Note the pic from North Dakota. It was like that in South Dakota too. The road was 5 feet higher than the driveway. ( that is the plowed, sanded road. Normally 6 inches lower ) We had tunnels to the house doors from the driveway. Texas didn't get as much. ( naturally. )
Of course, this is just weather, not climate. ( we are reminded of this truth each time it's cold, and it is forgotten each time it's warm )
Or Geoengineering by HAARP, your pick. I find it unlikely that an administration that won't release the President's school record will admit to Chemtrails.
"How many covers of magazines have you seen with sea skimming Ekranoplans? "
um - those work, and are damn scary with landing an expeditionary force across an ocean with a quickness. skimming over the water speeds in the 300+ knot range ? Under the Radar?!!? It is a good damn thing the Soviet Union Collapsed - they could be at our coast in a matter of stealthy hours. /youtube{V8Nu94khHoo} and for you anti-ship nuts; check the surface to surface missiles (these are what the Chinese copied to get their popular Styx Missile) for your insomnia theater http://youtu.be/xr8N0Z4Cl0U
Critics of WIG's note that a butt load of power is needed, the fuel efficiency isn't as good as expected, and the stability of these things in free flight, out of ground effect is suspect. ( hence the problem with autopilots & stability systems )
In other words, you burn a bunch a fuel in a bunch of engines just getting it off the water, ( an issue with any sea/float plane. But these Russian jobs are huge ) and you can't fly high enough to clear the trees.
Howard Hughes's Spruce Goose only flew one, and barely out of ground effect, yet pictures show it much higher than I've ever seen a Ekranoplan fly.
ON the subject of winter.
Damn it Geedee! Your Chrometrails ( reg trademark Google ) have left 3 feet of snow in my driveway, and I'm expecting to have it cleared by March.
yes, the open source stuff is pretty dull; I assure you the darker stuff and the missile test videos for the Anti Ship version that appeared in the late 80s was much more impressive - Their Achilles heel was range across the Pacific or Atlantic ; they would have to have a mid course refueling - that would make them susceptible to attack, but in littoral tight water Lanes of Channel - like South China Sea - they would have been very affective at disrupting shipping.
The spruce goose needs turbines as it is its totally underpowered. Ground effect hmm it flew not very high but it lifted off the water if it can do that it should fly. higher than ground effect. I have a little time in amphibs air has less drag than a float on the water.When you get wheels off the runway you pick up speed fast even in a short field take off.
Danair may be better able to cover amphib take off performance and drag he flys for a living
There may be videos of the Soviet Ekranoplans flying higher than an unlimited racer, but I've never seen one higher than a wingspan. Usually no higher than wing Chord.
There's a lot of misconception on ground effect.
Pt. 1 is the tip vortices get cut off as you get within 1 wing span ( wing tip to wing tip ) That reduces drag and causes "float" the plane can actually speed up and stop descending. In this case, it's not a "cushion" of air, but a change in the lift/drag ratio.
Pt 2 is the cushion of air under a VERY low wing, less than one wing Chord, ( from front to back on the wing only, nothing to do with the hull/fuselage length ) This is where the Ekranoplans fly. With short wing Spans, they seem to lack the ability to fly higher than the trees that surround the lakes they tend to get built in. Like building a boat in the basement.
For a real world example, I used to fly a glider from a company called Proair. About a 40 foot span, and large rounded wing tips on a swept wing.
When getting closer than 20 ft to the ground on landing or close pass to a terrain feature, the glider would speed up, no matter the pitch angle. This could cause overshoots on small fields. That's the Pt 1 mentioned above.
When in final landing approach, the pitch angle is increased, the nose goes up, acting as a brake and the idea is to stop forward motion just as the wing stalls and loses lift and greatly increases drag. Ideal was a no step, near zero vertical speed landing. BUT. The Proair's large wing tips would run into the PT2 ground effect at about 4-6 feet altitude, and the effect was to push the nose down as the air cushion pushed on the back of the wing not the front. The trick to overcome that was precise timing, an aggressive flare, and holding the flare at a intended higher pitch angle. ( most other gliders of the era didn't have this issue as the wingtips had less relative area and thus less pitching moment )
On the Ekranoplans, it seems like a brute force approach is used, the hull is long to give leverage to the tail to keep the wing from nosing the whole mess over as it flies in pt 2 ground effect cushion.
The Spruce Goose, once airborne on what was supposed to be a taxi test, had no problem getting dozens of feet in the air, but may not have ever flown higher that pt1 ground effect. It had long wings. We'll never know how well it would have flown at 10,000 feet, but the overall design was a flying machine, not a ground skimmer.
The Ekranoplans are one of those economy of scale things that work better the bigger you make them, The Russians have a thing for gigantism in projects and airplanes, so dreamed of mass amphibious transports, and low flying battle cruisers to take on our Aircraft carriers.
The Ekranoplans didn't have success in part, for political reasons, and in part because some aspects of the design just don't work as well as they hoped.
The US Navy had problems with the Martin Seamaster, Since the USAF had a monopoly on strategic bombing, and thus the plane was called a mine layer, while it was actually a strategic bomber. The idea that you could strike targets far from US territory and air bases by refueling the Seamaster from submarines was worked out, and most of the bugs worked out, but the politics dictated the budget went to AF bombers.
Mr. Lewis tells me that the latest observational estimates of the effect of aerosols (such as sulfurous particles from coal smoke)
Coal smoke.
The proposal to disperse sulphur dioxide in an attempt to reflect sunlight was discussed in a September 2008 London Guardian article entitled, Geoengineering: The radical ideas to combat global warming, in which Ken Caldeira, a leading climate scientist based at the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California, promoted the idea of injecting the atmosphere with aerosols.
“One approach is to insert “scatterers” into the stratosphere,” states the article. “Caldeira cites an idea to deploy jumbo jets into the upper atmosphere and deposit clouds of tiny particles there, such as sulphur dioxide. Dispersing around 1m tonnes of sulphur dioxide per year across 10m square kilometres of the atmosphere would be enough to reflect away sufficient amounts of sunlight.”
Experiments similar to Caldeira’s proposal are already being carried out by U.S. government -backed scientists, such as those at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S.C, who in 2009 began conducting studies which involved shooting huge amounts of particulate matter, in this case “porous-walled glass microspheres,” into the stratosphere.
The project is closely tied to an idea by Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, who “proposed sending aircraft 747s to dump huge quantities of sulfur particles into the far-reaches of the stratosphere to cool down the atmosphere.”
In 2008, scientist Tim Flannery also warned that “mankind might need to pump sulphur into the atmosphere to survive,” adding that, “gas sulphur could be inserted into the earth’s stratosphere to keep out the sun’s rays and slow global warming, a process called global dimming.”
Such programs merely scratch the surface of what is likely to be a gargantuan and overarching black-budget funded project to geoengineer the planet, with little or no care for the unknown environmental consequences this could engender.
Given that sulphur emissions cause ‘global dimming’, is it any wonder that the emergence of the chemtrails phenomenon coincided with an average 22% drop in sunlight reaching the earth’s surface?
What chemtrail phenomenon? Whatcha talkin' 'bout?
Any report that fails to discuss the elephant in the sky is bollocks.
I'd just like to note that I have never called for the Murder of M Mann, or A Gore.
Arrest for fraud? Yes.
But that is a real charge that a court of law could decide. ( In the case Of M Mann, U of PA, he was "cleared" by the same University "leader" that is now in trouble for covering up multiple rapes of children... for the good of the College. )
I'm interested in how the Haida's experiment turns out. This is a technique that has had a lot of math work done on it, and some very small scale experiments. The possibility that we can restore some dwindled fish populations is a real win/ win.
We must be Stewards of the Earth. ( that's the Conservationist in me talking ) That also means hunt more Deer. Got too many. We Kilt the wolves, now it's our job.
Goes a bit past Al the Prophet. Political. Ignore if you like.
My # 1 complaint with Al Gore isn't that he uses more resources for his lifestyle in a week than I do in a year.
It's that he can't discuss the science he pretends to know. His answer is "The Science Is Settled".
Um, no. It's not. It never will be. In the Inconvenient World of theory, experiment and reality, the idea is that there is Truth. If you have an idea, for example, you think the moon is made of green cheese, you then make observations. Calculate the mass of the Moon if it was Green Cheese, see if that is verifiable with orbital mechanics? No? Ok, maybe bounce a laser off the moon, see what a spectroscope says? No? perhaps you think of a few more observations you can make, then you sigh. You write up a paper with the results, "darn it, pretty sure the moon's not green cheese." and you go on to the next idea. When you fail to disprove the idea, you write a paper and hope it goes to full blown accepted theory. Get yourself a Wiki page.
Next Tuesday someone else publishes a paper that disproves you last idea. Darn it. Can you duplicate his work? Darn. Move on to next idea.
We have a fairly vague idea of how the Universe works. Often you'll hear how we are trying to duplicate the conditions from some tiny fraction of a second after the big bang. On TV or in the news paper you never get the caveats. IF the big bang theory as proposed by X and modified by Y, C, And H is correct, and we are right about Q then the energies involved are U......... You have an entire chain of assumptions, and when any of that chain breaks, you start over. BTW the reason those first fractions of a second are so interesting, is the Universe may be a frozen remains of a very energetic start and the really cool building blocks are either gone, frozen out of existence, or so rare we'll never find them. Or.... So we try and make conditions that are so incredible it takes slamming gold ions into each other at a sizable fraction of the speed of light. Then see what the splash is..... In some cases we don't even know how to make the detector.
So when I'm told to change my life, and give up money and freedom so the Planet Can Be Saved, and the graph they wave at me does not have the Medieval Warm period on it?????
What Al and crew are saying really is, "are you going to believe me, or your lying eyes?"
BTW that link above on Mariculture experiments is very interesting to me.
When the hypothesis of CO2 human caused Global Warming first came out, there were 2 reactions, depending on your mindset.
Al Gore, leftists, Greenies, and Authoritarians all went straight toward control of humans. ( that had been the plan for Ice Age Panic back in the '70s ) Impose a authoritarian state to control our production, consumption, movement and breeding. No pesky limits on power, constitutions, elections were needed or desired.
This has proven to be the only consistent part of the Climate Change Con, other than the constant lies.
The OTHER reaction came from technocrats, geeks, scientists, and practical people, who promptly started looking for a way to actually solve the problem.
One answer was "carbon sequestration" or locking CO2 from the air into a relatively harmless state, preferably as a solid like Calcium Carbonate and stick it somewhere where it would be stable and not recycle back into the air.
Some folk quickly saw how to make money on that, and the Carbon Credit schemes started cranking up.
Some of the ideas for hiding the CO2 included squirting it underground.
I can't tell you how happy the idea of injecting liquid CO2 under high pressure into rock formations, old mines, etc. makes me. The idea of dissolving rock, massive leaks of deadly, heavier than air gas, killing people with waves of suffocation and acid eating their lungs and eyes..... Awesome. It's a Dr. Who episode, without the saving humanity part.
I note with interest the greenies made a big deal/scare of accidentally causing a methane clathrate overturn eruption, wiping us all out, as an argument against exploiting ocean floor resources.
So. there are some ideas that seem a bit hazardous to me, and squirting gases into the ground, not to push oil out but to try and hide it, FOR TAX PURPOSES, strikes me as a scary one.
OTOH, spreading a nutrient ( usually an Iron compound ) on the ocean surface to cause a plankton spurt, to capture CO2, looks interesting, and lacks the "wave of deadly acid gas" drawback. I'm sure there are a lot of bugs to work out, and like Windmills, there may be side effects that make the technique undesirable.
Using such a plankton growth spurt to feed fish to promote a better harvest and/or restock fish populations in danger from pollution and/or overfishing, that's just brilliant!
Since solving the problem is not the goal of the Greenies it's natural that they would oppose such research. Feeding people defeats the goal of giving the planet back to Mother Gaia, as well, but that's a nihilistic religious issue not easily addressed by Science.
It's important to realize that without the Green Revolution of new food crops and methods of farming, there is no way the planet can support the number of people on it today. Without hybrid crops and new methods we WOULD have famines, even in the richest countries.
It is also important to know that this increase in available food comes at a price. High energy costs on production, in making the fertilizer, and chemicals used to kill pests. It's expensive to grow crops with modern methods.
It is even more expensive, in different ways to grow crops with old methods. "Organic" farming produces less food per acre, uses nearly the same amount of diesel per acre, for less food, requires more manual labor ( picking worms off corn, pulling thistles, etc. ) and produces far more food contamination problems. Almost all e-coli outbreaks from veggies comes from Organic farming. What did you think you use to fertilize if you're not using Nitrates? Yes, manure is supposed to be baked to kill the live cultures, but THAT takes energy, doesn't always work, ( and is cheaper to do poorly ) and increases costs.
It's also important to realize that if we did go, as a nation, to organic farming methods we simply would not make enough food to feed us, much less the rest of the planet. War, starvation, genocide, mass migrations.....
AAASMC: So the previous thirty years of cooling have never been explained? Broecker: No, not really. A lot of people cite volcanos or sulfate aerosols, but aerosols are really difficult to model, they bang into each other and create larger aerosols and so on, so it is hard to say for sure.
The guys I was reading in this time frame from 1975-1985 came to the conclusion that if there was a real increase in temperature due to CO2 increase, that was the factor keeping us out of the Ice Age coming down the road at us. I'm still inclined to this view.
How has work on using the Northwest Passage been doing? That ice free arctic should be a boon to commerce...
In short, the use of re-usable cloth grocery bags has led to a 26% increase in foodborne illness admissions in area hospitals, and a 46% increase in deaths due to foodborne disease.
97% of people who use these bags don't wash them. They are often stored in the car's trunk. ( a dark, warm place perfect for bacterial growth )
This is obviously an unintended side effect of an attempt to reduce litter and "save sea creatures" that are harmed by plastic bag litter that blows into or is thrown into the sea.
Oh, well, if only one sea lion is saved........
BTW If you use these cloth bags, I suggest 2 things. Use separate bags for meat and vegetables, and wash the bags from time to time with bleach.
Let me be clear. Litterbugs are a000oles.
While I've never punched a person who threw garbage on the street in front of me, ( that would be an over reaction, battery, and a criminal act. ) I have on occasion returned items people must have accidentally lost from their cars. ( I have to assume that the person in Buffalo I returned the lost bag to was overjoyed. I have a bit of a hearing problem, so I assume his repeated reference to my mother was about my fine upbringing. I do apologize that I was careless and the bag of precious collector cigarette butts and dripping fresh beer cans ripped as I passed it into his window. Perhaps I should have asked him to catch before I tossed it in his back seat? )
The two major US temperature databases have released their consolidated results for 2012, and as had been expected, global warming has failed to occur for approximately the fourteenth year running.
"One more year of numbers isn't in itself significant," A NASA quote used to justify cold weather, which, actually is a fair statement.
It was 60+ degrees earlier this week, I doubt I was in warmer than 20 degrees F all day, today. Cold front killed the nice weather, fast.. WE set a record earlier this week... high variation trends indicate cooling trends, according to every climate paleontology study I've seen. Warmer planet, calmer planet, Colder, wilder. I assure you the ice ages temperature variations are massive compared to today. See Vostok Core data. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok_Petit_dat a.svghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core#Vostok
Note that CO2 rise follows temperature increase. The IPCC says that it then acts as an amplifier, which makes sense.... until you go back to the fact that when the oceans get hotter they release CO2... So the CO2 rise is a result of warming, not the cause. The cause is solar.
I admit to only partial understanding of the chemical changes in the upper atmosphere from solar radiation. This science is young. Climate and space weather research is vital for a technological civilization, if we want to keep using electricity.
I suppose that since Ice ages last much longer than nice ( from my view point ) hot ages, it makes sense that the Greenland ice cap just is too thick, and too cold a local climate, to go away in recent geologic time. I've seen snow in north facing ravines in South Dakota, in August. ( I've had snowball fights in 85 deg weather. Short, cursing ones, since the snow is dirty, icy and grainy. Hurts a lot. )
It's interesting that a leaked version of the next report by the IPCC is acknowledging that solar variances have more to do with climate than they would previously admit. It will be telling if the final report edits this out again. This is a scientific theory that has been long ignored despite having good support from both observation of the world and lab experiments. If the warming doesn't pick up soon they will have no choice but to change their tune.
The theory, at least what I'm familiar with, is far less intuitive than you would think. It's been a few years since I've looked at it at all, but it has to do with how our solar wind fluctuations (which seem to have some correlation to sun spots) effect the earths magnetic field and how that effects cosmic rays, and how they influence cloud formation, that then effects our climate. At least I think that's how the chain of events goes. Believe it or not, it's cooler under clouds!