GuildCom

…and I had to jump off a friend’s bigass Cadillac with the temperature in the lower 20s in the teens, with a wind chill that brings things down to TWO DEGREES Fahrenheit. Well, I guess I didn’t have to, but what self-respecting human being would leave his fellow man out in the cold under such circumstances?

Anyway, it went off without a hitch and I’m hoping his Caddy keeps working through the evening, because it’s probably not going to get any warmer. It’s spitting snow outside as we speak, so cross your fingers.

Suzie, on the other hand, is performing well — or at least she is once she’s warm. It’s an established fact that shifting the Mustang’s Tremec 5-speed can be significantly more art than science in cold weather like this, at least until the transmission warms up. The 1-2 transition is especially rough, rendering second gear almost useless (as in skip it and go on to third) if you fumble it even a little (because, say, your entire body is wracked with violent shivering). On the up side, the light aluminum block engine warms up eagerly in the mornings and the heated seats are a gift from God himself, and she has plenty of torque to make up for any errors the driver may or may not commit while trying to accelerate.

It’s been more than a year since I brought her home now and she still puts a smile on my face when I lay the hammer down. Especially after this Thanksgiving, when I had the “opportunity” to take my little sister’s 4-banger Subaru to the gas station for a Dr Pepper run. (Should you ever be offered a similar opportunity… skip it.) I find that I have been spoiled by having that kind of (asphalt-ripping) power available at a tap of my toes. Driving a normal car was an eye-opening experience.

Actually, what struck me was the extent to which I have come to rely on Suzie’s 300 horsepower engine in daily driving. I routinely attempt left turns that would make Bullitt flinch, and I usually have to slow down to merge on the highway; frankly, even a V6 might find it difficult to keep up with my demands for power (and I’m sure my tires will, too, eventually).

Maybe I should take things easier?

That would require me getting out of bed earlier. Not gonna happen.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1363818.ece

When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were treated to another dose of it recently when the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier on climate change due for publication in a few months’ time. They declared that most of the rise in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases.

The small print explains “very likely” as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britain’s top nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion. It turned out that he was wrong. More positively, a 10% uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latterday Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea. That is how science really works.

Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised in favour of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers. And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported.

Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures that heatwaves make headlines, while contrary symptoms, such as this winter’s billion-dollar loss of Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to the business pages. The early arrival of migrant birds in spring provides colourful evidence for a recent warming of the northern lands. But did anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Adélie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago? While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8% in the Southern Ocean.

So one awkward question you can ask, when you’re forking out those extra taxes for climate change, is “Why is east Antarctica getting colder?” It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming. While you’re at it, you might inquire whether Gordon Brown will give you a refund if it’s confirmed that global warming has stopped. The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.

That levelling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do. After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high but roughly level state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun revert to the lazier mood it was in during the Little Ice Age 300 years ago.

Climate history and related archeology give solid support to the solar hypothesis. The 20th-century episode, or Modern Warming, was just the latest in a long string of similar events produced by a hyperactive sun, of which the last was the Medieval Warming.

The Chinese population doubled then, while in Europe the Vikings and cathedral-builders prospered. Fascinating relics of earlier episodes come from the Swiss Alps, with the rediscovery in 2003 of a long-forgotten pass used intermittently whenever the world was warm.

What does the Intergovernmental Panel do with such emphatic evidence for an alternation of warm and cold periods, linked to solar activity and going on long before human industry was a possible factor? Less than nothing. The 2007 Summary for Policymakers boasts of cutting in half a very small contribution by the sun to climate change conceded in a 2001 report.

Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate. The sun’s brightness may change too little to account for the big swings in the climate. But more than 10 years have passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism.

He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The sun’s magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world cloudier and gloomier.

The only trouble with Svensmark’s idea — apart from its being politically incorrect — was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation. After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.

In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.

Thanks to having written The Manic Sun, a book about Svensmark’s initial discovery published in 1997, I have been privileged to be on the inside track for reporting his struggles and successes since then. The outcome is a second book, The Chilling Stars, co-authored by the two of us and published next week by Icon books. We are not exaggerating, we believe, when we subtitle it “A new theory of climate change”.

Where does all that leave the impact of greenhouse gases? Their effects are likely to be a good deal less than advertised, but nobody can really say until the implications of the new theory of climate change are more fully worked out.

The reappraisal starts with Antarctica, where those contradictory temperature trends are directly predicted by Svensmark’s scenario, because the snow there is whiter than the cloud-tops. Meanwhile humility in face of Nature’s marvels seems more appropriate than arrogant assertions that we can forecast and even control a climate ruled by the sun and the stars.

I’d love to see the “science” used to justify the way that the “scientific” community has, with the help of the Left and the media, completely abandoned the scientific process in the pursuit of the white whale also known as anthropogenic climate change.

Yes, I could have put most of this in here over the dry spell over the weekend instead of dropping it in this monstrous text-bomb, but I don’t want to.

A conversation with Jason (aka Borre, for those of you in the know):

Generally speaking, most photovoltaic solar systems take about 20 years to pay for themselves. The down side is that they lose efficiency over time and only last about 30 years. Things like solar hot water heaters are a lot cheaper and pay for themselves sooner and can last longer.

-Jason/Borre

My response:

Yeah. Believe it or not, we’ve been dealing with exactly that problem here at work. One of our customers installed a system like that costing tens of thousands of dollars a few years ago and has been saving about 50 bucks a month on his electric bill.

We recently found out that we’re contractually obligated to purchase all our power from Golden Spread Electric Cooperative, which means that we can’t purchase power from him, even though we’re actually required to purchase his excess power by law. Also, we are also legally required to have backup power for this poor rube in the event that it’s cloudy, or, say, night time.

Which means, in short, that Golden Spread has to spend just as much money on generation and transmission hardware as if he had never actually installed his solar system to begin with even though they are now no longer getting the money he would normally be paying them to provide that power (fifty bucks a month).

The solution? We’re required, again via our contract with GSEC, to pay 40 dollars a month for the privilege of providing power to this individual. US, the company, not the consumer. Now, this might be understandable, I suppose; we’re saving a little money on our power charges (again because he’s not using them) but GSEC has to be able to provide power in the event that the consumer’s solar system fails, so someone has to pay for the maintenance of that system. At the same time, we’re meant to encourage the development and implementation of alternative power sources, so simply charging the customer 40 bucks directly would be a silly idea because then even over the course of the system’s 20 year life span, he would never recoup his investment.

Of course, we’re free to charge an additional fee, should we so choose, to help with the fee we pay GSEC each month.

Other cooperatives in the area have suggested a 19.95 “Variable Service” or “Emergency/Backup Service” fee. My boss, in his infinite wisdom, decided that our “Emergency Service Fee” would be…

…40 bucks a month.

I love working for this company.

-The Reverend Bishop

Also, please find reproduced here one of the greatest passages of literature ever birthed in English:

Don’t say another Goddamn word. Up until now, I’ve been polite. If you say anything else — word one — I will kill myself. And when my tainted spirit finds its destination, I will topple the master of that dark place. From my black throne, I will lash together a machine of bone and blood, and fueled by my hatred for you this fear engine will bore a hole between this world and that one.

When it begins, you will hear the sound of children screaming – as though from a great distance. A smoking orb of nothing will grow above your bed, and from it will emerge a thousand starving crows. As I slip through the widening maw in my new form, you will catch only a glimpse of my radiance before you are incinerated. Then, as tears of bubbling pitch stream down my face, my dark work will begin.

I will open one of my six mouths, and I will sing the song that ends the earth.

Penny Arcade

I’m not entirely certain I support the use of commas universally throughout this piece, but I am quite certain it is excellent. Moreso in context.

What would Jesus drive?

According to an article from the Harris News (whatever that is), this is becoming a more common question. Apparently, climate-based warmongers from “Interfaith Power and light, an ecumenical program of the National Regeneration Project,” are actually sending churches copies of Al Gore’s mockumentary documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

According to the Harris News, “Since the film’s release, 4000 congregations have joined chapters of the program in 26 states, including Kansas.”

Basically, they’re giving people (dis)information and tips on how to lower their congregations’ “carbon footprint.”

Now, obviously, there are some factors which would encourage churches to support this sort of initiative. Take this quote, for instance, from the General Board of Church and Society of the Methodist Church:

“As a matter of stewardship and justice, Christians must take action now to reduce global warming pollution and stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters around the world whose land, livelihood and lives are threatened by the global climate crisis.”

Sure, we’re to be stewards of all that God has given us. Including our fellow man.

Just how much, really, will green initiatives cost your neighbor, O Good Samaritan?

The Left is targeting its toughest demographic and winning in this case, it seems, by just a little passive deception. The not-so-blind-as-we-might-wish leading the gullible.

http://www.tennesseepolicy.org/main/article.php?article_id=367

Juicy article. Choice quotes below:

Gore’s mansion, located in the posh Belle Meade area of Nashville, consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year, according to the Nashville Electric Service (NES).

Wow. I didn’t know he had a mansion! Gotta get me one of those.

The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average.

Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh—guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of his energy consumption, Gore’s average monthly electric bill topped $1,359.

He spends $30,000 on energy (natural gas and electricity) bills every year.

I have got to figure out how to cash in on this whole climate scare. No sense letting an opportunity like this go to waste.

Is it getting hot enough for you? Not according to that news article. At least, not hot enough to actually melt the polar ice caps.

I think it may be time I made a small retraction of some of my prior statements. I have actually said in one of my sermons that the Earth is warming up. But it does seem I might have been premature in that particular concession. Going by the geologic patterns we’ve seen, it’s a little early for the Earth to be headed for the hot end of the spectrum. We may well be seeing a spurious warming trend that will come and go in a few decades or a few hundred years and leave no real clue as to why.

“That sort of thing doesn’t happen,” you say.

Nonsense. It actually does. Climate fluctuations come in all sizes. For instance, throughout most of the medieval history that bored you to tears in high school and college, Europe was in the midst of what historians call “The Little Ice Age.” It only lasted a few centuries, but it lowered the average temperature in Europe enough to have a significant effect on the peoples and cultures and historical events that shaped Western Civilization. (For instance, big rivers freezing over = bad if your rivers are your primary natural defense.)

So, yes, it’s happened before. Is there any reason it can’t be happening again?

I have often complained that, as simple plans of mice and men go, mine just don’t really come to fruition all that often.

“But Bishop,” you say, “you are one of the most respected political minds of our century and without your guiding words of wisdom to shepherd us we would be as livestock in the wilderness, waiting for some beast to devour us!”

…or maybe you don’t say that. Nonetheless, I tend to dream up the most cockamamie ideas imaginable and they just don’t tend to happen the way they’re supposed to. Well, this time, dammit, dreams come true — and I feel damn lucky. How many guys do you know have ever parked their dream car in their driveway?

Mine was a 2008 Mustang GT. Actually, make that, “Mine is a 2008 Mustang GT.” Except I guess it isn’t really a dream car anymore. Now it’s a candy apple red, 300 horsepower reality, devouring 88 octane unleaded. Luckily I get a discount on the stuff. Even more luckily, it gets nearly 30 miles per gallon when I’m not jacking around with the throttle (28.5 on a 50 mile trip on Saturday night).

I’ve wanted one of these things since 2005. Not really because it looks great, although that’s a factor. Not because it makes chicks drool — definitely a plus, though. But because a big part of me has always wanted a classic Boss, or a Cobra, or a Mach 1, and this thing just kinda makes me think of all that’s classic and American and right about modern life. That, and punching the gas will make you feel like you’re doing a set of crunches.

So now I find myself wondering what other dreams might materialize in the future. That road trip I’ve always wanted to take? …maybe that bestseller? …maybe a winning lottery ticket? Ok, scratch that last one, but I still like the other two.

Oh! And I added “politics” and “environment” and “global warming” to this post as categories because I also think of this car as just one more way I can be politically incorrect in our hypersensitive, carbon-unfriendly world. Good gas mileage aside, this thing is not E85 friendly, electric, or apt to project a “green friendly” image. All good things, in my opinion.

Her name is Suzie, by the way. Suzie Q.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/columnist/story/0,,2225383,00.html

Yes, I realize I just posted a link to this retard’s nonsense article. I’m hoping that if we shunt even a small portion of our vast daily traffic in his direction we can somehow create a makeshift Denial of Service attack by having our intelligent, educated readers suck up all his bandwidth so the other retards on the internet can’t read what this retard wrote.

It could happen!

Basically this guy is buying into everyone else’s nonsense about climate change and doing it with exceptional zeal. But it isn’t the article that I’d like you to read: it’s the *comments* at the bottom of the page.

“I believe that the only way to help prevent global warming is if some means were to come about by which we could extract CO2 from the atmosphere itself[.]“

Yes, that’s brilliant. What would we do with it? Besides waste more of our precious energy reserves by attempting to break the second law of thermodynamics.

“What we’re doing now is comparable to the Siberian Traps of 250 million years ago. In other words, we’re performing the man-made carbon emissions equivalent of truly massive volcanic activity. Judging by the fossil record, that episode wiped out 90 percent of life on earth, apparently through massive global warming from CO2. Let’s hope we don’t exceed it.”

This seemingly intelligent individual, while confessing that climate change *has* occurred without mankind’s influence, steadfastly believes that we can somehow match the output of “massive volcanic activity.” In fact, a single active volcanic eruption produces about 500 *million* tons of carbon dioxide per year. Current carbon output due to power generation (the largest source of carbon emissions worldwide) is almost 10 billion tons of CO2.

That’s eighteen volcanoes.

From Wikipedia (Yes, I know, not the greatest source, but better than one loser’s comment to another loser), what caused the Siberian Traps:

“Vast volumes of basaltic lava paved over a large expanse of primeval Siberia in a flood basalt event. Today the area covered is about 2 million km² and estimates of the original coverage are as high as 7 million km². The original volume of lava is estimated to range from 1 to 4 million km³.

“The area covered lies between 50 and 75 degrees north latitude and 60 to 120 degrees east longitude. The volcanism continued for a million years and spanned the Permian-Triassic boundary. There is no firm evidence that this event caused (or helped cause) the Permian extinction, but the timing of the two events is provocative.”

Impressive that the Industrial Revolution has done the same thing so much faster! Or else just impossible. Besides which, the Siberian Traps are also blamed for a *reduction* in global temperature in addition to a warming trend thereafter — not the symptoms we’re seeing today. Congratulations, genius.

(Admittedly, some sources suggest that the Siberian event took place MUCH more quickly — over the course of a mere 200,000 years. Much closer to the tenure of our beloved Industrial Revolution, right?)

Now, another comment from the peanut gallery:

“Clearly the first step is halt deforestation, the easiest and cheapest way to halt 20% of annual emissions and the doubly whammy of diminshed absorbtion capacity.”

Patently false. Trees extract carbon from the atmosphere when growing in order to construct their bodies — which we often refer to as “wood.” Not only to trees *stop* extracting carbon when they reach their full height (and most of them do that in a heartbeat on the global scale), but they also tend to die and rot, which releases carbon once again. Or we cut them down for building materials used in carbon-intensive processes such as shipping and manufacturing. Unless, of course, they’re covered up by some geologic process and buried underground to produce coal for future generations of polluters…

“It is difficult to get hold of all the figures necessary to show that countries can become near-zero carbon countries. However, there is a simple explanation that adequately reveals how this necessary target can be achieved. All our power requirements are for lighting, heating, transport, and energy for such things as industry on down to exercise machines. To make things simple we can assume that each category is 25% of total power. The lighting can be zero rated by building Buxton Geothermal Turbine Generators, the heating can be near-zero rated by installing Starlite coatings, that prevents heat escaping, on the walls and ceilings of all premises, and by having electrical heating from renewable sources we cut heating CO2 emissions to zero. Transport can be made near-zero in terms of carbon emissions by ensuring that all vehicles use carbon zero electricity, instead of petrol. This may seem to be an anathema to ”petrol heads” but this displeasure can be simply overcome. At the moment when inventors come up with new technologies for electrical vehicles Oil Companies buy and destroy the patents and designs. These patents have a shelf life of ten years so we could soon put together a group of past inventors in this field to reproduce their work legally, as an intergovernmental team. We still have the problem of transport by aeroplane and ship having to use fossil fuels. However, their carbon footprints can be at least halved by having their fuels mixed with water using an ultrasonic dibber. Finally, the power needed for energy can be made entirely of carbon free electricity. New ways of making industry work using electricity instead of the gas that they are used to will be needed, but these are not insurmountable problems given that the Governments of the world have ten years to achieve the target.”

You, sir, live in an interesting fantasy world. In your world, heating uses more power than cooling. Electric lighting is a significant cause of carbon emissions. Transportation emits as much carbon as power production and there is a method for producing fuel for transport which does not produce carbon. Electric cars can be powered without the need for electric power generation facilities. And, most astonishingly, “renewable” resources somehow work!

You must either A) really love the thought of nuclear power, or B) be from an alternate universe. See, where the rest of us live, energy consumption peaks when it’s hot rather than when its cold, industrial loads (rather than lighting) consume most of our kilowatts — and emit approximately fifty percent of our carbon — and electric cars are pushed by electric energy companies looking for off-peak loads to stabilize their income and SELL MORE ELECTRICITY.

Ok, I’ve wasted enough of your time and mine posting this tripe. If you want to read any more, go have a look at the page. Thankfully, there are a few commenters with a shred of common sense; just not nearly enough.

If you want to do something constructive with your time, you can Google “tripe” and see just what I think of this nonsense if you don’t know already.

FACT: Global warming is real.

FACT: There’s fuck all we can do about it.

FACT: The #1 most important greenhouse gas is WATER VAPOR.

FACT: Turn off your car, kill your electric lights, stop breathing, and WATER WILL NOT STOP EVAPORATING.

Fuck you, Al Gore.

Take a look at the fossil record, ladies and gentlemen. Do you really think the continents learned to swim sometime in the past 100,000 years? Do you think that the ocean just decided, “You know, I think I’d like to live on the beach!” and that’s why our shorelines are at their current point?

The “beach” used to be around Austin, Texas. It used to be around three hundred meters higher than it is today. It also used to be around 150 meters lower than it is today. Why? Climate change.

More ice = less ocean.

Less ice = more ocean.

You must have been driving your fucking ASS off back in the Ordovician Period of the Paleozoic Era, because half the damn planet was flooded. My God, those old model 510,000,000 B.C.E. Fords must have gotten SHIT for gas mileage.

It’s all your fault, you arrogant, anthropomorphic asshole. You caused global warming. You caused the dinosaurs to go extinct. It’s YOUR fault all those poor fish had to lose their homes because the sea receded to its current level (which is among the lowest on record). You pompous bastard!

Anthropogenic climate change is a load of horse shit, people. And the government is going to make a shit load of money on it, too. The Bishop has spoken. Peace be with you, bitchez.