50,000 years ago a bit of wayward rock about 50m across met Earth and left this 1200m wide crater in Arizona.
Ponder the momentum of 50m bit of rock that left a hole over a kilometer wide and 200m deep.
If one was coming. Would we know?
…(Click to enlarge) Photo not by JoNova
Thanks to NASA and The Earth Observatory
UPDATE: JoeV in comments adds an interesting link to Tracking space junk at Satview.org. An old satellite is coming in right now. It’s over Alaska (moving fast) at 153km high and falling quickly. Cosmos 1220, a Soviet era military surveillance satellite. Eddie adds a different link which suggests Cosmos is expected to crash into the Pacific in hours. Amazing what you can find out on the Internet.
More to the point, if one was coming, would anyone tell us?
80
AAAhhh, and is it really a rock? 😉
50
And has anyone even asked the rock what it thinks?
70
Oh No, Not again!
30
@Kevin Lohse
February 15, 2014 at 8:21 pm
‘ would anyone tell us?’, chances are they couldn’t hide it! Because there are so many ‘amateurs’ with powerful telescopes, looking for these things! In fact they alert people like NASA what is heading our way.
120
Not only that, BAU; ordinary folk are astral travelling all the time!
–
–
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=astral+travel&sm=1
40
If one was coming, would you want to know?
70
I think so, so I could sell Asteroid Shelters to the gullible CC followers, just in case it’s survivable as most events are.
110
Matty make the sales before may 24.
http://earthsky.org/space/comet-209p-linear-meteor-shower-storm-may-2014
You still need to build the bomb detectors oops I mean asteriod shelters. Have you thought of selling entire fleet insurance to every navy in the world?
Oh and as an example of how an entire fleet can be destroyed, Quote the Chinese fleet that was washed up onto New Zealand compressed and onfire from a comet and Tsunami.
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2006/s1702333.htm
20
To Matty, I wouldn’t. I’d get into the business of selling timeshares in the general impact zone vicinity.
10
That would depend on how big it was-think Shoemaker-Levi splashing down on Jupiter.
10
No worries, Plan A: Shoot is out of the sky Plan B: send Bruce willis to drill it Plan C : Do nothing and take the hit
50
Just imagine the size of the paper and scissors.
160
Kevin, check out spaceweather.com for a listing of near earth asteroids and their orbits!
10
Kevin maybe they would tell us if one was coming if it was 10km + in diameter e.g. like the asteroid impact on the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico circa 66Ma. Now that asteroid left a rather large impact crater of ~ 180km in diameter and ~ 12 km in depth. That impact resulted in the “Terminal Cretaceous Event” or the K/T Extinction Event” with mainly only species living on the ocean floor surviving through to the Tertiary.
20
And even more to the point, if one was coming and we did know about it, could we do anything about it?
20
I doubt it. But we would have the chance to say goodbye and bury a life-times’ hatchets to /with those who matter to us. I think that’s important.
30
I wonder if nations, religions and so many others who’ve been at each other’s throats, some of them for centuries, would do the same.
Nah! I expect that’s too much to ask for. They would blame each other for the asteroid. Such is the human condition. Pity!
20
I think Global Warming is to blame.
The asteroids have increased because the excess Carbon Dioxide has made the atmosphere so much thicker that we are capturing more asteroids. If we all paid some big banks big bucks for Carbon Futures Credits they could stop the asteroids … once again humanity is the problem, pay big banks and all will be well.
Anybody want to be a Carbon Derivative Futures Contract? I’ll give you a good price … Promise!
P.S] John Kerry is my new hero [sarc]
20
Sorry, that should read “buy a Carbon Derivative” not “be a Carbon Derivative”.
I think the constant warmist propaganda is attacking my brain like neurosyphilis … it never stops.
10
I can’t resist. Is there a difference between buying a Carbon Derivative and being a Carbon Derivative? They both look like the same sorry state of existence. 😉
10
That crater is only a short drive from the highway (route 66 when I was there) and you could hike down a trail to the bottom. I don’t know if you can still get to the bottom but looking over the edge is nothing like Arizona’s other big hole in the ground which is much more worth the trip. And you get a sense of awe from the Grand Canyon that you can’t get from this meteor crater and can’t soon forget.
10
Yes, avoiding an asteroid is possible, easy and cheap. A rocket placed close by in orbit around one, even a large one, would produce a small but enough gravitional pull to shift the asteroid’s direction. It’s not sci fi nor spectacular. A lot cheaper than the costs already spent on fear of AGW.
20
They will spend billions on UNFCCC conform research to claim that CAGW is so bad that it’s even affecting asteroids close to earth and drawing them into our atmosphere?
40
Don’t worry?
Everything will turn out okay?
Even if it doesn’t there is still no need or helpful to worry?
10
Jon, don’t forget it will be “much worse than we originally thought” and “it’s happening much faster than we originally anticipated”.
30
Sorry OT
But was just wondering what is a popular podcast
And when will Jo start one
10
Uh, Oh ! Has the UN found a useful purpose or another meal ticket ?
UN is taking first steps to curb risk of wayward asteroids.
Do I sense another politicised body of best experts we must listen to or is that still some way off ?
130
Don’t let your cynicism throw the baby out with the bath water.
10
Right. Except when you’re the group that wants to control everyone. Then there’s a different answer.
I’ll take my chances with the asteroid.
50
“Preventing weaponization is very important,” he said.’
Tilt sensor that stops it being pointed towards Earth.?
10
Remember the recent Russian meteor strike. Everyone was looking at the known object that missed and completely missed the one that hit.
20
Joe,another quality project worthy of the scientific genius of the UN.We shall prepare for this in the same way as saving the earth from man.We shall go forth and collect $hitload$ of money,create several thousand trough jobs and when the time comes we will put on a tin hat and duck.There may be help with this cause the UN has got Mr Moon,perhaps he could do air traffic control.
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What right do humans have to alter the natural course of an asteroid? Doesn’t the asteroid have a say? They like all things universal, have to be permitted to run their course freely. It is no different than those poor spotted owls. We must form a support group for the defenseless asteroids.
You bastards! You G*d Damn HUMANS always messing with nature. Leave them alone!
90
But surely it is for the Asteroid’s own good if it is diverted from being obliterated by colliding with the Earth.
Leftist authorities should have no problem with that, or with the money and bureaucracy it’ll enable them to amass along the way.
80
Joe,Asteroids have no rights,but now that you have mentioned the LEFT they will have union representation very soon.May also be a new pet project for sarah the oxygen thief.At least asteroids don’t hate women.I imagine they would be gender neutral and hate everybody equally,but hey that’s no problem,the UN will look after them anyway.Send money to:P.O.Box[number pending]
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Bones,
I see you have my view of the UN. Parasites that are going to kill the economies and what functions well in the societies that provide their funding.
I am going to give you a heads up on something else they are meddling in that cannot be on your radar but should be. They are partners through UNESCO in redefining the nature of what is curriculum in education. Just think of what the climate change discussion will be like if your science ‘knowledge’ comes from virtual reality gaming that is designed to create a belief in CAGW. With colorful visual effects. Your mind will have experienced catastrophic consequences and believe it knows the cause because that’s how virtual reality works.
When education gets transformed by UN to changing what a student believes and values, reality will still be out there but no one will accurately perceive it. All while the bureaucrats collect tax free salaries and benefits and travel. And politicians know it can be their post-office sinecure. Reward for policies pushed while in office.
40
Robin,I have already talked to kids that lean towards warming because of what their teacher says.These are not all kids though,some are in their early 20’s but they have the same view of climate,from the same place,SCHOOL.When I asked a primary teacher what she thought about manmade warming she had CO2 confused with natural gas.What chance do the kids have,they’re told to listen to the teachers.
60
Bones, I’ve had that discussion with a second year medical student who is shall we say, close to the family hearth. He can’t for the life of him understand how I can dismiss conventional (his understanding) wisdom. I pity the poor bugger when he finally understands that science and scientists are just as corruptible as anyone. What I care about most is that when he does, that doesn’t make him too cynical and that he has enough self respect to search for his own truths in an honest and open way. He’s buggered if he can’t.
80
It’ll get worse. Schools are already pursuing making the children Global Citizens. Climate instruction is certainly in the mix: http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/
21
Joe,
They will be too busy saving us from the horrible dangers of soda-pop as California is now wanting to do. They’ll have no time or money left to spend on the meteor. Seriously! 🙁
20
Far better that they be diverted or be destroyed on entry, than risk qualifying as asylum seekers and all that entails.
10
… led by Lembit Opik??? It was one of his pet ideas when he was an MP.
10
You would think the half megaton explosion over Russia would be a wakeup call.
There have been loads of meteoric explosions in the last century – this is the list from Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_meteor_air_bursts
The Tunguska event was a multi-megaton blast – fortunately in an unpopulated area.
Around 1% of the world is urban. Its just a matter of time before a great many people die, because we’re frittering our time on “climate change”, when we should be worried about real threats.
110
Notice the 10-20 years in between events shrinks to <1-3 years. Climate Change? Better correlation than CO2 and temp at least.
40
Personally I subscribe to the pirate theory… 😉
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PiratesVsTemp(en).svg
The current pause could be down to the resurgence of piracy off the coast of Somalia!
50
I read somewhere that the solution to the paws is at hand. It is due to the proliferation of cats in the Asia Pacific region. The missing heat is in the fur balls. Scientists expect that once the population of cats peaks, and is again in decline, that the heat will be released from all those fur balls and then we are really in for it!
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My cat agrees. She’s really knowledgeable about hair balls! 😉
10
There might be no increase in frequency at all, just better reporting. Similar to extreme weather events.
Looking a the Wikipedia list that Eric Worrall found, a quick count reveals 4 out of 28 were at sea, yet the sea covers 70% of the World’s surface. There are no observed events on the continent of Antarctica, yet this is the place where most of the small intact meteorites are found. USA and Europe are disproportionately represented in the finds as well.
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To you who’re both astromimers and better at statistical math than I am:
Is it even reasonable to expect some uniform distribution of meteorites over time? It certainly isn’t for extreme weather events.
10
Was certainly unpopulated after the explosion.
20
Absolutely correct Eric; $trillions on the lie of AGW and a pittance for a real problem.
60
Problem is that a lot of these are Apollo Asteroids,ie, they come at us from the sunny side, and we cant see them until well after they have missed us. Check out the story on 1989FC, which was first noted 6days after it had missed us by about 6hours! About 0.8km diameter, it was 1989FC that spawned the Bruce Willis movies, after the Pentagon finally realised there was a whole lot of nothing they could do about something they could not see, let alone predict, until after the near miss. Hopefully, near miss.
00
95 per cent of leading astronomers recommend a tax on meteorite pollution.
170
The Mail does quite a generous piece on one of our more real and present threats.
Comrade Davey, 48 Dim as an Eco-friendly Lightbulb
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You may balk at the dimness of a Lib-Con coalition Government, but the Dims do curb some of worst excesses of a runaway government of posh boy Tory toffs ( present leader of the Dims not withstanding of course).
When Climate Change was a bit of a sideline it didn’t matter much which dimwit got to run it, a fine hoppy horse for the Dims, but since its been combined with Energy we suddenly find the power of the Nation at the mercy of this Dim bulb’s incompetence.
20
If there’s a place where some dimwit can cause havoc, there’ll be a dimwit there causing it. It’s a direct corollary to the axiom in the biological sciences that if there’s something there that can be eaten, there’ll be something there eating it. Think about it. Is that not true?
10
–
If it’s reported and promoted by the IPBR – the Intergovernmental Panel on Big Rocks-, we should be pretty right!
30
AGL is purchasing the two Macquarie Generation power plants, Bayswater and nearby Liddell.
Macquarie Generation has accepted the price on offer, $1.725 Billion.
There are two things I want to explain given what is happening here, and I’ll place them in separate comments so both can be addressed.
So then, you tell me what is going to happen now.
Keep in mind that Bayswater is now nigh on 35years old.
A number of years back now, the owners of the plant were going to upgrade it with Bayswater B, a 2000MW+ site and to appease concerns, they offered up two options. One of them was for a new technology USC coal fired plant, which would have lowered emissions by 17% in comparison with older technology coal fired power plants. The second option was for a CCGT plant of the same capacity. Now while the USC plant was slated to cost $3.6 Billion, and the CCGT was a little cheaper at $2.8 Billion, but here, keep in mind that the cost of the construction of a gas pipeline was not added to that construction cost, so there is every possibility that the CCGT, overall, would end up costing more.
As to the fuel. MacGen owned the nearby coal mine so the cost of coal would have been nowhere near as high even as the current, now depressed price for steaming coal. Had the gas fired option been taken, then they would have to purchase the gas at market price, hence more expensive again.
Now, a couple of weeks back a Gas fired plant barely 11 years old was closed because it was more lucrative to sell the gas into the export market, rather than use it to generate electricity. That quite obviously now makes the CCGT option most probably off the table completely. Keep in mind here that the CO2 Tax is also a huge impost on this CCGT plant as well.
The USC coal fired option is also problematic, also because of that added and huge impost of the CO2 Tax, even if the Legislation is voted down in the future, but the bigger problem would have been the opposition from green and green leaning opponents.
Now. MacGen, the owners, have sold the plant. That tells me in huge headlines that Bayswater B has been canned totally, because, if constructed, it would have been a source of income for anything up to 40 or 50 years.
The new owners will not shell out that amount of money for a problematic new plant, no matter which option, with a cost that would only be increasing almost exponentially, and why would MacGen sell up Bayswater at a depressed price, if the replacement was still on the table.
As I said at the top here, you tell me what’s going to happen now.
Bayswater will not be replaced and the new owners will just sell the electricity remaining in the plant until it reaches its use by date ….. without thought of an Upgrade.
I’ve read a number of articles about the sale, and a couple of them said that the CO2 Tax considerably depressed the sale price.
Keep in mind that the new owners have only purchased the plant and not the nearby mine which supplies the coal, so instead of MacGen paying a much lesser cost for coal they already own, the new owners will have to purchase the coal at current market price.
It will probably be a case of Peter paying Paul if the CO2 tax is dumped, as the savings made if it is dropped will go on the coct of coal.
This does not assure the supply of electricity into the future as a new Bayswater B might have done.
Tony.
230
The solar plant at Ivanpah uses mirrors rather than PV. Do you have information on the mirrors regarding resistance to sand blasting or other wear? There are about 300,000 of these over about 3,500 acres and they are built to track the Sun. There have to be hundreds of thousands of moving parts in “a desert”, a hostile environment.
What do you suppose the maintenance costs will be? And the life span?
10
Not to mention the variety of avian species that is fried in flight.
10
Let’s not even mention your every day garden variety dust that blows around all day and all night. And any desert is going to be just the right place to have a lot of it. Dust on the mirror or dust on the PV cell — same performance “enhncement” in both cases.
You gotta love these engineers who can’t shoot straight. 🙁
PS: At least something could eat the fried birds. Lots of advantages for crawling things there (not other birds though).
10
John, and all you others as well,
notice how every time a seemingly simple question is asked, we all learn something new.
There’s the problem I face when explaining something like this. I think as someone who is electrically trained, so what I need to keep at the forefront of my mind is that the people I am trying to inform know (no offense intended here) almost nothing about these things, so I quite literally have to try and explain them from the ground up, and that’s where 6 years as a technical trades instructor helps me, and even then, there’s things I (subliminally) skip over.
One of these is actually something that John has mentioned here.
He says that these mirrors, in the case of CSP, and the panels, in the case of Solar PV, are installed so that they track the Sun during daylight hours, and this is done by having each mirror (or panel) mounted on what is referred to as a solar tracking table, and also referred to as a heliostat, so that the mirror or panel tracks the path of the Sun during the day.
This is achieved with an electrical motor attached to each mirror or panel, and while not consuming all that much power, when you have quite literally many thousands of them, that power draw is indeed quite considerable.
So, where does that power come from?
The overall power being generated by the plant itself, so this now considerable power draw subtracts even further from the miserably low amount of power these plants actually do generate.
So, while the spin says plants of this nature generate X amount of power in total, the plant itself is consuming some of that power, just to stay operational.
Sand blasting is probably a minor problem but even dust is a problem here as it effectively covers the mirrors or panels, acting in a manner similar to overcast.
For the plant to operate at its optimum, then the mirrors, or the panels need to kept absolutely pristine, and here I mean not just a hose down every so often, but mirrors and panels kept mirror clean at all times.
In the proposal for the Moree Solar PV plant, they actually said that the water consumption would be minimal, as the panels would only be washed twice a year. Oh dear! Massive fail right there.
They use theoretical models to calculate the absolute maximum power which can be generated by these commercial plants, both CSP and solar PV, and then they neglect to mention all the little things which add up to these plants delivering considerably less power than the perfect best case scenario always quoted in the site information.
My task is to distil that down to facts which the average person can actually understand, and in doing that, everyone then gets to see that plants like these solar plants are boutique (at best) and enormously expensive, while producing very little power which will ….. NEVER replace traditional methods of power generation.
Tony.
100
“as the panels would only be washed twice a year”
I have stayed with friends out that way at times.
I know just how dirty the car can get in just a few day of sitting not under cover.
Add a spot or two of rain, and a bit of dust and the car basically turns a speckled brown colour.
I reckon cleaning would be needed at least once every 3 or 4 days to get any use out of those solar mirrors.
And what do they do in a drought ?
80
Not to mention the marked decreased efficiency of the panels in high ambient temperatures.
40
That’s some pretty wacky engineering, having solar panels that decrease efficiency when it gets hot. 🙂
I mean… DOH !!!!
00
Tony,
This would be true of any power plant, no matter what technology. Even the generator in your car uses some of its output to create the magnetic field in the rotor and the voltage regulator needs a little power too.
So here’s a question for you. How do various technologies stack up against each other as to percentage of their rated output they consume? This would include control systems, pumps and all the rest, even necessary lighting, security systems, etc. — and assuming there are any numbers available.
00
er…. Tony , how do they surmount these problems in China and India. I have a feeling your answer may be as short as five words.
English Aborigine
20
Hey, look over there!
Tony.
4 words really.
20
In the recent Post here at Joanne’s site, (Coal is a gift from Gaia) I commented about the largest Solar PV power plant on Earth, the one at Agua Caliente in Southern Arizona. That plant cost $1.8 Billion to construct, (And then in a later Thread, I also mentioned the large Concentrating Solar Plant, Ivanpah in Southern Arizona costed at $2.2 Billion)
Now, note the closeness in price here of the Solar PV plant when compared with the sale price for Bayswater and Liddell, virtually the same.
Let’s then do a comparison, and you may think I’m comparing apples and oranges here, but there is a very startling point to be seen from this.
Those two huge coal fired power plants are now almost 30+ years old, so the comparison between the two may be spurious some of you may think. After all, power plants cost considerably more these days, as does everything because the dollar is not what it was way back then, but there is in fact something which makes these plants have some equality, besides the cost, and that is the time left in operation.
That Solar PV plant has around 20 to 25 years of operation left as they only have a life span of 25 years at the absolute outside best case scenario.
Both Bayswater and Liddell still have a good 20 years of operation left in them as well, as large scale coal fired power has an effective life span of 50 years plus.
So, both plants now have the same life span of operation remaining, and at much the same cost, now we have two points of equality.
The Solar plant has a Nameplate Capacity of 290MW, and with a Capacity Factor of 17%, will generate 432GWH of power each year. Now, let’s just pretend for a minute that this Solar plant can actually keep delivering that power, full in the knowledge that in actuality the output power drops off each year, and the drop off is not minor, but for the sake of this exercise, let’s just pretend it can still deliver at that rate. So, then, 20 years at 432GWH per year comes in at a projected delivery of 8.64TWH of power.
Bayswater delivers (and here I’ll even use the lower figures which are used by coal fired power opponents) 16,000GWH, and Liddell delivers 10,000GWH, hence 26,000GWH each year, which is actually 26TWH EACH YEAR. So, effectively, the lifetime power delivery from the solar plant ….. for the next 20 YEARS is delivered by Bayswater and Liddell in, umm 17 weeks and 2 days. Over the same 20 years of operation for the Solar Plant these 2 coal fired plants will deliver 520TWH of power ….. SIXTY TIMES more power.
Now, while that, of itself is absolutely ridiculous, consider this more important point.
These two plants cost roughly the same.
So now that $1.8 Billion cost for the solar plant has to be recovered from the sale of electricity.
The same applies for Bayswater and Liddell. The cost for those 2 plants has to be recovered from the sale of the electricity.
So, extrapolating that down, then just for the recovery of the Capital cost, the solar power component comes in a 20 cents per KWH.
If the coal fired power plant makes 60 times the electricity, then just to recover the Capital cost for these 2 plants, that comes in at 0.33 cents per KWH.
Now, every cost for those 2 coal fired plants has to be recovered from the sale of electricity, and even so, there’s no way possible that the costs will bring that price up to the same for what the solar plant costs are per unit of electricity sold into the market.
Please do not ever try and tell me that solar power can actually compete with coal fired power.
Now consider this. No matter who the buyer is, where do you think they will spend their same amount of money.
You tell me what the choice is going to be, even for a 30+ year old power plant.
Tony.
210
TonyfromOz
We are now leaving behind what remains of the great British Industrial Revolution that started some 250 years ago, an industrial revolution that has given mankind so much.
Coal is still mined and used in a manner that is still very similar to even the early periods of the Industrial revolution, and that is almost an anachronism compared to the progress made in every other technological field in those two and half centuries
The Indians , Chinese and now even the Americans are going full bore on designing and building the first generation of the thorium liquid reactor designs based on the original American experimental designs and developments in thorium reactors in the 1950’s and 1960s which were actually very advanced.
But then very promising thorium reactor technology was abandoned by the Americans in favour of the uranium and plutonium reactors so as to be able to extract nuclear weapons grade uranium and plutonium from the burnt reactor fuel.
Admiral Rickover who forced through the building of the first of the American nuclear submarines, the Nautilus being the first and dominated the
american nuclear program for many years until forced out at an advanced age, had a very big influence on having uranium and plutonium reactors developed over and above the thorium reactor technology.
Thorium reactors need a natural fissioning source to maintain the burn so plutonium is one such source.
And as such, the highly radio active weapons grade plutonium can be burnt up in a thorium reactor and becomes little more than a low grade ash needing disposal so getting rid of a major global problem of very long future duration..
The Europeans have also initiated an experimental burn of thorium last year in the European experimental reactor center in Norway as have the Canadians in their CANDU reactors which are very good reactor designs capable of burning a wide range of radio active products.
The Indians are also experimenting with using a linear accelerator as the burn initiator which constantly creates conditions in the thorium reactor that continues the thorium burning , all without any highly radioactive plutonium or highly enriched uranium as the ignition and thorium burn maintainer.
Thorium of course can be handled without gloves or anything else in the way of protective cover it’s spontaneous fission rate is so low.
But even Thorium may turn out to be little more than a side show for global energy production by 2020.
In fact having some idea on the capabilities of the organization involved, the Lockheed Martin’s very secretive Skunkworks,[ registered name by the way, ] I would be buying shares in Lockheed Martin and quietly sitting on them if I had the where withal and still had the prospects of another few decades of life in front of me.
The highly secretive and very successful Skunkworks seem to be claiming in a totally out of character release of information to the public that they have cracked or are very confident of cracking fusion for power by 2017 and will be in production with a treuck sized fusion reactor by the mid 2020’s.
If they can do this then there will be an all out effort by every nation and every big energy corporation to get a license for the Skunkworks fusion technology and get to producing fusion energy production systems for their own needs
All other energy sources will then arguably be of little value by the middle of this century if the Skunkworks can achieve what they claim they are on the brink of achieving, in fusion energy technology.
And we will have energy in an almost infinite amount for the totality of human existence on this planet.
Since the Google Solve for X forum release by Charles Chase of the Skunkworks there is almost no other information available so here is Charles Chase of the Lockheed Martin’s Skunkworks in February 2013 on their fusion technology
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAsRFVbcyUY
110
Interesting, ambitious and exciting. Thanks for highlighting this ROM.
The Skunk Works (Lockheed Martin) key development appears to be in a magnetic containment field that grows stronger as plasmolysed hydrogen moves away from centre of the reactor containment chamber. Increased plasma pressure is related to increasing containment forces — negative feedback.
ITER Tokamak in the south of France and the traditional tokamak technology possess an alternate ‘opposite’ technology — as plasmolysed hydrogen expands, containment within the magnetic torus weakens, which results in increasing instability — positive feedback and eventual field containment failure.
Publicly stated advances at Skunkworks appear to be threefold:
1. High ß — plasma pressure/magnetic field pressure ratio. Skunkworks claim a ratio that approximates a value of 1.
2. There is little plasma leakage due to a reduction in leakage points in the improved containment field.
3. Containment vessel design curvature is optimised and is more efficient.
Damned impressive, and if they get it down to projected size with amazing portability.
Anyone who has read a detailed history of the 99% endeavour and 1% inspiration that surrounds the development of the SR-71 understands how extraordinary work is accomplished at Skunkworks.
Of additional interest to me is the involvement of the US in both domestic and international fusion development projects. Note that the US continues to be a key player and participant in the funding and development of the ITER in the south of France.
PS. The Skunk Works, contrary to the popular cherished belief of the seriously dumbed-down, it is not a conjoint alien/human facility.
70
“it is not a conjoint alien/human facility.”
nope.. no humans near the place. 🙂
10
In Kelly Johnson’s day it was full of some of the brightest and best engineers and scientists anywhere. And appears to still be that way. It produced the U2 and its larger cousin the SR-71 “Blackbird”. The F-117 stealth fighter also came from the Skunk Works. And there’s probably a lot more we don’t get to know about. So I would not put down the Skunk Works even a tiny little bit. 🙂
As far as I know the SR-71 still holds the world speed and altitude records to this day and on both record breaking flights the pilot was pulling his punches so as to not reveal the real capability of the aircraft.
The total accomplishments of this group is one of the most impressive lists in the field of aviation and technology in general that you could compile.
10
The way an airplane tried for it’s speed record was to dive on the course, gaining airspeed in exchange for altitude so there was a boost above what power alone could do. This was done over the same course on the same day in both directions so the wind could be averaged out. Speed was determined by time over the course, not cockpit instruments.
The Blackbird simply flew to the course and set throttle for the speed the pilot wanted. He had power left over and still got a record, so far unbeaten. Considering what any other aircraft needed to do to get its best speed over the same course, the Blackbird was loafing.
Altitude records were tried by climbing to your limit under maximum power and when there, dive to trade altitude for airspeed as in the speed record but then pop up sharply to use that additional speed to get you a little higher than you otherwise could go. Then read the altimeter at the top. This was done a number of times to get the best altimeter reading.
The Blackbird pilot simply climbed to the altitude he wanted and sat there without straining a bit. The aircraft was still just loafing.
In both cases the airplane could have set a better record but its capabilities were classified at the time.
This was a truly remarkable airplane from a truly remarkable group!
10
I exaggerated a bit for effect. The power it takes to do what the Blackbird did is certainly not loafing. But it certainly was not full out either.
10
This article talks about the way the Skunk Works operated and the difference in results that came out of Kelly Johnson’s philosophy vs. the more usual project management.
The discussion might as well be about any project, software, power plant… …anything. And shows why adding more people to a project in trouble doesn’t get it out of trouble.
The U.S. Government might consider Johnson’s philosophy and its wisdom the next time they want to reinvent medical care and then develop a web site to handle enrollment. Some understand productivity and some only understand activity. They aren’t the same.
10
It leaked like a sieve. Had they never heard of Selley’s?
00
Lockheed Martin is no ordinary company.
Much of its work is in close collaboration with government.
Government involves politics. Just look at our once marvellous CSIRO.
You say this is a highly uncharacteristic revelation by Lockheed Martin.
This revelation must already be having a profound effect on world economic planning. Starting with your suggestion of purchasing shares, but extending to all plans for future power generation and power usage.
So. Is the story fair dinkum?
Already plans for all kinds of current technology power stations would be coming under pressure as a result of this announcement, right acrosss the world.
Politics? Politics.
00
Ted O”Brien
I’ve wondered about this aspect of the continuing “business as usual” in the power and energy producing industry since the Skunkworks announcement last Feb 2013 myself.
I came across a report on the Skunk Works reactor design and other fusion reactor designs in the works at the moment but darned if I can find it again. The nuclear experts involved actually suggested that another approach might be a better bet to achieve fusion than the Skunkworks approach.
The difference is that the skunkworks appears to be well down the road otherwise given their reputation they would be unlikely to be so public withnthe even limited information they have provided.
There is a suspicion that they may even have got close to break even, ie Energy in to achieve fusion close to matching energy out, something only the experimental UK Joint European Torus [ JET ] , the experimental small scale precursor to the immense ITER being built at Cadarache in southern France, has so far achieved for a very brief instant of time.
The National Ignition Facility in the USA is using lasers to compact a holoraum, a very small container containing tritium and deuterium about the size of a pea, which through laser ablation pressures on the holoraum’s outer shel is supposed to raise the density and temperature of the D/ T mix in the holoraum to about 100 million degrees Kelvin which initiates fusion within the holoraum which then creates or changes intense surrounding magnetic fields leading to high energy output for a few millionths of second or at least thats the theory.
The LIF have been promising to achieve Fusion for about 3 years but has consistently failed to do so due to serious problems with uneven heating and compression of the holoraums.
It seems the LIF may have been relegated to a nuclear fusion reaction testing centre after the continuous string of failures to achieve the promised fusion.
On the lack of reaction in the energy production business to the LM Skunkworks announcement, I can only put down to the usual blind spots and the inertia that exists in any big corporation where they will continue as usual as long as they are making a good profit until they are faced with a situation where they are finally forced to radically change or go out of business.
Compounded by the fact that there has been a long history of promises that fusion will be achieved within a decade, a promise that has been on-running for some 50 years plus since the 1960’s.
So the SkunkWorks fusion project is probably in a business situation or scenario where the average politician, business person , industrialist and a good part of the energy industry are quite probably unaware of LM’s fusion program or agenda to achieve fusion or if they do know of it , won’t change their planning or programs until they are faced with the Skunkworks fait accompli.
Some may even have contiguous plans in place in case it does work but it’s just good business sense to continue on with what you know works and makes a profit until events prove otherwise.
They all have a hell of a lot of other things to think about in their business rather than some small scale experimental fusion device which hasn’t even been proven as yet which may or may not have an effect on their business a decade or more into the future.
As a quick example of this sort of inability of major corporations to look beyond the technology they know and which constantly under the current conditions continues to make good profits, you only have to look at the wind turbine industry which with it’s huge subsidised profit making ability due to immense publicly funded subsidies and mandated by government, dispensations and payment advantages that are totally denied to any other energy producers.
They keep right on continuing to erect turbines even though the writing is well and truly on the wall for the wind industry as the Europeans start re-thinking wind and solar and in the case of a number of European countries with already large wind industries, start repudiating and chopping back on the handouts and privileges that the wind industry has so enjoyed at the expense of industry, citizens and society in those countries for the last couple of decades .
And thats when all the world knows that the wind industry and solar industries are now coming under increasing pressure and an increasing back lash from all the above players who are all finally getting a guts full of the scammers of the wind and solar industries and coming to the realization that wind and solar industry performances and costs are not within a bulls roar of what their proponents have blatantly hyped over the years.
Another example when there was a totally radical and completely unpredicted even traumatic change as the society of the times and the industrial sector was almost overturned in only a decade was completely unpredicted and ignored by the entire business, industry and citizenry of the times was the advent of the automobile in the very early 20th century.
It was just initially dismissed as of no consequence as the horse just could not be replaced as there was no alternative to the horse for power and transport . We can see the consequence of that change every single day of our lives.
Another is the internet which has totally transformed communications, knowledge access and commerce and industry across the globe but has done so, so subtly almost without people noticing the immense change despite the internet and WWW being publicly accessible and operational for less than two decades.
Nobody predicted that and very, very few realised what was happening on a global scale until it was all done and dusted with the internet and the
world wide web the dominate communication system of our modern world..
The examples of the past are all out there where new technologies both change and reform society across it’s entire spectrum but which are ignored until they suddenly seem to appear out of nowhere.
Then most old staid well established industries and companies and their executives are left open mouthed and standing as their world collapses around them and a new era begins.
So I think it will be with LM’s Skunkworks fusion power technology if it is successful.
00
Pipe Rupture, Fires Vex Ivanpah Solar Crews
http://www.kcet.org/news/rewire/solar/concentrating-solar/pipeline-rupture-fires-vex-ivanpah-solar-crews.html
The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the Mojave Desert suffered a setback in mid-May when a rupture was found in a tube intended to heat steam for use generating power at Unit 2. Repairs are still continuing, according to a state agency that monitors the energy plant. That rupture followed close on the heels of three “ignition incidents” at the plant’s Units 1 and 2.
40
Iberdrola: Suddenly sour on solar thermal
http://social.csptoday.com/technology/iberdrola-suddenly-sour-solar-thermal
Sánchez Galán, head of Iberdrola, the world’s largest renewable energy operator and a member of the council of Spain’s solar thermal association Protermosolar, had laid into the CSP sector during the call. “The 2,500 MW of solar thermal plants already preregistered could result in an additional cost of €2 billion,” he claimed after trumpeting a 3.5% rise in company profits, to EUR€2.14 billion.
“The massive deployment of these plants at the moment has no justification. We must immediately stop the development of economically and environmentally inefficient energies. Someone has to pay for the green solar feast; we can’t carry on doing things for the few.”
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Is there a child anywhere who didn’t focus the sun on a piece of paper with a magnifying glass and watch it catch fire? My friends and I did it over and over. One focused it on his hand — briefly. It would seem that the elementary school level lesson about the sun’s intensity has yet to reach as high as engineering school.
If there’s a mistake you can make, someone will make it. On the other hand, I watched the Valley Steam Plant in Los Angeles being built and saw it go into operation. It ran some 40 years until it was shut down, burning natural gas in two large water tube boilers, 24/7 except for maintenance and NO FIRES OR RUPTURED PIPES! What have we become that we can’t avoid focusing the sun on flammable adhesive?
By the way, the plant has now been restarted according to the Los Angeles Times. Nothing quite like a power crunch to get more life out of old stuff.
10
Well all the greenies are gushing because Ivanpah is finally online albeit only stage one of the three units they are building.
http://ivanpahsolar.com/
One of the many press releases here
It’s 377MW total. Note the $1.6 billion in subsidy!!
Later this year Crescent Dunes is due to come online.
A scan of the videos is interesting – talk about overblown BS.
20
Tony obviously the NSW state government has financial problems inherited after 16 years of Labor in power. Adding to the problems was Labor selling what had been valued at $12 billion of power industry assets for $5.6 Billion and after the sale debt of $4.8 billion had to be repaid so taxpayers effectively lost a huge amount of money our government should have received.
The debt by the way was borrowed by state government owned private companies and was used under instruction from Labor to increase dividends paid to the government that was used to improve the budget bottom lines over years. And interest was paid on the borrowings and added into electricity bills.
It seems to me that the present Coalition government had no option other than to sell the remaining assets, your comments reinforce this as far as I am concerned.
20
Thanks Tony, for sharing some facts. Why won’t our governments tell us what the typical costs in Australia are for each power source in cents/KWH, given each gets an appropriate return on investment?
And then tell us in simple terms what goes into the average price of our electricity in cents/KWh.
A March 2012 paper, Australian Electricity Prices: an International Comparison, commissioned by the EUAA shows that Australia’s electricity prices are very near to the highest in the developed world and seemingly set to reach the highest.
“Rising electricity prices are having a major impact on the cost of living and of doing business. All Australians know this and are naturally concerned about it,” Mr. Roman Domanski, Executive Director of the EUAA said.
“This paper exposes the myth that Australia continues to have low, or even mid range, electricity prices. Electricity is becoming a lot less affordable for both households and businesses and our prices are now a source of national weakness rather than strength.”
AEMO publishes annual prices but they seem to jump all over the place, and are clearly not connected to the prices I pay.
For Victoria, $27.62/MWh in 2004/5 to $54.27/MWh in 2013/14 (or 5.4 cents/KWh).
The Origin Energy website states that the average household consumes about 6.5MWh of electricity per year, and that costs $1500-2500 per year depending on location so that equates to $231-385/MWh or 23-38 cents/KWh. They also show a chart that indicates about 10% of that is GST, Government green schemes about 15%, about 10% goes to Retailers, generators get about 20% and networks 45%.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that from Jun 2007 to Dec 2013 the consumer price index rose by 19%, but electricity rose by 111%.
ENOUGH!! Get rid of the CO2 tax, and then the Renewable Energy
Target(Tax).20
In the 1980s they were amongst the lowest. This very substantial comparative advantage subsidised Australia’s inefficient work practices.
00
Ivanpah is very good at cooking birds apparently. Sometimes it hard to be a Green, innit?
10
“Sometimes it hard to be a Green, innit’
I wouldn’t think so.. You would just have to put all you morals, integrity and common sense aside.
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Evening all.
Parts of this are deliberately bad. The rest is jut bad, as per William McGonnagal. Off topic, please forgive me, but it is unthreaded…
A good weekend to you all!
Cheers,
Speedy.
Megan
(Who got on surprisingly well.)
My appreciation I would like to show
To the lass who runs Australia’s CSIRO,
A lass who is lovely and nice, and so very agreeable,
That she’ll stay in her job for the future foreseeable.
We know Dr. Megan Clark will always agree,
With whatever they tell her at the IPCC,
And we all know the IPCC is always correct;
That’s why she doesn’t bother about getting their assertions checked.
But that doesn’t make her a puppet, or some kind of parrot,
Or just a dumb donkey with her eye on the carrot –
No! She’s a Climate Scientist of the premium kind –
With a gigantic, enormous and pliable mind –
And a climate to save – it’s her pride and her passion –
Which is politically correct, thus the latest in fashion;
So all her big giant heads at the CSIRO,
Spend their time and our money in an effort to show –
How our fragile world is in such dangerous danger –
And atmospheric CO2 level is the only significant climate changer;
As a result of which, amongst her gifts to the nation,
Are exciting new ways to increase our taxation,
Which will somehow reverse the heating of climate;
But her own career ladder, it will help her to climb it,
So I expect her future career to take off and explode,
Like when an 18 wheel truck flattens a 10-inch cane toad.
180
Kudos on that one, Speedy. 🙂
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Jo
The answer to your question, ” … would we know?” is YES.
I have visited the Spaceguard centre (1) on the England/Wales border a couple of times. They form part of an international network which identify near earth objects (NEO). Until recently the key role of Spaceguard UK was to be fed siteings and to use a powerful refracting telescope to plot its movement against the fixed stars to enable the orbit to be calculated. The orbital information is then shared with others worldwide. The Internet in use!
Unless things have changed the central clearing house for NEO information is at NASA (2)
(1) http://www.spaceguarduk.com/
(2) http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/
They have already identified (and cleared) plenty of NEOs. Now, whether we can do what would be necessary to divert/destroy an arriving NEO is less clear but at least we should have early warning.
Alan Bates, West Midlands UK
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There’s a very interesting sales pitch/presentation on deflecting asteroids at long range by burning them with lasers. Lubin covers the size of the asteroid threat, then describes the rough specs of the DE-STAR system, and summarises what’s possible with current off-the-shelf photonics.
He throws in some rather interesting allusions to what is currently possible with portable laser gun systems that are still classified secret and nearly in a field deployable state of development, but of course he can’t talk in any detail about previous systems that he has worked on for the USA DoD.
This link skips most of his introductory asteroid background stuff and leads straight into the DE-STAR description.
http://youtu.be/XwYJZqBB0ms?t=15m56s
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That’s not in Mexico. It’s Meteor Crater in Arizona. I visited it in October 2008.
It’s about the same size as the Blue Lake volcanic crater at Mount Gambier for anyone who has been there.
[Fixed that. Thanks] ED
[Thanks Ian, and ED. I don’t know how I got that wrong. Brain snap, late. – Jo]
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Ian,
Yes, Just checked and you’re right, the only square crater.
Barringer Crater
Impact energy was about 10 megatons.
20
Decoding the Antikythera Mechanism. (11 minute video)
A discovery about this 2000 year-old astronomical devices reveals the timing of the earliest Olympic games.
The Antikythera Mechanism re-constructed with lego.
. . .
It won’t predict the next asteroid, but, will predict the next solar eclipse.
10
There’s not a lot floating around out there any more.
If the earth is about 4500 million years old (don’t forget it formed in the first place by sucking up lot of the stuff that was floating around before then) then anything in near earth orbit that comes around every 4500 years has been around a million times and hasn’t hit yet, or has hit and isn’t available for another strike. Anything that comes around every million years has already been around 4500 times and likewise.
Respectively about since the pyramids were built, and since the first hominids climbed out of the trees and started worrying about it.
What are the odds- maybe not zero, but close enough that it doesn’t matter. Major meteorite strikes are a thing of the past- I’d put the house on it.
41
Thanks, Gnome, I’m glad someone showed up to talk some sense into this fearmongering topic. When the experts in astrophysics can sleep soundly at night, I’m not worried about it. Plenty of real problems on terra firma.
Onnnnnnnn the other haaannnnnnnd…..
There was that rock that only came around once every million years and totally missed 4434 times in a row, and on its next attempt any dino without a decade’s supply of tinned fern leaves had a sudden career change.
The big rocks are exponentially rarer than the smaller ones. But it’s not impossible. One way or another, Earth lives on borrowed time.
Deal with it.
30
Isn’t that the same argument climate change makes? If there’s a one in a million chance they are right, we better do something NOW or suffere the consequences. Sure, it may be one in a million, but what if we hit that million on this run?
21
No it’s not. There is lot’s of evidence for meteorite collisions like UM, meteorite collisions… There is no Empirical evidence for runaway global warming, in fact for all the Millenia of Earth time CO2 has mostly been on an ever downward journey, and our worst fear should in fact be insufficient CO2, mankind’s helpful act in liberating CO2 has probably given us and most other species on Earth a few extra millenia to exist before earth is too CO2 starved to support advanced life
40
Well said , bobl ! 🙂
The world is so fortunate to have had access to be able to recycle all this precious CO2 and energy, that should have been in the atmospheric system, but got buried.
Plants have been on survival rations for a long, long time.
So long as we get back to sanity and don’t shut down the world’s CO2 replenishment, the world should continue to prosper for a long long time.
But if we are ever stupid enough to let the CO2 level drop back down below 300ppm, the world food supplies will be in deep strife.
20
You already know we haven’t and won’t change the climate to any significant degree. And you know I know that too. But you also know big rocks from space really have caused extinctions in the past and probably will again. For that reason alone you can’t pretend these two arguments are qualitatively the same, regardless of the long intervals and low odds involved in asteroids.
It’s because the physics of CAGW is known to not add up properly that the precautionary principle does not apply to it. We already know catastrophic warming can’t happen, no probability involved.
The arguments are fundamentally different. But you have a valid point about the worthiness of the whole enterprise.
Stony objects bigger than 1km have caused mass extinctions, or “Earth killers” basically. Objects of 300m in size cause “regional catastrophe” but it’s not clear what that means (perhaps a huge tsunami, something temporarily bad but which we can shrug off). By some stats the chances of an “average USA citizen” dying from a meteor impact are higher than dying from amusement park rides and spider bites. Does that make it worth it?
Well even according to the numbers offered by space laser defence enthusiasts, the only way a system capable of deflecting a 300m+ asteroid would be worth building is if it is maintained in perfect working order for 70,000 years, since that’s the rate we get 300m sized objects.
When have humans ever had a single cohesive civilisation last more than 7 000 years, let alone 70 000? So given human nature and energy supply limits it looks like a non-starter. Our temperament is the limit here, not physics. Also the time scale is so long that if we built such a system today we would be protecting a species that may not entirely qualify as human by today’s standards.
At the same time, one could also question what use the Apollo moon landings and Mars rovers were. They do not seem to have served any practical Earthly benefit, and yet there could be few who would say the Apollo programme should never have been done. Most would say it was an inspirational thing to do, a unifying event for the world, and that the psychological benefits of doing it “just because we can” shouldn’t be underestimated. Value is subjective. Look at China and India with their moon rover programmes, they learn nothing science didn’t know already and bring no marketable benefit to their sponsors, but the benefits seem to be in the journey, not the destination. So proving the chances of an asteroid defence system ever actually deflecting an Earth Killer during its operational lifetime are basically zero is still not sufficient for establishing that it should not be attempted. If the maintenance cost was low, I wouldn’t mind doing it just for kicks. Imagine it could be built for $20B and maintained for $200M/yr. It would just take a single $8 contribution from everyone aged over 18 in the world, and we would have 100+ years of blasting rocks out of the heavens. It would be like hillbillies sitting around a bug zapper and yelling “hee-haw that was a big `un!”
Wouldn’t that be fun?
Aaannd back on the first hand again… we wouldn’t want the Earth First crowd to gain control over the thing and use it to blast major industrial centres off the map, which the system could probably do, so why risk building it. That can happen 10,000 years before the first big rock ever appears.
I said I wasn’t worried about asteroid impacts.
I said “Deal with it” by linking to a GIF of a Russian pulling down his car’s sun visor and continuing to drive and go about his business like a meteor impact was no big deal.
Somehow I must be sending mixed messages here or something.
20
Then there is Jupiter eventually disturbing the orbit of an asteroid whose orbit didn’t used to intersect that of Earth. And whatever is in the Oort that makes comets eventually now and again fall towards the Sun. And Comet Schumacher-Levy that hit Jupiter a while back. Plus the Tunguska event and the recent half megaton airburst over Russia and numerous other historical and paleo(but not all that long ago in the Earth’s history) events.
Asteroids are nature’s way of asking “how’s that space program coming along?” Ask the dinosaurs(65 million years ago was less than 1.5% of the time back to the formation of the planet).
There’s a lot out there but space is big. Much the same as the Big Sky theory of avoiding mid air collisions yet pilots keep a lookout.
Maybe the human race should do the same. Else all that we have done will be nothing and there will be nobody to remember. http://www.astronautix.com/articles/iftndies.htm
And this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw9gHAmObps&list=PL8394E70A4DB81B5D
10
Sorry that should be #22 on the playlist “Sentries”.
00
“Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang”.
It was a good movie. I recommend it.
00
Of the stuff we know about the next expected uncontrolled reentry will be in around 18 hrs. Tome at 06:25 UTC Sunday , (+/-8 Hrs) of Cosmos 1220, a Soviet era military surveillance satellite.
Tracking space junk at Satview.org
A ball of solid rock on a direct collision course could be a rather different kettle of fish though. Like the 50 metre Asteroid 2012 DA14 that zoomed by on this very day last year, at only about 2 Earths diameters away, or less than 1/10 th. of the distance of the Moon and inside the geo-stationary satellite belt travelling at about 17,500 miles per hour (or 4.8 miles/second).
20
That Russian satellite is still whizzing around. Over the Atlantic at the moment. Reported sighting over Kingston, SE England last night .
Still 260 miles up & going at 4.6 miles per second across the Atlantic, headed for London just now.
Follow it here:
http://www.n2yo.com/?s=12054
10
Thanks Joe, thats an interesting link. Added to post. Amazing what you can find on thanks to the Internet. Thanks Eddie too. Good links.
10
Reports suggest Cosmos 1220 burned up at around14:00 GMT Sunday.
From RT.com
It might make you wonder who to believe or what these sites are really tracking, now some 18 hours later , at Satview
and at n2yo
00
Its not just the junk we expect to fall we have to worry about. It’s getting crowded up there. When satellites in stable orbits collide it can send stuff off in all directions.
00
The picture is a crater in Arizona not Mexico
[Fixed that. Thanks] ED
10
“No one should be overly concerned about an Earth impact of an asteroid or comet. The threat to any one person from auto accidents, disease, other natural disasters and a variety of other problems is much higher than the threat from NEOs. Over long periods of time, however, the chances of the Earth being impacted are not negligible so that some form of NEO insurance is warranted. At the moment, our best insurance rests with the NEO scientists and their efforts to first find these objects and then track their motions into the future. We need to first find them, then keep an eye on them.” http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/target.html
“One year ago, on Feb. 15, 2013, the world was witness to the dangers presented by near-Earth Objects (NEOs) when a relatively small asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere, exploding over Chelyabinsk, Russia, and releasing more energy than a large atomic bomb. Tracking near-Earth asteroids has been a significant endeavor for NASA and the broader astronomical community, which has discovered .. 10,713 .. known near-Earth objects to date. NASA is now pursuing new partnerships and collaborations in an Asteroid Grand Challenge to accelerate NASA’s existing planetary defense work, which will help find all asteroid threats to human population and know what to do about them…”
“Asteroids are discovered by small, dedicated teams of astronomers using optical telescopes that repeatedly scan the sky looking for star-like objects, which change location in the sky slightly over the course of an hour or so. Asteroid surveys detect hundreds of such moving objects in a single night, but only a fraction of these will turn out to be new discoveries. The coordinates of detected moving objects are passed along to the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., which either identifies each as a previously known object or assigns it a new designation. The observations are collated and then electronically published, along with an estimate of the object’s orbit and intrinsic brightness. Automatic systems at NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at JPL take the Minor Planet Center data, compute refined orbit and brightness estimates, and update its online small-body database.”
http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/asteroid/asteroid-redirect-mission-20140214/index.html#.Uv9lCoVdDUc
10
“One year ago, on Feb. 15, 2013, the world was witness to the dangers presented by near-Earth Objects (NEOs) when a relatively small asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere, exploding over Chelyabinsk, Russia, and releasing more energy than a large atomic bomb.”
With all this added energy to the earths atmosphere, how much did the world average temperature increase? Did this add to Global Warming? Is the energy now part of the hidden (missing) heat? Did the ‘Climate Scientists’ take this opportunity to track this energy (heat) and were they able to track and identify were it disappeared into the ocean?
10
The Tunguska Event in 1908 was from a smaller asteroid (30-40m) travelling twice as fast as last February’s near miss, that destroyed about 2,150 square km of forest from the airburst, estimated at at least 100 s of times the energy of a Hiroshima bomb.
10
We also have the Tunguska event. Could happen again any day, any where.
Tomorrow is promised to no one.
30
And just because it depends on coincidence doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Like great minds thinking alike at the same time (ok perhaps those did have some common prompt).
10
The Dellen lakes in Sweden:
The vaguely circular lake system was formed by an impact crater 89.0 ± 2.7 million years ago, placing the impact in the Upper Cretaceous. The resulting impact crater measures about 19 kilometres in diameter. It has resulted in the area containing the rock Dellenite (a rock intermediate in composition between Rhyolite and Dacite),[1] which has become the provincial rock.
(from Wikipedia)
10
The Day after Tomorrow was one movie I’d never seen…until…yesterday – OMG what a great comedy. Lines like – “My Dad is a climate scientist so he should know what’s going to happen!” 🙂
40
–
Good lord!…..I hope Chris.Turney doesn’t take his family to see it!
40
Turkey would already have this on blu ray and listed as a documentary for future reference,paid for by the taxpayer of course.Research material.
10
We rather need to be more concerned with the Day After Yesterday than living in the fantasy of what we cannot predict.
50
There’s a big baby expected in about 15 years time.
Apophis will pass about about the distance of geostationary orbit in 2029 but will be about 10 x the size of last February’s Duende and of the 1908 Tunguska asteroid that flattened 800 sq. miles of forest in Siberia.
I hope they’ve got their calcs. right, that far out.
In the meantime though there a couple of smaller (~10 metre) ones expected in 2017 & in 2026 and being smaller their path seems harder to predict.
This is from an observatory at Sormano in the North of Italy
http://www.brera.mi.astro.it/sormano/teca.html
Nowhere near Gran Sasso btw. where they got the super luminal speed of muons so disastrously wrong.
There’s always the unexpected to keep us on our toes in the meantime though, like last Feb’s. collider at Chelyabinsk
40
The Earth and it’s interior can generate the explosive force of a volcano and maintain the heat needed to melt rock! That’s an incredible amount of energy.
Please correct me.
There has to be some massive “chain reactions” going on in the planets interior for this to occur.
Elements must be getting consumed? But under what process?
10
Steve R.
In answer your question from Physics world,com
Radioactive decay accounts for half of Earth’s heat
quoted;
About 50% of the heat given off by the Earth is generated by the radioactive decay of elements such as uranium and thorium, and their decay products. That is the conclusion of an international team of physicists that has used the KamLAND detector in Japan to measure the flux of antineutrinos emanating from deep within the Earth. The result, which agrees with previous calculations of the radioactive heating, should help physicists to improve models of how heat is generated in the Earth
____________________
From ; Temperature in the earth.
Temprature gradient which varies according to rock type and etc is given as 25C per kilometre depth. So the deepest oil wells are now down to about the 11 kilometre mark or below and experience temperatures of around 250C plus .
And thats some mighty hot oil when it gets to the surface.
_______________________
Shell’s expandable oil well pipes.
Expandable Tubulars – Engineering a Pipe Dream
If you want to know a little of where and how the new emerging technologies that put the liquid stuff into the service station tanks that you pump into your cars at great expense then this article will give you a glimpse .
With the expandable oil well pipe system , once the well has reached the maximum depth of the first string of piping, the expandable pipes which are small enough to go down inside of the already installed pipes are lowered into the hole and down to below the bottom of the original string.
A mandrel is then drawn up through the smaller pipes expanding and enlarging them to the same size as the original pipe string.
And so this amazing technological process continues right down the depth of the well .
In theory and no doubt soon in practice there is no limit to the depths an oil well can be drilled to with 50 to 60,000 feet deep being talked about .
The only physical limit will be the temperatures at increasing depth which will be high enough to start to affect the strength of the steel used in the pipes which at say 60,000 feet or some 18 or 19 kilometres deep and 25 C per kilometre depth increase in temperature will be around the 500 C .
00
Steve RW I had a go at replying to you earlier but again lost the lot due to my usual stupidity and impatience.
A couple of references on the way in which heat is generated from the decay of radioactive elements in the Earths crust as well as the rate of increase with depth , about 25 C for each kilometre deeper is the approximate figure but it varies greatly due to the types of rock, can be found at these sites.
As a by comment, granite is actually quite radioactive as it contains the main radioactive elements that through their decay process provide most of the heat that is found in the /Earth’s crust as per the below article.
Consequently in places with a similar geology to the NSW granite belt, in New England I think, the levels of the radioactive Radon gas in homes can get quite high. There are plenty of cases overseas in similar granite geology locations where the levels of Radon gas in homes and offices has exceeded the safe working limits as set by the nuclear inspectorates
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Physics World .com
Radioactive decay accounts for half of Earth’s heat
quoted;
About 50% of the heat given off by the Earth is generated by the radioactive decay of elements such as uranium and thorium, and their decay products. That is the conclusion of an international team of physicists that has used the KamLAND detector in Japan to measure the flux of antineutrinos emanating from deep within the Earth. The result, which agrees with previous calculations of the radioactive heating, should help physicists to improve models of how heat is generated in the Earth.
Geophysicists believe that heat flows from Earth’s interior into space at a rate of about 44 × 1012 W (TW). What is not clear, however, is how much of this heat is primordial – left over from the formation of the Earth – and how much is generated by radioactive decay.
The most popular model of radioactive heating is based on the bulk silicate Earth (BSE) model, which assumes that radioactive materials, such as uranium and thorium, are found in the Earth’s lithosphere and mantle – but not in its iron core. The BSE also says that the abundance of radioactive material can be estimated by studying igneous rocks formed on Earth, as well as the composition of meteorites.
As a result of this model, scientists believe that about 20 TW is generated by radioactive decay – 8 TW from the uranium-238 decay chain; 8 TW from the thorium-232 decay chain and the final 4 TW from potassium-40. Fortunately, these decay chains also produce anti-electron-neutrinos, which travel easily through the Earth and can be detected, thereby giving physicists a way to measure the decay rates and ultimately the heat produced deep underground.
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Also; Temperature of the Earth
This site is associated with oil driling
Average geothermal gradient is about 25oC/km or 23oF/1000 ft
Oil window is at about 1,500 m (5,000 ft) to 4,800 m (16,000 ft)
depth
Radioactive elements are heat source
Oil window is at 2-5 km (6000-16000 ft) depth approx.
Low conductivity rocks lead to high thermal gradient and vice versa
Moving fluids disturb the thermal structure
Bottom-hole temperatures are not in equilibrium due to mud circulation, need to be corrected
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And if you want to know a bit about that nasty fluid fossil fuel global warming fluid stuff you pump out of bowser and into your car at great expense, thanks to our munificent government, you will read up on the amazing ability of the oil industry to lower pipes down the wells inside of the already installed well pipes and then expand those pipes down at the bottom of the drill hole to the same size as the top pipes through which they were lowered.
A bit of technology that now means that there is now no theoretical limit to how deep they can drill limited only by the temperatures down around 50 to 60,000 feet where the temperatures of around 500 C start to weaken the stainless type steels used in the pipes and down bore drilling heads.
Expandable Tubulars – Engineering a Pipe Dream
[quoted ]
In the early 1990s, engineers at Shell’s Research Laboratories conceived the idea of an expandable well tubular. The initial concept was similar to traditional well drilling but posed many new technical challenges. The idea was that the hole would be drilled and the pipe inserted into the hole. As soon as the casing was in position, but before the cement had set, an oversized hardened steel cone would be pushed or pulled through the pipe, irreversibly expanding the diameter of the casing by some 10–15%. The expansion would be selected so that the expanded casing fitted snugly into the previous casing at the overlap. At the same time the annulus between the pipe and the rock would also be reduced.
If this system could be realised it would mean that smaller casing sizes could be used at the outset of the well (14″ compared to 26″) yet still give the same production diameter (5″) in the reservoir as used in conventional drilling. The gains for the industry of this slimmer well design were obvious: deeper wells, a smaller diameter hole on the surface, less cement and cuttings, a narrower selection of pipes, a smaller rig and substantial savings on well costs (Figure 2).
This unique technology of slimmer well design has now been fully developed and commercialised. To date over 30,000 metres of casing haves been expanded in numerous wells all over the world.
A bottomless well? [ more ]
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HMM! I’ve now lost two posts in trying to reply to RW today. No problems elsewhere
—————————–
Let me know if the comments disappear so I can check the spam filter. – Jo
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Aww! I’m disappointed.
Fancy an opening for this Thread about a meteorite crater and here we are, almost seven hours after it was posted and no one has mentioned Australia’s own Wolfe Creek Crater.
It’s not all that much smaller than the one Joanne has mentioned, although considerably older at around 300,000 years, and it’s pretty well documented at that.
Legendary Australian crime fiction author Arthur W Upfield, author of the 29 Inspector Bonaparte novels actually led the expedition to the crater, sponsored by The Australian Geographic society, in 1948. a year after it was first noticed during aerial surveying of the area.
The crater also has a big part in Aboriginal Dreaming as well.
Upfield used the area in and around the crater in his second last novel, well conjecture might make that his third last novel, but this was Upfield at the absolute zenith of his writing, and that novel, The Will Of The Tribe, probably ranks as one of his best, and, umm, for those of you wishing to find a copy, well, good luck with that.
In my Arthur Upfield Series at my home site, I have reviews of all those Bony novels, and the review for this novel is at this link.
The Will Of The Tribe
For those of you who have Google Earth, type in Wolfe Creek Meteorite Crater. As the screen comes up, scroll out a little, and it’s down a bit and to the right. Great image.
Tony.
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Movie goers will probably recognize Wolf Creek from the movies of the same name.
I have not been to Wolf Creek crater myself, but I have visited the Henbury Meteorite Craters near Alice Springs. Not as large as the Arizona crater, nor Wolf Creek but very recent at 4700 years.
http://www.parksandwildlife.nt.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/10589/HenburyMeteorites_000.pdf
Well worth a visit if you are in the area, or passing by. They are just off the Stuart highway about 1 1/2 hours south of AS.
Quite a large meteorite landed at Cranbourne, near Melbourne about 200 years ago. The meteorite broke up in the air and did not make a hole in the ground. There used to be a display in the local park, demonstrating the size of the fragments. It has now been removed (sadly). The fragments have largely been removed to museums around the world.
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The names of the crater and the film whilst phonetically similar today, unless you happen to be speaking Chaucerian English, and as well as being coincident in location, are nevertheless spelt differently.
The crater in Western Australia near Halls Creek is spelt: WOLFE CREEK
The fim (2005, which I’d prefer to forget) is entitled: WOLF CREEK
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Well Tony #24, due to the vagaries of posting, you beat me to it as I searched through the thread to confirm that no one had considered it. Amazing really, given its back-yard status.
Wolfe Creek Crater
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Nor has anybody mentioned the Antarctic’s Wilkes Land crater at some calculated [ it is under a kilometre or two of ice ] by gravity anomalies at some 480 kms wide which would have required an object about 4 to 5 times wider than the size of the impactor that formed the Chicxulub Crater.
There is in fact some evidence of two Wilke’s Land impact craters
The hypothesised timing of the Wilkes Land crater impact is close to the formation of the Siberian Traps volcanic province in the antipodal position on the opposite side of the planet which is believed to be responsible for the Permian Triassic boundary extinction event .
Wiki quoted ;
It is the Earth’s most severe known extinction event, with up to 96% of all marine species[3] and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species becoming extinct.[4] It is the only known mass extinction of insects.[5][6] Some 57% of all families and 83% of all genera became extinct. Because so much biodiversity was lost, the recovery of life on Earth took significantly longer than after any other extinction event,[3] possibly up to 10 million years.
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The Central American Yucatan’s Chicxulub impact event with it’s some 180 kms across impact crater from about 66 milion years ago also coincided with the formation of the India’s Deccan Traps volcanic province which is also antipodal or on the opposite side of the planet to the Chicxulub impact and dates from about the same era.
The Chicxulub impact and the Deccan Traps formation are also linked closely in time with the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.
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And the Bedout anomaly
From Wiki;
Bedout /bɨˈduː/, or more specifically the Bedout High, is a geological and geophysical feature centered about 250 km off the northwestern coast of Australia in the Canning and overlying Roebuck basins. Although not obvious from sea floor topography, it is a roughly circular area about 30 km in diameter where older rocks have been uplifted as much as 4 km towards the surface.[1] The Bedout High was penetrated by two petroleum exploration wells (Bedout-1, Lagrange-1) in the 1970s and 1980s. It is named after nearby Bedout Island.
In 1996 Australian geologist John Gorter first suggested that the Bedout High might mark the centre of a very large buried impact crater up to 250 km in diameter, based mainly on its internal geological structure as revealed on a single seismic survey line, and suggested that it may be of near end Permian age, based on the reported age of volcanic rocks in Lagrange-1.
[1][2] The impact hypothesis was developed further by Luanne Becker (University of California) and coworkers who claimed to have confirmed that the supposed volcanic rocks in the petroleum wells are actually impact melt breccia showing evidence of shock metamorphism, and re-dated these rocks at 250.1 ± 4.5 Ma.
[3] The new age is essentially coincident with the Permian-Triassic boundary and associated extinction event, and Becker speculates that there is a likely connection.
It was subsequently reported, based on very limited preliminary data, that the impact hypothesis is further supported by chromium isotope evidence for the presence of extraterrestrial material.[4]
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And just to keep you interested, a North American impact disaster the timing and effects of which are now close to being accepted and are very close to the start of the very cold 1,300 year long Younger Dryas climate era of some 12000 yeas ago although the cause is still in dispute.
Comet Storm; ; A Different Kind of Climate Catastrophe
Quoted;
The 2007 Firestone paper caused a pretty good stir in the academic community. And it has become the ‘Flagship’, so to speak, of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.
In it, a team of twenty six scientists, studying sedimentary deposits, presented a whole suite of compelling evidence for a massive impact event of a comet that appears to have broken up, and scattered, fragments all across North America. The multiple, air bursts are thought to have triggered wide-spread bio mass burning on a continental scale. As well as causing a return to ice age conditions, and the extinction of many species. Including the mega fauna, like mastodons, wooly mammoths, and giant sloths. In all, I think something like 35 genera went extinct.
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Re the Wolfes Creek crater; My father was on the board of the centralian and Lutheran run Finke River Mission through the 1960’s’.
He told me that it was almost unknown except to a few that the americans had brought out their Apollo moon mission astronauts to the Wolfe Creek crater to get some real time experience on the possible terrain that the Apollo astronauts might expect in their moon landings.
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I had a post all written and lost the bloody lot when I hit the wrong key GRRRR!
So short cutting
Try checking these out if interested and want to make your hair curl thinking about it if one of these again hit the planet which they do about every few tens of millions of years. And these aren’t the biggest as there is quite a lot of debate about the evidence of much larger impacts far back in Earth’s early history.
The effects of incoming cometary debris and small space objects is not all bad as it is believed that it is Cometary debris and Cometary impacts and air bursts through the earth’s geological history which have provided much of the earth’s water that we have today.
Wilkes Land crater about 4 times the size of Chicxulub
Chicxulub
Bedout anomaly
North America’s Comet Storm; A Different Kind of Climate Catastrophe, something which may be a fairly common occurrence on a geological and astronomical time frame
10 Greatest Major-Impact Craters on Earth
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The following is the paper which supplies the reasoning behind the Comet Storm hypothesis in my above post.
The Taurids are an intense annual meteor shower which the Earth passes through a couple of times each year. I have sat out at night and watched this shower for a short time [ it was too bloody cold to sit there for the duration ] which can be spectacular with hundreds of meteors streaking across the heavens for some hours when the Earth passes through one of the thicker streams of what is most likely the debris from the break up of a giant comet some many tens of thousands of years ago.
One of the major papers on the probability of the Earth passing through and colliding with some very large chunks of the Taurid shower with a consequent and hypothesised devastating impacts on the North American continent along with the jump start in only a few years, not decades, of the very puzzling and very sharp and large fall in global temperatures, 1300 year long Younger Dryas period of some 12000 years ago.
Palaeolithic extinctions and the Taurid Complex
ABSTRACT
Intersection with the debris of alarge (50-100km) short-periodcomet during the UpperPalaeolithic provides a satisfactory explanation for the catastrophe of celestial origin which has been postulated to have occurred around 12900BP, and which presaged a return to ice age conditions of duration∼1300years.
The Taurid Complex appears to be the debris of this erstwhile comet; it includes at least 19 of the brightest near-Earth objects.
Sub kilometre bodies in meteor streams may present the greatest regional impact hazard on time scales of human concern.
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This is the collision to worry about.
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Has anyone ever put forward the theory that those craters are only the scars left from zits that the earth grew when it was a teenager?
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White House: “Weather practically everywhere is being caused by climate change”
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2014-02-15/white-house-weather-practically-everywhere-being-caused-climate-change
So Obama went to California to talk drought and climate change. He brought some cash with him to help the state cope with the water shortage. The Prez is right to be worried about this drought, after all, Cali is 15% of the US economy. The only question is how big the hit to CA/US GDP is going to be.
The President’s new plan is have the Ag department come up with $100 million for cattle farmers. There is also $5m for communities that are literally running out of water. So it’s 20 to 1 in favor of the cattlemen. Great plan…
As Obama headed west, the White House’s Science Assistant, John Holdren, had this to say about the California drought:
“Weather practically everywhere is being caused by climate change”
Really? It’s all climate change?
There are many forces that shape weather patterns. One of the most significant is the El Nino/ La Nina cycles. this is what NOAA has to say about the connection between El Nino and rainfall in the South West:
El Niño results in increased precipitation across California and the southern tier of states…
…The WH has a climate agenda – this is payback for a lot of support (money). Okay, but when the chief scientist at the WH ignores the scientists who actually look at weather patterns, then one is forced to doubt everything the WH says on the topic.
———-
Note: the photo in the link is priceless…
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It has never been important to Obama to be accurate. He just says whatever he thinks the crowd will like. Most of the time it’s lies, anyway, so him saying climate change causes weather practically everywhere will be heard as “Climate change has nothing to do with weather” by all but the dimmest amoung us. Lately, it’s handy for Obama to highlight things–people immediately know it’s nonsense and disregard it, except the MSM. Yes, john, it seems many people do doubt anything the WH says. As far as logic and rational thought goes, Obama will say the sky is pink even if it’s blue and insist he’s right. He will tell you today that climate change is caused by people and tomorrow he’ll say people had nothing to do with it. Whatever pops into his head. He has mastered double-speak at a whole new level.
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You give him too much credit, Sheri. He’s just reading the teleprompter. He has no knowledge or understanding of what he is reading.
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Personally, me thinks these ‘earth strikes’ will continue and based on the surprise entrance of Chelybinsk’s meteor, setting up a real good and solid observing system would act only as a pyschological insurance. Someday a big one will come. That will be interesting times. But I don’t believe a global Extinction Event is coming.
But I think a good observing system would be great fun to see in use. Plus I would rather have them ‘saving the world from
mass extinction’ with a space system than what the ‘warmist’ are doing down here.
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But with proliferation of any weaponisable platform in space it would only be a matter of time until it was turned to more nefarious use. The UN is no insurance against powerful nations either going it alone or ganging up to assert their interests against smaller independent nation.
If Australia cares about its independence it needs to join the Americans, the Russians and the Chinese in the Space Race.
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“The UN is no insurance against ———– assert their interests against smaller independent nation.”
In fact, you could almost bet the UN would be behind it.
We need the US, Russia, China as a foil against UN totalitarianism.
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Griss,the UN has shown itself to be a toothless tiger many times,the same as civil liberties groups who will only voice their opinions in safe countries where they wont be [disappeared]
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In front on confrontation yes, toothless.
But in sly, underhanded manoeuvring and manipulation, they do a pretty good job.
00
I wonder which would do the worse damage..
a 50m diameter rock landing in the centre of Australia,
or a 50m diameter rock landing in the middle of the Pacific (which is much more likely)
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My money would be on the Greens as way in front on the odds and the UN in that order followed by the space rocks.
After all the greens have some 40 to 50 million avoidable deaths from malaria due entirely to their all out campaign to eliminate DDT from the malaria control chemicals .
Plus another 10 million avoidable deaths per year of mostly little Asian kids due to the greens fighting at every level, the release of the life saving Vitamin A promoting Golden Rice for the last 13 years because it was a GMO.
The UN runs second and the space rocks have yet to get more than a handful of human deaths to their credit despite being around for all of 4.5 billion years compared to the greens 50 years or less.
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Thanks to a few brave souls like our hostess, the real purpose of fudging global climate data has now been explosively exposed, like the rock that created the meteor hole in Arizona :
http://theinternetpost.net/2014/02/15/tsar-bomba-king-of-the-bombs/
[snip we are not getting into that – sub] before Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon conceded to the USSR and China in 1971 and ended the Apollo Space Program.
The rest is history.
With deep regrets,
– Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
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The Canyon Diablo iron meteorite produced this creator.
In 1991 Qi-Lu reported that isotopes of molybdenum retained nucleogenetic isotopic anomalies from the reactions that made the molybdenum that is now in Canyon Diablo and several other massive iron meteorites [Qi-Lu, Doctoral Dissertation, The University of Tokyo, 1991].
This finding, later confirmed by others [Nature 415 (2002) 881], shows that iron meteorites formed directly in the iron-rich region of a local supernova, not by geochemical differentiation of iron out of an interstellar cloud of elements.
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Here is a link to the 2002 paper from Harvard and Kobe Universities confirming that molybdenum isotopes in massive iron meteorites like Canyon Diablo were never homogenized.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v415/n6874/abs/415881a.html
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Here is the history of the Canyon Diablo meteorite:
1. About five billion years ago a blob of iron was ejected from near the pulsar core of the Sun in the event that birthed the solar system.
2. These blobs of iron (mostly Fe, Ni, S) were not ejected far from the Sun and most accumulated into iron cores of the inner planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.
3. A few blobs of iron, like this one, escaped capture until after Earth had grown to its present size, mostly by capturing stone meteors that formed further from the Sun and were later deposited on iron cores of inner planets as the stone meteors fell toward the Sun in a path that crossed Earth’s orbit.
4. Canyon Diablo and other iron meteorites remained close to the pulsar and received a much higher dose of cosmic radiation from the pulsar than did the stone meteorites that formed further from the Sun.
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The Chelyabinsk meteor is estimated to have weighed 12-13,000 tonnes. The Barringer Crater meteor, is estimated to have been 270,000 tonnes. Chelyabinsk was unobserved prior to its fiery death, about 20 metres in diameter, Barringer 45metres. The difference in density being down to Barringer being a Nickel-Iron meteor, Chelyabinsk a stoney meteor.
We knew about the Duende asteroid, that is about 30metres in diameter, so Chelyabinsk was probably discoverable, if it hadn’t been coming in from the direction of the sun.
If a Barringer-sized body hit a major town or city, it’s cause considerable death & destruction, a Chelyabinsk-sized body would break up in the atmosphere.
Tunguska body, 60-190m in diameter also broke up in the atmosphere,but with sufficient energy to cause major destruction on the ground, it’s certainly destroy a major city, if such an event occured above one. It was probably similar in composition to the Chelyabinsk meteor.
A Tunguska-sized body is easily discoverable these days, arguably, given enough time, a body on a collision course with the Earth, could be deflected/disrupted, it’s probably highly unlikely that a KT Extinction Body would be undetected, we’re looking at a 10Km diameter asteroid here.
So, something big enough to wreck a city might be undetectable, if detected in time, would we be warned? Yes, I reckon we would. No Government would survive once a body, that was known, struck & destroyed a centre of population. The chances of such as impact are remote.
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Just came across this and thought it might be of interest.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/02/12/mann_vs_steyn_the_trial_of_the_century__121528.html
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The rule of law can be made to work in mysterious ways.Nice,well written story,though.
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For those who are interested in climate matters [ Ahem!!! ] and who drives what or what drives who I would suggest a read of the Bishop Hill post ;
Mini paradox, major paradox
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From Tallblokes blog.
oldbrew says:
February 14, 2014 at 6:24 pm
Just when you thought bad weather was the problem…
‘Potentially hazardous asteroid 2000 EM26 zipping by Earth on close approach on February 17′
http://phys.org/news/2014-02-potentially-hazardous-asteroid-em26-earth.html
Btw it’s in a near 4:3 orbit ratio with Earth (80:59 to be exact).
Data from:
http://newton.dm.unipi.it/neodys/index.php?pc=1.1.0&n=2000EM26
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Bah! 8.8 lunar distances? puh-lease! At that distance NASA doesn’t even bother to include it on their NEO list.
On the 16 Sep this year 2009 RR passes within 1 lunar distance of Earth. Only a little 26m pebble of Chelyabinsk proportions, no big deal.
If that’s not enough to get your pulse racing, how about a 900m sized “Earth Killer” passing within 5 Earth radii of our atmosphere – which is inside geostationary satellite orbit. That’s asteroid 2010 AU118 on 20 October 2033, but that’s so far in the future that a hit is only a 1 in a billion chance. Usually the chances go down with more information.
Presumably those fine folk at NASA know what they’re doing because the observations made during the Jan 2013 close approach of Apophis allowed NASA to completely acquit Apophis as a threat for 2029.
Glimpse the foreseeable future of close approaches.
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And if it should bump into something on the way then all those nice observations will mean diddly-squat!
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Rocks from space? Wrath of Gods.
Given there is far more empirical evidence for an extraterrestrial object impacting earth, than there is of a trace gas causing runaway climate.
We being the enlighten species, will huddle at the bottom of this gravity well, ignoring the asteroid and obsessing over the magic gas.
It is what we do.
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More on the Hansen lunacy since 1988. All his idiotic predictions have fallen in a heap as the graph shows and yet Labor and the Greens expect us to waste billions $ a year more on this lie and fraud?
http://notrickszone.com/2014/02/15/renowned-award-winning-climate-scientists-earlier-predictions-today-looking-more-like-rants-from-lunacy-land/
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Neville, I think that is a bit simplistic to blame Labor and the Greens, they are just many of the strawmen in this play. You might consider that many of the Governments around the world selling tickets to this show are Conservatives. The IMF are rattling the tin at Australia asking for ‘donations’ right now, it would be a long stretch to describe them as a bunch of Lefties, when the head is a hard core French Conservative. Don’t forget too that much of this ‘scheme’ started back in Howard’s day and enjoyed bi-partisan support. Don’t forget that the current Government has also promised to spend a few billion of our money to supposedly deal with this bogeyman. The current Government could take any number of measures to effectively rid the ‘carbon tax’ impost right now, it is not even a matter of waiting the few months – just quarantine the tax collected right now, heck do it way retrospectively too if they want and give it all back in a few months time if they are serious about it. As long as we are taken in by the strawmen presented to us we are just extras in this drama-noir.
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Joe I can agree with much of what you’ve said, but I still will vote for the Libs and Nats at any election state or fed.( before Labor and Greens)
Howard now calls himself an AGW agnostic and I believe more conservatives are agnostics on AGW than the loonies in the Labor and Green parties.
Although a few Labor people are agnostics as well.
But the bottom line is that AGW mitigation is a complete con and fraud and anyone who doubts this is either a liar or a fraudster. And they don’t understand simple kindy maths.
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I am sure that you do and so would most of the commentators on this blog and while that is certainly not a problem, it is not the point I am getting at. While there is a lot of good science discussed here it loses some significance when people (yes, including Jo) make attempts to analyze the politics and abandon all scientific principals in their analysis of cause and effect just to have a dig at their most hated politicians. This does nothing to try and understand how this scientific catastrophe has come about. What, have half the world’s scientists been somehow ‘influenced’ into making bad calls because of the influence of political ideologues? Are scientists just looking to shift the blame? Or is is more likely that ignorant and unscientific politicians have just latched onto whatever story suits their agenda or ideology and then gone on to influence the masses, a job they are more effective at than the scientists by a long shot. I do appreciate that it is the pollies that are the ones that actually cause the harm with their policies, but they are not the root cause – bad scientists have given them the heads-up. I think it would be totally fair to say that John Howard’s beliefs probably have nothing to do with his scientific understanding. The same goes for all our pollies whether they are science ministers or environment ministers. Keep it scientific and real. We need to know why science went so wrong.
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UK january 2014 rainfall was not unusual at all. Ditto UK + Wales rainfall.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/january-2014-rainfall-not-unusual/
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On the DW news website I came across a laughable story titled US and China agree to cooperate more closely to fight global warming. It is, of course, full of the usual non-binding, non-specific, ‘agree to agree to discuss’ type platitudes, such as:
Wow, that’ll sock it to that nasty ol’ carbon dioxide ‘pollution’.
And:
Being a conservative is such a humiliating thing. First you have to endure being laughed at by the Left for the fact that they set the agenda and control the institutions of this country no matter which party is in government. During the Howard era we had 11 years of ‘masterly inactivity’, to borrow one of Sir Humphrey’s terms, with not a single thing being done to undo the Left’s social policy agenda. Now, after the Abbott government wimped out on abolishing the AHRC and, it seems, 18C, and on gutting the ABC and SBS, the Left are again just laughing their heads off at us, while we are reduced to impotently venting our anger and frustration on blogs such as this.
The second reason it is embarrassing to be a conservative is to do with matters such as the China/US talks mentioned above. The Chinese are going all out to develop their country as fast as possible and accumulate as much wealth as possible in as short a time as possible. I’ve no problem at all with that – we all do it. And we know that China is going all out to reduce the particulate emissions that are choking its cities and posing a huge public health risk. As an aside, have you noted how the unprincipled Left try to deceive people into believing that China’s program to reduced particulate emissions by replacing old coal fired power stations with newer ones is actually evidence that China has a carbon dioxide emissions reduction program – but, of course, it is highly likely that many leftists are stupid enough to believe that soot is carbon dioxide.
Returning to my original point, China has no intention of participating in any scheme to reduce carbon dioxide emissions if it will cost money and impact on economic growth. My problem with this is that the Chinese think that we all are stupid enough to believe in the need for carbon dioxide emissions reductions. They think that, since we believe it is necessary, if they pretend to go along with it they will be giving themselves a huge economic advantage by not having their industries crippled with carbon taxes and emissions targets, as ours are. My message to the Chinese is: no, we are not all stupid. Yes, we have a few stupid people who simplistically think we can control the weather and that there is a linear relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature, and we have more – many, many more – who are simply using the whole exercise to make money through grants and by selling books and so on. The rest of know how absurd the whole thing is, so please don’t think that all of us are stupid. We already have the Left laughing at us; we don’t need you, China, laughing at us, too.
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Barry,China says that they are working with the U S on climate change.Obama keeps talking up carbon tax while China makes 70% of cars for G.M.with more to come.
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Sorry,forgot link.
00
try again
00
December 22 2013:
Global Warming Scientist Warns Florida Will Be Under Water
~ ~ ~
February 14, 2014:
Meanwhile, the Florida Department of Transportation leapt into action after the storm, building its first-ever stockpile of salt—42 tons.
New York City has used 379,000 tons this year.
Florida is shopping for more, but that leads to a problem: where to put it?
“Do we have to construct a new facility?
Can we figure out somewhere we already have?
What conditions does salt need to store?” says Ian Satter, a spokesman for the state’s transportation department.
“We’re trying to figure that out.
Looking to the future, the state is shopping for salt spreaders and plows and is planning to send workers north to learn how to respond to winter storms.”
. . .
A snorkel facility would be good foresight according to predictions from ‘settled climate scientists’.
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Big surprise, the majority of German MPs have a vested interest in Green energy. Because of their greed they’ve helped to wreck the country’s electricity grid.
Of course because of their lunacy Germany is again building new brown coal power stns.
http://www.thegwpf.org/newspaper-reveals-german-mps-vested-interests-renewable-energy/
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Yes I will know because I follow @AsteroidMisses on Twitter.
(presuming they will include ‘hits’ as well)
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Could we do anything about it even if we knew? I think not.
We’re doomed.
I’ve always said so.
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Search for Project Orion (the Freeman Dyson and friends one). The theory work is all done and we have the technology.
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But will Bruce Willis take the job?
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Is it true that a large part of the flooding problems in the UK stem from failure to dredge canals and rivers over the past couple of decades?
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This below from the Mail on Line applies to the Thames Valley but is equally applicable to the rivers and streams and ditches of the very badly flooded Somerset Levels which was basically a swamp until Dutch engineers drained it a couple of hundred years ago.
It is completely in line with the usual and now to be expected disastrous debacles that follow and are a direct consequence of the mindless, totally incompetent green anti humanity eco terrorists getting their hands on the levers of power of any sort.
So why wasn’t Thames dredged? In case a rare mollusc was disturbed – despite the region being described as one of the most ‘undefended flood plains in England’
The endangered mollusc halted calls to dredge strife-hit stretch of water
Environment Agency put welfare of ‘aquatic species’ before residents
EA claims the mussels were not the only reason it wasn’t dredged
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Thank you ROM
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DT if you get to see this a bit more on the causes of the severe flooding of the Somerset Levels
From;The Spectator via the GWPF site.
Revealed: how green ideology turned a deluge into a flood
Somerset saw the floods coming. The Environment Agency should have, too.
[ quoted ]
Because I live in Somerset, I first became aware that something very disturbing was going on back around the new year.
As it became clear that the flood waters on the Somerset Levels were beginning to rise dangerously high for the third year running, I set out to find technical experts who could explain just what had gone wrong.
I discovered what I was looking for in the members of a small task force set up by the Royal Bath and West agricultural society, which from the mid-18th century had organised the effective draining of the Levels, after they were first reclaimed from a marshy wilderness by Dutch engineers in the reign of Charles I.
These farmers, with long practical experience of working with the local drainage boards, along with an eminent engineer who chairs the Wessex flood defence committee, were in no doubt as to why in recent years the Levels have become subject to abnormally prolonged and destructive flooding.
The problem began, they said, in 1996 when the new Environment Agency took overall responsibility for managing Britain’s rivers.
These men had been alarmed to see a sharp decline in regular dredging. The rivers have always been crucial to keeping the Levels drained, because they provide the only way to allow flood waters to escape to the sea.
Equally worrying was how scores of pumping stations which carry water to the rivers were being neglected. And although the drainage boards were still allowed to operate, their work was now being seriously hampered by a thicket of new EU waste regulations, zealously enforced by the EA.
These made it almost impossible to dispose sensibly of any silt removed from the maze of drainage ditches which are such a prominent feature of the Levels.
But all this got markedly worse after 2002 when the Baroness Young of Old Scone, a Labour peeress, became the agency’s new chief executive. Dredging virtually ceased altogether. The rivers began dangerously to silt up.
The Baroness, who had previously run the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Natural England, talked obsessively about the need to promote the interests of wildlife. She was famously heard to say that she wanted to see ‘a limpet mine put on every pumping station’.
The experts I was talking to had no doubt that this apparent wish to put the cause of nature over that of keeping the Levels properly drained was eventually going to create precisely the kind of disaster we are seeing today. Their message as to what needs to be done couldn’t have been clearer.
[ much more and it gets worse ]
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Nothing is more certain. Giant space rocks are definitively the most significant risk we/the planet face. Coincidently I was reviewing this article today: http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1035&context=scipapers
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Interesting!
Somewhere quite some time ago I also came across the info on the Australian east coast mega tsunamis but they were attributed to possible gigantic mud or rock slides of some hundreds of square kilometres in extent on the western flanks of NZ’s Alpine chain or on the sub surface waters off the west coast of NZ.
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The greenhouse radiative forcing conjecture starts with an assumption that there would be isothermal conditions in a troposphere that was free of radiating (so-called “greenhouse”) gases, including water vapour, or free of direct solar radiation.
There are similar conditions in the Uranus troposphere where there is very little methane except in a layer in the uppermost regions. Virtually all the very weak solar radiation reaching the planet (nearly 30 times the distance from the Sun that Earth is) is absorbed and re-emitted back to space by this methane layer where the temperature is a very cold 60K or so, that being the radiating temperature of the planet. There is no internal energy generation that can be convincingly detected, yet the core is at about 5,000K and the base of the troposphere (where there is no surface being heated by any direct Solar radiation) is hotter than Earth’s surface.
The existence of isothermal conditions would be in violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics which says that a state of maximum entropy will evolve spontaneously. Such as state is isentropic, and so the sum of molecular kinetic energy and gravitational potential energy for each molecular has a propensity to be equal at all altitudes. This means that there is a temperature gradient, because temperature depends upon the mean kinetic energy, not the gravitational potential energy.
If there were isothermal conditions (an impossibility) then what is the sensitivity for each 1% of water vapour in the atmosphere above any region? Perhaps you would say something like at least 10 degrees of warming. Hence you would say in a dry desert (with say 0.5% water vapour the warming would be 5 degrees, but in a rain forest with 4.5% water vapour it might be 45 degrees, making the rainforest 40 degrees hotter than the dry desert.
Need I say more about this ludicrous travesty of physics?
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Yes,
I Struggle with how this is ignore so much, we live in a gravity well, the total energy at any height is given by KE + PE which without energy flows would give rise to a decline in KE (temperature) by height of 9.8C per km (Theoretically). The movement of thermal energy through the atmosphere actually reduces the rate of temperature decline through the lower atmosphere that the gravity well creates, to arrive at the lapse rate we see in practice of 5 1/2 or so degrees per km. The Atmosphere serves to cool the planet below the theoretical surface temperature for our situation ( by 4 or so Degrees per Km). Now if we take the temperature inversion in the stratosphere as the limit the surface temperature could not get more than about 40 degrees hotter no matter what we did to its composition. The IPCC on the other hand says if we doubled CO2 13 times we would have more than 60-120 degrees of warming. Nope, it can’t happen. Nothing bar increasing atmospheric density is going to increase the lapse rate beyond 9.8C per km, Nor could we get ANYWHERE NEAR IT without suppressing almost all energy flows on earth. There is a hard limit to CO2 warming, see my other treatments for an analysis of this but the hard limit is at about 5.5 degrees even if the atmosphere was all CO2.
So What exactly is CO2’s effect on the lapse rate, well because CO2 radiates, and there is presumably 30% more of it in the upper atmosphere, one must conclude that there is more cooling (out radiating) going on there, which implies more energy flow, which implies a lower lapse rate and less retained warming from the gravity well.
I have trouble reconciling energy with the warmist mantra, that somehow views GHGs as a warming influence rather than a cooling one.
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Yes Bobl
It’s good to see someone else thinks around here.
The height of a planet’s atmosphere allows the thermal profile to rise to the supported surface temperature. Water vapour reduces the slope, so the whole thermal plot rotates downwards at the surface end. An empirical study soon to be published in my book proves water vapour cools (not warms) and so does carbon dioxide, but by less than 0.1 degree.
No one can explain the thermal gradient on the planet Uranus if they think isothermal states are the norm before radiating gases supposedly raise the surface end of the temperature plot. They do the opposite.
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Seeing this is a Weekend unthreaded I have just come across the following on the ABC’s web site and I am as mad as hell about it.
It is nothing more than just another scam , one of an increasing number that is an utter rip off of the ordinary man in the street who is forced to pay the lavish salaries and fund the first class airfares and accommodation to exotic localities that is being undertaken by the miserable scamming rip off artists that try to pass as scientists in of our national science organisations.
What in the hell are so called researchers from hot Central Queensland doing studying the effects of the [ non ] changing climate on Snow Leopards in Kazakhstan and no doubt entirely at our’s, the tax payer’s expense ?
A decent politician would just cut all funding to such outright rip off stupidity as of now, including the whole university department responsible for granting the funds for this tax payer rip off caper.
If those so called scientists want to visit Kazakhstan then no problems . They entirely pay for it themselves just like everybody else who doesn’t call himself a scientist has to do.
These arrogant FW’s are simply immune to the thought that they are responsible to the people who fund them and they have become so arrogant that they assume that their demands for more money to go where they want to go and live in a style that others might only wish for is their god given right never to be challenged by the low level peons outside of the university academic elite who have to pay for all of this
In the end all they are doing is ensuring that sometime in the not so distant future, the great scientific tax payer rip off scam will come to a drastic finale as the tax payers become sick of being ripped off by extremely bad so called science and the increasingly open and blatant rip offs and scams that pass for so much science these days.
For most of those scammers floor sweeping might become the only possible employment future.
Central Queensland University to investigate effects of climate change on Kazakhstan’s snow leopard population
[quoted]
A Queensland university is joining forces with researchers in Kazakhstan to investigate the effects of climate change on snow leopard populations.
Snow leopards are skilled high-altitude climbers and are used to taking on the elements, but researchers say temperature changes pose a serious threat to their survival.
Central Queensland University (CQU) Professor Owen Nevin says the threatened animals are usually the first to feel the effects of any temperature changes.
“Snow leopards are a globally endangered species. They’re a mountain-specialist animal and [their] habitats are very vulnerable to climate change because as temperatures rise those habitats move up in elevation,” he said.
Up to 60 hidden cameras will be set up high across a mountain range in southern Kazakhstan in July, as part of efforts to better understand the elusive and endangered animal.
Professor Nevin has used the technology to study bears throughout British Columbia in Canada for nearly 20 years.
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You have to look at the researchers history, the person involved is teaming up with his old mates from his last appointment to continue research he had before. This was likely part of his employment contract.
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He can do what he likes bobl, so long as he pays for it, not us.
And thats no more than is expected from others outside of the science elite who want to follow up some project they are personally interested in.
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I want to research the endangered green sea turtle of the Maldives. With
global warmingclimate change and rising sea levels, there will be narrower beaches and also more competition with middle aged beach goers. The latter are expected to increase as global temperaturesincreasechange and they will become more obese due to the lifestyle afforded by cheap power from fossil fuel. This will severely reduce the area available for nesting.As a middle-aged man with ample proportions, I will be placing my self on the beach and studying the behaviour of this endangered species as it meanders past grumpily.
Does anyone want to join me? I believe the Akademik Shokalskiy is available.
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“As a middle-aged man with ample proportions, I will be placing my self on the beach and studying the behaviour of this endangered species as it meanders past grumpily.”
I am also a middle-aged man of ample proportions, and according to my nearest and dearest, meander grumpily everywhere. I offer myself as a subject to be studied. I assume that you will need at least 5 years to carry out the study.
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Have you made any provisions in your submission for dark glasses to protect the eyes when those young European lady tourists walk by on the beach?
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I see a further grant for a Lew and Cook-type paper to prove that ” Deniers” are all middle-aged men of ample proportions of a libidos nature.
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I don’t want to rain on your plans fellers,but krudd & juliar are not there anymore.You should have organised this last year,but if you get lucky give me a call,I’ve got time for bird watching.
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Greg Hunt’s a believer. We still have a slim chance.
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The Akademik S. I believe it needs disinfection…
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I wish to apply for a grant to research those endangered molluscs that have migrated from the Thames to Hawaii, due to CAGW, Climate Change and Climate Disruption – induced flooding of their habitat.
A 12 month stint on Maui should just about do it, plus a young graduate of the female persuasion to assist. I look forward to your reply and grant amount with interest.
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Another scientist allied with the MET office disagrees with Slingo about the cause of the latest storms and flooding in he UK. Good to see that they’re not all fools at the MET.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/15/flood-fight-at-the-met-office/#more-103322
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Rocks are always on their way, it’s more a question of when rather than if.
The Arizona crater was used in the movie Starman, a good fun movie. The movie towards the end had some good shots of the crater, but there’s not much available on youtube.
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a tale about loving or hating nature:
google actually has this on their main news page. those AlGore-ithms get nastier by the minute:
WT Gator:
God Pisses on Tony Abbott
Seriously. No rain for two years. Abbott appears and the heavens open. Couldn’t be anything else, right? 😀
FROM COMMENTS:
Hope the fucker gets bogged and stuck…
Probably well timed. Been hanging off till BOM gave him the all clear, so to speak…
yaaaaaaah for the farmers, but this is the last thing we need thou is his bloody ego filled….:( he gona think he is so good he brought rain…yes he is that retared…hahaha…
https://plus.google.com/+WTGator/posts/DzG2TDUBX28#+WTGator/posts/DzG2TDUBX28
A POSITIVE STORY AT THE AUSTRALIAN, WITH LOTS OF DETAIL IN THE STORY:
16 Feb: Australian: ‘Rainmaker’ PM pledges fair and responsible drought package
by: Sue Neales in Bourke
TONY Abbott arrived in the NSW outback town of Bourke today to talk drought — but instead brought more rain with him than the district has seen for two years.
As a thunderstorm pelted down on the shearing shed of 40,000-hectare Jandra station, the Prime Minister promised local farmers his government wanted to do more help them cope with the current drought.
“This is a great Australian sound, rain on a tin roof, but I am very conscious this has been a severe drought; it’s a natural disaster and a lot of people are doing it tough,” said Mr Abbott…
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/rainmaker-pm-pledges-fair-and-responsible-drought-package/story-fn59niix-1226828509682
Jessica sees the rain, the wind and the summer in a negative light & looks to ABC to explain the purpose of the PM’s visit:
16 Feb: WhitsundayTimes: Jessica Grewal: Abbott’s drought tour hampered by heavy rain
Just moments after their arrival, the heavens opened above the town which has been suffering through a seemingly endless summer.
After meeting with farmers at properties around the region, the pair boarded a plane to Longreach where the rare, isolated storm was producing heavy winds and rain…
The ABC reported the package would address the economic and social needs of people living in drought affected rural and regional Australia…
http://www.whitsundaytimes.com.au/news/Abbotts-drought-tour-hampered-by-heavy-rain/2171524/
this negative headline in google results:
PM drought tour washed out in Qld
Brisbane Times – 6 hours ago
has been changed to this blander version when u click on it:
16 Feb: Fairfax Brisbane Times: Paul Osborne: Abbott tours drought areas
http://news.brisbanetimes.com.au/breaking-news-national/abbott-tours-drought-areas-20140216-32tbi.html
the following ABC piece is negatively called “Rain falls on PM’s drought tour” on ABC’s homepage but, when u click on it, it ended up as:
16 Feb: ABC: Drought-hit farmers get chance to show Tony Abbott parched communities first hand
By Anna Henderson, Peter Lewis and staff
But part of the tour was cancelled because of rain – with heavy falls in Bourke, and some rain and strong winds in Longreach…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-02-16/tony-abbott-touring-drought-affected-nsw-qld/5262776
ABC finds no pleasure in the rain or winds.
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Damn the ABC and all the lefties – cop this!
Neilson Poll: Primary Votes: L/NP 44 (+3) ALP 33 (-4) GRN 12 (+1)
2 Party Preferred: L/NP 52 (+4) ALP 48 (-4)
(Galaxy poll) SA State – 2 Party Preferred: ALP 45 (-1) LIB 55 (+1)
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16 Feb: Guardian: Toby Helm/Jamie Doward: Climate change is an issue of national security,
warns Ed Miliband
Labour leader says UK is ‘sleepwalking to a crisis over climate’ as storms bring more major disruption and flooding
“The science is clear. The public know there is a problem. But, because of political division in Westminster, we are sleepwalking into a national security crisis on climate change. The terrible events of the last few weeks should serve as a wake-up call for us all.”
With the Tory party divided over whether extreme weather can be linked to climate change, a leading independent adviser to the government has also joined the fightback against the sceptics. Lord Krebs, a member of the Climate Change Committee, described those who question the science as “the flat earthers of contemporary society who show a flagrant disregard for the future needs of our children and grandchildren”…
An Opinium/Observer poll shows more than half of voters (51%) believe the recent floods are a sign of climate change and global warming while 24% do not and 20% are neutral. Among young people aged 18-34, 60% blame climate change, while 44% of those aged over 55 take the same view…
Miliband said he was ready to work with politicians of all parties, including “green” Tories such as Zac Goldsmith, to rebuild the consensus around climate change…
He said that “dither and denial” would be disastrous for the country.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/feb/15/ed-miliband-stark-warning-climate-change
Lord Krebs, Jesus College, Oxford University
http://www.jesus.ox.ac.uk/fellows-and-staff/fellows/lord-krebs
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What would Lefty Milliband know about national security ?
That’s like his side kick Balls lecturing us on the Economy.
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This comment is based on many comments from this and other threads:
I am terrified for the future of science. I cannot count how many people use YouTube and Wikipedia as difinitive sources of scientific learning. We learn about climate change, the stock market, physics, chemistry, etc from YouTube and Wikipedia. We are toast. People can’t even take the time to find a good online course from a reputable university. They watch videos and consult the modern scroll of knowledge to which anyone can make additions and corrections. I foresee a return to the Dark Ages (the really dark ages, not the pleasant ones Wiki describes). Intelligence really is not additive.
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Now come on Sheri, you’re not trying to tell me that the original Dark Ages, full of fear superstition & brimstone were somehow preferable.
That making up your own truth isn’t preferable to being at the mercy of plagues , of Barons and of Pontiffs ?
Ideleness, indifference & sloth are now the great enemies. Should it take an existential event to resharpen the senses we were born with ?
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“Should it take and existential event”? I don’t know if it should, but it seems likely it will. I’ll have to give some thought to the “making up your own truth” versus “being at the mercy of plagues, etc” question. I’m not sure…..
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Is the problem of misinformation much different than it ever was.
Yes there’s a lot more information available at your finger tips, a lot more to choose from than when not that long ago one might have wondered whether to believe what bloke-down-pub said.
You still qualify information against your knowledge & reputation of the source. Yes, still relying on the age old appeal to authority & while you may well trust the intent of the source you may still question their judgement .
Conmen & charlatans still abound as they always have.
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If you’re ever in Arizona, be sure to visit the meteor crater. I’ve been there twice and its really neat.
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In Indonesia, Kerry blasts climate change deniers
http://www.onlinesentinel.com/news/In_Indonesia__Kerry_blasts_climate_change_deniers_.html
JAKARTA, Indonesia — Climate change may be the world’s “most fearsome” weapon of mass destruction and urgent global action is needed to combat it, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday, comparing those who deny its existence or question its causes to people who insist the Earth is flat.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, right, waves to the press after meeting with Secretary-General of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Le Luong Minh , left, at the ASEAN headquarters in Jakarta, Indonesia on Sunday.
In a speech to Indonesian students, civic leaders and government officials in Jakarta, Kerry laid into climate change skeptics, accusing them of using shoddy science and scientists to delay measures needed to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases at the risk of imperiling the planet. He also went after those who dispute who is responsible for such emissions, arguing that everyone and every country must take responsibility and act immediately.
“We simply don’t have time to let a few loud interest groups hijack the climate conversation,” he said, referring to what he called “big companies” that “don’t want to change and spend a lot of money” to act to reduce the risks. He later singled out big oil and coal concerns as the primary offenders.
“We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists and science and extreme ideologues to compete with scientific facts,” Kerry told the audience gathered at a U.S. Embassy-run American Center in a Jakarta shopping mall. “Nor should we allow any room for those who think that the costs associated with doing the right thing outweigh the benefits.”
“The science is unequivocal, and those who refuse to believe it are simply burying their heads in the sand,” Kerry said. “We don’t have time for a meeting anywhere of the Flat Earth Society,”
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This is priceless:
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2014-02-16/stand-clear-giant-moron
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Here’s our oh so professional secretary of state.
John Kerry mocks those who deny climate change
Another loser appointed by King Obama.
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I see the link didn’t get set up right. Nuts! The item has disappeared and a quick search couldn’t find it again.
I had to do it in a hurry and that’s always a bad idea. My apology for the screw-up.
00
As I noted on another thread, Kerry apparently does not remember Obama made the Flat Earth comment and found out the president of the Flat Earth society believes in climate change. So does that make the Flat Earth society president “scientific”?
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Certainly! About as scientific as, say, John Brookes or the president himself. That seems to be the standard today. 😉
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No one has ever seen a meteorite hit the earth at right angles as implied by the shape of the crater. Every meteorite we have seen has followed a glancing trajectory through the atmosphere. Even comet Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter at a glancing angle.
Local aboriginals near Halls Creek township reckon that the nearby Wolfe Creek crater was the place where the rainbow serpent left the ground after traveling underground to form the Sturt and Wolfe Creeks nearby.
The alternative explanation for the Arizona and Wolfe Creek craters is that they are electrical discharge craters, not meteoritic impact craters.
Controversial to be sure but the science behind the meteorite impact model is the same as the science behind CO2 warming.
00
You must have a
wonderfulfantastic explanation for how electrical discharges can create shocked quartz in craters.Oh? So its existence is well supported by the available evidence?
00
Louis,
Not that I can comment on your alternate theory one way or another but I started to wonder about the vertical or near vertical angle of impact myself after the comments I made previously. But it looks to me that something coming in from just the right direction could hit head on and leave a crater like we see in Arizona.
I have no idea about the probability of such a thing but if it came, not across our orbit at an angle but just into it, almost parallel with it from the right direction and at the wrong time — bang!
Any comment? Where does this idea fall down? Would rotation of the Earth make this impossible?
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1/180?
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Actually the crater is just a footprint made by Paul Bunyan‘s big blue ox when it stumbled while they were digging out the Grand Canyon. That’s why it doesn’t look like an impact crater.
Problem solved. 😉
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I thought I had better add my two cent’s worth.
Having read all of I.Velikovsky’s work in my early 20’s I can now recommend the encyclopedic work of the much maligned “Nancy Lieder”[Zeta Talk] for even further thrills and spills.
I might also point out the last big meteor came from the direction of the sun.
For daily up-dates from the SOHO and LASCO telescopic satellites check the “Earth Changes and The Pole Shift” blog.
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I walked all the way around that crater once. I had a great trip to California, Arizona and Nevada with a mate of mine in September 1993.
00
The scientists at NASA track these and their work ensures we *do* know as much as we can.
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/
Here’s what’s coming close for the rest of Feb:
UPCOMING CLOSE APPROACHES TO EARTH
1 AU = ~150 million kilometers
1 LD = Lunar Distance = ~384,000 kilometers
ObjectName CloseApproach Date CADistance*(AU)CADistance* (LD)EstimatedDiameter** H(mag) RelativeVelocity(km/s)
(2000 EM26) 2014-Feb-18 0.0227 8.8 120 m – 270 m 21.7 12.37
85953 (1999 FK21) 2014-Feb-18 0.1910 74.3 590 m 18.0 24.29
(2014 CE13) 2014-Feb-19 0.0886 34.5 41 m – 92 m 24.0 14.72
(2014 BR57) 2014-Feb-20 0.0112 4.4 44 m – 98 m 23.9 11.01
(2014 BX2) 2014-Feb-20 0.1639 63.8 120 m – 260 m 21.8 18.87
(1999 SK10) 2014-Feb-21 0.1838 71.5 320 m – 710 m 19.6 11.48
(1995 CR) 2014-Feb-21 0.0197 7.7 130 m – 300 m 21.5 29.36
(2014 BB3) 2014-Feb-21 0.1160 45.2 48 m – 110 m 23.7 3.87
(2012 DY43) 2014-Feb-21 0.0403 15.7 67 m – 150 m 23.0 19.41
(2001 EB18) 2014-Feb-22 0.1161 45.2 370 m – 820 m 19.3 26.33
(2006 DS14) 2014-Feb-23 0.1644 64.0 220 m – 490 m 20.4 14.41
(2014 CR) 2014-Feb-24 0.0213 8.3 77 m – 170 m 22.7 12.02
(2014 CN13) 2014-Feb-24 0.1137 44.3 45 m – 100 m 23.9 10.79
(2009 EC1) 2014-Feb-26 0.1246 48.5 73 m – 160 m 22.8 8.07
(2014 CD13) 2014-Feb-28 0.0692 26.9 160 m – 370 m 21.0 25.85
Of course, paranoid conspiracy nutters might prefer to believe that NASA’s NEO project is a just a gravy-train for greedy Ferrari-driving scientists who fake all their research.
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