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Post by kungfuzu on Nov 12, 2019 9:40:00 GMT -8
Here is a short piece which points out that the 11,000 "scientists" who warn of Climate Change, are merely random people.
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Post by artraveler on Nov 12, 2019 11:33:04 GMT -8
Comes under the heading: 20,000,000 people unhappy with Hitler's racial policies. 50,000,000 million in China think Mao is wrong, 5,000,000 in Cambodia are not members of Kilmer, Huties and Tutus have a disagreement. All the news that's fit to print, and of course, "if you like your Doctor, you can keep your doctor."
For these people and their ilk, "logic is a beautiful flower in the woods, that smells bad"
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 13, 2019 21:02:26 GMT -8
But people do really believe this stuff. Or pretend to. You’ve got to admit the propaganda has been effective.
“Science” has been turned into an idol. I’m watching this (generally good) documentary about birds of paradise in New Guinea. The two guys photographing them really were intrepid dudes. One guy used a line to climb high into trees to mount cameras. There was considerable risk involved. They’d then run the cameras remotely from a laptop from the forest floor.
And watching those birds do these incredible dances is really interesting. What males will do to please the females of the species (including giving lip service to all kinds of junk science, including “climate change”). I think the birds are more honest about their baloney. It’s just colored feathers and movement and they don’t sell it as anything more.
Anyway, my point is, these two guys (who seemed like two very reasonable guys…not pussy men) kept saying how they had now done this and that for “science.” And I wondered who the hell this Mr. Science was that they kept referring to. They stuck a camera in front of dancing birds and somehow “science” was advanced in some meaningful way. As if no one had ever seen birds before. Incredible arrogance.
Next time you’re in the bathroom, photograph yourself taking a leak. You’ll be advancing “science.” I do think they have disembodied this idea of “science” from the idea of “accumulation of data to fit into a theory that offers an explanation.” They used big words like “sexual selection” as if that solved things.
And no doubt, males are shaped by sexual selection. I don’t dispute that. But how and why do males have the ability to even change their traits in the first place? “Evolution” is used like a magic word in place of any explanation. It does not.
So what I’m saying is that lazy, half-assed “science” permeates our popular culture. There are people doing real “science”. We know this because of advances in computer technology and stuff. But aiming a camera at a bird didn’t strike me as striking a great blow for Mr. Science. But I’m sure whoever the fellow is, he probably lives in the same neighborhood Mr. Climate Change.
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Post by timothylane on Nov 13, 2019 21:50:39 GMT -8
Well, if no one has ever seen that particular species' mating dance, then photographing it certainly advances knowledge. I'm not sure I'd really call it science, though, at least not in the sense of developing and testing theories.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 14, 2019 8:20:47 GMT -8
Oh, yes indeed. The way they did it did indeed advance our knowledge. They set up a camera in one instance to get the same view of the dancing male as the female has. And it contained at least one surprise. You could see the male bird flashing some spots on its feathers against the background of its jet-black feathers. It was quite the display.
It’s just the way they used a sort of disembodied temple of “science” toward which all this was done. But it could have easily been the temple of photography, for that is what they were doing. They had no theory in hand for why some birds danced one way and not another. It was just the overall catch-all of “sexual selection.”
A more honest approach would to have termed the expedition a photographic expedition. And it was a great success in that regard. But we still know nothing about how or why such behaviors came to be. Some bird species (probably most) in the area engaged in no such behavior, the male looking much like the female. There was one feint toward "science" when the narrator mentioned that abundant food and few predators was probably why such behavior "arose" in the birds of paradise species. But can we be sure of that or is that just guesswork anointed under the name of "science"?
And the one guy who was the tree climber is a commendable character. I liked him. Anyone who can tough out jungle conditions like that is okay in my book. And the other guy as well to some extent. What irks me a little as well is these modern “documentaries” which are actually more like Vanity Documentaries. The documentarians may have had more film time than the birds.
Maybe David Attenborough, Marlin Perkins, Jack Hanna, and Steve Irwin are to blame for that. Still, I did find most of these guys brought something to the table. But these guys in the birds of paradise documentary were center stage for no apparent reason, although I did find it interesting watching the one guy climb the trees and set up the cameras.
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Post by timothylane on Nov 14, 2019 8:30:22 GMT -8
I used to watch Wild Kingdom back in the late '60s. That would be a nice comparison. As a longtime zoo fan, I certainly enjoy much of nature (even if zoo environments aren't all that natural).
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Post by artraveler on Nov 14, 2019 10:04:34 GMT -8
I remember Jack Perkins, "Ill wait here in the truck, while Steve sticks his head in the lion's mouth"
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Post by timothylane on Feb 19, 2020 19:55:55 GMT -8
One of the books I recently received from my friend's e-book club is Greenhouse Gases or Ozone Depletion?. This explains a new theory on global warming that has the virtue of explaining recent patterns.
Peter Langdon Ward is a retired vulcanologist who noticed an interesting pattern: even though volcanic eruptions are thought to have a cooling effect, he noticed a pattern of warming linked to them. After he retired, he had time available to figure it out. He concluded that the hydrogen chloride spewed out in many eruptions would deplete the ozone layer. This would lead to an incrased in a narrow band of very high-energy UV waves -- and these could warm up the planet. Volcanic eruptions also tend to let out a lot of sulfur dioxide, which increases cloud formation and thus has a cooling effect. But in some cases the warming effect is greater than the cooling.
This was also affected by ozone depletion from Freon and similar chemicals in the atmosphere. As it happens, the most recent warming subcycle roughly coincided with heavy use of such chemicals in air conditioning and sprays. Once this had been halted and the ozone depletion sufficiently reversed, the warming also stopped. (More recently, there was some warming -- after a major volcanic even several years ago.)
This is no light reading, and I've only read a little -- but enough to get Ward's basic thesis. I'll probably comment more as I read more of the book.
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Post by timothylane on Feb 20, 2020 20:43:54 GMT -8
Continuing into Ward's book, I find a great deal of discussion of energy, in which he contrasts a point made by Richard Feynmann with the climate alarmism theorists. Nevertheless, he does mention a key difference between his ozone-based theory and the carbon dioxide-theory. The Sun heats the Earth in daytime through visible and ultraviolet radiation. At night the Earth radiates infrared.
Anything which decreases the infrared escaping into space would have a warming effect -- but so would anything that increases either light or ultraviolet radiation reaching Earth. The current greenhouse gas theory is based on the former. The ozone depletion theory is based on the latter -- ozone blocks UV-B, so ozone depletion causes a lot more highly energetic UV-B to reach the surface.
There are ancillary aspects to these theories, such as where one would expect to see warming or cooling, but they seem to be very similar. However, the carbon dioxide theory requires explaining why actual warming is so poorly linked to the steady growth in carbon dioxide (and particularly its hiatus after 1998). On the other hand, the post-1960 pattern reveals significant changes in about 1970 (from stasis to warming) and 1998 (from warming to stasis). This matches up well with the rise in CFC use in the 1960s and its great decline after 1993.
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Post by timothylane on Feb 23, 2020 19:18:38 GMT -8
Ward looks at a number of climate events linked to warming, and finds major volcanic eruptions that can be linked to them. For example, in the early '30s there was a series of major eruptions at several locations in the Ring of Fire around the Pacific, from the Dutch East Indies around to Chile. And then, shortly afterward, there came . . . the American droughts that became known as the Dust Bowl.
One interesting possibility, thus, would be predicting major droughts from major eruptions. The Dust Bowl isn't the only one he links it with (and warming can also lead to flooding in other places). Further research would be needed not only to validate his theory (which climate alarmists won't want to do because the Ward theory is useless to watermelons seeking to use global warming aka climate change aka climate disruption as an excuse to control the economy and reduce consumerism), but also to see if one can find a way to predict where such events will occur.
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Post by timothylane on Feb 24, 2020 20:13:39 GMT -8
Ward provides a brief history of greenhouse gas global warming theory. It dates back to 1859, when John Tyndall established that certain complex molecules such as water vapor and carbon dioxide absorb infrared radiation, but nitrogen, oxygen, and argon (the main components of the atmosphere) do not. Later studies worked this up in more detail, and Svante Arrhenius in 1896 used these to formulate the basic theory of global warming from greenhouse gases (especially carbon dioxide).
Of course, any scientific theory must be validated by experiments or observations that anyone can replicate. Knut Angstrom did such experiments in the Canary Island in 1900 and apparently (Ward doesn't go into detail, unfortunately) concluded that Arrhenius's theory wasn't strongly supported by evidence. Naturally, today's theorists are unhappy with his experiments -- but no one has attempted any further experiments to support the basic theory since then.
Nevertheless, in time Arrhenius's theory was resurrected and adopted. Isaac Asimov discussed it in an essay that appeared in his collection Fact and Fancy, which also included another article that mentioned I Nobel laureate Arrhenius in a different context. (This isn't from Ward; we had a copy of the book and I read it long ago and kept it as the family separated over the years. Our copy was from the library in the U.S. embassy to Greece, so I wonder how we initially got it.)
The result is that even today, IPCC and other groups have shown no interest in experimenting to study any of their theories. They also have tended to ignore inconvenient data such as the hiatus in warming since 1998, which no theory of theirs predicted. They also used Michael Mann's convenient "hockey stick" graph despite its dubious nature (it belied the reports of the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age) and the lack of confirmation. It was too convenient for the alarmists to risk refuting.
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Post by kungfuzu on Feb 24, 2020 21:02:30 GMT -8
Yes, one must be very careful with theories and depending on them to be correct. Only yesterday, I was thinking how close to disaster the US military came when they relied on "those who knew" to calculate the explosive power of the infamous Castle Bravo thermonuclear bomb test.
The theoreticians calculated that the explosive yield would be something like 5-6 mega tons. In the event, once the bomb went boom, the actual yield turned out to be about 15 mega tons. Only a slight miscalculation.
Too bad for the Japanese fishermen and South Sea Islanders who were irradiated by material which should not have come their way.
And the miscalculations of social scientists and lefties are worse than that, because we have already seen the results of socialist theories in practice. Today's leftist theoreticians are worse than stupid and incompetent, they are liars.
Do not truth theoreticians. Demand proof. Not computer graphics.
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Post by timothylane on Feb 24, 2020 21:44:05 GMT -8
I reviewed a book about a decade ago by liberal economist Joseph Stiglitz on the crisis of 2008 and its causes for Salem Press. I mentioned in it my notion that economic theorists are like "The Six Blind Men and the Elephant". Each has a theory that is indeed useful, but thinks that it explains everything. (Note that John Maynard Keynes titled his book The General Theory, and the tendency probably predated him.)
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Post by kungfuzu on Feb 15, 2021 9:57:18 GMT -8
On Saturday, Texans were asked by ERCOT (our Texas energy board which manages electricity flow) to cut back on electricity usage for several days. ERCOT claimed it was due to "record" amounts of energy use at the moment. I smelled a rat because, in the summers here, Texas is air-conditioned to the hilt and air-conditioners use a hell of a lot more electricity than gas heating systems, which are very common in Texas. We have one and I would guess almost everyone around us does as well. This morning, I came upon (what I believe) the true reason ERCOT requested us to cut back our electricity usage. This demonstrates the problem with alternative energy sources. Reliable clean energy? |
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Post by Brad Nelson on Feb 20, 2021 9:26:02 GMT -8
I was just thinking about this subject this morning, wondering if it was the dependence upon “renewable” energy or if it was the lack of insulation at power plants — or both. What’s your view, Mr. Flu?
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Post by kungfuzu on Feb 20, 2021 12:22:50 GMT -8
It is a bit of both with some fish thrown in. Texas electricity production is something of a con, in my opinion. Deregulation was approved by George W. Bush in the late 1990s. This was supposed to lower costs, but everyone who understood the electricity business knew this was a lie.
Instead of having a dedicated supplier to certain areas, the law allowed dozens of intermediary companies to get in between. These were to buy electricity from actual producers and sell to the public. Strangely, consumers were still left with one "delivery" company to deal with, i.e. one who owned means of delivery. So while a consumer could buy from ABC Company or XYZ Company, electricity was delivered through specific companies which were the old power companies who owned the transmission lines. The price of transmission was the same for everyone in a particular area. Only the balance costs were negotiable.
The politicians and electricity businesses liked the idea of an un-restricted market as though they told the public prices will drop, (I am told) they (among themselves) forecast prices to rise substantially, which they did at first. This was because the pricing of power was to be based, in large part, on natural gas. This was before the huge success which drillers have had with fracking, and the projections were that the price of natural gas was to skyrocket. This deal was therefore good for the gas companies as well.
The prices did jump, for a while, but then natural gas prices dropped like a rock due to fracking. This was not something the politicians and businessmen liked.
Once gas production started to climb, T. Boone Pickens then came out with the "brilliant" idea to push wind power and convert all public transportation to run on natural gas. I am sure that his owning large holdings in both wind power and natural gas had nothing to do with his suggestion. The good of humanity must have been his overriding motivation.
Whether or not it was Pickens' influence, or that of others, our wonderful governor, Rick Perry, took an idea which has originated in W's term as governor, and pushed for wind power calling Texas the "Saudi Arabia" of wind. Of course, there was one big problem. The wind power in Texas lay in West Texas and the population lay in East Texas. So the prick Perry arrange for everyone in Texas, who paid an electricity bill, to pay for transmission lines from the West to the East. The billions in costs were spread over millions of payers over years, so nobody said much. I did, but no one listened.
So much for the background.
As I mentioned, virtually all of Texas' wind power is produced in the western part of the state. Massive wind farms take up tens-of-thousands, maybe hundreds-of-thousands, of acres across flat lands. One can drive from the Texas/New Mexico border east toward Amarillo, which is a distance of about 70 miles, and one will see giant windmills virtually all of the way.
Now, anyone who is familiar with the Texas Panhandle knows, Amarillo gets extremely cold. The arctic winds regularly blow down from Canada to the bottom of the Great Plains in Texas. They get so bad that telephone lines often have weights hung from them to keep the lines from swinging around too much.
I mention this, because anyone who says that it is understandable that the Texas wind mill operators could not have expected such cold weather, is lying or doesn't know squat about Texas weather. While it is true that this recent cold front was one of the worst in decades, we have had similar fronts over the years. Heavy ice storms occur every 5 to 10 years.
So it is clear that the people who run the wind mills were not prepared. But I believe there is something else going on which we have not yet gotten to the bottom of.
We were warned of this coming cold front for days. I personally went out and covered all of my outdoor faucets days before the event. I even added more layers the day before the 0 degree weather was predicted.
Texas has, I believe, 60-70 gas run electrical power stations which sit idle until they are required for projected surges in power. Some of these were turned on, but it appears not enough of them were in time to makeup for the drop in wind power.
What I am saying is that, even if this was just a failure of wind power (which I don't believe) the people in charge ERCOT and others, should have been prepared.
I wonder if we will ever get to the bottom of this.
On a side note, to give you an idea of how odd power delivery can get here, my next-door neighbor was without power for several days. Luckily, we had power continuously without brown outs.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Feb 20, 2021 14:09:20 GMT -8
Thanks for the roundup. I had no idea of Texas’ energy situation nor how many windmills it had — nor how complicated it all was. Washington State is (generally) free from temperature extremes and hydroelectric is far and away the main source, although it’s a mix for all energy usage:  |
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Post by kungfuzu on Feb 20, 2021 14:47:59 GMT -8
As I recall, there are over 20,000 wind turbines in Texas.
I normally renew my electricity contract every year. The last time I renewed it, I did so for a 3 year period. Thank God I am on a fixed price as people who try to get the lowest price by letting rates float from day to day, are getting killed. Some are now being billed thousands of dollars for their electricity. It all has to do with how one books one's electricity through the dozens of intermediaries.
You are very lucky.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Feb 20, 2021 19:29:01 GMT -8
What an interesting way to buy electricity. We have no option like that. The price is the price. I believe there is some state commission that Puget Sound Energy has to go in order to gain approval for rate hikes, however. Still, at 9.79 cents per kWh, Washington State ranks on the low end (if not actually the lowest) of electrical rates in the 50 states. By that chart of 2019 prices, Texas is at 11.15 cents. I’m not sure about competition regarding natural gas. But natural gas in the last 25 years has become more abundant. Obviously (or perhaps not so obviously to those who live in some other states), people can get a lot of their heat from their wood-stoves as well. Although the environmental wackos run free, one can still burn wood in the Northwest, if only because their is such a dynamic changeover of air, there is no chance to have the kind of problems that California does. |
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Post by kungfuzu on Feb 20, 2021 20:46:51 GMT -8
That used to be the way it worked here, some twenty years ago.
Some years after the change in regulations, I wrote my state congressman about the boondoggle and said I wanted to discuss the problems which arose from the changes. I then met him and, although he had voted for the new regulations, it was clear he knew nothing about the subject. He did advise that he and his colleagues had been briefed on the subject by reps of the electricity industry. I simply asked him whether or not he, as a representative of his constituents, thought it was his responsibility to look into the subject on his own and educate himself properly in order to make an informed decision; that maybe reps from the electricity industry might be giving him biased information? Basically, he admitted that he had dropped the ball. That said, I have to admit that this is how things work here. The experts who can give knowledgeable information about a subject, be it power, insurance, the military or whatever, generally work in the industry they are giving briefings on. So it is not unusual that they are biased.
The whole story is much too complicated to go into. Let's just say at least one large energy company lobbied for the changes and promised to build something like 11 large new power plants once the new changes came into effect. Increasing energy supply was, after all, the big sell for making the changes in the law. In the event, none were built and the company went bust. There were some shenanigans with stock buy backs, companies being sold to other companies, etc. I think it was the largest bankruptcy in American history at the time. I am not talking about Enron.
I am paying 9.27 cents per kWh. I booked this rate two years ago this April. There are many many different pricing schemes available. I have seen fixed-rate schemes from 3 months to three years. There are many tricky schemes which give different rates for different levels of usage. Sometimes one is charged a higher rate for higher consumption, which is very strange to me. Sometimes it is the other way around. Basically, the buyer is taking a punt.
The rates here for natural gas are controlled somewhat the same way electricity rates are controlled in Washington. But that is also something of a scam here. Although the price of natural gas has dropped a lot from the early 2000s, the natural gas bill always goes up. The local supplier, Atmos Energy, asks for a raise in rates every year and the Texas Railroad Commission, which controls pricing, gives it to them.
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