Grassyhead Tyson tries to tie eclipse to global warming

Neil deGrasse Tyson used to be an astrophysicist.  Now he’s a TV celebrity, trying to appease the Hollywood left to keep the offers and money rolling in.

That’s why he’s doing utterly unscientific things, like trying to tie “climate science” theories to the 2,500-year-old practice of using math to predict solar eclipses.

“Odd. No one is in denial of America’s Aug 21 total solar eclipse. Like Climate Change, methods & tools of science predict it,” he claimed on Twitter.

That is false. Eclipses are predicted by mathematics, not science.

The Earth and moon travel on fixed orbits, at fixed speeds. That is why people with no background in science have been able to predict eclipses with 100 percent accuracy for 2,500 years.

If Tyson’s comment were true, weather and climate forecasts would be accurate and predictable to an infinite point, because predicting temperatures, precipitation, etc. would simply be a matter of arithmetic.

We’ve asked him to provide us with the mathematical formula that has allowed to use accurately predict weather and climate for 2,500 years, as is done with eclipses.

He has not responded.

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Motor Vehicle Fuel Efficiency Standards Are Inefficient: Study

A new study by the Reason Foundation’s Julian Morris and Arthur Wardle finds that the federal government’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) program, administered by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), is a highly inefficient method for reducing either motor vehicle greenhouse gas emissions or U.S. oil consumption.

Regarding emissions, Morris and Wardle write:

Using NHTSA’s lowest estimate for the annual cost of implementing the 2017–2025 standards, $5.4 billion, and NHTSA’s maximum estimate for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions over the period 2016–2028, 62 million metric tons/year, CAFE represents an implicit cost of $87 per ton of carbon reduced. That is higher than most estimates of the “social cost of carbon” (SCC) and more than twice the SCC developed by the EPA for the federal government (but since rescinded by President Trump). It is also more than 100 times the average price of a ton of carbon dioxide traded on the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). Using a higher—and more realistic—estimate of annual cost of $50 billion/year, and lower—but more realistic—estimate of emissions reduction of 50 million metric tons/year, CAFE represents an implicit cost of $1,000/ton. At the highest cost (186.1 billion/year) and lowest reduction (31.2 million metric tons/year), the implicit cost is about $6,000/ton.

Regarding oil consumption, the authors write:

Likewise, if we take the EPA’s estimates, CAFE would reduce oil consumption by an annual average of 133 million barrels at a cost of $5.4 billion—equivalent to $40.5/barrel. But if we take the more realistic estimate of oil savings of 100 million barrels/year and a more realistic cost of even $50 billion/year, the cost per barrel of oil saved rises to $500/barrel. That’s more than ten times the current price, five times the prevailing price in 2012, and more than three times the highest price oil has ever reached ($156.34 in June 2008).

The authors contend that new taxes on fuel consumption or vehicle miles traveled would be a more cost-effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and oil usage. Regrettably, the otherwise excellent report does not consider whether repeal without replacement is the best option

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Eclipsing Solar Dependency

Palo Alto California gets thirty percent of its’ electricity from solar sources. Because of that City Manager James Keene is calling on residents to disconnect all-electric gadgets during the eclipse to prevent an electricity shortage. Is this the future for all of us in a green future? If so it is not very bright.

The most important job in the world is motherhood. Without it there is no future, if done badly there is a bad future.

Note to affirmative action supporters: The way to stop racial discrimination is to stop discriminating based on race.

Note to managers: If you don’t tell your employees exactly what you want them to do then you cannot blame them when they do not do it.

Trump needs to appoint a National Commission to Leave Well Enough Alone. An appropriate subcommittee of that commission would be The National Committee to Mind Your Own Business.

When two hate groups engage in violence and the media refuses to identify one of the groups as a hate group, it is because they are ideologically members of that hate group.  Entrant in the how many times can you use the word group in a single sentence contest.

What we now call a state lottery used to be called the numbers racket and was run by organized crime. The major difference is that the mafia gave better odds. In legislative circles, the lotteries are known as a tax on people who are bad at math. Maybe this explains the state-run education system?

America used to be a place people wanted to come to because there was a chance you could become rich. Now people want to come to America because it is a place where it is comfortable to be poor.

We are headed for a Maoist cultural revolution. First, they physically attack symbols, then censor articles and books, and finally physically attack people. All three are happening and escalating.

I guess it makes political sense when you are wrong on all the issues you change the subject to statues. All-out war on inanimate objects. They cannot fight back.

All of the statues coming down are of Democrats. Is this a case of Democrats trying to erase their own history?

With Democrats in full control of Oregon, they have passed a law granting free abortions to all at any stage of pregnancy. Subsidies for live births are not available. What is it with the left’s love affair with death?

The only President to put Americans in concentration camps was a leftist icon, Franklyn D. Roosevelt. Real rather than imaginary racism. He also confiscated their property.  A disgraceful Supreme Court upheld the action.

If it is not Halloween and you see someone with a mask on it is safe to assume they are up to no good.

The leftist media never defines its terms. White Nationalist has become a deprecating term. What does it mean? A person who is white who is also a patriot. Is there something wrong with that?

The mascot of the University of Southern California’s football team is a horse named Traveler. That is now under attack because that was the name Robert E. Lee’s horse.  What is next? Travelers Insurance?

First, we heard Russia, Russia, Russia now we hear Racist, Racist, Racist. What is next?

Don Todd is the President of Americans for Limited Government Foundation

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Total eclipse of reason on green energy child labor, toxic waste, and animal protection

By Printus LeBlanc

If you are in favor of child slave labor, increased pesticide use, and toxic waste then green energy is for you. Smug liberal progressives turn their noses up at people, not as enlightened as they are while driving a green energy car, not realizing the damage they are doing. Green technology and green energy are far from environmental.

The electric cars being driven on today’s roads have a deep dark secret. Because they do not have combustion engines, they need batteries. Whether the batteries be lithium ion or nickel-cobalt-aluminum (NCA) based battery cells, they have one thing in common. The batteries need cobalt. Most electric cars have at least 33 pounds of cobalt in them.

Cobalt is primarily mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The DRC has over 60 percent of the known reserves of cobalt and houses many international mining firms. The mining industry in the DRC is not known for its safety and environmental standards.

Children as young as 5 use hand tools to dig for the toxic metal. The metal is so toxic it has a disease named after it. Cobalt lung is a pneumonia-like disease that can lead to death. The children are threatened with beatings if they misidentify or drop the mineral.

From the DRC, the cobalt is shipped to China, using a ship with an internal combustion engine, to be manufactured into batteries for everything from iPhones to electric vehicles. So, remember the next time someone brags about their electric vehicle helping the earth, remind them child slavery helped make that.

Another darling of the green energy cult is solar panels. Just think about it, the Sun is the ultimate renewable energy source. But the problem lies with production and disposal of the panels, along with storing the electricity generated.

The electricity generated from solar panels must be used immediately or stored. The electricity is stored using the same types of batteries as mentioned earlier.

The manufacture and disposal of solar panels is a toxic process. Manufacturing the panels involves hazardous chemicals and materials such as sulfuric acid and phosphine gas. Breaking down the panels is equally as hazardous. Because of the toxic makeup of the panels, they cannot be simply thrown into landfills.

Currently, the only copper parts of the panels can be reused after the panels have been discarded. However, to get to the copper the panels are being burned, releasing the toxic chemicals into the atmosphere. Finally, because more solar panels are needed to generate the same amount of electricity as more traditional means of electricity, it means solar is generating more waste than traditional means of power generation per unit of electricity.

Windmills are another darling of the green energy cult. The turbines have had a side effect that would make any environmentalist recoil with disgust. The windmills are killing millions of animals every year.

Not only are they killing birds, the turbines are killing endangered species. The Hoary bats are indigenous to the Hawaiian Islands, and currently, maintain a spot on the endangered species list. Since the installation of five windmill farms on the islands over 100 of the bats have been killed. The farms were only supposed to kill 187 over a time frame stretching to 2030. If nothing is done, the bats are expected to be extinct by 2050.

The windmill farms are having the same problem on the mainland. Bats are being killed by thousands by windmill farms. Bats are natures insect hunters. The continued decimation of the bat population by green energy is only going to lead to more pesticides being used against disease transmitting insects. Green energy is going to lead to the deployment of more pesticides.

President of Americans for Limited Government Rick Manning stated, “Green energy is perhaps the most immoral government expenditure our country has ever dedicated itself to.”

Taxpayers are subsidizing child slavery in Africa, toxic solar waste, and the windfarms that kill millions of flying animals. It is time for the government to get out of the green energy business, and let the free market decide the best energy solutions for the U.S. economy.

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India’s 50-Year Dry Spell Ends As Monsoon Rains Strengthen

Where's that famine Greens are always predicting?

An MIT study published in Nature Climate Change finds that the Indian summer monsoons, which bring rainfall to the country each year between June and September, have strengthened in the last 15 years over north central India.

This heightened monsoon activity has reversed a 50-year drying period during which the monsoon season brought relatively little rain to northern and central India. Since 2002, the researchers have found, this drying trend has given way to a much wetter pattern, with stronger monsoons supplying much-needed rain, along with powerful, damaging floods, to the populous north central region of India.

A shift in India’s land and sea temperatures may partially explain this increase in monsoon rainfall. The researchers note that starting in 2002, nearly the entire Indian subcontinent has experienced very strong warming, reaching between 0.1 and 1 degree Celsius per year. Meanwhile, a rise in temperatures over the Indian Ocean has slowed significantly.

Chien Wang, a senior research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, the Center for Global Change Science, and the Joint Program for the Science and Policy of Global Change, says this sharp gradient in temperatures — high over land, and low over surrounding waters — is a perfect recipe for whipping up stronger monsoons.

“Climatologically, India went through a sudden, drastic warming, while the Indian Ocean, which used to be warm, all of a sudden slowed its warming,” Wang says. “This may have been from a combination of natural variability and anthropogenic influences, and we’re still trying to get to the bottom of the physical processes that caused this reversal.”

Wang’s co-author is Qinjian Jin, a postdoc in the Joint Program for the Science and Policy of Global Change.

A theory drying up

The Indian monsoon phenomenon is the longest recorded monsoon system in meteorology. Measurements of its rainfall date back to the late 18th century, when British colonists established the country’s first weather observatories to record the seasonal phenomenon. Since then, the Indian government has set up several thousand rain gauges across the country to record precipitation levels during the monsoon season, which can bring little or no rain to some areas while deluging other parts of the country.

From these yearly measurements, scientists had observed that, since the 1950s, the Indian monsoons were bringing less rain to north central India — a drying period that didn’t seem to let up, compared to a similar monsoon system over Africa and East Asia, which appeared to reverse its drying trend in the 1980s.

“There’s this idea in people’s minds that India is going to dry up,” Wang says. “The Indian monsoon season is undergoing a longer drying than all other systems, and this created a hypothesis that, since India is heavily polluted by manmade aerosols and is also heavily deforested, these may be factors that cause this drying. Modeling studies also projected that this drying would continue to this century.”

A persistent revival

However, Wang and Jin found that India has already begun to reverse its dry spell. The team tracked India’s average daily monsoon rainfall from 1950 to the present day, using six global precipitation datasets, each of which aggregate measurements from the thousands of rain gauges in India, as well as measurements of rainfall and temperature from satellites monitoring land and sea surfaces.

Between 1950 and 2002, they found that north central India experienced a decrease in daily rainfall average, of 0.18 millimeters per decade, during the monsoon season. To their surprise, they discovered that since 2002, precipitation in the region has revived, increasing daily rainfall average by 1.34 millimeters per decade.

“The Indian monsoon is considered a textbook, clearly defined phenomenon, and we think we know a lot about it, but we don’t,” Wang says. “Here, we identify a phenomenon that was mostly overlooked.”

The researchers did note a brief drying period during the 2015 monsoon season that caused widespread droughts throughout the subcontinent. They attribute this blip in the trend to a severe El Niño season, where ocean temperatures temporarily rise, causing a shift in atmospheric circulation, leading to decreased rainfall in India and elsewhere.

“But even counting that dry year, the long-term [wetting] trend is still pretty steady,” Wang says.
More questions ahead

The team believes the current strong monsoon trend is a result of higher land temperatures in combination with lower ocean temperatures. While it’s unclear what is causing India to heat up while its oceans cool down, the researchers have some guesses.

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All-Time Record: Russian Harvest To Beat Soviet-Era Grain Record

A quarter century after the collapse of the USSR, Russian farmers are finally poised to beat the record for grain production that the country set during the Soviet era.
The harvest will total at least 130.7 million metric tons this year on bumper wheat and corn crops, said Vladimir Petrichenko, director general of Moscow-based consultant ProZerno. That would push production 2.6 percent above the previous all-time high in 1978, a year before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan under leader Leonid Brezhnev.

Farmers will gather more wheat and corn than ever before, while the barley crop will be the largest since 2008, ProZerno figures show. Those estimates may go higher still as Siberia collects more grain, Petrichenko said by phone.

Estimates for the crop have been rising as ample rains spurred growth in European parts of the country, contrasting with dry conditions that have hurt crops in the U.S. and Canada. The gains cement Russia’s position as a top producer this year. It’s expected to be the biggest wheat exporter in the 2017-18 season, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

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