Air Mail reports the patron of the ruckus has moved to Tunisia to regroup:
Heir to the Revolution
by Ron Cohen March 30 2024
You have seen him before...wearing wire-frame glasses in 1937, talking about the blood of the proletariat, Stalin and Trotsky... You saw him in a Mao suit in 1975…In 2024 he wears tattoos.
endangered but not extinct: a real live american climate communist
The one below the Adam’s apple, ACAB, is for “All Cops Are Bastards.” The one on the cheek, a kind of arrow beside his large brown eye, means something like “Fuck you and your death culture.”
“Did elite education get me around ideas that other people wouldn’t get around? "Absolutely,” Fergie told me. “People who are the most oppressed by a system are often those who have the least capacity to find ideas that would overthrow that system. It’s people in the elite who betray their background who build the intellectual vanguard.
Chambers built his Berkshire"ideologym" to get the vanguard of the revolution in shape.
Fergie was in Tunisia when we spoke. He’d been building his movement in Alford, Massachusetts. Fergie ran a gym where he taught the proles a little of the old hand-to-hand—the police shut it down...
“The local press was accusing me of forming a militia, which was crazy … We were giving martial-arts classes to working folks, and they were trying to say I was building Hamas in the Berkshires.”
And so, he took off. Why Tunisia? “We develop a lot of theory in the U.S. , but it’s not rooted in international resistance,” he explained. “Being in the Islamic world, in the Global South, close to what’s going on in West Africa, in Palestine, even in Ukraine, helps me feel more connected to those things.”
Fergie, who believes Russia is battling an appendage of the neo-colonial Western empire in Ukraine, is actually a fan of the old Soviet Union: his vanity license plates read CCCP "
Fifty years ago Freeman Dyson took a bite out of the Energy Crisis by insulating an unused Olympic swimming pool with foam and plowing it full of winter snow. Come summer, circulating chilled water from the thousand ton slush pond through the radiators of the Institute for Advanced Study quietly did the job of a hundred noisy air conditioners.
Fast forward a half century and a degree of warming to Ladakh, the Little Tibet east of Baltistan best known for Red Hat lamas, snow leopards and Yeti footprints, where local ingenuity has created cheap drought insurance by making ice all winter to augment the diminishing glacial meltwater supply. Uphill springs feed downhill penstocks, pressurizing water to the level needed to fountain water a hundred feet into the frigid nighttime air. The conical ice cascade, designed to minimize melting when the sun is high, has incidentally created a new Buddhist art form— the Ice Stupa:
While The Guardian reports conspiracy theories linking the runaway Baltimore Harbor container ship to China, Q-anon, and flying saucers have already circled the globe, over ten hours have passed without headlines or videos connecting the event to sea level rise, underwater volcanoes, low water levels in the Panama Canal, The Atlantic Meridonal Overturning Circulation, Galactic Cosmic Rays, Gulf Stream eddy temperature anomalies, or the Class 4 solar geomagnetic storm still in progress.
When will UNEP convene an emergency meeting to explain Climate Desk's shocking failure to adapt so valuable a crisis to purposes of publicity, and how it will impact the state of climate communication and the future of existential threat inflation as we know it?
The 948 foot long 157 foot wide vessel displaced ten times more that the roughly 5,000 tonne steel truss bridge it struck only a few tens of boat lengths after pushing off from its container ship port dock, raising questions as to how she came to accelerate so significantly ( reportedly 8.8 knots) and irreversibly in the confines of the inner harbor.
A coast guard and admiralty law replay of the aftermath of the grounding of the QEII in Vineyard sound is only to be expected, and the most salient question may once more be :
Where was the harbor pilot and what orders did he give?
UPDATES
Hope has dawned at Watts Up With That for a Willlis Eschenbach article linking the ship collision to bad thermometer siting and Baltimore's notorious urban heat island effect , pegged on the latest news from the NYTimes:
57 minutes ago
Peter Eavis
Covering logistics and infrastructure
An inspection of the Dali last year at a port in Chile reported that the vessel had a deficiency related to “propulsion and auxiliary machinery.” The inspection, conducted on June 27 at the port of San Antonio, specified that the deficiency concerned gauges and thermometers.
Climate change can also be invoked in the that the hasty departure that contributed to Dali's accident reflected her being behind schedule because drought slowed lock-filling and so delayed her Panama Canal passage earlier in March.
A Calvinist climate divine brave enough to confront the Pope in Rome flees after failing to exorcise a demonic TikTok clown in the trenches of the Climate Wars
The first week of February, I had the most bizarre experienceof my life... I thank God I came home alive...In early December, I got an email ... The producers said they appreciated Cornwall Alliance’s perspective and wanted to include it in the “round-table discussion.” I'd expected a business-like setting, with a table and chairs and an interviewer dressed in “business casual”...And the interviewer? He was wearing a clown’s suit!…
This interviewer had, they said, a TikTok channel with millions of viewers. The aim, they said, was to help calm young people’s fears about climate change I guess I was too guileless to realize what was up… most of the questions were absurd to the point of ridiculous. I worked hard to say intelligent, interesting answers comprehensible to children, and several times I wove in the gospel and the message that if we fear God we need fear nothing else, but it was a challenge.
Then, after about 20 minutes, the interviewer stood and announced that he was going to change into a… clown costume,... he said I must do the same. I refused… he began imitating mice, lions, or other animals...
By now I was, I confess, traumatized... I had been wholly in their keeping, potentially in danger, because no one else I knew, not even my wife, knew where they’d taken me...
I don’t know what will be done with that video footage. Will it surprise me by accurately depicting my words about climate and energy? Or, by creative video editing, will it make me look stupid, evil, or both?
bananas grow in greenhouses, worms are insects, and fossil fuels save the world from CO2 starvatioN and mass extinction OF THE plants that DEPEND ON THE GAS OF LIFE!
The Tennessee Senate has passed a bill targeting "chemtrails."
SB 2691/HB 2063, sponsored by Representative Monty Fritts, R-Kingston, and Senator Steve Southerland, R-Morristown, claims:
It is documented the federal government or other entities acting on the federal government's behalf ... may conduct geoengineering experiments by intentionally dispersing chemicals into the atmosphere, and those activities may occur within the State of Tennessee,
The legislation would ban the practice in Tennessee.
I wish I had known in 2000, that Stoat's William Connolley had transcribed and blogged the following note from The Philosophical Magazine 1909, vol 17, p319-320, The reason being that it is the journal in which John Tyndall FRS published his experiments on the same subject half a century earlier, a subject I wrote of here in 2014:
Bill presents" the full tect and his comment on why he thinks Wood's second-to-last paragraph " regrettable and wrong."
XXIV. Note on the Theory of the Greenhouse
By Professor R. W. Wood (Communicated by the Author)
THERE appears to be a widespread belief that the comparatively high temperature produced within a closed space covered with glass, and exposed to solar radiation, results from a transformation of wave-length, that is, that the heat waves from the sun, which are able to penetrate the glass, fall upon the walls of the enclosure and raise its temperature: the heat energy is re-emitted by the walls in the form of much longer waves, which are unable to penetrate the glass, the greenhouse acting as a radiation trap.
I have always felt some doubt as to whether this action played any very large part in the elevation of temperature. It appeared much more probable that the part played by the glass was the prevention of the escape of the warm air heated by the ground within the enclosure. If we open the doors of a greenhouse on a cold and windy day, the trapping of radiation appears to lose much of its efficacy. As a matter of fact I am of the opinion that a greenhouse made of a glass transparent to waves of every possible length would show a temperature nearly, if not quite, as high as that observed in a glass house. The transparent screen allows the solar radiation to warm the ground, and the ground in turn warms the air, but only the limited amount within the enclosure. In the "open," the ground is continually brought into contact with cold air by convection currents.
To test the matter I constructed two The bulb of a themometer was inserted in each enclosure and the whole packed in cotton, with the exception of the transparent plates which were exposed. When exposed to sunlight the temperature rose gradually to 65 oC., the enclosure covered with the salt plate keeping a little ahead of the other, owing to the fact that it transmitted the longer waves from the sun, which were stopped by the glass. In order to eliminate this action the sunlight was first passed through a glass plate.
There was now scarcely a difference of one degree between the temperatures of the two enclosures. The maximum temperature reached was about 55 oC. From what we know about the distribution of energy in the spectrum of the radiation emitted by a body at 55 o, it is clear that the rock-salt plate is capable of transmitting practically all of it, while the glass plate stops it entirely. This shows us that the loss of temperature of the ground by radiation is very small in comparison to the loss by convection, in other words that we gain very little from the circumstance that the radiation is trapped.
Is it therefore necessary to pay attention to trapped radiation in deducing the temperature of a planet as affected by its atmosphere? The solar rays penetrate the atmosphere, warm the ground which in turn warms the atmosphere by contact and by convection currents. The heat received is thus stored up in the atmosphere, remaining there on account of the very low radiating power of a gas. It seems to me very doubtful if the atmosphere is warmed to any great extent by absorbing the radiation from the ground, even under the most favourable conditions.
I do not pretent to have gone very deeply into the matter, and publish this note merely to draw attention to the fact that trapped radiation appears to play but a very small part in the actual cases with which we are familiar.
Why is his second to last paragraph wrong?
Comments and correction to this section are welcome!
Firstly, note that unlike the experiments described earlier, this paragraph merely expresses his opinion.
Second, although the troposphere is subject to convection, the stratosphere is not.
Third, in contradiction to his assertion about "the very low radiating power of a gas", the troposphere is largely opaque to infra-red radiation, which is why convection is so important in moving heat up from the surface. Only in the higher (colder) atmosphere where there is less water vapour is the atmosphere simultaneously somewhat, but not totally, transparent to infra-red and thus permits radiation to play a part.
W. M. Connolley, June 2000.
Apart from the opacity of plate glass to 10 micron room temperature blackbody radiation, I think the salient difference is one of infrared optical depth- Wood's
" enclosures of dead black cardboard, one covered with a glass plate, the other with a plate of rock-salt of equal thickness." filled with ambient air"
cannot have been very large because optical crystals of NaCl were not grown commercially until decades later, and clear plates or cleavages of natural rock salt rarely exceed ten centimeter size- Tyndall had his own custom made for the 1859 apparatus illustrated in The Philosophical Magazine:
If Wood built ten cm. wide cubic windowed black boxes- longer ones would need a moving telescope mount to keep the sun shining down them-they would contain a liter of ambient air ( then around 300 ppm CO2) per 10 cm of depth, or roughly 300 micrograms of CO2 and 10 milligrams of water vapor at 55% humidity
The atmospheric column as whole however weighs roughly a kilo per cm2, or 100 kg per 100cm2 and proportionately present an infrared optical depth some five orders of magnitude smaller than Wood's thermometer enclosures. So the roughly 45 degree solar warming he reports is the work of the carbon black on his "dead black cardboard enclosures " not the micrograms of CO2 within them.
Tyndall bought a 3,000 fold increase in his experiment's thermometric finesse by the simple expedient of filling his rock salt windowed tubes completely with CO2 or hydrocarbon vapors instead of air.
“In 2017, The Guardian created theguardian.org, a charity wing to fund news stories in The Guardian along the same lines as NGOs fund campaigns... A simple scan of their website showed 52 donations totalling at least $20,249,000 collected in the last five years. The average donation is around $400,000. Most of it was earmarked for stories on:
Environmental justice and food security: $1,750,000
The Age of Extinction: $1,500,000
Biodiversity loss: $1,400,000
Factory livestock farming: $2,236,000
Climate: $1,500,000
Oceans and climate: $1,600,000
This recalls Covering Climate Now's launch party at the Columbia school of journalism, where former White House Chief of Staff Bill Moyers appeared to kick start the 350 publication editorial collective with a foundation check for $1,000,000.Apart from helping Columbia Journalism Review &The Nation Institute, promote Climate Desk and Covering Climate Now , The Guardian and The Independent literally rewrote their style manuals, to better serve the climate communication agenda .
THE CONQUEST OF MARALAGO IN WHICH THE LATINX CONQUISTATRIX INVADES FLORIDA TO SEIZE THE WATERFRONT REAL ESTATE OF THE DREAD PIRATE TRUMP, AND PUT AN END TO AMERICAN DEPENDENCE ON SPANISH RENEWABLE ENERGY MATERIALS , LIKE PAULOWNIA WOOD:
In January, Twitter ubergeek Tucker Carlson interviewed Willie Soon, who delivered a Putin length stemwinder. Awed by Carlson's rigorous fact checking, Soon limited himself to statements falling into three categories:
1. : That's mildly interesting
2. : That's not true.
3. : That's wrong by several orders of magnitude.
While introduced Soon as an " Astrophysicist and geoscientist who spent 31 years at Harvard."
Which is odd as he never studied, taught or held an appointment there, and has a PhD in aerospace engineering, not astrophysics Soon's only claim to Harvard fame was being repramanded for falsely claiming affiliation:
Allegations Against Smithsonian Researcher Bring Attention to Harvard
By MEG P. BERNHARD and ZARA ZHANG, CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS February 25, 2015
Although a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has come under fire amid conflict of interest allegations has no formal affiliations with Harvard, the scientist’s use of Harvard’s name on research has brought attention to the University amid the public controversy.
Wei-Hock Soon, the controversial researcher based in Cambridge who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain climate change... is employed part-time by the Smithsonian side of the center and has no formal affiliations with Harvard, according to Charles R. Alcock, director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Soon is not an employee of Harvard, and there are no records indicating that he has applied for or been granted funds administered by the University, according to a statement from University spokesperson Jeff Neal…
According to W. John Kress, interim undersecretary for science at the Smithsonian Institution,... Soon does not formally study climate change…
Soon did not respond to a request for comment on his relationship with and employment at Harvard.
Although Soon is not a University employee, he has a Harvard email address and... some news outlets have referred to Soon as a “Harvard astrophysicist.” Michael B. McElroy, a professor of environmental studies at Harvard, said it is common practice for scientists to submit journal articles without prior review by their affiliate organizations. Even so, McElroy said he thinks that Soon ... used Harvard’s name inappropriately.
“The sense was communicated that this was a certified Harvard piece of work. But to my knowledge, neither one of them actually work for Harvard,” McElroy said. "
Soon's current academic post is , as he admitted to Carlson, as a John Birch Society summer camp science counselor. Soon, who has an aerospace engineering , not an PhD. never attended Harvard or served on its faculty.
In 1994, lobbyist and Moonie science guru S. Fred Singer helped Soon secure a Smithsonian Institution post. After coauthoring a paper on solar variabilty with a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which should not be confused with the Harvard Observatory. Soon used the Center as funding conduit, but was terminated nine years ago after it discovered that the "soft money" it received on his behalf was being granted in exchange for "deliverables" written in support of coal company efforts to downplay or deny the role of CO2, in climate forcing.
While some might wonder how life survived the 4 billion year Gas of Life drought preceding the advent of coal mining Carlsonnodded cheerfully throughout Soon's spiel.
However, those viewing it at leisure with access to science resources on the web
may find it edifying to keep score on science according to Soon asth interview progresses, using the handy peer review toolkit developed by Professor John Baez of the University of California:
A simple method for quantitatively rating potential contributions to science:
To score each Soon comment , add as you read:
1 point for every statement widely known to be false.
2 points for every clearly vacuous statement.
5 points for each such statement adhered to despite careful correction.
5 points for each thought experiment contradicting a real one.
10 points for each existing acronym expropriated, e.g. CERES
20 points for complaining an index like this "suppresses original thinkers"
20 points for every use of anecdote or myth as fact.
20 points for each use of " communist libtard" or "reactionary racist."
30 points for each public appearance with a person in a polar bear or chicken little suit
Willie Soon , at right 40 points for claiming that a "scientific establishment" or modern-day Inquisition is engaged in a "conspiracy" to suppress your work. 50 points for for comparing those opposing your ideas to Nazis, gangsters, or the KGB. 60 points for putting words in Einstein's mouth or chalk 100 points for displaying both in a single photoshopped image while pretending to take a call from President Trump:
Willie channels bogus Einstein quote while taking a call from a Trump impersonator
* The concentration of uranium in rocks is ~ 600 times higher than seawater, and as rocks are ~2.8 X denser than sea water Soon is off by a factor of a thousand.