This Has Happened Before

Florida is experiencing a bad drought.

It's either the worst in 15 years or the worst ever.  Sources are stepping on each other.

I was trying to find a picture of a pet and ended up finding a picture of my, mostly dead, grass in my back yard from 2004.

I did a bit of Googling and found Florida was experiencing a drought in 2004.

My lawn looks better now than it did then, so my particular patch of grass is not seeing a worse drought than 22 years ago.  It is clear, though, that we are still in drought conditions.

Five years ago my grass was LUSH!

That photo also proves that all we need is some rain and the grass will get lush again.

Until the next drought. 

Urf Ower

Tonight, from 8:30 to 9:30 PM local time you are supposed to shut off everything to show your support for...

Living like a rutting caveman or something.

Bollocks to that!

I'm putting a space heater to blow on my air conditioner's thermostat with all the lights on and all four cars idling in the driveway. 

Duke Power sent me a thank-you card last year for my efforts! 

SNOW? But I Live In Florida!

Overnight Saturday, more than one model is predicting some kind of snow here on the Suncoast.

Up to a 1/4 inch!

Which will melt almost as fast as it drops.

I want a picture so I can say I saw it in person.

And to refute Al Gore who said that my house would be under water by now from all the glaciers melting and how snow was a thing of the past... 

It's Intergovernmental Not Interscientific

Lots of scientists saying that not only isn't the science settled, but the IPCC has been corrupt and lying for years about what the scientists involved have been saying about their studies.

Wish I'd said this to Anglave all those years ago when he was attacking me from the liberal bubble of Iowa State University. 

Oh, wait, I did.

Got me mad enough that I closed comms for a week.

When I opened them back up...

Let's just say he did not, and has not, reached out.

That was ten years ago.

Record!

Global warming caused the weather to break a 133 year old temperature record last night!

In 1892 the low was 40°F in Tampa.

Last night it was 38°F!

I blame SUV's and cow farts. 

Quantify Your Statement

“I knew it was coming, I have been preaching this stuff for 30 years, everything we’ve said about climate change has come true."

--Harrison Ford

Considering that I've been watching prediction after prediction about global warming and climate change fail for about 40 years, I am wondering what the dancing monkey is talking about.

It's especially irritating to listen to someone with a private jet lecture about anthropogenic climate change.

But he's made a claim, can he quantify it?

Here's a top ten list from 1970 to 2009...

1) In 1970, S. Dillon Ripley, a wildlife conservationist who served as secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, warned that 75 percent to 80 percent of species would be extinct by 1995. Wrong.

2) In 1970, Kenneth Watt, an ecologist and professor at the University of California, Davis, warned that “there won’t be any more crude oil,” that “none of our land will be usable” for agriculture, and the world would be 11 degrees colder by the year 2000. False.

3) In 1970, biologist Paul Ehrlich at Stanford University warned that by the end of the decade up to 200 million people would die each year from starvation due to overpopulation, life expectancy would plummet to 42 years, and all ocean life would perish. Extremely false.

4) In 1970, Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, predicted that “world population will outrun food supplies” and “the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine” by the year 2000. Didn’t happen.

5) In 1971, Dr. S. I. Rasool, an atmospheric scientist at NASA, predicted the coming of a “new ice age” within 50 years. Incorrect.

6) In 1975, Ehrlich, the Stanford biologist, warned that 90 percent of tropical rainforests and 50 percent of species would disappear within 30 years. Erroneous. 

7) In 1988, Hussein Shihab, environmental affairs director of the Maldives, warned that his island nation would be completely underwater within 30 years, which wouldn’t even matter because experts also predicted the Maldives would run out of drinking water by 1992. False.

8) In 2004, a Pentagon analysis warned of global anarchy due to climate change. Major European cities would be underwater by 2020, at which point Britain would suffer from a “Siberian” climate. Extremely false.

9) In 2008, Bob Woodruff of ABC News hosted a two-hour climate change special warning that New York City could be underwater by 2015, among other apocalyptic predictions. Didn’t happen.

10) In 2009, former vice president and climate activist Al Gore predicted the Arctic Ocean would have no ice by 2014, which is the same thing Greta Thunberg said would happen by 2022. Nope.

I ended a friendship over globull warmering because I got sick of being lectured on shit they were making the fuck up.

The East Anglia scandal should have ended it right there.

The repeated instances of data and methods being destroyed "inadvertently" so that experiments cannot be recreated should also stop the debate.

It stops being science when you cannot replicate the experiment to confirm the results. 

America Was Wrong About Ethanol - Study Shows

Cyclic

I finally remembered that I wanted to see what the explanation for there being no hole in the ozone later over the arctic when nearly all of the CFC emissions are in the Northern hemisphere.

It's because the polar vortex in the antarctic is stable compared to the same weather structure in the arctic.

What hit me in the explanation is the reason for the hole appears to be a "wall" of weather that keeps atmosphere from the outside from mingling with the inside and this, combined with colder temperatures than up North, allows the ozone to be depleted inside the vortex.

The cold also explains why this catalytic reaction doesn't run rampant across the rest of the planet.

You need chlorine and bromine radicals attached to sub-freezing ice crystals in an isolating environment for it to destroy ozone.

Since this vortex is cyclical, the "wall" dissipates and fresh ozone from the outside can flow in.

What this also means is this was never a world-wide threat to ozone.  It's a local phenomenon. 

More Guac Please Perhaps On Toast

The greenies have decided that avocados are now haram, I need to include them more often in my diet.

Which is great because they're good for me and I like them!

Another Damn Lies With Statistics

Remember that graph that showed how hot The Gulf was that compared a really recent average to a range starting in 1878?

There's also some swelteringly hot years before that cut off as well.

I can't imagine a meteorologist not knowing that.

If you're going to figure a mean you need to use the entire range!

Wanna bet if we use the records going all the way back to the 1600's that the Spanish were keeping that we're going to find that it's not really that much hotter today than it's been historically?

Damn Lies

A local weatherman posted a bar graph showing how much hotter the Gulf of Mexico America was than the average.

The graph covers from 1878 to present and compares the measured temperatures to an average from 1961-2010.

Average?  Do the mean the mean?  Mode?  Median?  They don't say.

But I happen to know something about math and a bit about statistics.

This is cherry picking.

The average they used is arbitrary and suspect that it's not near so bad if you calculated the mean temp from 1878 to present.

But why stop at 1878?

I happen to know a bit about The Old West too.  We had some record cold going on in the 19th century.  Like the year without a summer, 1816?  Four of the worst seven years for cold are in the 1800's and another is 1978 which is used in their determination for their mean.

You don't think they would have picked an average that's cooler than normal and then picked a start point that's also colder than average to make the current temperatures seem abnormally high, would they?

I got accused of having Dunning Krueger.

But Thag know this math. 

Urf Day

It's a pity that I cannot crank the AC and Heat at the same time with my entirely too modern house thermostat.

But what I can do is leave Moxie idling all day while I drive around in my six-liter V-8 hot-rod!

The AC doesn't even work in it, but I can run the fans at full tilt just to waste some extra energy doing nothing.

All the lights will be on all day.

FTW!

Clean Enough

It's a long standing axiom in engineering that the last 10% of improvement costs the same as the first 90%.

It can be rephrased as, "perfect is the mortal enemy of good enough."

I was a kid in the 70's.

I remember all the pollution my, not liberal at all, parents talked about.

I got to experience the change in air quality as it was happening in the suburbs of Chicago.

The pollution was real.  The improvement was real.

I've worked in water and wastewater treatment.  One of our bread and butter items was selling treatment plants to places that had run out of grandfathering.  The pollution was real.  The improvement was real.  Seeing how little a 1960's plant did to make the water better compared to a late '90's plant was sobering.

One of the things you get to see is the little chart of what's allowable.  Get a substance below x parts per million and you're legal and it's good.

What if x is arsenic?  Arsenic is poisonous!  That's bad!  Get rid of all of it!

Reducing it below the threshold where your body can deal with it is fairly simple and very cheap.  Getting rid of all of it is not.

And that's where we are with the environmentalists.

We've gotten rid of most of the air and water pollution.  Gotten it down below the harmful thresholds and life should be good.

But perfect is lurking, waiting, to kill off good enough to make life impossible.

That the environmentalists don't really seem to care about pollution but forcing a non-industrial lifestyle on everyone is evident in their making up new pollutants.

I am also old enough to remember when the goal was to get combustion from cars down to carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and water vapor.  The GOAL!

As soon as the automakers had pretty much done that and horsepower was returning to cars...  Nope!  Carbon emissions need to be zero!

Plus, food crops cannot be counted for carbon absorption.  Can't have man benefit from carbon in the air.

Why Isn't There More News About This

I've been seeing a couple car-related YouTubers talking about this:

It's great news, but doesn't seem to be getting a lot of coverage.

I want to know the specifics, and I am not finding anyone who's giving any.

OK

Florida's HVAC market is jacked compared to everywhere else that's reported in.

Yes, the prices are appalling.  Especially compared to places where AC is a luxury not life support.

The licensing requirements are steep.

The state and county regulations are numerous and hostile.

So my ducts will seem to be very expensive if you live in a more permissive location.

There's also the trust factor.  Do I trust the company that's doing the work?

In my case, yes.  They've dealt with me honestly in the past.

We've already experienced the shady side and we're willing to pay more for someone who will actually answer the phone when we need warranty work done.

We haven't even scratched what the federal environoweeny regs will be doing.

If you haven't had your HVAC done in the last few months and are expecting it to be like it was 10 years ago, be braced for a bit of a shock.  $2,000 systems are near $7,000 now because they can't just use refrigerants that work, they have to be under patent or they will destroy the ozone layer.

I'm still waiting on the explanation about how a heavier than air gas gets up to the ozone layer.  I'm also waiting for an explanation about how a gas that breaks down into harmless sub-components when exposed to sunlight survives the climb as well.

Freon just... can't do what the alarmists say it did.

Speaking of things with low probability:  How did all that CFC in North America not create an ozone hole at the North Pole?  Most stuff stays on its side of the equator and the southern hemisphere is way behind the northern for emissions.  Yet smoke stays up north, but CFCs damage the south?  Pull the other one, it has bells.

I Say The Same Thing I Said To The Firearms Industry

When a state passes punitive legislation against your business: Stop doing business there.

I said that about California when they started getting stupid about guns.

No sales to anyone in the state until everyone in the state can buy.

People can't have, Government can't have.

Well Vermont and New York have gone insane about petroleum.

Fuck 'em.

Stop sales in those states.

Take the hit.

I'd love to see what happens to those two states when there's no gas, diesel, propane or fuel oil.

Set the cutoff date for February 1, 2025.

That's the height of winter, isn't it?

Being stupid should be painful and I think that the legislatures and voters in those two states deserve some pain from this idiocy.

Cheaper

The fly-away cost of an F-35A is now cheaper than an electric school bus!

But the price per charging station funded through NEVI and CFI is just, barely, less than $11.9 million!

Axial Tilt

Since this is a popular question in the comments.

Why yes, when it gets cooler north of the equator, it gets warmer south of the equator; and vice versa.

Swapping about every six months.

This is because Earth is tilted on her axis and one hemisphere will get more sun than the other when it's tilted at the sun instead of away.

It also gets cooler the farther from the equator and further from sea-level you go.

Now you can stop asking because I've answered.

If you're wondering where your comment went, 25 people asking the same thing in three posts makes me think "bot" and not "actual person" especially when there's no profile associated with the login.

E Tu Australia

 

Again.

Your "searing" temperatures must be warmer than I set my air conditioner to be considered "hot".

I was just reading that Sydney had a high of 77° F and there was much ado about how hot that was.

Darwin and Port Hedlund are getting up there to some real heat at nearly 90° F, but that's just normal Florida heat.

But just the interior and the northern cities seem to be actually hot.  The middle of Australia is kinda known for being warmer than the rest because it's got unique weather patterns.  It's fascinating reading for someone from the midwest.  To me, "entire nation" means that, well, the entire nation should be having some damn heat and it looks like a normal distribution to me.

And are we going to ignore the elephant in the room or talk about how comfortable Tasmania is when "Entire Nation" is gripped by a heatwave?  That just makes me wonder how fucking cold that place is normally when flannel shirt weather is a heatwave.

By the way, it's summer in the down under, so summer weather and temperatures are to be expected.

Well OK Then

Dozens of luxury condos, hotels in Miami sinking at ‘unexpected’ rates, new study reveals...

Takeaway quote though:

Experts called the study a “game changer” that raises a host of questions about development on vulnerable barrier islands. For starters, experts said, this could be a sign that rising sea levels, caused by the continued emission of greenhouse gases, is accelerating the erosion of the limestone on which South Florida is built.

EVERYTHING is globull warmering. 

Except for the complete lack of measurable sea level rise.

Barrier islands are sand bars.  We didn't use to care about erosion on them and they did what the name said:  They were a barrier to the waves and protected the mainland.  It was only after we started building on them and oceanfront property going stratospheric in value we started noticing how they would be eroded by the water.

I'm willing to bet that building tall buildings on sand is a bad plan regardless of sea level.

PS: They mention that the measured sinkage is within the expectations of the engineers who designed the buildings.