Shepherd on Climate

In response to:Energy Infrastructure Make-Over

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 05:40:08 +0200

So much to do. So little time to do it. Busy on other things...the most recent being http://tclethbridge.blog.co.uk

In response to:Energy Infrastructure Make-Over

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 23:59:00 +0200

You've got some intersting stuff up here, why so long since your last blog?

In response to:Climate Weapons

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 10:41:05 +0200

Today I did a little more tinkering with this Climate Weapons blog as I wanted to add a section to the dialogue about the Great Storm of 1987. The more changes I make to the blog the further and further it gets from being a rehash of Clive Cussler (now clearly cited as a primary source). I may eventually split out the witches from the scientists as I have some more interesting information about the Armada Wessex Witches...see The Shakespeare Conspiracy by Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman (Random House, London, 1994, ISBN 0 09 930247 0) who note that Prague became the 'Occult Capital' of Europe at the end of the 16th century.

In response to:Cows & Moose

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 21:15:11 +0200

It is three years since I penned Cows & Moose. I did make a good case for 'really investigating the issues'...so thank you for saying so...but I was only scraping the surface.

It turns out that the issues are much more intriguing than I realized and they look like leading me to very different conclusions.

In a chapter on climate change (Chapter 3) in The Carbon Fields: how our countryside can save Britain (Grassroots, 2008, 216 pps, £ 9.99p, ISBN 978-0-9560707-0-8), Graham Harvey shows the way to square the circle by improving the quality of our food and our soil, and the well-being of farm animals, while stabilising carbon emissions within a benign negative feedback loop that uses the soil to effect carbon capture.

As he is the Agricultural Story Editor for The Archers, with the means to speak directly to everyday folks, over the heads of the experts, this could get interesting. Farming Podcast Wars as Farming Today goes head to head with The Archers...on a daily basis. His thinking is going to cause consternation at both ends of the political spectrum.

According to Graham Harvey the real villain of the piece is not eating meat but consuming products that no longer come from animals reared on grasslands. Just as we are what we eat, so are our cows and sheep. And that is just for starters. The ramifications are many...and complex.

These issues are starting to get very very interesting indeed.

In response to:Climate Weapons

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:16:38 +0200

Disagree...but agree you have a case. I would prefer to be in a situation where I had the knowledge to write authoritatively about climate weapons. When I have I will be happy to replace this blog entry with something original. Incidentally I also googled etc. for Lazlo Kovacs, but without success. Did you have more luck? There is a new book on Tesla by Samantha Hunt entitled The Invention of Everything Else.

In response to:Climate Weapons

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 23:43:55 +0200

I happened to find this site, soley because I Googled "Lazlo Kovacs" while reading Polar Shift by Clive Cussler. In fact the novel is, at this very second, setting right in front of me above the computer less than 6 inches from the keyboard
There are numerous paragraghs that you copied, practically verbatim. That is nothing ahort of plagiarism.
If you were so concerned about being too similar to Mr. Cussler's work, then you should have contacted this site and asked them to remove it.
Creative writing involves using your ideas and your imagination to devlop a story.
In this case you have taken from, I misspoke, you have stolen from, someone else and then added some extraneous words on top of it.
Get rid of it.
I can say this because I have been reading Mr. Cussler's novel for the last several days. The similarities are way too coincidental to be embellishment or happenstance.
Frankly, I'm appalled.
Whatever happened to honor and personal integrity in a person's work?
Your attempt at a justification of your plagiarism;
" But your point is well taken and I'm not altogether comfortable with it and remember at the time I posted it that I ummed and aaghed a while and wondered whether or not to quote directly...and decided not to as I figured I was rather too far from Clive Cussler's original text and meaning by the time I had finished so it would be wrong to represent what I was saying as his words!" is truly pitiful on its own.
I repeat; if you were uncomfortable, then you should have never allowed it to go through to start with.
Very strong words I know.
Deserving though.
It's about right and wrong.
You did wrong.

In response to:Climate Weapons

Mon, 18 May 2009 17:55:00 +0200

An impeccably dressed bon vivant of Serbian birth, Nikola Tesla was widely celebrated for his inventions of motors and power distribution systems and his defeat of Thomas Edison's championing of direct current with his invention of alternating current. In 1901, at the age of 44, Tesla began work on a colossal project to construct a global system of giant towers to relay through the air not only news, stock reports, pictures and free electricity for all. But the system failed.

Tesla's timing of the project was unfortunate because just a few months later, on 12 December 1901, Marconi succeeded in sending radio signals across the Atlantic which led to J. Pierpoint Morgan, who had put the equivalent of three million dollars into the Tesla Project, removing his financial backing for Tesla's ambitions.

In response to:Medieval Warm Period

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 16:55:53 +0100

I am sick to the back teeth - even farther back than that actually - of all the rubbish spouted by lying scientists with their vested interests. I need to include your information on my website-just as an aside when I am writing about weather in London. Then maybe as a separate article. The site is www.london-taxi-tour.com. It is not up and running yet.I am still writing it. I am concerned about the environment. I don't want it poisoned and clean energy needs to be found and harnessed. The C02 increase fear is ridiculous. The masses will believe anything.I prefer being a heretic.

In response to:Kyoto Economics

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 11:06:49 +0100

Devoting resources to space exploration is important. The more countries with their own space programmes the better for everybody...if it goes into collecing data on planetary and cosmic climates and not into climate weaponry R & D.

In response to:Letter to Ella

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:22:12 +0100

Excellent post, well-written and to the point.

Tom.

In response to:Kyoto Economics

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:19:36 +0100

I do indeed :-)

He's right too. But first we need to eliminate greed and dangerous ideologies.

Tom.

In response to:Kyoto Economics

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:12:29 +0100

I'm sure you know it,

"Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money that we spend on weapons and defence each year, and instead spend it feeding, clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, for ever, in peace."

- Bill Hicks

In response to:Kyoto Economics

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:28:35 +0100

No worries. As an additional item of interest here, the UK's defence spending is about 2.5% of GDP:

http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/AboutDefence/Organisation/KeyFactsAboutDefence/DefenceSpending.htm

Tom.

In response to:Climate Deceits

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:54:46 +0100

You may be interested...

http://bumface.blog.co.uk/2008/11/18/12-months-to-save-the-world-5056274

In response to:Letter to Ella

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:52:55 +0100

Great post. You raise many concerns I share.

Ella is a lucky girl.

In response to:Kyoto Economics

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:50:43 +0100

Hi Tom,

Hope you don't mind, but I've replied to you here instead:

http://www.theenvironmentsite.org/forum/debates-discussions/14095-development-theory.html#post255858

Reason is, you provoked a few thoughts that are relevant to what I'm trying to do with this thread, and also my response is a bit long for a comment here!

Cheers,
M.

In response to:Kyoto Economics

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:09:10 +0100

If Stern did emphasize "the most pessimistic studies" as claimed, and remember his final cost was a measly 1% of GDP, then the true cost would be much lower than the 1% he gives. But it still makes sense to budget for the higher cost because as we all know, the future hasn't happened yet

Tom.

In response to:Kyoto Economics

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:54:17 +0100

Stern has been ripped apart by many leading economists on this subject. Good discussion here:

http://www.env-econ.net/2006/11/tols_comment_on.html
"In sum, the Stern Review is very selective in the studies it quotes on the impacts of climate change. The selection bias is not random, but emphasizes the most pessimistic studies."

Yet our government continues to take what Stern said at face value. I have been working on a project where Stern's word is taken as gospel; my protests are shouted down, and the academics and "experts" on this subject ignore anything that doesn't fit the neat little warming picture.

M.

In response to:Kyoto Economics

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 23:06:50 +0100

It's interesting how different his estimates are to The Stern Report's findings.

Tom.

In response to:Kyoto Economics

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:17:01 +0100

Brilliant, glad to find you William Shepherd.

I met Lomborg at a private launch of "Cool It". Great guy.

In response to:Climate Weapons

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 16:11:26 +0200

Prior to Cussler, there was a novel "The HAB Theory", which predicted the same thing. The "HAB comes from the initials of the fellow to came up with it, a fictitios "Herbert A Boardman."

In response to:Climate Weapons

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 09:22:03 +0200

i was thinking the same thing

In response to:Ice Ages & Science Wars

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 08:50:48 +0200

It is hard paddling against the current so the odd occasions when praise is received are particularly satisfying.

Last week I received the following email from my daughter who had previously been very critical of my Windscams posting causing me to withdraw it temporarily for redrafting to reflect her (multiple) criticisms.

'Just for the balance, I've now also read Ice Ages and Science Wars...and this is you at your best! sober, explicit, yes! linear! to the point, radical and interesting. aaah. much better, daddy, well done.'

We try! We try! Although I had the benefit of knowing that Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder had responded convincingly to their critics in their final chapter...'Postscript 2008 - carbon dioxide is feeble.'...of the second (2008) edition of 'The Chilling Stars: a cosmic view of climate change'.

I will hereby pledge to blog the full 6000-word text of this chapter in a later blog. Look out for it...or read the final chapter of the 2008 edition in Waterstones.

In response to:Climate Weapons

Wed, 21 May 2008 19:32:14 +0200

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/pandora/haarp.html

In response to:Climate Weapons

Wed, 21 May 2008 15:09:44 +0200

You're absolutely right. I'm impressed. But is there any truth in any of it? I think that I probably messed around with Cussler's words too much for it to be plagiarism particularly as I did some work on Google and Wikipedia to see what I could find out about Tesla's work...and one source is plagiarism and two sources is research as the old aphorism would have it. But your point is well taken and I'm not altogether comfortable with it and remember at the time I posted it that I ummed and aaghed a while and wondered whether or not to quote directly...and decided not to as I figured I was rather too far from Clive Cussler's original text and meaning by the time I had finished so it would be wrong to represent what I was saying as his words!

In response to:Climate Weapons

Tue, 20 May 2008 04:28:16 +0200

This sounds remarkably similar to Clive Cussler's Polar Shift novel... Hmmm...

In response to:Climate Deceits

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 11:20:04 +0200

You are of course right, The cause of global warming, if in fact there is any prolonged trend, has no relationship with a rise in CO2 levels.
It is a pity that the 'cold war' ended; as the two new ways of Governments scaring their Citizens into conformity, Global warming and Terrorism, poses an even greater threat to our freedom.
In this Country, it has also led to a massive increase in overall taxation.
However, the decline of all great Empires has been presided over by idiots, and that is certainly true in our case.

In response to:Global Electricity Grid

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 19:57:38 +0200

Great post you are more than welcome to my humble DK online casino blog

In response to:Global Electricity Grid

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:34:40 +0100

Interesting post. The argument about insurgents seems off base as we already have plenty of long line transmission where that's not really a problem. Generally insurgents want to make a political point, want the PR, and have other more visible ways to attack than to head for Alaska or Siberia. When was the last time the Alaska pipeline was blown up?

The idea that we get plenty of energy is more compelling, and will be the strategy of smaller communities. However, huge urban areas often snarf so much Kwh that the only realistic way to provide is by importing from a long distance away. Hauling coal by locomotive is a chief way of doing that today. Economies of scale should be compared, apples with apples.

Would the Siberia connection make it more affordable to power Calgary or Detroit? These are the kinds of questions (some of them already answered in the minds of the authors "monopolists" I suspect, given recent patterns of investment).

I like the point about the war with Iraq not really being about oil, but the spread of western banking. I wouldn't call that initiative "victorious" at this point however. It's more of a blending that's going on, like a Vulcan mind meld. Telling "east" from "west" is becoming increasingly difficult and those who over-indulge in such talk brand themselves as children of the 20th century (Fuller was more from the 21st).

In response to:Sea Levels

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:10:30 +0100

There is considerable dispute about sea level. It is not simple at all. You cannot just put a mark on a dock at high tide, measure it year after year, watch it go up and publish your findings.

In South East England for instance the land is oscillating up and down on its way to finding a new level after the melting of the ice at the end of the last ice age. In an area like Romney Marsh this means dramatically different shorelines since Shakespeare's time when the English fleet would take refuge between the cinque ports of Rye and Winchelsea.

Globally one of the core concepts in the measurement of sea levels is the geoid…the equipotential surface of the earth’s gravitational field that approximates the mean sea surface. But there are plenty of other complications. There are the complexities of glacio-hydro-isosatic modelling and the eustatic and tectonic effects on shoreline dynamics. And even with some rudimentary grasp of these subjects there is still holocene sedimentary sequences and intertidal foraminifera distributions to master. And when that is done waiting in the wings are the carbon analysis of coastal paleoenvironments and aminostratigraphy. Sea level is not simple...and is complexity squared when wrestling with time series stretching back over centuries and millenia.