257 thoughts to “Open Thread-Non-Petroleum, Feb 13, 2017”

  1. In the comments section of the Peak Oil and Plug-in Vehicles post from February 5, Matt Mushalik asked where all the additional electricity was to come from to provide power for an influx of EVs. To illustrate how far away Australia is from sustainable energies, Matt also provided the following link to a web page that shows Australian electricity production in real time:

    http://reneweconomy.com.au/nem-watch/

    In the discussions that followed, we looked at what the additional electricity demand for the US might look like and I looked at the solar resources available in Australia. I also looked at electricity production data for Australia and remarked that production from their “small solar” dwarfed the production from “large solar”. From the available data I estimated that the difference between the overnight low and the daytime peak for production from black coal and natural gas fired plants was about 8 GW and suggested that solar PV could provide that 8 GW if Australia got serious about solar. Their historical installation rates of hundreds of megawatts per year won’t cut it if they want to make a big dent in their carbon emissions. Australia will need to increase their annual installation rates to multiple gigawatts per year to start making a big impact on their carbon emissions. To that end:

    New renewable energy projects point to biggest year for Australia’s industry since Snowy Hydro

    More than 20 major renewable energy projects (e.g. wind and solar) are already under construction or will start this year in Australia, according to new analysis from the Clean Energy Council (CEC) released on February 11th, 2017.

    Together, the projects will generate more than USD 5 billion of investment, CEC notes.

    Clean Energy Council Chief Executive Kane Thornton said more than 2,250 MW of new large-scale renewable energy would be under construction in 2017, the most since the Snowy Hydro Scheme more than 50 years ago – one of the most iconic nation-building projects in Australian history.

    Not all 2.25 GW is solar bot I would posit that it’s a step in the right direction.

    Not so sure about the following though:

    Lithium-ion battery storage may be banned inside Australian homes

    Lithium-ion battery storage devices – including Tesla Powerwalls and other products – may be banned from being installed inside homes and garages in Australia under new guidelines being drafted by Standards Australia.

    The move, if upheld, is likely to send shockwaves through the industry, with thousands of Australian households, including prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, already installing lithium ion battery storage devices and millions more predicted to do so in coming years.

    Standards Australia, a voluntary body that draws on expertise from the industries involved and key stakeholders, is expected to release the draft guidelines in the next week or so. But news of its proposals has already leaked, causing concern that the decision could bring the industry to a halt.

    Is this a measure born out of genuine concern for the fire risk of these devices or is it a case of Regulatory Capture by FF interests?

    1. A few thoughts:

      The Tesla Powerwall can be installed outside. That would be a big pain for many people, but it can be done.

      “Water resistant and dustproof enclosure for installation inside or outdoors.” https://www.tesla.com/powerwall

      I doubt it’s necessary from a safety point of view…

      You used about 2 trillion miles, and .34kWh/mile for the analysis of grid expansion needed for EVs in the US. I think that should be either 2.9T miles for all light vehicles (including SUVs and pickups), or .30 (or fewer) kWh for sedans.

      1. There are quite a number of large factors in play that are not taken into account by simple energy calculations. In reality we will need far less energy in the future than we do now, even if we travel trillions of miles.

        1. I foresee a future, with a little luck, where extensive travel will be possible, but also where it will be unnecessary in order to live well and to get the work done.

          It’s insanity to believe that we really need to haul beer a thousand miles when it can be efficiently produced locally, and better quality at that.

          And while we WON’T be abandoning very much of suburbia, because the sunk investment is too big and too valuable in REAL terms, we will gradually move to building new communties where shopping, work, homes, and recreation are all close enough together to make it convenient and desirable to do very little day to day traveling.

          Old communities will gradually adopt new regulations that allow people to work from home and at home, which will help. There’s no real reason a plumber should have to drive to a shop in an industrial district to get the van he uses to carry his tools and spares and back home again in a personal car at the end of the day.

    2. Is this a measure born out of genuine concern for the fire risk of these devices or is it a case of Regulatory Capture by FF interests?

      I don’t know the answer to that question but the latest video at Jack Rickard’s EVTV has an in depth discussion about Tesla’s BMS. Tesla has developed a really safe battery management system for its car batteries. I would imagine they have it pretty much figured out out for the Powerwall as well.
      So I would guess it is the latter…

      This might also shed some light on Tesla’s Powerpack overall safety.

      https://electrek.co/2016/12/19/tesla-fire-powerpack-test-safety/
      Tesla set fire to a Powerpack to test its safety features – the results are impressive

      The use of lithium-ion battery cells in large energy storage applications is fairly new and the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) wanted to know more about what would happen if one were to catch fire.

      Tesla built its Powerpack with safety first in mind and was willing to put its battery system to the test. The company teamed up with NFPA last year and gave them two Powerpacks to set on fire. We got a hold of their test results.

      Even though battery cells are unlikely to initiate a thermal runaway reaction and catch on fire, what can happen will happen, and with the number of cells Tesla is playing with, it needs to plan for it.

      My current default position with any question regarding safety, efficiency, cost or affordabiility of Solar PV and battery storage technology is that, in general the vested interests in fossil fuel and Utility monopolies are basically feeling threathened and are responding in a hostile manner to anything that facilitates the development of clean energy. They are doing everything in their power to hold back and delay any progress. Until proven otherwise I do not trust them to have the best interests of the public at large as their goal. So I say to hell with them!

    3. Happened already in North America for PV. RSD “Rapid ShutDown” is part of the National Electric Code. For some reason Fire Fighters like to Axe thru Rooftop PV Panels while leaving Propane tanks and lines alone.

      1. Why not just axe through the side of the roof that doesn’t have panels?

        I think they don’t like spraying water on active power generating equipment and then having to be right near it or standing in the water.

        1. I have a lot of experience in a bunch of different lines of work that entail a lot of different potential safety hazards.

          A rapid shut down regulation is entirely justified in the case of residential scale solar systems, especially if they are grid tied.

          This is no more onerous a requirement than that cars have backup braking systems built in ( the dual master cylinder has been around now for decades ) or that sprinkler systems are mandated in some buildings, etc.

          There’s enough juice flowing in such a system to START fires if something goes wrong, and there’s definitely enough to be dangerous to firemen who are often literally drenched by their own hoses or rain. When everything is wet, the danger of a serious or fatal shock can be a hundred or a thousand times higher, because materials that are normally fairly decent insulators, such as wood, asphalt shingles, concrete, become good enough conductors to transmit well enough to result in potentially fatal shocks.

          Anybody who has ever been caught outside welding in a sudden down pour with a machine with with only sixty or seventy open circuit volts on it will tell you about it no uncertain terms.

          1. Rapid shutdown switches are easy and cheap.

            This insane Standards Australia “guideline” which appears to prohibit batteries from being put in the house or garage (what about the batteries in your laptop, or car, or the explosive gasoline in your car?) is ridiculous.

    4. In the meantime load shedding hit an aluminium smelter in NSW

      14 Feb 2017
      NSW’s privatized giveaway coal plant causes load shedding in extreme weather
      http://crudeoilpeak.info/nsws-privatized-giveaway-coal-plant-causes-load-shedding-in-extreme-weather

      The problem in Australia is that the government and the opposition are locked into a blame game about renewable energy and recent blackouts in South Australia while a bipartisan approach would be absolutely necessary to create an environment of investment certainty. For more than 10 years no real decisions have been made how to replace coal fired power plants. So what we see is that aging coal plants lead to shortages during heat waves.

      1. It looks like the problem was peak A/C demand, which would be nicely correlated with solar power.

        I’m puzzled by the Skelton report, which argues that full power supplies are needed to prevent a total loss of aluminium smelter pots due to freezing. That doesn’t make sense: the smelter is being interrupted precisely because they have a contract which allows it. The smelter wouldn’t sign such a contract if a short, partial interruption would have such consequences.

        My understanding is that an aluminium smelter can operate on about 5% of normal power load to maintain pot temperatures and prevent freezing. That doesn’t require much power because you’re just replacing heat lost. The other 95% is used to reduce aluminium oxide. The oxide reduction takes a lot of power, but that can be suspended without harm. Just maintaining pot temperature…doesn’t take much power.

        1. “My understanding is that an aluminium smelter can operate on about 5% of normal power load to maintain pot temperatures and prevent freezing.”

          That is correct, aluminium smelters consume a lot of electrcity and are prime candidates because of their quite supply insensitive process for demand management in Germany .

  2. In response to a post of mine on the February 9 non-petroleum open thread that included links to three articles about utility scale batteries, Fred posted a link to an article over at oilprice.com from September 2016 by Gail Tverberg titled “How Intermittent Renewables Are Harming The Electricity Grid”

    Along a similar vein, one the local rags in my neck of the woods had the following story in their Sunday edition:

    Power warning – Increased use of renewables could burn the pockets of some JPS customers

    With many local entities turning to solar systems or other renewable systems to reduce their reliance on more expensive energy supplied by the Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS), there is a another indication that persons who remain on the JPS grid could face the consequences.

    “We all should be concerned and thoughtful. You don’t want everybody who can afford solar on their roof going off the grid because you would still have to pay for the grid,” CEO of the JPS, Kelly Tomblin, told The Sunday Gleaner during a recent interview.

    “How do we take care of a particular company so that we also take care of the whole? How do we find a way to make it affordable for everybody and don’t just let people cherry-pick off the grid?” added Tomblin.

    There is no official registry of the amount of renewable energy being utilised on the island, but it is estimated that approximately 35 megawatts of renewable energy has been installed between residential and business customers in recent years.

    1. Fred posted a link to an article over at oilprice.com from September 2016 by Gail Tverberg

      Just to be clear, Fred was poking fun at Gail – he didn’t think her article was at all credible.

      Irony doesn’t work very well in print…

      1. Irony doesn’t work very well in print…

        Nope, it sure don’t 😉

        1. Irony?
          You see, authentic, spontaneous political events (in the form of uprisings or popular revolts against the elite) are a no-no in the West. History is supposed to have ended, remember? Max Weber called this the Iron Cage, and for good reason.

          Now, though, the meaninglessness and rootless of our lives trapped inside the cage have become too obvious to ignore, for most of us. As each day passes, our political discourse glosses over how lazy, ignorant, mean-spirited, and numb our society has become. We import luxuries from all over the globe, but can’t be bothered to cook or grow our own food, assemble our own electronics, expand renewable energy projects, provide clean water to inner cities, organize high-speed transport, or educate our youth without drowning them in debt, etc.

          So, many have lashed out against the system, and our more vulnerable members of society, in anger, defiance, out of sheer ignorance. Could it be because, deep down, we know how helpless, sheltered, and out-of-touch our society is, compared to the rest of the world? What are the root causes of this disintegration of public discourse?

          One cause is our utter dependency on the capitalist system to clothe, feed, and shelter us. What we used to inherit from our mothers and fathers, important agricultural knowledge, artisanal and cultural wisdom, a sense of place and belonging, have all been traded in for money, the privilege to be exploited by capitalism, toiling in jobs that alienate us from ourselves, families, the Earth. Paper bills and electronic bank accounts are a pitiful substitute for self-reliance. This loss, this grief, isn’t allowed to be expressed in public. Logical positivism tells us that progress will prevail, the future will be better than the past, and anyone who thinks otherwise must be some sort of Luddite.

          Since real income has fallen and social services have been slashed in the last 40-plus years, many have seen their loved ones’ lives cut short (lack of access to health care and quality food and produce, air and water pollution), their dreams defiled (steady jobs gone, factories shuttered), their entertainment homogenized and dangerous (sports mania has become normalized, “Go Team!”, alcohol, painkiller, and opiate addiction is rampant), their hopes for the future shattered (community and public space swallowed by corporations).

          Probably just humor?

          2. There’s no doubt that real income has fallen for a large segment of the population over the last forty years, but taken all around, it takes a fool to believe that social services have been cut overall. Some programs might have been cut, but when this has happened, on average new ones have been put in place and or others expanded.

            Just about any place I have checked, there are more programs and more social workers of one sort or another, by a mile, than in the eighties. Lets not forget that in the broader sense cops, teachers, etc are social workers too, although I’m not talking about cops and teachers.

  3. With the January Arctic Ice Volume essentially falling well below other years and outside two standard deviations of the 1979-2016 mean, the Arctic has now entered a new climate and feedback regime.

    1. Que Javier with ‘but the extent is extenting’ in 3… 2… 1…

      NAOM

      Ooops, just read Fred underneath 🙂

    2. The chart below was posted on the Arctic Ice Forum blog and is kind of eye opening. It shows rolling average annual temperatures for 80N from the DMI data (which I think is calculated from ECMWF). Things were just gradually getting bad, but something different has definitely happened this year.

      It is supposed to cool off this week and may dip below the average curve for the first time since Spring 2015. But for how long remains to be seen.

    3. This reminds me of last May alarm with low sea ice levels.

      Climate Central: Arctic Sea Ice Breaks May Record . . . By A Lot

      But guess what, September sea ice extent was higher than 2007 and 2012.

      Now we are back at it. More alarm and the Arctic entering a new climate and feedback regime.

      The bottom line, despite 7 out of the 10 warmest years since 2007 the Arctic is showing even more summer sea ice. Hard to explain, isn’t it? That’s why we see alarmists migrating out of sea ice extent and into modeled volume, or taking whole year averages. I mean they have to keep the scare alive, don’t they?

      1. You sure are a riot Javier. More conspiracy theory rants. More meaningless “data” and beliefs.
        Keep them coming, we need more entertainment.
        Meanwhile the actual observations and deductions will still happen. You can ignore reality but it does not change it.

      2. In Javier’s world Arctic sea ice is two dimensional. Volume is beyond the grasp.

        1. Not even two dimensional since sea ice extent could mean up to 85% exposed water (basically water with a few ice chunks floating in it). The only valid measures are sea ice concentration (actual area of ice cover) and volume.

          But spring is coming with the inevitable early loss of snow cover that has been occurring. Just one more long heating pulse to add to the ever growing list.

        2. I did not come up with a way of measuring sea ice. Apparently that way of measuring was fine for as long as it showed a rapid decay, but as soon as it shows stability, then it is no longer a good way of measuring sea ice. Because we all know that sea ice has to follow an inverse relationship to CO2, right?

          2. Wrong again, both concentration and volume (from height measurements) are measured and available. The sea ice extent is for shipping purposes, not a measure of actual ice amounts. You chose a measurement that has a wide error range. If the value is 2000 it can range from 200o to 300 in actual value. So ice extent values are all higher than actual ice area, up to 6.7 times higher. Thus a fairly meaningless number except for shipping wishing to avoid ice.

            1. “Scientists at NSIDC report extent because they are cautious about summertime values of ice concentration and area taken from satellite sensors. To the sensor, surface melt appears to be open water rather than water on top of sea ice. So, while reliable for measuring area most of the year, the microwave sensor is prone to underestimating the actual ice concentration and area when the surface is melting. To account for that potential inaccuracy, NSIDC scientists rely primarily on extent when analyzing melt-season conditions and reporting them to the public.”
              http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/faq/

              The sea ice extent is for shipping purposes

              Yeah right. That is why it is used by scientists at NSIDC, because they do a lot of shipping. You are funny.

            2. Glad to see I am motivating you to research some of the science you speak about.

              Yes Javier, NSIDC has chosen passive microwave satellite data as their primary detection method due to it’s long term use, ability to see through clouds and for internal consistency of data comparisons. Apparently they (unlike others) defer to sea ice extent during short periods when the microwave data might be causing a low response to ice due to melting.

              Another source of sea ice data is the operational centers that provide support to ships navigating in the Arctic. There are often discrepancies between information from these centers and our data because they employ additional data sources to capture as much detail on sea ice conditions as possible. However, unlike our data, because the quality and availability of their data sources vary, their products do not provide a long-term, consistent time series suitable for tracking climate trends and variability. Several Arctic nations have operational sea ice centers. The two North American centers are:
              U.S. National Ice Center: http://www.natice.noaa.gov/
              Canadian Ice Service: http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/

              So for higher resolution data use the NATICE or Canadian Ice Service that uses multiple sensing satellites.

              I hope you realize that modeling a comeback on my words sounds childish at best. You do it quite often. More creativity Javier.

            3. Nice try. You were caught lying again:

              “The sea ice extent is for shipping purposes, not a measure of actual ice amounts… Thus a fairly meaningless number except for shipping wishing to avoid ice.”

              When the truth is:

              NSIDC scientists rely primarily on extent

              ¿And your defense is that you are motivating me to do more research? You are just pathetic. Admit that you were wrong or just shut up, as everybody else does.

            4. “When the truth is:

              NSIDC scientists rely primarily on extent”
              More bullshit from Javier.
              They rely primarily on microwave measurements from satellites and only rely on extent for a small portion of the year.
              Read it and understand.

            5. You are just digging deeper. I am enjoying this.

              NSIDC webpage says textually:

              “NSIDC scientists rely primarily on extent”

              As I have quoted above.

              http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/faq/#area_extent

              Fifth paragraph:

              “To account for that potential inaccuracy, NSIDC scientists rely primarily on extent when analyzing melt-season conditions and reporting them to the public.”

              Perhaps they are worried that the public might go shipping into the Arctic. LOL. You are the one that got bullshit all over.

            6. From NSDIC about the microwave sensing of sea ice:
              Scientists at NSIDC report extent because they are cautious about summertime values of ice concentration and area taken from satellite sensors. To the sensor, surface melt appears to be open water rather than water on top of sea ice. So, while reliable for measuring area most of the year, the microwave sensor is prone to underestimating the actual ice concentration and area when the surface is melting. To account for that potential inaccuracy, NSIDC scientists rely primarily on extent when analyzing melt-season conditions
              Did you read that part “So, while reliable for measuring area most of the year”
              Most of the year means most of the data comes from microwave satellite sensing not sea ice extent.
              Javier is again trying to twist and feed BS to this blog.

            7. The melting season is half of the year. NSIDC graphs show extent for the whole year.

              GoneFishing spreads bullshit with his “The sea ice extent is for shipping purposes.” When caught starts attacking me in a typical smear tactic.

              Sorry Mr. Sea-ice shipping. You have been caught inventing bullshit, not knowing what you talk about and insisting on your mistake trying to put the blame on me.

              And all because Arctic sea ice extent, a way of measuring sea ice, is not showing the decline to support your hypothesis and the required level of alarm about the Arctic. You are essentially trying to pooh-pooh a valid scientific method because you don’t like the data it produces. Very typical of climate fear activists.

            9. Anyhow, the ice volume reported by the Danish Metereological institute is very similar to the 2012 volume

              http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icethickness/thk.uk.php

              I like to refer to the Danish data because they aren’t nearly as politically biased as USA sources.

              I’m fairly familiar with the Russian Arctic, and it seems the Barents is definitely running much warmer than usual. This helps keep the planet cooler, because 1 to 6 degree C water emits a lot of infrared into space. At the same time it increases humidity a little bit, and this’s leading to more snowfall over surrounding areas.

              For example, whenever you read the temperature above 80 latitude is abnormally high, you can assume the temperature isn’t high enough to melt ice, but it does bring increased snowfall. This puts a layer of snow on sea ice. It also leads to more snowfall over southern Greenland.

              Therefore, the warmer Barents does have feedbacks which tend to stabilize ice volume, release energy into space, and reduce water salinity in the Kara and Laptev (it may even impact salinity in the Chukchi, but I don’t have as much insight that far to the east.

      3. Bang on schedule, trying to change the topic and using cherry picked data.

        NAOM

          1. Those pictures are at the OSI SAF (Ocean and Sea Ice Satellite Application Facility) hosted in Norway, from EUMETSAT (European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites), an intergovernmental organization with a current total of 30 European Member States.

            How could they possibly be a lie? Are you a conspiracy theorist?

          2. European data sets seem to be much more reliable. Remember the higher temperature increases humidity, this leads to snow fall on top of the existing sea ice.

            When I worked in the Arctic we saw ice ridges form when the ice was pushed by the wind. If the ridged area was snowed upon the wind pushed snow drifts against the ridges and we could measure snow drifts over 3 meters tall. This eventually leads to pretty sturdy multiyear ice.

  4. the Arctic has now entered a new climate and feedback regime.

    Xavier Don Quixote showing up in Three, Two, One, …

    It is a Brave New World, isn’t it?

      1. That’s just because you are getting older, you feel colder. 🙂

    2. George Carlin would have had a ball with all that is happening now.
      Nobody but us humans are worried. The rest just take it as it comes and live their lives. At least it seems that way.

      1. Except we are in a mass extinction.
        (The last one was 65 million years ago, and no primate existed)
        In 4,5 billion years we have only had 5.
        This is not the normal.

      2. Nobody but us humans are worried.

        Well hell, humans should be the least worried. If half the human population had disappeared in the last 40 years, do you think we would be worried?

        Earth has lost half of its wildlife in the past 40 years, says WWF

        The number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years, according to a new analysis. Creatures across land, rivers and the seas are being decimated as humans kill them for food in unsustainable numbers, while polluting or destroying their habitats, the research by scientists at WWF and the Zoological Society of London found.

        1. Some animals do seem to have the capacity for anxiety and worry but in general do not extend much of their mental capacity to past and future events. They appear to have a much more realistic approach to life than humans who tend to get anxious and then mentally run to distracting occupations (entertainment, sports, drugs, games, books, etc. ) to relieve or ignore the worries and anxieties. Those are not survival mechanisms and don’t work in a more natural setting.

          Ron, when one steadily removes the basement walls of the house at some point the house will collapse. I think humans have a lot to worry about and are the least prepared to deal with large changes to their system of civilization and climate changes. They have the knowledge, the worry, the anxiety but rarely respond appropriately to omnipresent problems.

          1. GoneFishing, I think you completely forgot the gist of your post. That was that George Carlin would have a ball at what is happening now because only the humans are worried. In other words the animals are not worried at all. My post tried to point out that all the animals should be in an absolute panic because half of their numbers has disappeared in the last 40 years. I really don’t think George Carlin would see any humor in that statistic.

            1. Carlin said he wasn’t worried, enjoyed watching the destruction. Also said that people were the ones that were fucked.
              Listen to his “save the planet … ” skit. I think you misjudged his concern for animals.
              “The earth will recover, the planet will be renewed.”

              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tncnWp67wQI

            2. Carlin was a sarcastic old curmudgeon who held nothing back and he always told it like it was. He might have updated his, Saving The Planet skit, with some more recent info but it pretty much already says it all…

              George Carlin – Saving the Planet
              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c

            7. Look, there was no big bang, It was more of a whoosh or sigh. This is just one universe among many that happened when the space continuum developed pimples or bubbles or something and went positive/negative in places.
              This and the other universes just the leftover of a minor shift in the continuum, sort of like a rash in the bigger picture.
              We are just one of billions of species among trillions of planets among who knows how many galaxies and universes.
              We are essentially nothing at all in the bigger picture. Just a bunch of self-inflated protoplasmic oddities that can’t even grasp their own heritage or their own place within it.
              We really need to get over ourselves.
              Can you imagine what a god would be doing right now after seeing us (not that we are big enough or important enough to be noticed). That god would be laughing his ass off if it had one.
              We primp ourselves up, wear funny clothes and hats and think we are important.

            8. Hey OldMacDonald, maybe you could share your special lube with your friend. I think his hand stuck.

              I guess sometimes he grabs his own

          2. ” Some animals do seem to have the capacity for anxiety and worry but in general do not extend much of their mental capacity to past and future events.”

            GoneFishing,
            The difference between humans and animals is in awareness. Animals are not aware of themselves and that is why they don’t worry too much about future. Animals are like humans when we are sleeping. Alive, but not aware. Humans do have a seed of awareness. So we have only potentiality of awareness. But as you could see what we are doing to each other and planet and ourselves that seed just stay the seed and rarely flowers.
            But potential is there.

            1. Minor quibble, humans ARE animals! And self awareness is a continuum. crows, African greys, elephants, orangutans, dolphins, whales, etc… are all demonstrably self aware. Do animals worry about the future? Probably not in the same way as we do. But they are capable of experiencing both anxiety and time.

              What to you may seem like a quick swat at a common house fly, from the flies perspective is extreme slow motion and it has ample to time to get out of the way safely.

              https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/small-animals-live-in-a-slow-motion-world/

              Small Animals Live in a Slow-Motion World
              Time seems to pass more slowly for lighter animals with faster metabolisms.

            2. “Minor quibble, humans ARE animals!”

              I did not say that humans are not animals 🙂 Humans are animals. I have only said about difference between humans and animals in seed of awareness.
              There is one more difference and that is that humans are only animals that can laugh 🙂

              “Do animals worry about the future? Probably not in the same way as we do.”

              No they don’t. Because the future is just human construct. There is only a present moment in animal life. They are more relaxed than humans that way.

            3. I have only said about difference between humans and animals in seed of awareness.

              Yet you seem unaware of your own cultural bias! That very statement clearly shows that you do not REALLY think of humans as animals. in your mind you have created an artificial class in which there are humans AND animals. Though to be fair you have lots of company I would venture to guess that most humans hold that very same bias.

              To be clear I’m not in any way trying to argue that humans are not an extraordinarily unique species within the animal kingdom. While our knowledge is certainly incomplete and imperfect we do have enough evidence form multiple fields of inquiry from within the biosciences and elsewhere, to be able to state with a very high degree of confidence that we like all other animals are a result of evolutionary processes.

              Javier’s comment summarizes it quite well.

              Cheers!

            4. Fred
              Why are you always trying to make things so complicated when life is so simple? There is nothing to model. You just go outside and observe.
              I said they are the same but with one difference. And there are things in life that are the “same” and “different” at the same time. Men and women are the “same” but also “different” at the same time.
              I got to go.
              Cheers

            5. Do you really believe that hogwash from the 1800’s about animals.
              Not self-aware? Balderdash. I had someone tell me that animals felt no pain.
              All those tales are just to justify the abuse and killing of them. A way for humans to not feel guilty.
              Of course they are self-aware. Just a short period of observation quickly demonstrates their self awareness. In fact I would say many animals are far more aware than many humans.

            6. Do you even know what awareness even means? Give me your best definition of awareness and then we will see if you are confused with the terminology. I think you are very confused with the terminology based on what you wrote.

            7. Of course animals are aware, and of course humans have a cruel streak that runs deep all the way down to the depth of their soul.

            8. There is no soul, and cruelty is as much an animal trait as anything else we’ve got. Nature has no moral standards, and whatever improves the chances of passing the genes is adaptative.

            9. You are also confused what awareness means. Tell us your definition.

              ” cruel streak that runs deep to depth of their souls”

              If we put Hickory and Lion in a cage how long before Hickory would survive? 10 seconds? 5?

              You are like parrot talking in notions about soul and you have never even seen or experienced a soul. Don’t talk about things that you never experienced or seen. You can become embarrassed and ugly like politicians. They like to talk about things that they don’t know all day long. Humans are in deep sleep because the seed of awareness never flowers. They waste their lives without self realization and just go on accumulating crap (in their houses, basements, in their heads) all their life. That is the only problem with humans – no awareness. But humans have potential unlike animals. The seed is there.

            10. Animals are like humans when we are sleeping.

              This is completely wrong, and probably everybody realizes.

              There is no real difference between humans and animals because humans are animals, as Fred says. We simply have expanded our high order brain functions, and the rest is simply side effects. Most animals cannot realize that the image in a mirror is themselves, but some do. Therefore self-awareness does exist among animals. Even crows have been shown to be capable of basic maths. They can count the number of people going into a refuge and the number of people coming out and deduce if the refuge is empty or not.

              There is a common misconception that humans are the most evolved animals on the planet. That is the wrong way to look at it. Evolution is not complexity. Vertebrates are not more evolved than invertebrates, they have taken different paths. Evolution is simply adaptation in time, and an ant, a cockroach, a lion, and a human have been evolving for the same amount of time. You cannot rank them by evolution.

              Humans have been causing extinctions for about 100,000 years. Our cultural evolution allows that instead of adapting to the environment, we adapt the environment to ourselves. Civilization has increased our capacity to change the environment without increasing our desire to protect it in a similar fashion. The result is a huge damage on a planetary scale to all ecosystems, while at the same time some species and small enclaves are preserved or improve through protection.

              We need to greatly expand our protection of the environment, but for that two things are needed. First we must halt our growth, as that is the primary cause of our increasing damage. And second we must achieve a good standard of living for the great majority of the people, as it is clear that environmental protection is efficient and important in developed countries, while a minor concern in under-developed countries.

            11. Credit where credit is due! I find myself agreeing with something that Javier has said…

            12. You judge me just because I hold an opposite view to yours on the climate issue. The problem is in you not in me. Judging people is something difficult and prone to errors. I don’t judge you for your opinions, I simply share some but not others.

            13. Javier: “The problem is in you not in me.”

              That is judging as well 🙂 So you just told Fred not to judge you by judging him that “problem” is on his side 🙂

              See you guys later.

            14. Maybe you’re not being paid to lie about global warming. Maybe you’re just deluding yourself.

              It is tough to accept that humans are creating a condition which will cause severe damage to the ecosystem which supports humans, and tougher to accept that your lifetime line of work has been the major cause of this damage.

              You do not “disagree” on climate change. You just throw shit at the wall to try to convince yourself — you have enough background to know damn well at some subconscious level that global warming is happening as a result of fossil fuel emissions. You’re just trying to not admit it.

              You’re deluding yourself, Javier. You abandoned all claims to be a scientist in favor of believing what you want to believe and to hell with the evidence. I suggest you let go of the denial and accept reality. It’ll be upsetting at first but you’ll feel better in the long run.

            15. Javier,
              I did say Humans are animals. So please read the stuff before you post.

            16. I do. When we sleep we disconnect all voluntary functions, and therefore we are like other animals that are sleeping.

              In my third year Zoology class the last question of an exam was to write the fundamental difference between humans and animals. The right answer was none. Very few students got that one right and I wasn’t between them. I have had decades of thinking about it and reading all sort of information and studies that confirm that answer.

              An urban person’s life is so detached from the natural world that it is very understandable that most people don’t get this one right.

            17. In my third year Zoology class the last question of an exam was to write the fundamental difference between humans and animals. The right answer was none.

              Having taken a few zoology courses myself and comparative anatomy as well. I had the opportunity to dissect many different mammals and a few human cadavers, what always struck me the most was how similar our brain structures and overall neuroanatomy are to other animals.

    1. I find that after bringing up the site and clicking on a particular thread, then refreshing the page once or twice brings one up to the current state of the thread. Otherwise it seems to bring up past versions of the thread.
      When one jumps between threads, repeat the refresh process to get the most current version.
      Hope that helps.

    1. How else you gonna get tax dollars to the arms manufacturers? That’s the function of government, to get money from the people and into the pockets of corporations.
      https://www.democracynow.org/2014/9/15/who_pays_the_pro_war_pundits
      The problem with the war on terror is it doesn’t sell F35’s. Need Russia, China and Iran for that. War on terror is cheap and dirty. Drones and hellfire missiles are the biggest ticket items in the war on terror.

  7. “…if by some miracle a prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to take place, his predictions would sound so absurd, so far fetched that people everyone would laugh him to scorn.

    The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic…” ~ Arthur C. Clarke

    House of The Future

    The Death of The Internet: A Pre-mortem

    “Exactly when the last vestiges of the internet will sputter to silence is a harder question to answer. Long before that happens, though, it will have lost its current role as one of the poster children of the myth of perpetual progress, and turned back into what it really was all the time: a preposterously complex way to do things most people have always done by much simpler means, which only seemed to make sense during that very brief interval of human history when fossil fuels were abundant and cheap.”

    You Won't Like Downsizing

    “We might put solar panels on the roof, and banks of batteries to supply power, but a downsized society will not have the engineering complexity available to manufacture a single lightbulb, heating element or the basic components of an electric motor. Without those, any electricity production system is useless. You may be able to recondition an electric motor up to a point, but you cannot repair a lightbulb. A downsized lifestyle means a dark lifestyle, or put more bluntly a naked flame society… An energy depleted economy will mean a downsized state and a breakup of established law, because no government can exist outside the boundaries of its own energy range.”

    Burnt

  8. “…in the same way that we see the reality of climate change denied…”

    “…our focus on such dead ends as the electric car shows that humankind does not have the means to rid itself of dependence on the wheel. While the electric car might appear to be a bright shiny symbol of continuing wealth and prosperity, it is in fact a block of embodied energy, as subject to the laws of thermodynamics as any other construction…
    A growing awareness that something is wrong will foster denial of it, in the same way that we see the reality of climate change denied.” ~ Norman Pagett, The End of More

    1. The reality of climate change is not being denied. What is being denied is the fantasy of a catastrophic outcome for which there is no evidence.

      Misrepresentation of the opposite side in a debate is called a strawman argument. The climate has always been changing. In the last 1000 years we had the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, and the Current Warm Period. Climate is always changing. Some people are either too ignorant or too biased to recognize what it is a fact. Nobody denies that climate changes.

      1. It’s called risk management and risk analysis. Look it up. If you wait for evidence of catastrophic outcome it’s too late.

        1. Yes, it’s called risk anslysis, and the climate panic crowd doesn’t know much about the subject. They remind me of Bill and Ted quoting E=mc2

          1. You obviously know very little about risk analysis and mitigation, and Javier knows even less. I’m much, much better at it than probably anyone on this message board; it is one of my natural talents *and* trained skills.

            Suffice it to say that we have a serious tail risk of human extinction, with a high risk of famine killing billions — this is not in dispute among people who have looked at the facts. And it is quite cheap to eliminate these risks. But there are incumbent operators who will lose money if we eliminate them.

            We therefore have a collective action problem. It looks like it’s going to be solved by market pricing but there are enough uncertainties and enough political power among the incumbents that it’s hard to tell at this point. Because of the non-linear nature of the climate system, anything which can be done to give it a shove in the right direction is valuable.

            1. My profession was risk analysis and mitigation, as well as having in place incident response plans. When I got started, I was an “engineering authority”, later I moved up to be “Assurance Manager”.

              I have to confess the biggest risks we faced in the areas I supervised were limited to explosions which could cost around $5 billion US dollars, and/or kill about 200 persons. So that’s a bit far down the scale from say raising sea level 2 meters or evntually killing several hundred million in a resource war.

              I remember about 20 years ago I told a group of senior managers that an Arctic tanker oil spill was such a serious matter there wouldn’t be enough bullets to shoot them if it came to pass, so they’d better take the risk seriously, even if we thought the probability of such an event was very low.

              My guess is that you are tend to underestimate those you don’t agree with. Did anybody ever mention the possibility?

      2. Hi Javier,

        That might be your take, but you don’t/can’t speak for everyone WRT AGW/ACC, or its apparent shorthand, ‘climate change’.

        But that’s not really my point anyway.

        My point, which I’m kind of making again through the quote, is the idea, simply, of another potential form of denial.

        1. Denial is not the proper way of expressing that idea, Caelan. It is just a word “de jour” that fails to reflect reality.

          Every human works through a belief system. As we cannot check everything and we live in a complex world that is constantly changing our only way to deal with it is through a belief system. We start entering our belief system from childhood when we are exposed to the belief systems of our parents and educators, then our friends and colleagues, then our partners.

          For most things we have a weak belief because we are not very committed as they are not important things to us. A new scientific article can change our view on the origin of the Universe unless we happen to be a physicist defending an opposite view.

          However for many things our belief system defines who we are, how we are, and with whom we identify most. Our affiliation is based on our belief system. Those beliefs on which our identity rests will be defended. Any proof against will be rejected. A religious person will defend his faith against any contrary evidence. In politics, a lot of people defend that what the other party does is awful, but it is OK if done by his party.

          It is not the others that do not share our beliefs who are deniers. It is us who are believers.

          For many people whose belief system includes catastrophic climate change and/or peak oil, the EV solution has been incorporated into their belief system. They are not denying that it won’t work, they are just believing it will work. And they defend their belief as if the only one based on rational empiric evidence.

          So we can just throw us the word denier against each other or simply defend our belief systems in a civilized manner. I prefer the second, but I’m not being given much choice. In the end reality will impose itself and it won’t matter much who was right or wrong. Survivors will have to change their belief system to adapt to a new reality. They won’t learn to operate in a different manner.

          1. Javier, while I have limited time at the moment in general and with niggling with you in specific, I will just suggest that language is dynamic and changes (to say nothing of general issues of communications, such as signal, noise and interpretative differences, etc.). If we last as a species, English, for example, may be barely recognizable after the next, maybe, 5000 years. Perhaps like the climate.

            As for now, we are already in ‘overcomplexity/overshoot mode’ as a small-scale/number tribal/band species. In that sense, in a sense, we have no business being in/with BAU.

            And communicating through this medium.

            Happy niggles! ^u^

            Language Is A Virus (From Outer Space)

          2. Javier: You have never, not once, defended your delusional religious belief system in a rational manner. Your defenses are very similar to the Catholic Church’s defenses of its past misdeeds: bullshit, deflection, cherry-picking, lies.

            It’s sad that you can’t even see what a fool you’ve made of yourself.

            1. I don’t defend my religious belief because I have none.

              I am skeptic. I don’t buy that CO2 has such strong warming effect as to constitute a clear and present danger to us. It is contrary to paleoclimatical evidence and after 30 years of scare it has failed to live up to its predictions. Not even those in power believe it or they would be acting very differently.

              After 35 years of research, IPCC still says that it is likely that climate sensitivity is between 1.5 and 4.5. Likely. It means they don’t know if it is dangerous or not, or how dangerous, because with that sort of uncertainty predictions of future climate are just a joke.

              And after 14 years December 2016 just had the same anomaly temperature as January 2003:

              2003/01 0.599
              2016/12 0.592

              http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut4/data/current/time_series/HadCRUT.4.5.0.0.monthly_ns_avg.txt

              So yes, I am faithless.

            2. Stop lying, religious nut. The only person you’re fooling is yourself.

              I’ve already debunked your lies about the paleoclimate record. You have no response to the evidence of PETM.

              You use exactly the same dishonest rhetorical techniques as creationists. Over and over again. I’ve argued with enough creationists to recognize them.

              Just because you call yourself a “skeptic” doesn’t make you one. I guess “skeptic” is the name of your church.

              I’m not interested in cherrypicked charts with selective choices of year designed specifically to support your religious views, so stop posting them.

            3. I’m not lying. You have debunked nothing, and the evidence of PETM is questionable at least. It took place so long ago that nobody really knows what happened.

              I understand that you don’t like the evidence that I show, as it questions your dear belief in impending doom, something that you have inherited from your Judeo-Christian apocalyptic roots. [“Nathaniel (less frequently, Nathanael, Nathanial or Nathanel) is a given name derived from the Greek form of the Hebrew נְתַנְאֵל (Netan’el), meaning “God has given”]

              However whether it interests you or not, I can post them to provide evidence for what I say.

  9. Wind capacity blows past hydro to become most plentiful US renewable

    Dive Brief:

    Wind energy has the largest base of installed capacity among renewable resources in the United States, according to new data from the American Wind Energy Association.

    AWEA said that at the end of 2016 installed wind capacity totaled 82,183 MW, enough to power 24 million average American homes when generating. It now tops hydro’s 80,000 MW of installed capacity, making it the fourth-largest source of capacity in the U.S., behind gas, coal, and nuclear.

    One advantage is the resource’s geographic diversity: according to AWEA, almost 90% of new wind capacity completed last year was located in Texas, the Plains states and across the Midwest — while the offshore wind industry just launched in December.

    Dive Insight:

    Wind power will double over the next five years, and by 2020 will supply 10% of the United States’ energy needs, according to the wind energy group. And with the recent addition of North Carolina’s first utility-scale wind farm, AWEA said there are now more than 52,000 individual wind turbines in 41 states and two territories.

    Texas is the easy leader, with approximately three times more wind generating capacity than any other state, and nearly a quarter of wind industry employment in the United States. Last year, Texas became the first state to pass 20,000 MW of wind capacity, and there is more than 5,400 MW under construction and another 1,300 MW in advanced development.

    While we were commenting on the post “Peak Oil and Plug-in Vehicles”, there was a sort of parallel discussion happening over a insideevs.com

    BP Energy Outlook Says Electric Cars Won’t Deaden Global Fuel Demand

    British multinational oil and gas company, BP, just published its annual 2017 BP Energy Outlook. It projects a 30% increase in global energy demand over the next ~20 years. According to BP, while carbon emissions growth is declining, it’s not primarily due to EVs, and the fuel demand will grow, regardless of electric cars.

    Despite of the continued growth of electric cars, BP’s Outlook shows that 75% of total global energy needs by 2035, will be satisfied by gas, oil, and coal.

    This may seem substantial, but compared to the anticipated global gross domestic product increase of 3.4% per year, the energy increase of about 1.3% is considered low. The publication is proof that growing technology related to energy efficiency, along with global environmental awareness, is making a significant impact.

    Regardless of all of this, BP’s Outlook shows that 75% of total global energy needs by 2035, will be satisfied by gas, oil, and coal (in 2015, fossil fuels accounted for 86%). Half of the new growth will be covered by non-fossil fuels. While this is somewhat disconcerting, it shows promise that, as energy needs continue to increase, non-fossil fuels will keep getting a larger piece of the pie.

    I posted a comment as follows:

    Not surprising to see very modest growth in renewable energy use and EV penetration from this publication. It is after all produced by an oil company and I wouldn’t really expect to see them projecting their own demise!

    As Tony Seba always says, “It’s usually the “experts” and “insiders” who dismiss
    disruptive opportunities”

    After a bit of a back and forth with another (less optimistic) poster, I posted a final comment starting with the folowing paragraph:

    We disagree on the point at which growth will go linear. I believe that, in the US wind can double again over the next six years and that solar will continue exponential growth for at least another six years. That would result in a doubling of the contribution of renewables from currently just over 15% to over 30% by 2025, less than ten years. That would increase the non fossil contribution from 34% currently, to over 48% assuming no reduction in contribution from nuclear.

    So, I am counting on the projections of the AWEA and the Solar Energy Industry Association (and Tony Seba) being on target, otherwise I’m gonna end up with a lot of egg on my face! :-0

  10. Below is a 2014 EIA projection for wind and solar to compare with the projections in my post above.

  11. Dam hippies right again—

    Oroville Dam: Feds and state officials ignored warnings 12 years ago

    Three environmental groups — the Friends of the River, the Sierra Club and the South Yuba Citizens League — filed a motion with the federal government on Oct. 17, 2005, as part of Oroville Dam’s relicensing process, urging federal officials to require that the dam’s emergency spillway be armored with concrete, rather than remain as an earthen hillside

    The groups filed the motion with FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. They said that the dam, built and owned by the state of California, and finished in 1968, did not meet modern safety standards because in the event of extreme rain and flooding, fast-rising water would overwhelm the main concrete spillway, then flow down the emergency spillway, and that could cause heavy erosion that would create flooding for communities downstream, but also could cause a failure, known as “loss of crest control.”

    FERC rejected that request, however, after the state Department of Water Resources, and the water agencies that would likely have had to pay the bill for the upgrades, said they were unnecessary.

    Federal officials at the time said that the emergency spillway was designed to handle 350,000 cubic feet per second and the concerns were overblown.

    Federal officials at the time said that the emergency spillway was designed to handle 350,000 cubic feet per second and the concerns were overblown.

    I think they and our denier friends should join a organization?

      1. Water always wins.
        Nature doesn’t care what you or I think.
        Deniers and bureaucrats discard data, and hide from reality.
        But nature doesn’t care.

          1. “Javier says:
            02/14/2017 AT 7:13 PM
            Amen to that.”

            a·men
            1. uttered at the end of a prayer or hymn, meaning ‘so be it.’

            And elsewhere Javier says “I don’t defend my religious belief because I have none.”

            Perhaps we should just cherry-pick every last little thing that Javier says because that’s what he does here.

            1. Saying “amen” is not evidence of religious beliefs. The word has long been used, and is very commonly used, to indicate sincere agreement by the listener with the speaker.

      2. The drought isn’t over, and won’t be, unless there’s well above average rain and snow fall for at least three or four more years.

          1. Yes. So?

            You can’t tell the weather from the climate, can you?

            Ever looked at typical rainfall patterns in a desert? I suggest you do so. Oldfarmermac knows.

            1. The California drought is over for now. It’s recovering from the extreme rainfall that is the current problem. What the scientists have always said is that climate change will exaggerate the extremes.

            2. The drought is over if you define drought as surface conditions.

              The supply of water underground, water that is slowly replenished by way of rainfall and snow melt making it’s way down, is critical.

              Californians won’t be able to pump ground water again at the rate they have been pumping it for the last few years within the lifetime of most of us reading this today. It might be centuries before the aquifiers are replenished, because of continued heavy consumption, even if it rains and snows like crazy.

              The scientific community generally uses the more comprehensive definition that takes ground water into account.

              Water in underground reservoirs in places with very scant rainfall or snow pack really should be referred to as fossil water, because once depleted, it will not be renewed for thousands of years, maybe millions of years, barring the local climate turning wet.

              Saudia Arabia is a classic case.

              In other places , it ought to be described as a semi or partially renewable resource, meaning that if withdrawals are limited on average to the rate of replenishment, the endowment will last indefinitely.

              Water in such places can be looked at as a savings account, or emergency fund. It’s ok to draw it down in a pinch for a year or two, if you cut back in following years to allow it to build back up again.

              There are countless places in the USA that are in this category. If the local or state government allows excessive pumping on a regular basis, the first time a really bad drought hits, the shit will be in the fan, big time.

            3. I think sea level must be dropping, because there’s so much water on top of land. This means the earth’s rotation must be slowing down. Does anybody have a way to check it?

            4. It is known since the late 80’s that the speed of Earth’s rotation is affected by both ENSO and the Quasi-bienial oscillation (QBO).

              It is detected by measuring small changes in the length of the day (LOD) by trans-Atlantic Very Long Base Line Interferometry or similar techniques developed by Astronomers.

              El Niño increases LOD by a few hundreds of microseconds, and La Niña decreases it. Long term the LOD has been increasing, but for the last decades It has been decreasing. There appears to be also an inverse relationship between global average temperatures and LOD.

              In any case to check for changes in the speed of rotation you can check for changes in LOD, that are recorded at the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS).

            5. The average day grows longer by 15-25 millionths of a second every year owing to Moon’s tidal friction. Some events, such as large earthquakes, have caused the rotation to speed up by affecting Earth’s moment of inertia. Post-glacial rebound also changes distribution of the Earth’s mass thus affecting the moment of inertia.

    1. C’mon, GF, that crack in the ice shelf, is photoshopped, and that graph of the ice extent, it clearly shows increases in ice between 2011 and 2014. The fact that the overall trend between 1979 and 2016 has been steadily downward is a fluke or the data is bad and things will start getting really cold again any day now. Does anyone really believe temperatures around 50F in the dead of the Arctic winter. Get serious! Ain’t happenin!

      1. Just another side-effect of global warming. Poor Fred went into overload and is starting to channel the villagers.

  13. The updated effective radiative forcing of major anthropogenic aerosols and their effects on global climate at present and in the future

    The effective radiative forcing (ERF), as newly defined in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5), of three anthropogenic aerosols [sulphate (SF), black carbon (BC), and organic carbon (OC)] and their comprehensive climatic effects were simulated and discussed, using the updated aerosol-climate online model of BCC_AGCM2.0.1_CUACE/Aero. From 1850 to 2010, the total ERF of these anthropogenic aerosols was −2.49 W m−2, of which the aerosol–radiation interactive ERF (ERFari) and aerosol–cloud interactive ERF (ERFaci) were ∼ −0.30 and −2.19 W m−2, respectively. SF was the largest contributor to the total ERF, with an ERF of −2.37 W m−2. The ERF of BC and OC were 0.12 and −0.31 W m−2, respectively. From 1850 to 2010, anthropogenic aerosols brought about a decrease of ∼2.53 K and ∼0.20 mm day−1 in global annual mean surface temperature and precipitation, respectively.
    Surface cooling was most obvious over mid- and high latitudes in the northern hemisphere (NH). Precipitation change was most pronounced near the equator, with decreased and increased rainfall to the north and south of the equator, respectively; this might be largely related to the enhanced Hadley Cell in the NH. Relative humidity near surface was increased, especially over land, due to surface cooling induced by anthropogenic aerosols. Cloud cover and water path were increased, especially in or near the source regions of anthropogenic aerosols. Experiments based on the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 given in IPCC AR5 shows the dramatic decrease in three anthropogenic aerosols in 2100 will lead to an increase of ∼2.06 K and 0.16 mm day−1 in global annual mean surface temperature and precipitation, respectively, compared with those in 2010.

    http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/joc.4613/abstract

    1. They talk about what happened inside their model, not in the real world. Model science is easy. Just run the model and write the article with the output. No evidence is demanded.

      1. Modern science is not good enough for the villagers. They want proof, so they can just wait and see. That will give them years with their heads in the sand.
        Why are the villagers worried about something that is cooling the planet?
        Don’t they want things cooler?

        Actually the aerosol effects are measured and they are merely using the current effects in the future. The values are about the same, of course.
        What will probably happen is that we will stop putting up the aerosols long before 2100, so the heating will occur much sooner.

        1. Let’s own up to the truth here, the warmist orthodoxy proclaims that the climate change debate is over…full stop…no matter what reality or the real (not fake) news providers say.

          So the Southern hemisphere having a cold wet winter this year will not mean anything. So the drought in California ending completely by the summertime will not mean anything. Nothing that can possibly happen in nature means anything anymore to you people because you turned climate change into a belief system unto itself. By definition it’s communism, socialism, fascism and most of all liberalism all packaged up into one convenient but terribly oppressive entity.

          1. I am so glad you explained all that climate change stuff. It’s not physics or the environment or burning a bunch of dead plant exudate, just politics. That means we can vote it away. What a great idea. Let’s all tell our congressmen to put a bill to eliminate global warming, make it illegal.
            The president will have no problem signing off on that unless he realizes he doesn’t believe in it and would be signing off on an imaginary inconvenient truth.
            Thanks for the help.

            1. In fact let’s put a ban on climate change and not allow any of the international climate change across our borders. Maybe we can put a dome over the US to keep it out.
              No, that would probably actually act like a greenhouse and things would get hot.
              Well, I am sure the brain trust in DC can come up with some good ways to keep climate change out there. I mean we want to make America cool again, don’t we?

  14. Newsflash

    Meanwhile Greenland is being buried in a record amount of snow and ice.

    Already there are 150 billion tons over the 1990-2013 mean. Scientists are baffled, but remain pretty confident that it is all due to climate change, and therefore BAD.

    1. Shouldn’t be surprising to you to understand that some places will get much more rain or snow in a warmer scenario. Warmer air holds more moisture than cold air, and will deposit that moisture as precip. This is elementary meteorology. Not convenient principles if you are trying to grind an axe.

      2. It sure looks like we may be observing a feedback which may stabilize Greenland ice volume. If the snow fall keeps going like this we should see that sea level will have dropped in 2016 and early 2017. There’s a lot of water and snow falling on continents, and that does reduce sea level.

        1. Good point and we can measure sea level quite accurately. The data is available and even you can access it!

        2. There’s a lot of water and snow falling on continents, and that does reduce sea level.

          Surly you realize that water falling on continents will not reduce sea level. And snow falling will not reduce sea level either if it melts in the summer. It will all just return to the sea. And even on Greenland it will not reduce sea level either if ice either melts or calves faster than the snow accumulates.

          1. Ron,

            It is true however that sea level increases more than average during El Niño years and less than average during La Niña years. This is due as much to steric volume gains from a warmer ocean, as to the sloshing of water towards one side of the Pacific or the other. In any case the relationship between El Niño and sea level is well known and the explanation that Fernando is giving is the most frequently cited one.

            Of course you are right that this temporary deviations do not alter the long term trend, but some ill informed people might think that sea level rise is accelerating during and El Niño, when it is not.

            http://sealevel.colorado.edu/

            “The Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI) is the unrotated, first principal component of six observables measured over the tropical Pacific (see NOAA ESRL MEI, Wolter & Timlin, 1993,1998). To compare the global mean sea level to the MEI time series, we removed the mean, linear trend, and seasonal signals from the 60-day smoothed global mean sea level estimates and normalized each time series by its standard deviation. The normalized values plotted above show a strong correlation between the global mean sea level and the MEI, with the global mean sea level often lagging changes in the MEI.”

            2. Here is a model

              What do you mean here is a model? It is the same model you link and advertise in every post you participate for years. The same model you have been trying to publish for years but you won’t get accepted in any half decent journal.

              Your constant self advertising is tiresome.

        3. If the graph is real (no reference) then it looks like snowfall amount would have to double to stop the mass loss of Greenland Ice Sheet. Might be a bit early to predict a new glaciation period since the mass is still going negative.

      3. Hickory I understand that perfectly well. But you do realize that if Greenland gets little snow then Greenland is melting due to climate change and we are all doomed, but if Greenland gets a lot of snow then it is a manifestation of a warmer scenario due to climate change and we are all doomed equally.

        This is the point when a hypothesis leaves the realm of science and enters a belief-system. It can explain both a thing and its opposite and no matter what happens it is always correct. Obviously then it won’t be able to predict anything, but apparently that doesn’t bother any true believer and non-believers are to be scolded for rising doubts.

        1. Sorry Xavier Don Quixote de la Mancha, but even you can do better than that! Your argument has more logical flaws in it then Swiss cheese, believe it or not!

            2. Are you suggesting that you don’t even understand that I am not talking per se about Javier’s comment?

            3. Not at all! I’m not suggesting anything! I’m bluntly telling you to your face that I think you are an arrogant little twit, who is ignorant, deluded, scientifically illiterate and an ideologically crippled cultist to boot. As far as I’m aware you have never contributed a single original, positive or constructive comment, let alone displayed any propensity for being capable of rational or scientific thinking. You are an intellectually unsophisticated simpleton who lacks both the cognitive capability and necessary background in scientific knowledge to understand the world at large and how it is changing. You are just an angry little neo-luddite, who doesn’t have a clue!

            4. Coming from you, I’ll take that as a compliment. 😀

              “I’m not suggesting anything!” ~ Fred Magyar

              LOL
              Naturally

        2. Javier, as a religious true believer in the church of oil and gas, I don’t expect you to pay attention to reality, but go look at the sea level measurements. It’s undeniable what’s happening.

          To anyone who has ever studied atmosopheric physics, it’s also undeniable why it’s happening. If you dump more CO2 into the air than thousands of volcanos, you get pretty obvious results.

          To anyone who has ever studied geological history, it’s also obvious what the outcome is unless we stop. PETM. We seem to be on track to find out exactly how PETM happened, which is NOT good.

          And to real biologists, as opposed to those like you who have surrendered all their scientific credibility in order to comport with church doctrine, it’s obvious that that outcome is *very bad for humans*.

          1. Nathanael,

            You are the one that has subscribed to a church. I’m only interested in oil because I believe peak oil is taking place now.

            “go look at the sea level measurements. It’s undeniable what’s happening.”

            OK. Let’s go look at sea level measurements. What is happening is that it shows a constant rate of increase that according to gauges is about 1.6 mm/yr and according to satellites about 3.4 mm/yr.

            “If you dump more CO2 into the air than thousands of volcanos, you get pretty obvious results.”

            Well we are not getting them. Between 1993 and 2017 we have dumped over 40% of all CO2 we have ever produced. If CO2 is the cause of the sea level rise we should see an acceleration of the increase after nearly doubling the amount of CO2 emitted.

            How exactly is this obvious to you?

            ftp://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/allData/merged_alt/L2/TP_J1_OSTM/global_mean_sea_level/GMSL_TPJAOS_V3.jpg

            1. Javier is not much of an atmospheric scientist when it comes to explaining this stuff. It’s well known that warming is proportional only to the logarithm of CO2 concentration, so that any acceleration in concentration will be throttled by the logarithmic transfer function.

              Look Javier, we are not shrieking alarmists here, we know the science much better than you do and so understand exactly how this is trending. It’s just silly that you display your tanTrumps here.

            2. Yeah, a lot of words for not explaining how after nearly doubling the amount of emitted CO2 no acceleration in sea level rise is detected.

              Sea level rise acceleration is one of the many predictions from the CO2 hypothesis that are not taking place.

              And if adding more CO2 has no effect on sea level rise, why should reducing emissions have an effect?

            3. Javier is not much of an atmospheric scientist, or actually a physicist, when it comes to understanding this stuff. The warming response to increases in CO2 concentration is logarithmic so that acceleration would be hard to detect.

              As an example, acceleration due to gravity (before it hits terminal speed) is t^2. Throttling that acceleration with a logarithm would make it 2log(t) which is not an acceleration. If the acceleration were exponential, a logarithm would make it linear.

              This is all well known, yet Javier comes along and acts like he has found something significant.

            4. Webhubtelescope doesn’t know what he is talking about as usual, and is contradicted by the publications by experts and real scientists, not like him, from the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Colorado.

              Fasullo, J. T., R. S. Nerem, and B. Hamlington. “Is the detection of accelerated sea level rise imminent?.” Scientific Reports 6 (2016).
              http://www.nature.com/articles/srep31245

              “Global mean sea level rise estimated from satellite altimetry provides a strong constraint on climate variability and change and is expected to accelerate as the rates of both ocean warming and cryospheric mass loss increase over time. In stark contrast to this expectation however, current altimeter products show the rate of sea level rise to have decreased from the first to second decades of the altimeter era.”

              Once more Webhubtelescope shows that he doesn’t know what he talks about when trying to correct me.

              Acceleration of sea level rise has been predicted but not found.

        3. Everyone is drawing premature conclusions. That may be appropriate in this situation, since waiting for the conclusive evidence will be too late to make any course adjustments, if indeed fossil fuel burning induced climate change ends up be a truly big deal.
          At this point, its just about trying to assign probability, and that is certainly a big game of unknown. Easy to pretend we can ignore the possibility, but that is very risky.
          Massive risks one way or another. Goes along with massive overshoot.

          btw- I speculate that global warming will be a very big deal, but that fossil fuel use will decline from depletion before the big effects of global warming are apparent to most. Both issues will help to ‘clean up’ the overshoot.

        4. There are climate models which show more snow accumulation over Antarctica with increased CO2. This has to do with more humid air coming from warm water pools just outside the Antarctic circumpolar current.

          These model results are sort of kept out of the limelight, because they don’t want to say that sea level may go higher by 2100 if co2 emissions are reduced from their “business as usual” scenario.

    1. Here in U.S.A. we are given the opportunity to disagree with people of opposing viewpoints when we want to. So how’s about this, what caused the last ice age? What caused water so rise so much they have skeletal remains of fish in Montana? Flooding obviously happened without any people around at that time, therefore that climate change can’t be blamed on man, yet still happened anyway. How can that be when scientists are always saying climate change is human made?

      1. Here in U.S.A. we are given the opportunity to disagree with people of opposing viewpoints when we want to.

        Sure but just because you are a moron doesn’t mean you can make up your own fucking facts!

      2. Another important viewpoint brought to us with the kind support of the happy billionaires!

      3. Hi Max,
        Let me see if I can simplify it enough for you to GET IT.

        Some wild fires are started by lightning.

        Others are started by careless smokers, people burning trash, campers not keeping close control of their campfires.

        Now this might not be entirely clear to you right off the bat, but if you chew it over for a few hours, I’m willing to bet that you WILL get it, unless you’re just a troll.

    2. Yep, a lot of really stupid people, some who are full of shit and some who are just fucking nuts…
      Tks George Carlin!

  16. Not long ago, the folks determined to keep wind and solar power off the grid were very insistent that twenty percent wind and or solar power would put us all in danger of one blackout after another, with a gazillion dollars worth of damage to the grid itself and the electrically operated appliances, toys, and machines owned by the customer.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-13/wind-on-the-plains-supplied-more-than-half-region-s-power-needs

    There’s nothing in my news feeds about any blackouts tonight.

    The real question when it comes to a successful transition to renewable energy boils down to just two really basic factors. One, do we have the collective foresight and will power to put the necessary resources into the job over the span of time it will take to accomplish it, and two , will our luck hold long enough, assuming we muster the collective long term will power?

    There are countless things that can go wrong, and while most of them considered one a time would be manageable, if a bunch of them go wrong in short order……….

    Luck is going to play a major role in future history, just as it always has in the past.

    1. The worst power blackouts in US history were caused when we let Enron (unregulated capitalism) control the fossil fuel plants. They loved to joke about cutting off Grandma in California while they spiked their profits. People in California are still paying the price with twice the rates for electricity versus Oregon or Nevada.

      Only good thing is they now have options, during peak loads they can adjust peoples thermostats and throttle back industry instead of the rolling blackouts that were common in the Enron days.

      1. There are reasons things cost more in California.

        http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2014/nov/19/citylights1-california-electricity-rates-top/#

        Virtually everything almost always costs more in places where people have more money, from apartment rents to meals in restaurants to err …….. electricity.

        And the high rates some Californians pay are WAY FAR HIGHER, many TIMES higher, than necessary to pay for the wind and solar power subsidies the state has and continues to provide to the wind and solar power industries.

        Furthermore Californians benefit from better health outcomes, and from having more jobs and tax revenue remain inside the state.

        And from a California state website:

        In 2015, total system power for California was 295,405 gigawatt-hours (GWh), down about 0.5 percent from 2014’s total system power of 297,062 GWh1. California’s in-state electricity production was down by 1.5 percent at 196,195 GWh compared to 199,193 GWh. This decline in total system power, power from electric generation facilities rated at 1 megawatt (MW) and larger, is consistent with the recently published California Energy Demand 2016-2026 Revised Electricity Forecast2. Specifically, lower baseline per capita electricity consumption resulting from additional federal appliance standards3 and higher self-generation from behind the meter roof-top photovoltaic (PV) solar power systems are reducing total retail sales. 4 In short, increased energy efficiency combined with PV self-generation are slowly reducing traditional system power.

        California is getting ready for the day that gas will no longer be cheap, and coal will be more or less outlawed due to being so environmentally destructive.

        And while I’m pretty much of a free market guy, so long as a free market actually exists, and regulations are in place to protect the public, I’m telling you like a friend that when the owners of the gas industry get their way, if they get it, which seems very likely now that Trump is prez, they will export the hell out of our domestic natural gas supply, and the price of it will go WAY UP, and the price of electricity will go up right along with it.

        Gas depletes, coal depletes, oil depletes, rain and snow are not all that dependable, as evidenced by recent droughts, etc, but the sun almost always shines in Southern California, and the wind is as reliable statistically, but over different time frames, as rain and snow that part of the world.

        Younger people who are reading this forum today will live to see gas fired electricity cost an arm and a leg, while the oldest wind and solar farms are producing dirt cheap electricity decades after being paid for.

    2. Those wind turbines are in an integrated grid. Bloomberg writers tend to be a bit low tech when it comes to energy. I follow some on Twitter and I correct them about 25 % of the time.

  17. For HB,

    Sorry I got busy yesterday, or maybe the day before, and forgot to post some more reasons why HRC was ethically unqualified to be president.

    We’ll start with Cattle Gate.Thanks for the reminder, which I have reproduced below, since some folks might wonder why I’m still talking about HRC.

    xxxx
    HuntingtonBeach says:
    02/14/2017 AT 2:14 AM
    Hey OldMacDonald, maybe you could share your special lube with your friend. I think his hand stuck.

    I guess sometimes he grabs his own

    xxxx

    I’ll just use the stuff in Wikipedia for convenience, it’s enough. But for real detail, I reccomend the archives of the NYT or the Washington Post. I was living where I could get both papers on a daily basis at the time, but I don’t have access to their archives at the moment.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_cattle_futures_controversy

    Here are some excerpts.

    I doubt if you have either the ability to think critically, or any inclination to do so in relation to Clinton even if you know how, but the audience here is technically sophisticated, and will have no trouble drawing conclusions.

    “In 1978 and 1979, lawyer and First Lady of Arkansas Hillary Rodham Clinton engaged in a series of trades of cattle futures contracts. Her initial $1,000 investment had generated nearly $100,000 when she stopped trading after ten months.”

    “Bill Clinton’s salary as Arkansas Attorney General and then Governor of Arkansas was modest and Clinton later said she had been interested in building a financial cushion for the future.[3][4] The Clintons’ combined income in 1978 from the governorship and Rose Law Firm amounted to $51,173,[5] equivalent to $187,900 in 2016″

    Not exactly BROKE , would you say?

    ” James Blair was a friend, lawyer, outside counsel to Tyson Foods, Arkansas’ largest employer, and had been doing so well trading commodities futures that he encouraged friends and family to enter the market too.[6][3][4] Blair in turn traded through, and relied upon cattle markets expertise from, broker Robert L. “Red” Bone of Refco, a former Tyson executive and professional poker player who was a World Series of Poker semifinalist.[4][7] In October 1978, when Bill Clinton was Attorney General and on the verge of being elected Governor,[1] Clinton opened a trading account, although Blair made most of the trades.”

    ”At one point she owed in excess of $100,000 to Refco as part of covering losses, but no margin calls were made by Refco against her.[4]”

    DAMNED lenient, would you say? I would even go so far as to say this represents obvious evidence of special treatment. And most people who are concerned about such things would have some SERIOUS misgivings about the nature of the relationship between the FIRST COUPLE and a lawyer so well connected with the biggest business in the state, and one well positioned to have access to tons of insider information.

    When the investigation was started, it was started by the biggest and most powerful LIBERAL paper in the country and arguably the entire WORLD, the New York Times,

    “Clinton initially told aides that she had made the futures gains by studying the financial news and placing trades herself, but later acknowledged the help of Blair” . As best I remember, the story was put out that she did it all on her own, but she had to backtrack that little fib.

    “Various publications sought to analyze the likelihood of Clinton’s successful results. Clinton made her money by betting on the short side at a time when cattle prices doubled.[12] The editor of the Journal of Futures Markets said in April 1994, “This is like buying ice skates one day and entering the Olympics a day later. She took some extraordinary risks.”[2] Her activities involved exposure to losses that potentially could have been greater than her family’s net worth if the market had turned sharply against her.[13] The former head of the IRS chief counsel’s Commodities Industry Specialization Team expressed skepticism that a novice trader could make such a return.[14] One analysis performed by Auburn University and published in the Journal of Economics and Finance claimed to find that the odds of a return that large during the period in question were about one in 31 trillion.[15][16][17]”

    ,I haven’t run across any records of anybody else doing even remotely as well, and the same guys advising Clinton, and making her trades for her, never did even remotely as well for any other client, to the best of my knowledge.

    “Chicago Mercantile Exchange records indicated that $40,000 of her profits came from larger trades initiated by James Blair. According to exchange records, “Red” Bone, the commodities broker that facilitated the trades on behalf of Refco, reportedly because Blair was a good client, allowed Clinton to maintain her positions even though she did not have enough money in her account to cover her activity. For example, she was allowed to order 10 cattle futures contracts, normally a $12,000 investment, in her first commodity trade in 1978 although she had only $1,000 in her account at the time.[18] Bone denied any wrongdoing in conjunction with Clinton’s trading and said he did not recall ever dealing with Clinton personally.[2][8]” Obviously all novice new customers who just HAPPEN to have such powerful friends, not to mention the guv as the old man, are treated to such courtesies, so there was no special treatment.

    For you , HB, I will point out that my sarcasm lamp is LIT.

    “As it happened, during the period of Clinton’s trading, Refco was under investigation by the Mercantile Exchange for systematic violations of its margin trading rules and reporting requirements regarding cattle trading.[2][8] In December 1979, the exchange issued a three-year suspension to Bone and a $250,000 fine of Refco (at the time, the largest such penalty imposed by the exchange).[2][8]”

    Now I’m SURE , HB, that although Clinton’s a lawyer herself, it never occurred to her that associating with such people could ever present a problem for her as a politician. The same sort of arrogance led her to making other mistakes over the course of the years that ultimately cost her the WH.

    I have posted a challenge many times for any mathematically literate person to come forward and go over the math with me. Not one has ever done so, because nobody with a reputation for understanding math is willing to throw it away defending Cattle Gate.

    Next time, I will post the only explanation that I have ever run across that satisfactorily explains the actual facts of what was and was not done.

    Now given that your’re a true believing Clinton partisan, you’re willing to believe anything at all if it reflects well on her, or deflects criticism of her. People who mathematically literate and are capable of a little independent critical thinking just might conclude that Clinton got some VERY special treatment indeed.

    I can go into more detail if you wish. And we can go on from this one to another, and talk about how many of her personal business associates wound up in jail as a result of being in business with her.

    And incidentally, if there’s a pervert around, you might just be IT, considering you can’t seem to drop the subject. Now as far as you stand personally, you’re a fucking hypocrite who has BRAGGED about making money in the fossil fuel business, while pretending to be a Democrat of the sensitive and morally upright sort, while in the same breath calling me a Trumpster.

    I personally haven’t ever thought that the failings of the opposition excuses the failings of my own team, or my own personal failings.

    Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, and although I am ready to move on to new territory, since Clinton is now history, as a practical matter, I will post some more stuff with each reminder.

    The Democratic Party is in the throes of a struggle for its soul, and the eventual winners are going to be the Sanders guys and girls, because they’re the younger generation.

    Real adults face up to their own mistakes, rather than blaming other people when things go wrong. You may be sixty, but you think like a six year old.

    And I’m sort of like a building inspector. I enjoy this sort of thing. I’m actually getting paid,but not in cash or kind. I’m getting it by way of making my case as a political commentator, and within another couple of years, the large majority of big D Democrats will have come around to acknowledging that just about any OTHER D would have mopped the floor with Trump.

    The D party fucked up royally by running Clinton, because she was arrogant, vain, elitist, hypocritical, stupid in some ways. She was dragging a baggage train twenty miles long.

    She actually managed to lose to TRUMP, which should have been and WAS considered an impossibility by most more or less impartial or D oriented observers.

    The Sanders camp will have power enough next time around to either decide who the candidate will be, or if not that much, enough to make sure the candidate is not an elitist who not only ignores but looks down on the people who are the heart of the party while hanging out with the banksters.

    Next time, I will post the only remotely likely explanation I have yet heard as to how Clinton did so extraordinarily well, if you will be so kind as to remind me.

    1. Oh Mr. OldMacDonald aka KGB

      The Russians played and feed your hate for HRC and you don’t even realize it. You have been conned and proud of it.

      Your Ronnie Reagun is spinning in his grave

      3…2…1… Now it’s time for you to vomit on us again. Get it all out. You will feel better.

      Enjoy – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vypzrtAHyXk

      1. OldFarmer, just admit you have been conned and put an end to your hate. It’s the cover up rants that are making you look foolish.

        1. Sure I have been conned. I have three semester hours credit in probability theory on my transcript.

          History will bear me out. LOTS of top dog big D Democrats are already saying and have been saying the same thing I have said all along when it comes to HRC.

          I have posted links to a bunch of them saying so already, in clear language.

          More are saying so on a fairly regular basis, and if you read CAREFULLY, you will see that more yet are composing their public statements VERY carefully so as to only indirectly acknowledge Clinton’s failings.

          I don’t mind being called delusional, or stupid, or a redneck, but I draw the fucking line at being called a Republican or a Trumpster. 😉

          Go on hiding YOUR head in the sand, and maybe you will help the D’s nominate another candidate who enters the race with the highest negatives in party history, and the biggest and longest baggage train.

          Now for both you and HB, notice that the brokerage was fined at the highest rate EVER at that time, and that the broker himself was suspended, and then give a little thought to how seldom such crooks are ever actually prosecuted, when their CLIENTS are powerful politicians.

          Now having read extensively about this little scam, this is the ONLY explanation I have ever found that makes sense of the math:

          In those days, a broker, if he was willing to bend the rules, could place orders in the morning, and assign them to various customers in the afternoon, as it suited him, although he WOULD be at risk of losing his job, and his license, and going to jail, if investigated and prosecuted and the case proven.

          It’s simple as one, two , three. He placed orders, and after seeing which way the market moved, he cherry picked winners for Clinton by putting her name on winners, and some unlucky other customer’s name on a loser.

          People who do such things aren’t stupid, and they always mix in a fair number of losing bets to muddy the waters.

          Of course you are entirely free to believe that if you put on skates for the first time today, you can out skate the world’s best over the next year, lol.

          And your are likewise entirely free to believe that the millions that poured into the family slush fund’s accounts had absolutely nothing to do with hoping to get favorable treatment in return, and that the crash in donations after Clinton lost is merely a COINCIDENCE.

          In North Korea, they tell it like it is the same way, with doughboy going out to play golf for the very first time and hitting holes in one bang bang bang, setting a new course record that might eventually be MATCHED by his son to come, but that will NEVER be broken, because hey, one stroke per hole is the theoretical low limit.

          I have never defended or supported Trump. And if I hadn’t spent the last few minutes composing this reply to another of HB’s , I would have spent the time posting some stuff about what’s wrong with Trump and his homies.

          Grow up , and start taking responsibility for your own mistakes, and decide if you want to be REPUBLICANS or DEMOCRATS, and work to nominate candidates accordingly.

          Hardly anybody with a lick of sense and real appreciation of Yankee politics considers HRC and the current incarnation of the D party as anything other than Republican Lite.

          The working class of this country in political terms includes a hell of a large chunk of the white collar class, and a lot of professionals as well, such as teachers who don’t have much seniority and work in relatively poor school districts, and IT INCLUDES the large majority of the minority groups such as Hispanics, other immigrants, African Americans, etc.

          AND NO LESSER a big dog Democrat than James Carville himself recently said, if I translate his words to plain old American vernacular, that Clinton totally fucked up in not understanding that EVERYBODY lives well, or not so well, or miserably, according to how the economy does, and failing to understand THAT , fucked up her campaign. She’s too smart for her own good, and surrounded herself with equally too smart for their own good elitist yes boys and yes girls.

          If you two don’t know who Carville is, look him up.

          Nekkid apes are all more alike than they are different, and you two are displaying the usual response when you ‘are wrong, or have lost at some undertaking, denying the truth, and blaming your misfortunes on others.

          Neither party nominated an ethically or temperamentally or intellectually sound candidate last time. The fact that the R party was essentially hijacked by an outsider does NOT excuse the D party’s mistake.

          I seldom have much to say in favor of the R party these days, but I WILL say this much. The R party establishment did everything it could to PREVENT Trump’s nomination, whereas Clinton OWNED the D party establishment, and thus didn’t even have to mount a token campaign for it, EXCEPT for Sanders coming out of nowhere.

          If you two guys are unable to grasp just HOW LITTLE USE the country as a whole had for HRC, after thinking about how strong a challenge Sanders mounted , David versus Goliath style, FROM THE LEFT, well, you’re actually too naive or ignorant or both to talk to about politics, but I won’t let personal attacks go unanswered.

          Think about this, if you are ABLE to think from a somewhat different perspective. Maybe she won the popular vote not so much because the country wanted her, but rather or in very large part because enough people voted AGAINST Trump to give her the popular vote victory.

          I will drop HRC anytime you guys give up calling me the idiot, or the Trumpster or Republican, etc.

          1. Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. OK Einstein, Keep posting your hate.

            There’s a lot of things in the world that are binary. Your computer, on and off. There’s north and south. For a coach, it’s all X’s and O’s. Your bank account, debt’s and credits. And of course we have Republicans and Democrats in the United States.

            Independents really aren’t independent when it comes to American Presidential elections. Jill Stein and Gary Johnson both got some ridicules small amount of votes. Either Donald or Hillary were going to win the election. We all knew that.

            For the six months leading up to the election. You, OldMacDonald spewed your hate HRC Republican trash talk almost every other day as you trolled this site. You sure as hell weren’t doing it to get HRC elected.

            Calling one another names on a blog is pretty meaningless. It’s your actions that make you who you are. If you have a feeling that others view you as an idiot. Change your behavior.

            1. You’re still a little Clinton lap doggie, and unable to deal with the reality that your candidate was the worst in the history of the D party, and managed to lose to a guy who wasn’t even WANTED by the R party.

              Grow up , and learn to deal with your mistakes, and do better next time around. I tell it like it is, or at least the way I see it, and I don’t believe that the faults of other people justify my own faults.

              Trump is worse than Clinton would have been, and I pointed that out quite frequently.

              Now go on and cry baby some more, and remind me again, and I will post some more stuff that lays it out just how fucking stupid YOU ARE for believing that Clinton was ethically sound.

              Now here’s a line I WISH I had come up with, which I heard today, from a working guy who voted for Trump , out of desperation, although he has been a life long D voter.

              Paraphrased, he said that there was at least a slim possibility that Trump was telling the truth about his plans for the economy, although he didn’t trust Trump.

              Now as far as Clinton and the economy was concerned, he was absolutely convinced she was telling the truth part of the time, as when supporting globalization, and making secret speeches to the banksters, and that having heard what she said ( publicly, he was guessing about the contents of the secret speeches ) he KNEW he was screwed if she won. She was PROMISING, from his pov, to finish ruining him economically.

              So he’s sez in summary, if Trump’s lying, I’m fucked, and if Clinton is telling the truth, I’m fucked.

              My small efforts at pointing out reality don’t matter very much, I’m just one little guy like you’re one little hypocrite bragging about raking it in in the oil biz while posturing as an environmental advocate.

              More and more big D Democrats are coming around to admitting that Clinton lost because she was an incredibly inept campaigner, because so many people had less than zero use for her since way back when, because she was arrogant, because she occasionally talked some people’s talk but consistently walked the one percenters walk, etc.

              Later on tonight, or maybe tomorrow, I’ll post a few details about the White Water scandal. You can verify using the archives of the Washington Post, or the New York Times, that everything I will post is according to the record as published by those same two papers.

              And incidentally, this forum is populated almost entirely by hard core liberals who are mostly technically sophisticated and quite comfortable with basic math.

              I haven’t noticed a SINGLE ONE of them making a fool of himself pretending that Clinton earned that hundred grand.

              I have posted dozens of links already pointing out how bad Trump is , and will continue to post more.

              You’re just a little partisan lap dog, and haven’t ever had an original thought, politically. You just spout the establishment D party line like a preacher, with every thing the D party establishment does being perfect in your eyes , and anybody who doesn’t agree being a heretic or worse.

              Well, little lap doggie, the Sanders camp is where most of the younger Democrats found their political home, and they’re going to be running the D Party within a few years.

              And if I am able, I will be doing whatever I can to help, from contributing my twenty five bucks to manning a phone to providing rides to the polling station.

            3. Back atcha HB,

              My ” working guy friend” is a life long union man, and he has voted D every time, until the last time, according to what he posts.

              I have never met him, and to be technically accurate, I should have said I read his comment on the net , rather than heard it. A lot of people use the word heard interchangeably with the word read ( past tense ) in some contexts.

              He’s truly sick and tired of globalization, and not many people who are both informed and reasonably honest describe HRC as anything other than a globalist, and a hard core globalist at that in the opinion of a lot of people.

              There’s little question in the minds of working people that she sold them out banksters silver, and ENOUGH of them were convinced that she would continue to do so to put Trump in the WH.

              Pretending to care when you don’t is rubbing it in, with salt, to a man of his kind.

              This is not to say that most working people don’t understand that the R party is much worse in respect to globalism. The thing is, the R’s don’t give a fuck about working people, and don’t PRETEND to.

              This guy voted R for two basic reasons. One is that he wanted to give HRC and the D establishment the straight middle finger BACK.

              And the other is that he believed at the time he voted that Trump might actually do something to keep the rest of our industries from being exported to low wage countries.

              He evaluated Trump as no worse a Republican than Clinton.

            5. Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. OK Einstein, Keep posting your hate.

              I’ m doing the the same basic thing in this context over and over again because it’s a fundamental rule of communication in the media, no matter which media, that repeating the message over and over WORKS.

              That’s why both parties and most businesses spent megabucks on advertising their programs or products.

              But of course you are most likely too dense to understand such a simple truth. You’re certainly too dense to win a debate based on facts or wit.

              I’m the only guy in this forum who really is willing to speak out about what went wrong last election in terms of things that can be CONTROLLED by the D party.

              All the peeing and moaning and bitching in the world about the people who voted for Trump isn’t doing ANYTHING at all to further the goal of getting them to vote the D ticket next time around.

              And while nobody is coming out and saying I’m right, well, neither are the coming out and saying I’m WRONG, with the exception of you and maybe one or two more at longish intervals. This is understandable, because this is the sort of truth that makes D’s and liberals uncomfortable, but facing up to it NOW is necessary in order to prevent the same mistake being made again, that mistake being to run a machine oriented, Republican Lite candidate that represents BAU, when the country is literally SCREAMING for change.

              Now as a matter of actual fact, I believe I have probably gotten the message across to most of the members and lurkers here, and I’m ready to move on to new topics, but I am NOT willing to let you have the last word calling me a Republican, Trumpster, liar, pervert , or shill.

              Anybody reading this forum can decide for themselves what my motives might or might not be. I’ve been quite consistent in pointing out that the D party is entirely and totally superior to the R party in some critical respects, and in particular in respect to the environment, which is the most critical of ALL issues, and so important that it overrides all other issues combined.

              You on the other hand are a partisan little lap doggie,and bark at the other party no matter what, and lick the privates of the D party, right or wrong, because for you, your standing as a choir member in the D Church is more important than anything and every thing else put together.

              I have posted more nasty and TRUTHFUL remarks by far about Trump and the Republicans than you have, unless I’m badly mistaken, and I will continue to do so.

              When you have posted stuff about the R’s and Trump, I have gone on record here in saying your comments were relevant and accurate.

              Keep barking.

              Lap dogs always believe that when another dog passing by is out of sight, they scared it away from Momma’s lap up on the porch.

              Preachers and politicians always try to manipulate members of their church or party who are in danger of drifting away by using the same basic technique you are using, namely redirecting the attention of the member from the MESSAGE to the messenger, and badmouthing the messenger.

              There is nothing at all in my message detrimental to the D Party, but there’s plenty in it worthy of long hard thought on the part of THINKING D Party members and voters.

    2. OFM-

      This is chewy and interesting.
      https://thebaffler.com/salvos/trumped-abandoned-faludi

      “McNulty’s real antagonists were the explosive forces of economics and class—a deindustrializing society and a downwardly mobile workforce, the collapse of corporate employment and middle-class security, the reconstitution of power in the glossy redoubts of infotainment and tech culture. But those were forces he couldn’t change and couldn’t fight. What he could get in his sights was the image of a woman in charge.”

      1. Hi Duncan,

        I was just fixing to post this link, which is well worth the minute it will take to read it.

        http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/psychiatrist-donald-trump-not-mentally-ill_us_58a512a1e4b045cd34be9702

        There’s a huge element of truth in qoute you posted at four fifty three. Times are changing fast, in very frightening ways, and for more people than just angry white males, who are the only people you are not only allowed to make fun of , but COMPELLED by the rules of sniffy holier than thou nose in the air liberals.

        THAT little observation on my part is proof in my eyes that US and THEM are the two of the most important words we have in explaining and understanding human behavior.

        Every political and intellectual faction apparently must have an identifiable enemy, so as to be able to distinguish itself as US, with the enemy being THEM.

        The rest of it is good for a laugh. I ‘ve met a few men who remind me of Mc Nulty, but they aren’t nearly so common as some people like to think they are.

        Even old farts these days were young guys back in the sixties, and have lived most of their lives in contact with women in positions of power, interracial marriages, etc, and even in the heart of the backwoods where I live in the South, within an hour of Greensboro, if you speed a little, nobody even notices black guys with white women any more.

        The joke goes, two guys talking at a party, one asks the other if it doesn’t bother him that his wife makes more than he does.

        “Nah. She makes more than you do”

        And incidentally the comic portion sneaks in at least one gross lie to cover up a truly major D managed fuck up, the Davidian incident.

        You don’t have to be very bright to understand that one of the very first principles of law enforcement procedure is to preserve the evidence at a scene where people die so that it may be carefully and professionally examined and documented.

        I suppose you know what was done in this particular case.

          1. The nickel and dimer guys who are farmers and support their farming habit by working forty in town, or who have wives who “enablers” probably did vote mostly for Trump. It’s a dead sure thing that not many of them live in big cities, lol, and we all know that smaller communities all over went R.

            I LIVE among the sort of people who tended to vote mostly for Trump, and for a wild ass guess I would say that sixty percent, maybe more, of small farmers voted for Trump. But they didn’t so much vote FOR him as they did AGAINST Clinton.

            Taken as a class, they don’t have much use for the modern D party social agenda,because they believe, with substantial justification, that it’s a threat to their preferred culture and also to their freedom to do and work as they please on their own property.

            To see why this is so in terms of my own case, there are proposed regulations that will prevent me from farming a substantial portion of my limited acreage of “bottomland”, the land along side streams in the mountains, and the only flat level ground on my place, unless I’m grandfathered, when and if these regulations are enacted .

            I understand the need for such regulations, and can afford to comply, but if I were trying to make a living income on my place, this one regulation would cost me thousands of dollars every year. As a practical matter, the land adjacent to the stream would effectively be seized without compensation, and I would still have to pay taxes on it, lol.

            Farmers who are business men in the usual sense,meaning that’s all they do, know all about the need for migrant labor, export markets, etc, and it’s my impression that a smaller percentage of them voted for Trump.

            We don’t see as many migrants these days as we once did, and it’s been a boon to my community, because local farmers are paying high enough wages to attract temporary help from among people who live here year around. The biggest local guy who grows apples for instance hires about a dozen women to staff his packing operation during the harvest season. There are always plenty of them around who don’t have full time jobs and would like to pick up a couple of months extra work, including some who don’t even really need the money, but just want to get out of the house for a change.

            With fewer migrants, wages rise to a point that people WILL take the jobs they supposedly sneer at, and farmers are like all other business men in that they simply pass along their costs to the customer.

            It doesn’t really matter to me if I pay eight dollars for casual help, or twelve. I pay twelve , because I get more for my money that way. Even farm labor requires some skill and judgement, in addition to an actual willingness to stay busy instead of goofing off.

    3. Mac, a while back I tore the USA political system and culture a new evacuation hole because I saw the way the primaries were leading to two really lousy candidates. As long as people don’t see the rot and agree it’s their own fault, nothing will get fixed. I don’t have any solutions.

      1. Hi Fernando,

        I don’t always agree with you politically, when it comes to the right course of action, for example opening up relations with Cuba, but I do basically agree with your interpretation of the history of communism in the Western Hemisphere, etc.

        I don’t know if there IS a solution to the rot that has permeated our political system. It could be that we have already passed the point of no return, and are entering an era when our government won’t be any better than the governments of most third world countries.

        But I don’t think we have yet passed the point of no return. There is still hope in my estimation.

  18. Utilities vote to close 2,250 MW Navajo plant, largest coal generator in western US

    Dive Insight:

    Natural gas generation is already cheaper than power from NGS, and electricity from the 1970s-era coal plant is only expected to get more expensive in the coming years.

    Last year, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory issued analysis that pegged the cost of power generated at NGS at $38/MWh, compared with $32 in 2015. After 2019, that cost will rise to $41/MWh, reflecting terms of a new lease, and then $51/MWh in 2030 due to emissions standards (provided they are not rolled back by the Trump administration).

    That reality has led the plant’s four owners to say they’re shutting it down, though they leave option the option that another group could take it over. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation owns about a quarter of the NGS plant, while SRP claims 43%. Arizona Public Service, NV Energy, and Tucson Electric Power own the remaining shares.

    “The utility owners do not make this decision lightly,” SRP Deputy General Manager Mike Hummel said in a statement. “However, SRP has an obligation to provide low-cost service to our more than 1 million customers and the higher cost of operating NGS would be borne by our customers.”

    While shuttering the plant may make economic sense for the utilities, regulators are worried about the regional impact. Earlier this month, Arizona Corporation Commissioner Andy Tobin called for an “emergency summit” to address the potential job losses related to closing down plant.

    One not so small step at a time, carbon emissions are being reduced.

    I had a look at the solar resource for the area around the plant using http://globalsolaratlas.info and also the satellite image of the area. Below is a collage of the satellite image and the solar map with the location of the coal plant tagged in both. Seems to me that the Navajo Nation might do well to start looking into solar PV and maybe even concentrating solar thermal with storage.

    1. Phoenix still needs to pump water 300 miles uphill , no matter what the energy source.
      Colorado River Water.

      1. They already calculated that it was cheaper to power the water pumps with solar than with Najavo Generating station.

          1. Pumping water with solar power is one of the very best options for making the best use of it, because water is easily stored at the end use point in large tanks or reservoirs until needed.

            Depending on the capacity of existing pumping stations and pipelines, it might still be necessary to power the pumps thru the night using electricity from the grid, but if piped natural gas is available along the pipeline route,driving the pumps with ice engines running on gas would probably be the cheapest and cleanest option.

            Or it could be that enlarging the pipeline and pumping stations would be more economic. The cheapest option of all would be to make better use of the delivered water.

            I’m probably going to buy my first kilowatts worth of panels this year to run a half horse horse power domestic well water pump that will be used on a far corner of my place to pump water to the top of a hill about four hundred feet high. The panels and necessary additional parts will be cheaper than running wire from my service drop to the best location for the pump. I won’t get much more than a gallon a minute, but that will be plenty.

            But I’m continuing to hold off on getting fair sized set up for the home place, because the price is still dropping fast.

  19. US Solar Market Grows 95% in 2016, Smashes Records

    In its biggest year to date, the United States solar market nearly doubled its annual record, topping out at 14,626 megawatts of solar PV installed in 2016.

    This represents a 95 percent increase over the previous record of 7,493 megawatts installed in 2015. GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) previewed this data in advance of their upcoming U.S. Solar Market Insight report, set to be released on March 9.

    For the first time ever, U.S. solar ranked as the No. 1 source of new electric generating capacity additions on an annual basis. In total, solar accounted for 39 percent of new capacity additions across all fuel types in 2016.

    “What these numbers tell you is that the solar industry is a force to be reckoned with,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, SEIA’s president and CEO. “Solar’s economically winning hand is generating strong growth across all market segments nationwide, leading to more than 260,000 Americans now employed in solar.”

    Success this year was driven largely by the utility-scale segment, which was bolstered by a pipeline of projects initially hedging against the extension of the federal Investment Tax Credit. Not only did it represent the most megawatts installed, but the utility-scale segment also featured the highest growth rate of any segment, growing 145 percent from 2015.

    1. I’m worried about these statistics. My number 2 son got into the solar power business and tells me he’s making a lot of money. But I’m afraid the market will be saturated in a few years, and business will be tougher.

      2. Even if the growth rate slows, it will still likely be a much bigger business in 5 years than it is today. Much, much bigger in fact.
        It will take a massive build-out to put in a dent in replacing the energy production loss from fossil depletion.
        Our chance of keeping up with demand for PV is poor.

        1. New industries that are displacing old ones do eventually grow to such a size that their growth is necessarily limited to about the same rate as the growth rate of the economy.

          And it will be fairly obvious at some point that the pv industry is has grown to the point that further growth will necessarily be much slower, and that investment in new manufacturing capacity and training new workers, etc, won’t pay off.

          My own wild ass guess is that it takes about four or five years in the pv industry for new technology to go from the experimental stage to the patent office to small scale manufacture to scaled up production. It could be longer, but it seems unlikely it could be much shorter.

          So let us say for example that the pv market will be mature, and sales will be flat to maybe up a couple of percent a year, thirty years from now.

          So maybe the stocks of pv companies will peak at twenty to twenty five years or so , with investors understanding that further growth in sales will be modest at best ?

  20. The Tesla model 3 pilot production run should be starting next week!

    The new battery from the gigafactory is a 21mm x 70mm, just a little bigger than the 18mm x 65mm cells they used in the model S. The new cells are close to 6A*Hr capacity, nearly double the 18650s.

    The base model 3 will have a single rear motor and be under 7 seconds 0-60. We know a dual motor will be available as an option. The model S in Ludicrous mode can do 0-60 in 2.4 seconds with the latest software, but the model 3 is a lot lighter (thanks to the new battery). We don’t know for sure if Ludicrous mode will be offered on the model 3. BUT…

    The rumor is for the model 3 with Ludicrous mode; 0-60mph in only 2.0 seconds!!!

      1. I’m sure a petroleum engineer like yourself is rich enough to buy a much more expensive internal combustion engine powered macho machine for adults, no? Maybe a big diesel powered Mercedes Benz SUV?

        So why do you hate EVs and batteries so much anyway?

        https://electrek.co/2016/06/06/tesla-model-s-battery-pack-data-degradation/

        Tesla Model S battery pack data shows very little capacity loss over high mileage

        Data shows that the Model S’ battery pack generally only loses about 5% of its capacity within the first 50,000 miles and then the degradation significantly slows down with higher mileage. Plug-in America’s data shows several vehicles with over 100,000 miles driven and less than 8% degradation.

      2. The median price for a new car in the US is $34,000 so at $35000 minus some tax breaks, the model 3 is not just for the rich. Yes, it’s more for the 2.0 second 0-60 version, but most people would be pretty happy with the base model.

        The battery has thermal management for both hot and cold climates plus a good warantee. Yes, A replacement battery pack might cost $10,000 today, but in 5-10 years after the warantee expires, the price should be a lot lower.

        1. Things may change in the auto industry in more ways than one, and WILL change, but there’s an old saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

          And one thing that has stayed the same in the auto industry is that a lot of parts are available exclusively from the manufacturer, via the dealer, or in the case of Tesla, directly.

          At some point, not very soon imo, the batteries that run electric cars may be commodity products, just like tires. You can get tires for almost any car from at least half a dozen manufacturers, and the more popular sizes are available from at least twice that many.

          But I think it’s pretty naive to expect that you will be able to replace the battery at a cheap price in any currently marketed electric car ten years down the road.

          The demand for them will be small, because the number of cars needing them will be small, and there will be very little incentive for after market manufacturers to build them to fit the the car, and to match the electronics, etc.

          The manufacturers and dealers will be able to charge whatever the market will bear, most likely, for some time to come, for replacement batteries.

          It’s hard to say how much that might be.

          I wouldn’t be at ALL surprised if it’s literally impossible to buy a new replacement battery for some cars that are selling today in very limited to limited numbers, but there will likely be companies that are in the biz of refurbishing old batteries- IF you have a good core.

          You can’t get new light truck tires at all anymore for some older compact pickup trucks, and you have to special order them, at outrageous prices, for some regular size pickups built well into the nineties. All you can find at tire stores for these trucks are tires which are basically the same as passenger car tires.

          And there are still at the very least tens of millions of these older trucks still in service on a world wide basis.

  21. Oroville Dam and the Infrastructure Policy Swirl

    http://gregor.us/infrastructure/oroville-dam-and-the-infrastructure-policy-swirl/

    Given the policy incoherence of the Trump administration the temptation is strong to assert nothing they attempt on behalf of US infrastructure is likely to work. While this is true in a broad sense, it’s important to create roughly two classes of infrastructure that current policy proposals are likely to either neglect, or affect.

    The first is that class of infrastructure that generates little to no revenue, or, whose cost can never be recovered fully through rate payers. Into this box, you might place schools, public drinking water systems, and a number of large public transport mega-projects. These are the infrastructure typologies that pay out long-term social dividends and efficiencies to the economy. This is also the class most neglected precisely because policymakers, in their short-sightedness, find it hard to quantify the dispersed nature of the payoff—despite its potentially large accrual to human well being, and GDP.

    The second is that class of infrastructure that more typically produces steadier cash flow: internet infrastructure, pipelines, toll roads and bridges, and power plants. It’s the class of infrastructure into which large, sovereign funds like Australia’s superannuation and globally listed, dividend-seeking mutual funds have historically devoted capital.

    Now that Oroville Dam—and its power plant, the 0.819 GW Fred Hyatt hydroelectric station—have been in news this week, let’s ask the question: into which category would this piece of power infrastructure fall? Over at CityLab, they took a stab at this question and concluded needed repairs to Oroville’s spillway was the kind of project that Trump’s plans would neglect. But I don’t think that’s correct. Indeed, Trump’s preference for P3 (public-private partnerships–which are not necessarily a bad thing), would very likely target a power station like Oroville’s Hyatt. One could easily see an offer to Oroville in the form of a financing-stack, one that blends private capital with federal assurances, in exchange for a cut of the power station’s future cash flow.

    Oroville’s power station is valuable, despite the fact that its generation is hugely variable: not only month to month but year to year, due to California’s rainfall seasonality, and its longer cycle of flood and drought. That said, the station tends to produce about 1,500,000 MWh per year.

    But there’s more to Oroville’s Hyatt dam than simple hydro generation. The structure also contains pumped-storage capability, giving the station the ability to timely release flow at times of peak demand. And given the rate at which California is adding renewables (solar generation reached 10% of state demand in 2016), the state needs to build much more storage capacity in addition to utilizing stations like Oroville.

    It should be said, nearly all public infrastructure offers relatively low rates of return in the form of cash flow. But the flaw in Trump’s infrastructure plan is that the neglected class will continue to be neglected, because in combination with an austerity-minded Congress, the infrastructure most needed now requires federal investment that’s disproportional to its cash returns. (As President-elect, his team put together a quick 50 list, but it’s a more of a Hey, What About This? list than a coherent plan.)

    Oroville represents a very different risk, therefore. It’s not, as CityLab suggests, likely to be overlooked but rather is the type of infrastructure likely targeted by the administration. I reported on the issue of P3 (public-private partnerships) late last month in Route Fifty, as it happens, and it should also be said that P3 approaches can form the basis of smart, infrastructure design. But who really thinks smart design would be a feature of the Trump administration in any policy rollout, especially infrastructure?

    –Gregor Macdonald

    1. Pretty cool, even if the payload is smaller, the range a fraction of the distance of diesel, and recharge time a major factor.
      Lets see how these fit into our delivery system.

    2. From the Daimler link

      “The rapid technical development is supporting this trend: Daimler Trucks is expecting the costs for the batteries of an all-electric truck to fall by a factor of 2.5 from 1997 to 2025 – from 500 euros/kWh to 200 euros/kWh. At the same time the energy density of the available batteries in this period will rise by the same factor from 80 Wh/kg to 200 Wh/kg.”

      If battery tech improves this much this fast, all electric trucks will be more than competitive as local delivery vehicles. But for now, the battery pack appears to be too heavy for the truck to be competitive with a diesel truck. The extra payload and better availability of the diesel is more than ample to offset the cost of fuel and maintenance. Commercial trucks are remarkably reliable. A new one can be expected to run more or less continuously for a year or more at a time without a breakdown of any sort. That’s a lot of extra utility in terms of bang for the buck.

      1. I think they would work around here, for city delivery trucks, if they simply put in a better battery, and heat the cab with a propane burner.

        1. Fernando has a point about using a little propane to supply heat in automobiles and trucks, but apparently the people who build and buy them are religious about not using any fossil fuel.

          But good sense dictates taking the most efficient and practical path in making decisions of this sort, and battery capacity can be put to far better use propelling the vehicle than it can in keeping it warm. Using a little propane for heat would actually result in less using LESS gasoline or diesel fuel, by making electric cars more desirable, thus more would sell, and reduce the total amount of fossil fuel used, everything else held equal.

          A small heater can easily be made to operate at eighty percent or better efficiency at very modest cost, and for a few bucks more, such heaters can well into the nineties in efficiency.

          Burn the same amount of gas in a generating plant, and less than forty percent the energy will wind up in the battery, due to all the losses starting with combustion, and finishing up with charging losses.

          1. Why use propane when heat pumps provide both heating and cooling far more efficiently? They can use a battery or fuel cells.
            Insulate the cabs better to gain more passive efficiency.

            1. Because Fernando dislikes clean or alternative energy. Especially if it means doing things differently than in the past.

            2. HI Fred,

              True enough. But Fernando’s an old guy, and he is an old time hands on oil and gas man, and as we get older, we do tend to get more and more stuck in our ways.

              I’m stuck in my ways, as far as my actual actions are concerned, but I work hard at thinking like a child because children aren’t yet indoctrinated into believing most of the things that adults believe which aren’t true.

              I don’t personally believe that Fernando is opposed to renewable energy as a matter of principle, and he does understand that we can’t depend on fossil fuels over the long term, due to depletion.

              He sees the world thru the lens of working pro who has always had to be sure whatever he does can be paid for out of the returns earned, or the costs avoided, within the near future.

              I’m a big renewables advocate myself, but I share that concern, and haven’t bought a pv system for the house and home place yet because the return on the investment is not yet THERE, for me. I ‘m going to buy American blight resistant seedling chestnut trees this coming year for instance, and arrange things that so when they have nuts, even if I’m gone, the nuts will be freely distributed to help speed up the revival of this magnificent and incredibly valuable tree.

              This summer, if things go as planned, I will install my second piece of pv powered equipment, the first being an electric fence charger purchased some time back. The new project will involve a couple of thousand dollars worth of panels , but it the cost will be justified by the savings elsewhere, because it will be cheaper than buying and burying enough UF wire to get juice from where it’s available to where it’s needed.

              But if time permits, I might just build a WORKING water wheel for my own use, and rig it up to a generator. I’ve built a couple in the past for other people, but never one for myself, because I never had a suitable place to put one, until I bought a new piece of land a couple of years ago. This new property has a large enough stream, and suitable topography.

            3. Hi GF,

              This particular little bit of conversation is not about houses and larger buildings, but about AUTOMOBILES. It’s damned hard, maybe impossible, to efficiently insulate an automobile that necessarily has a lot of glass, and thin “walls” in order to maximize precious interior space and minimize the outside dimensions to reduce aero drag as much as possible.

              A heat pump mechanism would add even more weight and complexity, and it would STILL be draining the battery and reducing the useful range of the car.

              (Now it’s true that if the car has a conventional air conditioning system, some of the components are already on board but not all of them, and making the heat flow reversible would be tricky without adding weight and parts that would take a day or two just to UNCOVER THEM in the event they need repair. )

              We ought not to get all religious and insist on purer and whiter than wind driven snow solutions when it comes to using a little propane in a very efficient manner, considering that we will continue to use every drop available , and less efficiently, for decades to come.

              Burning a little propane in a tiny little heater to warm the interior of a car, and maybe to also keep the battery warm, will add miles to the driving range on the same amount of battery charge, and the trade off would be highly economic, in terms of the cost of the car, and the TOTAL consumption of fossil fuel, until such time as we get to one hundred percent renewable electricity.

              Now I’m as big an advocate of renewable energy and efficiency as you will find, but I also try to be realistic, and it’s my opinion that we will still be using one hell of a lot of oil and gas everywhere and a substantial amount of coal in some countries thirty years from now.

              It might be possible technically and NECESSARY as a practical matter to go one hundred percent renewable electricity at some future time, but it won’t be economic and practical to do so for at least a couple of generations, if then.

              The reason this is true is dirt simple, and never overlooked by members of this forum except when they get religious about something.

              The marginal cost of getting rid of let us say the last ten percent of coal generation might be entirely manageable in the Yankee north east. It might even be a bargain.Gas is cheap there, and pipelines are already in place.

              But there are places where gas pipelines don’t go, and in spite of all the gung ho talk about electrical storage, it’s expensive as hell on the grand scale , and will STAY expensive for a long long time. So in that sort of place, getting rid of the last little bit of coal is going to be SUPER EXPENSIVE.

              It would be FAR BETTER to burn say the last ten percent of coal currently used in such places, and spend the money saved on building out adequate renewable capacity and storage capacity on OTHER problems.

              I don’t think there is anybody here who is so naive as to believe that we will ever be able to solve all our critical environmental problems.

              It’s obviously the best policy to spend limited funds in the most efficient way possible, and thus MAXIMIZE environmental protections.

            4. Hi ofm,

              There isn’t any need for a propane heater for these latest electric cars. Any of the Tesla cars, the Chevy Bolt, and others coming soon, have large battery packs 50kwh or larger. Heating the cabin just isn’t a big deal.

              Think about a typical space heater for home, they are limited to about 1.2kw (10amps) because anything more than that would blow fuses in some homes. That’s way more then you need to keep the cabin in a car warm, and running that for 6 hours is only 7.2kwh. That’s just not a big deal, even if your only half charged with 25kwh available.

              These cars do have heating and cooling for the battery packs already.

            5. I haven’t ever actually looked up the capacity of an automobile heater, but I strongly suspect most of them are capable of putting out a hell of a lot more than a thousand watts. But with an ice under the hood, it doesn’t matter, because you are salvaging waste heat to keep the car warm.

              It’s true that the cabin of an automobile is small, compared to a room, but it’s also true that automobiles ALWAYS operate in high winds, and often during times when the weather is extremely cold. My guess is that it takes a LOT more than seven kilowatt hours to keep a car warm for four to six hours in let’s say zero F temperatures at sixty mph. Insulation must be minimal, it’s a CAR, not a house. And you MUST have a lot of glass, which is nearly worthless as insulation.

              And seven kilowatt hours battery capacity cost a hell of a lot of money in terms of purchasing the car, and also in terms of hauling around the extra weight of a battery sufficiently large to both propel the car and keep it warm.

              I will stick by my analysis. Burning a liter or two of propane at eight percent or better efficiency to stay warm in an electric car would be an all around bargain, in terms of money AND environment, but changing out the little propane bottle would be a minor hassle.

            6. Nissan heat pump (started use 2014)
              http://www.nissan-global.com/EN/TECHNOLOGY/OVERVIEW/heat_pump_cabin_heater.html

              Bosch heat pump
              http://www.greencarcongress.com/2015/09/20150908-boschiaa.html

              The skin of a car cannot get below ambient air temperature despite the wind. In fact wind causes some friction heat to be produced.

              Insulation works. If a car cabin is insulated wherever there are not windows, it will lose or gain less heat from the surrounding air compared to an uninsulated vehicle.
              Since you are a classic here is a site for you.
              http://secondchancegarage.com/public2/insulation.cfm

              And here is a more modern version of insulating a car.
              http://www2.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/insulated-auto.html

              Tesla uses motor heat to assist in heating both battery and cabin. However here is an even more modern novel approach to heating and cooling.
              https://www.technologyreview.com/s/513466/novel-heating-system-could-improve-electric-cars-range/

  23. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychiatrists-debate-weighing-in-on-trumps-mental-health/

    A number of professionals in the mental health field have been willing to go on record as saying Trump is unfit and dangerous.

    But I believe this other guy is more nearly on the mark, and if you read carefully, and know just a little about the field, you can see that he has said both less and MORE.

    ”In response to these efforts, Allen Frances, an emeritus psychiatrist at Duke University School of Medicine who helped write the standard manual on psychiatric disorders, wrote a separate letter to the Times denouncing attempts to diagnose the president as mentally ill. He explains that Trump lacks the “distress and impairment required to diagnose a mental illness,” adding that bad behavior and mental illness are not synonymous. “Psychiatric name-calling is a misguided way of countering Mr. Trump’s attack on democracy,” Frances wrote. Nevertheless, “he can, and should, be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.”

    When he says Trump “”lacks the “distress and impairment” ” it’s easily possible to read these as code words meaning he’s what we used to call a psychopath.

  24. Another reason to be applying the precautionary principle with regards the dumping of CO2 emissions into our atmosphere and oceans. I’m sure the villagers will be telling us we shouldn’t be alarmed even though the threads of the complexly woven tapestry of our natural systems keep getting pulled out one by one… Personally, I think the villagers are full of shit!

    Global ocean de-oxygenation quantified

    Oxygen is an essential necessity of life on land. The same applies for almost all organisms in the ocean. However, the oxygen supply in the oceans is threatened by global warming in two ways: Warmer surface waters take up less oxygen than colder waters. In addition, warmer water stabilizes the stratification of the ocean. This weakens the circulation connecting the surface with the deep ocean and less oxygen is transported into the deep sea. Therefore, many models predict a decrease in global oceanic oxygen inventory of the oceans due to global warming. The first global evaluation of millions of oxygen measurements seems to confirm this trend and points to first impacts of global change.

    In the renowned scientific journal Nature the oceanographers Dr. Sunke Schmidtko, Dr. Lothar Stramma and Prof. Dr. Martin Visbeck from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel just published the most comprehensive study on global oxygen content in the world’s oceans so far. It demonstrates that the ocean’s oxygen content has decreased by more than two percent over the last 50 years. “Since large fishes in particular avoid or do not survive in areas with low oxygen content, these changes can have far-reaching biological consequences,” says Dr. Schmidtko, the lead-author of the study.

    Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-02-global-ocean-de-oxygenation-quantified.html#jCp

    1. Meanwhile,

      HOW AN ICE AGE PARADOX COULD INFORM SEA LEVEL RISE PREDICTIONS

      “We’ve shown we don’t really need atmospheric warming to trigger large-scale disintegration events if the ocean warms up and starts tickling the edges of the ice sheets. It is possible that modern-day glaciers, not just the parts that are floating but the parts that are just touching the ocean, are more sensitive to ocean warming than we previously thought.”

      https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170215131551.htm

      1. And,

        ANTARCTICA JUST SHED A MANHATTAN-SIZED CHUNK OF ICE

        “… it’s hard to tie these individual events to climate change, but many studies have shown that Pine Island Glacier is retreating and thinning. That the recent rifting and calving could totally be evidence of an ongoing, rapid disintegration of the ice shelf, mostly due to ocean warming.”

        http://www.climatecentral.org/news/antarctica-iceberg-climate-21167

        1. While,

          ANTARCTICA’S SEA ICE SHRINKS TO NEW RECORD LOW

          Sea ice in Antarctica has hit a worrisome milestone, reaching its lowest recorded extent this week, according to data from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center. The daily ice area recorded on Tuesday represents an all-time low: 2.22 million square kilometers.

      2. Doug, very interesting paper and it makes sense.
        Just a few things.
        With large ice sheets covering a good portion of the land mass, the air would be colder from both the albedo change and the altitude change (1 to 2 miles higher).
        There was a steadily increasing level of insolation to the northern hemisphere due to orbital changes, total change of about 60 w/m2 at 65N over 10,000 years or so.
        Water can change from solid to liquid with essentially no temperature rise. Much of the energy input could be absorbed with no or little temperature rise. The cold water entering the ocean would reduce ocean temperature changes.
        When warm moist air moves over a cold water or ice covered area it tends to form fogs and clouds, but also rain which is great for reducing ice.
        So the whole thing would be large energy exchanges without much temperature rise at times due to the heat of fusion and altitudes, given large amounts of ice cover.
        Also these changes, several receding events and growing of the ice sheets, took thousands of years to happen.
        We are now seeing changes in a century or decades. Much faster probably due to combining temperature changes with radiation changes in both the atmosphere and oceans.
        As the ice recedes, the rate of temperature increase should rise.

        1. CANADIAN GLACIERS NOW MAJOR CONTRIBUTOR TO SEA LEVEL CHANGE, STUDY SHOWS

          BTW Ice loss from Canada’s Arctic glaciers has transformed them into a major contributor to sea level change. From 2005 to 2015, surface melt off ice caps and glaciers of the Queen Elizabeth Islands grew by an astonishing 900 percent. The Queen Elizabeth Islands contain about 14% of the global glacier and ice cap area.

          https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170215084119.htm

          1. I don’t mind the Canadians increasing the level of the ocean. I just wish they would stop sending down those Arctic blasts in the winter.

      3. “We’ve shown we don’t really need atmospheric warming to trigger large-scale disintegration events if the ocean warms up and starts tickling the edges of the ice sheets.

        Yeah, I believe it was you that posted a link to Dr. Richard Alley’s lecture on this very topic.

        BTW, my main beef with the one trick pony villagers that is they don’t look at all the evidence trickling in (no pun intended), from the myriad fields of scientific inquiry that all seem to be telling us pretty much the same thing. Which is that there is ample cause for concern. It is not a single line of evidence or just a few models. It is torrents of evidence from multiple independent lines of research. The villagers seem to lack true critical thinking and the analytical skills needed to parse complex integration of multiple interdependent non linear systems.

        When they try to impress us with cherry picked data while waving graphs with their hand drawn trend lines, they are not showing much more understanding of the bigger picture than the natives of Melanesian and Micronesian, practitioners of the Cargo Cult religion. Who built airplanes out of bamboo and placed them on earthen landing strips cut out of the jungle with the intent of attracting favors from the gods…

        The villagers are pretty darn stupid!

    2. It’s not just climate, although if we get thru the short term without wiping ourselves out, climate will be the elephant in the world china shop.

      In the meantime……….

      https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-02/uov-bdt021717.php

      We have some really scary short term problems that could be solved, at some substantial expense sometimes, no question, but solving them would cost a few cents on the dollar compared to letting them get worse and worse.

      Wild bee habitat is a critical part of the agricultural picture, and we need some land use regulations that are sensibly written to protect wild bees. If this necessarily involves spending some money, we had best spend it SOON.

  25. ,China Targets 800,000 Plug-In Electric Vehicle Sales In 2017

    In 2016, the targeted volume was 700,000. Given how short how short (~193,000 units) the actual total came to that estimate (despite being incredible impressive and outpacing the total sales of the rest of the global community combined), we tend to feel that 800k in 2017, with less incentives, has virtually no shot at happening.

    But we aren’t China, so we’d happily take a 150k miss on that number too!

    1. China’s political leaders, the guys and maybe a few women ( ? ) who make policy , are technically far more sophisticated than our own leaders. A lot of them are engineers.

      It’s easy to see why they would implement policies favoring electricifaction of their auto industry. China is dependent on imported oil. China is going all out to build out the domestic wind and solar industries. China has a hell of an air pollution problem. China hopes to control a large share of the world automobile industry and the battery industry as well.

      Every thing points to pushing electric cars as fast and as hard as possible.

      Unfortunately our own leaders at this time lack such understanding, and even when we had better ones, they were partly stymied by the opposition, and partly in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry, and not much was accomplished, compared to what could have been.

      1. “China’s political leaders, the guys and maybe a few women ( ? ) who make policy , are technically far more sophisticated than our own leaders. A lot of them are engineers.”

        LOL the lawyers I know consider themselves to have the most sophisticated minds on the planet. Of course it’s also true ninety odd percent of top Chinese officials are scientists and engineers — the same ratio of engineers and scientists occupy all top positions in China: this training tends to make these people admired and respected. Further, many of these degrees were obtained at (prestigious) Western schools like Oxford. I know (and knew) the dude who used to head of the nuclear power industry got his PhD at MIT.

        1. Hi Doug,

          I have heard before that up to ninety percent of the Chinese leadership is superbly well educated especially in the sciences, but I wasn’t sure of the figure, so just said LOTS.

          If we had similar leaders here in this country, considering how lucky we are in terms of having lots of natural resources,etc, we could solve all our own problems in short order, and maybe most of the world’s problems as well.

          In the event that we wind up in a real power struggle with China, it doesn’t look too good for us , long term.

  27. Interesting if this kind of stuff turns your crank,

    EVENT HORIZON TELESCOPE READY TO IMAGE BLACK HOLE

    Astronomers have built an Earth-sized “virtual telescope” by linking a large array of radio receivers – from the South Pole, to Hawaii, to the Americas and Europe. There is optimism observations to be conducted during 5-14 April could finally deliver the long-sought prize. In the sights of the so-called “Event Horizon Telescope” will be the monster black hole at the centre of our galaxy.

    Google “Event Horizon Telescope” if interested.

    1. Sheperd Doeleman, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge: “We’ve been fashioning our virtual telescope for almost two decades now, and in April we’re going to make the observations that we think have the first real chance of bringing a black hole’s event horizon into focus.”

        1. And yet refractors are the only ones capable of seeing very dim galaxies. Ok, they are Canon lenses in combo, but still refractors.

          Now for Hyakutake the Movie. I took a number of photos of this nearby comet, tail was 40 degree long. But here a refractor is used to show fine detail in the comet head.
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6uCHBqfZlk

  28. http://www.salon.com/2017/02/16/the-democrats-inept-resistance-party-leaders-want-bernie-sanders-to-save-them-from-angry-activists/

    Hey HB,

    Salon is most definitely not Trumpster turf.

    ” The first month of the Donald Trump presidency has provoked a public backlash against the president and his Republican enablers in Congress. Massive protest marches against Trump and his policies have been complemented by rowdy town-hall meetings that have left Republican legislators gibbering in the face of angry constituents.

    In politics, moments like these present what’s known as “an opportunity.” There’s obviously widespread discontent with the new administration, and a savvy opposition party would reorient itself to capitalize on that frustration. But for the Democratic Party, disruptions like these are something to be feared and controlled.

    The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that having seen the problems Republicans are facing with angry voters in their home districts, senior Democratic leaders are cowering at the prospect of having their own events disrupted. The plan they have devised to prevent this from happening is to ask Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., to request all the activists to not protest:

    Such episodes spurred Democrats to ask Sanders for help, according to Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), who attended the meeting on Tuesday.

    “They basically explained to Bernie, it looks like you could be the person that could calm down and make sure their energy and all this enthusiasm is directed in all the right proper channels,” Manchin said. “Bernie has a voice, and if [protesters] want to be active, then direct them to where the problem may be or where they anticipate a problem.”

    It’s so sad. Republicans who have faced down angry crowds have absurdly dismissed them as nothing more than “paid protesters” and professional activists. This is the Democratic equivalent of that nonsense. Democrats like Manchin and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York seem to believe that Bernie Sanders’ popularity with the activist base translates into controlling how it behaves. By their understanding, their constituents aren’t people with their own views; they’re vessels for Bernie’s agenda.

    That’s no less delegitimizing than calling someone a “paid protester.” Both presume that disruptive political acts flow not from genuine grievances, but from the whim of a distant authority figure. I would hope that there are some voters in West Virginia who are righteously pissed that Manchin has cozied up to Trump more clearly than any other Senate Democrat and voted to confirm all but two of Trump’s Cabinet nominees thus far, including Wall Street foreclosure baron Steve Mnuchin, now the Treasury secretary. With any luck, these voters will show up at a Manchin event and loudly voice that displeasure.”

    The Clinton machine is still mostly in control of the Democratic party power structure, even now, and still too stupid to understand that the people are not going to support a Republican Lite D party any more. The remains of the Clinton machine is so utterly without a clue that it expects the man the Party should have nominated to save it’s sorry ass, rather than facing up to the fact that they’re losers, and that they don’t DESERVE the support of the Sanders camp.

    They want to remain in sole control, and are stupid enough to think they can manage to do so and still win elections. There is a possibility that they might retain control of the D party, but if they do, the Party will lose even more elections to the R party than it has over the last couple of decades.

    I’m not the reason Trump is president today. Clinton’s the reason.

    More big D people and organizations are coming around to agreeing with me on a daily basis, although they don’t often say so in so many words.

    1. HRC beat Sander in the Democratic primary by more than three and a half million more votes or 55% to 43%. Clinton dominated the Democratic Black vote. Which knotted Sander’s out of the race in March. I would expect a Redneck Republican southern boy to dismiss that fact.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries,_2016

      Here is a link to my asshole. Enjoy

      https://thinkprogress.org/congressman-says-constituents-asking-for-a-town-hall-are-enemies-of-democracy-a492ea1e3fa0#.p204c1v1a

      1. Clinton had a twenty year head start campaigning on Sanders, and while he never got the recognition from the black community he deserved, due as much as anything to his late start, his record on civil rights and other closely related issues is as good or better than Clinton’s.

        It takes a long time for the public to get to know a new face, when it comes to the national political stage, and Clinton had the advantage there over Sanders, among unthinking Democrats during the primaries , but Trump had the advantage over HER in the same respect, in terms of the actual election. .

        He’s a much bigger scumbag, but the larger public never really had time to come to absorb that indisputable truth.It takes the public a long time to wake up, and those who wish to continue sleeping are almost impossible to arouse within the space of a year or less.

        There were some politically savvy young people who were very much in favor of Sanders. I met some of them myself. The older black people I know virtually all voted for Sanders, including the half a dozen or so I know well as neigbhors, local business people, and farm hands. None of them really knew anything about Sanders, and the media didn’t do anything to help. When I talked to them one on one, they were truly impressed with Sanders record, but they felt like they OWED it to the D establishment to vote for Clinton, because the establishment never even considered that anybody else would be the candidate.

        Sanders and Trump have one thing that is more or less in common to them. Both of them were considered outcasts and unworthy by the D and R party establishments.

        Trump succeeded in hijacking the R party, and Sanders gave it a hell of a shot, and in a truly open primary environment, he could have won, and WOULD have won , in my opinion.

        Just one example of media bias will suffice. The Atlantic is a very solid, very well managed publication, and has great credibility. But when the Atlantic ran a long article on Clinton’s scandals, the tone was skeptical, and the worst single one of all, Cattle Gate, WASN’T EVEN MENTIONED. The reason Cattle Gate is the worst is that the facts are incontestable, and everybody who knows some very basic math KNOWS the facts are incontestable.

        Of course I wouldn’t expect a Clinton true believer to know any of this, or that Clinton spent the last eight years tightening her octopus like grip on the D party machinery, so that her homies were in all the key positions so as to do some cheating in terms of scheduling debates, moving money around in D party accounts in such a way as to improve her financing, etc, maybe purging voter rolls, making sure it was harder for independents and R types to switch to D in closed primary states, etc.

        I wouldn’t expect you to know that she campaigned for YEARS on doing away with big money contributions, and then when she was about to pee her pants for fear both Sanders and Trump were about to whip her , she went back on her SO CALLED principles once again, for the umpteenth time, and called in her bankster and billioniare and near billion aire friends to bail out her Republican Lite ass by bringing in the money by the millions at a pop.

        I AM a redneck, born and bred, and proud of it. I’m also a graduate of a good university, and I’m well grounded in both the sciences and the humanities.

        I have a working brain, and TONS of accurate data stored in it, and I have forgotten more about just about any subject that really matters than you have or ever will know, judging by your comments.

        Enjoy your oil money while you can. I wonder sometimes if you’re one of the type that contributes to both parties. Trump will be doing all he can to help you make more, I’m sure, but the handwriting is on the wall for the oil industry. It will be all downhill starting pretty soon, but the industry will be dying a long slow death beginning within the next few years, if not sooner.

        I’m having a good time, and later on this evening, I will post some stuff about HRC’s business associates who spent a lot of time in jail, from back in her Arkansas days. Thanks for reminding me again.

        People who believe in what they are doing don’t give up just because it looks as if the odds are against them. They fight until the end for what they believe, and in the end, the Sanders camp won a huge victory, although it lost the nomination contest.

        The old line Clinton owned and operated bureaucrats who ran the party for her are on their way out, and the Sanders camp is on the way in, and I have every reason to believe that the D party will run a DECENT candidate next time around, and whip the R party’s ass, big time.

        Get used to it.

        It’s nice outside right now, and I’m going out and work in the sunshine for a while. Maybe my neck will get burnt a nicer shade of red, although it ‘s early for that. .

        Tonight I will instruct you in the indisputable facts of the White Water scandal.

        Did you KNOW that HRC used to be all gung ho for a Mexican fence??? 😉

        I really do wonder.

        1. OldMacDonald, your like a Foxes News Sanders channel. Get over it, he got his ass kicked by a women.

          1. Clinton lost, and the polls pretty consistently showed that Sanders would do better against Trump than Clinton would, but that’s one of the FACTS that you so CONVENIENTLY overlook. True believers never bother with facts that don’t suit their belief system, they just pretend they don’t exist.

            http://www.inquisitr.com/3992467/dnc-disrespecting-bernie-sanders-and-arrogance-lost-2016-election-not-russia/
            “DNC Not Accepting Responsibility For Their Actions In 2016 Election

            “The DNC and corporate Democrats want to blame everyone for their devastating 2016 loss; at least everyone but themselves. As reported by multiple sites such as Observer, the WikiLeaks emails proved what Sanders’ supporters strongly suspected all along — that the DNC acted to give an advantage to their chosen corporate Democrat, Hillary Clinton, despite polls that clearly showed Bernie Sanders fared much better against Donald Trump than Clinton.”

            The DNC refuses to face up to the truth, just as you do.

            Your princess stole the nomination, just like the old time machine politicians used to do it, because that’s what she IS, an old time machine politician.

            Sanders is respected by young Democrats. Clinton isn’t. He lost the battle, but his movement is winning the war.

            You get used to it. I’m repeating myself, obviously, but my message is one I want to get out, obviously enough. Your aim is to keep it from getting out. The more you try to silence me, the more I will post to help remind D’s about picking a candidate who is better liked, displays better judgement, doesn’t say one thing and do another, etc, NEXT TIME.

            She got her ass kicked by the biggest scumbag in living memory , one HATED by the party that ran him, against its wishes, the only candidate since the birth of modern polling that had negatives comparable to hers.

            Damned near ANY republican would have beat her, and damned near ANY democrat, except her, would have beaten Trump.

            I will be getting around to White Water, and some more of that VAST RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY that you believe was all smoke and no fire later tonight, lol. You keep asking for it, I have plenty, and I’m having a good time.

            I’m ready to move on to Trump whenever you give up defending Clinton, or referring to me as an R type partisan.

            Now here’s an obvious fact for Clinton partisans to chew on, between now and next election. You can control your own party, but you can’t control the opposition party.

            If you want to win, you need to run a candidate who is LIKELIEST to win, based on objective standards such as polling , consistency, lack of baggage, etc.

  29. http://www.npr.org/2017/02/16/515376114/the-south-has-been-slow-to-harness-its-wind-but-thats-changing

    RED North Carolina now has a working wind farm, and it’s one of the ironical little paradoxes of life that if most of the best sites for wind farms in Tar Heel country weren’t public property, there would probably be half a dozen already.

    But no wind farms are apt to be built in National Parks, lol, or TOO close to one such as the Blue Ridge Parkway, and I’m cool with that . 😉

    In another ten years, it will probably be practical to build some wind capacity in interior parts of the south on relatively low hills and ridges, but the wind resource isn’t good compared to say the mid west.

      1. One of the reddest states in the Union is Texas. Texas leads the country by a country mile in wind energy, and the wind industry will continue to grow fast in Texas.

        https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/20/texas-wind-energy-green-turbines-repbublicans-environment

        There isn’t a paper anywhere more pro environment and anti Trump to my knowledge, but even so, the writers there will give some credit where credit is due to republican type people and policies:

        “Another key factor in the growth of Texas’ wind industry is that this most independent-minded of states, unlike any other of the lower 48, has its own electric grid, minimising federal influence.

        “Texas is still the wild west of wind, sort of like the old prospecting days,” said Rod Wetsel, a Sweetwater attorney whose great-great grandparents settled in the town in the 1880s. “You can come out here, stick your stake in the ground, go get the leases from the land owners, you have no permitting – there’s no regulatory agency that controls wind, other than the public utility commission, which really just controls the grid system.”

        There’s a lot of good solid political commentary in this article, and a lot of pertinent facts. In the same article, some of Trump’s innumerable lies are repeated for contrast.

        There’s a way to talk to and work with R type people, and get things done.

        But sure as hell the usual method used here, making fun of them, is NOT a way that works.

        Now if when you ( the rhetorical you ) make a comment, the most important thing to you is to display your high moral and intellectual standing, and confirm your status as a member of the enlightened elite in your own eyes and the other members, well , in that case making fun of conservatives, religious people, etc, is precisely what you ought to be doing.

        But IF by some odd chance you want to actually make things happen, such as speeding up the growth of the renewable energy industries, and maybe electing middle of the road or even leftish leaning politicians, well in THAT case, it would be VERY helpful if you were to seek common ground, and emphasize that ground, and refrain from calling the opposition ignorant, redneck, racist, xenophobic, etc.

        It doesn’t even matter if these accusations are true, any more than it matters if HRC’s baggage train was real or manufactured. It’s what people think and believes that determines how they vote , and what they support.

        People cooperate with people they like, and do what they can to block the plans of people they don’t.

        A lot of us here go a hell of a long way out of their way to make sure that any conservative or independent minded person who happens to run across this forum will take one look and never visit again.

  32. I just happened across this publication for the first time. After an hour or so reading it, I ‘ m convinced it ‘s well worth a book mark for those of us with a strong interest in our own health and health care.

    https://www.statnews.com/

  36. Something tells me most of us here are either old or getting there fast.

    And if you ask just about any physician, he will tell you that you can’t BUY good health even for a million bucks, but you can do a hell of a lot to RETAIN and REGAIN it, if lost, IF you have the will to do so.

    Read this if you want to live longer and feel better. It’s not junk science.

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-hunger-gains-extreme-calorie-restriction-diet-shows-anti-aging-results/

    1. Your have a smart physician. There is a lot more to good health than just restricting food intake. Read Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution. He really gets to the heart of the matter, backs it up with real results and explains some of the reasons about how our bodies respond to food.

  37. Here’s a question for Dennis, Fred, Gone Fishing, or any of the guys, including Javier, who spend a lot of time on climate.

    According to the following link, it appears that California has suffered really heavy duty flooding about every two hundred years for couple of thousand years. Now the article doesn’t say these floods occur on a REGULAR basis, but it implies that they do actually come at rather regular intervals.

    http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/21/14684630/california-atmospheric-river-flood-storm-evacuations-rain-arkstorm

    So this leaves me wondering.

    Maybe there are more weather cycles than we have knowledge of. Cycles that repeat in ten or twenty years will almost for sure have been spotted by now, although maybe not for long enough to verify that they are actual cycles, rather than statistical flukes.

    But a cycle that stretches out for most of a century, or even longer……… now we might not have noticed it yet.

  38. For HB,

    I forgot earlier to cover this point. You accuse me of being conned by the Russians. I ‘ve been accused of being a redneck right winger scared to death of a non existent commie threat ever since my student days, and right on thru to the actual collapse of the old USSR, because I took facts seriously, even back then, rather than relying on either party’s propaganda.

    You see, it was the Russians that built the Iron Curtain, and it wasn’t built to keep people OUT, like the half built wall we have on our southern border.

    And it was the commies that virtually destroyed Chinese society with Great Leaps. Have you ever heard of MAO?

    Virtually every goddamned hard core liberal I knew for thirty or forty years never got tired of telling me how nice the Russians really were, and how misunderstood they were, and how STUPID I was to believe the R party MIC propaganda about the nice commies running the old USSR.

    In the meantime, I was reading everything available in English written by people who managed to escape or defect from both the old USSR and the Chinese mainland.

    You might want to read the Gulag Archipelago , or a recent history of China, from say WWI era thru globalization.I have. You haven’t, a thousand to one.

    And you think you are scoring points by saying the Russians have conned me.

    I think it is very likely that the Russians did pull some tricks involving our last election. Hard core liberals have accused the USA of doing the same thing many times, and I believe the evidence on their side is convincing.

    It doesn’t really matter much, except to partisans, who breaks rotten news. The great thing is that the truth has a way of making itself known, and Clinton was doing everything she could to keep in the shadows for reasons that couldn’t possibly have anything to do with other than hiding her tracks.

    If the emails had been delivered to the NYT, they would have published them just as fast as wikileaks, most likely,barring the editors being Clinton partisans, etc.

    Well, preachers always repeat their sermons, the idea on the part of the preacher to keep the congregation in line by insinuating that if you express any doubt, you are not a decent person in good standing within the church membership.

    You are simply repeating the same old worn out preacher’s tricks, trying to make sure all super stupid and timid church members plug their ears, and cover their eyes, and block out anything I have to say, because it’s bad for the Clinton machine.

    But some people at least are listening, and there are only a VERY few stupid people in this forum, VERY few indeed. And while I describe myself as as independent, they all know that I support all the science with which the D’s are on board, whereas the R’s are NOT.

    I would be campaigning for Sanders already, for 2020, except he’s maybe too old.

    Warren will be my favorite, based on what looks possible right now. She could have whipped Trump’s ass easily, because Trump couldn’t have campaigned on her being “crooked”.

    1. Sanders is to old. Just be a Democrat and proud of it. You don’t have to agree with everything. I will get back with you here later.

      1. I can support policies favored by both the D and R parties, and comment on them impartially and truthfully, as best I know how, only by maintaining independent status.

        Once a person identifies with either party, there is an overwhelming incentive to go along to get along as a party member.

        The US versus THEM problem makes it almost impossible to think and speak or write objectively.

        Consider how seldom you hear either a confirmed Democrat or Republican say anything really critical about any policy pursued by his or her party, and how seldom you hear such a person say anything really favorable about a policy pursued by the opposition party.

        There are exceptions of course, but they are very few by comparison to the numbers of people who just stick to the party line in any public conversation.

        And the very nature of US versus THEM issue means that a Democrat will generally tune out a Republican , and vice versa.

        As an independent, non partisan writer, I am morally and ethically free to pursue the truth, or what I believe to be the truth, without having to go along to get along.

        So – Considering environmental issues, the OBJECTIVE evidence concerning the environment is clear , and it’s obvious that the D party in general supports policies that are better for the environment than the R party, and I say so.

        But consider culture, and there simply aren’t any objective standards, there are only the values and opinions of various partisans. It’s entirely possible to argue most cultural questions from either a pro or con point of view, according to party affiliation, and in a million years, nobody will ever be able to say for any OBJECTIVE reason that one cultural standard is really superior to some other standard.

        If you believe in freedom and democracy, you should be able to live as you please, to the extent possible, so long as you are not harming other people, and it’s possible to credibly argue that even if some people ARE harmed by a given cultural practice, the majority is still the majority, and in the last analysis, the arbiter. Otherwise, you ( rhetorical) put yourself in the position of allowing some elite to decide what the rules will be, and the results of THAT decision may not be AT ALL what you want or expect.

        If for instance you are a hard core liberal and want to FORCE a two bit bakery to either close or sell a wedding cake to a gay couple, well, enjoy your righteous indignation, but it might be GOOD to remember that there are thousands of two bit bakeries, not to mention lots of bigger ones, ready and EAGER to sell that cake, and that all actions have consequences.

        If you really want to know why Trump is president, well, if you THINK about the culture war that has been raging in this country for the last half century plus, and WHO and HOW MANY people believe WHAT, you might justifiably conclude that Trump is president in very large part because this country IS a democracy, and because enough people despise the liberal cultural agenda to such an extent they voted for TRUMP, in some cases holding their noses while doing so; or that if they didn’t vote for Trump, they just stayed home, rather than voting for Clinton.

        People either have the right to believe in what they want to, and vote to support politicians who best represent their beliefs, or else they don’t have the right to think for themselves. If you don’t believe they have that right, well then, you believe in some elite element making the rules, and while your favored elite might be in power at any given moment, TOMORROW……… who knows?

        Now as a matter of actual fact, I do personally agree with most of the liberal social agenda, and I have been posting my belief for years that it will prevail, simply because younger people are generally in favor, and older people who are not in favor are dying off at an ever increasing rate.

        But I have also constantly pointed out that political backlash is a VERY real phenomenon, and while I believed Clinton would win, most of the time, and said so,
        I also pointed out that Trump might win, and he did.

        For what it’s worth, I now understand that I underestimated Trump’s chances all along, due to actually being personally biased in favor of the overall D platform, especially the environmental elements of it, and due to hanging out too much in liberal forums, and reading too many liberal papers, etc, and UNDERESTIMATING the actual level of opposition to the overall D party agenda.

        The R’s are right about some things, but they aren’t things that come up much in this forum, so I don’t argue the R case for them here. If someone else brings them up from a D partisan pov, I will point out the R or conservative case.

  39. I have pointed out a number of times why making fun of the people who constitute about half, and maybe more than half, of American society is a colossal mistake when it comes to winning elections.

    Here’s somebody who has gone to the trouble of expressing his ( her? ) opinion in more colorful terms, thanks to Fernando for linking to this in his blog. Otherwise I would probably have missed it.

    It’s an excellent counterpoint to a link that somebody else posted from the opposite pov a few days back.

    http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/11/sneering-response-trumps-victory-reveals-exactly-won/

    Any Democrat or liberal of the Clintonish persausion interested in winning elections would do well to read it.

    Hey guys, even the most backward of older hillbillies and swamp rat rednecks have televisions , and most of them have either cable or satellite these days, and eighty percent of their kids have cell phones with internet. Even Baptist churches have television and internet these days, and there are PLENTY of people who are more happy to repeat what sniffy holier than thou liberalish leaning city slickers have to say about their church, and their morals, and their intellects.

    It doesn’t matter if such a man or woman is in fact both stupid and ignorant. Calling him stupid and ignorant, or backward and superstitious , or worse, just about guarantees that his or her vote will be cast for the opposition.

  44. Just about every important question is so involved, has so many variables to consider, that any answer that can be composed even as a rather longish magazine or news paper article will be woefully lacking in depth, in terms of understanding not only cause and effect but also the pros and cons of any proposed solutions.

    Dennis might be right, and the supply of oil coming to market may diminish only slowly, at maybe one or two percent a year, in which case it seems likely to me that with some luck and pluck, we can turn the corner on the peak oil issue without it resulting in a catastrophic crash. We ought to be able to change our ways fast enough to deal with one to two percent annual drops in oil supply, even considering population growth, once we focus on the problem.

    Or Ron Patterson might be right, and we might be looking at a more or less world wide economic crash and burn future as the result of finite natural resource depletion in general, and oil in particular.

    I find it easy to believe or disbelieve in both scenarios these days.

    And the more I look into any given issue, the more I discover that the more I thought I knew yesterday, the more I realize how little I know, today.

    Most or nearly all the regulars who post comments here are well enough grounded in mathematics to understand the arguments made in this article from The Atlantic regarding very common health care treatments that are sometimes not only useless but are actually more dangerous to the patient than the problem being treated.

    It’s a sad but true observation that a well read layman is often better informed about a given health care option than his physician.

    It behooves us as older guys ( and maybe a few women? ) to read this and a lot of other in depth articles before deciding on our health care options.

    Sure it’s a long article, but the amount of time it takes to read and digest the contents of such articles is entirely trivial in relation to the cost of an unnecessary procedure in time OR money, not to mention possibly being in WORSE condition after having the procedure.

    BEWARE the establishment, no matter WHICH establishment. Vhttps://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/02/when-evidence-says-no-but-doctors-say-yes/517368/

    We live in a DARWINIAN world , and all establishments are best regarded as competing life forms that can be counted on, as a general rule, to put their own survival and expansion ahead of all other considerations.

    AFTER that, any given establishment might or might not work for goals we consider worthy.

  45. Here’s a question for anybody who has an answer, even a wild guess.

    Out of the hundreds of articles you can easily find every year touting some new technology, about how many are actually put into commercial use within say ten years?

    My own guess is not more than one out of a hundred but that’s no more and no less than a wild guess.

    Nevertheless, a few new technologies are put to use every year, and the total number of new technologies that are commercialized annually may reach into the hundreds.

    Here’s one that appears to have an excellent shot at commercial success, assuming it works well.

    https://phys.org/news/2017-02-polymer-additive-revolutionize-plastics-recycling.html

    There wouldn’t be much needed in the line of new machinery or equipment if this works, and the amount of feedstock available is enormous. The market for a tough new plastic that’s cheaper than virgin is also enormous, even if it can’t be used as food containers.

  46. http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/24/14716104/socialism-bernie-sanders-cpac

    The future belongs to the D party, if the people running it are willing to give up their Republican Lite ways and go back to being Democrats, regardless of what CPAC and Trumpsters do.

    “After all, “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders won more votes from those under 30 than any other presidential candidate in primary history. Donald Trump is wildly unpopular with people under 30 (they disapprove of his job performance by a 67-25 margin, according to Pew), and millennials will soon be the country’s biggest voting bloc. And polls show that, for the first time ever, young people are more supportive of “socialism” than “capitalism.”

    1. And this as well, about population trends:
      http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/25/millennials-overtake-baby-boomers/

      The oldest boomers are now well past seventy, and the boomer generation is on it’s way out. Most of the real HARD core social conservatives are staring at the grave. It’s not well publicized, but a hell of a lot of churches have very few members left these days, compared to a generation or two generations back.

      Welfare state services such as home health care and food stamps have displaced so much of the essential work formerly done by churches that the NEED for them has diminished to the point the members no longer do most of the social work that was the real glue that held them together.

      My own family and community is a representative microcosm. Not only has the birth rate dropped well below replacement among the women under about fifty or so; the percentage of parents who take their kids to church on a regular basis has fallen by at least two thirds, and even here in the heart of the Bible Belt, regular church attendance was never more than about two thirds at the most.

      There AREN’T any people around who believe the world is only six thousand years old to my knowledge, that’s a joke. Ninety nine percent of the membership of the Baptist churches have never even HEARD of Bishop Usher.Ask an old Baptist about Creation, and you can hear the story right out of the KJB, but then ask him how long a day is to GOD, and he will tell you that neither he nor anybody else knows, except that it’s as long as God wants it to be , even a billion years. I have never heard any body local deny the existence of dinosaurs, or that they must have all been gone a LONG time previous to the related Flood .

      All that sort of dogma is now and has been long accepted as allegory, except by the very oldest remaining church members, although if you corner one, and demand a yes or no answer about the veracity of these stories, he will say they are true, the same way a Clinton or Trump partisan insists his girl or guy is morally upright, while knowing otherwise.

      Hardly anybody bats an eye at interracial families any more, and nobody has broken in line ahead of a black person in my community in my presence within the last twenty years, and nobody has given a hoot about sharing restrooms and restaurants for twice at least longer than that. Kids that grew up in the sixties or later are seldom serious racists in my personal experience. The last of that sort among people I know personally are now mostly so old they seldom leave home to go anywhere except to the doctor or to a funeral.

      None of this is to say that the culture war is over, but rather that the tide of it has been running in favor of the Democrats for some years now, and that it will be running stronger from here on out.

      Some years ago, the KKK held a rally close by. It was eventually reported in the national media, but it was such a secretive affair that hardly ANYBODY local even knew it had been held until long afterward. Not a soul I know knew about it until it was in the papers later. The location was apparently selected on the basis of the remotely located farm where it was held being owned by somebody who supported the KKK, but that somebody has been dead for thirty years or longer now.

      I remain convinced, barring unfortunate accidents, that this country will have a government that looks more and more like a typical Western European government as the years pass, the next four years excepted. And at the rate he’s going, Trump might not last four years.

  47. My little buddy HB may not want to hear it, but the Democratic Party is as much in turmoil TODAY as the Republican Party was previous to the last election, with the R membership so THOROUGHLY pissed at the party establishment that it nominated Trump, against the wishes of almost every last party official higher than dog catcher.

    http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/320553-ellison-holds-edge-in-dnc-race

    The Clinton /Obama camp might hold, today, but if so, that hold won’t last much longer.

    The handwriting is on the wall, long term. Either the D’s get back to their true roots SOON, or we will continue to have an R party and an R Lite party, and that situation won’t last very long, historically.

    Either or both parties might split in that case, but my personal belief is that if the D’s go back to being real D’s , the two party paradigm will last for at least another generation or two.

    It took the R’s a long time and a lot of work, but they got control by working at the local and state level IN ORDER to take control at the national level.

    The D’s are now looking at repeating that job, but it won’t likely be as tough a job for them, with the demographic trends all being in their favor, and the R camp working hard to make things easy for the elite and tougher for the working classes.

    There must be fifty million younger people at least who are going to be very pissed indeed when they realize Trump apparently intends to keep pot illegal.But of course the black market operators and cops and jailers and criminal lawyers will all be in favor, because more work for them means more money, more security, more power and status.

    The old definition of a newly minted conservative, a liberal who has just been mugged, is about to be turned on it’s head, with millions of R voters fixing to find out it’s the R party poking it’s unwanted nose into their personal business in this respect.

  51. https://phys.org/news/2017-02-wsu-advances-energy-oil-gas.html

    The chemistry is over my head, but the implications are easily understood- less pollution, more net energy.

    One line in particular caught my attention. The article says we may be flaring as much as 25 percent of total methane AKA natural gas production here in the USA.

    That’s a hell of a lot, and while capturing it all is probably out of the question, we ought to be saving more of it for useful purposes.

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