Better get to installing, winter is creeping up on US. I think the funniest part is how the weather did not play its part well in DC. Hard to push the benefits of solar when there is no sunshine to make it work. Or Wind generation when the wind does not blow.
The big difference I see between this and your example is who is paying the bills. I think we would probably be far ahead in alternative energy if the Feds did not get involved. Maybe giving a few hundred thousand to colleges for research is ok. Handing $100s of millions to scam artists like the Solyndra bunch reeks of corruption. Notice they are taking the 5th. That to me says GUILTY AS CHARGED.
On our return from vacation we went by this large solar project. On further research we discovered it is one of about a dozen in Southern CA being built. It was the first I have seen of what is called a Solar Trough. Interesting concept. Not sure how practical it is. The states push for 20% alternative electricity by 2010 spawned many of these different designs.
I wonder how much Solyndra and its execs "kicked back" ... oh excuse me - "legally contributed" to the campaigns of those politicians who made that $500M in lost $ available.
One-hand-washes the other in Washington and politics in general. The most intelligent people realize that the best way to prevent corruption is to minimize the amount of $ they have to play with in the 1st place.
It sounds to me like there is quite a bit of fat still in government. Shutdown the Dept. of Energy and 80% of those optional, nonsecurity agencies in this country. If you want socialism and such, maybe we can make a deal with Europe to take those of you in. $10/gal gas will help you to keep your CO2 emissions down!
Solyndra employee: “Everyone knew the plant wouldn’t work”
This is a must listen. While we were focused on the debate last Wednesday night, Mark Levin got a call from someone who worked at the Solyndra plant, who gave some revealing details about this Solyndra scandal.
This is one of the more interesting things the caller said:
While we were out there, while we were building it – cause it is a half a billion dollar plant – everyone already knew that China had developed a more inexpensive way to manufacture these solar panels. Everyone knew that the plant wouldn’t work. But they still did it. They still built it.
She then emphasized that she isn’t even that high on the totem pole and she knew this stuff. So there’s no doubt in her mind that Obama and the White House knew that it wasn’t feasible.
Levin replayed the call tonight. Here is the full call:
Solar energy is the political football du jour. Obama is trying to push through $3 billion more by the Sept 30th deadline. At least one will not get our money.
But if I were pulling the money strings, I would put the $3 billion into SOLAR RESEARCH on how to get panels more efficient. Or to finance companies who have already found ways to improve it but need money to get it to production.
Remember in all these attacks to not attack the TECHNOLOGY. We would be fools to not try and capture all that free energy El Sol is providing us with.
Not only that, the big sites don't help get us off the grid. It just plugging more targets into the grid. So when a storm or fire or earthquake or idiot hits, the whole region goes dark.
I'll take a couple of panels for my roof for $2,000 please, Alex.
That is the key to solar as Larsb has already done. I was tempted if the leases were not so convoluted and tied against the home rather than the panels themselves. There is still no real protection if the panels fail 10 years down the road and the company is broke. If I could carry my home load with $5000 worth of panels it would be realistic in my opinion. The current $25k systems are over priced. Of course that is the reason the US made solar panel companies are being beat up by the Chinese. The last price I read was $1.30 a watt out of China. Evergreen closed up shop when the price was still $2.50 per watt. I also would want at least 48 hours of battery backup as part of my system.
Or even BETTER, that $3 billion could be used to put $40K panel systems on 75,000 homes.
That would generate 750,000 MEGAWATTS of power annually, powering all those homes AND adding capacity to The Grid.
That is more than you could produce with dozens of huge commercial solar arrays, and putting it on space which is already paid for, and not be battling 15 different entities for the permission to build on the land.
AND it would increase the market value of all those homes by 10%-15%.
Money better spent than paybacks to campaign contributors. How many people would be employed installing solar on 75k homes. Sign me up for a freebie solar system.
Right now all that free solar power costs an arm and a leg. I would even agree to pay 10% of the cost for a nice system. That way all that free solar power actually would be free (almost).
Alas, I guess if you really want to save money it will really cost you !! Has anyone seen that ad floating around the internet where this "genius" will send you the plans to build your own solar system on the cheap? For a slight fee of course.
Obama DOE Warns: We Can’t Let China Dominate Solar Industry Then Awards $337 Million to Firm That Uses Chinese Company’s Solar Panels Posted by Jim Hoft on Thursday, September 29, 2011, 12:16 PM
Here is how the scam works.
Arizona Solar Plant Picks Chinese Supplier
Suntech, the Chinese solar giant, has won a contract to supply photovoltaic panels for a 150-megawatt project in Arizona, marking China’s entry into a lucrative United States power-plant market dominated by American companies.
The project is the first phase of a planned 700-megawatt project called Mesquite Solar to be built about 40 miles west of Phoenix and operated by Sempra Generation, a subsidiary of Sempra Energy. A California utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, will buy the electricity produced by the power plant’s first phase, called Mesquite Solar 1.
A new report from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation found that West Africa, where half of the world's cocoa supply comes from, is becoming less and less suitable for cocoa production as climate change brings higher temperatures and changing rainfall patterns.
The report says that between 2030 and 2050 land suitable for cocoa production will be slashed dramatically, with production having to move to less suitable areas. This change will make a huge impact on the worldwide industry and hurt the local farmers who rely on cocoa crops for their livelihood.
Global demand for chocolate has been quickly rising as developing nations like China import more of it. The growing demand and drop in production will mean much higher prices for chocolate.
The study proposes finding new heat and drought resistant crops that could thrive in West Africa, while helping to transition cocoa production to more suitable areas.
We GOTTA STOP IT NOW !!! :shades: :shades: :shades:
If we get South and Central America to grow Cocoa Beans (Cacao) instead of Coca we would all be better off. Cocoa is not native to Africa anyway. They will probably plant crops for fuel soon. That is happening in lots of 3rd world countries. Cocoa will grow 20 degrees either side of the equator. So if the price is right it will be grown.
What I am ticked about is the price of Coffee. Over the last two years the coffee I buy at Costco has gone from $11.69 for a 3 lb bag to $17.99. Look for more and more inflation of all food products. Thanks to failed policies. Much of which is pushed by the global warmers and green agenda.
Maybe someone will come up with synthetic chocolate made from oil or algae.
PS They already have messed with my tequila. Taking out the Agave and planting corn to replace that which we have made into ethanol. Stinking greenies.
There might be a few things not perfect in this article, but the math does bring out the main point that the Earth is not growing but the human population continues to.
So what does Gates see as the world’s other “biggest problem?” Not global warming. Nor poverty. Not peak oil. The absolute biggest? One like the trigger mechanism on a nuclear bomb? One that could throw a monkey wrench into global economic growth, end capitalism, even destroy civilization? The one that if not solved soon renders all efforts to solve all the other global problems — including global warming, poverty and fossil fuel depletion — irrelevant, futile and impossible ever to solve?
Overpopulation. That was the consensus “biggest problem” when a group of billionaires that included Gates got together at a secret meeting in Manhattan a couple of years ago.
Get it? Out-of-control population is the world’s No. 1 problem.
That is what makes it so difficult to figure out the logic of the Liberal mind, like Bill Gates or Al Gore. They wring their hands over runaway population growth in many parts of the World, then raise a big stink when we have a war in one of those places. You would think they would use some of that money to provide those people with guns and ammo. Instead Al Gore plants 10,000 mango trees where they don't get enough water to grow. All to appease the GW gods. So how is feeding non productive people going to slow the population growth? Both in the 3rd World and the USA. You don't work, you don't eat, end of story problem solved.
I agree that overpopulation is a LONG TERM problem which will someday need to be addressed.
Whoa....that sounds ominous. Next thing you will be wanting to raise taxes to form a task force to study the situation.
Also, I don't know of any way to destroy water, salt water or fresh water. Freezing doesn't hurt it, fire just turns it into a gas, you can't hit it with a hammer, etc. If it gets dirty it just cleans itself. Water is eternal.
No - overpopulation is an environmental right NOW. The need for land and resources is one of the reasons the tropical forests are being cutdown, the oceans overfished, , there are so many pelectrical powerplants, and the numbe rof vehicles around the world continues to increase.
CO2 production, pollution, deforestation etc. will continue to grow worse as the population increases, and there aren't enough resources to provide them with the 1st world amenities they covet. Thus you have poor people, like in Nigeria who see a gasoline pipe running through their village, and who are willing to hack into the pipe, steal the fuel and burn it over open fires because they have and will never have anything else. Overpopulation NOW means people will do whatever they need to, to survive. So all the well-meaning wealthier environmentalists of the world can convert to their high tech. solutions to keep the Earf pristine, but it doesn't matter, as the masses of poor will continue to expand and use any resources in any manner.
The bacteria in the rest of this petri-dish we call Earf, win. They consume all the resources eventually. And that eventually is decades away, not centuries. Poverty and war beyond anything seen is the path humanity is on. A degree or 2 warming is not even a real concern.
Ask the typical U.S. citizen where climate-change stands on their list of concerns, and you'll find that since the decline of the global economy in 2008, jobs, health-care, college costs, taxes, and such are far and away more important. The typical citizen in my area does not care whether the average temperature during the winter of 1980 was 20.0F, or 20.2F this year, or will be 20.5F in 2025. It's basically the same.
Another City filing for Bankruptcy. Alternative energy the cause. In CA we are bleeding red ink over so many GW related projects, it is only a matter of time before the bigger cities start filing for protection under bankruptcy.
Harrisburg, Pa., Votes to File for Bankruptcy
Pennsylvania's capital city voted to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection on Tuesday as it faced a state takeover, according to media reports.
The City Council voted 4-3 to seek bankruptcy protection for Harrisburg, which has a debt burden five times its general-fund budget "because of an overhaul and expansion of a trash-to-energy incinerator that doesn’t generate enough revenue," Bloomberg Businessweek reported.
The bankruptcy means the city will lose state aid, but that is better than the proposed recovery plans, Councilwoman Susan Brown-Wilson said, according to Bloomberg.
7 billion people exhaling CO2 could be the problem. Wait till they all have a car or big SUV. Check out the projections for India.... :sick:
The world's population looks set to smash through the seven billion barrier in the next few days, according to the United Nations.
It comes just 12 years since the total reached six billion - with official estimates saying the figure will top eight billion in 2025 and 10 billion before the end of the century.
Experts say the pace of growth - which has seen the number of people on the planet triple since 1940 - poses an increasing danger to citizens.
With more people to feed, house and provide medical care for, they say the world's resources look set to come under more strain than ever before.
As populations stabilise in the industrial world, almost all growth in the near future is expected to take place in developing countries.
"Shale discoveries have reinvigorated U.S. oil and gas production that just half a dozen years ago was widely seen as in terminal decline. Today, there is a glut of cheap natural gas, and domestic oil production is rising for the first time in decades."
I really like the idea of CNG for vehicles. I think for commuters the Civic GX is a great choice. CNG vehicles are the only ones given HOV access with no end date. To me the biggest downside would be filling. If you work for a company that has CNG it is a no brainer. There is only one public CNG location left in all San Diego County. Several private places for buses, taxis and commercial vehicles.
Shale oil and gas seems to be where the real jobs are. If I was out of work I would be heading in that direction. I sure would hate to get a job with a fly by night solar or wind company, only to find out it was a scam to shuffle tax dollars into political pockets.
Fargo was booming when we spent the night there about a year ago. Of course, beside the oil and gas, they are installing a lot of wind turbines out that way too. :shades:
"The Berkeley Earth Project has used new methods and some new data, but finds the same warming trend seen by groups such as the UK Met Office and Nasa.
The project was established by University of California physics professor Richard Muller, who was concerned by claims that established teams of climate researchers had not been entirely open with their data.
Funding came from a number of sources, including charitable foundations maintained by the Koch brothers, the billionaire US industrialists, who have also donated large sums to organisations lobbying against acceptance of man-made global warming.
They also report that although the urban heat island effect is real - which is well-established - it is not behind the warming registered by the majority of weather stations around the world."
The Berkeley Earth Project (BEP) looked at land temperature since the mid-1950s. Berkeley Earth’s founder and director Richard A. Muller said:
“Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the U.S. and the U.K. This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that the potential biases identified by climate change skeptics did not seriously affect their conclusions.”
Muller is a physicist at the University of California, Berkley, who had a reputation for being a climate change skeptic, says his studies back up the work of previous groups. The study used five times as many station locations: Using over 39,000 stations and combining data sets of 1.6 billion temperature reports from 16 publicly available data archives, the scientists were able to avoid station selection bias.
The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project was created to make sense of global temperature change, with the world’s most comprehensive set of data. Previous global warming studies by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research in Britain have found that global land temperature rise has increased by 1.2 degrees C from the 1900s to now.
Muller previously said in a testimony to congress in March that “based on the preliminary work we have done, I believe that the systematic biases that are the cause for most concern can be adequately handled by data analysis techniques.”
The rise in temperature since the mid-1950s, most climate scientists say, is in part due to carbon dioxide emissions from human activities.
Muller also said in his testimony that the number attributed to human caused global warming, which is around 0.6 degrees, needs to be improved. “Berkeley Earth is working to improve on the accuracy of this key number by using a more complete set of data, and by looking at biases in a new way,” he adds.
Some of the critical findings in the studies posted online include:
While urban land heat does occur, it doesn’t really add to the average land temperature rise. Yes, a third of temperature sites reported a period of cooling over the last 70 years. This leaves the other two-thirds though, which reported warming. Weather stations ranked as poor, performed just as well as the stations considered okay. Therefore, it’s alright to include poor stations in the study of global warming trends. The Berkeley collaborators include Saul Perlmutter, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics. Using the same skills the physicist used to discover that the universe is expanding, Perlmutter and other astrophysicists and particle physicists in the group will analyze the massive weather data set.
Next, Muller wants to study the ocean temperature to build a more complete view of rising temperatures.
Do know anything about a guy named Nathan Myhrvold? He sees an overall warming trend over the last 100 years. He does not believe our burning of fossil fuel is a significant factor. Claims Beef and Sheep produce way more GHG World wide. And he also thinks the more Sulfur Dioxide we get into the stratosphere the better to cool the planet. He currently has a company that has one of the largest collections of patents in the World. The book Super Freakonomics talks a lot about him.
On the day we visited IV, Myhrvold convened roughly a dozen of his colleagues to talk about the problem and possible solutions. They sat around a long oval conference table, Myhrvold near one end. They are a roomful of wizards, and yet without doubt Myhrvold is their Harry Potter. For the next ten or so hours, fueled by an astonishing amount of diet soda, he prodded and amplified, interjected and challenged. Everyone in the room agrees that the earth has been getting warmer and they generally suspect that human activity has something to do with it. But they also agree that the standard global-warming rhetoric in the media and political circles is oversimplified and exaggerated. Too many accounts, Myhrvold says, suffer from “people who get on their high horse and say that that our species will be exterminated.”
Does he believe this?
“Probably not.”
When An Inconvenient Truth is mentioned, the table erupts in a sea of groans. The film’s purpose, Myhrvold believes, was “to scare the crap out of people.” Although Al Gore “isn’t technically lying,” he says, some of the nightmare scenarios Gore describes—the state of Florida disappearing under rising seas, for instance—“don’t have any basis in physical reality in any reasonable time frame. No climate model shows them happening.” But the scientific community is also at fault. The current generation of climate-prediction models are, as Lowell Wood puts it, “enormously crude.”
I read some about Myhrvold back in his Microsoft days but haven't followed him lately. Interesting guy, too bad (for Microsoft) that he didn't stick around for another dozen years.
He's smarter than Al. Shoot, he's smarter than most of us. :shades:
He's smarter than Al. Shoot, he's smarter than most of us.
Speak for yourself. :shades:
I would say he is not only smarter but more educated than the average person. From the above book:
Myhrvold, who is fifty years old, has been smart for a long time. Growing up in Seattle, he graduated from high school at fourteen and by the time he was twenty-three had earned, primarily at UCLA and Princeton, a bachelor’s degree (mathematics), two master’s degrees (geophysics/space physics and mathematical economics), and a Ph.D. (mathematical physics). He then went to Cambridge University to do quantum cosmology research with Stephen Hawking.
He is so polymathic as to make an everyday polymath tremble with shame. In addition to his scientific interests, he is an accomplished nature photographer, chef, mountain climber, and a collector of rare books, rocket engines, antique scientific instruments, and, especially, dinosaur bones: he is co-leader of a project that has dug up more T. rex skeletons than anyone else in the world. He is also—and this is hardly unrelated to his hobbies—very wealthy. In 1999, when he left Microsoft, he appeared on the Forbes list of the four hundred richest Americans.
I think you would enjoy Freaknomics and Super Freakonomics. Answers some interesting questions you may have never thought of.
Lol, so did I. And in those days it stayed on your transcript forever. If you made an "F", you then had to make an "A" to bring your grade up to a "C".
When my kids were is college, if you failed a course and then took it over and made an "A", the "A" wiped the "F" off the books and you got an "A" . I am not sure when they changed the calculation.
I learned more math from this guy than I ever did in school (but I had that awful Yale method too). Had to retake it in high school and again in college.
Physics is offered through that free Khan academy link, but no GW module yet.
I would say he is not only smarter but more educated than the average person. From the above book:
Myhrvold, who is fifty years old, has been smart for a long time. Growing up in Seattle, he graduated from high school at fourteen and by the time he was twenty-three had earned, primarily at UCLA and Princeton, a bachelor’s degree (mathematics), two master’s degrees (geophysics/space physics and mathematical economics), and a Ph.D. (mathematical physics). He then went to Cambridge University to do quantum cosmology research with Stephen Hawking.
He is so polymathic as to make an everyday polymath tremble with shame. In addition to his scientific interests, he is an accomplished nature photographer, chef, mountain climber, and a collector of rare books, rocket engines, antique scientific instruments, and, especially, dinosaur bones: he is co-leader of a project that has dug up more T. rex skeletons than anyone else in the world. He is also—and this is hardly unrelated to his hobbies—very wealthy. In 1999, when he left Microsoft, he appeared on the Forbes list of the four hundred richest Americans.
He sounds very intelligent.
But smart and intelligent aren't the same. He's intelligent. I wonder if he can have a normal conversation with someone outside his field? That's a smart guy.
I really did poorly in HS. Except shop classes which I aced. I guess it could have been the fact I did not take any homework home. I usually got good grades on the tests and that kept me at a C average. I worked all through HS and felt most of what they taught me was a waste of my time. I concentrated on what would get me a good job in electronics. Worked for me. It is possible to learn a lot of useless stuff. I sometimes wonder if I should have applied myself to the sciences and gone into engineering. Engineers were not making high salaries back then. Only took a little OT to make more as a technician. By the time I retired in 2006 I was making about $30k a year more than our head of engineering.
Now that I am retired I am cramming my head full of a lot of Useless Stuff.
So here we are, entering another dark and cold period of the year. Why am I complaining about Winter right? Why - is because - it is Oct. 29th, a full 7 weeks away from the start of Winter!
As usual the cold and freezing weather which isn't supposed to be happening, because the Arctic is warming so much - is here again. Yes that same Arctic with all that warmth melting the ice, has somehow overcome the warm air of the tropics. So where is all the cold air coming from in October then? Why are the boots and shovels coming out already?
I really don't see how a warmer Earth would be detrimental to most of us. However we get to a warmer earth - whether naturally or thru MMGW, let's DO IT. Every degree warmer helps me save energy (for heating), and reduces all the waste of removing snow, month after month. So go out and drive!
"One of the predictions of climate change models is that extreme weather—floods, heat waves, droughts, even blizzards—will become far more common."
"Snowfall during October is not uncommon in the Northeast in general, but when it does occur it typically only falls on a very narrow swath, high elevations or a relatively small patch of land." (accuweather.com)
Button down - sounds like this one is out of the norm.
I thought the GW Cult changed the name again to "Climate Chaos"? That way no matter what calamity strikes, from Tornadoes to Volcanoes it can be attributed to a warming trend.
I really liked the balanced approach they took in Super Freakonomics. They cut through the political BS that has taken over with its demands for Cap n Trade to raise taxes.
The most simple explanation is usually the best. It usually gets cold because it is getting colder, not warmer. I think I will stick with that explanation.
The GW folks are essentially paid political hacks looking for a free ride and are fast becoming laughingstocks. What in the world has happened to common sense in this country?
I can tell you that common sense left CA long ago. About the same time Reagan left the Governor's office here. We are the first with a real Cap n Trade law. Whoopee, higher utilities are on the way.
Forgot to tell you that I got the Freakonomics books from the library the other day. I think I read the original one, but with my memory, it'll most all be new again. :shades:
From skimming the net, it sounds like their '09 stuff on GW (and yeah, I still prefer the warming moniker; haven't heard the chaos one), isn't too well researched or well founded.
Houdini, did you miss my post the other day where the Koch Brothers' funded research said that the global warming research was well done, scientific, supported, etc.? That's in spite of all the rhetoric, email scandals, hockey sticks, etc. The only question now is whether it's man made or not.
Gotta run - my sister left a message about the snow already falling in N. Virginia and I need to call her back before the power goes out for a week.
The weather probably isn't becoming more extreme. What's become more extreme is the number of people taking data, running around with cameras of all sorts, and the prevalence of those videos and information available on the web and on numerous TV channels.
And what you have is a larger U.S. and global population who occupy more land area, and in many cases are forced thru market-conditions or government programs, to build in disaster prone areas. Example - rebuilding New Orleans on a delta that is sliding/sinking into the Gulf of Mexico.
So the combination of the 2, appears to us to be more extreme. And if you have more scientists counting and classifying events, you have more events. Nice and neat argument can be made, but there need to be a few asterisks explaining the devil-in-the-details. Sort of like the Chevy Volt's mpg rating.
And remember scientists are human too. I'm sure they are just like everyone else. If you read enough history and biographies, you can discern how thru the centuries every leader, religious figure, scientist, and politician all believed their generation and era was a "defining/changing moment". I see our climate-scientists have the same desire. They see the current era as the defining moment, and they are the messengers of the Truth.
Climatologists are at least 30 years away from having the computer power to model the atmosphere anywhere near correctly. Climatologists may have data showing a short, slight warming trend over the last few decades, but that's happened before over the previous centuries. They don't know what is going to happen in the next decades and centuries, and don't have a decent model to make a decent estimate. Anyone who tells me they know what the climate will be like in 25 or 50 years, is either lying, or a zealot not recognizing their own limited, knowledge.
The science of climatology is in its infancy. As many science's are. Glad I didn't go for that colonoscopy! How do we feel knowing the flu vaccine is effective about 60% of the time? We have much to learn; and you should keep that in mind when someone comes along and gives you "the "truth" on some subject. I won't mention the prime exemplary clown.
Only about 20% of the study was funded by the Koch brothers, and probably they did not even know where the money was going. Plus the study actually did nothing to confirm or deny that GW was man made.
It is hard to see how anyone could do a valid study when so much info to be studied was withheld, changed or destroyed.
Afaik, no one here has ever denied that the earth's temp has gone thru several changes over the years on a cyclical basis. It may be in a warming trend right now or it may be in a cooling trend. Apparently it just depends on who is doing the study.
"There is no reason now to be a skeptic about steadily increasing temperatures, Muller wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal's editorial pages, a place friendly to skeptics. Muller did not address in his research the cause of global warming. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists say it's man-made from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil. Nor did his study look at ocean warming, future warming and how much of a threat to mankind climate change might be.
Still, Muller said it makes sense to reduce the carbon dioxide created by fossil fuels."
Comments
The big difference I see between this and your example is who is paying the bills. I think we would probably be far ahead in alternative energy if the Feds did not get involved. Maybe giving a few hundred thousand to colleges for research is ok. Handing $100s of millions to scam artists like the Solyndra bunch reeks of corruption. Notice they are taking the 5th. That to me says GUILTY AS CHARGED.
http://www.energy.ca.gov/siting/solar/index.html
One-hand-washes the other in Washington and politics in general. The most intelligent people realize that the best way to prevent corruption is to minimize the amount of $ they have to play with in the 1st place.
It sounds to me like there is quite a bit of fat still in government. Shutdown the Dept. of Energy and 80% of those optional, nonsecurity agencies in this country. If you want socialism and such, maybe we can make a deal with Europe to take those of you in. $10/gal gas will help you to keep your CO2 emissions down!
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
This is a must listen. While we were focused on the debate last Wednesday night, Mark Levin got a call from someone who worked at the Solyndra plant, who gave some revealing details about this Solyndra scandal.
This is one of the more interesting things the caller said:
While we were out there, while we were building it – cause it is a half a billion dollar plant – everyone already knew that China had developed a more inexpensive way to manufacture these solar panels. Everyone knew that the plant wouldn’t work. But they still did it. They still built it.
She then emphasized that she isn’t even that high on the totem pole and she knew this stuff. So there’s no doubt in her mind that Obama and the White House knew that it wasn’t feasible.
Levin replayed the call tonight. Here is the full call:
http://www.therightscoop.com/solyndra-employee-everyone-knew-the-plant-wouldnt-w- ork/
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/topaz-solar-farm-will-not-meet-doe-loan-guarant- ee-deadline-2011-09-22
But if I were pulling the money strings, I would put the $3 billion into SOLAR RESEARCH on how to get panels more efficient. Or to finance companies who have already found ways to improve it but need money to get it to production.
Remember in all these attacks to not attack the TECHNOLOGY. We would be fools to not try and capture all that free energy El Sol is providing us with.
I'll take a couple of panels for my roof for $2,000 please, Alex.
That would generate 750,000 MEGAWATTS of power annually, powering all those homes AND adding capacity to The Grid.
That is more than you could produce with dozens of huge commercial solar arrays, and putting it on space which is already paid for, and not be battling 15 different entities for the permission to build on the land.
AND it would increase the market value of all those homes by 10%-15%.
It's a perfect solution. :shades:
Money better spent than paybacks to campaign contributors. How many people would be employed installing solar on 75k homes. Sign me up for a freebie solar system.
Alas, I guess if you really want to save money it will really cost you !! Has anyone seen that ad floating around the internet where this "genius" will send you the plans to build your own solar system on the cheap? For a slight fee of course.
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
Posted by Jim Hoft on Thursday, September 29, 2011, 12:16 PM
Here is how the scam works.
Arizona Solar Plant Picks Chinese Supplier
Suntech, the Chinese solar giant, has won a contract to supply photovoltaic panels for a 150-megawatt project in Arizona, marking China’s entry into a lucrative United States power-plant market dominated by American companies.
The project is the first phase of a planned 700-megawatt project called Mesquite Solar to be built about 40 miles west of Phoenix and operated by Sempra Generation, a subsidiary of Sempra Energy. A California utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, will buy the electricity produced by the power plant’s first phase, called Mesquite Solar 1.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/?refresh=true
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/arizona-solar-plant-picks-chinese-supp- lier/
Obama has one more day. Who will get the rest of our Tax Dollars on his payback scam?
It's fine when GW makes me turn up my A/C, drive a hybrid, buy solar panels, etc.
But when it starts messing with MY CHOCOLATE, then things get personal !!!
http://ecogeek.org/component/content/article/3606
A new report from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation found that West Africa, where half of the world's cocoa supply comes from, is becoming less and less suitable for cocoa production as climate change brings higher temperatures and changing rainfall patterns.
The report says that between 2030 and 2050 land suitable for cocoa production will be slashed dramatically, with production having to move to less suitable areas. This change will make a huge impact on the worldwide industry and hurt the local farmers who rely on cocoa crops for their livelihood.
Global demand for chocolate has been quickly rising as developing nations like China import more of it. The growing demand and drop in production will mean much higher prices for chocolate.
The study proposes finding new heat and drought resistant crops that could thrive in West Africa, while helping to transition cocoa production to more suitable areas.
We GOTTA STOP IT NOW !!! :shades: :shades: :shades:
What I am ticked about is the price of Coffee. Over the last two years the coffee I buy at Costco has gone from $11.69 for a 3 lb bag to $17.99. Look for more and more inflation of all food products. Thanks to failed policies. Much of which is pushed by the global warmers and green agenda.
Maybe someone will come up with synthetic chocolate made from oil or algae.
PS
They already have messed with my tequila. Taking out the Agave and planting corn to replace that which we have made into ethanol. Stinking greenies.
Between 2030 and 2050? Whoever came up with that probably could not tell you if it will rain the next day !!
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
So what does Gates see as the world’s other “biggest problem?” Not global warming. Nor poverty. Not peak oil. The absolute biggest? One like the trigger mechanism on a nuclear bomb? One that could throw a monkey wrench into global economic growth, end capitalism, even destroy civilization? The one that if not solved soon renders all efforts to solve all the other global problems — including global warming, poverty and fossil fuel depletion — irrelevant, futile and impossible ever to solve?
Overpopulation. That was the consensus “biggest problem” when a group of billionaires that included Gates got together at a secret meeting in Manhattan a couple of years ago.
Get it? Out-of-control population is the world’s No. 1 problem.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-big-money-men-ignore-worlds-biggest-problem- - -2011-10-11?link=home_carousel
Which makes it even MORE IMPORTANT that we manage and take proper care of Earf's resources.
We are gonna need lots of land for making food, and lots of water.
Desalination is not the answer because we need to ocean doing what it's doing now - providing us with a lot of food.
It's going to be a strange world our chillen's chillen are going to grow old in.
Whoa....that sounds ominous. Next thing you will be wanting to raise taxes to form a task force to study the situation.
Also, I don't know of any way to destroy water, salt water or fresh water. Freezing doesn't hurt it, fire just turns it into a gas, you can't hit it with a hammer, etc. If it gets dirty it just cleans itself. Water is eternal.
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
CO2 production, pollution, deforestation etc. will continue to grow worse as the population increases, and there aren't enough resources to provide them with the 1st world amenities they covet. Thus you have poor people, like in Nigeria who see a gasoline pipe running through their village, and who are willing to hack into the pipe, steal the fuel and burn it over open fires because they have and will never have anything else. Overpopulation NOW means people will do whatever they need to, to survive. So all the well-meaning wealthier environmentalists of the world can convert to their high tech. solutions to keep the Earf pristine, but it doesn't matter, as the masses of poor will continue to expand and use any resources in any manner.
The bacteria in the rest of this petri-dish we call Earf, win. They consume all the resources eventually. And that eventually is decades away, not centuries. Poverty and war beyond anything seen is the path humanity is on. A degree or 2 warming is not even a real concern.
Ask the typical U.S. citizen where climate-change stands on their list of concerns, and you'll find that since the decline of the global economy in 2008, jobs, health-care, college costs, taxes, and such are far and away more important. The typical citizen in my area does not care whether the average temperature during the winter of 1980 was 20.0F, or 20.2F this year, or will be 20.5F in 2025. It's basically the same.
Harrisburg, Pa., Votes to File for Bankruptcy
Pennsylvania's capital city voted to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection on Tuesday as it faced a state takeover, according to media reports.
The City Council voted 4-3 to seek bankruptcy protection for Harrisburg, which has a debt burden five times its general-fund budget "because of an overhaul and expansion of a trash-to-energy incinerator that doesn’t generate enough revenue," Bloomberg Businessweek reported.
The bankruptcy means the city will lose state aid, but that is better than the proposed recovery plans, Councilwoman Susan Brown-Wilson said, according to Bloomberg.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-12/harrisburg-pennsylvania-files-for-ba- nkruptcy-lawyer-says.html
The world's population looks set to smash through the seven billion barrier in the next few days, according to the United Nations.
It comes just 12 years since the total reached six billion - with official estimates saying the figure will top eight billion in 2025 and 10 billion before the end of the century.
Experts say the pace of growth - which has seen the number of people on the planet triple since 1940 - poses an increasing danger to citizens.
With more people to feed, house and provide medical care for, they say the world's resources look set to come under more strain than ever before.
As populations stabilise in the industrial world, almost all growth in the near future is expected to take place in developing countries.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2049451/Room-World-population-reach-7-BI- LLION-days.html
It's Official: 'Age of Shale' Has Arrived (Wall St. Journal)
Shale oil and gas seems to be where the real jobs are. If I was out of work I would be heading in that direction. I sure would hate to get a job with a fly by night solar or wind company, only to find out it was a scam to shuffle tax dollars into political pockets.
The project was established by University of California physics professor Richard Muller, who was concerned by claims that established teams of climate researchers had not been entirely open with their data.
Funding came from a number of sources, including charitable foundations maintained by the Koch brothers, the billionaire US industrialists, who have also donated large sums to organisations lobbying against acceptance of man-made global warming.
They also report that although the urban heat island effect is real - which is well-established - it is not behind the warming registered by the majority of weather stations around the world."
Global warming 'confirmed' by independent study (BBC)
The Berkeley Earth Project (BEP) looked at land temperature since the mid-1950s. Berkeley Earth’s founder and director Richard A. Muller said:
“Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the U.S. and the U.K. This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that the potential biases identified by climate change skeptics did not seriously affect their conclusions.”
Muller is a physicist at the University of California, Berkley, who had a reputation for being a climate change skeptic, says his studies back up the work of previous groups. The study used five times as many station locations: Using over 39,000 stations and combining data sets of 1.6 billion temperature reports from 16 publicly available data archives, the scientists were able to avoid station selection bias.
The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project was created to make sense of global temperature change, with the world’s most comprehensive set of data. Previous global warming studies by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research in Britain have found that global land temperature rise has increased by 1.2 degrees C from the 1900s to now.
Muller previously said in a testimony to congress in March that “based on the preliminary work we have done, I believe that the systematic biases that are the cause for most concern can be adequately handled by data analysis techniques.”
The rise in temperature since the mid-1950s, most climate scientists say, is in part due to carbon dioxide emissions from human activities.
Muller also said in his testimony that the number attributed to human caused global warming, which is around 0.6 degrees, needs to be improved. “Berkeley Earth is working to improve on the accuracy of this key number by using a more complete set of data, and by looking at biases in a new way,” he adds.
Some of the critical findings in the studies posted online include:
While urban land heat does occur, it doesn’t really add to the average land temperature rise.
Yes, a third of temperature sites reported a period of cooling over the last 70 years. This leaves the other two-thirds though, which reported warming.
Weather stations ranked as poor, performed just as well as the stations considered okay. Therefore, it’s alright to include poor stations in the study of global warming trends.
The Berkeley collaborators include Saul Perlmutter, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics. Using the same skills the physicist used to discover that the universe is expanding, Perlmutter and other astrophysicists and particle physicists in the group will analyze the massive weather data set.
Next, Muller wants to study the ocean temperature to build a more complete view of rising temperatures.
http://www.intellectualventures.com/Home.aspx
On the day we visited IV, Myhrvold convened roughly a dozen of his colleagues to talk about the problem and possible solutions. They sat around a long oval conference table, Myhrvold near one end. They are a roomful of wizards, and yet without doubt Myhrvold is their Harry Potter. For the next ten or so hours, fueled by an astonishing amount of diet soda, he prodded and amplified, interjected and challenged. Everyone in the room agrees that the earth has been getting warmer and they generally suspect that human activity has something to do with it. But they also agree that the standard global-warming rhetoric in the media and political circles is oversimplified and exaggerated. Too many accounts, Myhrvold says, suffer from “people who get on their high horse and say that that our species will be exterminated.”
Does he believe this?
“Probably not.”
When An Inconvenient Truth is mentioned, the table erupts in a sea of groans. The film’s purpose, Myhrvold believes, was “to scare the crap out of people.” Although Al Gore “isn’t technically lying,” he says, some of the nightmare scenarios Gore describes—the state of Florida disappearing under rising seas, for instance—“don’t have any basis in physical reality in any reasonable time frame. No climate model shows them happening.”
But the scientific community is also at fault. The current generation of climate-prediction models are, as Lowell Wood puts it, “enormously crude.”
I don't think you really need to post anything about that movie anymore. Most "thinking" people now see it for what it was.
It's 15 minutes of fame are gone.
He's smarter than Al. Shoot, he's smarter than most of us. :shades:
Speak for yourself. :shades:
I would say he is not only smarter but more educated than the average person. From the above book:
Myhrvold, who is fifty years old, has been smart for a long time. Growing up in Seattle, he graduated from high school at fourteen and by the time he was twenty-three had earned, primarily at UCLA and Princeton, a bachelor’s degree (mathematics), two master’s degrees (geophysics/space physics and mathematical economics), and a Ph.D. (mathematical physics). He then went to Cambridge University to do quantum cosmology research with Stephen Hawking.
He is so polymathic as to make an everyday polymath tremble with shame. In addition to his scientific interests, he is an accomplished nature photographer, chef, mountain climber, and a collector of rare books, rocket engines, antique scientific instruments, and, especially, dinosaur bones: he is co-leader of a project that has dug up more T. rex skeletons than anyone else in the world. He is also—and this is hardly unrelated to his hobbies—very wealthy. In 1999, when he left Microsoft, he appeared on the Forbes list of the four hundred richest Americans.
I think you would enjoy Freaknomics and Super Freakonomics. Answers some interesting questions you may have never thought of.
Okay.
I flunked algebra.
Twice.
When my kids were is college, if you failed a course and then took it over and made an "A", the "A" wiped the "F" off the books and you got an "A" . I am not sure when they changed the calculation.
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
Physics is offered through that free Khan academy link, but no GW module yet.
Myhrvold, who is fifty years old, has been smart for a long time. Growing up in Seattle, he graduated from high school at fourteen and by the time he was twenty-three had earned, primarily at UCLA and Princeton, a bachelor’s degree (mathematics), two master’s degrees (geophysics/space physics and mathematical economics), and a Ph.D. (mathematical physics). He then went to Cambridge University to do quantum cosmology research with Stephen Hawking.
He is so polymathic as to make an everyday polymath tremble with shame. In addition to his scientific interests, he is an accomplished nature photographer, chef, mountain climber, and a collector of rare books, rocket engines, antique scientific instruments, and, especially, dinosaur bones: he is co-leader of a project that has dug up more T. rex skeletons than anyone else in the world. He is also—and this is hardly unrelated to his hobbies—very wealthy. In 1999, when he left Microsoft, he appeared on the Forbes list of the four hundred richest Americans.
He sounds very intelligent.
But smart and intelligent aren't the same. He's intelligent. I wonder if he can have a normal conversation with someone outside his field? That's a smart guy.
When they start with the x's and o's, I just zone out !!
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
Now that I am retired I am cramming my head full of a lot of Useless Stuff.
As usual the cold and freezing weather which isn't supposed to be happening, because the Arctic is warming so much - is here again. Yes that same Arctic with all that warmth melting the ice, has somehow overcome the warm air of the tropics. So where is all the cold air coming from in October then? Why are the boots and shovels coming out already?
I really don't see how a warmer Earth would be detrimental to most of us. However we get to a warmer earth - whether naturally or thru MMGW, let's DO IT. Every degree warmer helps me save energy (for heating), and reduces all the waste of removing snow, month after month. So go out and drive!
"One of the predictions of climate change models is that extreme weather—floods, heat waves, droughts, even blizzards—will become far more common."
Storm Warnings: Extreme Weather Is a Product of Climate Change (scientificamerican.com)
"Snowfall during October is not uncommon in the Northeast in general, but when it does occur it typically only falls on a very narrow swath, high elevations or a relatively small patch of land." (accuweather.com)
Button down - sounds like this one is out of the norm.
I really liked the balanced approach they took in Super Freakonomics. They cut through the political BS that has taken over with its demands for Cap n Trade to raise taxes.
The GW folks are essentially paid political hacks looking for a free ride and are fast becoming laughingstocks. What in the world has happened to common sense in this country?
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
From skimming the net, it sounds like their '09 stuff on GW (and yeah, I still prefer the warming moniker; haven't heard the chaos one), isn't too well researched or well founded.
Houdini, did you miss my post the other day where the Koch Brothers' funded research said that the global warming research was well done, scientific, supported, etc.? That's in spite of all the rhetoric, email scandals, hockey sticks, etc. The only question now is whether it's man made or not.
Gotta run - my sister left a message about the snow already falling in N. Virginia and I need to call her back before the power goes out for a week.
Isn't that where cars have a flashing light on the dash during snow storms that says "Abandon Car Now"?
And what you have is a larger U.S. and global population who occupy more land area, and in many cases are forced thru market-conditions or government programs, to build in disaster prone areas. Example - rebuilding New Orleans on a delta that is sliding/sinking into the Gulf of Mexico.
So the combination of the 2, appears to us to be more extreme. And if you have more scientists counting and classifying events, you have more events. Nice and neat argument can be made, but there need to be a few asterisks explaining the devil-in-the-details. Sort of like the Chevy Volt's mpg rating.
And remember scientists are human too.
Climatologists are at least 30 years away from having the computer power to model the atmosphere anywhere near correctly. Climatologists may have data showing a short, slight warming trend over the last few decades, but that's happened before over the previous centuries. They don't know what is going to happen in the next decades and centuries, and don't have a decent model to make a decent estimate. Anyone who tells me they know what the climate will be like in 25 or 50 years, is either lying, or a zealot not recognizing their own limited, knowledge.
The science of climatology is in its infancy. As many science's are. Glad I didn't go for that colonoscopy! How do we feel knowing the flu vaccine is effective about 60% of the time? We have much to learn; and you should keep that in mind when someone comes along and gives you "the "truth" on some subject. I won't mention the prime exemplary clown.
It is hard to see how anyone could do a valid study when so much info to be studied was withheld, changed or destroyed.
Afaik, no one here has ever denied that the earth's temp has gone thru several changes over the years on a cyclical basis. It may be in a warming trend right now or it may be in a cooling trend. Apparently it just depends on who is doing the study.
2013 LX 570 2016 LS 460
"There is no reason now to be a skeptic about steadily increasing temperatures, Muller wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal's editorial pages, a place friendly to skeptics. Muller did not address in his research the cause of global warming. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists say it's man-made from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil. Nor did his study look at ocean warming, future warming and how much of a threat to mankind climate change might be.
Still, Muller said it makes sense to reduce the carbon dioxide created by fossil fuels."
Seattle Times