Solar_Proton_Event_Fry_The_Earth_999.html
pg
Green renewable energy schemes “cracking up” in the UK
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/charlesmoore/8569280/Why-vote-blue-go-green-doesnt-sound-quite-so-clever-any-more.html
More volcanic cooling in the making
Another decade, another stock bubble: http://wp.me/pVVqe-67
Verity,
I used to love the “Crusty” sour dough bread we had in Wales 60 years ago. When I moved to the USA, my employer (ITT corporation) owned the Continental Baking company that invented “Wonderbread” and “Twinkies”.
As a loyal company drone I never criticised the company’s product but my family would not eat what tasted like cotton wool. Now it seems that the UK has gone the same way with Chorleywood bread.
When living in New York, the bread was wonderful with traditional Italian bakeries everywhere. After retiring to Florida I thought I was doomed to consuming factory bread. Instead, the totally awesome Publix supermarket chain that dominates down here bakes every kind of bread you can shake a stick at.
My personal favourite is the crusty “Tuscan Boule”. It reminds me of those Welsh loaves.
Another Ian,
I just spotted your hilarious post from April 20,
I was awarded a major scholarship in physics at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Folks like me generally disdain obscure minor universities. Cambridge is located in East Anglia so I say foul scorn to usurpers calling themselves the “University of East Anglia”.
Sadly, I failed to live up to my academic potential owing to wine, women, song and Rugby football (although not necessarily in that order).
In spite of my fall from grace I still say a pox on the UAE even though I do have a soft spot for another minor university (the University of Southampton) owing to the contributions of Alex Gambling and David Payne to my chosen field (Quantum Electro-optics).
If you have not heard of David Payne, he brought about the collapse of major telecommunications companies such as Global Crossing in 2000/2001. Naturally, for this amazing achievement he was knighted by Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth II.
“In spite of my fall from grace I still say a pox on the UAE”
And just what has the United Arab Emirates done to you? ;)
Should the inclination ever arise, and time present itself, would appreciate your thoughts in the “Emergency Preparation” category of diminishing the impact of another, yet bigger and longer, US Dust Bowl Tragedy smack dab in the Heartland (and of course a little something to coinsidentally knock out production of 99% of all fruit and veggies in California’s Central Valley and that newly acquired US territory to the South, ahhhhhh… “May-Hee-Go”??–or something like that). They say that what goes around eventually comes around, and like the issue of Antibiotic waste and abuse that you mention above, it’s about time for Mother Nature to really remind the Good Ol’ USofA who the Boss is and how to, once again, pray over a garden in the back yard;-)
Eruption of possibly Mallahle volcano, Eritrea region of Ethiopia.
IR plume can be seen on the left side of this:
http://www.sat24.com/zoomloop.aspx?ir=true®ion=af&lat=16&lon=46
Considering the size of the earthquakes accompanying the eruption, it might be pretty large.
http://earthquake-report.com/2011/06/12/unusual-series-of-moderate-volcanic-earthquakes-in-eritrea-and-ethiopia/
From comments on Erik Klemetti’s blog.
@pascvaks:
I don’t suppose “Move to Florida” would be a reasonable answer? 1/2 8-)
@George:
Looks like the “quite before the stom” might be the “next comes volcanoes” marker… (Dig Here! But gently ;-)
Also looks like Kizimen has exploded on the same day (Kamchatka).
Swarm Alert: Something is going on in Ethiopia
http://www.iris.edu/seismon/zoom/events/?lon=41.81&lat=13.23
Puyehue-Cordon-Caulle eruption continues and shows no sign of coming to an end…
R. de Haan, looks like a significant eruption. IR plume according to one report appears to be >50,000 ft altitude, yet another stratospheric injection of volcanic material. Also, Kizimen seems to have erupted in a large way. The stratosphere is really loading up over the past month, not from any one single eruption, but a series of smaller ones.
Volcanic Eruption started in Ethiopia
Plume visible at sat views
Yes George, these are busy times.
We now see a period of cooling coinciding with a period of enhanced volcanic activity and low magnetic solar activity.
Time to place your bets where we’re heading.
Little ice Age anyone?
In the mean time Katla is showing signs of harmonic tremor
http://www.jonfr.com/volcano/?p=1052
About the current Kizimen eruption
http://www.kscnet.ru/ivs/kvert/index_eng.php
More info about the Rift Valley Eritrea eruption.
Pieter De Leeuw (Netherlands) has traced the eruption as probably coming from the Nabro volcano, a crater with a diameter of 8 km. We agree with him. Nabro volcano has no records of recent eruptions.
http://earthquake-report.com/2011/06/12/unusual-series-of-moderate-volcanic-earthquakes-in-eritrea-and-ethiopia/
There is now visible satellite, this plume is huge. At least one report of 50km plume altitude which would be much higher than Pinatubo’s 35km.
River pouring through levee breach near Hamburg
http://www.ncnewspress.com/features/x1534031266/Weather-services-issues-flash-flood-warning
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-181&cid=release_2011-181
Ok looks like the Little Age age could be approaching, 2010 was the peak before the big crash :P
http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/15-06-2011/118207-volcanoes-0/
Interesting article on volcanoes/sun/jupiter
Ozone destroyed by volcanoes, end the ban?
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=2827&from=rss
USGS rolled out the same guy to restate that they know what 3million undersea volcanoes are doing LOL
@Scarlet Pumpernickel:
They don’t even know how many volcanoes there are or where they are, and just recently discovered a whole chain of them under the Arctic Sea so “Good Luck with that” comes to mind ;-)
Besides the fact that CO2 is non issue there is no way they can estimate CO2 emissions from
volcanic venting. They don’t have the figures right for land based volcanic systems let alone they know what’s happening under the sea surface.
The entire Southern and Middle land mass of Italy for example is emitting CO2.
And we have not even mentioned the existence of non volcanic related CO2 earth degassing.
http://reading.academia.edu/AntonioCosta/Papers/568893/Non-volcanic_CO2_Earth_degassing_Case_of_Mefite_dAnsanto_southern_Apennines_Italy
Also worth reading is this article about Yellowstone/Italy Co2 emissions
http://www.personal.psu.edu/fth/Yellowstone-Italy-CO2.html
Humanity burning fossil fuels adding only adds an estimated 3% to the natural CO2 cycle.
To suggest that CO2 from volcanic origin is less than 3% of the natural budget is ludicrous.
Alert
Katla about to pop?
http://www.jonfr.com/volcano/?p=1062
Iceland Katla could be about to pop, close to the poles again, so massive global cooling. Funny how computer models think they can predict volcanoes and the sun… :P
http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/englishweb/myrjokull.html
Check out earthquakes right on Katla now!!
http://www.irishweatheronline.com/news/earthquakesvolcanos/2011-on-target-for-highest-number-of-recorded-earthquakes/20688.html
Highest earthquakes EVER? CO2??? Do solar or planetary factors effect it?
http://www.irishweatheronline.com/news/earthquakesvolcanos/antarctic-region-hit-by-series-of-moderate-earthquakes/20656.html
The other end of the source of El Nino (east pacific rise) has an earthquake
@Scarlett Pumpernicklel
As for the number of quakes and the entirely useless graphs published by irishweatheronline, I would like to refer to a much better representation of the quake numbers here:
http://modernsurvivalblog.com/earthquakes/why-are-2010-earthquakes-up-151-percent/
Scrolling down on the left side of the page you find a continuously updated overview of quakes to date, a rolling average, a year to date view.
I.M.O this makes more sense because the year 2011 is still underway.
19-Jun-2011
(USGS data through yesterday)
A different way of looking at quake stats…
Instead of a rolling avg., a year-to-date.
Magnitude 8 – 9.9
2011 Earthquakes (1)
annual average (1)
100% of 20yr. YTD avg. until day #170
Magnitude 7 – 7.9
2011 Earthquakes (8)
annual average (14)
120% of 20yr. YTD avg. until day #170
Magnitude 6 – 6.9
2011 Earthquakes (124)
annual average (134)
199% of 20yr. YTD avg. until day #170
Magnitude 5 – 5.9
2011 Earthquakes (1,322)
annual average (1,319)
215% of 20yr. YTD avg. until day #170
Self destructing wind mills
http://notrickszone.com/2011/06/20/windmill-tower-snaps-in-half-crashes-down-across-path/
@Scarlet Pumpernickle and R. de Haan:
Very interesting trend data. Now if only we had a 4000 year baseline and a mechanism….
Maybe it’s a sudden change of LOD? Slopping magma has to be “an issue”….
It bugs the hell out of me that I can see the pattern, it has thousands of years of history, it is repeating NOW, and I can’t for the life of me think of a mechanism….
@R. de Haan:
If you can note what towers are steel vs aluminum, that would be of interest. Aluminum is “special” in that cyclic loading below Young’s Modulus still causes failure. For iron (and most other metals) if you stay below the critical point, the age under cyclical load is infinite. Aluminum is not that way. EVERY load, no matter how small, contrubutes to the eventual inevitable crack failure….
Plastics are a whole ‘nother kettle ‘o fish…
At first glance at the photos it looks to me like the problem was a bad job of connecting the sections together. Notice the residue on the interface where the bolt holes are. That looks to me like RTV that was probably put on it to seal it like a gasket to keep water out of the inside of the tower. The telling part is the oval shaped holes. It looks like the bolts weren’t properly torqued and that top section was rocking slightly for a long time.
Also I cant see any inserts in those holes. You generally don’t want to run a steel bolt through aluminum if there is going to be a lot of flexing going on because the steel will saw right though it eventually. You generally put a bushing of some sort in the hole and run the bolts through with a nut at the other end of the bolt.
I wish I could get better pictures of that entire interface. My guess for root cause: Too much sealant in the interface and improperly torqued bolts. In other words, a poor quality installation. If I were the manufacturer, I would go back and find out who assembled that one and inspect every single one installed by the same crew.
http://bigthink.com/ideas/38998/create_comment#comments The Volcano CO2 pseudoscience from the new USGS article is doing the rounds.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110328151734.htm “Their work also shows that the release of CO2 from the deeper mantle to Earth’s atmosphere, at least in certain parts of mid-ocean ridges, is much higher than had previously been imagined.
Given that mid-ocean ridges constitute the largest volcanic system on Earth, this discovery has important implications for the global carbon cycle which have yet to be explored.”
Apparently the new Gerlach article knows everything about every undersea volcano on earth..
http://translate.google.no/translate?sl=no&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.forskningsradet.no%2Fservlet%2FSatellite%3Fc%3DNyhet%26cid%3D1253966873249%26p%3D1226993599893%26pagename%3Dnorklima%252FHovedsidemal Norway warmer then past
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/usc0004f5m.php
Major quake in the Aleutians. M7.4
@George:
You got the entry in tips just 9 minutes before my screen captures were done and about 20 ish before I was ready to publish the article. You watching a live feed or what?
@Scarlet Pumpernickel:
Maybe next they will realize they don’t know the actual isotopic ratio from them and that if they are putting loads of CO2 and heat into the bottom of the ocean then there are unknown quantities of both and unknown lag times for their release into the air.
I guess it’s a sort of progress…
I saw it come across on Twitter.
http://wallpapers-place.blogspot.com/2009/08/socotra-island.html this is a cool place to write about. Apparently the US wants to put a base on there, so it might be gone soon :(
STIMULATING? For about a two year window, beginning December 2007, “stimulus” (fiscal + monetary) – was about 25% or a little more of GDP.
Extraordinary, and most distortional, as government spending counts in the stats as an immediate dollar of GDP (and our Washington solons assume a positive multiplier on top of that). [from Grants Interest rate Observer].
Since there really hasn’t been a sea change in GDP levels (to be ‘filled in’) this seems to indicate a far more rapid descent into overt statism than is being reported. Bernake has now terminates QE2 – but if his mantra is employment rather than inflations I don’t see how he avoids QE3, and the White House certainly wants current spending to be the new normal. This actually looks like a larger diversion from normal US economics that either WWII or the great depression, with no obvious “end point” to indicate its time to start the road back, other than bankruptcy.
@Richard Ilfeld:
Sir, I would like to protest that what you say is quite wrong! I’d like to, but I can’t… 8-(
Yes, we’re being railroaded into the Socialist Progressive State as fast as their little fingers can type the new laws and print the funny money. It is at times like this that I wish we had the Parlamentary System and it could “fail” instead of our “4 year monopoly” system…
At any rate, QE3 will not be done. We will get QE 2.5 as a stealth QE. The portfolio will not be “run off” but instead will be “reinvested”. As that is “no change” it will not be seen as QE…
Yes, I fear the “end game” will be bankruptcy (but they won’t call it that… it will be a ‘restructuring of our banks”…)
http://www.ancientdestructions.com.au/site/destructions/Mega-Tsunami-Melbourne-Australia.php
Interesting topic, the Pacific ocean is 1/3 of the earth, and a great catching ground for asteroids ;)
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/news/chinese-property-risks-fuel-concerns/story-e6frg90x-1226082551978
China’s property closer to collapse
The guy who shorted Enron and Subprime keeps adding to his short
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/152096/20110525/chanos-continues-to-short-china.htm
Interesting eruption occured 1400s in Vanuatu, was the biggest sulfur releasing event in 700 years. I’m sure the computer models can predict one of these. This volcano still bubbles just below the surface of the Vanuatu sea. Mount Garet could be the next one to do this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwae#Climatic_consequences_of_the_1452_-_1453_event
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_changes_of_535%E2%80%93536
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v307/n5949/abs/307344a0.html
http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/Kuwae27.pdf check all the footnotes heaps of links
They are not sure whether in 1400s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahuika_crater the mega tsunamis that hit Australia and NZ were from Kuwae or an asteroid. Apparently could have destroyed the Chinese fleet
Then we have all the asteroids, can the computer models pick these, these are some of the small undetectable ones that hit us last century
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_Incident
..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Mediterranean_Event
..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitim_event
..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cando_event
Also I came across this link, and want to see what people who know stuff think this is true or just some crazies talking rubbish?
http://www.indigoworld.com/index.php?topic=1180.0%3Bwap2
Things that make you go “Hmmm”.
http://www.infowars.com/cancer-surges-in-body-scanner-operators-tsa-launches-cover-up/
Much more at the link. This should get wider exposure in my opinion.
@George:
You know, I can think of no group more “At Risk” of an attack than Congress and the President.
Clearly we need to have a set of scanners put at the entrance to Congress and to the White House and EVERYONE (yes, even the Predential Family and Congress Critters) needs to pass through them EVERY DAY. Can’t be too careful, and some Rogue Agent might have planted something on them without their knowing it…
I’m sure there will be no “issues” so they ought to be “fine with that”…
Members of Congress are exempt from the scanners at airports, BTW.
http://earth-of-fire.over-blog.com/pages/volcanoes-and-climate-effects-of-explosive-eruptions-on-climate-5381140.html
Interesting article, this is way too complicated and one of the variables that the supercomputers leave out
@Scarlet Pumpernickel
OK, I looked at it. Now my brain hurts…. Please send drugs…. good ones…
;-)
I’d hate to even try to figure out how to model that …. Now add that every volcano has a unique chemical signature…. There’s the high Fluorine content of the ones in Iceland, for example… and does anyone know the impact of Fluorine on the stratosphere? The Ozone? How about a sub sea one that injects sea water (chlorine / bromine / brine shrimp ;-)
Yeah, that’l be easy to model…
http://www.truththeory.org/magnetic-storm-earths-invisible-shield/
Cool doco on earth’s core
Joe Bastardi is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u18l95EAOZI&feature=player_embedded taking a stand on Global cooling now, he will be right imho
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110527080327.htm Iceland is now high in Chlorine too, from the http://earth-of-fire.over-blog.com/pages/volcanoes-and-climate-effects-of-explosive-eruptions-on-climate-5381140.html article u can see how long it lasts in the atmosphere. Is it related to http://www.sciencenewsline.com/nature/2011040416280000.html I mean how dumb are they to not even think about possible connections?
Its been over 40 years, but….
One of the major differences between education today and in days gone by is that some of us went to schools where reading of primary sources was required. If one wanted to talk about the economics of Keynes or Smith, one better have read them in the original. Four summers of “the Great Books” that once seemd a burden now seem a blessing.
Your racing charts, recently on corn and more recently on Gold, jogged a memory……Adam Smith went to some length, as I recall, to justify corn as a long term proxy for value in favor of gold, which he disparaged as a store of value as he saw it as just another commodity. He was even then, is 1776, decrying government interference in markets, the wisdom of the crown being as suspect then to close observers as the wisdom of Congress today. He considered inflation through government debasement of currency inevitable.
There is clearly much wisdom in a work whose primary thoughts still hold after two and a half centuries.
What you need to know about our sun from Prof. Dr. C. de Jager
Must see presentation
http://www.cdejager.com/film/
S-P & EMS I think there is something wrong with the diagram on earth-of-fire web page. If there is net heating (ie increased temperature) of the stratosphere then the IR to space must increase not decrease. The particles/ash which come from volcanoes will absorb incoming radiation from space. If the ash contains some carbon the emissivity could be close to 1. If the emissivity is less than 1 then some incoming radiation will be reflected to space. The particles have some heat capacity but will lose energy in the IR range to space. The particles will also transfer energy by convection to the atmosphere which in turn from ozone, H2O, CO2, SO2 and other aersols (eg liquid H2SO4, liquid H2O, ice, solid CO2, etc) will radiate to space in the IR wavelength range. At all times the temperature of the stratosphere will be less than the earth surface so that a net loss of IR to space will continue. Practically nothing can occur instantly, process tend towards an equilibrium which maybe slightly different from the initial equilibrium but process can overshoot and hunt. Maybe iceages come from a combination factors -say 1. quieter sun 2. more cosmic rays 3 more cloud formation 4. more volcano activity 5. less SW radiation at the earth surface 6. more ice reflecting SW radiation 6 drier areas in low latitudes 7 more wild fires resulting in more aersols & CO2 etc. This could happen over long period say 1000’s of years or over shorter periods say 10’s years. It could happen it the next 20-30 years.
Re Chlorine & Fluorine I do not think either gas is there free in the atmosphere. It is most likely an outcome of the method of analysis and how data is reported. I recall examining emission and fallout data from industrial works and power stations. Chlorine was reported but it was found to be present as NaCl and KCl and then in turn, it was found (when plants were shut and considering wind direction) that most of the reported ground level atmospheric content and fallout actually came from the nearby ocean. Unless one knows the method of sampling, the method of analysis, method of data handling and the errors involved it is best say the data is useless.
“ash” from volcanoes isn’t ash like from a fire. It is more like extremely fine sand, not carbon. “Ash” is basically a misnomer as it is not the result of any combustion. It is very fine rock. Most ash is some mixture of basalt to silica with other things in the mix. This molten rock contains various amounts of H2O, CO2, and SO2 and a few other gasses thrown in that vary from one volcano to another or even from one eruption to another of the same volcano.
So imagine shaking a warm bottle of champagne as much as you can, letting loose the cork, and now imagine the foam solidifying on contact with air. Now you have “volcanic ash”. The amount of ash released depends on the rate of degassing of the magma. Once the pressure has been released, an eruption might produce lava flows with very little ash such as we see in Hawaii.
Generally, the more the silica content of the magma, the more explosive the eruption and the more ash because it is much thicker in viscosity. A nearly pure basaltic flow might produce very little ash at all and might flow like syrup.
Also, volcanoes can emit large amounts of chlorine/fluorine but others might emit nearly none. Icelandic volcanoes have been known to erupt so much water soluble fluorine in its ash that it will kill people and livestock by contaminating water supplies that percolate through it. In fact, this is why communities that get water that has been in contact with granite will have a high natural fluoride content in the water.
This is why water from, for example, the Hetch Hetchy water system in California needs no added fluoride. It has a high natural fluoride content.
@ George, fluoride (-F) is chemically different from fluorine F2 which is an artificially produced gas. A quote from an old chemistry book “Because of their strong tendency to take up electrons and thus form compounds, the halogens (F, Cl, Br, I) are never found in nature in the free state. It is estimated that (the element) fluorine occurs in the earth’s crust to the extent of 0.1% of the total -mainly in the form of the minerals cryolite, Na3AlF6, and fluorspar, CaF2.” “Fluorine (F2) unites directly with every element, with the exception of chlorine, nitrogen, oxygen & the members of the helium family” CaF2 is only sightly soluble and fluoride is added to water where necessary as NaF (about 1ppm). The chlorine/fluorine emitted from volcanoes is present as either an alkali salt (eg NaCl, NaF) or in minerals of the ash not as a gas. Exactly the same applies to the emission from a coal fired boiler at a power station. Note the temperature of the flame in a boiler is over 2000C and in some directly fired processes the temperature can be over 3000C.
Well, the fluorine creates a fluoride compound upon reactions with water and other things in the environment. When I said fluorine, i meant fluorine atoms which are in molecular bonds with other atoms.
It doesn’t erupt as pure fluorine. It is erupted as water soluble fluorides and fluorates (same with chlorine, it is erupted as various chlorides and chlorates).
http://cfc.geologist-1011.net/ Nice article on CFC
and here are the EPA’s fairy tales, so can they explain the hole increasing last year in the north only and do they really know the size of the hole in pre 1950 and after the Carrington event?
http://www.epa.gov/ozone/science/myths/volcano.html
http://geology.com/press-release/salton-sea-earthquakes/
The “ozone hole” has more to do with the nature of the polar jet and temperatures aloft than it has with anything else. A reduction in UV radiation from the sun might also decrease ozone production because while ozone protects us against UV, it is the UV that creates the ozone in the first place.
So a reduction in UV energy in the solar spectrum would result in less ozone being produced and the potential for larger “ozone holes” but ultimately it depends on the nature of the cicumpolar jet during winter at the pole in question. A jet that migrates farther South and contains more sunlit area in winter will generally result in a “smaller” ozone hole. A tight jet that sequesters air that gets no sunlight over the pole will result in a more dramatic ozone hole. Ozone is unstable. It destroys itself. In the absence of any UV to create more, the ozone that exists will decline over time. In the absence of mixing with air from lower latitudes that does get UV, the ozone will not get depleted.
So at some point in the spring, the pole begins to get sunlight, the polar jet weakens, and the “hole” then “spills out” across the higher latitudes as a region of ozone depletion. This eventually mixes in with the rest of the atmosphere and that depletion area goes away.
At one point they thought chlorine in stable compounds like CFCs were broken down at altitude by solar energy and the chlorine would react with the ozone resulting in more dramatic ozone loss in the winter. They have since come to realize that their calculations were over an order of magnitude (I think closer to two orders of magnitude) off and the CFCs don’t have significant impact on ozone loss.
But … the DuPont patent protection of Freon 12 was ending and it was set to become a “generic” and the prices was set to plummet so they needed to come up with a way to ban Freon 12 and mandate a new refrigerant that still had plenty of patent life in order to keep the income stream going.
http://www.irishweatheronline.com/features-2/wilde-weather/the-sun-could-control-earths-temperature/290.html/comment-page-1#comment-2763
Great solar article
Ok, so maybe the ice ages are due to long (about 100K year) periods of a quiet sun and the interglacials happen when the sun suddenly becomes active.
One thing that fits their scenario is that during the glacial periods, the storm track across North America seems to drop South by a significant amount. The storms that usually come in over British Columbia and Washington/Oregon seem to come in across California and the Great Basin region creating such things as Lake Lahontan and Lake Bonneville.
So it would appear that the paleoclimatology would match that notion of the change in the jet streams given in the link you posted.
Coldest in 10,000 years at the moment!!!
I have been trying to make a similar point for several years. The thermometer was invented and deployed into wide service just as we were coming out of the LIA. That temperatures have warmed should be no surprise, they would be expected to. Had they not risen, we would probably be in a glacial era by now considering the pace at which the glaciers were accumulating at the end of the LIA.
Not really big news but worth mentioning:
Eruption of Mount Soputan, Sulawesi, Indonesia
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2011/07/03/mt-soputan-erupts-n-sulawesi.html
North California and South California? Nice ring to the ear. (aka – ‘sound’) Kind’a like N.Carolina and S.Carolina. Anyway news article:”Official Calls For Riverside, 12 Other Counties To Secede From California; New state would have no term limits, part-time legislature”, July 1, 2011 7:00 PM; at link –
http://www.instapaper.com/m?u=http%3a%2f%2flosangeles.cbslocal.com%2f2011%2f07%2f01%2fofficial-calls-for-riverside-12-other-counties-to-secede-from-california%2f
Sounds like something that might prove devisive;-)
VOLCANO: Soputan 0606-03
PSN: N0107 E12443
AREA: Sulawesi Indonesia
SUMMIT ELEV: 1784M
ADVISORY NR: 2011/2
INFO SOURCE: MTSAT, SIGMET
AVIATION COLOUR CODE: RED
ERUPTION DETAILS: VA PLUME TO FL460 OBS AT 0132Z EXTENDING 220NM
TO THE W
Sometimes, when trying to point out the insanity of an overly byzantine legal and regulatory system, one can come up with a truly crappy example. Suppose a (nameless) city banned the carrying of feces, presumably to protect the DNC. Suppose selfasame city mandated that dog owners clean up after dogs? Oh dear, what is the perplexed but law abiding canine owner to do?
A 7.8 earthquake near New Zealand.
http://www.businessinsider.com/earthquake-strikes-off-new-zealand-2011-7
Pingback: Solar Max 2014, then Grand Minimum for perhaps 100 years | The GOLDEN RULE
The United States now has no manned space flight capability for the first time in the lives of most Americans.
Some people are excited by space exploration.
Some are excited by controlling how much sugar your kids breakfast cereal can have.
Some folks follow dreams, find knowledge and create wealth.
Others kill dreams, are in thrall to myths, and redistribute and destroy wealth.
So the shuttle is dead, and NASA is engaged in Muslim outreach and climate fraud.
But some of us can still wave the flag and be proud of what our nation has accomplished.
sic transit gloria, I’m afraid — we’ve been nibbled to death by the socialist ducks.
Uh, one more thing folks. America has no publicized civilian way to put men into orbit. I would be awfully disappointed if there weren’t a functional fourplace version of the Boeing/AF “Mini-Shuttle” in case we have a defence need on orbit. Its been proofed publically in Automated form, and the life support package can’t be very different that a cross between The Shuttle and the SR71. If not we are in more trouble than I thought.
http://www.longrangeweather.com/Long-Range-Weather-Trends.htm
Great site
First the volcano vs temperature chart
and
Secondly the moving of the dates you can pull up old charts which show the climate changing the same as today!!!
http://www.longrangeweather.com/300bc.htm
eg check out this
Solar system warming?
http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/englishweb/myrjokull.html
http://scienceblogs.com/catdynamics/2011/07/jkulhlaup_in_mrdalsjkull.php?utm_source=networkbanner&utm_medium=link
Looks like it could be on for Katla!!!!
http://earth-of-fire.over-blog.com/pages/hot-spots-involved-in-the-movement-of-tectonic-plates-5426266.html
New theory of tectonics
http://www.archive.org/details/gov.dod.dimoc.24371 1957 ICE FREE!!!
I’m just wondering how we know the amount of Carbon Dioxide that volcanoes produce, if we have not even found them all?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43729871/ns/technology_and_science-science/
Just for the record, after the Quake off the coast of France, we now have a quake in Northern and middle Italy.
Past two weeks:
12-JUL-2011 07:15:09 44.00 11.80 4.6 2.4 NORTHERN ITALY
12-JUL-2011 06:53:24 43.95 11.89 4.5 7.1 CENTRAL ITALY
07-JUL-2011 19:21:47 41.99 7.64 5.3 5.8 WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN SEA
And also quite unusual, three quakes today in Costa Rica?
12-JUL-2011 20:51:27 10.87 -85.14 5.1 30.9 COSTA RICA
12-JUL-2011 20:18:01 10.84 -85.11 5.1 59.0 COSTA RICA
12-JUL-2011 20:11:08 10.77 -85.03 5.6 62.4 COSTA RICA
Today the GOP minority leader has offered Obama the “Power of the Purse”, a Constitutional responsibility of Congress.
I wrote a short story at Sullivan Travelers connecting the dots I think exist between today’s events in the US Senate, the Euro Zone and Al Gore’s new campaign which besides the usual compilation of lies is a frontal attack on climate skeptics.
I think we’re witnessing the prelude of a global power grab.
http://rarereaders.seablogger.com/2011/07/24-hours-of-reality-my-ass-this-is-the-prelude-of-a-global-coup/
http://tribune.com.ng/index.php/your-health/25114-how-global-warming-affects-your-health
Must be a request for your bank details in there somewhere.
Costa Rica river disappears after earthquake
http://news.yahoo.com/earthquake-causes-river-disappear-costa-rica-200100966.html
Drones look like the next big growth area. Who will be involved? Boeing? Lockhead Martin? Cisco?
There will be armies of them soon, you can invade any country without even asking
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/189176.html
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/188707.html
E.M. How’s your Latin? You might critique this
From a comment at
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/07/labor-sets-new-record-in-unpopularity-worst-result-since-world-war-ii/#comments
“Winston:
July 17th, 2011 at 9:40 am
Dear Jo,
In gratitude for your blog, which provides such an excellent forum for those skeptical of the CAGW cult, I thought I would provide a bit of political satire in recognition of your 60,000th comment milestone, recognizing that humour (such that it is!) is the best weapon we have in persuading the uninitiated toward the skeptics cause.
So, in predicting what I believe will occur to our current fearless leader on or before the Ides of March, 2012, I decided I might write a play, in the tradition of Jonathan Swift or Lewis Carroll, using the similarities between Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and the current situation with figurative knives drawn in readiness for deposing Ms.Gillard from her post as PM due to her massive unpopularity. ”
More at link
Watch this: Katla shake up
http://en.vedur.is/earthquakes-and-volcanism/earthquakes/myrdalsjokull/
@R. de Haan:
Woo Hoo! A “green star” for over 3.0 magnitude!
I got this strange feeling it’s going to be getting really interesting in Europe in the next year or so…
The coming default.
It is easier to renounce one’s debts that to pay them. We have a lot of government and quasi-government and faux-goverment units that have to choose between paying their folks and paying thier bills. If at all possible they’ll pay the folks.
The most popular method of government default is to extend the term of the loan, while keeping the interest rate the same, or maybe even offering a “sweetener”. This allow the banks and other note holders to pretend they are OK, still 100 cents on the dollar on the balance sheet, while the borrowers get vastly reduced debt service and pay far less in real terms over the life of the loan. From cities to toll bridges to stadium commissions, watch for it at a crooks convention – er – public meeting near you.
And if you are a poor retiree clipping the coupons? Sorry Charlie. Can you say Whoops! (WPPSS).
@Richard Ilfeld:
Oh God! Don’t even get me started about the mountain of “munies” out there…
@Another Ian:
I like the job done over at WUWT by a couple of folks in the video:
No Latin Required… vox populi does it all… ;-)
Eugenics had the support of all the major bodies
http://www.michaelcrichton.net/essay-stateoffear-whypoliticizedscienceisdangerous.html
These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.
Latest about Katla
Detection of new formed Cauldrons
http://www.jonfr.com/volcano/?p=1219
Small glacier flood last night
Comments to quake paterns
http://www.jonfr.com/volcano/?p=1228
Katla quake swarm continues
http://en.vedur.is/earthquakes-and-volcanism/earthquakes/myrdalsjokull/
Iceland quake oversight
http://en.vedur.is/earthquakes-and-volcanism/earthquakes/atlantic/
Want to know why we are still in a recession even though we have added
over 200,000 new federal employees in the past two years?
Simple, it’s not a good time to be an ant!
@Verity Jones,
Although I think adding Federal employees is absolutely not the way out of a recession I enjoyed the link.
@Scarlet Pumpernickel:
That’s another one of those “Progressive” policies that the modern Progressives try to keep swept under the run and /or tagged to “conservatives” (even though the conservatives were generally opposed to it as it being against “God’s will”…) Yeah, probably deserves an article…
@R. de Haan:
Oh Boy, more to do this weekend ;-)
I’m pretty sure Europe is going to have a ‘bad day’ out of this Real Soon Now…
@Verity
Nice… very nice… I’d likely have added to the reasons the ant was let go that “productivity in her department had dropped and she was not producing to plan…”
If you want to read a terrific take on the whole Ant/Grasshopper analogy read John Ringo’s book The Last Centurion:
http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/18-EyeoftheStormCD/EyeoftheStormCD/The%20Last%20Centurion/The_Last_Centurion.htm
The book was written in 2007 and printed in 2008. It is based on the premise of what happens when you have a liberal Dims controlling the House and Senate with a Liberal Dim President at the same time a world wide pandemic occurs. To top it off the next mini ice age starts due to the Sun going quite.
@Boballab:
Hmmm…. Missed it by one pandemic and a House… Then again, the election cycle is young…
EM:
The timeline for what happens is 2017-2020 after the 2016 elections. Guess who the winner of that election is supposed to be? One hint: female Dimocrat.
I don’t know much about volcanos, so have no idea if any of those currently being followed could compare to Tambora — but a repeat of the year of no summer (1816) would probably cause enough malnutrition to kick of a level of crisis that looked like a pandemic. Imagine our corn belt producing at about a 25% net yield. Imagine the Russian Wheat crop failing entirely. Although the effects were widely distributed, I think its possible that this event was the worst natural disaster in recorded history, as the impact was global.
@Richard Ilfeld:
Tambora was a very large one. Unfortunately, one can get a very large disruption from a much smaller one in Iceland.
If, as I suspect is true, the volcanic cycle is in sync with solar cycles, it’s going to be a very bad day WHEN a ‘big one’ does go this round.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2011/0120/Bye-Bye-Blackbird-USDA-acknowledges-a-hand-in-one-mass-bird-death
USDA not Silent Spring DDT killed the birds in 1960s?
Unconfirmed report of “volcanic event” in southern California.
One commenter says that there are active mining claims in area and that the radar signature could be from transient dust cloud due to mining explosives. Video maker feels plume may be dust or steam.
My opinion? Not enough data. Maybe worth watching.
@Jason Calley:
Yeah, ‘worth watching’ but I’d not put a whole lot of time into it…
When it gets big enough to be clearly “something” there will be no doubt.
When it’s too small to be on ‘the usual’ reporting agencies, it’s a non-event.
All over California is volcanic to some degree. We’ve got a variety of hot springs and mud bubblers, cinder cones and major volcanoes. While it’s quite possible it was just some folks out in the desert blowing off some ordnance, even if it WERE a volcanic “puff of smoke” it doesn’t mean much.
I’ve heard that guy before and my sense of him is that he has a hair trigger for attribution of things to non-causes and claiming ‘non events’ as evidence of other events. (Like the “scary scary” about California and forrest fire paranoia… except this is in the desert where it’s very hard to do forest fires… I’ve driven though Barstow dozens of times. I don’t think you could set the place on fire if you tried… Sand, cactus, and Yucca don’t burn well. (Tried to burn some Yucca once in the fireplace… like semi-silicate-cellulosic sponge filled with water… took a good 2 oak logs to dry out and ‘burn’ each yucca ‘log’ water foam chunk… Maybe up on some of the ridge tops closer to the ocean… ) At any rate, some dust on the weather radar doesn’t mean much.
No quakes to speak of on the quake map either.
My money is on ‘dust devil’ as they have them from time to time. Some pretty big too…
Spill the beans, E.M. (Unless you already did and I missed it.)
You’ve posted here and on WUWT that you are returning to the ‘Land of Dilbert.’ So when do you leave the loony left coast for the roiled right coast?
Of course I wouldn’t expect company names and title, but in general, what will you be doing for someone else for which you’ll receive a pay check?
Are you sure your system is prepared for the shock? ;o)
Are they prepared for you? ;o) ;o)
E.M. More in the spirit of that video. See
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/farm-women-join-coal-seam-gas-protest/story-e6frerdf-1226101108203
http://www.ees1.lanl.gov/Wohletz/Krakatau.htm
Mega Krakatau
@H.R.:
I can’t give the company name, near as I can tell, as he contract says all client info is proprietary. I’ll be doing project management on data center work for a large company in the area. I’ve got to get my I-9 and W-4 et.al. in this week and start next. So, as of a few days ago, I’m a Floridian…
(That’s why I’ve not been rushing to the invites to dinner at the coasts… I’ll have more time “shortly” ;-) Perhaps this Thursday / Friday / Saturday time frame would be good?… )
BTW: What shock? The one of getting paid for the work I do? ;-)
I grew up where it’s 110 F in the shade, and there aint no shade…. so the heat is not an issue. That it rains and cools in the evenings just fascinates me. (Where I grew up, if it “cooled off” to 90 F in the middle of the night you were lucky. We only had a ‘swamp cooler’, not AC, so “near 100% humidity and slightly cooler” vs “hot as heck and dry” were your “choices”… )
I doubt they are prepared for me… no one else ever has been ;-)
@Another Ian:
FWIW, I grew up in a place with nat gas under the dirt. Once asked why we didn’t have a share as we had dirt… Was told of a bit of ‘case law’ that found that since we were zoned such that WE could not put up a well, we had no rights to the gas under it as we could not extract it legally… therefor the gas company drilling a well a few miles away and sucking it out gets all the gas for free….
Yeah, the laws are tilted to the companies. Guess who wrote them and handed them to the congress critters they bought and paid for? …. While I’m not in favor of The Socialism Shiny Thing, I’m equally uninterested in The Crony Capitalism Bought Market either…
Really, what is “right” is that every land owner be paid a very fair share for THEIR gas… say, about 1/2 the retail price…
@Scarlet Pumperknickel:
Nice article. There are two major candidates. One is Krakatau, the other is a potential Iceland event. There are some old Irish records of something going bump in the night about 535 AD or so along with a “boom” and records of very blood red sky.
Of course, the worst possible is that both were involved… And isn’t Katla being a bit of a pill right now? While Anak Krakatau is rumbling? (Though it has been for several years…)
In my “Now THAT would be a Really Bad Day” moments, I ponder if there is a 1470 year cyclical pattern to volcanoes and if that causes Bond Events and if the one that started about 535, plus 1470 = 2005 means something “interesting” could happen Real Soon Now… which is why I watch volcanoes so much…
We’ve already got a general uptick, and some “big ones” venting in South America and Kamchatka. Just need Alaska / Indonesia / Europe to “chime in” and we’re well on our way … Oh, and Mt. Fuji in about 2016 given the Great Quake +6 years cycle…
EM:
Here is a ink to a blog where the blog author witnessed a “going Galt” moment in Alabama by a coal mine operator:
@ E.M.
lol!
And… naw, I wasn’t expecting a company name, even if they didn’t care one way or the other. It’s not good practice to casually give it out on the internet. I was only curious if you were going to take a different direction from your IT-industry past. You’re not. Anyhow, the rocket science biz is gonna’ slow down in Florida now, so that path is probably closed.
In the spirit of “anecdotes aren’t data”, I have just driven (twice) across the Great Basin. Once in early July, once three weeks later. I will post the following report to archive for possible future use.
The sage brush across Western Colorado, Utah, and Nevada are absolutely brilliant green as in springtime, not the usual dusty grey generally seen this time of year.
The peaks of the Basin and Range province still have snow on the North side of the peaks as of day before yesterday.
Open range with grazing cattle still have green grass without irrigation. The irrigation channels are plumb full which is very unusual for this time of year.
The Colorado above Grand Junction is still running high with the meadows on the sides of the river still flooded.
The Green River in Utah is also running high for this time of year with some meadows on the sides of the river still flooded.
Snows will be returning to some of these areas in only about 45 days or so. The current Pacific ENSO conditions show we could have a repeat this coming winter of what we had last winter. I would say that farmers in the Great Basin have had a wonderful growing/grazing season this year, possibly the best in a couple of decades.
Colorado River near Cisco, UT discharge rate:
http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwisweb/graph?agency_cd=USGS&site_no=09180500&parm_cd=00060&period=120
(Generated from: http://waterdata.usgs.gov/ut/nwis/uv?cb_00010=on&cb_00060=on&cb_00065=on&cb_00095=on&format=gif_default&period=120&site_no=09180500 )
Current discharge rate is about 300% of the median value for July 25.
@George:
Guess it’s time to revisit that “lake level rises in cold times” hypothesis from the Great Salt Lake and related postings… And maybe Adolfo can give us an update on the “Salt drinking lake” (that also gets wet in cold turns”…
@Boballab:
“Going Galt”… I like that… It’s what I did about 8? years ago in the dot.com bubble era. Just reached a point where I was ‘fed up’ with everyone ELSE getting ‘first dibs’ on my company productivity. Employees and Governments first, then all the bills, then… and if any is left over, me as owner.
Had the same emotional state as the guy with the mine. Sure, I could keep employing folks. Sure, I could keep the company ‘ticking over’. But why bother? if the government leaches get the best deal? Being “not stupid”, I just packed it in. Spouse worked for a government paycheck, we got government benefits, and the kid got a government scholarship to pay for his college… (“Means Tested” – so I was careful to assure I had the appropriate low ‘means’… )
Now my opinion is that California is going to be “toast” pretty soon, so we’re looking to ‘re-candle’ out of there. The “means test” issue is gone. And we’re looking at a better total package in a more capitalist friendly place without state income taxes. The balance gives a reason to bother working again, so I’m restarting my career.
It’s really pretty simple cause / effect stuff.
BTW, the Gov. Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown California Budget is of the form “Tax beatings will continue until business morale improves” so I don’t expect much improvement, but rather continued slow collapse. Spouse was having 5 furlough days a year (unpaid days off) now rumors are 10 and rising… So with her job being more “dodgy”, time to volley back to me…
@H.R.:
What I’d hoped for (and worked toward) was for a ‘pick up’ at a temperature computational research gig. Figured that the GIStemp port, alternative dT/dt method creation, and perhaps some of the base understanding (such as the philosophy of temperature averages is broken) might stir some interest.
It *DID* stir interest, but only if I was willing to work for free… which I’ve done in some modest way for a couple of years. And would likely have continued to do if there were still some ‘hope’ of that path working out.
However… “Hope is not a strategy. -E.M.Smith”
And while the government is cutting $5M checks for folks who do demonstrably broken science and tell deceptions to promote Global Warming, the money simply does not exist on the skeptics side.
And, with the California “issues”, and hope being a very empty vessel … the reasonable alternative was to “re-candle” …
So I’ve found a company in a ‘survivor’ industry with good cash flow and decent lobbyists to protect their franchise who can use my skills, and will pay a decent rate for them. Add in that I get to keep 11% more (no state income tax) that sales taxes are about 4% less, that actual prices in the stores run about 15% – 20% less (as the businesses do not need to carry that tax load either) and that a house here is “dirt cheap” (my California equity – NOT sale price… – would buy a 3 to 4 times larger home, and about 40 or 50 years newer, with a pool, clear…) and the story becomes compelling.
We’ll see. It’s only a contract position at present, so things could change at any minute and / or a schedule change and I’m back on the street. I figure a year of ‘working at it’ to ‘freshen’ the resume and then we’ll see…
Welcome to the sequelae of a “Progressive” Government driven agenda…
Today, Greece. Tomorrow, California. Next week? Watch congress…
EM:
Here is an article from the Hoover Institute I thought you might be interested in:
http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/86876
Hmm I seem to remember a certain fellow in a discussion here awhile back that stated a Flat Tax wouldn’t soak the Rick but would raise taxes on the poor.
EM:
Don’t know if you saw or heard of this:
http://moneymorning.com/2011/07/25/the-1-billion-armageddon-trade-placed-against-the-united-states/
@Boballab:
Didn’t see that…
Probably a safe bet.
Either:
1) Obama gets his ‘spend $Trillions’ desires and we’re off AAA from too much spending.
or
2) Obama doesn’t get ‘his deal’ and he vetoes the deal, expecting a stock market drop and a Republican “cave”.
Don’t see a scenario where we happily tighten the Federal Budget by about 40% and pay all our debt without pause…
Just not seeing any way to align a 25% of GDP expenditure rate with an 18% of GDP can be collected via taxes no matter what you do with the tax code, other than a ‘bugger the dollar / bugger the debt’ strategy…
Quake Swarm developing Gulf Califironia
DATE and TIME (UTC) LAT-ITUDE LONG-ITUDE MAG-NITUDE DEPTH km REGION
26-JUL-2011 19:40:28 25.05 -109.58 5.0 12.4 GULF OF CALIFORNIA
26-JUL-2011 18:57:11 24.83 -109.56 4.3 11.5 GULF OF CALIFORNIA
26-JUL-2011 17:44:21 25.19 -109.55 5.9 10.2 GULF OF CALIFORNIA
15-JUL-2011 10:37:57 31.97 -115.11 4.0 7.0 BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO
@boballab — t’wasn’t me, but the tax of choice to soak the poor is consumption tax, either a sales tax, or a VAT. VAT is preferred cause most of it is hidden from the cash register receipts.
— Old saying: Dems will love it because it raises a lot of money, hate it becase it is regressive. Republicans will love it because it is regressive, hate it because it raises a lot of money.
The truth – we’ll probably solve our problem by devaluation thru inflation, but, in fact, the only “real” solution would be to somehow return to a social structure where there are more producers than parasites (parasites in the Rothbard libertarian sense, not perjoratively).
@Richard
No I stated it after a certain other individual started ranting about “soaking the rich” and wanted a flat tax. I pointed out that right now over 40% of adult citizens in the US pay no Income taxes and if you institute a true Flat Tax you won’t soak the rich but you would raise taxes on the poor since they would no longer be exempted from paying.
Lake Powell water level
http://graphs.water-data.com/lakepowell/
Lake Meade
http://graphs.water-data.com/lakemead/
Upper Colorado basin cumulative precipitation
http://graphs.water-data.com/ucsnowpack/index.php
R. de Hann
I would say that looks like a fairly normal aftershock sequence for a 5.9 main shock. It is following pretty much the standard “California” aftershock sequence typical for the region.
What we generally call a “swarm” around here is a series of quakes at about the same magnitude where you don’t have a well-defined main shock and aftershocks or dozens of little quakes without any larger one having set them off.
@R. de Haan:
Thanks for the G.of Cal pointer. Looks like I need another quake posting…. smack dab on the spreading zone. There is also a load of ‘modest quakes’ all over the planet…
@George:
Thanks for the lake level graphs… I’ve been lazy and not following up that “Dig Here” point…
Just for the record:
Cold and Snow events all over the SH from South America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
@R. de Haan”
Linky linky? Or am I to go on a Google Quest…
@ E.M Smith, here are some of the links.
Covering entire SH:
http://www.c3headlines.com/2011/07/the-southern-hemisphere-it-has-not-warmed-in-over-15-years-another-brutal-winter-happens.html
New Zealand:
http://www.iceagenow.com/Christchurch_snowed_in-Worse_to_come.htm
Australia
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2011/07/govt-report-australia-just-experienced.html
South Africa
http://www.iceagenow.com/Traffic_chaos_in_South_Africa-Heaviest_snowfall_in_20_years.htm
South America
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=51437
http://notrickszone.com/2011/07/26/south-america-gripped-by-brutal-winter/
Lost power for a while again today. Not a big deal, it happens to us a lot. We can see the power plant from out house, and on a visit had it explained to us that what that means is we are at the very end of the return line, after the power has gone out to the grid and foozled around a bit. So any lightning, or errant backhoe anyhere is likely to provide an interruption to us. And then there are are hurricanes.
So since there was a ‘sale’ on, I went out to buy a generator — frig, fan, TV and a couple of lights. “What did ya get?” she asked. And “How Much”.
The light bulb went off. 500,000 talking heads who should never have gotten out of journalism school have been prattling on about spending and cuts, and I haven’t heard any look at:
What we get for some particular piece of spending….
What we’ll get if it’s cut to some new level.
I think that’s because both they and the politicians they are protecting know that if we really saw the price tags on things, we’d send them all to elbonia by a slow leaky boat.
I don’t mean “gotchas” like Nancy Pelosi’s huge booze bills on her ‘private jets’ courtesy of the USAF.
Lets not talk about dollars here, lets identify some things and even people.
I mean like, what did the governmnet buy with our money, in, say, the Education department, and what did they pay for it. and if there is an “Assistant Diversity officer for The Head Start Contract Revisions Office” (a joke, I hope) how much do they make and what do they do?
I’ve been euphamized to death! by our euphamized in chief, and am ready for some specificity.
E.M. Happenings down our way
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/07/the-convoy-of-no-confidence-is-amassing-towards-canberra/
Watch these videos, even USGS put out a statement because of his blogs, but did something happen in USA volcanoes?
@Another Ian:
I left a comment on the link… Maybe Australia can lead us out of this particular mess…
@R. de Haan:
Thanks for the reading list!
@Richard Ilfeld:
I added a link to Elbonia, hope you don’t mind ;-)
I started to do a posting on the ‘government value proposition’ of TARP but got too depressed. There was this article in the Orlando paper about something like $740,000,000 being spent to rehab some 240 ‘distressed homes’ for resale. Yeah, it worked out to something like $3 Million per home… for things that were worth about $200,000 when done. I’ve tried to banish it from my memory as it was just giving me ulcers ;-)
But you are correct. We get about a penny on the dollar of ‘value’ for our taxes spent….
FWIW, “in a prior life” I did the cost accounting system for the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. EVERY single thing used had to be tracked from purchase to final use. I once figure out they were spending about $2 to ‘track’ a penny washer… Even if you used 2 sq. inches of paint to cover a scratch, a form had to be filled out (at how much per hour pay rate?) entered into the system by key operator, and tracked… There was no ‘sanity check’ on when to just say, for example “Touch up paint: $20 over 100 vehicles”… or “1/4 inch washers: 10,000 at 1 cent each total”. Nope. Every Single One and Every Single Use had to have a form filled out…
THAT is the problem of governments. Nobody can make a rational decision. It’s all digging holes with tea spoons to fill them in again…
BTW:
A Yahoo! search on [assistant diversity officer Head Start contract revisions office] gives 13,500,000 results…. Google somewhat more selective:
While I’m sure it can be reduced by putting quotes around key phrases, it’s got a few orders of magnitude to ‘suck up’… (Bing! comes in at 12,700,000)
Unfortunately, swapping to [assistant “diversity officer” “Head Start” contract office] in Bing! blows it out to “1-10 of 45,400,000 results”; while putting the quote before “assistant” drops to zero, so the ‘tuning’ of the quotes is critical to the search…
As a result, I can’t say for sure that your hypothetical is a hypothetical, but i can say there there is a Great Deal very close to it that is NOT hypothetical…
@Scarlet Pumpernickle:
I’m not all that much convinced with that guy’s stuff. He makes some repeated logic errors. Such as “a 3.x quake means an old volcano is activating” then demanding that the USGS explain why it isn’t what he wants.
Sorry, but “not their job” to educate him…
There can be a quake ANYWHERE and at any time in that 4.x to 0.1 range. Rocks break and deform. The Basin and Rage area especially is being stretched, and so blocks form and drop. The only things that really indicate volcanic awakening are harmonic tremor and eruptions. (And a potentially misunderstood radar reflection is NOT venting / eruption…).
So while I personally believe we are in a time of increasing volcanic activity, it must be measured by observable and observed volcanoes, not be random modest little quakes, old pock marks on the surface, and some radar that could just be off a dust devil…
Basically, show me the lava and ash deposits, the harmonic tremor shake records, or an active venting plume. Otherwise it’s just someone leaping off a cliff of conclusion…
Per the second video of “moisture”: So what? We’ve got various steam vents all over the place. Ground water gets into hot rock and you get steam and / or a geyser. A geyser is not a volcano… (If it even IS a steam vent).
So on a scale of 1 to 10 of “value of insight” I’d put this at somewhere down near a low “1”. A nice “maybe check some times for something more definitive” but a very very long ways away from “something odd is happening for sure”…
With that said: I fully DO expect a volcanic event with lots of venting and maybe even lava flow somewhere on that Baja to Mono spreading zone sometime or other in the next bunch of decades (to maybe a century). On a Geologic time scale that’s “instant” and “now”. But I’ll not be getting excited about it until there is glowing lava on the ground, 10 news trucks filming it, and a USGS warning to evacuate the area. Anything less than that is just “business as usual”.
I do appreciate the pointers to interesting things, but I really want to see a full on volcanic event on that spreading zone… It would be ‘way cool’ ;-)
EM:
I think you meant to add from far enough away to be safe or on TV. Trust me being too close to a Volcano when it erupts is no fun and is not ‘way cool’. I speaketh from experience (NTCC Subic Bay RP 1990-1992):
Volcanoes are best observed from far, far away.
Actually, there are a huge numbers of old volcanoes in the region from Northern New Mexico, across to Northern Arizona and up through Southern Utah. An area around Panguitch Lake erupted within the past 1,000 years as have various cinder cones in the Sunset Crater region of Arizona.
Some of these volcanoes are very obvious to the eye. We went swimming last week at a public pool that is heated by natural warm water (98F) that comes from a spring next to a volcano in Veyo, Utah:
It is a small cinder cone, one of many such cinder cones in the area along with a lot of lava flows. We camped in the middle of some fairly recent lava flows in Grants, New Mexico. We also drove through the Inyo Craters region around Mono Lake.
Now if you look at the USGS map of Earthquakes, and I wish they carried EQs more than two weeks, one thing that stands out is a nearly circular pattern of quakes that starts at, say Caliente, Nevada, goes East into Utah, then turns Northeast up to about the Utah Wyoming border, then turns North to about the Idaho, Wyoming, Montana border junction, then curves Northwest along the Idaho/Montana border, West across the top of Idaho into Washington and then down along the Cascades and Sierra Nevada to about Mammoth Lakes and then turns East again to complete the circle. Some times I have looked at the USGS map and it has appeared like an almost perfect circle of quakes.
What we do know is that there was, about 370 million years ago, a pretty large impact in what is now Nevada (Alamo bolide). Debris from that impact are scattered over an area of more than 100,000 square kilometers. The circular pattern of the various quakes and volcanoes has led me to wonder at times if a huge impact at some point in the past has had some lasting affect on the underground plumbing in that area.
@George:
I’d expect that there would be persistent anomalies. Add in the stretch / spreading forces extending those spots, and it’s reasonable to think quakes would congregate there…
Remember how the Republicans (specifically Sarah Palin) warned of death panels when you get socialized medicine and how the left derided that? Remember how the “One” appointed a guy that wants a UK style healthcare system in the states to oversee medicare and Medicaid services?
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/and-then-there039s-about-dr-donald-berwick#ixzz1TROLPiOr
Look at what is being reported in the UK now about their healthcare system:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8668906/NHS-delays-operations-as-it-waits-for-patients-to-die-or-go-private.html
I especially like how the managers (non docs) excused the practice of deliberately making patients wait:
So that’s what they call dying while waiting for surgery now: removing yourself from the list.
Wonder if they look up your political donations before deciding your order in the queue for medical treatment.
U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)
PRELIMINARY MAGNITUDE (current estimates of location and magnitude often differ from text below.):
Magnitude 6.6 SOUTH OF THE FIJI ISLANDS July 29, 2011
Earth Quake Swarm below EL Hiero Volcano Canary Islands
http://earthquake-report.com/2011/07/28/earquake-activity-below-el-hierro-volcano-canary-islands-spain/
@Boballab:
The NHS managed to kill my Uncle. Went in for minor surgery, never came out. They botched the anesthesia… His wife had a ‘bum knee’. They bickered for over 3 years about “Ought they put an artificial knee in the bad one, or replace the good one with an artificial knee as the bad one was putting more stress on it”. (No, no smiley, no /sarcoff>. That really is what they were ‘debating’…). But it all worked out well for the NHS as she ended up having a stroke (likely from the endless stresses and ‘crap’ happening to the blood as it went through the bad knee… ) and then, since she could not walk, no longer needed the knee replacement…
My own story I’ve given a couple of times. 3 or 4 visits to try to get a sty treated. My Dad treated one when I was a kid. Two minutes and a needle; it was done. Had one treated in the USA. 10 minutes and a prescription for antibiotics. Paid a Dr. in the UK (after NHS failed) who prescribed very hot compresses and antibiotics (15 minutes, but she was about 75 years old and had no clients waiting, so seemed to like talking with me. Nice German lady of obvious skills that would have been awesome in earlier times…) Dr. German Lady said that she would have done a minor surgery to assure no return by scraping out the sebaceous gland; but her hands were no longer steady enough. Compresses cured it in 2 days and antibiotics kept it gone.
Believe it or not, the klutz doctor in the NMS walk-ins / “emergency” room could not figure out how to poke a hole in a cyst… I even explained to him how it was done by my Dad. (Roll eyelid over pencil or small diameter handle, apply needle to inside lid where the white spot showed the body of the cyst). He was “willing to give it a go” but unable to ‘execute’… Too klutzy. He also didn’t know how to prescribe antibiotics for it (or was not allowed?) and didn’t have the “old school” knowledge of hot compresses to pasteurize the thing.
He was able to say: “Oh, it’s your eye. Well, we’ll schedule you for ‘eye clinic’ next week.”… Who also could not quite figure out what to do other than say I ought to come back in another week and see if it had gotten all better on it’s own by then… (With some badgering they were able to point me at a place where I found Dr. German Lady and got it fixed …)
It was abundantly clear to me that the staff were incompetent (my medical skills exceeded theirs and I’ve actually read the PDR and know what drugs work…) and their primary purpose was to delay any and all treatment in the hopes you just go away, or as you noted “leave the list”…
This was in London, BTW, not some backwater… IIRC, it was Kings Cross? hospital or some such near Kings Cross. Very large facility. Lots of nicely starched white jackets. No clue to be found…
@George & R. de Haan:
Ok, ok, … I’ll get a new quake posting up ;-)
@ George “Wonder if they look up your political donations before deciding your order in the queue for medical treatment.”
Why George! How very cynical of you! The real process will never be like that. Health care professional would never stoop to researching donations.
The way it actually works, is that YOU call your Representative and remind him how much you have donated. Then, your Representative will — at his discretion — call your local health care facility with instructions on your place in the queue.
The latest revisions of economic data are remarkable, not just for the changes, but what it says for the believability of the current data. If they change it so much, then what will the current figures look like in a year?
This is called “data creep” but is more than that, these revisions are all over the place! Ususally with revisions, the previous figures go down the rabbit hole, you need to consult old publications to find them. I wonder if it’s possible to retrieve the old economic data and chart the revisions. Who is covering their tracks the most? When does it count as a outright lie?
In my line of work, we have robust methods to prevent “data creep” — remarkable that the US government economists do not have the same. As though they are missing the most basic work rules — like they are kids.
@ NZ Willy
The data creep you describe is not a bug in the system, it is an enhancement — at least it is an enhancement if you are trying to mislead and defraud.
E.M. and others have pointed out what I think is the exact same mechanism of altered data being promulgated by the CAGW community. The original data, the raw data, is never easily examined, even when it is available. The “adjusted data” is what is shown and each year it creeps a little. Eventually 1934 becomes cooler and 1998 becomes hotter. http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/09/25/thermometer-magic/
In my very considered opinion, these data creeps are not accidental, nor are they the result of poor work processes. How do I know they are not accidental or poor work? Because they are uniformly “errors” and “adjustments” in favor of those promulgating them, and the individuals involved are rewarded instead of being punished.
“Health care professional would never stoop to researching donations.”
I wasn’t thinking about the health care professionals. I was thinking about the bureaucrat that assigns you to a health care professional.
You should check out Iowahawk for some of the consequences if the debt ceiling isn’t raised on Aug 2nd:
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/07/default-dear-brutus-is-not-in-our-stars-but-in-ourselves.html
http://news.discovery.com/earth/ancient-earth-volcanoes-110728.html#mkcpgn=rssnws1
Time to rewrite textbooks?
Well, the “several hours of background harmonics” he mentions in the video is NOT a sign of “magma movement underground”.. It is general a sign of strong winds. I will be willing to bet there were strong winds in the area. I see it all the time from webicorders in Alaska, Iceland, etc.
It was probably a desert thunderstorm.
E.M. This might interest you.
“Comment from: ianl8888 July 30th, 2011 at 9:42 am
@sean2829
“now its being cited as a source of light reflective aerosols that can explain cooling over the last 10 years.”
The base paper for this assertion is “Anthropogenic sulfur dioxide emissions:1850-2005″, Smith,S.J. et al, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 11, 1101-1116, 2011, wherein Smith et al promote a measurement of the sulphur content of coal burnt in Chinese power stations
Unhappily for this notion of SOx aerosols helping “cool” the planet, the guesstimate of sulphur content in raw/washed coals used in the paper is > 50% higher than laboratory-measured content. Since sulphur content in raw/washed coal is a make-or-break parameter for supply contracts, the widespread lab measurements are accurate and very carefully monitored
Yet another wishful Polyanna notion promoted to a gullible media (which are infested by scientific illiterates and mathematical innumerates)
And, as cementafriend’s post notes:
CSG (coal seam gas) = very, very BAD
LNG (liquified natural gas) = better, mo’ greenie friendly
yet both are methane CH4”
From http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2011/07/natural-gas-more-polluting-than-coal-only-according-to-the-ipcc-a-note-from-cementafriend/#comments
http://thesurfaceofthesun.com/ Weird story on the sun
@Scarlet Pumpernickel:
Not so much “weird”, IMHO, as illustrative of the theories of Dr. Oliver Manuel and related theories. If I get time tomorrow, I may make an abstract of that page for comments by same…
@Another Ian:
The more they dance about, the less likely they are to have ‘got it right’ ;-)
@George:
It looks a lot more like wind and weather to me, than like anything volcanic.
Here is some weird and wacky animal encounters that didn’t go the way you would think they would go:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3347532/Leopard-savaging-a-crocodile-caught-on-camera.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3353107/Mouse-bites-snake-to-death.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3352517/Heron-catches-rabbit-Dramatic-photos.html
Each one has a slide show presentation of the pictures taken of what happened.
Remember how Barney Frank told us that the government didn’t put pressure on banks to lend money to people that were bad risks so that they could buy a home?
And that didn’t cause the housing boom that went bust in 2007/8?
And that even if they did that in the past, this is the here and now and it wouldn’t happen now?
If you believed all that I got one word for Ya….Sucker!
Take a look at what the Obama DOJ is doing now:
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/577794/201107081851/DOJ-Begins-Bank-Witch-Hunt.aspx
Maybe those crazy conspiracy theorists that say Obama is deliberately trying to destroy the US via the economy are not so crazy after all…you can only go with the stupidity over malice argument for so long.
E.M. FYI
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/08/02/obama-2006-raising-americas-debt-limit-is-a-sign-of-leadership-failure/
http://www.avo.alaska.edu/activity/Cleveland.php
http://earthsky.org/space/jupiters-secrets-to-be-revealed-by-juno-spacecraft Cool mission to Jupiter, check out that Aurora! And look at what they think is inside Jupiter (since it was supposed to be a start that failed) why does it have a metallic core :P?
Interesting article about the energy of the earth
http://thunderbolts.info/tpod/2011/arch11/110729fortyfour.htm
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2011/07/17/what.keeps.earth.cooking Another article on internal heat of the earth
Per Obama and the Dimocrats:
I’m torn between the fact that the Progressive movement has repeatedly shown malice toward business and a desire to destroy wealth ‘for a goal’ (socialism in all it forms does this deliberately and leads to poverty as a goal as near as I can tell) and the truth in the saying:
“Intelligence is limited but stupidity knows no bounds. -E.M.Smith”
Our Congress Critters and other Government Lackeys (i.e. da Pres) have near zero understanding of how an economy works. They can be incredibly stupid…
Blend that with even a tiny bit of ‘malice’, greed, and envy and it’s a lethal cocktail that we are all being asked to drink…
@Scarlet:
Maybe I can get to those links on the weekend… Until then, others can take a look see and comment…
If your think the “Tea Party” has become a force, and is creating acrimony, wait for the “Tea Scouts”
The Tea Party wants to be fiscally conservative now, and balance the budget.
Suppose the next set of youthful revolutionaries, instead of concentrating on peace, love, dope, and obnoxious music, figures out that they are the victims of a Ponzi Scheme. They will pay the “liberal” taxes (aren’t the young mostly liberals?) and then some future “don’t Trust anyone under 30” leader will have a magic mushroom moment “Hey – there’s no savings and no investment and there won’t be anything left for us!!!”
“We’re not Boy Scouts or Girls Scouts — we’re Tea Scouts, and Hell No – We won’t Pay(go)”
I’m not sure what the congressional equivalent of sitting in in the college president’s office is, but I hope its voting energy and not Kent State.
The fundamental problem is the creation of host and parasite classes and pitting them against each other. The end comes when the tick grows larger than the host.
E.M. FYI
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/08/blockbuster-planetary-temperature-controls-co2-levels-not-humans/
And you’re quoted
@Another Ian:
Thanks, I’ll take a look!
@George and Richard;
I have great hope for the “Tea Scouts”… I was recently talking with a 17 year old “Gay Guy”, just the sort who OUGHT to be incredibly “liberal” (and he is on most things). He as somewhat vocal about the “taxing him to pay for others” action of congress on their plans to fund Porkulus…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atiR8QgGU6Q&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL Some interesting questions…
You know this precautionary principle thing they crap on about all the time.
So they have spent at least $79 billion on Climate Change, and still can’t prove CO2 does anything
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/07/massive-climate-funding-exposed/
http://planetarydefense.blogspot.com/2011/02/nasa-fy2012-budget-and-neo-program.html
Yet we spend only a few million a year looking for NEO/Comets which could hit earth (and in the small time scale we’ve seen Jupiter hit by a comet a few times).
So how does that work, should we spend on NEO/Comets as well, as the precautionary principle suggests?
Germany possibly on the hook for 133% of its GDP in Eurozone bailout:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/explaining-how-just-announced-ecb-market-rescue-pledged-133-german-gdp-cover-all-europes-bad-de
I think this deal might be what pushes the Germans to leave the Euro and if that happens, the Euro collapses.
E.M., I see from the Nat Hurricane Center that the remnants of trop. storm Emily look like they’re trying to reform and make a comeback tour in your neighbourhood?
My daughter sent us a graphic pic of the damage done to their place when Emily passed over St. Lucia a couple of days ago
:)
Dear Chuckles, I opened the link to see the picture your daughter sent…thanks for the chuckel.
George, I agree, and if not, one way or the other, dissolve it will eventually anyway.
@Chuckles
Too funny!
Then I got my wife to read your post and open the link. It’s even more fun watching the expressions of someone else.
Nicely done.
David, HR, Thanks, the old hand chiseled, recycled ones are the best…
E.M. looks like a false alarm, Emily is getting coy yet again.
@ Chuckles
Did they put in for their Federal Disaster Relief check yet?
For those that want a chuckle or two, you should see how I responded to a one of those condescending Libprog/Socialist types that tries to say they aren’t a Libprog. Keep in mind what got me started was his complaining about someone calling Obama: “Comrade”. Some how he thought that was uncivil name calling. Lets just say things went downhill from there when he asked:
http://www.beyondthefarhorizon.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1588&start=15
Oh no, the martians are coming, the sea will rise, the global warming is coming. I’m sure if they put that we have to pay a tax to stop Martians coming people would believe…
http://www.cbc.ca/dispatches/the-view/your-dispatches/2011/08/03/thorium-the-safe-nuclear-fuel/ Thorium
@boballab,
I’m sure they’d love to, but unfortunately it’s an independent country, part of the Commonwealth, and they’re not a recognised poster child by Them Wot Decide Such Things, so the disaster relief is pretty much ‘You’re on your own.’
When they got hit by Hurricane Tomas ($5-600 million damage) last year, it barely made even a passing reference in newspapers in most of the world. Nothing to see here, move along.
Yet this past week, we had major headlines in just about all British media about the mighty Emily, that was about to devastate poor defenceless Haiti, and that international aid must immediately be mobilised to rush to their assistance.
They seemed not to notice that Emily had already passed over St. Lucia and St. Vincent, as well as Puerto Rico, causing a couple of mud slides, and was rapidly weakening.
And, just for variety, they had a 5.0 earthquake off the coast this morning…
Check out this pseudoscience http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/asthma-risk-linked-to-exposure-from-powerlines-in-pregnancy/story-e6frg8y6-1226106348597
But the climate change bigger looneys already disproved this ages ago ;)
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/08/07/father-of-global-warming-electrify-children-to-create-a-master-race/
@chuckles
I didn’t see anything in that list that is disqualifying under the Obama administrations rules.
:)
First Obamacare….
Then Obamanomics……
Now Obamacation:
”
President Barack Obama’s administration will bypass Congress to override the nation’s main public-education law, granting waivers to states if they agree to his schools agenda.
States can avoid the No Child Left Behind law’s 2014 deadline for achieving 100 percent proficiency on standardized state reading and math exams if they sign off on yet-unspecified administration “reforms,”
”
DUH.
The tests are too hard. We could do a better job with the kinds…..nah
throw out the damn tests.
Its an Obamanation!
Its how we like our future voters, stupid but with lost of self-esteem.
Three quakes in the M3 range in Nevada over the past few days. A little swarm near Hoover Dam, too.
OK someone predicted it all
Guess what the 3million volcanoes under the sea actually do something surprise surprise
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44080264/ns/technology_and_science-science/#.TkIWKGGWaOU
Money on the sidelines and punishing savers.
Zero or near zero interest rates. QE3, or 4 (but who’s counting).
Net returns probably negative. Punishing savers.
Folks trying to live on fixed incomes hurting. Folks living on savings
are digging into the capital base as these isn’t much income from the fixed security market.
We need both deflation and deleverging.
In a “normal” economy businesses might hold on to workers, do some training, catch up on deferred maintainence, do some prospecting……Might not pay boomtime wages and sales force won’t get big commissions, so average wage will be down (deflation) and there will be price pressure (more deflation) and unions will moderate demands and work will shift to lower cost areas (more deflation) until a balance is reached.
But if the authorities won’t let the corrections happen (the current, and unfortunate state of affairs) they both prolong the agony and modify expectations. Companies take the money and run – invest in non-hostile environments. Fewer families can fix their balance sheets.
Part of the lesson we are learning as a society is the one Detroit learned a generation ago. You are in a global market.
The political wisdom that “there are some things you can’t outsource” is wrong in the sense that while you may not technically outsource the business customers migrating away from it has the same effect. The bridal service may still be on fifth ave, but the wedding is in Singapore.
Interestingly, the fundamental sources of wealth are still here in the US, intact and underutalized.
Wealth comes from extraction, agriculture, value added manufacturing, and ideas that add productivity to lives . Much of our idea culture is intact – it’s the hardest to regulate.
We waste a huge part of our ag on ethanol – in a hungry world. And we STILL pay farmers not to grow some crops. We actually import a lot of food.
We don’t extract much of our energy, and are net importers.
We don’t extract much of our other assets, such as rare earths, and are net importers.
Other than on private land, we manage our forests as if they were flower gardens.
We discourage manufacturing – both through environmental extremism and through the myth that all of our population is above average, thus anyone’s legitimate self esteem is deflated by an $8.00/ per hour job, no one’s economic value to society is that little. Better to be on welfare, with zero income, but the myth that you are a wonderful individual but happen to be a victim.
Not that all these “crisis conditions” are man made –
Our basic assets are intact yet our “wealth” is shrinking. Our political class has failed us.
And I’m a grumpy old man on a nasty, rainy day.
@Scarlet Pumpernickel https://chiefio.wordpress.com/tips/#comment-21185
Sorry, seems like so much navel gazing to me. The universe consists of holographic projections of our brains? Nonsense. These guys are STILL doing LSD apparently.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54PneHwH354&feature=youtu.be .
@Jeff Alberts I think they are correct, the image you even see is totally upside down, your brain turns it the right way up.
We cannot see UV for eg flowers have patterns on them we can’t see but insects can. We have devices that can detect things we can’t eg radio, radiation. So really we can’t see what the universe around us really is like, its just a projection how we interpret it using our couple senses.
The thing is, how did we get to be inside yourself, and yet grow our own brain without even thinking? There are many interesting philosophical questions. But physicists talk about other dimensions, are these what we can’t see with our senses. And what are dreams and why does a dream seem real?
That’s not what I got from them. They’re basically saying that because a blind person can’t see the hammer, it isn’t really there. Even though they can touch it, pick it up, and hit things with it.
http://www.jonfr.com/volcano/?p=1304 Katla will in the end crash the DOW and the Euro?
http://www.realscience.us/2011/08/11/cancer-research-takes-giant-leap-forward/ HIV as a cancer treatment
E.M. Seen this, which just came in on an email?
What have we learned in 2,066 years?
“The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled,
public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be
tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should
be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to
work, instead of living on public assistance.”
– Cicero – 55 BC
E.M. Enjoy!
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/06/04/did-a-meteor-bring-down-air-france-447/ Evidence that Air France 447 was shot down? Who was on that plane, coming from South America??
http://media.mtvnservices.com/player/prime/mediaplayerprime.1.9.2.swf?uri=mgid:cms:video:thedailyshow.com:394630&type=normal&ref=www.facebook.com&geo=AU&group=entertainment&&CONFIG_URL=http%3a%2f%2fmedia.mtvnservices.com%2fpmt%2fe1%2fplayers%2fmgid%3acms%3avideo%3athedailyshow.com%3a%2fcontext2%2fconfig.xml%3furi%3dmgid%3acms%3avideo%3athedailyshow.com%3a394630%26type%3dnormal%26ref%3dwww.facebook.com%26geo%3dAU%26group%3dentertainment%26 Ron Paul ignored!
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-august-15-2011/indecision-2012—corn-polled-edition—ron-paul—the-top-tier Sorry right link
@Scarlet re: Air France. Known Pitot-static issues with this aircraft type. Prior fly-by-wire software issues with this type. Possible lightning strike. Airplanes crash all too frequently. I’ve knicked one up a bit myself. There is usually an incident chain leading to the accident, which all-to-ofton combines an out-of-the ordinary event with an inadequate pilot response (“pilot error”, but as a pilot that’s an awfully easy out somtimes for the analyst.) From what I have read, te “black box” indicated a pilot-induced deep stall, or mush, all the way to the water. Don ‘t think much of either the meteor or shoot-down theory. Especialy since explosive decompression was not reported. Of course all the authorities could be in on the fix, but to my mind, that’s tinfoil hat territory.
I must admit that I expected this to happen, but it still makes me grit my teeth.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-atf-guns-20110816,0,7676977.story
So here we have US BATF managers who set up a program where they supply weapons to a known Mexican drug cartel, and the cartel is also allowed to smuggle in drugs without being arrested — all on the theory that the chosen cartel will then give us information on the other cartels. Some of the weapons are later used to kill US Border patrol Agents.
And the managers, when the plan becomes publicly known, are given promotions.
Hey Chief, I hadn’t noticed any chatter on your website about the 2 visiting comets in Aug-November this year. I know there is a lot of BS out there, but one thin I heard which made my ears perk up was this, 3 alignments with Sun-Earth on dates of significant recent quakes.
2/27/2010 – 8.8 Chile
9/3/2010 – 7.2 New Zealand
3/11/2011 or 3/15/2010 – Japan Quake (uncertain date, but reasonably close to raise an eyebrow).
Of course there is no proposed mechanism, except for 2 other “comet oddities” – 1) The Electric Universe theorists claim some comet connection to plasma in space 2) I’ve come to realize that Comet’s give off Xrays – this nasa article says the original finding was orders of magnitude greater than they expected.
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/features/news/15apr96.html
Neways, I’ll be watching for 9/26/2011 this year – which also happens to be Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year.
_MichaelM
Just to clarify, my hypothesis would be that the comets affect the sun more than the earth in some unknown way. Birkeland currents, etc… but at that point I must acknowledge I have no idea what I’m talking about.
_Michael
Is Obama a Neo Con? He’s got 4 wars going already and looks like he wants to ramp up Somalia and Yemen http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25968
First starve the people, then send in the military under the cover of “Aid”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardsalsman/2011/03/23/libya-exposes-obama-as-our-latest-neocon-president/
It looks like only Ron Paul can save USA now? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D58v4eiUuI
http://www.5min.com/Video/Are-the-Media-Ignoring-Ron-Paul-517144550 Media keep ignoring him lol???
http://www.space.com/12450-unknown-comet-earth-threat-meteor-shower-evidence.html New comet, don’t be scared, only Global Warming is a threat as we can’t cash in on a comet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGvT6qm3VSA&feature=player_embedded .
I don’t know about the media, but I am certainly ignoring Ron Paul.
http://www.newsrescue.com/2009/11/ancient-200000bc-human-metropolis-found-in-africa/ Wow 200,000 year old ruins?
I can think of another purpose for those structures. Basically what amounts to traps for grazing animals. You create a circular area with an entrance, allow grazing animals to enter, then you block the entrance. Now you can eventually kill the animal when you need it.
So imagine you have one of these areas. Animals graze outside of it reducing the amount of grass. Now you open the area, animals discover this “paradise” of untouched grass, suddenly you have the entire herd in there. Now you block the entrance and you kill off the herd as you need to for food. Maybe this is where cattle were domesticated.
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/what-caused-a-giant-arrow-shaped-213463.aspx Global warming making funny clouds on titan. Interesting they say Titan is like early earth. Yup, the oil was there already , squashed fish did not make it!!!
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Abiogenic-Oil/118793368145644
Here is a little video some may enjoy while their 401k circles the drain:
Hey Chiefio, isn’t this around the time that you say that gold has gone parabolic and has gotta fall?
NZ Willy picked a goo time to post that since we got this:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Stagflation-signs-surface-in-cnnm-2117488997.html?x=0
I particularly liked this line:
That is why whenever you hear a talking head or a left wing economist point to how Core CPI just isn’t rising that fast, it is a bogus argument and they are trying to make Obama not look bad…like Carter.
Here is links to two old but good “books”.
From 1946:
http://www.fee.org/library/books/economics-in-one-lesson/
From 1963:
Click to access agd.pdf
Everyone in NZ got $3000 LOL
@Scarlet Pumpernickel
on 17 August 2011 at 1:23 pm
http://www.newsrescue.com/2009/11/ancient-200000bc-human-metropolis-found-in-africa/
Wow 200,000 year old ruins?
======================================
I enjoyed the article at that link. There’s enough tinfoil in there to make a fair-sized hat, but there are also a lot of just-plain-facts and photos that are interesting. The Creation and Flood traditions mentioned are much the same as they are in all cultures.
(I’m not buying that the 5-foot tall rock wall they show has stood for 200,000 years, BTW.)
And who knows; maybe it solves the mystery of where the Celts came from, eh? ;o)
Scarlet P,
Thanks for that link to the ruins, I know the area well, and I’ve seen some of the stones, circles and ‘altars’ described.
My brother-in-law met Cyril Hromnik, mentioned in the article, some years back, and visited some of the sites with him. As to the ‘what’, and ‘who’, no idea. I’ve seen similar looking structures on a hilltop near Lanseria airport north of Johannesburg, which is just down the road from the ‘Cradle of Humankind’ World Heritage site. Hmmmmm…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle_of_Humankind
Magnitude 7.0 – VANUATU
2011 August 20 18:19:24 UTC
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqinthenews/2011/usc0005hbt/
@N.Z. WIlly:
It’s close to it.
Veteran gold / commodities traders like Garman are headed for the exits and calling a ‘top soon’. I’m not quite ready to make that call (mostly as I’ve not looked at the detailed volume charts); but it’s clearly headed into parabolic land (any visual curve fit will show that).
Per the “must fail” part: Well, that’s more problematic. It is more like “is more likely to fail than continue”. It’s an “odds” thing. And WHEN it fails, it will fail spectacularly.
Recent news has “natural demand” down by 20% on prices. Jewelry, industrial users, etc. As soon as the ‘investment’ demand shifts to some new Shiny Toy, and gold starts being sold (i.e. whenever panic fades just a bit), that puppy can crash, hard.
But it’s also a truism that “bubbles persist far longer than anyone expects”. While I personally think this one is likely to top out between $1800 – $2000 / ounce (i.e. right about here); all it takes is one stupid politician too many or a war somewhere to spike it to $2500. But at present, the vacuum under it is greater than the sucking sound above it, so time to be “edging for the exits” as I said before.
I’m not “all out”, but mostly. Profits pulled out and most of the risk capital pulled out of it a few weeks ago. Still have some “mad money” in metals, though. (In GLTR that is a mix of mostly silver and gold, but with some palladium and platinum in it).
At this point, Silver is looking better than gold. (Note that after that Silver Bubble I did say at one point “now it’s probably OK to own” at about $35 IIRC)
Some folks seemed to think my saying Silver was in a bubble was the same as saying “never own it”; when that simply isn’t the case. You don’t own ANYTHING when it’s too far from the SMA lines on emotional news. You sell then and buy back after the crash.
So IMHO Gold is so over bought that it WILL have a crash. But “when” is the issue… So I’d not be putting in new money (and in fact would not and have not for a couple of months) and I’d be pulling out old money (and have to about the 1/4 of a position level in GLTR and a zero position in GLD). BUT, that does not mean ‘never own gold again”, it just means “I think you can avoid a plunge and buy back in at lower prices such that you make a year of gains in a few months, later, and do other things with the money now.”
But will that “reentry point” be a week from now? Or six months? Hard to say. Much easier to say that “now is not the time to be buying, but rather to be selling” and that “the bottom point will be clear after it happens”. (And it will be… Drop, dead cat bounce, retest of the bottom, recovery slope. All very clear to see. THAT is when the risk of buying is minimal. After a parabolic pull upward from the SMA stack, all the risk is to the downside…
Yes Chiefio, my timing was good for a change to have topped up my gold and silver holdings whilst the NZ$ was high and just before the new big gold and silver rises. So I’m happily sitting on my stash now.
Your two new developments hit home for me: (1) Your computer upgrade after 12 years and site upgrade — my usual computer is a 10yo Windows 98 machine, simply because it keeps goin and goin and loyalty is a 2 -way street. But your site upgrade makes the poor old thing freeze. Much like what you said about your old machine. I’m slowly switching my allegiance to the games machine upstairs.
(2) Travelling to the new job. Been there, done that. Defer decisions as long as you can, is my advice, you’ll be happier with the increased clarity that time brings.
Silver certainly made a big push on Friday; as a holder of jars of the stuff I’ll be watching this next week with interest. Be good to see it rejoin the fray as Gold’s sidekick. I don’t think they’ll fall far while the O’Bummer wrecking crew is on duty. cheers.
E.M. Irene is skimming over the Windward Islands and starting to look like she might take an interest in Florida later in the week. One to watch
Vanatu is rocking and rolling.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dont-look-to-libya-for-relief-at-the-pump-2011-08-22?siteid=bigcharts&dist=bigcharts $3 barrel oil won’t effect the market, its a new form of special economics lol
Found this link over on WUWT under the Hurricane Irene topic:
http://www.stormpulse.com/atlantic
It has a very nice interactive tracking map where you can toggle on and off things like the weather models, satellites, cloud cover and a few more.
Looking it over I really hope the GFS, BAMD and BAMM models are not right and the NOGAPS one is; since the first three have Irene going over N.C. and back over water and up the coast to where I live in MD. Sigh time to pre stage.
Pretty good size quake hit Colorado not that long ago:
Colorado shakes
DATE and TIME (UTC) LAT-ITUDE LONG-ITUDE MAG-NITUDE DEPTH km REGION
23-AUG-2011 05:46:19 37.14 -104.67 5.5 4.9 COLORADO
22-AUG-2011 23:30:20 37.05 -104.77 4.6 5.0 COLORADO
Colorado quake causes damages
http://earthquake-report.com/2011/08/23/unusually-strong-earthquake-in-colorado-new-mexico-united-states/
HOLY SHIT!
I felt that Va. Earth quake at my house in Ocean City MD.
Magnitude
5.8 (Preliminary magnitude — update expected within 15 minutes)
Date-Time
Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 17:51:03 UTC
Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 01:51:03 PM at epicenter
Location
37.875°N, 77.908°W
Depth
6 km (3.7 miles) set by location program
Region
VIRGINIA
Distances
15 km (9 miles) S (179°) from Mineral, VA
18 km (12 miles) SSE (154°) from Louisa, VA
26 km (16 miles) ENE (58°) from Columbia, VA
54 km (34 miles) NW (314°) from Richmond, VA
139 km (87 miles) SW (214°) from Washington, DC
Location Uncertainty
Error estimate not available
Parameters
NST= 17, Nph= 17, Dmin=59.5 km, Rmss=0.33 sec, Gp=173°,
M-type=”moment” magnitude from initial P wave (tsuboi method) (Mi/Mwp), Version=1
Source
West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center/NOAA/NWS
Event ID
at00lqe6x3
Here is an article on the quake
http://www.kesq.com/news/28951639/detail.html
Viriginia Quake upgraded to a 5.9
Shock felt in Manhattan, Pentagon and US Capitol evacuated?
http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2011/08/23/quake-hits-virginia-shakes-manhattan/
That’s a really big area for a relative small quake.
@R. de Haan
People over on WUWT from southern Canada felt it.
Also the geological make up of the East Coast is different than the West Coast and quakes are felt further away. On top of this the depth is very shallow for the quake. The more shallow it is the further away it will be felt.
With all that said, I don’t believe that number from USGS. I lived in San Diego when the 7.4 North Ridge quake in LA occurred and felt that. So I got a good comparison here and I felt this quake in Ocean City MD more than the North Ridge Quake in SD. Also on top of that the reports of damage coming out of DC (flooding in the Pentagon, holes, cracks and metal breaking in Union station) says it is bigger than 5.9. All the monuments in DC is evacuated with unconfirmed reports that the Washington Monument is damaged and possibly leaning.
Could these East Coast quakes suggest that the passive margins are beginning to become active…like the Atlantic plate diving under the NoAm? The Atlantic Ocean ridge has been spreading and spreading and…..
Mmmm, boballab,
If the USGS has measured this quake at a lower strength than it really is there must me a reason for it.
An increase in quake insurance premiums perhaps?
It won’t be long before the Greens will use the quake argument in their quest to close down the US nuclear power chain.
That could be another argument.
I have checked other independent quake centers like KNMI in the Netherlands and they have rated the Virginia quake at 5.9 as well.
The mitigation of the shock waves must be influenced by the composition of the rock formations allowing the waves to cover bigger distances. Who nows.
There are still too many white spots in our knowledge.
Still learning.
Got your eye on Mammoth Lake EM?
Nigel Calder’s report on the Nature paper on the CERN cloud experiment: http://calderup.wordpress.com, 8/24/11 Filed in 3a. News and Comments. Looks like every possible support, plus details, for Svensmark’s theories.
First, I have read The Chilling Stars about three times now, along with following up questions I have via the internet. I have been slow on the uptake here, possiby because there was so much for me to learn. This material remains difficult for me without a sigificant science-math-astronomy background, only a life-long interest. (That interest was filled with AGW science from the 1990s to 2006 without my being conscious of the limited view.)
Second, after also reading climatetruth.org’s review of all the sigificant research from 1999 to 2009 (http://theclimatetruth.org/science/solar-variability-and-climate-cycles/cosmic-rays/) re experimental, observational, and “paleoclimate” support for cosmic ray influence on “climate change” via solar max-min (magnetic field, esp), I am even more gobsmacked at the hornswoggle (needed some new words!). At least I know in my bones, even in every cell, that history of any kind, truthfully researched, does not lie. It might be misinterpreted for a while, but the truth will out.
Chiefio, I am sorry you are not in Texas, because Rick Perry, the one candidate who has begun to say, seriously, the right things, needs lots of help and a quick science-study that can be communicated to large numbers of people. Can you add that one, E.M.?
Rick Perry?
I did some desk top research on Perry and found out this guy changes his opinion quicker than a kameleon changes color.
I don’t trust the guy for a bit.
Think he will be a bigger disappointment than Obama.
He was Gore’s campaign manager and a member of the democratic party when Gore pushed his AGW doctrine and duing his Texas day’s he has been a stout promoter of the UN Agenda 21 crap.
Please do your homework.
We can’t afford to pick the wrong President two times on a role.
I think Perry’s past has disqualified for any future presidency.
Period.
Ron, this is not an appropriate place to comment re your “desk top research” other than to say you might be reading mainly those with more pure or extreme views. My only point here is that if any serious politicians are running, and Perry is one of the few with a long record and much support, and are willing to speak the truth about “climate change”, everyone of them should get “serious help” re the science from those who are excellent communicators.
I’ve just begun a geology course at a local university. The professor is a big AGW proponent, and based on the syllabus he intends to use his platform to further promote it. His tests are the only grading criteria, and they are multiple choice. Therefore, i should be able to argue effectively without affecting my grade. I’d like to be able to bring up the right arguments at the right time. I am appealing to not just you, E.M. but this group of knowledgable folks for assistance. The first slides I saw (I can propagate them if needed) showed the hockey stick in a slightly different form and some CO2 graphs to prove that it is the leader not the follower in climate change, and they go back aeons using ice cores. I’ve been reading this site and WUWT for a year now so I really do not know where to start!
The hockey stick shows a whopping .7C change since 1850. He also mentioned our recent heat wave (this is Texas) as a point of proof(ignoring last winter’s record cold). I’d like to be able to ask questions that will help my fellow students question what they’ve been fed, obviously I’m already a sceptic. This isn’t about me, it’s about my classmates.
If you guys don’t here too much from after Friday afternoon it is because I’ll be evacuating. They have ordered a evacuation of Ocean City MD and I live just 5.5 miles inland from there and only half a mile from the bay that runs between OC and the mainland.
@Doyle
Glad to help if I can – and that probably goes for most folks here. A scientific education should be not about answers but questions – asking the right questions in the right way.
I remember one of my first unversity science classes. About 300 in the lecture theatre: “How many of you think you are here to learn biology?” Most hands went up. “Well you’re not!…” (stunned silence and nervous sideways glances) “…you’re here to learn HOW to learn.” I’ve never forgotten that (one of the best lecturers incidentally), and when I repeated it at my first job interview, it was one of the things that helped me get the job.
@Doyle
Start here
http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/ice-core-graph/
@Doyle
This is a recent posting re the hockey stick. It should get you started on links that go back through the HS fiasco.
E.M.
Here’s one that should be of interest. BBC: Neanderthal sex boosted immunity in modern humans
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14673047
For any that might be interested I’m taking pictures and posting them as Irene approaches. Well posting them as long as I have power and/or a connection:
Slovakia has become a model for free-marketeers around the word and continues to enjoy one of the strongest growth rates in Europe. (Dan Hannan again)
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100102328/slovakia-baulks-at-joining-yet-another-bailout/
@Verity:
Wonder if that’s where we got IG-E and allergies…
@Doyle:
There’s a lot here already, but if you have particular things of interest, post them, and we can point to references and / or write new ones ;-)
E.M.
From http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/9/1/breaking-the-ice.html
“Breaking the ice
Sep 1, 2011
Climate: Surface
Autonomous Mind has an amusing story about diplomacy and sea ice. It appears that the Swedes are not going to allow the US National Science Foundation to lease their biggest and best ice-breaker for use in the Antarctic. Stockholm reckons they are going to need all the ice-breaking capacity they can lay their hands on in the Arctic.
Which is odd, because I thought the Arctic ice was about to disappear.”
Nasty little fellow forming over the pool in your back yard at the moment –
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/
@Chuckels:
Yeah…. Watching the weather channel from time to time. Interesting to see how much heat one of those suckers moves in a day. Need to turn it into W/m^2 and compare it to the CO2 number at ‘near nil’ ;-)
@Another Ian:
Well, you don’t survive in the snows near the pole by being stupid… they can have political stupidity from time to time, but when it’s getting cold, the games stop.
http://iceagenow.info/2011/09/katla-showing-signs-eruption/
@ Chiefio
My computer is having problems with this thread. I can not scroll through the comments. Have had this problem for about a week. No problem with other threads. pg
@JohnM:
I’ll take a look at it!
@P.G.Sharrow:
We’re up to 440+ comments. I suspect a ‘long slow load’ as some of them are with graphics, and / or a memory fullness issue. I had similar problems with my old Mac on a slow link on WUWT “tips”. Part of why I’ve tried to steer “discussion” to other threads. Perhaps time for me to move this thread or start a “Tips 2″…
(Or you could get a new laptop with 100 GB of memory and a T3 line ;-)
On the climate front:
Carbon Dioxide Not a Well Mixed Gas and Can’t Cause Global Warming
Click to access CarbonDioxideNotaWellMixedGasandCantCauseGlobalWarming.pdf
Fred Singer At Suppressed SEII Presentation: 1976 To 2000 Warming – “That’s Fake, It Doesn’t Exist”…
By P Gosselin on 3. September 2011
…and Singer says: “The IPCC is finished!”
http://notrickszone.com/2011/09/03/fred-singer-at-suppressed-seii-presentation-1976-to-2000-warming-thats-fake-it-doesnt-exist/
R de Haan, interesting. I bet there are few climatologists who know about the Schmidt number. A certain gentleman(?), at Real Climate, with a similar name does not. The findings of E G Beck have been critised on grounds of local emissions although that work included measurements from balloons see here http://www.biomind.de/realCO2/realCO2-1.htm and the various papers and the data used in the papers.
cementafriend
Time for a Tips 2, E.M.
It’s loading slow on the laptop and when I’m on the netbook, I can go make a sandwich while I’m waiting ;o)
Interesting one for the abiotic implications
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/11/rainforest-fung/
I think we should leave carbon fuel production up to the planet.
http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=45838
Here is another link about the abiotic origin of oil and gas
http://www.viewzone.com/abioticoilx.html
E.M.
Check out
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/09/the-obama-money-plan-oh-dear-the-secret-is-out/#more-17067
Historic La Nina in the making?
http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/posts/historic-la-nina-imminent-233.php
Jeff Master says La Nina is fading?
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/article.html?entrynum=1749
No consensus on La Nina predictions.
Which is great for all the known reasons
Feedback: There has been a heavy-duty demonstration of an application of control analysis to the Spencer/Dessler cloud-feedback discussion over at CA these last few days.
Can any of you identify an example of an inanimate system in nature which includes a feedback process either positive or negative? The feedback can be at the joint between two inanimate systems, but one clearly must react to an impulse from the other and in so doing encourage or discourage some aspect of the initial impulse.
I couldn’t think of one, but that doesn’t mean much – i can’t think of a lot of things.
Having written the above, moisture temperature changes in vertical air currents would be a “feedback” process. But what about one that doesn’t involve gas and vapor?
Nasty stuff going on around the border with Mexico.
How long before all those weapons the ATF sent south end up back in the US?
@UninterestingConnections
They are already here:
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/08/news/la-pn-atf-gun-20110908
But why worry about those guns the ATF gave away, worry about the ones they left walk to gangs in the US:
Where Mexico seems headed…
Not pretty …
There is a new “T2 “Tips” page so folks can have faster loading times. New “tips” need to be posted there:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/t2/