102 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, November 29, 2017”

  1. Due to Ron’s post on ‘Carrying Capacity, Overshoot and Species Extinction’, I have a hunch that this non petroleum thread will have a lower than average number of comments, so I thought I’d add at least one… 😉

  2. Well, Tesla has now shown off the all-electric semi (with overwhelming economics), and also a toy for the rich for the purpose of “[giving] a hardcore smackdown to gas-powered cars”. Let’s see if this affects the mentality of the West African plains apes who want shiny things, and gets them to want to stop burning fossil fuels…

    1. Hi Nathaniel,

      I think maybe you get it, but I can’t be sure reading your comment.

      Musk understands technology , and he also understands PEOPLE.

      If you want to sell new technologies to consumers, and you NECESSARILY have to start out with low sales volumes, you don’t have any choice other than to start the ball rolling with a super premium package that can be sold on the basis of bragging rights.

      Low volume means high costs. There’s simply no way around it, except to build up the volume, anyway possible.

      Whatever Tesla spends on the super sports car will be recovered a dozen times over in free advertising for the next twenty or thirty years.

      The automotive press has run thousands of articles already about the new Ford supercar, including the history of the LAST Ford super car, which dates back fifty years or more.

      The icing on the Tesla super car cake will be that the car will serve as a real world test bed for whatever new tech goes into the building of it.

      The folks who buy them will not be bitch about high maintenance and repair costs, or less than stellar reliability. People who buy supercars expect to pay the price of an ordinary car in maintenance costs alone every time they put ten thousand miles on their shiny new status symbol.

      New cars are as much about status as they are about transportation. Otherwise everybody would be driving a Rambler. Can’t remember the last time I saw one on the road.

  3. Time to dig through the closet, grab the jacket, scarf, mittens, galoshes, and so on. The earth cooling Polar Vortex will return soon.

    1. Considering that it is almost winter already, Alaska looks really warm there! Apparently you still haven’t grasped how the Jet Stream influences the weather have you?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it_B5bnjmm4
      The Arctic Meltdown & Extreme Weather – Jennifer Francis

      Please note: She is talking about Extreme Weather not extreme climate.

      1. You are wasting your time Fred. Charley Chucklehead is just being a jerk.

        1. Yes, 2 X’d out people within a few comments of each other: Bob Frisky and Caelan. Not sure OFM would approve 🙂

          1. Helping You Throw You Into Your Own Safe Space

            I hardly post or lurk here anymore for good reason: There’s little left, cheapened and gutted at it has been by the kind of asinine commentary that I have previously questioned and/or highlighted, a handful of whose owners have since fleed to their safe spaces, yet ‘virtue signaled’ from within them in, while illustrating, the same kind of commentary style/attitude that had Caelan initially ‘throw them in’ by their own hands.

            That’s partly why we’re trashing and likely collapsing our world, by the way: Too much idiocy and wilful ignorance– including from those who should know better.

            Enjoy your little safe spaces while they last, there’s a shifting reality out there, full of shocks a lot worse than little ol’ me. LOL

            1. There are a few here who have shown themselves to be as intolerant and ignorant as those they criticize.

            3. I’ve never seen a criticism of the denier trolls for being intolerant, it’s for being denier trolls of whatever hue, and it would be pretty difficult to be as ignorant as some of them (note ignorance means not knowing stuff, not being stupid, most of the deniers don’t even try to find out before they comment).

            4. The only comment by JN2 so far and guess who gets mentioned in it… Can you make this stuff up?

              You could write a short standup comedy routine segment about it, maybe enlisting someone along the lines of the late George Carlin to buff it up a little and deliver it live…

              “Ok, so who’s on an internet forum? Show of hands? (hands go up)…

              Ok, that’s most of you…

              Ever get those guys who press that ignore button on you and then announce it, like sometimes it’s their only comment in the entire threads?
              (audience maybe laughs/claps and nods their heads, etc….)

              Or sometimes, while they’re busy ignoring you, they comment on your comments that others have quoted and commented on? (audience…)

              …Wow… ya… right…

              …So when they sleep, do you think they have dreams of ignoring you?

              Maybe they feel especially well-rested when they wake up the next day…

              And can’t wait to get back on the forum and ignore you some more…”

      2. I have an incredible grasp on how jet streams influence the weather. It’s you who gets uncomfortable whenever well below normal cold temperatures are mentioned.

        2. You are incorrectly interpretting discomfort from boredom as something else.

          1. For one, the two images aren’t even mapping the same thing. Second, your map covers November 30-December 4 while mine is December 7-13. Yours shows the highest temperatures predicted during your time period and mine shows the expected magnitude of climate change relative to normal for the time period.

            1. Good job Bob! It appears you understand the difference between temperature and temperature anomaly, however you seem to have erroneously referred to temperature anomaly as “climate change”, as well as you have erroneously stated that yours shows the expected magnitude; it does not- it shows the expected probability. See it’s right there on the map- “Temperature Probability”. I must admit I had my doubts that you understood the distinction between temperature and temperature anomaly. Now if we can just get you to understand the distinction between magnitude and probability we’ll be making progress, eh Bob? Now, five day forecast temperatures from Florida to Kentucky appear to be anywhere from approx 68 to 86 *F. The 10 day forecast isn’t much different. Why do you feel it is necessary to advise residents there to “dig through the closet, grab the jacket, scarf, mittens, galoshes, and so on”? Do you wear a scarf and mittens when it’s 68*F? I think that if you did you’d look pretty fucking stupid. However, I sense that looking pretty fucking stupid is not something that weights heavily on your mind. And I use that term loosely.

              http://pamola.um.maine.edu/fcst_frames/GFS-025deg/5-day/GFS-025deg_ARC-LEA_T2_max_5-day.png

            2. Surely the top map shows the probability of a positive or negative anomoly only, it says nothing about the size of the anomoly or base temperature. As for the chart below I have absolutely no idea what that is saying except it’s propoganda from a fossil fuel booster twttier feed. Maybe Bob can enlighten us, it would be less tedious than his normal repetitive, inane schtick.

    3. And now there are some other thoughts out there about the upcoming United States deep freeze.

      https://twitter.com/Met_khinz/status/935968102550003712

      Interesting scenario this PM with data suggesting possible Western Pacific tropical activity, which is also supported with favorable upward motion ahead. *IF* this would materialize and recurve it would potentially make the cold pattern ahead even colder in the US #NatGas #OOTT

        1. Very high anomalies in the Arctic, Greenland might actually see some melt. A lot of the cold air has been shoved our way in Western Europe and looks likely to stay for a few weeks.

        2. Here are temperature deviation data for 9 northern North American locations for Nov. 2017 relative to the 1971-2000 averages for those locations:

          Location ……………………………………Temperature Deviation (F)
          Prudhoe Bay, AK ……………………………………………+15.50
          Moosonee, Ontario ………………………………………-3.82
          Nome, AK …………………………………………………..+6.93
          Churchill, Manitoba ………………………………………-3.79
          Iqaluit, Nunavut …………………………………………….+6.57
          Goose Bay, Newfoundland …………………………+1.92
          Yellowknife, Northwest Territories …………………..-3.80
          Sault Ste. Marie, MI ……………………………………..+0.76
          Hibbing, MN ……………………………………………-2.92
          Average ………………………………………………………..+1.93

          Here are temperature deviation data for 9 northern North American locations for Jan-Nov 2017 relative to the 1971-2000 averages for those locations:

          Location ……………………………………..Temperature Deviation (F)
          Prudhoe Bay, AK ……………………………………………..+5.71
          Moosonee, Ontario ……………………………………….+2.62
          Nome, AK …………………………………………………….+1.19
          Churchill, Manitoba ………………………………………..+2.61
          Iqaluit, Nunavut ………………………………………………+2.34
          Goose Bay, Newfoundland ……………………………+1.23
          Yellowknife, Northwest Territories ……………………..+2.92
          Sault Ste. Marie, MI ………………………………………..+4.34
          Hibbing, MN ………………………………………………-0.80
          Average …………………………………………………………..+2.46

          For Sault Ste. Marie, it was the 4th warmest fall (Sept-Nov) period on record. The top 5 warmest Sept-Nov periods on record in Sault Ste. Marie are giving in the table below:

          Ranking ………………………..Sept.-Nov. Ave. Temp (F) ……………….Year
          1 …………………………………………..51.39 ……………………………2016
          2 …………………………………………..50.84 ……………………………1931
          3 …………………………………………..50.19 ……………………………2015
          4 …………………………………………..49.14 ……………………………2017
          5 …………………………………………..49.04 ……………………………2011

          For the January-November period, 2017 was the 5th warmest period on record dating back to 1888 for Sault Ste. Marie. Here are the top 5 warmest January-November periods on record:

          Ranking …………………….Jan.-Nov. Ave. Temperature (F) ………….Year
          1 ………………………………………..47.46 ……………………………………2012
          2 ………………………………………..47.36 ……………………………………1998
          3 ………………………………………..47.00 ……………………………………2010
          4 ………………………………………..46.92 ……………………………………2016
          5 ………………………………………..46.36 ……………………………………2017

          1. Thanks for all the info. To really see the significance we need confidence limits or ranges for each site before conclusions can be made.
            At least around here at the edge of the north continental zone, temperatures of seasons and months have a wide range from year to year . So one winter can be well above average and the next well below.
            We know temps are moving upward on average but regions and locations can vary quite a bit from the global average.

    4. Hey Bob, did you notice its getting pretty dark at night.
      That is not what Al Gore promised.
      I’m thinking about asking for my money back.
      Do you have the address, cause I’ve got my self-addressed return post card ready?

      Also, I’m confused by the map.
      It shows Kentucky as a Blue state, and California as Red. I’m pretty sure thats wrong.
      S. Dakota is neutral?

  5. Mac, I thought you’d like this:

    A new plan seeks to promote solar installations in an effort to help revive southwest Virginia’s economy.

    Formed as a result of the 2016 Southwest Virginia Economic Forum funded by a federal grant and the U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative, the Solar Workgroup of Southwest Virginia Wednesday outlined its roadmap for putting roof-mounted or ground-based solar systems at commercial and non-profit organizations and a handful of academic institutions.

    https://southeastenergynews.com/2017/11/29/virginia-group-seeks-policy-changes-to-boost-solar-in-coal-country/

      1. Solar power has a good foothold in next door North Carolina, and there’s no real reason it shouldn’t become a growth industry here in Virginia.

        Sometimes programs such as this one take root and grow.

        Cheap land in this area, land with an excellent southern to southwestern exposure on hills higher than the surrounding area is plentiful near major highways and transmission lines. We have pretty decent weather too, with lots of sun, not as much as the Southwest, but enough.

        And while the people here, like the people in North Carolina tend to be politically conservative, they are nevertheless very quick to make long term investments in any thing that promises to lower their cost of living over the long term.

        Nothing fits that description better than a nice little personal solar system. A lot of people I know who have money enough to live quite comfortably still burn wood and dry their laundry outside, because they consider it wasteful to do otherwise.

        The fact that a great many of them voted for Trump, etc, hasn’t stopped them from switching to led lights, lol, or replacing their old oil furnaces with shiny new heat pumps when the old furnace needs a major repair.

        Talk to them earnestly, and respectfully, and avoid stepping on their cultural and religious toes UNNECESSARILY , and you can convince them of the merits of sound environmental policies, setting the stage for moving them from the right wing to the middle, politically, and sometimes even all the way over to the D column on election days.

        When I talk to them about water pollution, I never even mention mining. I just stick to talking about piss poor fishing, and the cost of treating the water so it’s safe to drink.

        They aren’t so stupid they can’t figure out WHY they aren’t catching fish, and WHY their town needs a bigger more expensive water treatment plant.

        Handling the issue this way predisposes them to think of the river as THEIR water. And it IS, logically and morally.

        And while it’s not necessarily theirs LEGALLY, they have the power to make sure OTHER people who don’t own it aren’t allowed to pollute it.

        They’re very much like everybody else. If they once understand a little federal or state money is headed their way, they’re guaranteed to be ready with their own rationalized arguments about why it’s ok and justified in their case but bum welfare in all other cases, lol.

        Winning the environmental battle depends on winning the cultural battle.

        People decide who their friends and allies are, and who their enemies are, on the basis of a few very simple rules. If they think the owner of a coal mine is their friend, because the mine provides jobs, well then, they have a most amazing ability to overlook the fact that the river is dirty, the water undrinkable, and the fish all gone. They can even overlook the fact that old Uncle Joe spent his last years wheezing and sucking on an oxygen mask because he worked in a mine.

        Approach them as a fellow fisherman and tax payer, and you can make allies of them. They don’t REALLY give a shit about coal, because hardly any of them outside the smaller communities where the mines are located actually works in a mine, or for a company servicing the coal industry.

        Plenty of them are well enough educated to understand that in some cases, it takes only a little new competition to crash the price of a commodity such as coal or oil or even a commodity food such as eggs or apples.

        If we let the bau crowd, the R types, control the debate, and frame it in terms of their rights and freedoms, and make the case that them there low life socialist commie dimmerkrats er out to take away their jobs and their property rights, and force ’em onto welfare, well, they have a most amazing ability to overlook the fact that neither they nor anybody they actually know personally still works in a fucking coal mine, or for a company that services the coal industry. They come to see the Koch brothers and the Trumps as their friends, and environmentalists, and therefore Democrats as their enemies, and once people make up their minds about who their friends and enemies are………… they are very reluctant to change them.

        A key rule is that you don’t attack your potential new allies’ and friends’ prejudices and predispositions frontally. You just point quietly out the advantages associated with the positions you wish your new ally to adopt, and allow him ( or her ) to figure out for himself which side his bread is buttered on.

        Tell a man his PERCEIVED ( or real ) friends are fucking him over, and his natural reaction is to identify YOU as an enemy, a person not to be trusted.

        You can take it to the bank that any man who owns a fishing rod is already more than halfway home when it comes to believing in clean water laws, and is ready at least in theory and very often in fact to decide that the coal industry is his enemy, so long as he has not already aligned himself culturally with the right wing backers of coal.

        Even then you can slip SOME sense into his head, using a nice soft cloth rather than a hammer, enough that he will be a little more likely to stay home rather than vote for Trump and associates next election. 😉

        It goes without saying that everything I have said applies equally to how people who are middle of the road or left leaning react under similar circumstances.

        Show a man that in the REAL WORLD that ample supplies of gas result in the price of coal crashing, with the happy result that his electricity bill is lower than it would be otherwise, and he’s not apt to spill any tears for the coal industry.

        Show him that wind and solar power ACTUALLY result in his electricity bill being less than it would OTHERWISE, and he will be strongly predisposed to think kindly of the wind and solar power industries, and is thus predisposed to vote with environmentalists …….. meaning with the D’s.

        And just about every last one of us here DOES understand that in actuality, wind and solar power mean electricity cost us less already, on average.

        Almost every body is smart enough to understand that EVENTUALLY coal, oil, and gas MUST come up in short supply, and be very expensive, due to depletion, and that it is thus in their long term interest to substitute some wind and solar power for fossil fuels, thereby EXTENDING the finite life of our one time gift of nature supply of these fuels. Talk about just about anybody quietly and respectfully about his own enlightened best interests, without preaching, without arousing his hackles by arousing his fears, and he will often make up his mind that the things you have mentioned are more important to him than the things the political opposition is pushing on him.

        You don’t LEAD political converts to the waters of political righteousness TO the water. You just help them understand WHERE the water is, in general terms, , and they WILL find it for themselves, and as a result, they’re thereafter strongly predisposed to be YOUR friend, rather than a friend of the Koch brothers and the R’s……… if you’re an environmentalist, lol.

        I’m having a lot of fun gradually bringing around one of my relatives to supporting the electric car industry. Three or four years ago, he was dead sure electric cars would always be a joke, but a little while back I heard him telling another doubter how he watched a supposedly anemic electric car outrun a new hot rod Corvette at the drag strip, and that the guy driving the electric didn’t even leave a hundred bucks worth of rubber on the asphalt in the doing of it.Furthermore he went over and took a good look at the car, a Tesla S of course, and told his doubting friend there’s room enough in the so called frunk to get naked, lol.

        He LIKES to be right about things, and tell his other friends about how they are behind the times, lol.

        He’s an old man, but he votes, and he has lived thru the transition from the tail end of farming with draft animals to the dawn of the electrified transportation age, and he now believes that electric cars will be cheap enough in another five or ten years to take over the new car market.

        Ask him about how he got to own a million dollar farm that he doesn’t even farm or rent out, at least not for the last twenty years or so, and he will just laugh about the farmer’s welfare loan at three percent, less than the rate of inflation most years, lol, that enabled him to buy it back when he was a younger guy.

        He’s a Trump voter, still yet, but he’s not opposed to subsidies, when they benefit HIM, and he understands that the more electric cars there are on the road, the cheaper HE will be able to buy gasoline and diesel fuel, lol.

        So….. if electric car industry subsidies were decided by referendum, he would vote for them.

        It’s all about the CULTURE WAR , folks, although some of us prefer to frame the discussion in other terms. Those other terms can generally be reduced to cultural terms.

        If you want to win, show your enemies what you have to OFFER them, rather than attacking them and making fun of them.

        1. Stupid is as stupid does

          ” I’m going to vote against my best interest, because you don’t want me too ”

          Senate GOP tax bill hurts the poor more than originally thought, CBO finds

          The Senate Republican tax plan gives substantial tax cuts and benefits to Americans earning more than $100,000 a year, while the nation’s poorest would be worse off, according to a report released Sunday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

          Republicans are aiming to have the full Senate vote on the tax plan as early as this week, but the new CBO analysis showing large, harmful effects on the poor may complicate those plans. The CBO also said the bill would add $1.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, a potential problem for Republican lawmakers worried about America’s growing debt.

          https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/26/senate-gop-tax-bill-hurts-the-poor-more-than-originally-thought-cbo-finds/?utm_term=.3aa076423ebb

            1. I’m not sure they all hate the poor. I think it’s more like they need to have the poor for their own wealth. It’s just modern day slavery. One of the means of doing this is though the ignorance of religion. There is no rational for religion to be in the educational system or running it and should be outlawed. It poison to the mind.

            4. Wealth and status tend to correlate with reproductive success, so showing off you wealth just naturally feels good, even if the status symbols are not intrinsically desirable. The point is to visibly differentiate yourself.

              Of course, people swear that luxury goods are better. I’ve heard people swear up and down that smoking $50 Cuban cigars is a wonderful experience. Makes me cough and feel woozy.

              Peope also ignore the fact that $100 bottles of red wine are basically undrinkable crap that tastes like sour persimmons. Polyphenols are nasty. The monkeys in my mother-in-law’s persimmon tree know better, and spit the fruit out if it’s not ripe. But monkeys don’t associate eating sour persimmons with reproductive success, they’re just hungry.

              Archaeologists can easily judge the status of graves from Germania Superior (now Southwest Germany) because rich people were buried with their mulled wine heating and filtering apparatus. It was an imported Italian luxury.

              Nowadays houseproud Germans show off their fancy Italian coffee machines, and Americans sashay around with paper cups from Starbucks bearing pseudo-Italian names like latte grande or whatever. It’s interesting how little things have changed since Caesar’s times, and how desperate people are to demonstrate their status.

  6. Arctic Sea Ice Hits Record Lows Off Alaska

    As we enter December, the Chukchi and Bering Seas, which border Alaska on its western and northern sides, have unprecedented areas of open water and the least amount of ice ever recorded there.

    “Certainly we’ve never seen anything quite like this before,” said Mark Serreze, the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

    https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30112017/arctic-sea-ice-extent-record-chukchi-bering-sea-alaska-ocean

    1. But, but, didn’t Javier assure us that Arctic sea ice extent was increasing in both area and volume?! Mark Serreze must be mistaken! After all what does he know about this topic?!
      He’s only the the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center. People with Political science degrees like Bjorn Lomborg are so much more qualified than Mark Serreze to opine on such matters…

      http://cires.colorado.edu/council-fellows/mark-serreze

      Research Interests
      I am an Arctic climate scientist and Director of the CIRES National Snow and Ice Data Center. Over the past two decades, my research has focused on making sense of the profound changes unfolding in the North—shrinking sea ice, rapidly rising temperatures—thawing permafrost—and what they mean not just for the Arctic’s future but for the rest of the planet. I am also very active in science outreach and education. Today, more than ever, it is important that scientists reach out and make science more accessible and relevant to society.

      1. Fred – maybe time for us all to move on from Javier, for the good of all our psyches.

        1. Did I miss something? Is Javier really gone? If so, good riddance.

          1. IS Javier gone? I missed it if it’s true.

            I wouldn’t mind seeing Caelan quit, because he never has anything new to say.

            A troll such as Bob Frisky is good for a laugh. Sometimes I think he’s spoofing, poking fun at those who deny reality, by posting maps than show more of the country as hotter than normal while talking about the colder parts, lol.

            Now Javier gives even ME a run for the money in posting lots of comments, but I don’t personally want to see him gone, because I have learned more about climate from reading the rebuttals to his comments than I could ever have learned in an equal amount of time otherwise, lol.

            I don’t even pretend to know more about climate than any well informed layman, so there’s plenty for me to learn. Javier keeps the rest of you guys busy posting stuff that’s gold to me, and he provides many an example, ready and handy , for me to use later in explaining to my own hoped for future readers how and why it is that numerous otherwise reasonably well informed people don’t believe in forced climate change.

            1. I’m sure he’ll flare up again, like a wild pack of hemorrhoids.

            2. I have already more or less quit here, Glen, and happily leave you forevermore to your windbagging. That’s part of what’s new for me– greener pastures and time better spent…

              “I enjoy making a fool of myself in public jousting with Caelan…” ~ OFM/Glen McMillian

              Ahhh…

      1. It appears Flynn is prepared to testify that Donald Trump asked him to contact the Russians. Kushner will get rolled up in this next IMHO. He doesn’t look to me like a guy who can cowboy up and do time to protect his crew. He looks to me like someone who could be made to cry rather easily. He’ll flip to save his ass. I think Flynn flipped to save his son.

        1. I am a little worried that it will turn out that the illegal collusion with Russia to manipulate the election was actually ordered by Kushner and not by Donald. 🙁

  9. Solar PV on a fast rise in the US lately. Almost doubled in 2016 and still going strong in 2017. Charts in the article are well above a linear rise rate. With over 1.5 million solar installations across the country the distributed grid is coming to life.

    In 2016, Solar installed 39% of all new electric generating capacity, topping all other technologies for the first time. Solar’s increasing competitiveness against other technologies has allowed it to quickly increase its share of total U.S. electrical generation- from just 0.1% in 2010 to 1.4% today. By 2020 solar should surpass 3% of total generation is expected to hit 5% by 2022.

    https://seia.org/solar-industry-data

  11. Does anybody here know just how fast a typical meaning ordinary or everyday lithium ion cell can be recharged if it can be kept cool, without significantly shortening it’s life?

    My every day power tools take pretty decent charge in fifteen or twenty minutes, getting warm but not hot to the touch. I don’t want to charge them faster, I’m just wondering how fast such cells CAN be charged, if they can be kept cool while doing it.

    Will new tech be necessary to get the charging time down further, or will better designed cooling systems be all that’s needed ?

    Vespa’s coming out with an electric scooter soon.

    https://chargedevs.com/newswire/vespa-electric-scooter-to-arrive-in-2018-italian-streets-will-never-be-the-same/

    Too bad Vespa’s are so pricey. I can buy a used Honda Metropolitan for as little as five hundred bucks that will probably run thirty thousand miles needing nothing more than new tires and an pint of fresh oil once in a while.They get up to and over a hundred mpg, depending on how hard you push them.

    One of my neighbors who weighs well over three hundred pounds rides his Metropolitan as much as eighty to hundred miles a day during the summer, just for the fun of it, just killing time, day after day,from spring to fall. I saw him over twenty miles from home on it today. He bought it well used, and he’s put over twenty thousand miles on it. Always starts at the touch of the key, and runs noticeably quieter than most cars.

    1. Re: Charge rates – A rule a thumb is not to exceed 1C. For Long Life < .5C is better.
      But it depends on cell design, cooling, etc. You can Charge upto 80% at Much Faster rates
      WHEN you need to. A Level 2 Car charger (40A Breaker 240V) is 7Kwh.
      If you have time … like all night – charge at Level 1 rates.
      Level 3 or DCFC – aka. DC Fast Charge is rare yet except at Tesla Superchargers.
      http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/what_is_the_c_rate

    1. ROTFLMAO!!! Oh my fucking god!!! Ty Cobb, Trump’s lawyer just released a statement:

      “Nothing about the guilty plea or the charge implicates anyone other than Mr. Flynn.”

      The entire statement, (see link below) was written in ‘Comic Sans’… When an attorney chooses to write something in ‘Comic Sans’, you know things are only going to be heading down hill from there on.

      https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/936726050133995521/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fs.yimg.com%2Fos%2Fyc%2Fhtml%2Fembed-iframe-min.2d7621e2.html

    1. The average size is increasing as well from around 40 to 50 before 2000 and now consistently above 100. Does that reflect changing land use or drought areas moving north into larger forests (or something else)?

      1. “Does that reflect changing land use or drought areas moving north into larger forests (or something else)?”

        I’m speculating, pure and simple, but I do pay attention to news about fires and talk to local firefighters quite often. Some of them habitually hang out at the nearest country store which serves as our local version of a Starbucks. It’s only a quarter of a mile from there to the substation.

        There are more and better roads into more and more places and more people living in fire prone areas, which would at first glance leads to the conclusion that more and more fires should be happening. But the flip side of this is that it’s also a hell of a lot easier than it used to be to put such a fire out before it’s large enough to be included in the sort of statistics discussed in the link given.

        We have had a dozen or so small fires in my immediate area this year, but none of them consumed more than a fraction of an acre before somebody with a cell phone notified the fire department. We have substations now, so that our local volunteer fired department is on the job in less than half the time it took ten years ago. I’m thinking the biggest fire our local guys dealt with burned only a little over two acres.

        Just a couple of guys with one truck can put out a fire easily if they get there quick enough. Half an hour later…….. you may need everybody within driving distance.

        Once the countryside is crisscrossed with roads and driveways and farm lanes too, these serve as ready made fire breaks which often make it possible to contain a fire that would otherwise get out of hand very quickly.

        I’m guessing that the bigger fires these days are mostly happening in places where it still takes an hour or more to get fire crews on the actual scene, and by then…….. they’ve spread quite a bit, and the bigger a fire gets, the faster it can spread, because sometimes the updrafts hoist burning leaves well up into the air and drop them as much as two or three hundred feet away, maybe even farther sometimes.

        I’m not a fireman, but I have some training in the field, I’ve helped out lots of times, and I’ve seen a hot ember fall fifty yards from an existing fire and start a new one myself.

        It’s interesting to note that farmers are often well equipped to fight small fires using their own equipment. My own house is standing because our next door neighbor saw smoke once back in the days before we even had a telephone, never mind a capable local fire department, and drove his tractor and orchard sprayer over right away and put the fire out with it. The house would have burned to the ground for sure otherwise. We had a similar machine, but it wasn’t loaded with water and ready to go. His was, luckily.

        I’m hoping to get a newer truck next year, and the plan is to convert my existing old four by four into an ersatz brush truck with a two hundred gallon tank , a ten horsepower pump, and a few tools. I already have a couple of hundred feet of the right kind of hose, the pump, and the hand tools, and an elevated water storage tank in place that can be used to load it in five minutes or less. It can be left loaded anytime there’s no danger of it freezing up. Can’t afford a heated garage for it. Total cost will be less than fifteen hundred bucks including the value of the old truck,pump and all. It will be used maybe once a year on average AS a fire truck. Anybody who knows me well will know where the key is, lol, and operating it will be as simple as driving it and starting the pump motor.

        The local cops have given me to understand that so long is it’s not involved in an accident on a public road, it will be invisible at the scene of a fire within four or five miles of my farm, lol. Farm trucks can be driven on the roads just like tractors in Virginia, no registration required.

        Local resilience is the name of the game.

      2. IMHO it’s drier forests. Forest fire behaviour is primarily influenced by weather, fuel type/moisture content and topography. There’s just a lot of fuel ready to burn.

        Has Climate Change Intensified 2017’s Western Wildfires?
        https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/09/why-is-2017-so-bad-for-wildfires-climate-change/539130/

        Why Big, Intense Wildfires Are the New Normal

        https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/08/130827-wildfires-yosemite-fire-firefighters-vegetation-hotshots-california-drought/

        California has had a record year- first place. As did BC in Canada. USA overall is in second place so far in 2017. First place was 2015.

        1. Unusually dry forests and excessive fuel loads are indeed major factors.

          I should have mentioned them myself. We will be dealing with the consequences of Smokey Bear fire suppression policies for another forty or fifty years.

          Fire is a natural part of the landscape. Suppress it long enough, and you set yourself up for super hot super hard to control fires.

          But the length of time it takes to get a fire crew on site is still the single most critical factor, as far as I can see, in determining whether a fire burns as little as a fraction of an acre……… or hundreds or even thousands of acres.

          Hell, I’ve put out a potentially catastrophic fire myself with a garden hose…… after accidentally starting in myself, in my own outside work shop area.

          It didn’t take me very long to learn to turn down a welding job on a haybaler sitting in a hay field, lol.

          1. While it is true that decades of fire suppression has given opportunity for fuel loads to grow, it is also worth remembering that decades of logging has removed fuel from the fire habitat. I’m not sure how the magnitudes of those two factors equate.
            I do agree with your point- putting out fires while they’re small provides opportunity for the fuel to grow, and when it does eventually become ignited it can really rip.
            The rural urban interface has also increased- that is all the suburban homes in the forest with mature spruce right up to the cedar shakes and the stack of firewood on the porch. I’ve also seem homes with a good fire break around them go up in flames when a hot ember lands on a combustible roof. A metal roof is the way to go, and a good fire break.

            1. I totally agree.

              And metal roofs are actually the most environmentally friendly roof you can have, in my estimation.

              It’s true that metals are environmentally expensive, but a good quality metal roof, properly maintained, will outlast any other material, possibly excepting slate or something equally, and outrageously, expensive as slate.

              I have some that are sixty years old now, and all the maintenance they have ever had consists of a couple of coats of paint with powdered aluminum in it. They’re good to go another sixty years, easily. They might last centuries, if kept painted.

              The original galvanizing does eventually all corrode away of course, unless it’s protected from acid rain, tree sap, rotting leaves on the roof, etc.

  15. Trumpster SEZ that the more things change, the more they stay the same is the way it is, mostly…….

    But sometimes things do change in fundamentally important ways.

    The people who are most interested in the LONG TERM success of their political party, both D’s and R’s, are losing no time in calling for the resignation of any of their members who have been credibly accused of harrassing women and girls, on or off the job.

    https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ruben-kihuen-sexual-harassment_us_5a220239e4b03c44072db128
    These people understand that there has been a sea change in American politics, and that before long, younger women are going to be electing the politicians of THEIR choice. The older women who take various conservative political positions to heart are dying off pretty fast now, and enough of them will be gone before long that there won’t be enough women voting with the men to elect macho male candidates,R or D.

    From TIME

    “Young women are driving the change. In the 25-34 age group, 37.5% of women have a bachelor’s degree or higher, while only 29.5% of men do. (Rates of college attainment for men and women in this age group are increasing roughly equally.) But for the over-65 crowd, only 20.3% of women have such degrees, compared to 30.6% of men.”

    Furthermore women are statistically more apt to major in fields that have high social impacts, such as law, medicine, education etc than men who are more apt to major in fields such as engineering. So they will be having a disproportionately large impact even beyond the advantages they are gaining in other respects.

    Back when I was young, I never met a single older woman who had a boy toy, as best I can remember, but lots of men had girl toys, and still do, so far as that goes.

    Now I know of at least three fortyish and up women in the immediate neighborhood who have their own noticeably younger boy toy. As Sharon Stone put it in the movie, these women are fucking their boy toys, they’re not dating them.

    One of them runs a local business and her toy hangs around pretending to work there, and sometimes he actually does, a few hours.I know he’s short of work and money, and asked her if he would work for me a day once in a while. She laughed, contemptuously, and said that as far as work is concerned, he’s totally worthless. She’s a decent, morally upstanding woman, well respected except by the old church going types, and so far as I’m concerned, she’s as entitled to a boy toy as a man is a girl toy. It’s her business, and the boy’s. He’s well into his twenties.

    1. “What is your weakness ?”

      I’m not telling, but my strength is that I hate advertising. I hate being manipulated and lied too. About 14 months ago I signned up to a Facebook account for the first time. It matched up my email address with others that have my email address in their address book. It then directed me to their Facebook page. Where I was surprised and saw some unbelievable political hate of people I knew. I never gave Facebook any addition information about myself other than to sign up and have never returned to the site. I also had to unsubscribe from Facebook in my email account because it was massively abusive trying to suck me back in.

      We should all be thankful there is no advertising here at Peak Oil Barrel

    1. Saleh just died. Gonna get messier.

      Also, turns out the Saudis can’t intercept missiles from Yemen.

  19. I saw somebody with a tee shirt printed with a large M A G A in town yesterday. It was the small print that made my day. You had to be pretty close to read the small print.

    It read Mueller Ain’t Going Away.

    Still laughing!

  20. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-tweet-obstructionof-justice_us_5a232a53e4b03350e0b7295b

    “President Donald Trump gloated in a tweet Saturday that he fired Michael Flynn because he knew he lied to the FBI. If that was the case, Trump’s attempt to stop former FBI head James Comey’s investigation of Flynn could constitute obstruction of justice, legal experts warned.

    The tweet was apparently triggering enough concern that the president’s personal attorney John Dowd came forward late Saturday to tell ABC News that he had actually written the tweet, which he called “sloppy.” The Washington Post also reported that two unnamed sources told the newspaper that Dowd was responsible for the message. The White House hasn’t commented.”

    Shades of Nixon’s secretary!

    Now we’re supposed to be dumb enough to believe that a lawyer who represents the president of the USA is stupid enough to compose and publish THIS sort of bullshit?

    If he didn’t tweet it himself, then Trump is still an idiot for having a lawyer dumb enough to do it.

    He’s like a stupid kid caught red handed by the cops, changing his story from one day to the next, depending on what new evidence the cops show him, constantly contradicting himself.

  21. The other way to burn down forests.

    the use of wood for energy purposes increased by about 75 million cubic meters between 2010 and 2015 — an uptick of 21 percent.

    But they claim that the use of wood waste from the forest industry has gone up by only 10 percent, whereas the use of wood coming directly from the forest has increased by 24 percent.

    http://www.dw.com/en/burning-wood-under-fire-are-forests-going-up-our-chimneys/a-41586050
    Some countries – including the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark – have built new wood-fired plants or converted coal-fired plants to produce electricity from burning wood.

    Drax power station in North Yorkshire, England, is the UK’s biggest power plant and provides about 7 percent of the country’s electricity. The company boasts that it generates 70 percent of its electricity from compressed wood pellets rather than coal. But part of their wood source comes from the US.

    “The USA is now the main supplier of wood pellets to Europe,” US and Dutch researchers write in the journal Biofpr – Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefining.

    European pellet consumption reached 7.3 million tons in 2015, with about 4.6 million tons being imported from the southeastern US.

    1. I don’t have links handy, but looking at the bare ground left behind for miles at a time where wood has been harvested to be burned on the industrial scale is enough to make a grown man cry.

      And I can’t believe burning wood this way is a good deal for ANYBODY, excepting those people directly involved as sellers and workers harvesting and hauling it.

      Considering the amount of oil and coal burnt in the harvesting and hauling of wood from my area across the Atlantic, grinding it, drying it, pelletizing it, and so forth, it seems to me that the people buying the electricity generated by burning it would be several times better off burning coal and spending the money saved on efficiency and conservation measures.

      The same argument applies to the use of moonshine in gasoline of course. Ethanol is a bad deal all the way around for everybody except the people associated with growing corn and distilling the moonshine. Oil companies don’t like it, mechanics don’t like it, the engineers that design cars don’t like it, and it’s an ecological disaster in the making, if the cards fall wrong and we try to expand the use of it to make up for a shortfall in oil supplies. ( This is not to say growing all the EXTRA corn being used to make it is ok, but rather that growing even MORE to make more has the potential to cause catastrophic environmental problems.

  23. The models are coming into agreement (esp. in medium term) about the AO going very negative. This will dispatch the Polar Vortex straight from the Arctic to chill our bones in the middle latitudes.

    1. Consequently we can see Ice Age cold completely engulfing the east. Maybe this December will wind up being one of the 10 coldest on record? #NatGasFutures

      1. Yawn

        From Mirriam Webster
        Definition of probability
        plural probabilities
        1 : the quality or state of being probable
        2 : something (such as an event or circumstance) that is probable
        3 a (1) : the ratio of the number of outcomes in an exhaustive set of equally likely outcomes that produce a given event to the total number of possible outcomes
        (2) : the chance that a given event will occur
        b : a branch of mathematics concerned with the study of probabilities
        4 : a logical relation between statements such that evidence confirming one confirms the other to some degree

        For more detail
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability

        NAOM

        1. Now on this map these aren’t probabilities. Just a lot of frigid cold working its way down.

      2. So WTF is happening in up there in Alaska?!
        Maybe this December will wind up being one of the 10 warmest on record?

        2. Well, it’s bloody obvious. There is a conspiracy to rotate the USA so that Alaska is in the south, enabling all year round drilling, and fake maps are being produced to hide the rotation.

          NAOM

  24. https://in.reuters.com/article/venezuela-economy/enter-the-petro-venezuela-to-launch-oil-backed-cryptocurrency-idINKBN1DY081

    I’m having a hard time getting my head around WHY people are willing to TRUST crypto currencies, but then I have the SAME problem understanding why they trust dollars or Euros, or whatever. The answer seems to be that as long as the mass delusion that electrons and pieces of paper have enormous intrinsic value lasts, a currency of any sort can last.

    Here’s something more to the point. Suppose Maduro’s regime owns a ship, and loads it with crude, and sends it to some country with a refinery, any country that wants to snub the USA. Suppose the owner of the refinery owns a ship too, and loads his with grain and sends it to Venezuela.

    Is the Yankee navy going to intercept and seize these ships ?

    I don’t see any REAL need for a bank at either end of such a barter. I do understand of course that the USA and other countries have it in their power to harm most countries that wish to defy the embargo of Venezuela by various means, but Putin could care less, and the Chinese leadership has us by the balls rather than the other way around in terms of who owes who a lot of money, lol.

    I don’t see the dollar dominating and controlling world trade too much longer.

    1. Fundamentally, money is worth something because other people will accept it.

      Consider cigarettes in prisons, or the Euro in Montenegro.

      The dollar will continue to have value for an arbitrarily long time because people will continue to accept it, which is largely down to the level of anti-fraud controls on the printed bills and the accounts.

      Bitcoin will continue to have value too but a lot fewer people accept it, and that will remain the case.

      The renminbi will continue to have value, too.

      We had some experience with local currency in my home town: if you have someone charismatic enough, everyone will accept it.

    2. The Chinese do not have the U.S. by the balls in any respect. They aren’t buying our currency because they want to and they can’t just quit. If they don’t give us back our Dollars (by buying bonds or investing), we cannot buy their junk. The U.S. can certainly gift them whole industries. We’ve done it before and seem intent on it for the key industries of the future. But, why worry about the future when we can give it away to buy 5 more years for the past.

  25. http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/04/politics/trump-moore-endorsement-twitter/index.html

    Trump’s basically crapping in his pants, because if he loses control of Congress, his ass is toast, and impeachment is now a given, with the D’s in control… If they get control.

    But he’s RIGHT, in context, in terms of his own problems, to support Moore. That one seat in the Senate may well be the difference that saves his ass.

    But on the other hand……….. The D’s are going to be howling mad, and super motivated, and between now and the midterms, some old folks are going to die, and some young ones, and some young women in particular, are going to register to vote, and while those here who like to make fun of religion in general and Christianity in particular will deny it, at least a few million church going people are going to turn on the R’s as the result of the continuous string of Trump scandals. Not all of them voted for him in the first place. I know some who voted D myself,primarily because they consider the D’s support of an extensive safety net as more important than abortion. So far as that goes, not all Christians consider abortion murder. I know some that don’t.

    There will be enough of these Christians in some states and districts to flip a midterm election to the D column, if it’s a close race, one that comes down to a couple of percent either way.

    So….. bottom line, Trump is doing more to destroy the R party from within than any dozen D’s combined are doing to put it in the doghouse from without.

    And the R party knew this would be the case, which is why it hated his guts before he won the nomination, and STILL hates his guts, although the nature of the political game forces the R party to cooperate with him most of the time, and of course most individual R office holders don’t really give a fuck about the long term fortunes of the R party, in times such as these. If they can see their way to big rewards for themselves, by way of supporting Trump, they will continue to support him.

    My prediction now is that the D’s will win back control of Congress, both houses, because the younger D’s are going to be on the war path in a way that we haven’t seen since the Vietnam era.

  26. Let’s be real about what’s going on in ‘Bama……. and all over the country, for that matter.

    http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/04/politics/trump-moore-endorsement-twitter/index.html“A new CBS News poll released Sunday found that “71 percent of Alabama Republicans say the allegations against Roy Moore are false,” according to a CBS News release. ”

    Am I the only person here who can’t see the parallel between Democrats saying back when that they didn’t believe that Bill Clinton was a serial abuser of women, and that HRC was running a bimbo squad to cover up for him?

    I have had countless D’s get in my face,some ready for physical violence, and tell me that all the allegations about the Clinton’s were ( and remain ) simply R party propaganda, false news, part of the GREAT RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY.

    When it comes to the behavior of naked apes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Those on both ends of the political spectrum are controlled by the same basic programming built into us by the blind engineer we call EVOLUTION.

    The bottom line is that politics in this country, in the last analysis, can best be explained in terms of culture war.

    Both sides tend to believe in forgiveness and rehabilitation if simply overlooking and forgetting isn’t practical ……. unless the sinner in need of forgiveness is a member of the opposition, lol.

    1. Given how mind-controlled Alabama Republicans are, the fact that 29% of them believe that Moore was preying on underage girls is actually revolutionary. I would suspect it’s about 100% of Democrats and independents, and by the way, the number of Republicans drops every year.

      1. Hi Nathaniel,

        I grew up among people hard to easily distinguish from Alabama reevangelical Republicans, and retired back to my childhood turf to retire, and live among them today. I also spent about fifteen years total hanging around in a typical very liberal university environment, including my undergrad days, so I know first sides of the cultural divide first hand.

        You can take this to the bank.

        When twenty nine percent of ANY self identified group of people, such as “Republicans” or “Democrats ” are willing to say in public that one of their own is guilty of such behavior, it’s VERY likely that at least half again to twice that many believe in the guilt of the accused.

        Now that leaves up to forty percent who may actually believe Moore is telling the truth but my own personal guess is that not more than one fourth of the people who SAY they believe in Moore’s innocence actually believe he IS innocent.

        I’ve met a LOT of hard core Democrats over the last twenty years. Maybe one out of ten of them was willing to admit that Bill Clinton was a serial abuser of women, and then only in private,up until the last year or two. That same ten percent were the sort who would publicly say ” I know LBJ is a son of a bitch, but he’s OUR son of a bitch”, lol.

        Since the Clintons are now fading into history, and their day on the national stage is most likely over, a few prominent Democrats, and numerous younger D leaning people, especially Sanders fans, are now willing to say publicly that they do believe that Bill was a serial abuser of women and that Hillary covered up for him.

        I was at a cafeteria table at a local community college during the primary season, and heard half a dozen young women say in essence that one of the biggest reasons they were Sanders supporters was that they had NO RESPECT for HRC as a person, because she covered up for Bill and stuck with him although she had no real reason to do so…… other than to further her own ambitions. I wouldn’t have been welcome at that table unless I was known as a Sanders supporter myself.

        Only dimwits and or true believers can possibly believe either Moore or the Clintons when the subject is the abuse of women.

        I know a dozen at least older men uneducated men, and that many younger ones too,personally, who if asked directly, are willing to swear on their KJB that they believe it is literally the word of God, and not to be questioned, although they do say some parts of it are subject to being interpreted in more than one way.

        But when I engage in casual conversation with these guys, none of them bat an eye at the mention of evolution, or deep time and dinosaurs, and I have NEVER heard one of these two dozen say, without being PRODDED to saying it, that he believes in whales swallowing men and coughing them up alive, or wooden boats big enough to hold two of every kind of living animal, or any thing along such lines.

        ( And yes, I know some other men, but not nearly as many, who will say they believe in such things without being trapped into saying it. )

        Most of the people I have known over the course of my life are ready to lie for the sake of cultural solidarity, or at the least make a serious effort to avoid saying anything harmful to their own cultural group, regardless of the nature of the group, political, racial, ethnic, professional, or whatever.

  27. For those who are seriously interested in nature……….. This article is as much about biology at the cutting edge as it is about philosophy.

    I can’t remember which book it was in, but I distinctly remember reading in one of his own books that E O Wilson says that if he could live his life over again, he would specialize in the micro biome since that’s where the real action is going to be for the next generation or longer.

    We aren’t just men, cows aren’t just cows. We’re living communities of thousands of so called species living together, and some of those species are ESSENTIAL to our very LIFE, and others are essential to our living our lives in what we consider normal fashion. In most cases we don’t even know which ones are which, and we have only the faintest ideas about how WE all interact, getting sick, or staying well.

    https://aeon.co/essays/science-and-metaphysics-must-work-together-to-answer-lifes-deepest-questions

    1. Thanks, Mac – great link. IIRC, our bodies contain ten times more bacterial cells than human cells, for about 10% of body weight.

  28. Read this for insight.

    http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/05/politics/white-women-class-divide-gender-divide/index.html

    If you want D’s to control Washington, it’s at least thinking about saying and NOT SAYING things that trample on the cultural toes of working class white women. They may be wrong, or right, about a lot of things. A lot of the things that nose in the air liberals are dead certain THEY are right about are matters of OPINION rather than objective fact.

    Stay away from that sort of thing, and when you encounter such women, talk to them respectfully without making fun of them and their culture, and keep the discussion centered as best you can on actual discrete factual arguments, showing them the way to understanding their own enlightened best self interests, and you can win them over……. or at least discourage them from rousting themselves out to vote for R’s.

  29. Back to wild fire for a minute

    http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-school-fire-20171204-story.html

    This is the sort of fire that results from fire suppression for extended periods of time and extended periods of dry weather, meaning even drier than usual in such places which get only a little rain even in wet years.

    I’m no fire expert, but it’s my understanding that when such landscapes are left undisturbed, fires are frequent but not often very large, because a new fire CAN’T spread very far before it reaches an area that was burned over within the last decade or two at the most, and thus doesn’t have fuel enough to support the further spread of the fire. According to my reading, sometimes any given part of such a landscape may burn as often as once or twice in a given year, if it supports a lot of grass, or maybe once every three or four years up to once a decade or longer if it it’s mostly shrubs.

    I have a friend who used to work on a fire crew out west in such areas who he tells me he has seen as many as four fires at once, from the top of a high hill, all of which were started by lightning within his fire crew’s line of sight, while already ON a fire call.

    We sometimes have a lot of lightning in my area too, but I’ve never heard of lightning starting more than maybe two fires on the same day within twenty miles of my home place.

  30. Wow, the more I hear about that tax plan the more it sounds like something dreamed up by Dr. Evil. Many features directly target democrats. It basically has individuals loosing all their deductions to pay for a corporate tax rate cut.

    People making less than 75,000 will pay an additional 5 trillion in taxes while those making over 1 million will pay 5 trillion less over 10 years.

    Teachers deduction for out of pocket expenses (school supplies) – removed, but deductions for private planes is fine.

    It removes the tax EV tax credit, but the hummer deduction is okay.

    It increases taxes on farmers, while hedge fund managers get another break.

    Once it’s phased in, it actual is the biggest tax increase in history…

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