Nom de plume: Rivrdog

More Global Warming alarmism

Part Deux? Soixante Deux (62) is more like it. 

Here is some totally garbage alarmism from Ass Press.

Here is the opening statement:

"TELESCOPE, Grenada (AP) — The old coastal road in this fishing village at the eastern edge of Grenada sits under a couple of feet of murky saltwater, which regularly surges past a hastily-erected breakwater of truck tires and bundles of driftwood intended to hold back the Atlantic Ocean.

For Desmond Augustin and other fishermen living along the shorelines of the southern Caribbean island, there's nothing theoretical about the threat of rising sea levels."

Okay then, let's apply a tiny filter called Truth to this.

• Nowhere in the entire story does it ever say how much the sea level has risen.
• It does say that the Grenadans have done some ill-advised dredging in the area.
• Nowhere does it say that their man-on-the-scene has ANY credentials as either an engineer or a climate scientist, but...
• The article goes on to blame climate change anyway.
• The simple fact here is that there are two ways to flood a coastline: raise the sea level or lower the seashore. It definitely appears that the latter was done here, but yet the alarmism still continues.

This whole Ass Press article is a crock of crap.

I challenge the Global Warming Alarmist Fraternity to adopt the following manifesto of Truth:

• Every article on the subject of rising sea level damage shall be opened with a statement of just how high the sea level has risen, over a stated period of time. Not in storm surges, but permanent sea level rise, the ONLY indicator that can (or can't) show the truth of such claims. 
• When talking about sea level changes, ANY alteration to local ocean floors MUST be discussed, with an engineering-level statement of how those changes, natural OR man-made, affected flooding of the coastline.
• Water seeks a constant level, and is easy to measure. We know about tides, we can predict and measure storm surges, and all of those factors can be discounted to give us a true base water level. According to this interactive chart by NOAA, the sea level rise in Grenada's part of the Caribbean Sea is from 3 to 6 millimeters per century. The entire US East coast has a sea level rise of 3 millimeters per century, maximum. That's one-eighth of an inch, and one quarter of an inch, MAXIMUM,  in the South Caribbean Sea. Note that in AK, some sea levels are trending DOWN by a half-to 3/8" per year.

This alarmist article by Ass Press does no one any good.

Have you ever asked yourself just why, if all the Earth's coastlines are in danger of inundation from rising sea levels, that engineering to "save the coastline" hasn't even started yet, anywhere? Can you guess why that is?

In every engineering analysis of solutions to a potential crisis, the engineers will first ask the question, "is this crisis actually happenning or can it realisticically be expected to happen, and when?"

Of course there's no engineering, because that question has already been asked, and the answer is, always, "come back to the engineers when you have data showing an actual threat".

That's the name of THAT tune, "Actual Threat". As currently measured, the actual threat, if present trends continue, will not occur for several to many centuries.

BTW, the Ass Press article tries to blame "ferocious storm surges made worse by climate change". That's an apples and oranges discussion, and again, the alarmists will lose, because when you stack up hurricanes by the century or epoch, there's little to no change to report. Weather is weather and climate is climate, and there are few links between them.

Ass Press, get real or get out of here.

End of discussion.

 

 

What a racket!

Computer printers are a racket.

Several years ago, the Canon all-in-one printer I had, a Pixma 1500, started telling me that the "ink waste tank is full", and, of course, it stopped working. After reading up about it, I decided just to toss the printer and get a new one. Ka-ching! My Citeh charges a $5 fee to "recycle" such equipment.

Got the new one, a Lexmark S305 which the reviews said was a good basic printer. About $50 for the printer, but it takes somewhat spendy ink cartridges (the real reason they dump these printers on the market so cheap is to keep you buying ink). Now, after two years, the Lexmark is toast. It keeps throwing me a code which says "printhead error". Following the troubleshooter, I cleaned the printhead, but that did not fix the problem. The problem happened with no warning, which is not the failure mode of a wearing-out part on any machine. I suspect that the machine was programmed to fail after x-number of copies, but I can't afford the hi-tech private forensics to prove that. I could plunk down $95 and get a replacement printhead, but if the machine is programmed in failure mode, that won't work and I would have wasted the money.

So, I went to Fry's.com and got another sexy Lexy for $39.99. Add $20 bucks for shipping (costs about $15 gas to drive to Fry's in Wilsonville, and five bucks more for no freeway aggravation is worth it). 

There's no way out of this forced-obsolescence racket.

If I could, I'd go back to my old Panasonic dot-matrix printer, which in High Quality mode, printed black-ink copies just fine. I just got tired of putting on ear protection each time I had to use it and tearing off the tractor-ends from the paper.

Dump S.3525, the "Sportsman's Act of 2012"

I don't know about the rest of the gunnies, but lately, my inbox has been bombarded with emails by various gun-related businesses for me to call my reps and senators to get them to vote for S.3525, aka "The Sportsman's Act of 2012".

As you can see by this listing, the Sportsman's Act is an omnibus bill, that is, a collection of bills lumped together primarily because the support isn't there to pass them individually.

Read the titles on that list. If you have a lot of time, read the bills.

What jumps off the page at you when you peruse the list?

Answer: the majority of the bills are ecologist's wet dreams.

There is exactly ONE Bill on that list that is not "green", S.3065, the Target Practice and Marksmanship Training Support Act, which would establish funds to support government-owned firearms ranges. Some states have those public ranges and some don't.  This Bill would provide grant money to publicly-owned ranges. I could support that Bill, maybe, unless it establishes some more restrictions on firearms ownership and carriage.

With that one exception, S.3525 holds the Second Amendment at arm's length. The 2A is THE 900# gorilla in the room whenever guns are mentioned, but there is NOTHING in this Bill which supports the Second directly, and ONE bill which supports it indirectly. (Somewhere in that Bill is a statement affirming that no lead ban may be enacted for hunting ammo. Okay, that prohibition on lead bans is already Federal law, and I'm not sure it needs re-iterating.)

Why, Oh Why, don't the gun dealers, the NSSF, etc realize that without the Second Amendment, hunting goes away rather quickly? Why, Oh Why, is there no strong support for the 2A in this Bill?

Yes, the Second is NOT about hunting, it is about protecting the Constitution from tyranny. That said, the same Founders who gave us the Second Amendment also refuted the European idea that hunting was a privilege for the landed aristocracy only, so the Founders didn't parcel out all those millions of acres of public lands to the control of folks who could shut them down to hunting and fishing, they required public access to, and use of those lands, in stark contrast to the Europeans, who forbid it, and generally, had no public forests or streams. You pay to hunt in Europe, if you are lucky enough to find a lease to hunt on and can manage the restrictions on owning a hunting firearm.

Now we have established a new Landed Aristocracy in this Nation, that being the Government, which increasingly reserves more and more rights of the use and access of public lands to itself. In fact, unless you just came in on the slow shuttle from Planet Zargon, you probably know that the Greens have succeeded in closing off most uses of public lands except hunting/fishing by foot access only. In Oregon, just in the past five years, we've gone from over ten thousand miles of forest roads open to powered conveyances (road vehicles and ATVs) to less than a thousand, and some entire National Forests here have but a few dozen miles of legally-driveable roads in them now (Mt. Hood National Forest, a half-hour from here). Should you take your rifle and fire a few rounds to assure yourself that it is still zeroed, if one of your bullets hits a tree in the forest, you've just committed a Federal crime, and are subject to a $5,000 fine, per tree hit. Same rule when you are hunting. If you bag a deer, the first thing you'd better do is drag it quite a ways from where you shot it, because if your bullet left the deer and hit a tree, that's one expensive deer if the ranger stops by, has a quick look around, and finds that "wounded" tree.

We need to put it right to the Greenies: these are OUR woods. Keep your farging idiot regulations out of them.

S.3525 needs to go away. Do NOT call your congresscritter to support it. Your support of S.3525 only empowers the Greens, and empowering the Greens is a direct attack on ALL your Constitutional freedoms, including the Second Amendments.

While you're at it, resolve now to evaluate everything involving guns and the outdoors on the basis of the Second Amendment, without which you don't GO hunting. If your pro-hunting stance doesn't include a pro-2A link, you are being led astray, and the orgs which do this are usually tools of the gun-banning filk.

The Left won again

Let's make that win the final time.

Analyzing the win, the left won because they got their Socialist message of  "come git yo FREE shit" out better than the Romnoids got out their message of  "capitalism works, let's give it a try". This "free Shit" is the forever way that Socialism has been foisted off on nations, for the past 100 years.

The Left was better organized at the polls. As I went to bed in my Scotch fog last night, Obama had just over a 1.1 million popular vote margin, but he had over 300 electoral votes. He gamed the system and won. He got Ohio way back, three and a half years ago, by bailing out the auto industry. Free shit, he gave out government-backed auto-industry jobs for free, smiled at those auto workers and said, "remember me on November Sixth, 2012." They remembered. Romney never had a chance in Ohio.

So it went. I'm not going to sit here and moan about it. Now we have to live with the Obama agenda for the next four years.

Or do we?

Can we fight back?

Can we put some awful hurt on the Left, enough hurt to chase them back to their holes in four years?

I think we can.

Over at Say Uncle, the short but powerful post on Obama's win brought out at least one thinker, a commenter named Nevyan (at Comment #12). Nevyan proposes local action to take down the left, and he proposes how to do it legally and properly, so close those gun safes and let's follow Nevyan's system here.

After we pick a local target to "wage lawfare" on, and start gathering our information, both on suspected violations AND on the intracacies of the laws we will use, we can do one other thing.

Let's wage war on on the Left's pet system, the Green Agenda.

Instead of fighting the Green Agenda only as the left brings up new parts of it, like most of us have done, let's go offensive instead of staying defensive.

Take longer showers. Keep your lawn green in the summer, if the law allows it. Use all the water you can.

Burn all the lights in your house while you are awake on these long winter nights. Use that electricity that is there, on demand, in your wires.

We're going to deny the Left their present advantage of claiming that their conservation system works, that less is better, that composting can take the place of garbage service, etc. We're going to require them to build out the electric grid, because we are going to overload it. Rationing? Brownouts? The occasional blackout? Yep, we will have those, but who will get the blame for that? You won't. The Left will because they are in charge. Yes, it will cost you money not to conserve, but how else can you wage this kind of assymetrical war for so little money and still keep your freedom?

When the Left starts to soak up more and more of the blame for the collapsing utility infrastructure, the Government WILL be changed out, legally, properly, at the polls.

No one of us can do this alone, but in our millions, we CAN make it happen (oooooh, collectivism against the collectivists, yessss!). The Government will either yield, or they will have to become overly restrictive, and when those draconian restrictions on utility use happen, they will hurt EVERYONE, and then the Greens get blamed and get removed. At the very least, it pits the Greens against the suburban soccer moms, who also voted for the Won last night.

Take the Greens out of the fight, and conservatives have an even chance on the electoral battlefield.

The White House can be ours in 2016, but only if we wage a consistent and persistent fight. We can't win with bullets, I agree. We can win with "lawfare" (a Green tactic, BTW), and we CAN and WILL win with resistance to the Green Agenda of doing with less.

Consume your way to victory, my friends.

Furnace on...

Present temp is 43, headed for 39. Cold rain showers which are snow above 3500 feet. My highly-insulated home has finally given up it's summer heat, and although dressed warmly, as I sat and watched the #8 Oregon State Beavers play decent football against the Utah Utes inferior game, and win, 7-21 (probably pushing them up to #7, since the SC Game Cocks lost), I felt chill, and the thermostat was sinking below 67, so I gave up and coded the furnace back into the HVAC computer.

Hello, gas bills!

Letter to Mitt - 09-11-12

No, this letter isn't about the 9-11 attack, I'm convinced that you are properly respectful in that area of remembrance.

This letter is about the biggest and stealthiest weapon the Socialists have, and one that they use to undermine our Nation every day. In this respect, they are far more dangerous than the Islamists who perpetrated the attacks on 9-11-01.

The weapon to which I refer is environmental extremism, and no, it's not in the form of a "hockey stick" wielded by Al Gore, either. He was pretty much laughed off the stage and has retired to his counting room to count his millions.

The current emphasis of the environmental extremists is coal.

There is currently a full-on War on Coal in progress.

The facts are simple: the burning of coal to make heat, and the use of that heat to generate electricity, is an old technology, one which has become somewhat supplanted by newer electric-generation technologies, but not replaced by them. We still need coal to generate enough electricity to keep our economy running. That's a fact. Without coal-burning power plants in operation, we would have at least a 10% shortfall in power to feed the electric grid, some say as much as a 20% shortfall.

Since all the rigging of "global warming" statistics, the "Carbon Footprint" people have toned down their rhetoric somewhat, but only to switch tactics because of a new economic development in the coal business: we have offers from China to buy as much coal as we can load onto their contracted ships. We could export as much as 400,000 tons per day from West Coast ports if the enviros are to be believed. Even if you cut that figure back by a third for the usual enviro inflation of all "evils", it's still 250,000 tons per day. That coal money would go towards reducing our horrible balance of payments for all the importing of Chinese goods we do, and that's a GOOD thing.

As much as the Socialists love China, they hate the idea of burning all that coal over there, they hate the "Carbon Footprint". Rather than bring up that issue to their puppet-masters in Beijing however, they try to short-circuit the coal on it's transport from the mines in the Powder River Basin via railroad, to the proposed ports in the Pacific Northwest. All of a sudden, coal trains are Evil Incarnate around here. The Socialist/Enviro-whackos reason that if they can stop the coal from getting from the mines to the ships, they will prevent it's burning and thereby "save the planet". Of course, we all know about their list of "threats to the planet". None of them stand the light of investigative science. None of them.

Now it gets local.

The Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad would be moving that coal. They have the trackage, they have the motive power, and they own the coal cars to do it, and will build more without a dime of taxpayer money if they need to. The only thing stopping them is the Socialists, who don't want to let the railroad build the waterside coal terminals along the Columbia River and in the Puget Sound, and now, don't want to let them pull coal trains through this County.

Where's Mitt?

Mitt Romney has been conspicuously absent on the War on Coal, just as he's been mostly absent from the Pacific Northwest. If Mitt thinks that this is too hot an issue to take on, it simply shows that he will be a GW Bush kind of President if elected, and will never get his hands dirty taking on the Environmental Marxists mano-a-mano. If Mitt doesn't want to get down and dirty in the War on Coal, maybe it's time to say he's not our man. Maybe, just maybe, we'd be better electing the Devil We Know, than a wuss who won't ever take on the real enemy of our Nation.

In case you don't think that the eviro-whackos are the enemy, you may not live where I live. Those Marxist idiots took over this once-vibrant state in the 1980's, shut down it's most active industrial base, logging and wood-fiber production, and have since taken aim at most other things that they think are Threats to the Planet. Their financing comes out of California, where the Sierra Club taps into the mega-rich to develop the huge war-chests necesary to buy whole states like Oregon, Washington and Alaska.

So, Mitt, are you going to stand up and be counted on as a leader against the enviros, or are you, like GWB43, just going to watch them tear down what's left of natural resource management and use?

We're waiting, Mitt. I promise NOT to vote for you until I see you weigh in on the correct side in the War on Coal.

Northwest heat wave breaks...

It made it to the high 90's again yesterday, but by late evening, I noted a westerly breeze. I called up a yachtsman I knew was on the river, and he reported bucking a 26-knot wind while motoring "Orion", his Nauticat 33, downriver from St. Helens to Longview. He was taking plenty of water over the bow in the troughs, but the tough Danish motorsailer's design shrugs off that sort of weather.

We lost almost 40 degrees of heat between last evening and this morning, which is cloudy and cool, with a Deep Marine Layer in place now, the Heat Low having fled eastward.

The airconditioning is in the OFF mode, the first time in a while. Window fans are completing the cool-down of the interior, which is down to 70 on the first floor and 73 on the second floor.

Good thing, it will be cool for the Hot August Nights party at my Yacht Club tonight, so I can dance my a** off to the beats of the Loafers.

Thursday Thuds, mid-summer Edition

The first two Thuds are all about the effects of Summer weather (not the effects of climate Change).

Thud the First: "Earl the Pearl" Blumenauer (D), Portland, my congressional Representative (who rarely represents ME), recently sent me an email in which he clearly linked the current drought/heat in the mid-continent to Climate Change. OK, let's go straight to the chase here: Climate NEVER Equals Weather. Period. I had a Geography series in college, one term of which was Weather and Climate. Nowadays, the courses are entirely separate, but back then the University rolled tham into one course. The other two in the series which I also took (and got straight "A"s in) were Physical Geography and Cartography. On the first day of W&C, the Professor told us that Weather and Climate were two entirely separate subjects, and if, on any quiz, exam or paper, we confused the two, it was an automatic "F" for us. He then spent the rest of that first class explaining the difference, which, very roughly is: Weather is the current state of the atmosphere, and how we observe it, while Climate is the overall history and progression of the Atmosphere and how it relates to the planet. As you can see, Time is the defining factor between Weather and Climate, and in an instantaneous snapshot, you are ALWAYS looking at Weather, never Climate. Earl the Pearl can't seem to figure out the difference, so he flunks the Junior-level Geography series. Earl not only fails in his basic science knowledge, he then takes his failure  and turns it political: Note that in the above link to his blather, Rep. Blumenauer says "Congress can help prevent climate change". What a crock of crap! Rep. Blumenauer, for your complete ignorance, you take the fall, so the first, and loudest "Thud" is your sorry ass hitting the deck.

Thud the Second: Also weather related, we are going to see significant food price increases soon, because of the failure of the Midwestern Feed Corn crop, which has failed due to excessive heat and not enough rain (both Weather conditions in this snapshot, not Climate conditions). Yesterday, the Feddle Gummint, Obama version, came out with some warnings about the price increases. They warned that food prices would rise, an overall 3%, with some food components rising 4.5%. Unfargingbelieveable! If the railroads have a two-week shortage of grain cars due to mis-positioning (happens frequently), you get those levels of price increases. This increase is because of almost no product available to sell futures on, so I'm guessing that the actual increases will be 5 to 10 times as much as the Government has generously forecast for us. An 80% loss of the feed-corn crop will cause the farmers to radically shrink their herds of livestock (pigs and cattle eat corn), and poultry as well. The 4.5% increase forecast for meat and poultry prices is a joke, but the worse joke is on us: Ethanol is coming home to roost, to use an agri-metaphor. Ethanol, which is in full production now due to high fuel prices, will suck a lot of that short-supply of feed corn up. The Congress needs to dump Ethanol on it's ass, right now.

The Wauna, OR Ethanol plant on the lower Columbia River. Photo by Rivrdog. Permissions given to reproduce. Note all seven cooling towers are blasting away. There are TWO complete grain trains parked in the plant's sidings, and a train of tank cars to carry the Ethanol away, plus there's a barge dock for that, also. Big operation, all tax-subsided, taking grain from the food production chain.

The subsidies, the interventions in the market which favor Ethanol production over agricultural uses of feed grain, all must be ended, at least temporarily, or this drought and it's associated crop failures are going to kill the economy, and kill it dead. The lefty WaPo actually got it mostly right in it's editorial. The Thud! you hear is the Government report falling hard on the gun-deck.

Thud the Third: ...is ME, falling to the floor after being gob-smacked by the complete truth of an Ohman political cartoon. Ohman, you see, considers himself to be the Left's best visual aid in these parts, cartooning as he does on the Oregonian's Editorial Page almost every day. His 'toons are almost invariably a parade of lefty ideas, and they rarely skewer any lefty dogma, only righty ideas. Today, he not only skewers the President, he skewers the lefty, urban image of the City of Portland itself: A toon is worth a thousand words, and Ohman got it right today*.

* Key to lampoon: President in spendy Urban Outfitter or Columbia sportwear summer togs, smoke (doobie?) hanging from lips, backpack on back, mountain bike nearby, sandals on feet, microbrew in hand. Basic idea, the lefty Portland image fits Obama to a "T".

 

B.O.H.I.C.A.*, New Global Warming alarmism.

EhBeeCee News this time, and it was the lead story tonight.  "Major Alert" intones Diane Sawyer as the phrase "Tipping Point" gets casually tossed around. "State of the Climate (Fearmongering) Report just isued", the story blathers on. Cue the picture of the polar bear standing forlornly on the melting iceberg. More alarms: "The odds of a tipping point keep growing."

The story opened with "Weather equals climate?" as an affirmative question, then sort of said it wasn't, but if the writers know that weather NEVER equals climate**, why did they put that in? More fearmongering.

Remember the famously discredited "hockey stick" chart which propelled Al Gore to fame, then shame as a GlowBULL warNing" expert? Look at it this way, the "hockey stick" is back, except that it's now called a "tipping point". The fearmongers knew better than to mention ALGore's name during the story, but it wouldn't surprise me if commentary puts him back into the conversation.

Why now? With the election and the economy and Radical Islam still nipping at our heels, you'd think that the climate alarmists, having been roundly discredited in several major revealing incidents, would be a little less forthcoming this time.

It's "double-down" time! This is a characteristic trick of pathological liars in general, and liberal liars in particular: deny, deny, deny, counter-accuse. The corollary to that is, when caught in the first lie, make up a bigger one to cover the first one. That's what we're seeing now, the Next Big Lie.

BTW, liberloons, the "tipping point" idea was fine as an attention-getter in the climatescare movies, but it has never been proven to actually happen in real life. The climate is fairly well mapped out in the micro-paleontology of the ice caps, and there is no record of a "tipping point" there.

Here's the curmudgeon's last word. Now that the Cloward-Piven strategy is revealed, an early sort of "October surprise", the object/event to be overwhelmed this time is the election and it's previously-driving event horizon, the US economy. The (D)onks know that they will get beaten down by the sluggish-to-declining economy, so they are going to dance out of it with global warming alarmism. "How can we just sit there and let this happen. Quick, before the tipping point gets here, let's DO SOMETHING"

Mark my words, the "DO SOMETHNG' will include re-electing Barack Obama, despite his dismal record on anything related to climate change.

What can WE do?. Start looking for the emails and the evidence that this was set up. They've got to be out there, and if history is any guide, the alarmists aren't capable of any effective cover-up. After we find evidence of these connivances, let's make a supreme effort to tie it to the world liberloon conspiracy.

***************************

* B.O.H.I.C.A. (Bend Over, Here It Comes Again)

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** I took Weather and Climate in college as part of the Geophysical Science triad. On the first day, the Professor advised us that mixing up the two sciences, Weather and Climate, would result in grade failure, because if there was one sure thing on this earth, it was that there is ZERO mathematical relationship between weather and climate. Yeah, that was almost 50 years ago, but I have heard nothing in the intervening half-century to contradict that Professor. BTW, I got an "A" in the course, despite not having the math skill to do any of the really scary calculations to study past the introductory course.

Celebrate Independence with a Curmudgeon

Rivrdog's flag went up promptly at 0700. I hope yours is up on this Independence Day.

It's even more important to celebrate it this year, because Independence is under attack by the forces who would impose a government equally as burdensome on we moderns as King George imposed on the Colonists on these shores.

Some examples:

The Government wants to spy on our every movement. In addition to a projected 30,000 spy drones in our skies by 2015, the Government wants to force automakers to put GPS chips in our cars so that we may be taxed as we drive, or more obviously, to keep track of the more obnoxious of us. We elect these jerks. How come shucking off this mantle of oppression hasn't become our central election theme, anyway? I think we scare the forces of evil just as much by showing them that we don't care about their puny efforts as much as we do by having Government forces everywhere to fight them.

The Government wants to force us to abandon celebrations of Independence Day, because it might disturb the wildlife. Of course it disturbs the wildlife. For one day. It disturbs me to refuse this important celebration based on this specious reason. We celebrate our Independence loudly because we can, and when we can't, we aren't Independent anymore. There's much more of most wildlife in this Nation than there was when whites colonized it, anyway. The animals aren't so dumb, and many species of them thrive living next to us. I have three separate dens of coyotes living within 150 yards of me that I know of, and two more that I suspect are there in the wild creek bottoms nearby. There are deer in this suburb. Mountain lion are seen within ten miles of here, hawks and eagles fly the local skies, and all those critters will still be there on July 5th, after the fireworks.

Did you know if you take a legal firework and put tape on it to increase the pressure and sound of it's detonation, you are committing a felony? In Oregon you are. No intent to attack anyone need be proven by the rozzers, just that you taped up a firework, and you don't even have to set it off, just possess it.

I seldom shoot off fireworks anymore, because it's too bloody expensive, and I don't want to mess with the explosive to make them. Anything worth shooting off won't stay on my property, anyway, and that's the height of irresponsibility, IMHO. Now, the occasional blank .38 fired from a revolver...that's another story....