| Sunday,
June 24, 2001
Subject:
Home Servers and the High Price of Web Hosting
Guy T. Tate tateg@nc.rr.com
Having read of your plight with broadband on your
site I thought I’d pass this ray of sunshine along.
About two years ago my wife and I started a business
consulting home business which was primarily based on the internet. This
required us to maintain a web presence that cost, at times, more than a
$100 a month. I am a Master Sergeant in the Army Special Forces stationed
at Ft Bragg so this was only a sideline and was barely paying for itself
at the time so I was looking for another way of hosting my site cheaper
than the current rates. I went from a full featured unlimited bandwidth
site to the very limiting $19.95 el cheapo site you find everywhere and
was very unsatisfied with the difference but I had to endure the
limitations for the sake of the budget.
During this time period my local cable provider
asked me to beta test the rollout of Road Runner here in NC, this was free
access for the duration of the test so I agreed quickly. I found myself
propelled from the world of 28.8 to the world of 2Mbits in a day. WOW,
what a difference, and the uploads were 386k as well. During that test I
received an invitation from M$ to beta test their latest offering in
Network Operating Systems so I thought what better way to put their server
version through it’s paces than to run it on a broadband connection from
my house. I assumed I could host my own site and mail and get unlimited
bandwidth without paying for this service and save myself a bundle as
well.
I was rapidly to find that I was half right. I saved
some but I sure did get unlimited access and I got to configure my server
any way I wanted.
My IP address was served by DHCP and wasn’t
permanent and RR wanted an arm and a leg for a fixed IP address. I had
heard of services that would register an IP address dynamically or
redirect to a dynamically changing IP address as it changes so that a web
site or email server could be run so I started shopping. After researching
several companies I found many of them wanted as much as my former hosting
service did for each DNS entry.
Anyway to make a long story just about as long, I
found a service called dyndns.com at www.dyndns.com who only asked $50 a
year to create an A and an MX record. They provide a small client
application that runs in the system tray which updates their DNS when the
IP address changes. If you make improvements to their software they even
offer service for free.
So, now I have been hosting my own web and mail
servers for more than a year and it’s considerably cheaper than paying
someone to host it for me. (I currently have the web server offline but
the mail server never goes offline) It’s also an interesting experience
trying to keep it secure from the various hazards out there as well.
If you ever do get a broadband provider that you are
satisfied with you might consider moving Chaos Manor to your own server. I
would make an interesting story I’d think not to mention it’s a lot of
fun to setup and maintain.
Sincerely,
Guy T. Tate
No if I get broadband I will still use a
commercial service. But I will have a model page on the Penguin.
Thanks for the story.
A very interesting op-ed on global warming showing
how far proponents of global warming are going to shade the truth.
Trent Telenko
----------------- Return to Global Warming
Source: NYPress Published: 6/24/01 Author:
Alexander Cockburn
George Bush traveled to Europe and earned dog’s
abuse for his trust in space-based missile defense and his mistrust in the
thesis that human generation of greenhouse gases is prompting the earth to
heat up at an unacceptable rate. Lovely women in Gothenberg bared their
rumps in protest. "Shield defense" is indeed an unworkable
proposition. But (though doubtless for entirely misguided reasons) Bush is
quite right to be mistrustful of the global warming thesis, as I discussed
here back in March. Let’s take another look. Global warming has become a
matter of theological conviction on the liberal left. Dispute the thesis
and they want to burn you at the stake. As a way of indicating my
all-round lowness of moral character and intellect, Katha Pollitt sent a
tremulous e-mail to my CounterPunch co-editor Jeffrey St. Clair not so
long ago, squawking that "someone who denies the existence of global
warming is not just mistaken about one little fact among millions of
facts, but is seriously warped, disingenuous, etc." To the contrary,
I do believe in global warming. I just don’t believe it’s caused by
humans. The world may well be on a long-term warming curve, just as the
weather folk thought in the late 1930s, and thus returning to
"normalcy," as it enjoyed two million years ago. Or the apparent
recent trend may reverse itself in another quarter century, as Robert
Essenhigh, a mechanical engineer at Ohio State, argues in a recent issue
of Chemical Innovation, published by the American Chemical Society.
Back in March there were headlines about a
paper published in Nature that offered supposedly "the first direct
evidence" (AP’s phrase) that so-called greenhouse gases are
building up in Earth’s atmosphere and allowing less heat to escape into
space. Remember the central premise of the greenhouse gas model of global
warming: During daylight hours the Earth gets its huge heat input in the
form of short infrared rays from the sun. In close balance, our turning
globe releases this heat in the form of longer waves in infrared radiation
during the night hours. In the greenhouse model, allegedly malign gases
such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane happen to absorb the long
infrared radiation more strongly. Thus these allegedly malign gases let
the short infrared rays in, but when heat tries to escape each night, they
hold it in the atmosphere. The more CO2 we humans create, the more cows we
put to pasture and in feedlots belching out methane, the more heat is
trapped and the hotter the world gets.
A team at London’s Imperial College
compared satellite readings of infrared light from Earth’s surface and
found less was escaping into space in 1997, specifically in the
wavelengths known to be absorbed by greenhouse gases, such as carbon
dioxide, methane and ozone.
"We’re absolutely sure, there’s no
ambiguity: This shows the greenhouse effect is operating and what we are
seeing can only be due to the increase in the gases," John Harries,
the Imperial team’s leader, said, carefully adding that the effect of
clouds remains a huge ambiguity. The British study compared spectrometer
readings from NASA’s Nimbus 4 satellite taken from April 1970 to January
1971 and similar information collected from a Japanese satellite for about
nine months in 1996-97. Only clear-sky readings of the atmosphere over the
central Pacific were compared.
We’ve reproduced the crucial graph from
that paper in Nature. It represents the "adjusted" temperature
difference between observations in 1997 and 1970, based on measurements of
the strength of the infrared energy radiating from the Central Pacific
outward through the atmosphere and received at the spacecraft. It
supposedly addresses exactly the core issue concerning so-called global
warming: how much heat is being absorbed by greenhouse gases.
The numbers running vertically on the left
are a Kelvin temperature scale (that is, a scale of infrared brightness)
depicting the 1970 to 1997 difference in the heat escaping at each
wavelength. So plus-5 means that there would be 5 degrees more heat
emitted in 1997 than in 1970. Minus-5 would mean less heat was escaping in
1997 than in 1970, with this being ascribed by the Imperial College
scientists to the dreaded man-made greenhouse gases. The claim these
scientists make is that the extra heat being absorbed in 1997 by CO2 and
methane is consistent with the independently measured increase in
atmospheric CO2 and methane in the last 20 years.
The numbers along the bottom of the graph are
points on an infrared spectrum, meaning wavelengths longer than what is
visible: 800 represents far infrared, meaning the longest infrared waves,
and therefore the farthest from visible. For example, if you look at coals
on a barbecue, the actual radiant heat from the coals is invisible.
Going to the uppermost of the triplet of
graphs, the scientists from Imperial College want us to focus on the
regions of the spectrum containing the wavelengths where carbon dioxide
and methane absorb heat. Readers will note that between 700 and 800 (the
CO2 window) as well as between 1225 and 1325 (the methane window) there
are downward spikes. The Imperial College gang take this to mean that more
heat was absorbed and that therefore the global warming models are
"confirmed."
Now we turn to my scientific advisor in these
greenhouse and global warming matters, Pierre Sprey, a man knowledgeable
about the often disastrous interface between environmental prediction and
computer models.
Sprey: "All they’ve proved is that CO2
absorbs heat, and methane absorbs heat, something that could as easily
have been demonstrated in a lab. Even worse, they’re focusing only on
the parts of the graph where carbon dioxide and methane absorb heat. Why
the spikes they point to? Simply because emissions of carbon dioxide and
methane were slightly higher in 1997 than 1970. But since CO2 and methane
don’t represent the bulk of the heat absorbed by the atmosphere those
spikes cannot tell us whether the earth is cooling or warming. And in fact
if you include the effect of water vapor, as shown in a different part of
the graph, it appears that the earth was cooling over that period."
Again, remember that water is the single
largest factor in the heating and cooling of the Earth. There is far more
water in the atmosphere than CO2, and it absorbs a lot of infrared
radiation. But from the computer modeler’s point of view, atmospheric
water in all its forms is very variable. Rain, they can’t predict;
clouds, they can’t predict; humidity, they can’t predict. All the
greenhouse models fall down in this single inability to model the heating
or cooling effects of water, whether in the form of humidity, clouds, ice,
snow or ocean currents. The heart of the problem is that water is super
complex. Take clouds. How much heat they absorb depends very much on the
diameter of ice crystals, which no one knows very well. Clouds vary even
more. Dark clouds absorb sunlight. White ones reflect it. So some clouds
contribute to heating, some to cooling. That’s why water is so maddening
to modelers.
Now back to the graph. Sprey points out that
if you look at the region in which water vapor absorbs heat, the most
critical parts of the graph lie between 800 and 1000 and 1100 to 1200,
precisely because these are the windows in which water does absorb heat.
The reader will note that on the graph, both of those regions on the
horizontal scale are positive, which means that in 1997 less heat was
absorbed by the atmosphere than in 1970. Since the total positive area is
much larger than in the total negative area in the CO2 and methane windows
(those lunging but narrow downward spikes), the graph clearly shows that,
overall, between 1970 and 1997 the atmosphere’s water cooling effect was
2.5 times larger than the CO2-methane heating effect.
Ergo, the models have been disastrously
contradicted.
Given the impossibility of modeling water,
the Imperial College crew zealously avoided the inconvenient parts of the
graph line. If they weren’t so focused on the evil of justifying flimsy
models, if they took all greenhouse gases into account, including water
vapor, like Sprey they would have seen there’s more heat being emitted
from Earth in 1997 than in 1970.
Sprey: "Water fucks up everything. Their
graph doesn’t mean Earth is cooling. It just means that their model is
screwed up. It could be that 1997 happened to have been less humid than
1970, a fact which the modelers ignore along with all the other water
difficulties. And there are plenty of other problems with these data. For
example they generated their graph from two entirely different infrared
sensors, ones incompatible enough that people careful with infrared
measurements would never dream of comparing the two sets. The sensible
scientific thing would have been to do a hell of a lot of worldwide
measuring of clouds, rain, ice, snow and humidity to get a real handle on
cooling and warming."
Just as Bush was embarking on his trip to
Europe he got hit with a report on global warming from the National
Academy of Sciences, which generated more headlines about this being the
final, ultimate, irrefutable proof of global warming. The NAS report
sounded like the work of a lot of beard-strokers and placemen busy trying
to sound objective, reviewing the work of their good friends and
colleagues Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (excoriated here in
March). But even the IPCC panel’s report had to concede what it admitted
to be a "very low" level of scientific understanding of an
"aerosol indirect effect," one that could cool the climate
system at a whopping rate of 2.35 watts for each square meter.
Aerosols are particles so fine they float in
air. They can directly save the Earth from the sun’s heat (as happens
when volcanoes spew forth dust, provoking bad winters), though by how much
is hard to predict with models. Even more uncertain is the effect of the
seeding of clouds by aerosols, which we know can cause rain. The more rain
we have, the less water vapor in the form of clouds, hence the less heat
trapped by this water vapor. In a burst of honesty, the recent NAS report
admitted that "climate forcing by anthropogenic aerosols is a large
source of uncertainty about future climate change. On the basis of
estimates of past climate forcings, it seems likely that aerosols, on a
global average, have caused a negative climate forcing (cooling) that has
tended to offset much of the positive forcing by greenhouse gasses. Even
though aerosol distributions tend to be regional in scale, the forced
climate response is expected to occur on larger, even hemispheric and
global scales... Climate models that incorporate the aerosol-cloud physics
suggest that these effects may produce a negative global forcing on the
order of 1 watt per square meter [i.e. very substantial] or larger. The
great uncertainty about indirect aerosol climate forcing presents a severe
handicap both for the interpretation of past climate change and for future
assessments of climate changes."
In other words, it’s arguable that the more
sulfate particles you put in the air, the more rain you cause, and the
more you cool the Earth. You really want to live by a model that installs
the coal industry as the savior of "global warming"?
What we have here is very odd science. When you mix politics and
science you get that. What we do not yet have is a real model. We do
not know if we are in for global warming or an Ice Age. And the
bureaucrats still want control, which means treaties and agreements and
the rest in the absence of any real science in the matter.
And that is where we are. And the
regulatory scientists lie, the real scientists are careful because they
don't know, and everyone has axes to grind.
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