Half-baked Republican Presidential Fruitcakes (and fellow confections)

Turtwig

LOL!
That's the 2nd thread this week in A&A where Anno 2070 has been referenced.

Hotblack Desiato

Overheal wrote: »

Its more about how global heat energy circulates. The planet does in fact lose energy via radiation into space just as it comes in from the sun via radiation. With less wind force you would get worse hot spots and what kind of effect that has on how wind circulates at the poles, where we have the ice caps I havent a clue but be careful about rocking that boat.

Yes but I doubt we could extract so much wind power to make a difference globally.

Pherekydes wrote: »

What's frightening is that the fig leaves are on the fig trees and we have no fig rolls for the end times. Bloody frustrating that.

Matthew 21:18-22

Early in the morning, as Jesus was on his way back to the city, he was hungry. Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, “May you never bear fruit again!” Immediately the tree withered. When the disciples saw this, they were amazed. “How did the fig tree wither so quickly?” they asked. Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done. If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”

Hotblack Desiato

Jernal wrote: »

NASA got conceptual ideas for that too. A giant space mirror to reflect incident solar radiation.

Oh ffs! I can't link to that either.
:mad:

You could reflect it off into space.. OR focus it down on a solar furnace (or on your enemies, perhaps.)

Back in the 70s they had concepts for putting hundreds of huge solar power satellites (up to several kms in size) into geostationary orbit, and beam the power down by microwave. The microwaves would cook anything that flew through the beam, generate massive radio interference, possibly heat the upper atmosphere in an unnatural fashion, and the sats would pretty much kill off any optical or radio astronomy but hey, it's green power :pac:

joseph brand

Overheal wrote: »

Its more about how global heat energy circulates. The planet does in fact lose energy via radiation into space just as it comes in from the sun via radiation. With less wind force you would get worse hot spots and what kind of effect that has on how wind circulates at the poles, where we have the ice caps I havent a clue but be careful about rocking that boat.

Anno 2070 is a nice sim style game that incorporates the concept. Stacking wind farms near eachother reduces their total efficiency/output.

Never mind drilling for oil at the poles, it's wind farms in Ireland that's causing global warming.

What about tidal power? Who's going to stick up for the Atlantic? Taking all it's energy.

Since solar panels harness the sun's rays, and prevent them warming the earth (soil/ rock), is there a chance that solar and wind cancel each other out? :rolleyes:

joseph brand

Obamacare Will Destroy America! Says Rep. Broun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm2hJ-P06Ks

The end times are near. Bachmann was right all along*.




*Disclaimer: Bachmann is clinically insane and needs to be sectioned.

Turtwig

joseph brand wrote: »

Never mind drilling for oil at the poles, it's wind farms in Ireland that's causing global warming.

What about tidal power? Who's going to stick up for the Atlantic? Taking all it's energy.

Since solar panels harness the sun's rays, and prevent them warming the earth (soil/ rock), is there a chance that solar and wind cancel each other out? :rolleyes:

Wut?

Global warming is a global issue. Depending on the region various phenomena have a different impact on the climate. Depending on how close a wind farm is to the equator it's impact is different. A wind farm in Texas is more like to contribute towards warming than cooling. That's science, no matter how incredulous it may seem to you.

joseph brand

joseph brand wrote: »

DERP!!

Barton is an oil industry shill.

Rep. Joe Barton Apologizes to BP's Tony Hayward for White House "Shakedown"

"I do not want to live in a country where any time a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong is subject to some sort of political pressure that is -- again, in my words, amounts to a shakedown. So I apologize."
House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) later said he disagreed with Barton's characterization, and GOP leaders put out a statement calling his comments "wrong."

According to the Associated Press, Barton has taken more than $100,000 in political contributions from oil and gas interests since the beginning of 2009, more than all but one other member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

This man is a hero, sticking up for the giants of the oil and gas industry, who have ruined the lives of many along the gulf.

Joe Barton Cites Great Flood To Disprove Human Role In Climate Change

If only those pesky 'scientists' would read the bible (cos it's all in there y'all), they'd see that we didn't cause The Flood, so eh, there. /smug face

joseph brand

Jernal wrote: »

Wut?

Global warming is a global issue. Depending on the region various phenomena have a different impact on the climate. Depending on how close a wind farm is to the equator it's impact is different. A wind farm in Texas is more like to contribute towards warming than cooling. That's science, no matter how incredulous it may seem to you.

I'm open to correction, but I have to admit I'm stunned.

Have you been reading Fox news?

Researchers at the State University of New York at Albany analysed the satellite data of areas around large wind farms in Texas, where four of the world's largest farms are located, over the period 2003 to 2011.

The results, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, showed a warming trend of up to 0.72 degrees Celsius per decade in areas over the farms, compared with nearby regions without the farms.

"We attribute this warming primarily to wind farms," the study said. The temperature change could be due to the effects of the energy expelled by farms and the movement and turbulence generated by turbine rotors, it said.

It's not like Fox 'news' to be against renewable energies. :rolleyes:

No, wind farms are not causing global warming.

Scientific studies are misrepresented all the time. But now and again the distortions get particularly bad. That was the case Monday, when Fox News ran the headline, “New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming.” A number of other media outlets did the same thing. And it’s... not true at all.

(George Frey/Bloomberg) The frenzy started after Liming Zhou, a scientist at the University of Albany, published a short study in Nature Climate Change. Zhou’s team analyzed satellite data for a handful of large wind farms in west-central Texas. And he found that, between 2003 and 2011, the surface temperature in the immediate vicinity of Texas’ wind farms had heated up a fair bit, especially during the night hours, as the wind turbines pulled warmer air from the atmosphere down closer to the ground.

As Zhou himself explained in an accompanying Q&A (pdf) about his paper: “the warming effect reported in this study is local and is small compared to the strong background year-to-year land surface temperature changes. Very likely, the wind turbines do not create a net warming of the air and instead only re-distribute the air’s heat near the surface, which is fundamentally different from the large-scale warming effect caused by increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.”

Read that paragraph again. Wind turbines appear to move some warm air around in a relatively small patch of Texas — a fact that might be of note to, say, nearby farmers. But that’s not the same thing as putting more carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere, which traps heat that would otherwise escape out into space and which leads to a net overall increase in the Earth’s temperature. The latter is global warming. The former is not.

To get a sense for what scientists know about this topic, I called Mark Jacobson, an environmental engineer at Stanford who has done a fair bit of modeling work in this area. The key thing to note is that, for now, humanity doesn’t use anywhere near enough wind power to make a big difference to global wind patterns. Jacobson’s earlier research suggested that there’s somewhere around 72 terawatts of wind power that could feasibly be harnessed worldwide. At the end of 2011, the world’s wind power generation capacity was still just 0.2 terawatts. (Human beings use about 16 terawatts of energy, all told.)
And scientists dispute what would happen if we did start blanketing the globe with wind turbines. One 2004 study led by the University of Calgary’s David Keith found that getting just 2 terawatts of electricity from wind could produce “non-negligible climactic change at continental scales” — including shifts in rainfall patterns. (That much wind power would not, however, change the overall temperature of the planet.) But, says Jacobson, the effects that Keith’s group modeled don’t appear to be distinguishable from random fluctuations in the Earth’s climate. “To me,” says Jacobson, “that’s a meaningless result.”

Isn't this just a case of the oil industry blowing hot air.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYKIP0vtovI

Turtwig

I never meant to imply that wind farms everywhere caused global warming. I was just stating that there's an element of truth to the Republican's statement that they do appear to contribute a positive temperature to their local area. I was stating that in Texas the research suggests that wind farms there contribute towards warming in that area. Global warming is a complex phenomenon that consists of many systems working in tandem.
Sorry if there was any confusion.

Wind turbines appear to move some warm air around in a relatively small patch of Texas — a fact that might be of note to, say, nearby farmers. But that’s not the same thing as putting more carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere, which traps heat that would otherwise escape out into space and which leads to a net overall increase in the Earth’s temperature. The latter is global warming. The former is not.

Also regarding this. Global warming isn't [latex]CO_2[/latex] in the atmosphere. Global warming is the rise in the average temperature of the earth. Some regions may cool, some regions may get warmer. It's the average temperature of the earth. Whether it's [latex]CO_2[/latex], Aliens or the Sun that's main the driver has nothing to do with the terminology global warming. Anthropogenic Global Warming or AGW is the term the author should have used here. It's a seemingly subtle distinction but referring to everything [latex]CO_2[/latex] related as global warming leads to confusion. For climate models to be accurate regional climate effects, such as the large scale wind farm, if significant, are important. Not just of note to the local farmers.

Hotblack Desiato

CO₂ not CO2 or (worse) C02. It's not that hard to get right

Turtwig

ninja900 wrote: »

CO₂ not CO2 or (worse) C02. It's not that hard to get right

Posted that from my phone feck off!:D

Overheal

ninja900 wrote: »

Yes but I doubt we could extract so much wind power to make a difference globally.

thats probably what they used to say about carbon emissions. whoops.

joseph brand wrote: »

Since solar panels harness the sun's rays, and prevent them warming the earth (soil/ rock), is there a chance that solar and wind cancel each other out?

Actually there are reports that mega-solar farms are having a significant impact on their local climates.

http://in.reset.org/blog/potential-environmental-impacts-and-obstacles-solar-energy

"The direct environmental impact of installing a solar farm has to do with the clearing large areas of land which in turn affects native vegetation and wildlife in numerous ways and has an adverse ecological impact and can affect the rainfall and the drainage of a region. Reflected light beams coming from the concentrated solar power system can, if misdirected, interfere with aircraft operating pathways. CSP system operations involves high temperature emissions in surroundings which may pose an environmental risk. These facilities also produce electric and magnetic fields which can hamper the natural surrounding."

Or if you prefer a more academic report: http://www.bnl.gov/pv/files/pdf/229_RSER_WildLife_2011.pdf [PDF]

I didn't vet these 2 examples very hard mind, I have to use the mens room and Im procrastinating I need to write an essay and turn it in in the next 2 hours. But needless to say it stands to reason that large solar arrays definitely impact the climate and ecology. Less so than fossil, IMO, but still impact it and back to the original point - is not infinite or free from negative side effects, further to the politicians point.

Turtwig

Jernal wrote: »

Posted that from my phone feck off!:D

That was definitely the wrong smiley.

Sarky

Overheal wrote: »

giving that a "Derp" isn't really meritable indeed. Its got truth. Wind power is not infinite.

Semantics, perhaps, but considering that the winds are a result of the atmosphere absorbing some 90% of the solar energy that reaches Earth, we probably have another good 4 billion years of it left. Wind power is fairly infinite. What he might mean is extracting power from a wind current might change the current. Very different thing altogether. Wind farms will not suck up all the wind ever.

Wind farms harness a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of any area's wind, anyway. I suspect that our politician friend is opining chiefly from his hoop.

Genghiz Cohen

thats probably what they used to say about carbon emissions. whoops.

Now THAT is spacious reasoning.

Brian Shanahan

Jernal wrote: »

God just might kill a kitten.

I am no longer in the business of killing kittens, Death used to get quite morose every time I did son.

However, goldfish are not an issue.

joseph brand

Overheal wrote: »

I didn't vet these 2 examples very hard mind, I have to use the mens room and Im procrastinating I need to write an essay and turn it in in the next 2 hours. But needless to say it stands to reason that large solar arrays definitely impact the climate and ecology. Less so than fossil, IMO, but still impact it and back to the original point - is not infinite or free from negative side effects, further to the politicians point.

Is not infinite? The Sun's rays? I guess you're right, because we've only got 5.4 BILLION years left (book a sun holiday soon), so yeah, my bad. Also, we're running out of wind it seems. Better fly some kites soon and make the most of it.

Tip: Stop listening to Faux news, Limbaugh, Jones, Beck, Bachmann, Santorum, Norquist, Armey, Scarborough and any other of those christian jacka**es.

joseph brand

Jernal wrote: »

Wut?

Global warming is a global issue. Depending on the region various phenomena have a different impact on the climate. Depending on how close a wind farm is to the equator it's impact is different. A wind farm in Texas is more like to contribute towards warming than cooling. That's science, no matter how incredulous it may seem to you.

My comment was quite sarcastic. Hence the smiley.


I know that Global warming is a global issue. The clue is in the title. I was replying to Overheal's incredulous response that 'Wind power is not infinite'. Which would be true, if we all lived for another Billion years and feared for the next generation/s.

This country is, sadly, very dependant on foreign fossil fuels. Wouldn't it be better if we could be a little more self sufficient? We have an enviable climate for forestry, sockfulls of wind and crashing waves on our western seaboard (just ask the surfers from all around the globe who visit to ride our Atlantic waves). We could also be surrounded by oil fields, but that's beside my point.

Wind and solar power are renewable technologies. Calling them finite is absurd at best.

jank

joseph brand wrote: »

My comment was quite sarcastic. Hence the smiley.


I know that Global warming is a global issue. The clue is in the title. I was replying to Overheal's incredulous response that 'Wind power is not infinite'. Which would be true, if we all lived for another Billion years and feared for the next generation/s.

This country is, sadly, very dependant on foreign fossil fuels. Wouldn't it be better if we could be a little more self sufficient? We have an enviable climate for forestry, sockfulls of wind and crashing waves on our western seaboard (just ask the surfers from all around the globe who visit to ride our Atlantic waves). We could also be surrounded by oil fields, but that's beside my point.

Wind and solar power are renewable technologies. Calling them finite is absurd at best.

Wind power is not infinite in the way that it is windy 24x7x365 never mind the noise pollution it creates and how it destroys the scenery of some of the most beautiful places Ireland has to offer. That is not even going into the cost of producing a Kwh of energy say compared to gas or oil.

Renewable energy is generally a good idea but it is very expensive to generate and not always practical. Tbh Ireland should go Nuclear but that is a conversation for another time. My point is that the ideology of "renewable is ALWAYS good" and "fossil fuels are ALWAYS bad" leads to the same black and white discourse that is common on many a debate that many love to pursue. Both have their merits.

Sulla Felix

Wind power, I have to say seems to me like a loser. They've shown in Colorado how despite them increasing the number of wind turbines to meet the mandated 20% renewable target, emissions at the coal fired plants are actually rising per Kw even though the overall Kws produced are dropping. Something to do with the inefficiencies inherent in throttling the plants up and down on a sometimes hourly basis to account for the fluctuating nature of the wind power generated.

Nuclear, tidal and solar all have problems of their own but less fundamental ones. Particularly like the idea of those solar driven steam turbines they wanted to stick in the Sahara. Can't remember the exact numbers but the prototypes seemed to generate more energy pount for pound than normal solar arrays.

robindch

A bunch of teabillies meet Sarah Palin and hear a lawyer tell Obama a few home truths:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/13/larry-klayman-obama-quran_n_4094589.html

Larry Klayman wrote:

[...the USA is...] "ruled by a president who bows down to Allah," [...and...] "is not a president of "'we the people." I call upon all of you to wage a second American nonviolent revolution, to use civil disobedience, and to demand that this president leave town, to get up, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come up with his hands out,"

Sulla Felix

robindch wrote: »

A bunch of teabillies meet Sarah Palin and hear a lawyer tell Obama a few home truths:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/13/larry-klayman-obama-quran_n_4094589.html

Really? They're equating themselves with the 60s libbers? :mad:

robindch

Bob Carroll of Skeptics Dictionary fame, visited Europe recently and compared here and then with there and now:

Bob Carroll wrote:

I've never read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shirer's account of how Hitler and his Nazi comrades rose to absolute power and how they failed to fulfil their fantasy of a mighty Germany built on the ruins of Russia and other countries, rid of impure non-Aryans and all those who didn't share their myths about Germans, destiny, races, history, masters and slaves, etc. I figured it was about time to read for myself what I'd been told in other books about what happened in Europe during the decade or so before my birth. Like most highly emotional experiences, reading the account of Nazi mythology, passionately believed by political fanatics hell bent on imposing their will on nations they deem inferior, has affected everything I perceive these days. For example, Ted Cruz and the Tea Party folks seem to me now like the one-dimensional fanatics who took over Germany by wit and might in the 1930s. Obviously, these American fanatics are not aiming to impose a dictatorship on the rest of us. They want to dismantle government except for a few things they deem essential, such as national defense. The constant push to reduce taxes is a way to that end. With less money coming in, government has less power to fund social welfare programs or build and maintain infrastructure. What the Tea Party folks share with the Nazis is the absolute conviction that their myths about our government, Obama's birthplace and religion, the Christian nation, death panels, economics, aliens, etc. are unchallengeable. They also share the passion of the Nazis to see their will be done or bring down their enemies (anybody who disagrees with them, but especially "liberals") on top of them. Do they really think that if they can't cause Obama to fail, they will make things so messy that the people will clamor for the Tea Party to save the nation from total collapse? I don't know, but their fanaticism bothers me and I think it should bother more people than it apparently does.
My first day back from vacation I read a newspaper, The Sacramento Bee, something I hadn't done in a month. Two stories stood out on October 3: one about a practice in California's Department of Corrections (CDC) and the other about the National Security Agency collecting records about where Americans were when they made calls from their mobile phones. (I learned later that the NSA has also been collecting online contact lists from places like Yahoo.) The CDC is being sued by inmates for "brutal and inhumane" treatment. The charges include the claim that mentally ill inmates have been shackled at the arms and ankles while being made to stand inside metal cages the size of phone booths. Mentally ill inmates have been pepper sprayed in their cells for refusing to obey orders to come out for their "treatments." I suppose there is some comfort in knowing that it could be worse: forcing or coercing mentally ill inmates into sterilization was a common practice in California until it was outlawed in 1979.

Somehow I'm not comforted by the information that the NSA decided not to implement their plan to collect information on where we are when make mobile phone calls.

Fortunately, these are isolated incidents and not part of a party's or group's plan to control everything according to their beliefs in the inferiority of certain people, the need to control our thoughts as well as our actions, or the need to know nearly everything about everybody under their rule. I don't want to fall into a slippery slope argument, but there is a danger that once we get used to our government invading our privacy in every area possible, some sinister group in the future might use these snooping mechanisms for evil purposes such as setting up a Christian nation of white homophobic supremacists under one conservative banner that reads "liberals are traitors."

BTW, William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" is meticulous, long and excellent.

Meanwhile, there was a teabilly-organized rallya day or two back to protest against the government shutdown.

Sarky

They're... they're protesting the shutdown that they caused in the first place?

Nodin

Sarky wrote: »

They're... they're protesting the shutdown that they caused in the first place?

You're trapped in the vice of joined-up thinking. Free yourself, and all things are possible.

robindch

Sarky wrote: »

They're... they're protesting the shutdown that they caused in the first place?

The teabillies don't really do irony.

joseph brand

GOP chair can't hide his racism. Can't understand why blacks can use the 'n' word, while he can't? And there's more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs2HLQ8t6LA

Here's another link:

"Now you have a black person using the term, "N— this and n— that, and it's OK for them to do it," Yelton said at one point.

That prompted Mandvi to respond, "You know that we can hear you, right?"

Republicans brought in voter ID laws, to suppress the black vote. It was blatantly obvious. Yelton readily admits that voter fraud amounts to about 1 or 2 votes out of about 60,000. Basically a non-existent problem.

In the interview, which aired Wednesday night, Yelton tells Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi that the new voting law, which mandates voter identifications, the curtailing of early voting operations and does not allow college students to vote using their school ID, “is going to kick the Democrats in the butt.” He also dismisses concerns that the law will particularly affect communities of color by saying, “If it hurts a bunch of lazy Blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.”

Naturally, he was fired.

Afaik, he's the first Republican to admit that the voter ID laws target Democrat voters. I want to ask; how come a southern, redneck, racist can be so dumb? But the answer is in the question.

The GOP really have cornered the bigoted, racist, anti 'book lernin', religious vote.

Brian Shanahan

joseph brand wrote: »

GOP chair can't hide his racism. Can't understand why blacks can use the 'n' word, while he can't? And there's more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs2HLQ8t6LA

Here's another link:




Republicans brought in voter ID laws, to suppress the black vote. It was blatantly obvious. Yelton readily admits that voter fraud amounts to about 1 or 2 votes out of about 60,000. Basically a non-existent problem.




Naturally, he was fired.

Afaik, he's the first Republican to admit that the voter ID laws target Democrat voters. I want to ask; how come a southern, redneck, racist can be so dumb? But the answer is in the question.

The GOP really have cornered the bigoted, racist, anti 'book lernin', religious vote.

You know that up until Regan, Bush ,Sr. & Jr. started appointing idiots, frauds and lickarses to the Supreme court (and even for a while after), the Republican party had to go to the courts on a periodic basis to swear that they weren't discriminating against black voters, under pain of dissolution of the party?

Of course after the Supreme court was stacked with people who didn't understand law, or English for that matter (otherwise the US would have much tougher gun controls in line with the wording of the 2nd Ammendment), this requirement was dropped, along with a lot of the civil rights era legislation barring the various Jim Crow measures the Republicans are reintroducing.

robindch

Rafael Cruz, a preacher and father of Ted Cruz of Tea Party fame, has announced that young Ted is "anointed" to bring about a "transfer of wealth" which will give "the spoils of war to the priests":

http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/brucewilson/cruz-father-suggests-ted-cruz-anointed-bring-about-end-time-transfer-wealth

From about 6:00 onwards:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNa5w9js48s

[-0-]

robindch wrote: »

Rafael Cruz, a preacher and father of Ted Cruz of Tea Party fame, has announced that young Ted is "anointed" to bring about a "transfer of wealth" which will give "the spoils of war to the priests":

http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/brucewilson/cruz-father-suggests-ted-cruz-anointed-bring-about-end-time-transfer-wealth

From about 6:00 onwards:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNa5w9js48s

Ridiculous!