Yeah, that's right. It's a little like the way some light travels faster than sound, and some politicians look pretty bright before they start to speak.
Actually what happened was I got interrupted between forming the intent to reply, and getting to writing it. When I was done dealing with the phone call, I scanned the message for the part I wanted to quote, and totally failed to notice that what was above it had been clipped from someone else. My bad.
Um, ground level begins at 5,000 ft MSL in most of that area. I have the impression that most pilots in those mountains are more concerned with AGL than MSL.
One problem with above post is that this is mountain terrain, and "3,000 to 5,000 feet [above mean sea level]" has little meaning when there are valley floors above 3,000 feet and you need 15,000 or more to comfortably clear some of the terrain. I believe AGL, above ground level, is more commonly used in that region.
I think it very likely that the persons behind the FEMA desks do not know enough about flying in mountains to make good decisions about how to modify regulations that are outside of their authority. I also think they are too bureaucratic to know how to bring anyone with any sense of mountain aerial conditions into the decision making process. You can get pretty high up in the FEMA bureaucracy with just the skills needed to count blankets and water bottles, estimate how many will be needed when the storm hits, and arrange to have them trucked to the right places. That is all spreadsheet work; it doesn't require a lot of creative problem solving.
Dealing with a 500 year flood involving most of a State (by population, not area) is going to require thinking in a place where there has never been a box.
RTFA. It does not take long for a company that knows what it is doing to do the kind of aerial survey that can tell the choppers where the victims are. Especially when the UAVs can be used when the choppers can't fly.
There is no way in hell that it would not have been possible to schedule UAV surveys and chopper flights safely. But somebody sitting behind a FEMA desk does not have enough imagination to figure it out.
Evidently the pruning after the Katrina catastrophe did not get rid of all the deadwood in FEMA.
Parent post would sound like a reasonable defense of FEMA, until this part:
The most likely scenario in my mind is that FEMA has a plan on how they will handle this situation. The plan comes from tons of experience with disaster relief.
The problem with this logic is that the Colorado events are being described as a 500 year flood. That is more than twice the age of the USA, and more than ten times the age of FEMA. They may have tons of experience handling small stuff, but this is a megaton situation and they are trying to treat it like they can just scale up from dealing with a broken levee, or something. FEMA has absolutely, positively NO EXPERIENCE in dealing with this kind of event. This is much, much worse than Katrina, and they really managed to fuck that up.
Before this is over, there are going to be more deaths from an inadequate response to the catastrophe than from the floods themselves.
What this sounds like, is that there is at least one too many drones sitting behind a FEMA desk incapable of doing anything useful, like maybe coordinating an on-going, effective mapping operation that FEMA cannot do with the logistics support of rescue and evac that FEMA is supposed to be able to do.
Apparently the lessons of Katrina have not been well learned.
I think "drone" is particular stupid when applied to the Predator. Since for the entire history of the English language, a "drone" was bee without a sting that contributed nothing to the hive except once in a while one of them would give a new queen a momentary thrill.
Author of parent post has a short memory. The Federal government was shut down briefly during Clinton, until the Republicans gave way: that was Clinton's action, not a bluff.
At the time America was quite wealthy and Clinton could afford to take the risk. Obama, though, is President over a very different America, one that was driven into credit card bankruptcy before he took office, and whose finances and aggregate personal wealth had been wasted away by finance crooks and the mortgage bubble. Obama has not had the options Clinton had.
Between Clinton's Administration and Obama's Administration, the USA went from being one of the wealthiest countries in the world to having one of the poorest debt to asset ratios of any country, at any time. That's what allowing the housing bubble with its derivative financial tools to go on and on, and starting endless wars paid for on credit, can do to a country.
Obama's legacy is not going to be anything that he has built. His legacy is going to be the acknowledgment that he successfully glued back together what had been broken into nasty shards during the years between Clinton and Obama.
How did that work when Obama had a Democrat house and senate?
Pretty well, really. Back in those miserable days, Obama managed to keep the Great Recession from becoming Great Depression II. That took guts and a lot of nimble footwork, and nobody ended up happy. I was severely disappointed that the bastards who were screwing finance and mortgage laws were allowed to walk free. But compromises needed to be made, and we have emerged from the greatest economic crisis in 80 years without having to jump into another world war to do so.
Carter was, and is, one of the best statesmen the USA has ever had as President. Unfortunately he was inadequate as a politician. He never was able to get Washington to work.
Obama is also having trouble getting Washington to work. But in this case its because he has to deal with a badly broken Republican party. The Republicans were enticed into bed with a pretty little tea bagging wench and are now saddled with a marriage partner who cares more about being given the bling she has set her silly dreams on than about making the marriage work.
Time and again Obama and professional Republican politicians have started to work out the meaningful compromises that make a democracy work, only to have that dumbass wench throw a hissy fit because she won't get the bling that she thought she had been promised.
The Republicans need to toss the bimbo out. Let her make her own party. Yeah, divorces are messy and both sides lose, but marriages like this one that should never have happened are messier for longer, and can really get dangerous to everybody, especially when there are so many firearms in the household.
</rant>
You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but there's a reason why this technology was never used for this purpose back in the '30s
And that reason is because the technology did not exist back in the '30s.
That was before carbon fiber, before Mylar, before the concept of a lifting body air frame. In short, it was before 80 years of engineering advancements.
The Aeroscraft airship is not the steampunk airship you imagine it to be.
I may not be the ultimate authority on all things mining
I definitely agree with the author's statement.
Extracting oil from the Canadian tar sands requires huge pieces of equipment that are currently barged up the Columbia River then trucked through Idaho and Canada on oversized vehicles, at night, requiring road closures because the things are so wide. Air freight by dirigible from the Port of Portland or Seattle would be much more economical (and avoid a lot of political noise as well). Not that I favor this: my politics are quite green and tar sands exploitation is one of the dirtiest ways of getting our gasoline fix.
Getting oil rigs into the tundra is also a major hassle, both in road building and in politics. Dirigibles would be a better alternative than road building.
Production mining often requires railroads to efficiently move product to market, but pre-production exploration could often be supported by dirigible, with a major reduction in the amount of road building needed. In the Chilean Andes, this could be the difference between a ten mile road to the nearest safe dirigible air field and a two hundred mile road to the nearest existing road.
Modern airships will be useful as "go anywhere" barges.
These airships are perfect for installation and maintenance of windmill farms. One could easily handle the big components like towers and blades that are currently so hard to get to good sites. Airships would also be useful when building new power lines. And of course an airship could carry a huge amount of solar cell panels into roadless areas.
Airships and renewable energy development are a good fit.
The Chinook and other heavy lift helicopters are great for short distance hauling, such as logging. But these are too expensive to operate over hundreds of miles.
These would be very good for windmill installations. And installing the power line towers needed to move the electricity from the wind farm to the city.
Also for moving drilling rigs to remote dry land sites, and to replace to some truck traffic with a lower cost alternative.
Think of these new dirigibles as 'go anywhere" barges that don't need rivers.
I have done some further reading on food web, etc. While this thread is old, I thought it worthwhile to put my findings on it.
While the biomass energy of each trophic level decreases to roughly 10% of the level it predominantly feeds upon, carbon sequestration is not coupled with this. If it were, there would be no carrion, crap, or bird droppings in the forest. Only the carbon exhaled as CO2 escapes the ecosystem; the rest is recycled through bacteria, fungi, and other saprophytes and effectively stays sequestered. For that matter, some of the CO2 that is exhaled is recaptured through photosynthesis before it has left the physical dimensions of the ecosystem. This stuff is not simple.
The amount of CO2 that escapes a healthy climax forest is hard to estimate and harder to measure, apparently. Evidently over time, a lot of the fossilized carbon that man is burning is going to enrich many (all?) ecosystems: the Earth's total biomass will increase. Whether this can happen fast enough to prevent serious acidification of the oceans is a question. Whether human activities will prevent this from happening is another question. How the increased biomass will affect climates is also a question.
Flippant, but true. Do you hunt? Every deer I have ever taken has gotten its carbon mostly from trees. Maybe a little from munching on grasses and forbes, but mostly from browsing trees.
The forest sequesters carbon, and exports some of it as living things. Or sometimes as venison. Yum.
A rule of thumb is that roughly 10% of total energy acquired by an organism is transferred to the next trophic level, when that organism is consumed.
Whose thumb is that? I'm not just being clever, I'd like a pointer to that discussion. It looks like I might learn something. In other words, citation needed!
On a related note, it is important to recognize that the conversion of dead trees to other lifeforms in an ecosystem is not a one-time thing, but a continuous process. A ten percent rate of return is not a spectacular ROI for a speculator, but is quite good for the long term investor. In a climax forest, it probably represents the fishes, birds, and animals the forest exports to neighboring ecosystems.
Yes, a good bit of the carbon in rotting vegetation ends up as CO2 eventually. But not all of it; much of it moves from part of one living thing to a part of another. Trees are predominantly made of cellulose, which is polymer of a simple sugar. Much of a rotting log is literally being eaten by bacteria and animals that can consume cellulose: this feeds the ecosystem at its base level.
Temperature, humidity, and other factors affect the speed with which rot occurs, but do not affect the process or its eventual results. Some fraction of what was once a log becomes free CO2, but a much greater portion moves into the region's ecology.
The conifer forests are sometimes described as "primary soil builders". Partly because their roots begin to break up the bedrock of mountains, but also because when they die, their products of decomposition feed the nascent soils.
Then I should be able to measure the thickness of that soil, its carbon content and deduce its age. But I can't.
Of course you can't. You are not a pedologist or edaphologist or other soil scientist; you are not an ecologist, or biologist; you are probably not any kind of scientist. You are not even well-read about the subject you write about. So no one with any sense would expect you to be able to do any kind useful soil measurements.
You are entitled to your opinion, which you have expressed in a manner which makes it very clear how broadly it is based in fact. Which is not very broadly at all; it is so narrow that it topples under its own instabilities. Nevertheless, it is a valid opinion that you are most certainly entitled to express. And which can be used by anyone to assess the value of your contributions to these discussions.
Parent post is using some very incorrect assumptions.
Rotting vegetation does not release all the carbon that was sequestered during growth into the atmosphere. Much of it is transformed into other living things: termites and other insects, nematodes, fungus, etc. A log in contact with dirt becomes more soil; it does not evaporate into gases. The carbon is sequestered for as long as the ecosystem remains healthy and growing.
In a forest fire, a large amount of CO2 is released, but also a large amount remains in unburned wood (especially in the root systems) and in charcoal. The roots rot, as described above: that carbon is sequestered. The unburned wood above ground eventually rots as well; more sequestering. The char weathers into small bits over time and eventually enters the soil as biochar. That carbon is not only sequestered, but has become an important substrate to an enriched ecosystem. [One gram of biochar has an active surface area the size of a tennis court, which captures micro nutrients for slow release as the ecosystem can absorb them, and filters out heavy metals and other pollutants.]
In a forest fire, the ratio of carbon that remains sequestered to carbon that goes atmospheric as CO2 is somewhere between 1:4 and 1:2. Not all of the carbon in a forest is burned in a fire; somewhere between 25% and 33% is retained, basically forever, in the ecosystem as it recovers.
The REAL question does not concern Snowden and what he has leaked publicly.
The real question is how many others at the NSA have been selling stuff on thumb drives to agents of other countries, the Syrian Electronic Army, and the Colombian drug cartel?
The NSA is incapable of securing the data it collects and the black hat software it produces. It seems to believe that since the Lockheed Skunkworks program was so successful in the 1950s through the 1970s, the same techniques can be used in today's cyber world. What is wrong with that picture? A big part of it is that you cannot smuggle an SR71 Blackbird out of the Skunkworks on a thumb drive.
Assholes in the upper reaches of the USA government have created a nest of vipers that cannot be contained and whose venomous stings are going to repeatedly damage USA corporations and institutions. The NSA is by its very nature a crime against the USA Constitution. It is like a hand grenade factory where the stuff that comes off the assembly line will go to USA armories, but all the hundreds of assembly line workers can help themselves to as many grenades as they can carry, as often as they want. And who they sell those to, and where they end up being used, is of little concern to the NSA.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's right. It's a little like the way some light travels faster than sound, and some politicians look pretty bright before they start to speak.
Actually what happened was I got interrupted between forming the intent to reply, and getting to writing it. When I was done dealing with the phone call, I scanned the message for the part I wanted to quote, and totally failed to notice that what was above it had been clipped from someone else. My bad.
Um, ground level begins at 5,000 ft MSL in most of that area. I have the impression that most pilots in those mountains are more concerned with AGL than MSL.
One problem with above post is that this is mountain terrain, and "3,000 to 5,000 feet [above mean sea level]" has little meaning when there are valley floors above 3,000 feet and you need 15,000 or more to comfortably clear some of the terrain. I believe AGL, above ground level, is more commonly used in that region.
I think it very likely that the persons behind the FEMA desks do not know enough about flying in mountains to make good decisions about how to modify regulations that are outside of their authority. I also think they are too bureaucratic to know how to bring anyone with any sense of mountain aerial conditions into the decision making process. You can get pretty high up in the FEMA bureaucracy with just the skills needed to count blankets and water bottles, estimate how many will be needed when the storm hits, and arrange to have them trucked to the right places. That is all spreadsheet work; it doesn't require a lot of creative problem solving.
Dealing with a 500 year flood involving most of a State (by population, not area) is going to require thinking in a place where there has never been a box.
It is definitely an odd construction. But it did make its point even.
RTFA. It does not take long for a company that knows what it is doing to do the kind of aerial survey that can tell the choppers where the victims are. Especially when the UAVs can be used when the choppers can't fly.
There is no way in hell that it would not have been possible to schedule UAV surveys and chopper flights safely. But somebody sitting behind a FEMA desk does not have enough imagination to figure it out.
Evidently the pruning after the Katrina catastrophe did not get rid of all the deadwood in FEMA.
Parent post would sound like a reasonable defense of FEMA, until this part:
The most likely scenario in my mind is that FEMA has a plan on how they will handle this situation. The plan comes from tons of experience with disaster relief.
The problem with this logic is that the Colorado events are being described as a 500 year flood. That is more than twice the age of the USA, and more than ten times the age of FEMA. They may have tons of experience handling small stuff, but this is a megaton situation and they are trying to treat it like they can just scale up from dealing with a broken levee, or something. FEMA has absolutely, positively NO EXPERIENCE in dealing with this kind of event. This is much, much worse than Katrina, and they really managed to fuck that up.
Before this is over, there are going to be more deaths from an inadequate response to the catastrophe than from the floods themselves.
What this sounds like, is that there is at least one too many drones sitting behind a FEMA desk incapable of doing anything useful, like maybe coordinating an on-going, effective mapping operation that FEMA cannot do with the logistics support of rescue and evac that FEMA is supposed to be able to do.
Apparently the lessons of Katrina have not been well learned.
That would make a Cruise missile just another drone. I don't think so.
I think "drone" is particular stupid when applied to the Predator. Since for the entire history of the English language, a "drone" was bee without a sting that contributed nothing to the hive except once in a while one of them would give a new queen a momentary thrill.
Author of parent post has a short memory. The Federal government was shut down briefly during Clinton, until the Republicans gave way: that was Clinton's action, not a bluff.
At the time America was quite wealthy and Clinton could afford to take the risk. Obama, though, is President over a very different America, one that was driven into credit card bankruptcy before he took office, and whose finances and aggregate personal wealth had been wasted away by finance crooks and the mortgage bubble. Obama has not had the options Clinton had.
Between Clinton's Administration and Obama's Administration, the USA went from being one of the wealthiest countries in the world to having one of the poorest debt to asset ratios of any country, at any time. That's what allowing the housing bubble with its derivative financial tools to go on and on, and starting endless wars paid for on credit, can do to a country.
Obama's legacy is not going to be anything that he has built. His legacy is going to be the acknowledgment that he successfully glued back together what had been broken into nasty shards during the years between Clinton and Obama.
How did that work when Obama had a Democrat house and senate?
Pretty well, really. Back in those miserable days, Obama managed to keep the Great Recession from becoming Great Depression II. That took guts and a lot of nimble footwork, and nobody ended up happy. I was severely disappointed that the bastards who were screwing finance and mortgage laws were allowed to walk free. But compromises needed to be made, and we have emerged from the greatest economic crisis in 80 years without having to jump into another world war to do so.
Carter was, and is, one of the best statesmen the USA has ever had as President. Unfortunately he was inadequate as a politician. He never was able to get Washington to work.
Obama is also having trouble getting Washington to work. But in this case its because he has to deal with a badly broken Republican party. The Republicans were enticed into bed with a pretty little tea bagging wench and are now saddled with a marriage partner who cares more about being given the bling she has set her silly dreams on than about making the marriage work.
Time and again Obama and professional Republican politicians have started to work out the meaningful compromises that make a democracy work, only to have that dumbass wench throw a hissy fit because she won't get the bling that she thought she had been promised.
The Republicans need to toss the bimbo out. Let her make her own party. Yeah, divorces are messy and both sides lose, but marriages like this one that should never have happened are messier for longer, and can really get dangerous to everybody, especially when there are so many firearms in the household. </rant>
You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but there's a reason why this technology was never used for this purpose back in the '30s
And that reason is because the technology did not exist back in the '30s.
That was before carbon fiber, before Mylar, before the concept of a lifting body air frame. In short, it was before 80 years of engineering advancements.
The Aeroscraft airship is not the steampunk airship you imagine it to be.
I may not be the ultimate authority on all things mining
I definitely agree with the author's statement.
Extracting oil from the Canadian tar sands requires huge pieces of equipment that are currently barged up the Columbia River then trucked through Idaho and Canada on oversized vehicles, at night, requiring road closures because the things are so wide. Air freight by dirigible from the Port of Portland or Seattle would be much more economical (and avoid a lot of political noise as well). Not that I favor this: my politics are quite green and tar sands exploitation is one of the dirtiest ways of getting our gasoline fix.
Getting oil rigs into the tundra is also a major hassle, both in road building and in politics. Dirigibles would be a better alternative than road building.
Production mining often requires railroads to efficiently move product to market, but pre-production exploration could often be supported by dirigible, with a major reduction in the amount of road building needed. In the Chilean Andes, this could be the difference between a ten mile road to the nearest safe dirigible air field and a two hundred mile road to the nearest existing road.
Modern airships will be useful as "go anywhere" barges.
These airships are perfect for installation and maintenance of windmill farms. One could easily handle the big components like towers and blades that are currently so hard to get to good sites. Airships would also be useful when building new power lines. And of course an airship could carry a huge amount of solar cell panels into roadless areas.
Airships and renewable energy development are a good fit.
The Chinook and other heavy lift helicopters are great for short distance hauling, such as logging. But these are too expensive to operate over hundreds of miles.
These would be very good for windmill installations. And installing the power line towers needed to move the electricity from the wind farm to the city.
Also for moving drilling rigs to remote dry land sites, and to replace to some truck traffic with a lower cost alternative.
Think of these new dirigibles as 'go anywhere" barges that don't need rivers.
I have done some further reading on food web, etc. While this thread is old, I thought it worthwhile to put my findings on it.
While the biomass energy of each trophic level decreases to roughly 10% of the level it predominantly feeds upon, carbon sequestration is not coupled with this. If it were, there would be no carrion, crap, or bird droppings in the forest. Only the carbon exhaled as CO2 escapes the ecosystem; the rest is recycled through bacteria, fungi, and other saprophytes and effectively stays sequestered. For that matter, some of the CO2 that is exhaled is recaptured through photosynthesis before it has left the physical dimensions of the ecosystem. This stuff is not simple.
The amount of CO2 that escapes a healthy climax forest is hard to estimate and harder to measure, apparently. Evidently over time, a lot of the fossilized carbon that man is burning is going to enrich many (all?) ecosystems: the Earth's total biomass will increase. Whether this can happen fast enough to prevent serious acidification of the oceans is a question. Whether human activities will prevent this from happening is another question. How the increased biomass will affect climates is also a question.
Thanks! I have some reading to do now.
Flippant, but true. Do you hunt? Every deer I have ever taken has gotten its carbon mostly from trees. Maybe a little from munching on grasses and forbes, but mostly from browsing trees.
The forest sequesters carbon, and exports some of it as living things. Or sometimes as venison. Yum.
Why does a 10K year old old growth forest not contain 10x the carbon of a 1K year old one?
Well, shoot. That's easy. The owls and the wolves and the raccoons and all the other critters carry the carbon away, to neighboring ecosystems.
None of this stuff is compartmentalized. The only compartments in ecology are in your head.
A rule of thumb is that roughly 10% of total energy acquired by an organism is transferred to the next trophic level, when that organism is consumed.
Whose thumb is that? I'm not just being clever, I'd like a pointer to that discussion. It looks like I might learn something. In other words, citation needed!
On a related note, it is important to recognize that the conversion of dead trees to other lifeforms in an ecosystem is not a one-time thing, but a continuous process. A ten percent rate of return is not a spectacular ROI for a speculator, but is quite good for the long term investor. In a climax forest, it probably represents the fishes, birds, and animals the forest exports to neighboring ecosystems.
Yes, a good bit of the carbon in rotting vegetation ends up as CO2 eventually. But not all of it; much of it moves from part of one living thing to a part of another. Trees are predominantly made of cellulose, which is polymer of a simple sugar. Much of a rotting log is literally being eaten by bacteria and animals that can consume cellulose: this feeds the ecosystem at its base level.
Temperature, humidity, and other factors affect the speed with which rot occurs, but do not affect the process or its eventual results. Some fraction of what was once a log becomes free CO2, but a much greater portion moves into the region's ecology.
The conifer forests are sometimes described as "primary soil builders". Partly because their roots begin to break up the bedrock of mountains, but also because when they die, their products of decomposition feed the nascent soils.
Then I should be able to measure the thickness of that soil, its carbon content and deduce its age. But I can't.
Of course you can't. You are not a pedologist or edaphologist or other soil scientist; you are not an ecologist, or biologist; you are probably not any kind of scientist. You are not even well-read about the subject you write about. So no one with any sense would expect you to be able to do any kind useful soil measurements.
You are entitled to your opinion, which you have expressed in a manner which makes it very clear how broadly it is based in fact. Which is not very broadly at all; it is so narrow that it topples under its own instabilities. Nevertheless, it is a valid opinion that you are most certainly entitled to express. And which can be used by anyone to assess the value of your contributions to these discussions.
Parent post is using some very incorrect assumptions.
Rotting vegetation does not release all the carbon that was sequestered during growth into the atmosphere. Much of it is transformed into other living things: termites and other insects, nematodes, fungus, etc. A log in contact with dirt becomes more soil; it does not evaporate into gases. The carbon is sequestered for as long as the ecosystem remains healthy and growing.
In a forest fire, a large amount of CO2 is released, but also a large amount remains in unburned wood (especially in the root systems) and in charcoal. The roots rot, as described above: that carbon is sequestered. The unburned wood above ground eventually rots as well; more sequestering. The char weathers into small bits over time and eventually enters the soil as biochar. That carbon is not only sequestered, but has become an important substrate to an enriched ecosystem. [One gram of biochar has an active surface area the size of a tennis court, which captures micro nutrients for slow release as the ecosystem can absorb them, and filters out heavy metals and other pollutants.]
In a forest fire, the ratio of carbon that remains sequestered to carbon that goes atmospheric as CO2 is somewhere between 1:4 and 1:2. Not all of the carbon in a forest is burned in a fire; somewhere between 25% and 33% is retained, basically forever, in the ecosystem as it recovers.
The REAL question does not concern Snowden and what he has leaked publicly.
The real question is how many others at the NSA have been selling stuff on thumb drives to agents of other countries, the Syrian Electronic Army, and the Colombian drug cartel?
The NSA is incapable of securing the data it collects and the black hat software it produces. It seems to believe that since the Lockheed Skunkworks program was so successful in the 1950s through the 1970s, the same techniques can be used in today's cyber world. What is wrong with that picture? A big part of it is that you cannot smuggle an SR71 Blackbird out of the Skunkworks on a thumb drive.
Assholes in the upper reaches of the USA government have created a nest of vipers that cannot be contained and whose venomous stings are going to repeatedly damage USA corporations and institutions. The NSA is by its very nature a crime against the USA Constitution. It is like a hand grenade factory where the stuff that comes off the assembly line will go to USA armories, but all the hundreds of assembly line workers can help themselves to as many grenades as they can carry, as often as they want. And who they sell those to, and where they end up being used, is of little concern to the NSA.