The unusual freezing to the north was only unusual in recent times, and it was largely due to the same effect that brought warm air over the poles: the unusual lack of cohesiveness of the polar vortex this winter. This is something to be concerned about, not an indication that global warming isn't happening.
Not so unusual actually, nor will it be unusual when it's hot in August. It's COLD in the winter and HOT in the summer, imagine that...
Look, The earth is warming, why is the open question. But I've heard this "Man Made" claim over and over with some very dire consequences attached over the last few decades. I think it's likely that there are a bunch of folks just echoing the "WOLF!" cry and they are echoing the cries of a few people who are competing for research dollars and those who are trolling for votes. The likes of Al Gore stand behind the crowd yelling "Global Warming" (or what ever name du Joure is) for personal gain, power and profit.
I think it's a pretty safe bet to say that YES, mankind is primarily responsible.
IMHO you are wrong. Both on the attributing the global warming to CO and that it is Man Made, but that's just my opinion. Way to many dire predictions have been made and failed to materialize in my lifetime so I'm pretty skeptical about those who make the claims now, especially when there is big $$ involved in either research grants or politics.
I think the question is if global warming is essentially man made or mainly just the natural cycle of things. IMHO this is an open question not settled science.
What evidence do I have? Well, the lack of the previously accepted brew-ha-ha from the previous predictions not coming true, at least not with the dire consequences that where used to scare us before. I wasn't born yesterday nor was it 100 years ago, but if you choose to cry wolf and are wrong too often, I get tired of being whipped into a frenzy and start ignoring you. Remember Al Gore? He made some seriously dire claims, of which how many where correct? I dare say some where exaggerations and most where just plane false. So why did he make the movie? To make money, both though the movie as well as by inventing a new market for "Carbon Credits" where he was positioned to be in on the ground floor. There are more examples...
I personally don't believe they understand what exactly is happening so they cannot predict through their models. They invent these scenarios using their models and in order to get research funding they hype the results. In reality, they don't know, and we end up surprised that the model was wrong. So, I've been around this block a few times, I'm not falling for the chicken little FUD campaign about global warming/climate change or what ever the name du jour is.
You mean like maybe north of Canada or in the Bering Sea where there is so much ice the last few years that boats can't follow their normal schedules and are shut down for months at a time because of the ice? But I never see an alarming article about MORE ice. Always less.
The 70's are calling... Back then the global environmental disaster of the day was "Global Cooling". Seems these things are kind of cyclic, but the real issue is using the spreading of FUD for control and profit. Environmentalists are not about caring for the earth, they are about getting power and using it for profit. The political aspect of this cannot be underestimated. When a politician tells you he cares about some issue, what he's usually saying is that he wants people who care about the issue to vote for him/her.
That is not to say the earth isn't warming up. Evidence is pretty clear that it is. The real question though is if the activities of man are primarily responsible or if we are just seeing natural climate cycles like the ones that gave us the ice age and such.
Is it still cheaper when you account for the pollution created by burning the natural gas, and having to deal with rising oceans, etc., due to the pollution?
Only if you assume man made global warming is true. I'm not so sure it is (Note the MAN MADE caveat). IMHO, we need to concentrate on conservation, spend our money on fusion research and forget this renewable energy nonsense as an attempt to be "green". Just build NG plants until fusion comes online.
Not to mention that industrial scale battery manufacturing has a huge carbon footprint. But this whole man made global warming brew-ha-ha is not about the environment, it's about control and the money that comes from having control.
There are cheaper ways to do that, and I doubt that Virgin's "spacecraft" is going to allow you to unbuckle and float around... There is always the Vomit Comet flying a parabolic zero G arc. I got a feeling it would be cheaper and you would get to float around for 25 seconds at at time.
Presumably they are looking to see the curvature of the earth and the stars set against a black background. If I saw that, I'd feel like I went to space, even if technically I did not.
So, you'd settle for a picture or a video? Well, I think I'm going to expect a bit more.
Disruption of the GRID costs LOTS of money so it is avoided like the plague. Yes, grid operators are driven by $$, but don't forget they have SLA's with many of their customers who depend on reliable power to be available and they are going to be out a pile of money if the grid goes down. Not to mention that there is a regulatory requirement for minimum margins and safety of the grid so if you mess around and crash something, the regulators are going to have you in a hearing answering questions.
So, as news worthy as this "The GRID is UNSTABLE" scare mongering FUD being passed about, is IMHO more about scaring up support for more utility regulation than it is about what actually is necessary.
The Grid is vulnerable to all sorts of things, weather being the most likely.... Misbehavior in Solar controllers is likely to be an issue only in very specific conditions which grid operators tend to avoid like the plague. Grid operators keep significant safety margins in place at all times they can deal with unexpected equipment outages. They go so far as to do controlled shut downs of parts of the grid to maintain the grid's stability (although this is not something they like to do)
IMHO a CME event is much more likely to have any disruptive effect on the grid than some software glitch in a solar controller.
We a Koch Bros. Industries are now hiring enterprising talent
Sorry, not moving back to Wichita, KS... Thanks anyway.
Never interviewed at Koch, not that I tried very hard to get one, but I knew a number of folks who worked there. Not the best place to work for job security and if you loose your job there isn't much else in Wichita to do. Sort of a dead end kind of town for technology careers. Every company I know that *used* to be there, moved to FL or TX, just went broke or wasn't anyplace you ever wanted to work anyway. The exception was the aircraft makers, but they only wanted "tin binders" and machine operators.
Squirrels could potentially cause black-outs and mess with power grid configurations. In fact, they have.
Yes, but they usually are small scale outages because squirrels are limited to shorting circuits they can bridge using their bodies. Not to mention that it usually costs a squirrel its life. This means that the really high voltage transmission lines are beyond what a single Squirrel can do and I don't see too many squirrel power grid assault teams being formed...
Weather does impact solar... so this needs some sort of power-storing battery in order for it to work.
Yea, great idea... Can we please get the efficiency of industrial scale electrical power storage within some kind of useable range? Right now, converting into DC to charge batteries and then converting back into AC to release power is *really* inefficient. That's going to have to change.
Right now, it's SO much cheaper to just build a natural gas fired plant to handle the dark nights and cloudy days. Actually, it's cheaper to build a natural Gas plant and forget the solar thing altogether, but folks who support solar and wind go nuts when you tell them that. Not to mention that you are going to need that gas fired plant anyway to cover the dark calm days, so it's going to be built. (At least until storage capacity is efficient enough to actually make sense to use. )
A WATT is a measure of the RATE of power flow. It's like saying you are going a specific speed in your car. You can calculate this by multiplying Volts times Amps but the value you get is only valid for the instant you measured the values. (You EE guys don't complain to me for ignoring power factor... I'm trying to make this simple. )
A WAT HOUR is a measure of the AMOUNT of power that has flowed. This is like saying you went 100 miles in your car by driving 50 for 2 hours.
So, you pay for electricity in WATT HOURS (usually KILO-WATT HOURS) which is an amount of power transfered. It doesn't matter if you consumed 2 KW for 30 min and nothing for 30 min, or 1 KW continiously for the whole hour. (At least for most of us who don't pay for power by time of use yet. )
Many of the professor written texts I used where good ones and I still have them. I just objected to the blatant profiteering by the one professor because he unnecessarily tried to make profit though how he ran the classroom. He made it clear that he was selling books first and stroking his ego second with teaching someplace beyond that on his priority lists.
I don't mind if they wrote the book, but if they are stroking their ego and padding their bank account at my expense, then wasting my time joking about it during class, I'm going to do my best to limit the payoff (both in ego stroking and money). If the professor's priority is to teach something to their students, then I don't care who wrote the book, I'll gladly pay for the text so I can learn.
I was justifying the time it took to get your own pages printed.. But OK.. I would personally do my best to disrupt the prof's monopoly, just out of principle. But if you want to knuckle under to the pressure from "the man" feel free...;)
Oh they *know* what it is, at least *somebody* at the cable company does. Keep asking for a manager if nobody fesses up to having them. If not, go to the FCC and file a complaint, the enforcement division will be happy to take them out behind the woodshed and instruct them on the law.
Not true. By law they MUST allow you to use your own tuner and can only charge you a small monthly fee for the CABLE CARD you need to decode their encrypted signals. Silicon Dust sells such tuners, as does a number of "cable card ready" TV makers. You can even get DVR devices to do this too.
Don't rent from the cable company... Shesh.. But I guess folks cannot afford to buy $500 worth of equipment all at once just to watch cable, so they pay though the nose by the month and never own anything..
it won't work because professors will refuse to assign this textbooks.
Oh it will work, who do you think WRITES the books? Yea, you guessed it, the professors write the books....
I have a number of college books on my book shelf that where written by the professor who taught the course, or by his boss. I even had one professor who made a big deal out of the fact that he wrote the book and that you needed to keep it forever. I bought a used copy and sold it as soon as I could...
I disagree that it is ALL of them trying to suck you dry. There are some out there who are interested in providing education over just taking your money. They might be hard to find, but they are out there.
But, let's face it. With all the easily available student loans out there that are federally backed, sucking money out of students is a profitable business. The very program that makes federal loans so readily available has artificially increased the price to the point where a 4 year degree can cost a $100K. My tuition was under 5K a year some 20 plus years ago. My whole education cost under $20K for a 4 year degree. Now we are paying $25K a year, 5 times the price? Something is wrong here.
Slashdot Mirror
The unusual freezing to the north was only unusual in recent times, and it was largely due to the same effect that brought warm air over the poles: the unusual lack of cohesiveness of the polar vortex this winter. This is something to be concerned about, not an indication that global warming isn't happening.
Not so unusual actually, nor will it be unusual when it's hot in August. It's COLD in the winter and HOT in the summer, imagine that...
Look, The earth is warming, why is the open question. But I've heard this "Man Made" claim over and over with some very dire consequences attached over the last few decades. I think it's likely that there are a bunch of folks just echoing the "WOLF!" cry and they are echoing the cries of a few people who are competing for research dollars and those who are trolling for votes. The likes of Al Gore stand behind the crowd yelling "Global Warming" (or what ever name du Joure is) for personal gain, power and profit.
I think it's a pretty safe bet to say that YES, mankind is primarily responsible.
IMHO you are wrong. Both on the attributing the global warming to CO and that it is Man Made, but that's just my opinion. Way to many dire predictions have been made and failed to materialize in my lifetime so I'm pretty skeptical about those who make the claims now, especially when there is big $$ involved in either research grants or politics.
I think the question is if global warming is essentially man made or mainly just the natural cycle of things. IMHO this is an open question not settled science.
What evidence do I have? Well, the lack of the previously accepted brew-ha-ha from the previous predictions not coming true, at least not with the dire consequences that where used to scare us before. I wasn't born yesterday nor was it 100 years ago, but if you choose to cry wolf and are wrong too often, I get tired of being whipped into a frenzy and start ignoring you. Remember Al Gore? He made some seriously dire claims, of which how many where correct? I dare say some where exaggerations and most where just plane false. So why did he make the movie? To make money, both though the movie as well as by inventing a new market for "Carbon Credits" where he was positioned to be in on the ground floor. There are more examples...
I personally don't believe they understand what exactly is happening so they cannot predict through their models. They invent these scenarios using their models and in order to get research funding they hype the results. In reality, they don't know, and we end up surprised that the model was wrong. So, I've been around this block a few times, I'm not falling for the chicken little FUD campaign about global warming/climate change or what ever the name du jour is.
You mean like maybe north of Canada or in the Bering Sea where there is so much ice the last few years that boats can't follow their normal schedules and are shut down for months at a time because of the ice? But I never see an alarming article about MORE ice. Always less.
The 70's are calling... Back then the global environmental disaster of the day was "Global Cooling". Seems these things are kind of cyclic, but the real issue is using the spreading of FUD for control and profit. Environmentalists are not about caring for the earth, they are about getting power and using it for profit. The political aspect of this cannot be underestimated. When a politician tells you he cares about some issue, what he's usually saying is that he wants people who care about the issue to vote for him/her.
That is not to say the earth isn't warming up. Evidence is pretty clear that it is. The real question though is if the activities of man are primarily responsible or if we are just seeing natural climate cycles like the ones that gave us the ice age and such.
Touche'
But free fall can be a lot of fun too..
Is it still cheaper when you account for the pollution created by burning the natural gas, and having to deal with rising oceans, etc., due to the pollution?
Only if you assume man made global warming is true. I'm not so sure it is (Note the MAN MADE caveat). IMHO, we need to concentrate on conservation, spend our money on fusion research and forget this renewable energy nonsense as an attempt to be "green". Just build NG plants until fusion comes online.
Not to mention that industrial scale battery manufacturing has a huge carbon footprint. But this whole man made global warming brew-ha-ha is not about the environment, it's about control and the money that comes from having control.
Skydive, it's cheaper... Who knows, it might be safer too..
As long as I was weightless, I wouldn't care.
There are cheaper ways to do that, and I doubt that Virgin's "spacecraft" is going to allow you to unbuckle and float around... There is always the Vomit Comet flying a parabolic zero G arc. I got a feeling it would be cheaper and you would get to float around for 25 seconds at at time.
Presumably they are looking to see the curvature of the earth and the stars set against a black background. If I saw that, I'd feel like I went to space, even if technically I did not.
So, you'd settle for a picture or a video? Well, I think I'm going to expect a bit more.
Disruption of the GRID costs LOTS of money so it is avoided like the plague. Yes, grid operators are driven by $$, but don't forget they have SLA's with many of their customers who depend on reliable power to be available and they are going to be out a pile of money if the grid goes down. Not to mention that there is a regulatory requirement for minimum margins and safety of the grid so if you mess around and crash something, the regulators are going to have you in a hearing answering questions.
So, as news worthy as this "The GRID is UNSTABLE" scare mongering FUD being passed about, is IMHO more about scaring up support for more utility regulation than it is about what actually is necessary.
The Grid is vulnerable to all sorts of things, weather being the most likely.... Misbehavior in Solar controllers is likely to be an issue only in very specific conditions which grid operators tend to avoid like the plague. Grid operators keep significant safety margins in place at all times they can deal with unexpected equipment outages. They go so far as to do controlled shut downs of parts of the grid to maintain the grid's stability (although this is not something they like to do)
IMHO a CME event is much more likely to have any disruptive effect on the grid than some software glitch in a solar controller.
We a Koch Bros. Industries are now hiring enterprising talent
Sorry, not moving back to Wichita, KS... Thanks anyway.
Never interviewed at Koch, not that I tried very hard to get one, but I knew a number of folks who worked there. Not the best place to work for job security and if you loose your job there isn't much else in Wichita to do. Sort of a dead end kind of town for technology careers. Every company I know that *used* to be there, moved to FL or TX, just went broke or wasn't anyplace you ever wanted to work anyway. The exception was the aircraft makers, but they only wanted "tin binders" and machine operators.
Squirrels could potentially cause black-outs and mess with power grid configurations. In fact, they have.
Yes, but they usually are small scale outages because squirrels are limited to shorting circuits they can bridge using their bodies. Not to mention that it usually costs a squirrel its life. This means that the really high voltage transmission lines are beyond what a single Squirrel can do and I don't see too many squirrel power grid assault teams being formed...
Weather does impact solar... so this needs some sort of power-storing battery in order for it to work.
Yea, great idea... Can we please get the efficiency of industrial scale electrical power storage within some kind of useable range? Right now, converting into DC to charge batteries and then converting back into AC to release power is *really* inefficient. That's going to have to change.
Right now, it's SO much cheaper to just build a natural gas fired plant to handle the dark nights and cloudy days. Actually, it's cheaper to build a natural Gas plant and forget the solar thing altogether, but folks who support solar and wind go nuts when you tell them that. Not to mention that you are going to need that gas fired plant anyway to cover the dark calm days, so it's going to be built. (At least until storage capacity is efficient enough to actually make sense to use. )
Just to clarify some terms...
A WATT is a measure of the RATE of power flow. It's like saying you are going a specific speed in your car. You can calculate this by multiplying Volts times Amps but the value you get is only valid for the instant you measured the values. (You EE guys don't complain to me for ignoring power factor... I'm trying to make this simple. )
A WAT HOUR is a measure of the AMOUNT of power that has flowed. This is like saying you went 100 miles in your car by driving 50 for 2 hours.
So, you pay for electricity in WATT HOURS (usually KILO-WATT HOURS) which is an amount of power transfered. It doesn't matter if you consumed 2 KW for 30 min and nothing for 30 min, or 1 KW continiously for the whole hour. (At least for most of us who don't pay for power by time of use yet. )
You got serious mental issues... Or are just a troll... I'm going with troll..
FULL STOP
Many of the professor written texts I used where good ones and I still have them. I just objected to the blatant profiteering by the one professor because he unnecessarily tried to make profit though how he ran the classroom. He made it clear that he was selling books first and stroking his ego second with teaching someplace beyond that on his priority lists.
I don't mind if they wrote the book, but if they are stroking their ego and padding their bank account at my expense, then wasting my time joking about it during class, I'm going to do my best to limit the payoff (both in ego stroking and money). If the professor's priority is to teach something to their students, then I don't care who wrote the book, I'll gladly pay for the text so I can learn.
I was justifying the time it took to get your own pages printed.. But OK.. I would personally do my best to disrupt the prof's monopoly, just out of principle. But if you want to knuckle under to the pressure from "the man" feel free... ;)
Sure, if your time is worthless, that's a great solution.
There is a certain amount of principle here.. Not to mention, that if you got a suitable counterfeit, Profit could be in your future...
Oh they *know* what it is, at least *somebody* at the cable company does. Keep asking for a manager if nobody fesses up to having them. If not, go to the FCC and file a complaint, the enforcement division will be happy to take them out behind the woodshed and instruct them on the law.
I see a trip to the custom stationary store to fix that one, assuming a photo copier wouldn't work...Assuming you could find similar paper....
Not true. By law they MUST allow you to use your own tuner and can only charge you a small monthly fee for the CABLE CARD you need to decode their encrypted signals. Silicon Dust sells such tuners, as does a number of "cable card ready" TV makers. You can even get DVR devices to do this too.
Don't rent from the cable company... Shesh.. But I guess folks cannot afford to buy $500 worth of equipment all at once just to watch cable, so they pay though the nose by the month and never own anything..
Oh that is easy. You charge them a deposit, refundable upon return of the book.
Oh wait, this is a law school... You just sue them to get it back...
it won't work because professors will refuse to assign this textbooks.
Oh it will work, who do you think WRITES the books? Yea, you guessed it, the professors write the books....
I have a number of college books on my book shelf that where written by the professor who taught the course, or by his boss. I even had one professor who made a big deal out of the fact that he wrote the book and that you needed to keep it forever. I bought a used copy and sold it as soon as I could...
I disagree that it is ALL of them trying to suck you dry. There are some out there who are interested in providing education over just taking your money. They might be hard to find, but they are out there.
But, let's face it. With all the easily available student loans out there that are federally backed, sucking money out of students is a profitable business. The very program that makes federal loans so readily available has artificially increased the price to the point where a 4 year degree can cost a $100K. My tuition was under 5K a year some 20 plus years ago. My whole education cost under $20K for a 4 year degree. Now we are paying $25K a year, 5 times the price? Something is wrong here.