John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 09:00:58 -0700, Mark Fergerson
wrote:

[1] Assuming we don't ever get around to moving planets etc. around for
our convenience.

That turns out to be quite feasible.

True. But it won't be real fast, or real soon. OTOH by the time we do
it we won't be worrying about petroleum combustion byproduct pollution,
but Helium pollution...


Mark L. Fergerson

John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 09:49:28 -0700, Mark Fergerson
wrote:

We simply cannot wield energies on natural scales.

Mr. Larkin thinks that washing his car will cause an ice age.

I think he's being just the least bit sarcastic.

No, I think that, if climate is a chaotic system, the tiniest
disturbance will propagate to complete changes of state.

Seriously? You don't recognize the basic inertia (homeostasis) of the
system?

It's interesting that the "climate change" crowd (formerly known as
the "global warming" crowd) now warn us of a "tipping point" where
added CO2 will trip a positive feedback mechanism and cause either
intense warming, or an ice age, I'm not sure which.

Both, actually, depending on when you cite a given author. Most of
the current "global warming" crowd were warning of "global winter" a
couple decades ago, and AFAICT changed their stripe only when climate
data showed them wrong.


Mark L. Fergerson

"John Larkin" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 14:17:53 -0800, "Richard Henry"
wrote:



The first car I owned I never changed the oil. I just put in a
half-quart
every time I filled the gas tank.



Yeah, I had a British car too.

Actually, it was a 10-year-old VW Beetle.

I bought it for about $600, spent about $30 on repairs, and sold the engine
a couple of years later for $250.

On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 20:07:39 -0800, John Larkin
wrote:

On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 09:49:28 -0700, Mark Fergerson
wrote:


We simply cannot wield energies on natural scales.

Mr. Larkin thinks that washing his car will cause an ice age.

I think he's being just the least bit sarcastic.


No, I think that, if climate is a chaotic system, the tiniest
disturbance will propagate to complete changes of state.

It's interesting that the "climate change" crowd (formerly known as
the "global warming" crowd) now warn us of a "tipping point" where
added CO2 will trip a positive feedback mechanism and cause either
intense warming, or an ice age, I'm not sure which.

John


The name "climate change" came about when they suddenly realized they
didn't know **** ;-)

...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |

It's what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.

John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 14:17:53 -0800, "Richard Henry"
wrote:



The first car I owned I never changed the oil. I just put in a half-quart
every time I filled the gas tank.




Yeah, I had a British car too.

John

Or a SAAB . :-) My 850 GT had an oil tank I filled every couple of
gas tank fillups. :-)
...lew...

"Mark Fergerson" wrote in message
news:9kyLf.494$fL3.244@fed1read01...
Richard Henry wrote:

"Mark Fergerson" wrote in message
news:eIlLf.421$fL3.193@fed1read01...

Ken Smith wrote:

And you think that the amount of CO2 man has added will have no
effect.

"Trivial" effect, no sarcasm intended.

What degree of CO2 increase would you consider to be non-trivial?

Something on the order of what natural sources regularly (and
irregularly) produce. The irregular events I consider more worrisome as
the overall environment has a better chance of coping with relatively
slower changes; we ramp up our CO2 production over decades, the
biosphere adjusts to utilize it. A volcano blows off ten times as much
in one hour and there's no immediate place for it to go. Homeostasis (in
this case meaning staying on the "natural" attractor that determines our
climate) is a lot easier to maintain when the individual elements of the
system have adequate time to react to changes by sequestering excesses
of any resource, and Earth's biosphere has gotten very good at that.

Actually I worry less about rapid volcanic CO2 releases than things
like deep-ocean methane ice blowoffs. A seaquake releases a few cubic
kilometers of that in say an hour upwind of a populated coast and the
population is non-trivially screwed. This is not alarmist fantasy, it's
actually happened in large, deep inland lakes, killing every
air-breather for kilometers around. That was estimated to be from on the
order of a few cubic _meters_ of methane ice.

Are you talkinga about Lake Nyos in Cameroon? That lake burped off carbon
dioxide (CO2, heavier than air) and methane hydrates will burp off methane
(CH4, lighter than air).

I agree that a volcanic burp causes human emisions to pale. But only for a
few days. Meanwhile, the constant human emissions continue. Scientists are
able to sample atmoshperic CO2 levels by various means, such as air bubbles
trapped in galcial ice. The current concentration is thehighest it has been
for the last half-million years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:C...ide_400kyr.png

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 07:27:54 -0700, Jim Thompson
wrote:

On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 20:07:39 -0800, John Larkin
wrote:

On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 09:49:28 -0700, Mark Fergerson
wrote:


We simply cannot wield energies on natural scales.

Mr. Larkin thinks that washing his car will cause an ice age.

I think he's being just the least bit sarcastic.


No, I think that, if climate is a chaotic system, the tiniest
disturbance will propagate to complete changes of state.

It's interesting that the "climate change" crowd (formerly known as
the "global warming" crowd) now warn us of a "tipping point" where
added CO2 will trip a positive feedback mechanism and cause either
intense warming, or an ice age, I'm not sure which.

John


The name "climate change" came about when they suddenly realized they
didn't know **** ;-)

...Jim Thompson


One candid climate researcher said something like "Not only do we not
know the magnitudes of major couplings, we don't even know their
signs."

John

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 00:18:48 -0700, Mark Fergerson
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 09:49:28 -0700, Mark Fergerson
wrote:

We simply cannot wield energies on natural scales.

Mr. Larkin thinks that washing his car will cause an ice age.

I think he's being just the least bit sarcastic.

No, I think that, if climate is a chaotic system, the tiniest
disturbance will propagate to complete changes of state.

Seriously? You don't recognize the basic inertia (homeostasis) of the
system?


I do know that we had ice ages and jungle ages, and graphs of
temperature/ice coverage/CO2/species extinction vs time are all over
the place. There's no short-term inertia (weather is wild, from hours
to months) and no long-term inertia (ice ages come and go), but I
suppose there might be a mid-scale inertia. A Fourier analysis of
earth temp versus time *might* be bimodal or something, but I'm
guessing that weather/climate are noisy at all time scales, and are
chaotic except for occasionally being whacked by cosmic events and
vulcanism.

Whether climate has any significant chaotic components (nonlinear gain
mechanisms, wherein past states have a significant but complex
influence on current state), or whether it's largely dependent on
external inputs, I can't say of course.

John



It's interesting that the "climate change" crowd (formerly known as
the "global warming" crowd) now warn us of a "tipping point" where
added CO2 will trip a positive feedback mechanism and cause either
intense warming, or an ice age, I'm not sure which.

Both, actually, depending on when you cite a given author. Most of
the current "global warming" crowd were warning of "global winter" a
couple decades ago, and AFAICT changed their stripe only when climate
data showed them wrong.


Mark L. Fergerson

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 00:23:24 -0800, "Richard Henry"
wrote:


"John Larkin" wrote in message
.. .
On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 14:17:53 -0800, "Richard Henry"
wrote:



The first car I owned I never changed the oil. I just put in a
half-quart
every time I filled the gas tank.



Yeah, I had a British car too.

Actually, it was a 10-year-old VW Beetle.

I bought it for about $600, spent about $30 on repairs, and sold the engine
a couple of years later for $250.



I've only had four cars so far, the first two British and the next two
German. The brits leaked, and the germans didn't.

It's like the motorcycle thing. The classic British bikes had
vertically-split crankcases and shook like pile drivers, so of course
they leaked. The Japanese bikes had horizontally-split cases, so that
the seam wasn't under oil, and ran like sewing machines.

John

Richard Henry wrote:


"Mark Fergerson" wrote in message
news:9kyLf.494$fL3.244@fed1read01...

Richard Henry wrote:


"Mark Fergerson" wrote in message
news:eIlLf.421$fL3.193@fed1read01...


Ken Smith wrote:

And you think that the amount of CO2 man has added will have no

effect.

"Trivial" effect, no sarcasm intended.

What degree of CO2 increase would you consider to be non-trivial?

Something on the order of what natural sources regularly (and
irregularly) produce. The irregular events I consider more worrisome as
the overall environment has a better chance of coping with relatively
slower changes; we ramp up our CO2 production over decades, the
biosphere adjusts to utilize it. A volcano blows off ten times as much
in one hour and there's no immediate place for it to go. Homeostasis (in
this case meaning staying on the "natural" attractor that determines our
climate) is a lot easier to maintain when the individual elements of the
system have adequate time to react to changes by sequestering excesses
of any resource, and Earth's biosphere has gotten very good at that.

Actually I worry less about rapid volcanic CO2 releases than things
like deep-ocean methane ice blowoffs. A seaquake releases a few cubic
kilometers of that in say an hour upwind of a populated coast and the
population is non-trivially screwed. This is not alarmist fantasy, it's
actually happened in large, deep inland lakes, killing every
air-breather for kilometers around. That was estimated to be from on the
order of a few cubic _meters_ of methane ice.

Are you talkinga about Lake Nyos in Cameroon? That lake burped off carbon
dioxide (CO2, heavier than air) and methane hydrates will burp off methane
(CH4, lighter than air).

No, I meant an event at the Black Sea (for which I cannot find a
link), and freshly-melted methane is heavier than air. The stuff has
been found all over the planet, from the British Columbia coast (Canada
is apparently thinking about mining it for energy), to the Gulfs of
Mexico and California, to the Black Sea. Evidently there's twice as much
carbon sequestered in the clathrates as in all the petroleum known to exist!

Don't forget the Edmund Fitzgerald; it is thought that it sank due to
a methane ice blowoff.

I agree that a volcanic burp causes human emisions to pale. But only for a
few days. Meanwhile, the constant human emissions continue. Scientists are
able to sample atmoshperic CO2 levels by various means, such as air bubbles
trapped in galcial ice. The current concentration is thehighest it has been
for the last half-million years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:C...ide_400kyr.png

I just love the way the industrial age/CO2 correlation is presented
as fact in the yellow box.

I notice that the recent spike is from two data sources, the Siple
Dome and Mauna Loa.

The raw data from Siple is "restricted to WAISCORES investigators",
which makes me suspicious. Also, I'm kinda suspicious of CO2 data from
an aircraft refeuling station in the Antarctic.

You do know that Mauna Loa is a volcano, right? And that even
"inactive" volcanoes leak all sorts of gases? I can't think of a worse
place to put a CO2 monitoring station, except possibly in a cattle feedlot.

That aside, check out their site:

http://www.oar.noaa.gov/organization...rs03/cmdl.html

and compare these statements from the

"...it is the only lab with a primary mission of monitoring
atmospheric parameters continuously over decades to centuries."

"The observatories at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, and at the South Pole have
been in operation since 1957."

Decades to centuries, with a half-century's worth of data...

Now, you may take the above as quibbling or even "conspiracy theory"
paranoia, but notice the other graphs on your cited page, specifically:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:P...on_Dioxide.png

The literal bottom line is:

"Both measurements and models show considerable uncertainty and
variation; however, all point to carbon dioxide levels in the past that
have been signifcantly higher than they are at present."

That spike simply doesn't fit.


Mark L. Fergerson

John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 00:18:48 -0700, Mark Fergerson
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 09:49:28 -0700, Mark Fergerson
wrote:

We simply cannot wield energies on natural scales.

Mr. Larkin thinks that washing his car will cause an ice age.

I think he's being just the least bit sarcastic.

No, I think that, if climate is a chaotic system, the tiniest
disturbance will propagate to complete changes of state.

Seriously? You don't recognize the basic inertia (homeostasis) of the
system?

I do know that we had ice ages and jungle ages, and graphs of
temperature/ice coverage/CO2/species extinction vs time are all over
the place. There's no short-term inertia (weather is wild, from hours
to months) and no long-term inertia (ice ages come and go), but I
suppose there might be a mid-scale inertia. A Fourier analysis of
earth temp versus time *might* be bimodal or something, but I'm
guessing that weather/climate are noisy at all time scales, and are
chaotic except for occasionally being whacked by cosmic events and
vulcanism.

That's just it; there is indeed mid-scale inertia, but also long-term
inertia in that the extremes of the factors you mention and the others
we've gone over (and more we don't yet know about) tend not to change
much from cycle to cycle, and when they do it follows roughly
predictable trends. What's the plural of inertia?

And certainly they're noisy at all time scales, which is why there's
so much controversy; different camps place the noise floor at different
levels (so to speak).

Whether climate has any significant chaotic components (nonlinear gain
mechanisms, wherein past states have a significant but complex
influence on current state), or whether it's largely dependent on
external inputs, I can't say of course.

Just looking at the various curves I see it, but what the hell.


Mark L. Fergerson

Jim Thompson wrote:

The name "climate change" came about when they suddenly realized they
didn't know **** ;-)

Bah ! Nonsence.

It's because the end result may also include chilling ( such as in the UK
if the Gulf Stream packs up ).

Graham

On Wed, 22 Feb 2006 15:17:04 +0000, Ken Smith wrote:

In article ,
John Larkin wrote:
[....]
Of course you can't determine what a small change does to a real-life
chaotic system, because there's nothing to use as a no-stimulus
reference. But you can simulate a chaotic system, with and again
without some stimulus, and compare the results. In a healthy chaotic
system, any, even the tiniest, change results in increasing effects;
if you wait long enough, any small disturbance grows to total,
grand-scale differences in system state. The longterm differences
between a small pertubation and a large one are indistinguishable;
*everything* looks different.

When I lift my arm it appears to move smoothly upwards. The nerves and
muscles are in fact a chaotic system. If you look at one cell, for lift
to lift, the action of that cell can't be predicted. My arm, however,
still rises smoothly.

The "hit and miss" regulator's pattern of on and off is hugely different
when you make a small change in the load but the output voltage remains
near constant.

Both these are examples of systems that robustly chaotic and yet the
average results are easy to predict.

I read a very interesting item about the US economy. It seems companies
are going belly-up like flies, and people are getting thrown out of work
by the thousands, but the economy as a whole is more stable and robust
than it's ever been. I think that one thing is that with the instant
world-wide communication and EFTs and stuff, that the response loop
has been shortened, maybe intensified, at the one-company level - but
because it is so chaotic, and so big, some other entity will very quickly
fill the "void" - actually, this is another reason why Freedom is always
better than control. :-)

Cheers!
Rich
--
"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo Possum

On Wed, 22 Feb 2006 08:24:53 -0800, John Larkin wrote:

There are many implications to washing my car. Other people who drive
by may slow down to avoid hitting me in the street, or just to admire
my form.

Some years ago, I drove past a bevy of cheerleaders hawking their HS
fund-raiser car wash. I pulled up to the curb, and said, "Y'know, you
could make about a thousand dollars an hour if you did it topless. ;-)"
[note smiley inside quotes. ;-)] They were kind of amused, but this was
in Minnesota, so that's about as far as that idea went. )-;

That changes the timing of their lives, and of the timing of
the lives of everyone else they interact with. And those disturbances
spread around the world.

I once cleared a miles-long slowup on I-5 eastbound out of LA near the
I-10 interchange. Three or four lanes of traffic were stop-and-slow for
more than a mile, with, I'm sure, traffic piling up behind me. What had
happened was, some guy had stalled in an incredibly bad spot - I-5 goes
under an underpass, and then there's an upgrade with no room for anyone
to go around, so traffic had to neck down right there. Some guy had
stalled there and the tail end of his car was still sticking out into the
traffic lane. So, everybody had to go around, so they had to pull out, so
the next lane had to make room, and so on; voila! Traffic slow-up. Well,
as it happens, there was a very convenient pull-off there - between the
main I-5 and some on-ramp, that was a paved area big enough to park a
couple of cars and have a picnic. So, I pulled into there - everybody else
on the road, as soon as they got past, zoomed away as fast as their little
Lexuses could carry them ;-). Walked up to the guy, and asked, "So, can I
give you a hand pushing it out of the road?" He said, "Sure!" He pushes
from the driver door, and I stick my ass out into oncoming traffic, which
just happened to be a Big Rig who is watching this whole scenario, and he
waves me up and holds the spot. I might have been a little adrenalined-up
at that point, because pushing this Toyota Camry or whatever it was up
onto that turnoff felt like pushing a roller skate. ;-)

The traffic opened up so good that it was another 10 minutes or so before
I found a spot to merge in. ;-)

But I felt like I did a good thing. :-)

Cheers!
Rich
--
Elect Me President in 2008! I will:
A. Fire the IRS, and abolish the income tax
B. Legalize drugs
C. Stand down all military actions by the US that don't involve actual
military aggression against US territory
D. Declare World Peace I.

On Wed, 22 Feb 2006 10:25:03 -0800, John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 22 Feb 2006 10:32:54 -0700, Mark Fergerson
...
The climate is _not_ stable and never has been for any significant
....
I concur with George Carlin; I see "Chicken Little"'s assertion that
our comparative butterfly-wing-flapping is driving global warming as
arrogance.
...
I suggest that weather and climate are so chaotic that anything we do,
big or small, changes the state of climate in totally random and
unpredictable ways.

So we agree that there's no point in getting neurotic about
human-influenced climate change.


Yeah - I especially like the fact that plants breathe CO2 and make food -
the more CO2, the healthier the plants, and the warmer the climate, the
longer the growing season! I don't see a downside here, unless, of course,
you think that melting the poles and raising the ocean a few feet is a bad
thing. Heck, it'd make all new beaches! And in any case, I don't think it
would happen fast enough that harbor folks couldn't keep up with it - they
already have adjustable piers, you know. :-) And NO,LA is an awesome
example of how we can build levees and pump out water, much like The
Netherlands - I mean, it's off-the-shelf technology. Build levees around
Miami, and run a ferry service. ;-)

[Just don't let them appoint a US Harbor Czar from Arabia!]

Cheers!
Rich
--
Elect Me President in 2008! I will:
A. Fire the IRS, and abolish the income tax
B. Legalize drugs
C. Stand down all military actions by the US that don't involve actual
military aggression against US territory
D. Declare World Peace I.

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 21:08:27 GMT, the renowned Richard the Dreaded
Libertarian wrote:

I read a very interesting item about the US economy. It seems companies
are going belly-up like flies snip

Don't you mean that they are dying like hotcakes?


Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
--
"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com

On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 02:49:17 +0000, Ken Smith wrote:

Mr. Larkin thinks that washing his car will cause an ice age.

What an odd thing to say. I got the impression that he was saying that
whether or not his car has any influence on the ice age cycles, there is
no way to know which, or even if at all. He did seem to say that there
would be some larger-scale influence based on his decision to wash his
car, but there are just too many variables for any kind of rigorous
analysis.

And I agree with him, so I'm pretty much saying the same thing. :-)

And you
think that the amount of CO2 man has added will have no effect. I think
it is safe to assume that at least one of you is wrong.

Assuming that it is safe to assume makes an ass out of you twice.

And what in your world makes you think that car washing and CO2 production
have anything to do with each other?

Thanks,
Rich
--
Elect Me President in 2008! I will:
A. Fire the IRS, and abolish the income tax
B. Legalize drugs
C. Stand down all military actions by the US that don't involve actual
military aggression against US territory
D. Declare World Peace I.

On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 09:49:28 -0700, Mark Fergerson wrote:
...
We simply cannot wield energies on natural scales.

This prompted a little thought experiment - what would have happened if,
while Katrina was marshaling her forces right plop on top of the Gulf,
what if we'd dropped a little nuke right down her eye, with an air burst
at about 8,000'? It'd blow the whole thing away, right?

Then I thought, Ach, crap, no. What about the updraft from the 'shroom
cloud? It'd start a new one, only even worse! AAAAIIIIIEEEEEEEE!!!! =:-O

Thanks! ;-)
Rich
--
Elect Me President in 2008! I will:
A. Fire the IRS, and abolish the income tax
B. Legalize drugs
C. Stand down all military actions by the US that don't involve actual
military aggression against US territory
D. Declare World Peace I.

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 00:11:14 -0700, Mark Fergerson wrote:

Actually I worry less about rapid volcanic CO2 releases than things
like deep-ocean methane ice blowoffs. A seaquake releases a few cubic
kilometers of that in say an hour upwind of a populated coast and the
population is non-trivially screwed. This is not alarmist fantasy, it's
actually happened in large, deep inland lakes, killing every
air-breather for kilometers around. That was estimated to be from on the
order of a few cubic _meters_ of methane ice.

Uh, where exactly did this "methane ice" come from?

Thanks,
Rich
--
Elect Me President in 2008! I will:
A. Fire the IRS, and abolish the income tax
B. Legalize drugs
C. Stand down all military actions by the US that don't involve actual
military aggression against US territory
D. Declare World Peace I.

On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 20:07:39 -0800, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 09:49:28 -0700, Mark Fergerson

We simply cannot wield energies on natural scales.

Mr. Larkin thinks that washing his car will cause an ice age.

I think he's being just the least bit sarcastic.

I think you're responding to a non sequitur anyway. ;-P

No, I think that, if climate is a chaotic system, the tiniest
disturbance will propagate to complete changes of state.

But all chaotic states have "attractors", which conceptually
can be mapped onto equilibrium points, so to speak, AFAIUI.

It's interesting that the "climate change" crowd (formerly known as
the "global warming" crowd) now warn us of a "tipping point" where
added CO2 will trip a positive feedback mechanism and cause either
intense warming, or an ice age, I'm not sure which.

I saw some guy on edjamacayshunal teevee just the other night, who said
practically exactly the same thing, and went on to say that we've already
passed it (the TP), so no matter what we do, the ice caps are going to
melt.

He used recent melting rates of glaciers and core samples that he claimed
went back 250,000 years, and there is supposedly a recent spike in the
CO2, and it's observable that the glaciers are melting faster than they
were last year, and so on; the clincher was that the more ice and snow
that melts, the more dirt is exposed, lowering Earth's albedo, so we
warm up more, and so, the positive feedback has already kicked in.

Now, to me, that's cause for the opposite of panic. Screw it, we can do
anything we want to, so eat, drink, and be merry! Nothing's going to
make any difference anyway! %-}

And, as I've always said, what would be so bad about the whole planet
being a tropical paradise where people don't even need to wear clothes?
Well, the women, anyway. leer, snort

Cheers!
Rich
--
Elect Me President in 2008! I will:
A. Fire the IRS, and abolish the income tax
B. Legalize drugs
C. Stand down all military actions by the US that don't involve actual
military aggression against US territory
D. Declare World Peace I.

On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 08:26:53 -0700, Jim Thompson wrote:
I'm a nut case

...Jim Thompson

Thanks for finally acknowledging what the rest of us have known since we
first met you.

Cheers!
Rich
[oh, yeah: ;-) ]
--
Elect Me President in 2008! I will:
A. Fire the IRS, and abolish the income tax
B. Legalize drugs
C. Stand down all military actions by the US that don't involve actual
military aggression against US territory
D. Declare World Peace I.

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 21:45:57 GMT, Rich Grise
wrote:

On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 02:49:17 +0000, Ken Smith wrote:

Mr. Larkin thinks that washing his car will cause an ice age.

What an odd thing to say. I got the impression that he was saying that
whether or not his car has any influence on the ice age cycles, there is
no way to know which, or even if at all. He did seem to say that there
would be some larger-scale influence based on his decision to wash his
car, but there are just too many variables for any kind of rigorous
analysis.

And I agree with him, so I'm pretty much saying the same thing. :-)

---
Rich, you do have a remarkable grasp of the obvious!
---

And you
think that the amount of CO2 man has added will have no effect. I think
it is safe to assume that at least one of you is wrong.

Assuming that it is safe to assume makes an ass out of you twice.

---
No, it doesn't. Declaring that an assumption has been made and under
what conditions it was made doesn't make an ass out of the declarer,
it, in fact, clarifies the declarer's position by removing the
ambiguity which might exist had the declaration not been made.

Being unable to understand that and thinking that that old chestnut,
"Making an assumption makes an ASS out of U and ME" is universal and
can be applied in every situation, with no thought given to the
circumstances surrounding the situation is what's assinine.
---

And what in your world makes you think that car washing and CO2 production
have anything to do with each other?

---
Well, just for starters, washing a car requires an expenditure of
[human] energy greater than that of, say, pounding away at a
keyboard or watching TV, so car washing and the production of CO2 go
hand in hand.


--
John Fields
Professional Circuit Designer

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 04:38:25 +0000, Pooh Bear wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 14:17:53 -0800, "Richard Henry"

The first car I owned I never changed the oil. I just put in a half-quart
every time I filled the gas tank.

Yeah, I had a British car too.

Yawn...........

Very tired joke indeed.


Not necessarily a joke - when I was in the USAF, there was some weird jet
plane that, when it came back from a flight, the ground crew would climb
up on the wings and pour about 6 quarts of oil into each engine's oil tank -
apparently, this engine injected oil into its turbine bearings and just
let it blow away - that was normal operation.
http://www.nasm.si.edu/research/aero...artin_eb57.htm

And I think it's fairly well-known that Fords will last forever, as long
as you can afford to keep them oiled. ;-)

Cheers!
Rich

--
Elect Me President in 2008! I will:
A. Fire the IRS, and abolish the income tax
B. Legalize drugs
C. Stand down all military actions by the US that don't involve actual
military aggression against US territory
D. Declare World Peace I.

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 00:23:24 -0800, Richard Henry wrote:


"John Larkin" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 14:17:53 -0800, "Richard Henry"
wrote:



The first car I owned I never changed the oil. I just put in a
half-quart
every time I filled the gas tank.



Yeah, I had a British car too.

Actually, it was a 10-year-old VW Beetle.

I bought it for about $600, spent about $30 on repairs, and sold the engine
a couple of years later for $250.

I got out of the USAF in 1972 and bought a Ford Pinto. After 2 months and
29 days, I went and re-enlisted in the USAF. They had a 3-month grace
period where you could re-up with full bennies - this was at the depth of
the "Vietnam Era", so they were being very generous. And I hadn't been
to Thailand yet. ;-)

So, I drove the Pinto from Minneapolis to Duluth to re-up, hung around
Duluth for awhile, got transferred to Thailand with a TDY (Temporary
DutY) to Keesler AFB, Biloxi, MS, for supplemental tech school, drove
there, hung about for awhile, drove back to Minneapolis, sold the Pinto
to my brother for a song (almost literally - he was a wannabe professional
guitarist at the time) and flew from MSP to Khorat AFB, Thailand, in
the middle of January. There were snowplows plowing the runways when I
took off, and it was 70F in the middle of the night when I got there.

Later, I learned that my brother had forgot to keep adding oil to the
Pinto, and it ran dry and siezed, and he and his buddy swapped out
the (1.6L) motor with their bare hands. ;-)

Cheers!
Rich
--
Elect Me President in 2008! I will:
A. Fire the IRS, and abolish the income tax
B. Legalize drugs
C. Stand down all military actions by the US that don't involve actual
military aggression against US territory
D. Declare World Peace I.

On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 07:58:40 -0800, John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 08:18:11 -0700, Jim Thompson

I usually just trade them in when they get too dirty ;-)


How can a car get "too dirty"? The vibration knocks off the bigger
chunks before their weight has a serious effect on mileage.


Well, you've heard of "keeping up with the Joneses"? Jim just wants
to be Mr. Jones. ;-)

Cheers!
Rich
--
"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo Possum

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 22:34:14 GMT, Rich Grise wrote:
On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 04:38:25 +0000, Pooh Bear wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 14:17:53 -0800, "Richard Henry"

The first car I owned I never changed the oil. I just put in a half-quart
every time I filled the gas tank.

Yeah, I had a British car too.

Yawn...........
Very tired joke indeed.

Not necessarily a joke -

Indeed. Graham knows (or should, anyway) that the early Saab cars used
2-stroke engines. It's rather a lot of fun. For best pre-mixing, you
take a quart of the 2-stroke oil (synthetic yamalube is my preference),
dump that into a one-gallon gas can, add 2 quarts of gasoline, shake it
up, dump it in, and then fill the rest of the way up for an 8-gallon
fill. Quite the production. I was doing the thing with the stuff, and
this guy is just _staring_ at me, wondering WTF my problem was. I gave
him a look, said "Well, it's 30 years old and I can't find the oil
filler, so I just dump it in this way and hope for the best".

The look on the guy's face was priceless.

Looks like this beastie only not in as good of condition:
http://winktimber.com/vintagerally/c...ab/racsaab.htm

On 24 Feb 2006 11:15:22 -0800, wrote:

The world we have known is history. A mere 1 degree Fahrenheit global
average warming is already raising sea levels,

by what, a couple of millimeters?


strengthening
hurricanes, disrupting ecosystems, threatening parks and protected
areas, causing droughts and heat waves, melting the Arctic and glaciers
everywhere and killing tens of thousands of people a year.

How do you know that climate change isn't saving millions of lives in
other, less obvious places?


Yet there are several more degrees coming in our grandchildren's
lifetimes.

It is easy to feel like a character in a bad science fiction novel
running down the street shouting "Don't you see it!" while life goes
on, business as usual.

Climate change is the biggest thing to happen here on earth in
thousands of years,

But the climate has been changing erratically for billions of years,
often thousands of times more radically than it's changing now. And
nobody really knows if it's getting cooler or warmer, and if we knew,
we still wouldn't know if that will make things better or worse, and
for who.

with incalculable environmental, social and
economic costs.

You're sure right about the "incalculable" part.

John

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 21:57:58 GMT, Rich Grise
wrote:

On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 09:49:28 -0700, Mark Fergerson wrote:
...
We simply cannot wield energies on natural scales.

This prompted a little thought experiment - what would have happened if,
while Katrina was marshaling her forces right plop on top of the Gulf,
what if we'd dropped a little nuke right down her eye, with an air burst
at about 8,000'? It'd blow the whole thing away, right?


A good hurricane sucks up heat energy at something equivalent to
hundreds of h-bombs per second. It wouldn't even notice a nuke.

John

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 22:34:14 GMT, Rich Grise
wrote:


And I think it's fairly well-known that Fords will last forever, as long
as you can afford to keep them oiled. ;-)

---
Didn't you mean to say that you were making the _assumption_ that:
"it's fairly well-known that Fords will last forever, as long as you
can afford to keep them oiled?"

Regardless of what you were trying to say, They won't. Their mttf
is designed in, and planned to cause a gradual collapse of the
vehicle with time.

A while ago I read that, in the early days, Henry sent techs out to
the junkyards to find out why steering gear was more reliable than
(say) engines, and took the steps appropriate, after the reports
came in, to make sure that the steering gear wouldn't outlive the
engine, in order to shave costs = increase margins. AIUI, that
process continued until everything was pared down so that it would
slightly outlive the engine.

Now it seems that everything is designed to die on queue in order to
keep the aftermarket and the new vehicle business going, with the
engine itself only designed to last for a certain amount of time
instead of "forever".

YMMV?

--
John Fields
Professional Circuit Designer

"Mark Fergerson" wrote in message
news:7tILf.569$fL3.557@fed1read01...
Richard Henry wrote:


"Mark Fergerson" wrote in message
news:9kyLf.494$fL3.244@fed1read01...

Richard Henry wrote:


"Mark Fergerson" wrote in message
news:eIlLf.421$fL3.193@fed1read01...


Ken Smith wrote:

And you think that the amount of CO2 man has added will have no

effect.

"Trivial" effect, no sarcasm intended.

What degree of CO2 increase would you consider to be non-trivial?

Something on the order of what natural sources regularly (and
irregularly) produce. The irregular events I consider more worrisome as
the overall environment has a better chance of coping with relatively
slower changes; we ramp up our CO2 production over decades, the
biosphere adjusts to utilize it. A volcano blows off ten times as much
in one hour and there's no immediate place for it to go. Homeostasis (in
this case meaning staying on the "natural" attractor that determines our
climate) is a lot easier to maintain when the individual elements of the
system have adequate time to react to changes by sequestering excesses
of any resource, and Earth's biosphere has gotten very good at that.

Actually I worry less about rapid volcanic CO2 releases than things
like deep-ocean methane ice blowoffs. A seaquake releases a few cubic
kilometers of that in say an hour upwind of a populated coast and the
population is non-trivially screwed. This is not alarmist fantasy, it's
actually happened in large, deep inland lakes, killing every
air-breather for kilometers around. That was estimated to be from on the
order of a few cubic _meters_ of methane ice.

Are you talkinga about Lake Nyos in Cameroon? That lake burped off
carbon
dioxide (CO2, heavier than air) and methane hydrates will burp off
methane
(CH4, lighter than air).

No, I meant an event at the Black Sea (for which I cannot find a
link), and freshly-melted methane is heavier than air. The stuff has
been found all over the planet, from the British Columbia coast (Canada
is apparently thinking about mining it for energy), to the Gulfs of
Mexico and California, to the Black Sea. Evidently there's twice as much
carbon sequestered in the clathrates as in all the petroleum known to
exist!

Freshly-melted methane is heavier than air? I did not know that.

Don't forget the Edmund Fitzgerald; it is thought that it sank due to
a methane ice blowoff.

I did not know that either.

In article eIlLf.421$fL3.193@fed1read01,
Mark Fergerson wrote:
Ken Smith wrote:

Unfortunately, "attractors" only appear when the data is displayed in a
form that allows you to see them. You need to plot two interdependant
variables as X and Y to see them. This makes them hard to demonstrate for
the climate issue.

X and Y plots are for 2 variables; the Wiki page shows _lots_ of
interdependent variables (FTM there are variables it doesn't even
mention). There's no rule against plotting multidimensional attractors;
the "classic" Lorenz strange attractor must be shown in 3D.

Yes, I should have said "two or more" dimensions.


In the case of modelling climate, you _have_ to include all of them
(at least in the interest of preserving intellectual honesty).

I disagree with this statement. We ignore "unimportant" things all the
time when we model things in electronics.

Yes, it's
hard, but that's no excuse for going all Chicken Little when _one_ of
them shows a trend

Nor, is the fact that there are other variables and excuse for ignoring
the threat. If we assume that temperatures are increasing and that this
will result in bad stuff, why not take a shot at reducing the effect. We
would be making a bet. If we do nothing we are making a different bet.
Right now, it seems to me that the safer bet is to seee if we can reduce
the C)2 output.



--
--
forging knowledge

On Sat, 25 Feb 2006 01:07:55 +0000 (UTC),
(Ken Smith) wrote:

In article eIlLf.421$fL3.193@fed1read01,
Mark Fergerson wrote:
[snip]

In the case of modelling climate, you _have_ to include all of them
(at least in the interest of preserving intellectual honesty).

I disagree with this statement. We ignore "unimportant" things all the
time when we model things in electronics.

[snip]

"unimportant"? As in all those factors that don't fit your political
agenda ??

...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |

It's what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.

In article 7tILf.569$fL3.557@fed1read01,
Mark Fergerson wrote:
[...]
Don't forget the Edmund Fitzgerald; it is thought that it sank due to
a methane ice blowoff.


Thought by who? As I understand it, the Edmund Fitzgerald went into
shallow water in an attempt to avoid the worse of a storm. The waves plus
the draft of the boat was enough that it could have struck the bottom.
The bottom around there is rocky and lumpy.

There was also an issue of sloppy practice involved. Other ships (the
same companies I believe) were inspected just after the sinking. The
other ships did not have the hatches properly dogged down. When the
bottom of the ship got punched, it opened it and broke the structure of
the spine. Without the hatches held in place, the water came in very
fast. The hatches also add strength to the ship making it basically a
tube. With the bottom weakened and the hatches loose, the ship had all
the strength of a noodle. It went under the next big wave and never came
up.

Its still a great song however.

--
--
forging knowledge

In article ,
John Larkin wrote:
On 24 Feb 2006 11:15:22 -0800, wrote:

The world we have known is history. A mere 1 degree Fahrenheit global
average warming is already raising sea levels,

by what, a couple of millimeters?
^^^^^^ Metric! I'm shocked.


--
--
forging knowledge

On Sat, 25 Feb 2006 01:17:07 +0000 (UTC),
(Ken Smith) wrote:

In article ,
John Larkin wrote:
On 24 Feb 2006 11:15:22 -0800, wrote:

The world we have known is history. A mere 1 degree Fahrenheit global
average warming is already raising sea levels,

by what, a couple of millimeters?
^^^^^^ Metric! I'm shocked.



Oh, we always use metric units for small stuff that doesn't matter.

John

The SUN is getting warmer. We feel that. Mt. St. Helens dumps 100's of tons
of S02 into the air each year - far exceeding cars and power plants of the region.

The little one in the Philippines cooled the earth by 1 degree by dumping more
crap into the air than all trucks, cars, motorcycles and ... of all time. Far worse
than many thought at the time - but remember it was a colder year and the stars were
colored.....

The oilfields that burned in IRAQ and the triangle area of Kuwait put black soot
around the world.

The UK was a very dusty place to live in for many years. Now cleaner, how about more.

Martin

Martin Eastburn
@ home at Lions' Lair with our computer lionslair at consolidated dot net
NRA LOH & Endowment Member
NRA Second Amendment Task Force Charter Founder



Pooh Bear wrote:
phorbin wrote:


In article ,
says...


So, assuming no dispute and solid science, why is it that the term "Climate
Change" is becoming the preffered term these days??

Because it's easier to pretend that "climate change" has nothing to do
with industry, oil, fossil fuels etc.? Some PR maven probably cooked it
up as part of a disinformation campaign.


How about because it's a more accurate description ? It isn't as simple as plain
'warming'. If the UK loses the Gulf Stream we'll be damn sight colder !

Graham



----== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com - Unlimited-Unrestricted-Secure Usenet News==----
http://www.newsfeeds.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! 120,000+ Newsgroups
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The Southern jet stream brought a storm through Hawaii, down through Mexico,
through Texas and diagonally N.E. through states and then headed for Poo Bear.
It is on its way right now.

Martin
Martin Eastburn
@ home at Lions' Lair with our computer lionslair at consolidated dot net
NRA LOH & Endowment Member
NRA Second Amendment Task Force Charter Founder



Pooh Bear wrote:
Jim Thompson wrote:


On Tue, 14 Feb 2006 23:16:31 +0000, Pooh Bear
wrote:


phorbin wrote:


In article ,
says...


So, assuming no dispute and solid science, why is it that the term "Climate
Change" is becoming the preffered term these days??

Because it's easier to pretend that "climate change" has nothing to do
with industry, oil, fossil fuels etc.? Some PR maven probably cooked it
up as part of a disinformation campaign.

How about because it's a more accurate description ? It isn't as simple as plain
'warming'. If the UK loses the Gulf Stream we'll be damn sight colder !

Graham


The jet stream has not dipped down into Arizona in months... the
result... 118 days without rain so far, and more moderate
temperatures... "three bears" style, just right ;-)

If this persists, our east coast and England and parts of Europe are
going to be damned cold.

...Jim Thompson


Can you educate me as to the influence of the jet stream on your local weather ? I'm
unfamiliar with this effect.

Graham


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----= East and West-Coast Server Farms - Total Privacy via Encryption =----

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 18:03:05 -0800, John Larkin
wrote:

On Sat, 25 Feb 2006 01:17:07 +0000 (UTC),
(Ken Smith) wrote:

In article ,
John Larkin wrote:
On 24 Feb 2006 11:15:22 -0800, wrote:

The world we have known is history. A mere 1 degree Fahrenheit global
average warming is already raising sea levels,

by what, a couple of millimeters?
^^^^^^ Metric! I'm shocked.



Oh, we always use metric units for small stuff that doesn't matter.

John


Sno-o-o-o-o-ort !-)

...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |

It's what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.

In article ,
Jim Thompson wrote:
[....]
"unimportant"? As in all those factors that don't fit your political
agenda ??

No, "unimportant" as in don't make enough difference in the result to
matter. I know you do it all the time in the modeling of semiconductor
circuits. We wouldn't be able to design stuff if we couldn't ignore
things.


--
--
forging knowledge

In article ,
Jim Thompson wrote:
[....]
I'm a nut case over oil, change oil and filter every 3000 miles, and I
use distilled water in the radiator ;-)

Distilled water is actually bad for the radiator.

So how long do your cars last with all this extra work you do?

--
--
forging knowledge