Category Archives: Weather/Climate

Butterfly Rose

Posted on April 20, 2014 | 1 comment

Butterfly4

Springtime in the back forty at Rancho Roly Poly.

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Posted in Antique Roses, Rancho Roly Poly, Texana, Weather/Climate

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The wages of drought

Posted on April 15, 2014 | 3 comments

It’s a staple of some science fiction, the recycling of human urine on a spaceship to keep the crew supplied with drinking water.

Now Wichita Falls wants to go half-way: treating so-called gray-water, toilet flushes—but not the actual urine—for drinking water.

Drought is normal in Texas, but with recent population increases—all those victims of the Democrat economy looking for jobs—the wages of drought are getting serious.

UPDATE:  Lubbock and Big Spring are already building treatment plants to do the same thing.

MORE: Austin also is considering it.

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Posted in Obamalot, Science/Engineering, Texana, Weather/Climate

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Thar she blows!

Posted on April 4, 2014 | 4 comments

The dystopian outlook that seems to dominate science fiction these days, particularly the apocalyptic kind, foresees an eruption of the dormant but volatile Yellowstone volcano in Wyoming as civilization shattering, especially in North America.

So does the U.S. Geologic Survey: “If another large caldera-forming eruption were to occur at Yellowstone, its effects would be worldwide. Thick ash deposits would bury vast areas of the United States, and injection of huge volumes of volcanic gases into the atmosphere could drastically affect global climate.”

Comes contrarian meteorologist Joe Bastardi at WeatherBell to say that such an eruption would likely, counter-intuitively, be a ho-hummer in most places downwind.

“Remember Mt. St. Helens. There was very little notable disruption to the climate from that. Great sunsets yes and of course the utter devastation around it, but the volcanoes that are of prime concern are in the tropics, and in the Arctic. Volcanoes in the westerlies have their ash distributed quickly, and so I don’t think this would have any real affect on the climate, or put it this way, it would be in the category of Mt St Helen[s] which was minimal…”

Lots of apocalyptic scifi authors who, along with their readers, seem to delight in imagining human misery, are going to look awfully foolish if the thing does blow and Joe is right. And things just might get a little crazy if he isn’t. But I’ll place my bets with him.

UPDATE:  OTOH, as Bastardi’s colleague Joe D’Aleo notes, Jellystone has the potential to be 2,000 times the size of the Mt. St. Helens eruption.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obsessions, Science/Engineering, Weather/Climate

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“We don’t understand climate”

Posted on April 1, 2014 | 4 comments

It’s so refreshing to find a scientist who is willing to speak the truth, in the face of his nattering peers. Particularly a physicist, the hardest of all the hard sciences, and, of course, it would be Freeman Dyson:

“Generally speaking, I’m much more of a conformist, but it happens I have strong views about climate because I think the majority is badly wrong, and you have to make sure if the majority is saying something that they’re not talking nonsense.”

Via Instapundit.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obsessions, Science/Engineering, Weather/Climate

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The carbon dioxide shuck

Posted on March 30, 2014 | 2 comments

“Almost every global environmental scare of the past half century proved exaggerated including the population ‘bomb,’ pesticides, acid rain, the ozone hole, falling sperm counts, genetically engineered crops and killer bees. In every case, institutional scientists gained a lot of funding from the scare and then quietly converged on the view that the problem was much more moderate than the extreme voices had argued. Global warming is no different.”

—Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist and member of the British House of Lords.

Meanwhile, Wormtongue, the shuck’s most prominent proponent, is siccing his cronies on “deniers.”

UPDATE:  And the Dictator’s Club’s favored alarmists are getting shriller than ever.

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Posted in Obamalot, Science/Engineering, The Economy, Weather/Climate

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Unsettling “science”

Posted on March 27, 2014 | 5 comments

Add the American Association for the Advancement of, ahem, Science to the global warming/climate change cult.

Crank up the NPR propaganda machine, boys.

Anthony Watts, whose Watts Up With That blog consistently wins awards for analysis of the climate hoax’s prevarications and outright falsehoods, has a devastating critique of their latest shuck, which carries the AAAS stamp of approval:

“To ‘inform the public’ about their fearful conclusions, [the AAAS] cited 2 outdated peer-reviewed articles, written by [University of Texas biologist] Camille Parmesan, who not surprisingly was one of the 13 scientists writing the AAAS’ media release…If we peruse those papers, we find that one of those 2 cites 11 other Parmesan papers, creating a consensus where Parmesan agrees with Parmesan. Not only are the AAAS’s argument[s] very inbred, they are outdated and contradicted by more recent peer-reviewed studies.”

Back when I did science writing I was initially impressed with the triple-A S and its members, though I soon recognized that most of them were kneejerk leftist Democrats. They routinely sneered at any colleague who did research with corporate money and insisted that only the feds, who fund most of American science research, were pure and objective. As if.

I also interviewed Parmesan on her initial butterflies-moving-north-to-beat-the-heat studies which Anthony shows have been long since superceded by the work of others finding the opposite. UT nevertheless touts Parmesan as a global warming “expert.” Her principal expertise seems to be impressing the Democrat news media.

Cue the NYTimes and Wapo. Bring up the BBC’s spotlight. We’re all gonna dieeeeee.

UPDATE:  The dictator’s club’s cult agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, apparently didn’t get the AAAS memo. They’re softening their drumbeat of disaster:

“The 2007 [IPCC] report was riddled with errors about Himalayan glaciers, the Amazon rain forest, African agriculture, water shortages and other matters, all of which erred in the direction of alarm….According to leaks, this time the full report is much more cautious and vague about worsening cyclones, changes in rainfall, climate-change refugees, and the overall cost of global warming.”

MORE: Well, they weren’t all that “cautious and vague” even in the face of declining temperatures. Don’t trouble them with facts.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Science/Engineering, Texana, Weather/Climate

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White House attacks science

Posted on March 5, 2014 | 1 comment

It’s the wrong kind of science, see, the kind that contradicts Wormtongue and his cronies and makes them look downright dumb:

“Evidently, if there is one thing the Obama Administration dislikes more than conservatives pointing out the numerous weaknesses in the case for catastrophic global warming it is a Democrat doing the same thing…

“Combining this with Secretary of State Kerry’s recent factually incorrect statements about global warming, it seems the Obama Administration both seeks to unfairly suppress dissenting views and is increasingly anti-science.”

Has to be to back up the boss. Who said, we must not forget, in his SOTU that AGW “is a fact.” Like this congenital liar would know fact from fancy.

Even his AGW acolytes are getting desperate. Dr. Jeff Masters of Weather Underground jumped the shark when he turned to the Voice of Russia to back up his claim that this deadly winter is the spawn of C02 rather than natural variability.

It really could be, as has been said before by others, that everything Wormtongue touches turns to poop.

Via Meteorological Musings & Watts Up With That.

UPDATE: Some are beginning to wonder if global warming science really is science: “Real science does not fear those who challenge it, does not work to have challengers’ articles banned from science journals, and does not compare skeptics to Holocaust deniers or, as Mr. Kerry did in Jakarta, members of the ‘Flat Earth Society.'”

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Posted in Blogosphere, Science/Engineering, The Culture, Weather/Climate

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