The size of the snow banks in our neighborhood is daunting as we are literally running out of space to put the snow. I didn’t think we’d had that much snow, but the evidence can be seen right outside The Gulch’s front door.
And to think I made arrangements to rent the boat slip for the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout just last week.
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Yeah, like this is going to work out well.
Solar Geoengineering 'Only Option' to Cool Planet Within Years, UN Says.
Messing with the insolation level for Earth to ‘cancel’ out warming will have all kinds of effects, with some of them being catastrophic. Yet there are actually some folks who think this is OK because it will “Save The Earth”. Not that Earth needs saving as it has been both colder and warmer on Earth, even during the last 12,000 years, and the Earth did not become uninhabitable.
At least the UN isn’t proposing anything other than studying the prospect at this point.
Research into sun and heat-deflecting technologies to tackle climate change are proceeding at a rapid pace around the globe, prompting the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to investigate their potentials and dangers while stating that these controversial interventions are humanity's "only option" to quickly cool the planet within years.My only problem with such geoengineering is that they really don’t know what the effects will be. I have to wonder if proponents understand what the unintended consequences could be.
In a report published by UNEP in February, an independent panel describes what’s currently known about so-called solar radiation modification, also called solar geoengineering, and concludes that, despite its great potential, it's not viable or even safe right now. Nonetheless, amid growing calls from governments to find an emergency brake for climate change—and ongoing, independent efforts to develop solar geoengineering technology—the UNEP is calling for a full-scale global review of the tech and eventual multinational framework for how it should be governed.
Ask any atmospheric physicist and they’ll tell you Earth’s atmosphere, and by extension its climate, is a semi-chaotic system. How does anyone factor in the chaotic elements of the atmosphere in order to come up with an even semi-representative model of what will happen? We certainly haven’t seen that with the climate models the so-called ‘climate scientists’ have been using to push their agendas. They haven’t even come close to predicting what is happening and were dismal failures when tested by hindcasting - using the models to ‘predict’ climate starting a few decades or a century ago and seeing how the predictions match the data of what actually happened – which fills no one with even a modicum of understanding with any kind of confidence that these same folks will have any understanding of what their efforts will reap.
If they trigger a premature Ice Age will their only response be “Oops! We didn’t think this would happen. Sorry!”
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Watts Up With That has been posting a tutorial addressing reliable versus intermittent power generation. It deals with the issues of ‘traditional’ power generation systems – coal, natural gas, hydro, biomass, and nuclear – versus intermittent power generation systems – solar and wind – and the problems with providing power where and when it’s needed. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.
This two-part post is a follow-up to Robert Bradley’s recent IER article, “Wind, Solar, and the Great Texas Blackout: Guilty as Charged.” His article discussed how regulatory shifts and subsidies favoring Intermittently Variable Renewable Energy (IVRE) producers resulted in prematurely lost capacity, a lack of new capacity, and upgrade issues with remaining (surviving) traditional capacity. These three factors–“the why behind the why”–explain the perfect storm that began with (or was revealed by) Storm Uri.It seems it’s primarily folks who have little or no understanding of how electrical grids work and the delicate balancing act required to keep the grid up and running in order to meet demand are the ones pushing solar and wind. Their ignorance, honest or willful, drives them to push for renewable energy in place of reliable and well understood generation systems. What’s worse is that when it is shown the renewable sources aren’t reliable and add to grid instability, their answer is to push for even more renewable sources as if they will magically fix the problem...which only makes the problem worse.
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Last week I wrote about how social media is hurting our kids.
Legal Insurrection has a follow-up, focusing more on how social media is contributing to the mental illness epidemic among teen girls.
When impressionable teenage girls become ensnared by social media, the real world being subsumed by social media – a make believe world that tantalizes, beguiles, tempts...and lies. Is it any wonder those same teenage girls can be wrecked emotionally and mentally by such a place?
A big story last week was the partial release of the CDC’s bi-annual Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which showed that most teen girls (57%) now say that they experience persistent sadness or hopelessness (up from 36% in 2011), and 30% of teen girls now say that they have seriously considered suicide (up from 19% in 2011). Boys are doing badly too, but their rates of depression and anxiety are not as high, and their increases since 2011 are smaller.As one commenter to the LI post asked, “By “mental illness epidemic,” are we including the trans craze, or… too soon?”
It is a legitimate question because it seems much of the ‘trans craze’ is hawked heavily on social media. It is a major source of influence among teens and many of the ideas and memes being pushed there are damaging to the mental health and well-being of our teens.
Limiting teens’ access to social media is one possible means of reducing this epidemic, something we can no longer ignore.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where we’re still moving snow, Winter Break is ending, and the kids have to go back to school tomorrow morning.