etudiant

11 hours ago, gravitylover said:

I want a mini goat. No more mowing and free fertilizer for the garden. 

Don't they also eat tin cans? Hoping for an organic trash processor.

1 hour ago, IWXwx said:

Locally, our tests have a 48-72 hour turnaround. I don't think that's bad considering the numbers being tested. Also, in Indiana, I can get tested daily if I so desire. However, I don't know how government can force frequent testing. A percentage of the population won't even wear a mask. Do you think people with that mindset will agree to the government requiring frequent testing?

You raise a valid concern.

The Asian testing regimes all have as a common basis the ability of the authorities to track all phone carriers, indefinitely. That is quite unacceptable to many Americans, even as they blithely allow Google and others to monitor their location along with every keystroke they make.

Absent the Asian approach, it seems that Sweden has chosen a viable alternative, which is to prevent mass gatherings which would generate huge surges in caseload, but keep business as usual mostly, letting the health services cope with the victims. That minimizes the toll fairly effectively while also limiting the catastrophic economic damage generated by lockdowns.

I just wonder how Dr Fauci reconciles his push for extensive lockdowns with his Hippocratic oath: to above all, do no harm. The lockdowns have not really helped, but they have certainly ruined many and made us all much more indebted, with no visible benefit.

What I do not understand is the incoherent nature of the approach in the US and elsewhere in Europe.

What is the purpose of testing people other than to allow people who are infected to isolate themselves. Yet it still takes days to get a result, so a good spread to those around the person can be confidently expected and contact tracing is hopeless. Bill Gates, who is no dummy, has called our testing useless, perhaps for that reason, but it continues unchanged.

That is very different from the approach followed in Taiwan and South Korea, where the virus has been reasonably contained. Frequent testing and fast tracking appear to work. But neither Europe nor the US appear interested in that course. Perhaps there is an acceptance that the virus is not containable, much as the Swedish health authorities recognized earlier.

35 minutes ago, OSUmetstud said:

The CDC never had the ability to make up for the test failure early on because the administration wouldn't let them to take the lead on the pandemic. Public health is what they do, they are supposed to be in charge in all of this. The HHS put political pressure on them often and did political review of scientific literature. 

Fauci has been serving this country for 50 freaking years. The right hates him. They have done everything to make it political. He's said to wear mask 1000s of times after the initial stuff in March. The anti-mask rhetoric is not about what fauci said in March. It's just another political tool to justify being anti-mask. 

This sounds a lot like the "scientists are the problem" that couldn't be father from the truth. 

I've no idea whether the CDC was prohibited from allowing other countries or industry tests, but they failed to provide a working test themselves because their material was contaminated.

That is a failure which the CDC owns, not the White House or others. Likewise, the Fauci flip flops on masks did not serve the country well.

I recognize Dr Fauci's long service, but in this case, I think he and his organization failed abysmally. He had lots of access to the microphone, if he felt pressured, he had the power to push back, but he never did.

2 hours ago, Angrysummons said:

One thing that blows me away with the vote/covid fatigue, it was the old people that had it more than younger people. Many Boomers who never voted, basically became a one issue voters, yet are the ones that voted for Trump due to pandemic............ok lol. If they get sick and die, well. Tough. I read Darwin as well, but I don't think Charles quite meant this is general.

That seems seriously silly.

We should be disappointed by the abject failure of the CDC and of Dr Fauci, as well of Trump if he was dumb enough to believe them.

The CDC and Dr Fauci were actively harmful to the efforts to curb this epidemic. Specifically, during the first 3 months of 2020, when there was still a slim chance of controlling the epidemic, they insisted that only their own test be allowed, rejecting any industry or foreign options. Of course their own test was slow and defective, which prevented any prospect of curbing the outbreak.

Since then, Dr Fauci has added to his failures by his flip flops on masks. from 'we don't need them' to ' we all need to wear them'.

Credibility is precious and imho neither the CDC nor Dr Fauci deserve any in light of their performance this year.

The only societies that have managed to curb this pandemic have been Asian. No Western nation has developed an effective response in the 9 months of grace we were given..

Now with winter coming and the case load again soaring, much as happened during the Spanish Flu, the Western politicians only idea is another lockdown, ruining yet wider swaths of the societies they are leading.

Did 75 years of following US leadership make all these countries stupid?

24 minutes ago, LibertyBell said:

If we actually had a 920 mb low hit us directly, what would that do? 100 mph winds and a high storm surge regardless of what kind of storm it was?

What's the strongest storm that has actually hit land between Cape May and Eastport, ME and how strong was it?

 

Think the 1821 hurricane had a bigger storm surge than Sandy and is probably the strongest in recorded times. However, Wikipedia notes that there was a stronger storm around 1300+/-, based on evidence from diggings.

The weather will always confound our expectations, think of Dorian glued in place for days and then transpose that to our NJ/NY/ Ct corner of the world.

3 hours ago, LibertyBell said:

they're destroying the forests there?  In the Age of Nature series they were showing how Bhutan became the first carbon negative nation on the planet by preserving their forests and building dams by hand to stop flooding from ice melt.

 

Sadly very much true, for instance some of the best old growth forests in Poland, notably the Białowieża Forest, have been decimated. An outbreak of bark beetles provided the pretext for wholesale logging. The pellets were sold to the UK subsidized 'green power' stations. Similar deals were implemented elsewhere along the Baltic. 

2 hours ago, gravitylover said:

Ooh good reminder, gotta turn the water off to the spigot too. My lettuce and tomatoes are probably goners  

Maybe save the lettuce at least  with a blanketed cold frame? Although 24 degrees is tough.

2 hours ago, LibertyBell said:

Looks like the best way may be to preserve the forests we have.

Tell that to the people pelletizing the old forests of Eastern Europe to feed the boilers of the 'green renewable fuel' electric power plants.

2 hours ago, LibertyBell said:

Saw a great series on Nature last night about expanding forests to take carbon out of the atmosphere.  Bhutan is the world's first carbon negative nation.  We need to expand forests to get them to cover 60% of the world's land surface and that means a few trillion more trees.  That will greatly help our efforts to get carbon dioxide levels lower and improve biodiversity.

 

Forest fires are an issue.

In general, all the reforestation schemes that I've seen have been execrable, spindling pulpwood conifers planted way too close together, obviously worthless as ecosystems or even habitats.

Here as everywhere else, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Ensuring a proper execution of the 'green' design requires hard headed management, something in very short supply.

27 minutes ago, Snowstorms said:

I would be too. DST is useless. Whether the clock moves ahead one hour or back one hour, you can't change the orbital cycle of the Earth. The days will get longer or shorter regardless of that one-hour change. 

Quite true and the desire appears to be there to get rid of DST, but it seems to take forever to get any actual progress.

44 minutes ago, Moderately Unstable said:

So, basically it has to do with the convective structure of the storm. From the eye, air twists upwards and circulates outwards in a divergent pattern. Surrounding concentric rings of convection form because certain regions concentrate momentum and energy. Imagine a bunch of big vertically oriented ovals. Air rises, is ejected outwards, and then descends further away from the center of circulation. This creates alternating regions of rising and sinking air motion. The stronger the storm, the more well organized, curved, and structured, these bands get.

 

MU

Thank you, that helps some. Guess these things are a lot more complicated than they look at first glance. Time to hit the books again. Suggestions would be very welcome.

4 minutes ago, eyewall said:

I am thinking that spot was heavily sheltered.

Bourbon St in the French Quarter is pretty much the highest ground in NOLA afaik.  Guess they just got lucky.

In any case, the cameras are back on and the winds appear to have died down, presumably the eye passing.

3 minutes ago, eyewall said:

I am going to guess the hurricane.

You're surely right, but the images until they went dead were of a garden variety thunderstorm, nothing massive or damaging.

The potted plants along the balconies were doing fine and the barricades in front of construction were not moving.

NOLA cameras seem to have cut out. Is there a blackout or some other cause?

Can someone please explain the 'bands'? It seems that these storms have a structure, but why does it develop in bands?

8 hours ago, ORH_wxman said:

Area is more accurate if you want to know the precise value of surface that is covered with ice.

Extent is better for things like shipping...if a region is covered with 40% ice concentration, you probably don't want to try going through it without an ice breaker. That region would be considered "covered in ice extent" even though there is open water mixed in. Area would give us a lower value because it's only 40% ice.

Thank you, that makes sense. 

From a climate monitoring perspective, that suggests area is the one to focus on.

In that context, I note that area is the lowest ever for the date, https://cryospherecomputing.tk/

Hard for me to understand why this is a disputed fact.

Which is the better metric, area or extent?

I've been focused on area,  thinking that extent just adds another variable, yet most contributors prefer to use extent. What are the pros and cons driving the choice?

6 hours ago, donsutherland1 said:

New research published by the National Bureau of Economics (NBER) indicated that rising sea levels are beginning to hinder home sales in vulnerable coastal regions. Put another way, markets are not denying the reality of climate change or one of its major adverse impacts.

Abstract:

In this paper, we explore dynamic changes in the capitalization of sea level rise (SLR) risk in housing and mortgage markets. Our results suggest a disconnect in coastal Florida real estate: From 2013-2018, home sales volumes in the most-SLR-exposed communities declined 16-20% relative to less-SLR-exposed areas, even as their sale prices grew in lockstep. Between 2018-2020, however, relative prices in these at-risk markets finally declined by roughly 5% from their peak. Lender behavior cannot reconcile these patterns, as we show that both all-cash and mortgage-financed purchases have similarly contracted, with little evidence of increases in loan denial or securitization. We propose a demand-side explanation for our findings where prospective buyers have become more pessimistic about climate change risk than prospective sellers. The lead-lag relationship between transaction volumes and prices in SLR-exposed markets is consistent with dynamics at the peak of prior real estate bubbles.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w27930

 

Seems a sensible piece of work.

Unfortunately, more people will read about President Obama's purchase of an ocean front home in Martha's Vineyard than NBER research.

7 minutes ago, skierinvermont said:

The studies I posted were independent scientific assessments of bird deaths. Your claims of underreporting are without evidence or merit. Given that cats, windows, and Comm towers kill 1000x more I think those are the bigger issue to focus on not a few birds killed by wind mills. 
 

The benefit is an end to strip mining, oil spills, oil holding ponds, air pollution which kills tens of thousands of adults just in the United States every year, climate change, acid rain, and much more. The oil and gas industry has wreaked havoc on the environment and human health for far too long. Oil holding ponds alone, which is like the smallest aspect of the oil industries affects, kill more birds than windmills such as the picture above from an oil holding pond. That’s just the tip of the iceberg with oil.

Windmills are selective killers, they preferentially kill large soaring birds, eagles, hawks and other large avifauna. The victims,  who seek out the same windy spots to stay in the air without much effort, cannot see the blade coming down of them from above. Removing the slow breeding large birds this way is not a sensible policy imho.

They also are efficient bat killers, as the vacuum left by the blade speeding by (tip speed is close to sonic velocity) ruptures the bats lungs, but bats get less attention.from the media.

That said, no argument about the damages inflicted by the fossil fuel industry. But that is no reason to give the other 'green' power initiatives a license to destroy either.

2 hours ago, Prospero said:

I do try to contribute quality more than raise an eyebrow now and then speaking what is truly on my mind. But hey, Truth (or possible Truth) is and has always been a scary and dangerous concept. We could go back hundreds of years and see examples of "conspiracy theories" being denied that were true and angered people only to learn in history how true they turned out to be. Even the weather modification experiments in the 60s were conspiracy theories until they were acknowledged.

I'll try to be more conservative.

I love this forum and hope I do not get banned altogether. GOL (ghost of leroy) is still here, so maybe I'll be OK even though on an ever growing list of ignores...

When considering the validity of conspiracy theories, Bismarck's axiom, 'Never believe anything until it has been officially denied', would be worth keeping in mind.

43 minutes ago, blizzard1024 said:

And one more thing, when the price of energy goes sky high because of wind and solar which now dots the landscape and degrades the environment, people resort to burning wood because they can't afford to heat their homes. Deforestation goes up. We have been seeing this in Europe. It's a huge problem in the 3rd world when they don't have access to cheap fossil fuels. So they raze their environment causing massive deforestation and mass extinctions. So yeah the green new deal or anything similar before the technology and cost supports it is the biggest threat to our environment in so many ways. If you are an environmentalist like me don't let the name fool you. It is a disaster for our wildlife and natural habitats. 

At least in Europe, the deforestation is not because people cannot afford to heat their homes, it is because the 'green' incentives for 'renewable' energy have made it attractive to use pelletized wood chips instead of coal to fuel the power stations. So vast stretches of old forest have been razed to provide these pellets, which incidentally are a much dirtier fuel.

This kind of senseless policy has been vigorously condemned by conservationists, but is hugely profitable for the recipients of the incentives, so ihe damage continues.

16 hours ago, forkyfork said:

surprised there isn't a flash flood watch. what an impressive sounding for heavy rain

Very nice call!

7 hours ago, ldub23 said:

Just goes to show seasonal forecasting  has a  long way to go. I was reading the  NHC  disco on little  paul and they mentioned how "Parched" the atmosphere  is. everything  is  parched and sheared even though the east  pac  continues to cool. I still think sept20-oct  10 might  offer something  interesting but  i also think oct 10 is about the end  of the season.

Surely that is a divergence worth investigating. We all know that water vapor is the preeminent greenhouse 'gas', so a parched atmosphere just seems curious given the well above average temperatures we've seen. Does it mean the winds off Africa are unusually dry?