I live in South Texas. We pay a lot of attention to the hurricane predictions every year. It was supposed to be terrible last year and this because of global warming. Last year we Had DON (better named Dud) that hit here in Brownsville and did absolutlely nothing. Had 1 that ran up the eastern seaboard and caused a bunch of flooding. This year we had 1 hurricane hit souther Mexcco and 1 go through New Oleans and caused a little flooding. Last year ist seemed like they named every cloud and most of them were nothing. Last year was a scorcher down here, but this year the temperature didn't break 100 til after the first of september and is now peaking in the low 90's.
Previously we had lived in northern Indiana. My boss had a fruit farm. Apples and Peaches. Except the weather had been so cold for several years that he was getting no peaches. Last time thathappened was in the 1960's.
And then we hear that the winters are colder because of "global warming". But most of the conversation insisting that it is real seems to be centered on how do we use "global warming" to controls other peoples lifestyles.
Oh - and some of the brilliance of the "global warming" crowd. Can't burn wood and wood products because that will release carbon Dioxide. Yes, but the carbon dioxide from burning wood and wood products is easily recycled into more wood and wood products. The sun shines, the trees grow, we harvest them and start over again. But most of the "environmental" crowd can't see that trees are a crop just like corn and beans and cucumbers. In East Texas a few years back they had to cut pine trees and burn them because they got too old and unhealthy and the pine beetles were doing damage to the unhealthy as well as the healthy trees. Perhaps, if they had harvested the trees after growing for 25 years they could have used the wood and the trees would grow again. But no, they were cut and burned. Brilliant use of a natural resource.
Dear Jarvis. Yes I have heard of Milankovitch. So has every scientist I have read on the subject of GW. I can't say as much for the political GW side, which I mostly ignore, along with their opposite. I suspect if you think no one who is convinced of GW, in the scientific world that is, knows or is mentioning the long term solar cycles, you are not reading broadly enough. Of course I speak from 60 years of study so there may be some modern folk who are not as well studied as they should be, Milankovitch is like freshman level study now. All I can tell you for sure is that the solar insolation was very much part of the GW studies funded by NOAA back about 5 years ago that I did read. Actually with few exceptions most scientists are not idiots or easily forced to accept anything. They got to be scientists because they were rabble rousers of the first order, back in their days as students, and questioned everything they were told. Most of us still do, politics or not.
Hi Tim. GW does not have two sides. There is fact, as poorly as we may understand it, and all else is false. I do observe that many of the Pro side (in the political argument that is) overstate the effects, the rates of onset, and the likely consequences of our inaction, and our action, and way understate the ability we have to amelorate the effects. On the other side, however, is a lot of absurd shouting and downright silly positions. There is no question at all that we are warming, slowly so far, and that human action is impacting that substantially. It is very unclear how much simply reducing a bit the rate of increase in combustion of fossile fuels could even slow down the rate of change over the next 20 years or so. And there are 3-4 major tripping points that could make abrupt changes with very challenging impacts to everyone, whether they believe in GW or not. Right now, all I can hope for is that the US wide (except the west coast) drought and super hot summer is not becoming the new norm. Wringing our hands and saying "It's not my fault." won't cool us off one little bit. Nor improve the skiing. Practice eating less and change to water sports I guess.
Over a hundred years ago, Milutin Milankovitch calculated the occultation of the earth's orbit around the sun. It has a 70,000 year cycle. To think that we are on a stable planet is foolishness.
Yet not one of the environmental activists ... not ONE ... has mentioned the Milankovitch cycles, or seems willing to admit that there may be something greater than man at work, here.
If one refers to first principals...(and to paraphrase a former president):
It's the SUN, stupid!
I would submit that this entire debate is over the wrong thing. Whatever the climate is doing, we still need to be good stewards of the environment. And we can do that by adopting serious policies with respect to energy, waste, and water. The focus needs to be there, not on the level of an atmospheric trace gas.
And by the way, fully 1/3 of atmospheric CO2, net of plant uptake, is generated by commercial aviation, and directly injected in the stratosphere every day. This isn't generally discussed, why? Perhaps because environmental activists are busy flying to conferences? Or maybe they're too busy to run the numbers. The data was available at the time of the Tokyo accords.
can always argue whether co2 is good or bad for the earth but these scientists must like the oceans to be more on the acidic side and hate polar bears.
Atlantic Conveyor not yet broken. Maybe the Brits will be affected, and so if it gets broken, try to fix it. My guess is the Gulf of Mexico, the GOM puts out so much
hot salty water into the Gulf Stream and so the shape of the ocean floor combines with the bulge of North Africa to keep the North Atlantic stable.
The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is a different matter.
That one already had a major anomaly this past year and knocked a few microseconds off the clock here and there. When the rotational momentum from the ACC Antarctic Circumpolar Current gets knocked into the west coast of South Africa, the continent gets pushed faster.
Whole earth spins a bit faster. This is fun. Just like being on a merry-go-round.
People hop on and fall off. Ocean currents are the same.
Arctic Circumpolar Current spins then goes off track.
Even Magellan could notice the current as we go past Good Hope and
Tierra del Fuego. And when that current breaks into the South Atlantic,
that is measurable and real. So the air and the oceans do interact.
Only the people are too slow to understand what is happening.
The Eureka ALERT is a good post. Hot parched areas can trigger both dust storms and rain and lightning storms. The heat from sunlight can dry wet ground and also the negative feedback, when that system snaps back, will bring rain.
I think of the earth as a big boiling pot. Phase One and Phase Two types of boiling sure do happen. And the transition between Phase One and Phase Two can be truly explosive. Water has a surface tension. When that tension snaps, watch out.
We live in interesting times. The carbon is changing faster in the air during my lifetime than ever before in history. And the truly amazing thing is, we can sit under a tree and watch the clouds build up in the sky.
I love to sit under a tree and watch the seasons change - snow and rain, then sunny and hot and dry. Each year the fruit trees are a bit different.
That reminds me - many pears are ripe now. Apples and peaches had a rough year. Even the blueberries were a bit off and the black berries did better than the
many shades of red, gold and black raspberries. Even many varieties of seedless and seeded grapes tell a story.
Global Warming happens, and methane and carbon dioxide is really building up fast. We can see it in our lifetimes. Sure hope the heat does not make the Arab States restless. They live in a difficult part of the world - the Marsh Arabs and the Nomads in the Desert. Read Kalil Gibran...
I think that the issue quickly becomes a political one because of some of the draconian solutions proposed. It seems that the 'environmental cause' is not just for the environment, but is also being used as cover for a range of socio-economic initiatives. That just complicates an already complicated issue.
For 3D printing to make the jump from rapid prototyping to manufacturing, engineers will need to find easier ways to move products from their CAD screens to their printers.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
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