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etudiant

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Everything posted by etudiant

  1. No obvious impact thus far. The CO2 data shows no diminution at all thus far from the current record levels See .https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
  2. Nothingburger to date here in Manhattan. A bit of rain,tenth of an inch tops, small gusts.
  3. The dogs need remedial training, they got the wrong guys. Moles are your friends, they don't do vegetables, only bugs and worms. That said, lawn maintenance and moles are not very compatible, even if veggie gardens and moles are just fine.
  4. Food for whom? My garden in Connecticut was harvested messily by the local raccoons, just before the corn was ripe. They laugh at fences, so hope you have a serious dog.
  5. You might be able to cut down on that by pasting a couple of hawk decals on those windows. (https://windowalert.com ) One always feels bad when some wild creature gets injured that way. The stickers do help some, but are not perfect.
  6. Well beyond my pay grade, but where is the cold to come from? I recognize the arctic has been colder than average this year, but one would think that even a substantial cold arctic air mass would pick up a fair amount of heat on the way down to this area.
  7. Interesting, so it was still held during the Spanish Flu outbreak?
  8. Ticks are the worst, but people love deer, which are their adult vector, so they flourish. I'd read that ticks will succumb to a very cold and dry climate, which unfortunately leaves out this winter. So avoid greenery and tall grass this year.
  9. It may in fact be a lot easier. I expect travel to take a serious hit as people cocoon for the duration of the outbreak. So there will be more interest in storm news as well as fewer others on the road.
  10. We've had flu vaccines for many years, but they work only partially, maybe 70% if we're lucky. I doubt the vaccine for this bug will perform much better. For people over 50, they should try really hard not to catch it. That is the best advice imho.
  11. Flu vaccine is often not very effective, as there are many different flu variants. This virus may be equally unpredictable, just a lot more dangerous. Meanwhile, we are in the early stages of discovering the downside to a globalized economy, it busts all over rather than in pieces. The shortage of masks is just an early symptom, medicines and chips will soon follow. They all reflect the collapse of production in China.
  12. No expert, but am struck how closely the recent Arctic ice area is tracking the 2012 values. See: https://cryospherecomputing.tk May just be coincidence, but perhaps an early indication of history repeating.
  13. Even more illuminating than their current longer term forecasts presumably...
  14. Actually, there has been good progress, with the performance of the devices improving by about a factor of 10 every decade since the 1950s. Based on that trend, we should have working prototypes in another decade or so, but the effort is desultory at best. The international centerpiece of fusion is the ITER reactor in France. It was supposed to be ready by 2010, now expected to be finished by 2025, with the first real fusion experiments around 2035 - 2040. Basically a UN managed research effort, makes herding cats look easy. The problem is that cheap gas and subsidized wind/solar drained any urgency from the search for more energy, so this is run as a hobby effort, no urgency at all. I've visited the ITER site, no weekend work, single shifts, a handful of workers, lots of visiting dignitaries and probably masses of administrators behind the scenes in Geneva and elsewhere.
  15. Is there a drought issue, given a warmer than usual climate with a sub par snowpack?
  16. Thank you, Isotherm, for bringing us all back to the facts! This is the kind of reality check that is often missing in these discussions.
  17. Presume this is the IBM sponsored weather service. I'll certainly give it a try, there is surely a need for a detailed short term weather service.
  18. Not a stance that I agree with. Pension money is inherently long term oriented, they are seriously interested in this issue. I think that a frank discussion in front of a bunch of no BS money managers would be enlightening and I'm sorry the field was left to the skeptics.
  19. Honestly, at well over 10,000 feet, it does get colder, even in Hawaii. It does switch to extensive fog during the summer.
  20. Nothing at all wrong with KIlbeggan Irish Oats, they are actually delicious. While they are not instant, they are organic. Can be had as Irish Oatmeal Cookies if instant convenience is essential. Guiness or Harp both go well with them.
  21. Absolutely correct on the human impact, 74/75 was modest, the worst was in 2009, when 171 people died in Victoria.
  22. A quick look at the record indicates that the 1974-75 fire season in Australia was by far the worst in terms of acreage, with over 100 million acres burned. No other year comes close. The burn to date for this season is about 15 million acres, still a huge area, but again not in the same league.
  23. It is a serious issue that the researchers recognize by widening the error bars on the older data. There are so many changes to take into account, in the instrumentation as well as the environmental transformation over the past 140 years. Add to this that many places were not monitored consistently, so putting it all together is a massive task involving lots of judgments. For instance, a site that has a continuous record since 1880 is valuable, as there are not that many, but that location may have gone from rural to midtown during that interval. There has been an effort to select a relatively small number of stations, in the 1000 range iirc, which are deemed representative, so many fewer stations are used for the more recent data than are available.
  24. Trying to translate this measurement into actual temperature impact, I estimate as follows. The increased heat content since 1990 of 300 or so zettajoules (300x10**21 joules) is spread over perhaps the top one third of the oceanic volume of roughly 1.3 billion cubic kilometers. That is roughly 400 million cubic kilometers. (400x10**6 cubic kilometers). A cubic kilometer contains 10**9 cubic meters, each of which contains 10**6 cubic centimeters of water, so the relevant ocean volume is about 400 zettacubic centimeters (10**21 cubic centimeters) of water. Rounding, it means the added heat content is about a joule per cubic centimeter. It takes about 4 joules to raise the temperature of 1 cubic centimeter of water 1 degree C, so the added heat increases the temperature by about a quarter of a degree C. At first glance, that does not seem much, but it really highlights how massively important the oceans are to our survival. They buffer the imbalances hugely.
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