etudiant

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Very nice call!

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?

I would be happy to see a decent analysis of the 'divergence', which should be a piece of cake now that we have another 20+ years worth of tree rings to evaluate. I have no beef with current climate measures, the sea ice measures alone are pretty strong evidence. What is less convincing to me is the earlier stability claimed, it seems inconsistent with the historical record.

With no reflections on this paper, the credibility of all 'climate change' related documents is imho tainted at the source. The initial Mann 'hockeystick' paper in Nature glossed over that the same dendro evidence used to form the stick showed declining ring formation in the most recent era, which had been interpreted as periods of cooler weather. So that information was frog marched out of the paper, with a chart grafting modern temperature measures on the earlier tree ring data to create the 'hockeystick'. An honest presentation should have highlighted the divergence, which really produces a downward signal rather that the increase shown by the thermometer measures. Perhaps it just means tree ring data is not fit for the purpose of measuring temperatures. That in itself would be a useful, but afaik that analysis has not been done, nor have there been follow on studies to examine whether the 'divergence' has worsened or improved since the Mann Nature paper. As a former Wall Streeter, I'm pretty attuned to hard marketing. Prof Mann marketed too hard for me.

That is rather sobering. How does anyone separate the wheat from the chaff?

You know, people to leave your money to.

That is a very good catch. Almost doesn't look natural. Looks like a plane dumped a bunch of silver iodide in a straight line to seed the clouds... I'm saving the loops and going to talk to the director of the Hurricane Research Division about this. There was thing called project storm fury years ago where they did stuff like this. It moved so fast that aircraft dispensing silver iodide can be ruled out imho. Moreover, the track was straight, not wind distorted from what I could see. Very peculiar indeed. THIS ONE FROM TURTLE TAKES THE CAKE

Aircraft are made of aluminum, so they act as flying Faraday cages, they can be struck by lightning with no internal impact. The wings usually have trailing discharge wicks to leak off any excess charge. The main risk is flying into severe turbulence, so pilots will try to avoid thunderstorms and the associated anvil clouds.

Have to give a thumbs up to the Cedar Rapids home builders, the storm snapped pretty big trees but the houses appeared unscathed. That is pretty impressive for 100+mph sustained winds.

Best comment of the day and surely the most useful! Given the number of small systems crawling around, no regional forecast is really valid.

That seems to leave open the step of ensuring the models reflect reality. I'd have been happier if the paper had linked to actual historical data.