The Environment

[Haggis@wk]

FIRST the good news. These bitter winters aren’t going to last forever. The bad news is that they will go on for the next 30 years as we have entered a mini ice age.

[Shapley]

Rising Sea Levels "The Greatest Lie Ever Told", According To Sea-Level Expert

"But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by
Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.

The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world".

When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.

Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. The only evidence the scaremongers can cite is based on the fact that extracting groundwater for pineapple growing has allowed seawater to seep in to replace it. Meanwhile, Venice has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr Mörner.

One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC's favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a "corrective factor" of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they "needed to show a trend".

[Haggis@wk]

Looks like them Sandy Eggans' got the best bragging rights

[Haggis@wk]

Britain Is Freezing To Death.

When people in England are freezing to death and the oldsters are dying of heat stroke in La Madeleine because nobody can afford heat (or AC)and their family doesn’t check on them because that’s what the government is supposed to do, you have the compassion of the Welfare State on display.

[dai bread]

Charities claim this country has the highest winter death rate in northern Europe, worse than colder nations such as Finland and Sweden.

Read more: http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/215 ... z17ThNIlHq

I've read this comment before. Then, it was attributed to people standing on railway platforms waiting for trains while dressed for the office rather than the wind. Gaberdine overcoats, leather shoes and the like are very nice but not much good in really cold conditions.

Another thing, and this constantly surprises me though it shouldn't, is that the British, even the Scots, seem totally unprepared for this sort of weather. It's not exactly rare. Don't they have snow tyres? Chains? It is possible to drive on snow in street tyres, but there's always someone ahead who can't do it and stops everyone in their tracks.

[Haggis@wk]

Britain: Now the Army moves in to clear away snow in coldest December for 100 years as fuel runs out at petrol stations in Scotland and East Anglia.

Heck, stations in Scotland were running out of "petrol" last August so I'm not surprised they're running out in the dead of winter, How a country like the UK can reach first world status and have so few gas stations has always been a mystery to me!

[Haggis@wk]

Osborne Reef The unintended consequences of "good intentions". My then hippy, newly married sister was involved in this along with her husband and his big boat. Dropped from boats off of Fort Lauderdale's coast some of those tires found their way to Pensecola and North Carolina.

Fortunately, my sister actually turned out pretty good and has the good graces these days to blush whenever the "moon child, earth mother, all-we-need-is-love" phase of her life comes up in conversation.

[analog]

It's real curious how the tires got from Ft Lauderdale, east coast in Atlantic , clear around to Pensacola in the gulf, which would be going against the gulfstream all the way. One would suspect they'd have had to make the trip clear around Atlantic, past England.

Methinks instead there's an undocumented tire dump off Pensacola.

If it's indeed the same tires, they must be scattered all over the hemisphere. Which is plausible.

a.

[Haggis@wk]

Spacecraft Saw ULF Radio Emissions over Haiti before January Quake.

“A French satellite observed a dramatic increase in ultra low frequency radio waves over Haiti in the month before the M7.0 earthquake earlier this year.”

Earthquake prediction would be extremely useful.

[jamiebk]

Spacecraft Saw ULF Radio Emissions over Haiti before January Quake.

“A French satellite observed a dramatic increase in ultra low frequency radio waves over Haiti in the month before the M7.0 earthquake earlier this year.”

Earthquake prediction would be extremely useful.

I hope that they have their "eyes" on CA.

[dai bread]

Did they see any over Christchurch last September?

[analog]

this old physicist is really fun. he still appears now & then on TV , watch for him. Last of the Manhattan project scientists...



HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY [8.8.07]
By Freeman Dyson

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html

[Haggis@wk]

The next Solar Max.

“Recurrence of a 1921 event today would fry 350 major transformers, leaving more than 130 million people without power, it heard. A bigger storm could cost between a trillion and two trillion dollars in the first year, and full recovery could take between four and 10 years.”

Personally, I think the panic that would ensue would be much, much worse.

[Haggis@wk]

Global Warming Skeptic Predicts Brutal Winter, Warns “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet”

Compared to a cooling trend I’d prefer a warmer globe.

[Haggis@wk]

Thanks, suckers! Eco-bulb cost to treble: Makers cash in as the ban on old-style bulbs kicks in.

Gee, whqat a surprise!

[dai bread]

I wonder why Northern Hemisphere people have such trouble with their fluorescent lights? Mine work perfectly well. Even the cheap and cheerful old-fashioned starter-and-tube one that I put into my bedroom works steadily since I got a decent starter for it. 3 or 4 flicks and it's running steadily. The compact ones don't flicker at all, and never have.

[jamiebk]

I wonder why Northern Hemisphere people have such trouble with their fluorescent lights? Mine work perfectly well. Even the cheap and cheerful old-fashioned starter-and-tube one that I put into my bedroom works steadily since I got a decent starter for it. 3 or 4 flicks and it's running steadily. The compact ones don't flicker at all, and never have.

'cause we get 'em from China.

[analog]

The old timey fluorescents with a ballast do flicker a little bit, but at line frequency which is too fast for our eyes.
You can detect it by watching the shaft of a lightly loaded induction type electric motor(no brushes)... blemishes on the shaft will appear as a faint shadow that rotates slowly as the motor shaft moves around the phase of line voltage.

The newfangled lights don't flicker because they have a ridiculously complex switching power supply inside. They take the line voltage, make DC out of it, apply power factor correction, then switch that DC back into AC at real high frequency (tens of KHz) which goes into the lamp. The "dead times" at that high frequency are so much shorter than the persistence of the phosphor that there's no flicker.

It has been reported that some birds do see the flicker of ordinary fluorescent lights and prefer to roost away from them. Myself i wonder if perhaps they are sensitive to the UV content instead, and i don't know if it includes parakeets, but I always made sure the nightlights in rooms where my kids' pet birds stayed were incandescent. Poor birds needed their rest too...
http://www.bio.bris.ac.uk/research/beha ... schap5.pdf , bottom of page 150:

In summary, starlings that are accustomed to artificial lighting can clearly detect the
difference between HF and LF lighting, and prefer HF.

And growing up i the songbird population around Miami decreased as i got older. I blamed it on pesticides , everybody gets their yard sprayed nowadays and the birds eat the poisoned bugs, but maybe also they don't like the new sodium and mercury vapor gas-discharge streetlamps ?

Has anyone else noticed while driving at night those new LED taillights? Some of them are strobed, ie flashing but so fast they look continuous to our eyes. But just barely fast enough.
I notice when i move my eyes to scan traffic that the strobed LED taillamps produce a line of dots across my field of vision, and i find that disconcerting and annoying.


a.

[Shapley]

My complaints with CFL's are as follows:

The have a long warm-up time - they are very dim when they first come and take several minutes to reach full brightness.

They are expensive, which wouldn't be so bad if they lasted as long as advertised. They don't.

Some of them smoke and smell terrible when they fail.

You're not supposed to use them in enclosed fixtures, which means I'll have to replace many light fixtures in my house when I
switch completely over to them (out of necessity, due to lack of availability of incandescents, not out of desire).

They agitate my stepson. I have no idea if it is due to the flickering which we can't observe, the UV light, or whatever. He is visibly agitated when placed in the vicinity of them, so we have to move him to a spot away from them, or leave them off when he is in the room.

The older ones are a fire hazard if used with a dimmer switch. They now have 'dimmable' CFL's I see, but they are even more expensive.

[Shapley]

Do you suppose the operation at 50 Hz vs. 60 Hz makes a difference in the visible flicker rate?