What is kind of interesting is that the price of natural gas has plummeted over the last couple years. So ... you take cheap-ass NG and use it to process tar-sands/shale oil, etc. and make expensive oil!! Brilliant.
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What is kind of interesting is that the price of natural gas has plummeted over the last couple years. So ... you take cheap-ass NG and use it to process tar-sands/shale oil, etc. and make expensive oil!! Brilliant.
" ... a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition."
Push nuclear, solar, etc.
Just found this article:
Summit plots route to clean electricity : Nature News
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110610/full/news.2011.362.html
Interdisciplinary talks call for investment in nuclear and geothermal power. Jeff Tollefson
"Harnessing the potential of geothermal energy and advanced nuclear reactors that burn nuclear waste could be part of a broader plan to create a low-carbon electricity system by 2030, a global group of scientists, policy experts and young environmental leaders concluded this week.
Released on 9 June, the communique from the Equinox Summit, held in Waterloo, Canada, endorses geothermal energy, renewables and advanced nuclear power while calling for batteries and grid technologies to help decarbonize urban electricity use. The document also emphasizes the role of new flexible and lightweight organic solar cells in bringing 'first light' to roughly 2.5 billion people currently without access to mains electricity."...
This one is pretty funny:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articl...ng_631915.html
In an obvious attempt to inflict a symmetrical Climategate-style scandal on the skeptic community, someone representing himself as a Heartland Institute insider “leaked” internal documents for Heartland’s most recent board of directors meeting to a fringe environmental blog, along with a photocopy of a supposed Heartland “strategy memo” outlining a plan to disseminate a public school curriculum aimed at “dissuading teachers from teaching science.”
This ham-handed phrase (one of many) should have been a tipoff to treat the document dump with some . . . skepticism (a trait that has gone missing from much of the climate science community). But more than a few environmental blogs and mainstream news outlets ran with the story of how this “leak” exposed the nefarious “antiscience” Neanderthals of Heartland and their fossil fuel paymasters. But the strategy memo is a fake...
The most likely instigator of an anti-Heartland provocation would be someone from among the political activists of the environmental movement, such as the merry pranksters of Greenpeace, who have been known to paw through the garbage cans of climate skeptics looking for evidence of payoffs from the fossil fuel industry (which, contrary to left-wing paranoia, has tended rather to be a generous funder of the climate catastrophe campaign). But shortly after the document dump, Ross Kaminsky... noticed something odd in the digital fingerprint of the “strategy memo.” It had been scanned on an Epson printer/scanner on Monday, February 13, on the West Coast (not in the Midwest, where Heartland is located), just one day before the entire document dump appeared online for the first time...
...Gleick confessed on Monday, February 20, that he was the person who had deceived Heartland into emailing their board documents. Gleick claimed, though, that he had received the phony strategy memo anonymously early in the year by mail...
As curious as the reference to Gleick and Forbes is... the reference to Andy Revkin... Revkin is a New York Times science blogger who reports climate issues fairly straight up, though his own sympathies are with the climate campaign. Perhaps because he is basically sympathetic, Revkin’s occasional departures from the party line have been a source of annoyance for more ardent climate campaigners; one of the emails from the first cache of leaked Climategate documents in 2009 complained that Revkin wasn’t “reliable,” and University of Illinois climate alarmist Michael Schlesinger threatened Revkin directly with the “big cutoff” if he didn’t mend his ways...
...Heartland, for its part, has set up a legal defense fund to pursue a civil case against Gleick, presenting the ultimate irony: -Gleick’s attack may well help Heartland raise more money...
...That tiny Heartland, with but a single annual conference and a few phone-book-sized reports summarizing the skeptical case, can derange the climate campaign so thoroughly is an indicator of the weakness and thorough politicization of climate alarmism.
The Gleick episode exposes again a movement that disdains arguing with its critics, choosing demonization over persuasion and debate. A confident movement would face and crush its critics if its case were unassailable... Yet the serial ineptitude of the climate campaign shows that a tiny David doesn’t need to throw a rock against a Goliath who swings his mighty club and only hits himself square in the forehead.
But to continue...
The dog that didn’t bark for the climateers in this story is the great disappointment that Heartland receives only a tiny amount of funding from fossil fuel sources—and none from ExxonMobil, still the bête noire of the climateers. Meanwhile, it was revealed this week that natural gas mogul T. Boone Pickens had given $453,000 to the left-wing Center for American Progress for its “clean energy” projects, and Chesapeake Energy gave the Sierra Club over $25 million (anonymously until it leaked out) for the Club’s anti-coal ad campaign. Turns out the greens take in much more money from fossil fuel interests than the skeptics do...
On fairness:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...pinion_LEADTop
Is it fair that wind, solar and ethanol producers get billions of dollars of subsidies each year and pay virtually no taxes, while the oil and gas industry—which provides at least 10 times as much energy—pays tens of billions of dollars of taxes while the president complains that it is "subsidized"?
Is it fair that some of Mr. Obama's largest campaign contributors received federal loan guarantees on their investments in renewable energy projects that went bust?
The USA needs to start implemetation of solar power. We have a long way to go.
Can the U.S. Jump Back into the Solar Race?
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...he-solar-race/
...But physics and engineering alone cannot bring solar energy to the masses. Expenditures such as installation and permitting, known in the industry as balance-of-system costs, run nearly as much as the photovoltaic modules themselves. The problem is compounded by the numerous nested jurisdictions in the U.S., where a potential solar buyer may have to contend with overlapping local and state laws—along with paperwork from each—that affect the solar installation. Interfacing with the local utility adds an extra layer of complexity. "...
It seems to be easy now in CA. All you have to do is call a solar company, and they install it and bill you monthly, and many save money on it. I haven't tried it yet; I need a new roof first....Originally Posted by radind
Here's one:
http://www.solaruniverse.com/
Still more storms in the South and Mid-West, taking lives and ruining communities. This is a major aspect of our 4T. It is frustrating to see all the damage, and mindful too that the failure of Americans to act to stop the cause of the increasing weather disasters, means that we are partly responsible for what's happening. The usual suspects will make the usual retorts; ranging from "one weather event does not prove global warming" to "global warming is a hoax perpetrated by people who want an academic paycheck" yadda yadda yadda. But the scientific facts are clear that global warming is a real crisis, and that it causes more extreme weather, among other things. So when will we act? When will we convert to clean green energy, so that we don't cause these disasters? Why wait? Are we homo sapiens, or homo destructiens?
This isn't quite global warming, but it relates to something coincidental -- acidification of the oceans.
http://news.yahoo.com/oceans-acidic-...202817121.html
More at the link.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The world's oceans are turning acidic at what could be the fastest pace of any time in the past 300 million years, even more rapidly than during a monster emission of planet-warming carbon 56 million years ago, scientists said on Thursday.
Looking back at that bygone warm period in Earth's history could offer help in forecasting the impact of human-spurred climate change, researchers said of a review of hundreds of studies of ancient climate records published in the journal Science.
Quickly acidifying seawater eats away at coral reefs, which provide habitat for other animals and plants, and makes it harder for mussels and oysters to form protective shells. It can also interfere with small organisms that feed commercial fish like salmon.
The phenomenon has been a top concern of Jane Lubchenco, the head of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who has conducted demonstrations about acidification during hearings in the U.S. Congress.
Oceans get more acidic when more carbon gets into the atmosphere. In pre-industrial times, that occurred periodically in natural pulses of carbon that also pushed up global temperatures, the scientists wrote.
Human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels, have increased the level of atmospheric carbon to 392 parts per million from about 280 parts per million at the start of the industrial revolution. Carbon dioxide is one of several heat-trapping gases that contribute to global warming.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Just another tornado outbreak...
The major lesson one learns from turning theory is that cultures remain static, that values only change, when a catastrophic disaster is clear, present, and undeniable. Until things are undeniable, they will be denied. Kings will have divine rights. Negroes will be mentally inferior, deserving of their status as slaves. The government will not need to intervene in the economy, as the boom bust cycles are better managed by totally free markets. Wars in Europe are best left the the europeans, as the US should avoid foreign entanglements.
With 20 20 hindsight all of the above seem obviously incorrect. The cultural changes that come with crisis seem obviously necessary and appropriate to those who get to study the crisis from a safe historical perspective. They did not seem obviously necessary and appropriate to established factions in all of the above crises. People will cling to the old culture and values, finding every excuse to avoid looking at handwriting on the wall. Homo destructiens might not be the most appropriate label. How does one put a stubborn clinging to old patterns still beneficial to established powerful minorities into pseudo-latin? Homo whatever.
Problem is, ecological problems have more inertia than the human cultural problems at the core of earlier crises. It takes longer to global ecological systems around. Ecological systems move in much slower rhythms than the typical 5 year crisis era war. It doesn't look like the clear and present danger will be visible by enough people until tipping points and points of no return are long past.
Global warming could itself be the essence of the Crisis of 2010. If anything would force gigantic projects of engineering and profound changes in ways of life then that could hardly be more a Crisis. Just imagine places like New York, London, St. Petersburg (both the one in Russia and the one in Florida!), Shanghai, Singapore, and Calcutta having to become Venice-like cities. Just imagine what happens to food supplies when rich lowland farm country becomes inundated. Just imagine what happens when alligators start filching beloved pets -- let alone children -- in Chicago -- or hurricanes become possibilities in the Mediterranean Basin. Think of what happens as Athens gets the infernal climate that we now associate with the Persian Gulf.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Meteorologists are predicting that there will be an El Niño starting this fall, according to Dr. Masters at Weather Underground.
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism
New Storage Projects Turns CO2 into Stone
Interesting article
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...co2-into-stone
New Storage Projects Turns CO2 into Stone
Iceland is experimenting with pumping carbon dioxide underground and converting it into rock
By Umair Irfan and ClimateWire | March 5, 2012
..oh, please:
...and what happened to those predictions of increased hurricane activity, anyway?
Ah, the earth's eventually going to get swallowed up by the sun in 5 billion years anyway. None of us will be here, so I'm not going to get too worried about it.
1992 Millie
http://reason.com/archives/2012/03/0...raud-at-a-time
If the theory of man-made global warming were such a self-obvious truth, the result of scientific consensus, then why do advocates for this idea keep committing frauds to advance it? Even more disturbing, why are some writers willing to defend this behavior?
...“Peter Gleick lied, but was it justified by the wider good?”asked James Garvey of the British Guardian newspaper. He compared Gleick’s action to that of a man who lied to keep his friend from driving home drunk. “What Heartland is doing is harmful, because it gets in the way of public consensus and action,” he argued. “If his lie has good effects overall—if those who take Heartland’s money to push skepticism are dismissed as shills, if donors pull funding after being exposed in the press—then perhaps on balance he did the right thing. … It depends on how this plays out.”
...Although he offered his regrets, Gleick’s mea culpa was laden with excuses: “I only note that the scientific understanding of the reality and risks of climate change is strong, compelling, and increasingly disturbing, and a rational public debate is desperately needed. My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts—often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated—to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved.”
How do you base a “rational public debate” on deceit?
Anyone?
Last edited by JDG 66; 03-05-2012 at 05:21 PM. Reason: query added
There is certainly a difference between being concerned about a potential calamity that will happen in 5 billion years versus one that could happen within your lifetime (or in my case, since I have a child born in 1994, my daughter's lifetime). :o
I want people to know that peace is possible even in this stupid day and age. Prem Rawat, June 8, 2008
Yup. In the long run, we are all dead, so why worry about going a little early?
How to spot a shill, by John Michael Greer: "What you watch for is (a) a brand new commenter who (b) has nothing to say about the topic under discussion but (c) trots out a smoothly written opinion piece that (d) hits all the standard talking points currently being used by a specific political or corporate interest, while (e) avoiding any other points anyone else has made on that subject."
"If the shoe fits..." The Grey Badger.
It's still a bad practice to stash oily rags that can do spontaneous consumption and burn up your house long before the Sun goes into its red giant stage.
Last edited by pbrower2a; 03-06-2012 at 06:40 PM.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
This is an interesting article. We should continue to push solar energy technology.
Solar concentration without mirrors (Photonics Spectra | Mar 2012 |
http://www.photonics.com/Article.aspx?AID=50301
" Mirror-free thermophotovoltaic devices could someday make a much simpler and less expensive system to concentrate sunlight. The goal is to prevent heat from escaping the thermoelectric material by using a photonic crystal – essentially, an array of precisely spaced microscopic holes in a top layer of the material.
By concentrating the sunlight thermally – capturing it and reflecting it back into the material – the device could absorb as much heat as a standard black object, yet not reradiate much of the heat, suggests Peter Bermel, a scientist at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics." ...
..."The efficiency of ordinary solar-energy-harnessing systems is around 10 percent, but the new theoretical material could achieve 32 to 36 percent. It is important to note that an increase in efficiency of even 1 percent is considered significant."...
Not to worry (there's never a reason to worry anyway); but remember, reincarnation is a likely reality, for those not hooked on a narrow scientific worldview. And also, our children's children's children.... and they will not still be on Earth to be swallowed up by the sun, but on another terraformed planet, with all our species taken there on a latter day ark. And/or in a subtle dimension; by then the celestine prophecy will not only be true, but far in the past.... meanwhile we can have many millennia of a beautiful Earth for ourselves (reincarnated) and the descendants of our fellow living beings, if we preserve it. There's every good reason not to think "eat, drink and be merry for tommorrow we die" because you likely do not. We are here, and here again and again, for a reason. This is a special planet, as God indicates to us, because maybe it's the only one with a Sun and Moon the same size as appearing from it, and both reflecting the most precious metals in creation (gold and silver). It pays to have a more spiritual perspective....
Indeed so. I remember the Awakening, though; in those years people were actually looking for new ideas and experiencing changing worldviews at a record pace. That's one reason I look back fondly on an era that had its destructive sides. So looming disaster is not the only catalyst to changing values; spiritual and social awakenings (better yet, both at once) can do it too.
All the more reason why, in the light of the 2012 consciousness and Neptune in Pisces, this 4T could also have aspects of a 2T, and we can awaken to a higher consciousness of the value of Earth.It doesn't look like the clear and present danger will be visible by enough people until tipping points and points of no return are long past.
There is the science that is pretty much clear, and there is public relations and propaganda which is quite cloudy. Would it be that the public could and would follow the science. As is, the public relations and propaganda goes to the faction willing to spend money and lie. It is hard, when the 'skeptics' are "often anonymous, well-funded and coordinated" not to respond in kind, but doing so only discredits the true scientists, which is what happened with Gleick. One alarmist doing what the skeptics do on a regular basis of course becomes a staple for the skeptics.http://reason.com/archives/2012/03/0...raud-at-a-time
If the theory of man-made global warming were such a self-obvious truth, the result of scientific consensus, then why do advocates for this idea keep committing frauds to advance it? Even more disturbing, why are some writers willing to defend this behavior?
...“Peter Gleick lied, but was it justified by the wider good?”asked James Garvey of the British Guardian newspaper. He compared Gleick’s action to that of a man who lied to keep his friend from driving home drunk. “What Heartland is doing is harmful, because it gets in the way of public consensus and action,” he argued. “If his lie has good effects overall—if those who take Heartland’s money to push skepticism are dismissed as shills, if donors pull funding after being exposed in the press—then perhaps on balance he did the right thing. … It depends on how this plays out.”
...Although he offered his regrets, Gleick’s mea culpa was laden with excuses: “I only note that the scientific understanding of the reality and risks of climate change is strong, compelling, and increasingly disturbing, and a rational public debate is desperately needed. My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts—often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated—to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved.”
How do you base a “rational public debate” on deceit?
Anyone?
Go solar
Famous astronomer eyes cheap solar power
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/on...for-desig.html
..."Others have tried solar collectors, but have had a hard time keeping costs down. REhnu gets around this by making its mirrors out of thin sheets of cheap float glass, the stuff used in windows. Heating softens the sheets so they slump into a parabolic mold, and once cooled they get a reflective metal coating. A prototype uses a mirror 3.1 metres wide that focuses the sunlight onto a spherical glass receiver which distributes the sunlight to an array of high-efficiency three-layer solar cells.
REhnu is now building a 20-kilowatt prototype with a lightweight frame to track the sun on an test site in the Arizona desert. The developers claim they can get the capital cost down to $1/watt of generation capacity by 2020, and estimate that a solar farm producing a gigawatt of electricity would cover about 15 square kilometres."
One keeps hearing about alternative energy sources that might produce more power for the buck than burning fossil fuel. Eventually one such scheme will work and can be upscaled...
Or maybe instead of being upscaled to industrial proportions and distributed from huge power plants over a massive grid, it will be a distributed form of power in which every home and office has its own solar cells. So far, that's been the most popular and most economical way to go.
The Only One Source model, the Single Source on a Massive Scale Serving Everybody model, may well be an artifact of the mid-20th-Century industrial society, making sense in that context but not in today's context. Isn't this the age of customized products, niche marketing, and choose-your-own-apps, after all?
How to spot a shill, by John Michael Greer: "What you watch for is (a) a brand new commenter who (b) has nothing to say about the topic under discussion but (c) trots out a smoothly written opinion piece that (d) hits all the standard talking points currently being used by a specific political or corporate interest, while (e) avoiding any other points anyone else has made on that subject."
"If the shoe fits..." The Grey Badger.
Afterthought: this is an age of Fourth Generation Warfare, which makes resilience mandatory. You don't want all your resources coming from something one fanatic with a bomb can take down, no matter how strongly your determination to guard it (which in itself is quite expensive.)
How to spot a shill, by John Michael Greer: "What you watch for is (a) a brand new commenter who (b) has nothing to say about the topic under discussion but (c) trots out a smoothly written opinion piece that (d) hits all the standard talking points currently being used by a specific political or corporate interest, while (e) avoiding any other points anyone else has made on that subject."
"If the shoe fits..." The Grey Badger.
