Predicting Stratospheric Winds

Paul Pukite Climate, non-fossil fuel

Last week the USA shot down a suspected Chinese balloon with an air-to-air missile. The balloon itself was obviously just following the stratospheric jet stream and was not completely controllable in terms of navigation [1]. This brings up an interesting issue, as the state-of-the-art in atmospheric science has never been able to predict which direction the jet streams will follow at any future time. Nowhere is this more evident than with the stratospheric winds that encircle the Earth along the equator, known as the QBO. Scientists have been able to heuristically gauge when this wind will reverse it’s direction (hence the name Quasi-Biennial Oscillation) but have never been able to explain why it reverses. The first time they were able to systematically measure it was via the launching of instrumented weather balloons (radiosondes) in the 1950’s.

The QBO is visualized by the following animation:

The QBO wind is indicated by the Saturn-like doughnut ring [2]; when it is colored BLUE it is an easterly wind and when RED it is westerly. With the calendar updates you can see it reverses direction about every 14 months, with a complete cycle every 28 months.

The important point is that no one knows why the QBO wind changes direction and why the period is 28 months.

What should have been evident from the start, at least once a few cycles completed, was that the QBO was a lunar tidal phenomena, synchronized by the lunar nodal orbit and the seasonal solar cycle. We described how this works in the book Mathematical Geoenergy (Wiley/AGU, 2018) several years ago.

Even though the math is straightforward to derive based on when the sun and moon transitions through solstice and equinox positions [3], not one scientist has previously proposed this as a mechanism, and moreover it hasn’t been cited by other researchers, even though it’s been published for over 4 years now …. until now that is.

Lo and behold, the idea has been cross-checked by a group of Chinese physicists (working under several organizations) that have cited our research in a paper currently under review, titled “Global zonal wind variations and responses to solar activity, and QBO, ENSO during 2002–2019”. The lead author of the paper expended some effort in duplicating the lunar-forced QBO model via a discussion paper, triggered after I offered a comment myself over a month ago.

(chart by Xiao Liu copied from discussion paper)

Professor Liu did an excellent job of following the math and was able to match the QBO data in the chart labelled Figure 4 shown.

From what I understand based on reporting of the weather balloon fiasco, the Chinese government was embarrassed by allowing it to escape from its control while the USA were anxiously waiting for it to occupy safe space before shooting it down with an expensive missile. And then we downed a few other unidentified objects since. From my own perspective, having studied the science of winds for several years now, I’m only amused by the fuss [4] and remain perplexed by the slow progress in earth science research. The fields off geophysics, climate science, oceanography, atmospheric science, astrophysics, etc are all hampered by the inability to perform laboratory-controlled experiments so they tend to be conservative in adopting new ideas [5]. Perhaps these balloons are just plain old experiments.

Notes

[1] There is a way to control a balloon by lowering and raising it’s altitude and thereby taking advantage of winds blowing in different directions.

[2] The QBO ring, unlike Saturn’s rings, are not visible to the naked eye as they are just moving air, free of any cloud particulates.

[3] A nodal crossing is when the sun or moon is viewed to pass through the ecliptic, or roughly the equatorial, plane. This happens every semi-annually for the sun and approximately every two weeks for the moon.

[4] Google had a research program called Loon that it only recently terminated involving balloons for communication purposes. See this blog post for context — https://geoenergymath.com/2015/11/20/project-loon-and-qbo/ — sorry that some of the images are defunct, check this Google search. Given that countries are trigger happy over air-space perhaps it makes sense that the program ended.

[5] https://GeoEnergyMath.com and @WHUT on Twitter for running commentary and latest research updates on all things related to earth sciences. Consider the recent Turkey/Syria earthquake in which a Dutch seismologist actually anticipated based on lunar and planetary orbits, see this Twitter thread on the shakiness of such a prediction.

POSTSCRIPT 3/11/2023

This is a note on a disappointing outcome from my interactions with the Chinese atmospheric scientists I was interacting with. In particular it points to the absolute scientific cowardice of the Earth Sciences research community.

I have frequently provided open review commentary to Copernicus journal articles pertaining to Earth Sciences.  The one described in the above post was a comment on wind stream analysis “Global zonal wind variations and responses to solar activity, and QBO, ENSO during 2002–2019”.  The main research group was affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Science and they showed interest in what I had to say, as we had several back-and-forth e-mail exchanges where I guided them in replicating my mathematical analysis on the origin of wind cycles. As I stated above, eventually they responded on-line and suggested they would amend their manuscript via a citation.

https://acp.copernicus.org/preprints/acp-2022-792/#discussion

Unfortunately, yesterday I learned that the editor of the journal intervened and essentially demanded that the Chinese authors retract any mention of my suggestions in favor of a consensus viewpoint. 

“Among the comments on this paper is a community comment by Dr. Paul Pukite. This comment proposes a new theory for the generation of the QBO which does not involve wave/mean flow interactions – the theory which has been accepted for over 40 years by the atmospheric community. As this comment involves a new idea that has not been published in a recognized journal and received peer review, it should be addressed in a separate paper where its scientific quality and relevance can be appropriately evaluated. This could either be led by Dr. Pukite, or the authors of this paper in collaboration with Dr. Putike should they feel it to be a valuable contribution to the field. In this respect, the recent review on the QBO by Anstey et al.  ( Nat Rev Earth Environ 3, 588–603 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-022-00323-7) and references therein might prove useful as an indication of the physical mechanisms currently associated with understanding this phenomenon.“

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-2022-792-EC1

The Chinese authors acquiesced and almost immediately provided an amended comment, replacing my cite (which was to peer-reviewed publications and presentations of mine dating back over 5 years ago) with the editor’s suggestion to instead cite a review article by a group of academics from U of Oxford and elsewhere.  

In fact, climate scientists have no idea of the mechanisms behind natural climate activity such as ENSO and QBO winds, and so this active suppression of potentially valuable mathematical ideas seems counter-productive for advancing the research.  The editor’s suggestion of considering instead “future collaboration” with me is a thinly veiled suggestion for me to “run along” or “go away“. Collaborate is shade codeword for “not gonna happen” in Chinese.

It may be that geoscience has failed as an open scientific discipline. They actively dissuade contributions from people outside their inner circle, perhaps they are wary of climate science deniers (which I’m definitely not!).  Likely they are frightened by the fact that they can’t control ideas and suppressing information is their only option.

86 thoughts to “Predicting Stratospheric Winds”

  1. It seems that a government, research institute, university or corporation that has a scientific instrument go astray over another countries territory should immediately notify that country, and share data to the satisfaction of the ‘host’ country. If it is an innocent mistake with a innocent mission.

    It is wonderous that those equatorial zonal wind reverse course.

    1. The UK Royal Met Office just released an interesting YouTube video on the QBO a few days ago, Very nice animation at the beginning.

      https://youtu.be/LTkppqrmuLY (inlined in the top-level post just above)

      Of course, I added a YT comment:

      “The QBO may be somewhat predictable at a 28 month cycle, but that doesn’t mean that they understand WHY it oscillates. The hint is in the cycle higher in altitude and so positioned above the QBO, which has a clear semi-annual period, reversing direction every 6 months. So what happens if we include the moon’s “seasonal” cycle into the mix? It turns out that the interference of the annual cycle and this lunar monthly cycle generates precisely the same 28 month cycle. And then it gets more strange, as all the other climate indices mentioned, such NAO and ENSO (El Nino) also are synchronized by earth, sun and moon interactions. Are climate scientists and geophysicists curious about this correlation? “

  2. I have no pretensions of understanding what actually happened but the statement:
    ” ..obviously just following the stratospheric jet stream and was not completely controllable in terms of navigation…”
    implies that you know that it was just an innocent weather baloon. There are two reasons why I can’t take that statement as difinitive. First I live in an area that is deluged by recreational hot air balloons at certain times of the year. They are clearly steered because with rare exceptions they land where they plan to land. If one lands in the wrong place it gets in the newspaper. I don’t think they can have nearly the controllability that an instrumented, powered, multi-ton machine implies. Second the experts from the Pentagon are pretty adament that it is not a weather balloon and I’m inclined to believe them. I guess we may find out when and if they ever reveal what they have learned from the recovered wreckage.

    1. Recreational hot-air balloons don’t enter the stratosphere and don’t travel at 100 MPH.

      1. YJ, One would think that the amateur balloon, having circumnavigated the Earth a few times, would have been shot down by now, either by the paranoid Chinese or Russians after it entered their airspace. But noooo, it’s the gun-happy Americans

        1. We are NOT alone!! The aliens are using HAPPY BIRTHDAY balloons to watch us.

          Paul, I hope you keep posting stuff. I really enjoy it.

  3. A hobby group may have the answer to what the U.S. shot down over Canada last week

    The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, in a blog post that was first reported by Aviation Week, says one of its balloons went “missing in action” in the same region the U.S. military shot down one of the three unknown objects.

    On Tuesday, the group said one of its balloons was last spotted at 12:48 a.m. on Saturday along an uninhabited island off the coast of Alaska. That tracks with when a U.S. F-22 used a Sidewinder missile to shoot down an object over the Yukon later that same day. Canadian officials have since said the debris will be extremely difficult to retrieve due to the frozen terrain and the remoteness of the site.

    The club’s balloon had a long journey, traveling for 123 days and 18 hours of flight before — possibly — being shot out of the sky. “For now we are calling Pico Balloon K9YO Missing in Action,” the club’s website says, without making any accusations or connecting the incident to the military shootdown.

    https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/16/mystery-object-balloon-illinois-biden-00083355

    1. The establishment really is against amateur scientists. Next thing you know they will try to shoot down my QBO model.

        1. Thanks Schinzy, an excellent link. This part:

          ” If your theory does not agree with empirical evidence, it’s wrong.”

          Absolutely. Can’t agree more with this. In the context of the QBO model described in the main post, all that someone has to do is show where it disagrees with the observed data. Many physicists all too well know this yet need to invoke something else to show how a model is wrong. They will claim overfitting, or they will claim bias in your model as if you should be completely independent and not tainted by any prior knowledge of the data, as if the theory has to be sent down from heaven and planted in your brain via divine inspiration. Nope, that’s not the way it works. Somebody didn’t figure out ocean tides ahead of time, and then have it proven the first time a careful measurement was made and then compared to what was written down. In fact what likely happened is that curious people in numerous cultures constructed geometrical drawings of the moon and sun’s position in the sky at specific times of day and started to realize the correlation to the sea surface level. Especially why it cycles about twice per day instead of once since the sun and moon are each overhead only once per day. I don’t think anyone anticipated this with a theory in advance of observations being made and compared to the geometry. That diurnal model of tides was in fact biased by prior observations. Moreover, as it turns out there are hundreds of lunar and solar tidal factors that can go into a modern tidal analysis, yet no one claims overfitting of the data. They in fact get the model to work at 1st-order and start to add secondary factors to gain further accuracy as they continuously recalibrate.

          There’s a gatekeeper of science acting as a mall cop at a physics blog that is scolding me for apparently doing this work outside of his specific orders. This is his comment from yesterday:

          “Optimisation is the root of all evil in statistics, if you optimise you introduce the risk of over-optimising (i.e. over-fitting) and I suspect symbolic regression tools are doing a *lot* of optimisation.

          Of course we have gone over that many times before and you have disregarded my advice, even though this form of over-fitting is my main research interest. So I am not expecting you to pay any attention this time.”

          From the spelling, you can see that he is British, and the profile picture he uses looks like something out of Monty Python’s Holy Grail, demanding to know “how many swallows …..”, whatever LOL.

          https://skepticalscience.com/pics/gavin_small.jpg

            1. I’m a Daniel Dennett fan.
              I should have kept my mouth shut?
              Probably

            2. Regarding the rules of discourse, it’s often a no-win situation. Try to be accommodating either way, whether criticizing or being criticized, doesn’t work for certain people.

  4. It makes intuitive sense to me that variations of tidal forces resulting from the cyclical variations in the orbits of the Earth and moon and possibly some of the other planets as well could actually trigger earthquakes, so that they happen sooner than they would otherwise.

    If my understanding of the forces involved is correct, the strain or tension builds up very gradually over a very long time, along and near a fault line, and then it’s suddenly released, the result being an earthquake.

    Sometimes just walking into an old building ready to fall is enough to trigger its collapse.

    1. Valid point but I think part of the problem is that the induced stress from tidal torques happens frequently enough that even though it may be a root cause, there would be so many+frequent false alarms as to make a prediction meaningless.

      The chart that the one author Kolvankar showed with perfect 45 degree alignment at the end of the blog post above we figured out was a plot of time vs time, really an embarrassing mistake. He had claimed that aligned tidal forces had triggered 98% of all earthquakes. I think that the 2% were time zone inconsistencies, leap days, etc.

      1. I believe you are right about using tidal forces to actually predict earthquakes, for the reason you state…… that they line up right too often.

        But the effect might be enough to enable somebody to study the exact time of quakes that have happened over the last few decades, and compare the times to the precise locations of the moon and planets.

        This wouldn’t have any practical value in terms of predicting future quakes, but you might be able to make use of such data in refining our understanding of earthquakes.

        1. Only a few seismologists believe that earthquakes can be calibrated against orbits. As I stated this guy Kolvankar claimed to have shown 98% agreement but that is likely spurious because of the way he plotted the chart.

          What he did was compile a list of Sun-Earth-Moon (SEM) angles, which is essentially full/new moon alignments and also a list of Earth-Moon Distance (EMD) positions, which is the distance of the earthquake from the moon’s longitude. He then added up the SEM+EMD on the x-axis and time on the y-axis. But when you take (Moon-Sun) + (Earthquake-Moon) the moon cancels out and you just get the position of the earthquake relative to the Sun’s longitude, which is just the GMT time. So he ended up plotting time = time — a straight line !!!!

          The paper was not peer-reviewed but from a tectonics newsletter http://www.ncgtjournal.com/

          1. “A review of tidal triggering of global earthquakes” (2022)

            https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362666022_A_review_of_tidal_triggering_of_global_earthquakes

            “Inconclusion, not all earth-quakes are triggered by tides, but based on numerous statisticalinvestigations, tides play an important role when the tectonicbackground is in a high-stress state; so, monitoring the changes intides and their correlation with earthquakes can help assess riskscenarios. The research results can also provide us with physicaldata for analyzing fault ruptures and clues to the mechanisms andcan serve as a powerful constraint for future mechanics models”

            (4) (PDF) A review of tidal triggering of global earthquakes. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362666022_A_review_of_tidal_triggering_of_global_earthquakes#fullTextFileContent [accessed Feb 24 2023].

  5. Hickory’s earlier post. This seems a lot more important than a few wayword baloons, to me anyway.

    This sums things up pretty well-

    ” A UN report in October said there was “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place”. Current national targets, if met, would mean a 2.4C rise in temperature.”

    “The climate crisis is causing sea levels to rise faster than for 3,000 years, bringing a “torrent of trouble” to almost a billion people, from London to Los Angeles and Bangkok to Buenos Aires, António Guterres said on Tuesday. Some nations could cease to exist, drowned under the waves, he said.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/14/rising-seas-threaten-mass-exodus-on-a-biblical-scale-un-chief-warns

    1. I saw that Fox News continued with their willful ignorance campaign 4 days
      “Face masks made ‘little to no difference’ in preventing spread of COVID, scientific review finds”
      I won’t paste a link since I refuse to spread bullshit.

      1. Dr. Dan Wilson, aka Debunk the Funk On YouTube is good. He addresses all the bullshit quite soundly.
        https://youtube.com/@DebunktheFunkwithDrWilson

        Here he is on episode 218 of Qanon anonymous
        https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/qanon-anonymous/id1428209307?i=1000598579680

        For H5N1 I will forgo N95 and KN95 disposables, and go with 3M 6503QL 1/2 mask and 2091 P100 “pink pancakes”.

        If Elon Musk and the Fox News fans wish not to take precautions then I suppose I’d call that a silver lining.

        1. Jebus Crustus. That guy on u2b is fighting a tsunami of fruitcakes. Perusing his list of idiots gave me a headache.

          1. Gotta keep your finger on the pulse of the nation lol; Dan is a good reference for when having to tackle a family member who won’t shut up about some Qanon medical advice. Chances are he has covered it. Consuming his entire compendium for academic purposes is a bit much.

            I respect his attempt to be persuasive. I’m weak in that area, especially in person; I’m prone to outbursts of “I don’t owe you a stage on which to perform your one-man asshole stand up routine. Fuck off. Stay mad.”

        2. How a small [15%] reduction in virus transmission plays out at the population level.
          See the graph below.
          At the individual level mask wearing can get you though a cloud of virus without infection, and can help you avoid infecting your friends and families.

      2. Contagious diseases, as potentially dangerous as they are, aren’t causing us more than a minor fraction of all the health troubles brought on by the industrial food and beverage industry.

        Half of what you see published by various government agencies and health care organizations is actually dangerous.

        The people with skin in the game have managed to get into control, to a substantial extent, of what is recommended, with disastrous consequences.

        Watch the portion of this link to get some insight into the way food companies control what we see published by way of spending mega bucks on lobbying.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImvX3avAlM4

        The part you should listen to starts around ten minutes or maybe a little bit before.

  7. CLIMATE FEEDBACK LOOPS PROJECT

    Major new paper on climate feedbacks:https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(23)00004-0

    “Many feedback loops significantly increase warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. However, not all of these feedbacks are fully accounted for in climate models. Thus, associated mitigation pathways could fail to sufficiently limit temperatures. A targeted expansion of research and an accelerated reduction of emissions are needed to minimize risks.”

    and excellent new site: https://scientistswarning.forestry.oregonstate.edu/climate_feedbacks

  8. The speed with which Antarctic sea ice is being lost is pretty amazing. From almost the highest on record in 2014 (blue), to below average in 2021 (yellow), to lowest on record now (black). This shows area, extent is higher at around two million km2; at one million it’s considered ice free. The ice remaining is all in the Weddell Sea, north of the Antarctic Peninsular.

    https://cryospherecomputing.com

    1. Even more astounding when you consider that the ‘normal range’ with the grey zone of 2 standard deviations
      looks to be derived from the period years 2000-2019, which were already warming compared to last century.

  9. I often see a a statement blaming capitalism as the source global problems.
    I think its a fallacy.
    Please educate me if you know a viable or successful economic system that is not based on growth.
    I read articles like this as an example- https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/growth-without-economic-growth
    and see that it is easy to identify the problem of having grown too big [overshoot],
    but much more difficult, or impossible?, to craft a replacement system or mechanism to manage a sustained and purposeful contraction.
    And so contraction will be unmanaged, or very poorly managed.

    If was to characterize my rather infantile notion of optimal economy it would be a heavily regulated capitalism with big socialist priorities. The goal would be to prevent huge disparities in wealth accumulation.
    But this is still a recipe for growth, and not a cure for overshoot.

    1. “I often see a a statement blaming capitalism as the source global problems.
      I think its a fallacy.”

      I agree that most likely it’s a fallacy. I also believe unregulated capitalism is a system that advances inequities among humanity. Capitalism is a vehicle of laws for humans to interact. But it’s the human drive to reproduce, survive, avoid pain or fear, and strive for pleasure or enjoyment that drives growth.

      1. Agree.
        And that last sentence is the basic reason we will not go easily into the night,
        even though it is very late day on this human moment.

      2. HUNTINGTONBEACH —
        unregulated capitalism
        Unregulated capitalism is a libertarian myth. The free market is based on assumptions like property rights, complete information, competition between producers etc, which can only be enforced by a government. Without heavy handed government intervention, free market turn into monopolies and capitalism is dead.

        The real problem of capitalism is that it depends on prices to provide incentives, and there is no price on valuable resources like carbon content of soil, just to name one of many examples.

        1. I’ve heard before that “you can’t put a price on nature”; well, there has been a price put on nature, it’s zero, that’s why it’s dying.

        2. ALIMBIQUATED- I think we are pretty much in agreement.

          I said- “Capitalism is a vehicle of laws for humans to interact” I agree government is needed for property rights, etc.

          Al says “free market turn into monopolies and capitalism is dead”

          I would disagree with this comment. Monopolies won’t end capitalism, just competition. But, you are helping make my point for the need for regulation. Without regulations the powerful will take advantage of the weak until you basically have legal modern day slavery. Think child labor laws and how government is needed or the rights for labor to collectively bargain. I would argue the American South buy-in to anti-Unions is part of the reason they are the poorest part of the country with the worst inequity.

          SURVIVALIST- “well, there has been a price put on nature, it’s zero” Another prefect example for the need for regulation to protect the environment, land, air, water, etc.. Regulations can put a cost to dumping waste in the air, water and land. But what do we continue to hear from business against regulations, “but those regulations will cost the public more for X”. I say, without regulations the real cost of X is not being realized when purchased.

          1. Right, the government has to put a price on nature. For example, instead of paying farmers to output produce nobody wants, they should pay farmers to increase the carbon content of the soil on their farms, or set aside land for planting cottonwood trees or whatever.

    2. As I recall, the Cold War era featured many places of the world under the control of something other than capitalism, and they seemed to fair no better with regards to pumping out the pollution.
      Global problems of the climate change variety seem to be the problem of a global industrial society producing too much industrial waste. Ones damage to the planet, so to speak, is best correlated with wealth, not with how much one cares about the environment, or is either a Commie or a Capitalist.

      1. Painting fast with a broad brush this time, but the short answer is that capitalists don’t care about pollution, so long as it doesn’t interfere to any serious extent with their own affairs.

        The capitalists who own waterfront resort hotels worry like hell about scenic pollution, lol, if a wind farm is proposed within sight of their top floor.

        And there never were any real commies. There were lots of people running things in Iron Curtain countries to suit themselves of course. And since they weren’t very productive, in terms of producing goods and services, and more concerned about their own personal short term survival and position at the top of the social and power heap, they were perfectly willing to cut corners anywhere and everywhere they could ….. their primary objective being to preserve and enhance their own personal status.
        So this meant huge investments in military hardware, and minimal investments, the least possible, in just about every other area of their economies.

        Bottom line, neither capitalists nor so called commies are truly interested in the public welfare.

        But it is possible for a government to be more about the public welfare than otherwise, as exemplified by Western European governments in recent years.

        I’m reasonably hopeful, or at least cautiously hopeful, that the people of such countries will manage to control their natural appetite for growth to a sufficient extent that they can maintain decent living standard while using less and less energy and one time gift of nature raw materials.

        Growth in some respects can continue. It’s possible to have more and better housing, better medical care, better education, a safer society. It’s possible to build cars and trucks that are very close to one hundred percent recyclable. It’s possible to make just about every consumable good either recyclable or of sufficient quality to last a lifetime.

        But accomplishing such things will necessarily involve changing the way we live in such ways that a huge portion of the citizenry will fight these changes tooth and claw, to the death even.

        So……. will any society ever manage such a transition?

        It won’t be our current day American society. We’re too poorly educated, too divided, too ignorant.
        But maybe the French, or the English, or the Germans, could manage it, given time enough, and some luck.
        And maybe if the built in overshoot crash unfolds SLOWLY enough, even a country such as the USA might manage to transition mostly to an economic footing based mostly on a steady state rather than a growth oriented economy.

        1. As usual, OFM, you give a good picture of where we are. I have been saying for some time that the best description of the Soviet Union was not about their communist values but just about them being Russian. Today they don’t claim to be communist and yet we see the same disparity of wealth, the same disregard for their soldiers as in 1915 and 1941. I suppose that’s true here too, that we haven’t changed much and are unlikely to as things degrade. Somehow the Europeans, perhaps as a result of the destruction of European wealth during WW2 in association with their history of education and cultural expectations, do seem to be on a better path. I also think Japan might show us a way forward as they lead in demographic changes and have a very cohesive culture.
          Are we really too uneducated, divided and ignorant to avoid terrible suffering? Thee’s a lot of evidence to support that but you might have said the same thing in 1940. We did come together then, made willing sacrifices and were the main force for good in the world, albeit with some provisos, for many years. Hopefully we still have some of the right stuff.

          1. Well—-

            Santa Clara and San Mateo counties had 163,000 millionaire households in 2022, which the report defined as households that had more than $1 million in investable assets.

            But that is Silicone Land.

    1. All programming languages get compiled into CPU machine instructions (Boolean Algebra logic gates)

      Unless there is a new CPU machine instruction, nothing to see here …. other than a programming language that has pros and cons.

      My 2 cents

      1. For climate science the candidates are Fortran and Julia, with Python sometimes in there for numerical and scientific libraries such as NumPy and SciPy. See this paper under review

        https://twitter.com/EGU_GMD/status/1625819081004748802

        Of course my advice is to work smart and not hard. Since I spent 20 years doing software engineering I prefer something like Ada and can dance circles around those doing fluid dynamics simulations.

        1. You want to pick a programming language that is fit for purpose

          Python, you can spin up a Neural Network in 20 minutes, but you have less control of how memory or disk is used

          C programming, you have lots of granular control over how memory is allocated and the resources of the machine are used. But you are vulnerable to more bugs because of that ( accessing the wrong memory ).

          Sounds like this RUST is protecting you from bugs ( memory access, garbage collection, etc ) but that comes with a cost.

          You could write everything in BINARY 00001000 if you want.

          But you have to be Alan Turing to understand what is going on.

          The whole point of a programming language is because humans aren’t good at communicating in 0’s and 1’s

          1. Peak, Do you have part of that 20 minutes to spin up a NN to solve the QBO problem at the top of this post? Just give me the instructions if you don’t have the time.

            1. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/create-first-neural-network-with-python-tensorflow.html#gs.ql4386

              Your math is over my head.

              I didn’t say a good one. And would have to be a small dataset.

              Using Tensorflow. You have to tune the parameters ( e.g. number of layers, number of output, etc)

              Need to provide the training data and the testing data.

              Copy, Paste, Run. Just need the Data

              This particular example predicts numbers in images

              “The model correctly predicted that the image contains the digit 7 with a good probability of about 98 percent.”

              If you are familiar with Python you should be able to get this working in under an hour. 20 minutes may be tight.

            3. I know you are a really intelligent guy (Paul P) and don’t need an “Intro to Neural Networks”

              My point is, The laymen can spit out neural networks with Python very easily by adjusting parameters and training supervised data….and I am far from a genius.

              Your very sophisticated and interesting climate models are much more than you see in the business world unless you work at GOOGLE…

              Compliment to you!

      2. Not exactly true, and worth discussing.

        Java got compiled to the JVM (Java virtual Machine) which ran the resulting “byte code” on multiple machines. That was cooked up in the 90s. Nowadays programming languages (including Rust) compile to the LLVM (Lightweight Virtual Machine) that can compile to machine instructions or be run directly. Pretty much everything does. Google even uses LLVM to compile Java to Android instead of running JVM.

        In the end you don’t really know these days how the code will run. Your compiler spits out LLVM code, even when you’re using low level languages like GNU C++. That’s definitely how Rust works as well, and Apple’s Swift.

        Everything is virtual and cross platform. Even if your code ultimately compiles to machine instructions, it may well end up running on a virtual machine in the Cloud. In that case, virtual machine code is laboriously translated into (possibly identical) real machine code for execution.

        All this virtualization is convenient to programmers and system administrators, but I shudder to think how much computer power (and energy) is wasted on it.

        But I guess your point was that the backend remains the same, even if the syntax sugar coating on top changes. that’s true.

        1. Ultimately everything ends up as CPU machine instructions no matter how it got there.

          JAVA virtualises for portability (you can run it on lots of different platforms) at a cost of being less efficient

          C compiles to one specific platform as a benefit you can be more efficient in your instructions.

          There are all kinds of layers of abstraction, but at the end of the day the code gets converted into the commands you tell it to otherwise the programming language would be unpredictable.

          That’s how CPU’s work. Layers of abstraction don’t change that.

      1. Most of the discussion of RUST is over my ancient head, lol.
        But some people are claiming it can be used to run server farms and save substantially on electricity, which is a huge expense.
        Is that potentially true?

  11. “If was to characterize my rather infantile notion of optimal economy it would be a heavily regulated capitalism with big socialist priorities. The goal would be to prevent huge disparities in wealth accumulation.
    But this is still a recipe for growth, and not a cure for overshoot.”

    Hickory’s scenario or vision is IMO the likeliest possible solution to a sustainable, civilized, and modern future.

    The magic ingredient would be to make the ” big socialist priorities” THE biggest priorities.

    The key would be to have a truly well educated society, and a truly democratic government, such that the people could make sure that all major public policies are in the public interest, and that businesses simply aren’t allowed to do things contrary to the overall or general public interest.

    Doing away with the opportunity to make a profit would be a big mistake.

    The profit motive is without a doubt the very best guarantee that BETTER ways to do old jobs better will be found and implemented, and life, bottom line, is all about the OLD jobs…….. food, shelter, health care, personal and community safety, etc.

    In such a society the opportunity to get rich while killing l people wholesale by advertising cigarettes and sugar water would no longer exist. Given time, the marketing of both these murderous products could be pretty well eliminated, or at least regulated into MINOR problems.

    Selling seven thousand pound pickup trucks for personal transportation would no longer be possible.

    But selling safe and nutritious food would still be profitable, and selling sensibly sized electric cars and trucks, built to last indefinitely, given proper maintenance, would still be a potentially profitable business.
    Building ( super energy efficient) new houses could still be profitable.

    I could go on all day……. except for just one little problem.

    How do we get there, from here?

    Just talking about such possibilities in public here in the USA means being painted as a godless commie soc’lis ‘ traitor to the flag.

    But MAYBE there’s some hope for a few countries such as those of Western Europe……. assuming they aren’t dragged back to pre industrial times due to the global overshoot problem.

    We don’t actually know how long we have left.

    All we know for sure is that the opportunity to change our ways is slipping away from us at an ever faster rate.

    1. “How do we get there, from here?”

      Mac, you had already answered your question and I agree.

      “The key would be to have a truly well educated society, and a truly democratic government”

      Maybe you can find yourself an acceptable “seven thousand pound pickup truck”

      https://www.wattelectricvehicles.com/about/about

      1. “I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime.”
        –Albert Einstein

        1. HIGHTREKKER, I am no accusing you of just making this shit up, but I am accusing you of being hoodwinked. Someone just made that quote up and you believed it, so you repeated it. That quote is total bullshit. Einstein never said any such thing.

  12. What we will have to do, if it can be done, to achieve a long term sustainable economy is to convince people that there are other ways to be wealthy than just having tons of STUFF.

    I don’t for a second believe this approach will work with people who are still living poor and hard, compared to us wealthy westerners, but it could at least potentially work, if it’s handled just right, in a modern industrial country.

    I know a lot of people who are slaving away in factories, doing hard boring work that leaves them dragged out and empty at the end of the day. The most they can look forward to, in more cases than not, is to more of the same until they’re so old they have to quit, and then live on even less than they do now.

    It’s not impossible to educate such people to the point that they understand that the purpose of the health care profession should be to help people stay well, and heal them if they get sick……… rather than to make a ton of money for the people in the industry.

    It’s DAMNED hard.

    I’ve succeeded in doing it, on a person to person basis.

    But I don’t think it can be done, here in the USA,at least not within the next generation or so.

    However, given that it’s already been done in other countries……. maybe they can continue to progress towards sustainability. There are plenty of hopeful signs, as for instance the rate at which such countries are switching to renewable energy……… although this progress may well be too little too late.

  13. The Global Passenger EV Market to Deploy 762.9 GWh Onto Roads in 2023

    In 2023, a booming 762.9 GWh of battery capacity will be deployed onto roads in newly passenger EVs globally (+/- 12%), Adamas Intelligence predicts.

    Additionally, in 2023, Adamas projects that 19.7 million passenger EVs (HEVs, PHEVs, BEVs) will be sold globally (+/- 10%), translating to a sales-weighted average pack capacity of 38.7 kWh, up from 34.0 kWh in 2022.

    https://www.adamasintel.com/adamas-rule-of-thumb/#.Y_EKgwGjWaM.twitter

  14. Russia’s Lesser-Known Intentions in Ukraine
    https://carnegieeurope.eu/strategiceurope/87319

    If Putin had waited any longer to invade he would be having the Russian Army seize international Corp owned mines & resources. By striking prior to sales Putin had the Army seize Ukrainian state owned mines & resources.

      1. I heard Nate’s pod and then searched up some of her writing. I tend to view Resource Determinism as the root cause of almost all conflicts; unfurled moral exhortations aside.

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_war

        GWOT made GoPro footage popular. Now it’s popping up in Ukraine. Gripping stuff.

  15. COVID came along and made certain types of people more likely to brace up against wearing basic RPE right before H5N1, with a CFR of .6, comes along. As far as evolutionary bottlenecks selecting for critical thinking and agreeableness are concerned it seems like a fair one. Shrug. I still mask up steady as I’m in solidarity with the immunocompromised peeps.

    1. Every time I see these “reports” about masks causing health and mental problems, I think there must be a massive number of stunted and unhealthy doctors, nurses, surgeons, high tech workers in clean rooms, etc.

      1. COVID-19 primed the H5N1 anti mask moron death pump.
        Perhaps a concurrent multiple bread basket harvest failure would be less of a concern with 50% less mouths to feed.

  16. Russia’s decision to cut oil production has only been made for March
    February 21 / 12:34

    Moscow. Russia’s decision to voluntarily cut oil production by 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) has so far only been made for March. This was announced by Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Alexander Novak.

    “We will watch how the situation on the market develops, and decisions on the market will be made from this. Now the decision is for March,” he said.

    Novak added that the reduction in oil production by companies in March will be proportional to production.

    “Yes, depending on the production,” the Deputy Prime Minister specified.

    Earlier, he stated that the Russian Federation plans to voluntarily reduce oil production by 500,000 barrels per day in March.

    According to the representative of the Deputy Prime Minister, the reduction in production will affect only oil, excluding gas condensate. At the same time, a TASS source in the industry specified that the reduction in production will be calculated from the real level of production, and not from the Russian quota under the OPEC+ deal. According to the parameters of the deal, oil production for Russia is set from November 2022 at 10.478 million bpd. In January 2023, as Novak said earlier, Russia was producing approximately 9.8-9.9 million b/d.

    1. Moscow. Russia’s decision to voluntarily cut oil production by 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) has so far only been made for March.

      Yes, that’s what they said, wasn’t it? And history has taught us that we should believe everything the Russian Government says. 🤣

      1. To be complete I’ll add that the statements of all country governments need to taken with a high degree of skepticism. Require multiple independent information sources and analysis prior to believing the ‘official’ story. Same goes for all sources of information.

        Examples of false information from the US Executive branch of the Federal Government
        -1964 Gulf of Tonkin Incident …a fabrication used to justify escalation of the US invasion of Viet Nam

        -2002-3 Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq… a false assertion by the Cheney/Bush administration used to justify the invasion of Iraq. A case of finding ‘facts’ to fit your faulty per-conceived notions.

        -2016-2020 Trump presidency… “Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years”
        https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years/

        We could fill the Great Lakes with false statements.

      2. I think that the situation on the market in April is not clear to the government itself. I assume that the target audience of his message is the management of Russian companies.

  17. Sometimes I hear about supposed big new things that are actually real, things that will actually be put into production, saving considerable amounts of money.

    The discussion of the RUST programming language leaves me convinced it’s just one more language, which MIGHT be better than others for certain purposes or applications, but that it’s not a game changer by any means.

    But this is something that will be a big thing, in terms of reducing the costs of building wind farms.

    https://electrek.co/2023/02/21/heres-why-the-first-commercial-spiral-welded-wind-turbine-tower-is-a-game-changer/

    I can’t estimate how much money, time and skilled labor this process will save in terms of the total cost of building a new wind farm, but the savings on the tower itself will be substantial.

    The machine used to do the welding is without a shadow of a doubt highly automated, and one or two operators will be doing the work formerly done by a lot of hands on guys erecting towers a section at a time. Bolting up using tons of extremely expensive heat treated bolts will mostly be a thing of the past.

    The machine is at least potentially transportable to the job site, meaning hauling huge and very heavy tower sections from a far away factory can be eliminated in favor of hauling the necessary steel on ordinary trucks.

    And this design is according to the link approved for a forty year service life.

    It’s been hard for me to find anything open source about the ACTUAL expected service life of towers and the foundations they are built on, but I haven’t run across any info provided by people in the industry, or by actual ENGINEERS, to the effect that wind turbine towers won’t last considerably longer than the usual predicted life of a wind farm……. twenty to twenty five years.

    I’m not an engineer, but I’m a world class jackass of all trades, and I’ve worked here and there on heavy infrastructure up to the level of nuclear power plants and that sort of thing.

    And it’s perfectly obvious to me that while turbine blades and gen sets may not last much past twenty years, the rest of a wind farm, excepting possibly the towers, can be refurbished and made as good as new, or better, for a rather minor fraction of the cost of building new from scratch.

    I have a hard time understanding why this ( to me at least) obvious fact isn’t well publicized in the various forums devoted to promoting renewable energy.

    The savings on the preliminary work alone, before the first shovel of dirt is moved, are enormous. The political fight is over, the right of way, environmental permits, the land paid for or leased long term, the grid interconnections built, electrical storage capacity in place to some extent at least, etc.

    And of course the people who do the actual work get better at it , doing it faster and cheaper, in terms of constant money, year after year.

    1. That is indeed most impressive, and relevant.

      I saw in the news today that the Biden admin has opened 3 lease blocks in the Gulf of Mexico for wind energy development. These are the first in the Gulf [offshore from Lake Charles and Galveston].

      This area, and the whole Gulf, is not a choice wind location- with 100m hub height average annual wind speed at roughly 6.8-7.5 m/s
      For reference, offshore from Cape Hatteras up past Maine ranges from 8.8-9.9 m/s, which is more typical of the places where offshore wind is being targeted for deployment throughout the world currently.
      Browse yourself to see where it is windy- https://globalwindatlas.info/en
      [place the cursor anywhere to see the average annual wind speed displayed in the bottom right corner]

      If these Gulf block leases get attention and development, it will be a signal that the wind industry is on the verge of a huge breakout, since there are vast areas around the world that have stronger reserves- both offshore and onshore.

  18. Flying wind turbines may never be more than a niche technology, but considering how much it costs to build towers and foundations, not to mention turbine blades and gen sets on the giant scale, I’m not so sure.

    Wind speeds a couple of thousand feet or more up tend to be pretty damned fast, and a lot steadier than at ground level, or even five or six hundred feet up.

    I can’t really see why a tethered wind turbine couldn’t be put up there, assuming the necessary light weight can be manufactured affordably , with some of the power generated used to control the flight of what would basically be a giant kite, probably shaped pretty much like an old prop driven airliner.

    Putting in a couple of batteries powerful enough to enable it to land using the generator turbine run as a motor would be at least potentially possible. Landing at least occasionally would obviously be necessary, in the event of hurricanes or repair work, etc.

    And with the wind speed being so high, four turbines five or six meters across could generate one hell of a lot of power.

    With the right software controlling such machines, I think they could probably be located on a grid no more than a kilometer or maybe two kilometers max each way, without getting them entangled and crashing.

    There are plenty of places with few enough people that crashes wouldn’t be a serious safety hazard.

    Can it be done on the grand scale?

    It’s working already in at least a couple of places where circumstances and conditions are such that flying wind power can compete.

    Building in the actual equipment is obviously a job well suited to a high degree of mechanization and mass production, and shipping the components on ordinary trucks appears to be entirely practical. Flying wind power could turn out to be pretty damned cheap, in the long run.

    https://e360.yale.edu/features/after-a-shaky-start-airborne-wind-energy-is-slowly-taking-off

  20. I don’t see anything at all, in the free major mass media, which HONESTLY describes the eventual waste problem involving old wind turbine blades, unless I go actively looking for it.

    Just about every damned thing I see, coming up in news feeds or social media feeds, is slanted one way or another to make disposing of old turbine blades look like getting rid of hot nuclear waste.

    I guess that’s the price of getting people to click on links. You have to paint things as bad news, or use some sexy men and women to attract to get that click.

    The truth of the matter is that cutting them up on site, so that they can be easily hauled on ordinary trucks, is a trivial problem in principle, and requires very little equipment and only a rather modest amount of labor in actual practice.

    And grinding them up for processing, while separating the metal in them, is also a cut and dried job, and with maybe a couple of modifications to control dust, than can easily be done using the same shredding equipment used to grind up old cars and appliances for easy shipment to foundries where such metal is final step recycled for reuse.

    Adding one more set of blades to chop up the product into really fine particles might be necessary, but that would be it.

    There’s all sorts of bluster about the resins being pretty much indestructible, with this being rather conveniently overlooked when dismissing the use of the fiberglass and resin component mix in concrete, or mixed in with gravel to make the necessary foundations for new roads or repaving old roads. This material certainly appears to be inert to the point it could also be used without any worry at all in concrete used to pour slabs and foundations for houses.

    And beyond all that…… even if all the blades we will have to deal with a generation down the road have to be landfilled…….. well, they’ll represent probably less than five percent of what will be landfilled annually in any case. Being pretty much INERT materials, landfilling them won’t require much if anything in the way of making sure there won’t be any significant ground water pollution.

    The construction industry spends millions of dollars, every working day, hauling dirt and stone to places it’s needed to level out hollows and gullies to build new stores or houses. If this stuff IS inert, it could be used that way, and a LOT of people would be glad to pay to have it delivered.

    And of course those supposedly inert resins WILL burn. I’m not an industrial chemist, lol, but it seems very likely to me that they could be fed a little at a time into a coal burning power plant or even a gas fired power plant, using some equipment designed for the job, and burned while netting some energy as well as getting rid of them at the same time.

    If I were young again, I wouldn’t mind having a few truck loads of some of the bigger pieces to build shelters on the farm to store hay and machinery out of the weather, in the fashion that a bike shelter is pictured in this link.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-UH6e10ocI

    And since this stuff IS inert, I don’t see any reason at all why it can’t be mixed with some new additional resin or other binder, and used as lumber or other building material, once the quantities available are sufficient to make doing so practical.

    Sky Daddy help us, most people would rather die than think a little, and “the powers that be” appear like the idea of us dead, as opposed to THINKING, lol.

  21. Attention all coal-is-dead posters.

    INDIA INVOKES MAXIMUM ENERGY OUTPUT LAW FROM COAL PLANTS

    • India invoked a law that will demand maximum output from power plants running on imported coal.
    • Beginning on March 16 and ending on June 15, all power plants will have to be running at maximum capacity and selling to buyers on exchanges.
    • India is expecting a record power usage this summer, with peak demand in April of 229 gigawatts.

    India’s government expects coal-fired power plants to use 8% more coal in the next financial year between March 2023 and March 2024, as demand is set to continue rising thanks to growing economic activity and unpredictable weather.

    https://oilprice.com/Energy/Coal/India-Invokes-Maximum-Energy-Output-Law-from-Coal-Plants.html

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