Debt Rattle October 22 2015

 

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  • #24527

    Jack Delano Spectators at annual barrel rolling contest, Presque Isle, ME 1940 • Iceland Sentences 26 Bankers To A Combined 74 Years In Prison (USUncu
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle October 22 2015]

    #24528
    VisionHawk
    Participant

    Re VW… “The manufacturer can recover from the scandal in two-to-three years if the right decisions are made now to make VW more efficient, agile and cost competitive, he said.”

    Are VW so far out of touch that they can’t see the trust that has been broken globally??
    And new findings today that say diesel cars are 4 times more toxic than a bus !!!

    I well remember the firm pulling out of the Australian market in the late 70’s – and recently having the gall to say in their ads “been in Aust for 60 years!”

    Looks like their fast & loose days are over. Perhaps we need more of an Icelandic approach to poor behaviour in ALL industries :))

    #24529
    Dr. Diablo
    Participant

    Welcome to science-for-hire. Remember all those measuring scandals, in “adjusting” South America, in changing sea-temperature points to inside the ship engine, etc, ad nauseum? Well here you go. Sharply below-average temperature in the Northeast, lower fall temperatures in Europe, completely average North Sea ice, and yet hilariously higher global temperature in aggregate. Isn’t the whole supposed to be the sum of the parts? But it snows a month early now and it’s warmer than ever.

    Also not all weather can be bad. They just said that not having El Nino was bad and cost billions and lives. But now having an El Nino costs billions and lives too. Even the rain in California and the west won’t cheer anyone up–that’s a crisis too, although perfectly normal in the west, when it first rains there are always and forever flash floods. Seems like all weather is a crisis, no matter where or what it is. Is this a matter of perspective, in that we used to have all the same weather and consequences of weather, but just thought it was local to the area? Sort of like being able to read about every murder on earth and not just in the local paper? How can everything and its opposite both be bad?

    Not sure the objection of the wood burning. It is categorically true that burning wood is renewable, and that it captures carbon, burn=release, grow=capture. Seems the only way the author would be happy is to say burning releases but growing doesn’t capture. Yes, this has to do with how and whether the forest grows back, and that sustainable forest issue is important, but elsewhere, not addressed. Again, everything has to be a catastrophe, even wood decay.

    And Iceland, 75/25 = 3 years in prison? Really? I could steal $500Million and serve only 3 years? That’s $166M a year. I need to go there right away. If I start at 25, by age 28 I could have $2M a year to spend for the rest of my natural life. That’s a good deal by any measure. And is shows how desperately lacking justice is that Iceland is delivering the harshest terms which make their criminals (only) millionaires. Oh the humanity!

    #24543
    earlmardle
    Participant

    Diablo, I’m so glad your perspective allows you to be so upbeat, long may you live in that frame of mind. I would be ecstatic, seriously, to find that you are right. However, you might want to think about the whole planet, not just your corner.

    It is true that certain areas are indeed cooler than their long term averages, but that’s kind of the point in taking a global average. For example, your state may be 2 degrees cooler this year than average; however Antarctica may be 15 degrees warmer (for argument’s sake). It is still cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey in Antarctica and if you step outside in your bikini you WILL die very quickly, but that temperature rise is what matters on a global level. As a denizen of NZ I am now anticipating that the southern oceans will have more ice, not less and that ice will cover a much wider area than at present (see the latest Hansen paper for details). That will create a much greater ice/air interface leading to much cooler air above the southern seas. As the tropics continue to get warmer, they will average out in the usual way, through storms in the 45 south latitude range, right where I live. Hansen refers to them as superstorms and we can expect winds not in the 150kph range which we are seeing increasingly, but double that, or more. My country will probably be blown off the map. Possibly within my lifetime, certainly within my daughter’s lifetime. But I’m sure she will be grateful for your sunny perspective in the process.

    As for wood, you might have noticed that fire works faster than growing, so the effects of burning more wood will come first while the mitigation will come very much later, by which time other factors such as the abovementioned storms will have made a lot of the mitigation moot. Still, we should be able to offer a whole country about the size of Japan or Germany to grow trees, if they can stand the winds.

    As for Iceland, you are still with me Diablo? Anyway, there we agree wholeheartedly, justice is so very small these days for sure.

    #24545
    Nassim
    Participant

    “The Strongest El Niño in Decades Is Going to Mess With Everything (Bloomberg) ”

    I prefer this, less sensational, headline by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology:

    “Pacific and Indian oceans now reinforcing climate patterns”

    https://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/

    If you read the actual report, it is not so dramatic either:

    “While the 2015 El Niño is the strongest seen since 1997, its equivalent in the Indian Ocean—the positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD)—is now at levels not seen since late 2006. The strong El Niño is expected to last until at least the end of the year before declining in the first quarter of 2016, however the positive Indian Ocean Dipole is expected to decay earlier, in November 2015.

    Sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the central to eastern tropical Pacific continue to warm, further entrenching El Niño, while waters south of Indonesia have cooled, strengthening the positive IOD. Likewise, waters to the north of Australia have also cooled over the past three weeks, which may further contribute to drier conditions.

    Most international climate models surveyed by the Bureau of Meteorology indicate the anomalous warmth in the tropical Pacific Ocean is likely to peak around the end of 2015. Typically, El Niño peaks during the late austral spring or early summer, and weakens during late summer to autumn.

    Four out of five international climate models suggest the strong positive IOD event will persist into November, but decline rapidly as the monsoon trough shifts south over the IOD region, changing the wind patterns. This change means the IOD pattern is no longer able to form in the ocean.

    El Niño is usually associated with below-average spring rainfall over eastern Australia, and increased spring and summer daytime temperatures in Australia south of the tropics. A positive IOD typically reinforces the drying pattern, particularly in the southeast. ”

    Big deal.

    We have not had a drought for 5 years so one is due. Nothing special. 🙂

    #24549
    Dr. Diablo
    Participant

    I’m with you. I used to be a big Global Warming follower, after 1989 when the weather first went strange.

    …But then the data came in. First, ice cores showed that CO2 FOLLOWED the warming, not preceded it. This was re-confirmed. Okay, that’s just one data piece. Then we saw the hockey stick, totally erasing the incredibly-well-known Little Ice Age in Europe, and the scuttling of the well-known records surrounding it. Followed by the complete failure of the atmosphere to coninue to warm, the failure of 101 models to predict anything at all, then 15 years of temperature plateau…while we noticed that all planets in our solar system had similar warming. Then the world-ending U.S. hurricanes caused by global warming stopped cold. After that, we had the global carbon tax inititive appear, Goldman Sachs’ multi-trillion$ carbon-credit trading platforms (and skimming/front-running) stall out, followed recently by scandal-a-month in temperature data-rigging, admitted by many people, schools, and points. Okay, so it’s science: it’s contentious. There are many opinions, and, given science’s long history, most are wrong (tectonic plate deniers, anyone? Remember, the last popular “undebatable” worldwide scientific fad championed by politicans, scientists, the media and the public…was Eugenics. Chilling, but true. Read about it if you dare.)

    But now we’re 15 years on from when NY should have been underwater, where tempertures should be running away, and nothing. North Sea ice is normal. South Sea ice is meh. Just today, San Fransico’s tidal monitor shows no change for 75 years. Nothing. Nada. Bupkis. It’s nice to have theories and models, but they have to produce. This week the IMF says we should just raise carbon taxes anyway because they could really use the money.

    So aside from all that, we can go back to basics: the US weather is normalizing. It’s actually getting cooler. Europe notes the same thing. And we don’t need fancy temperature data by experts to show it. It’s so noticable, you can tell by your wardrobe how you’ve moved up a jacket already.

    New analysis from Australia suggests that the model (that unscience-like, they wouldn’t release) was over-emphasizing CO2 and under-emphasising the sun, and this rectifies the predictive power of the model. Just as we saw in the solar system’s warming, on Pluto. We also see this in increasing documentation of a 200 year solar cycle. We also see this in geological history to time immemorial: the planet has had Krakatoa, Tambora, the entire Siberian plains in lava, ice miles thick, palm trees in Antarctica…and all that time, temperatures stayed within a certain range. They did not run away even once because the earth is an astoundingly huge, self-regulating system that can take way more than we puny humans can throw at it. If one volcano can admittedly release more CO2 than a whole nation, and we had a CONTINENT of volcanoes going off and it didn’t run away, well…maybe we need to update our models a little. And share the models. And share the data, without bending it. And keep the debate open. Because real science is about keeping ALL debates open. Closed debates are for closed minds.

    Yes, maybe I’m wrong and every other place, except every place I can read about, is warming up. I had that very thing in mind in my original post. Or, perhaps if two continents–or three in your case–are cooling and putting on sweaters, we were on a well-known solar cycle that has reached its maximum and will moderate? Just like has always happened since the beginning of the world.

    That’s not a cheerful end, because contrary to the global warming story, historically humans prosper in warming, and dimish sharply in war, famine and disease in cooling. But cooling does not collect taxes for the center. Plant your trees.

    #24556
    E. Swanson
    Participant

    Dr D., you’ve surely put together a great batch of denialist talking points. For example, the notion that the CO2 changes in the ice cores follows the temperature increase is entirely logical, as there weren’t any massive sources of CO2 at the time. The resulting lag between temperature and CO2 can be simply explained as a positive feedback WITHIN the Earth’s natural ecosystems. For you to claim this data proves there’s no global warming is to display a complete lack of understanding of the physics of the problem.

    Then, you claim that the “the North Sea ice is normal”, which is technically true, since there’s no sea-ice in the North Sea at this time of the year. Big deal. But, the Arctic sea-ice has declined steadily and this year’s minimum is among the 4 lowest in the record. Then, you mention volcanoes and sunspots, both of which do not exhibit a long term trend in the recent record, while the global average temperature has steadily increased. Of course, you are cherry picking data, beginning with the 1997-98 El Nino year, which was rather warm. If you wait until next year, you might find that this year’s El Nino surpasses that of 1997-98. As for the Little Ice Age experienced in Northern Europe, there’s little evidence that it was a global event and it’s known that there’s natural variation in the Thermohaline Circulation in the Nordic Seas, which could be the cause of that local cooling, in addition to couple of rather large volcanic events during the period.

    Then there’s this current event. Glad I don’t live in Mexico. I wonder how many more migrants will show up in the US after the storm plows thru…

    #24557
    Ken Barrows
    Participant

    Dr. D,
    Doesn’t matter. Humans should avoid carbon emissions to reduce ocean acidification.

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