Category Archives: View

View 799 Monday, November 18, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.

Barrack Obama, famously.

The general media has been desperate to find some good news, but there hasn’t been much, and now the story is out that the typhoon in Asia and the late tornadoes in Illinois are indications of climate change due to man-made CO2. It’s global warming manifesting itself.

That seems clear enough to many pundits but it’s not clear to me, particularly because we don’t seem to have had any global warming in the past decade, and I don’t know any mechanism for generating monster typhoons and late season tornadoes in cyclone alley and points north and east. It may be informative to look at speculations about what will come in 2013 made back at the early days of the tornado season: http://www.climatecentral.org/news/an-in-depth–look-at-tornadoes-climate-change-15745 .

Whatever one concludes about the increase of CO2 – which is certainly happening – we need to remember one thing: CO2 is not a very effective greenhouse gas compared to water vapor. As Freeman Dyson has reminded us for years, CO2 isn’t going to have much of a warming effect except in cold, dry places. Now one theory of CO2 and climate is that the CO2 warms things up enough to increase the water vapor which increases the greenhouse effect, but so far that is more speculation than theory: to the best of my knowledge there aren’t any interesting and tested models incorporating that effect.

Climate science is a very complex matter, but there are some clear facts that need to be kept in mind.

One is that CO2 is definitely increasing. We know how to measure it, and we have a good place to measure it from: the top of Mauna Loa at an altitude where atmosphere gasses are well mixed, and there are prevailing winds bringing continuous new samples. Exactly how long it has been since CO2 levels reached what they are isn’t settled because we don’t have such good measurements for past times, but it appears to be about 50 million years ago, at a time when the earth was considerably warmer, the seas were much higher, and the earth for some reason was beginning to cool and the CO2 and sea levels beginning to drop.

Second, while we can come to some agreement as to what temperatures are now, they aren’t all that good. They are getting better but it’s damned hard to come up with a good measure accurate to a tenth of a degree for the right now temperature in your house, or your neighborhood, or your city, or your county, or your nation, or your continent. What do you measure?

The best, I would submit, would be the globe temperature outside exposed to the sky and elements: that would be the temperature inside a standard copper globe painted black inside and out. This measures the combined radiant and conductive temperature, and what most of us would say reflects whether it’s warm or cold. But of course that isn’t what is usually measured even in your living room. Now we want the average temperature in your house, and it gets more complicated. Do we use a globe in each room? Do we skip any rooms? Do we give equal weight to the temperature in the kitchen, the bed rooms (which are not of equal size), the bath room, the TV room? What about the screened in back porch which we spend a lot of time on in summer and fall but not winter?

And as you make the area larger the complexities increase. Global temperature? Land or water? All right, both. Equal weights? By area? Surface or at depths? Wait, we don’t have the atmosphere. While we are at it, getting the temperature in your back yard – do we take that in the sun or the shade? Don’t forget that if we take it at night exposed to the stars, it can get quite cold: the Romans used to make ice cream in the Sahara by exposing a straw lined pit to the stars at night, and covering it with highly polished metal shields in the day time; the straw and the shields kept it from warming up in there, and exposure to the stars exposed it to a radiant environment not far above absolute zero. So I hang my globe thermometer at two meters height where it is exposed to the sky: how many steradians are exposed to sky and how many to fences or buildings? That will make a big difference on a clear starry night, far bigger than the 0.1 degree accuracy we need to discern global warming.

And we haven’t yet got an 0.1 degree accurate temperature for my back yard, much less my neighborhood or city or region or continent, and we’re still talking about land temperatures.

My point is that the assumption that we know the average temperature of the earth to a tenth of a degree is at least disputable, and the belief that the different temperatures we do have taken in the various places we get them from all make use of the same instruments in the same conditions is absolutely and verifiably false.

And we haven’t even got started yet, and it’s time to have lunch with my wife. We’ll continue this later.

What I hope we can conclude is that while we have a very accurate measure of world CO2 atmospheric levels, we are nowhere near that in coming up with a single measure of global temperature. It is clear that we don’t use the same measures year after year, either. Sometimes they change. Sometimes entire regions don’t report and interpolations have to be used. All of this establishes trends, but to claim accuracies to 0.1 degree C with high confidence is absurd; and even conceding a capability to compare a number representing the average temperature of the globe for 365 days to a comparable number from a year ago, we certainly have no way to compare that to temperatures in the 1800’s when sea temperatures like as not came from putting a mercury thermometer into a bucket of water hauled up onto the deck, and most regions of the earth didn’t report any temperature at all on a daily or even weekly basis.

What we do know is that while the CO2 level has risen dramatically in the past 100 years, the temperatures have not. They have certainly fallen and risen dramatically and undisputedly in the past twelve hundred years. Earth’s climate was considerably warmer then than now, and we have evidence from all over the world. Well, to be exactly accurate, most of that comes from the northern hemisphere, but I know of no theory that allows a really dramatic long term temperature difference between hemispheres so I assume that the whole earth was warmer when there were dairy farms in Greenland, Vines in Nova Scotia then known as Vinland, grapes grown in Scotland and the Border lands, longer crop seasons in continental Europe and China, etc. It’s pretty well undisputed that the climate was all better in Viking times, and stayed that way until just after 1300 when it got to be colder and wetter all over from Greenland to China. By 1500 the climate was colder and wetter everywhere, and there were signs that things had been better in the New World and were now getting worse. In any event the cooling continued to about 1800, after which there was a halt to cooling and a gradual warming. Benjamin Franklin, seeing the dense clouds from erupting volcanoes in Iceland while travelling to Europe, speculated that the volcanic clouds were shading out the sun and causing the climate to be colder, and predicted more glaciers.

Somewhere before 1850 rivers began freezing less solidly in winter, and the spring ice breakups happened earlier and earlier, as recorded in Farmer’s Almanac as well as private diaries. By 1890 the warming trend was obvious, and Arrhenius began his calculation on the effect of increased CO2 from the Industrial Revolution on climate. It was not then considered obvious that warmer weather and longer growing seasons were a bad thing.

thermal radiation to space

Jerry:

Your comment about Roman ice cream reminded me of an incident from 1962.

I was stationed in Thailand at the ARPA R&D Field Unit. Our job was to do in-theater research that didn’t require combat involvement (that was done by a sister unit in Saigon). One problem was tracking insurgents who waded through paddy fields after dark. It was suggested to us, by a researcher in the US, that this wading should stir up the water, leaving a warmer trail of water from near the bottom, which would contrast with the cooler water on top, where it lost heat quickly at night. So we simply inserted thermometers at several depths in a pond and measured how quickly the temperature dropped after nightfall. It turned out that the temperature dropped very quickly through the whole column of water. The idea that there would be a layer of cooler water on top of a layer of warmer water was simply wrong. Radiation to space was a very real thing, even in tropical Thailand.

Joseph P. Martino

Which is why clouds are important in any model of climate: cloudy areas do not get exposed to space at night.  Of course they don’t get the blazing Sun in daytimes.  And in cold dry places CO2 will definitely have an effect.  In damp areas the water vapor will have absorbed all the re-radiated energy leaving none for the CO2 to affect.

More on this theme later this week.  Meanwhile:

Hello Jerry,

I know you like opera, so I thought I would pass this one on to you, just in case it hasn’t already ‘passed through’

http://videos.komando.com/watch/4333/viral-videos-9-year-old-opera-singer-stuns-all?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=tvkim&utm_content=2013-11-09-article-screen-shot-f

Enjoy.

Bob Ludwick=

All I can say is WOW! Brava!

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 798 Tuesday, November 12, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.

Barrack Obama, famously.

Universal Health Care and Equality

It’s pretty clear that the objective of the Affordable Health Care Act is to bring about a situation of universal health care, with the goal being that it will be just free: no insurance premiums, low to zero co-payments for both drugs and medical services, pretty well free hospitals. We may adjust the system, particularly with co-payments to discourage frivolous use of medical resources, but that appears to be the goal: universal single payer health care.

As it happens, I had breakfast with Frank Herbert the morning he was informed that the intestinal discomfort he had been feeling lately was middle stage pancreatic cancer. Frank being Frank it was a lot less unpleasant than you might have imagined. We were both making speeches at a computer convention in Seattle, and Frank gave his with aplomb, and we had dinner at Ivar’s that night. During dinner he told me that he and his wife had made arrangements for him to go to the Mayo clinic the next day. He was determined to lick this thing.

Of course he didn’t, but not from lack of trying. The point is that he could do that.

At that time I couldn’t have. Indeed, when I was told I had brain cancer in late 2007, my choices were always limited to what Kaiser offered; going to the Mayo Clinic or Sloan-Kettering wasn’t a financially feasible option. I hasten to add that had I had the money I wouldn’t have been tempted: my experience with the Kaiser system was as pleasant as it could have been under the circumstances, and I had every reason to believe in the competence of my physicians – most of whom had actually read some of my books.

Pass now to days of universal health care: can the Mayo Clinic exist? For that matter, can “Cadillac Plans” such as I have had with Kaiser for more than twenty-five years continue to exist under single payer universal health care? Could the Kaiser system itself survive?

“Why should Frank Herbert have access to better health care than I can get?” Or Bill Gates, or – but you get the idea. If we ever get to single payer universal health care that will be a question that must be answered. Why should anyone have access to something better than everyone can afford?

So you are faced with allocation of services – death panels, in popular parlance – to elite institutions, or else the elite institutions must cease to exist. They may not vanish and go out of business; there is always the alternative of expanding them enormously so that they are no longer elite institutions although they keep the same name; but effectively they will be gone.

I invite comment. If we have universal health care, will it allow Bill Gates and Frank Herbert options that you and I won’t have? How? Will physicians be allowed to offer concierge practice to the rich? How will physicians be paid?

Solar activity heads for lowest low in four centuries

I like these quotes: "The Maunder Minimum coincided with the worst European winters of the little ice age" and "The precise extent to which solar cycles influence global temperatures is still debated." And while the Climatologists didn’t see this coming, they know the outcome: "we should not expect a new grand minimum to bring on a new little ice age".

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24512-solar-activity-heads-for-lowest-low-in-four-centuries.html

David Smallwood

Of course the media are filled with dire warnings that “Climate Change” (no longer Global Warming) is responsible for the severity of the recent typhoons in the Philippines. There is no evidence for this hypothesis, but that doesn’t bother the institutional bureaucrats of the UN who get to pose as scientists.   Why any scientist worthy of the name participates in the UN political farce they call science is not clear. 

I used to build models for a living. The notion of systems analysis was to find systems you could model using mathematics that let you solve the model; you then tested the model against the real world.  The various climate models do none of this. They don’t even attempt to model in known factors, and they can’t even predict the real world – that is they can’t take the initial conditions of 1950 and run to 2010 and get anything similar to what actually happened.  And as the years go on it becomes more and more clear that there is no more warming trend now than there was in the days when the great fear was a cooling trend toward an ice age.  The fact remains that we don’t know what generates long term climate trends, and we have absolutely no understanding of solar radiation phenomena.

We do know that Earth was much warmer in Viking times than it is now; and that it was much colder during the Little Ice Age after the cooling trend began about 1300; and that it has been warming since about 1800 with a good deal of the warming happening before 1850.  CO2 has been seized as a forcing factor largely because it’s hard to think of another; but then CO2 from volcanism isn’t predictable either, and it’s not clear just what its contribution to rising CO2 levels may be.

We ought to be working on ways to reduce CO2 levels if they get a great deal higher, but not at the price of bankrupting ourselves.  Since there is uncertainty whether climate is getting hotter or colder, Bayesian analysis would indicate that optimum strategy would be to spend more on reducing that uncertainty, not on betting on remedies that depend on guessing correctly.  We know that CO2 is rising; it’s wise to think up ways to deal with that; but not as climate control.  Incidentally, forests are pretty good at sequestering CO2.

‘Until recently, without the knowledge of Congress, the Air Force was moving fast on a secret plan to help fund the F-35 by abolishing the A-10 fleet.’

<http://www.defense-aerospace.com/articles-view/feature/5/148289/usaf-maneuvers-to-retire-a_10.html/article/20130923/NEWS04/309230002/>

 

—–

Roland Dobbins

Droll

6 satellites ready for space

Each one is a 10 cm cube loaded into a dispenser. They will fly to ISS next month. You can post the picture.

Someone told me Von Braun thought kicking sats out the door of a space station was the best way to do it. You heard this? Want to ask your readers? Would love to get a source.

Rich

Commercial space in action.  I seem to recall hearing that von Braun had said that and it seems reasonable, but he never said it to me. Anyone remember it?

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 798 Monday, November 11, 2013

VETERAN’S DAY

And belatedly:

Happy Birthday Marines, Marine Family and Friends!

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq;

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.

Barrack Obama, famously.

Logistics: Combat Zone Parts Factory 3.0

Jerry

The U.S. Army continues to develop its decade old MPH (Mobile Parts Hospital) concept for instant fabrication of parts in a combat zone:

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htlog/articles/20131109.aspx

“The latest version, called Ex Lab (Expeditionary Lab), is more compact and relies more on 3-D parts builders (3-D printers) and operators trained to help users come up with designs for components that don’t yet exist. It’s often the case that troops discover the need for a new component or improved replacement part for their equipment. In the past this request had to go back to the original factory for development and manufacturing. But with the software and equipment available now, as well as satellite data links to factories, it is possible to get this work done quickly in the combat zone. Thus, the new name for what is essentially MPH 3.0. The MPH was developed when the army realized that the easiest and quickest way to get the many rarely requested, but vital, replacement parts to the troops was to manufacture the parts in the combat zone.” And there’s more.

Interesting, I think.

Ed

Sort of like having blacksmiths and farriers as an integral part of a cavalry regiment… Or armourers as part of the king’s household.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 797 Wednesday, November 06, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.

Barrack Obama, famously, 2012 Presidential Campaign.

Obama Officials In 2010: 93 Million Americans Will Be Unable To Keep Their Health Plans Under Obamacare

Federal Register

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2010-06-17/pdf/2010-14488.pdf

Generals

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/11/05/does-the-military-have-too-many-generals/military-should-trim-the-top-like-most-innovative-organizations

There are some amazingly soundly presented comments as well…

I, for one, believe that Field Grade officers (at that pay) can do the job of 50% of the flag rank (as they used to do!).

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

That would be my experience as well, but of course I spent most of my time with the military as a civilian analyst in force structure and procurement. Some generals were absolutely vital: Benny Schriever is a great example. Whether the recent purges in the top ranks are for efficiency or as part of a political strategy is not quite as clear. I note that one of the comments on this is horror at the thought that diversity may suffer.

If one considers longer time periods, it is clear that at some point in the not terribly distant future it will not be possible to simultaneously service the national debt, pay the military, pay the civilian police, pay the unions, pay the entitlement portions of Social Security (disability payments to those who have never paid into Social Security), pay veterans benefits, pay the retirement obligations of federal and state government workers, and pay the entitlements of Food Stamps: that is, will no longer be able to service the debt, provide bread and circuses , and pay the soldiers. Choices will have to be made. At that point the question of whom the Army obeys will be rather critical, as many South American republics with constitutions modeled almost word for word on the Philadelphia Constitution of 1787 have discovered. The Wikipedia discourse on the suspension of habeas corpus and how it was “enacted” by the Congress may be instructive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_Corpus_Suspension_Act_1863

Note that this is not precisely ancient history.

On Oct. 17, 2006, President Bush signed a law suspending the right of habeas corpus to persons "determined by the United States" to be an "enemy combatant" in the Global War on Terror. President Bush’s action drew severe criticism, mainly for the law’s failure to specifically designate who in the United States will determine who is and who is not an "enemy combatant." http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/rightsandfreedoms/a/habeuscorpus.htm

If something cannot go on forever, it will stop, Herb Stein told Nixon. It should be self evident that we cannot afford to service the debt, pay the soldiers, and provide increasingly expensive bread and circuses forever. At some point we will have to decide whom to pay.

The Republican establishment decided that Virginia should not be a maximum effort mission, while the labor unions and the Democrat National Committee decided it should be. The result was a preview of what is likely to happen two years from now. The RNC did not allocate much money to the Virginia campaign; this is either such gross incompetence that they no longer deserve a penny in donations, or else it is a malicious treason of the clerks as Rush Limbaugh suggests. Either way, the result is the same.

The RNC would rather stay in control of a party in “opposition” than share control while in power. We saw that in the time of Newt Gingrich when the US had actual budgetary surpluses, we saw it when they ran the only man Clinton could beat in his re-election, and we have seen it ever since.

The Libertarians decided to run a candidate as spoiler, and allowed him to be financed by false flag Democratic PACs who were pleased to have a few percent of the vote go to anti-Democrat voters. They can now be proud of having elected a Democratic operative and fund raiser as governor of a key state. They can feel proud of having accomplished the only possible outcome of their actions and we can count on them to duplicate their efforts in 2014.

If you have not read much about the lives and times of Caesar and Pompey and the end of the Roman Republic, you might find some of it interesting.

On the elections:

Jerry,

The Country Club crowd is already loudly drawing a suicidally wrong lesson from yesterday’s elections in New Jersey and Virginia. A lesson momentarily advantageous for them, but probably fatal for the party’s chances in 2016, and thus quite possibly fatal for this country’s chances of ever again being the kind of place it was founded to be.

They’re gleefully saying Chris Christie’s convincing win was because he’s a moderate, inclusive, country-club kind of a Republican, while Ken Cuccinelli’s point-and-a-half loss was because he’s a wild-eyed social conservative and thus inherently vulnerable to a patented Dem "War On Women" attack campaign. (The lesson as to who should top the ticket in

2016 is left as an exercise for us peasants.)

But the Dems DID NOT WAGE SUCH AN ATTACK on Christie. Oh, the losing candidate tried, but she never got the national Dem money or support to pay for the saturation ad barrage to make it stick. Christie cut his various deals to fend off the national Dem attack machine (embracing the President post-Sandy right before the 2012 election, splitting off the NJ Senate election so Booker and he each got their clear runs) and it worked.

Anyone who thinks he (or any Republican candidate) will get the same courtesy from the Dems in 2016 is massively deluded and riding for another Romneyesque fall. Christie’s easy win yesterday might even be viewed as a deliberate attempt to set up a Romneyfail repeat in ’16, by a sufficiently suspicious old curmudgeon. (I don’t know where we’d find someone like that.)

The truly interesting thing here is that Cucinelli campaigned hard on the ACA then damn near won. This despite the all-out Dem attack machine assault, and despite essentially being hung out to dry by the national Country Club establishment. He ended up outspent by two-to-one overall, and had no cash left for ads in the metro DC area for the final weeks of the campaign. The national Dems meanwhile were saturating the DC market with attack ads. The northern Virginia DC suburbs – suburbs that the previous Republican governor, with national party help, won – duly gave McAuliffe his narrow winning margin.

Yet Cucinelli closed from double-digits down to within a point and a half by yesterday, going from 24 points down with women statewide to 9 points down, and winning independents overall. Given a little more money, a couple more days, he probably would have won.

The lesson on the Dems’ growing vulnerability over the ACA is clear.

It’s every bad thing they do in a nutshell, and Cuccinelli’s surge started when he began explicitly campaigning on it. And the ACA issue is only going to get more powerful as millions of policies dropped or doubled becomes tens of millions in the coming year.

Less obviously, I’d say that if a "War On Women" attack campaign with a

2-to-1 funding advantage (AND an apparently Dem-sponsored Libertarian

spoiler) only produced a point-and-a-half win, the Dems may have gone to the well too often with that one. It is hard to say just how much repetition is weakening that, versus how much the emergence as a barefaced lie of "You can keep it, period" is trumping it.

Regardless, we’re due for a dose of smug advice from our self-appointed betters. I advise patience. The crucial trick will be to figure out how to avoid taking the bad advice without them once again sitting out future fights in a huff.

Porkypine

Minor correction: Cuccinelli’s loss is now by 2.45%, according to the unofficial total at http://electionresults.virginia.gov/resultsSW.aspx?type=SWR&map=CTY. I think my conclusions stand.

The point is that it is a picture of the future.

The paladins of Genghis Khan were empowered to kill tyrannical local officials out of hand.  They would be pardoned the death penalty nine times (renewable if their crimes were justified).

‘Eckert was sent a $6,000 bill for the medical procedures he involuntarily underwent, his lawyer says.’

<http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/11/05/man-seeks-millions-after-nm-police-force-colonoscopy-in-drug-search_print.html>

——

Police forced New Mexico scrap metal tradesman David Eckert to undergo two digital anal probes, three enema insertions and ultimately a colonoscopy after officers incorrectly assumed he was concealing drugs, according to a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court on his behalf.

No drugs were found by police or doctors at the Gila Regional Medical Center in Silver City, N.M. The exhaustive search began when Eckert allegedly rolled through a stop sign in Deming, N.M., on Jan. 2, 2013.

Roland Dobbins

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.