Coming Ice Age

View 802 Thursday, December 12, 2013

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

Begin with this reminder of climate science consensus:

Leonard Nimoy on The Coming Ice Age: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_861us8D9M

Note that at the time as a science fact columnist I was pretty well convinced of this. I even took the picture of Stephen Schneider and Margaret Meade that they used on the back cover of their book. It looked like the future was desertification and cold, cold, cold.

For more on that

1974 : NCAR Called Global Cooling The “New Norm” And Blamed Climate Disasters On It.

<http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/1974-ncar-called-global-cooling-the-new-norm-and-blamed-climate-disasters-on-it/>

Roland Dobbins

Climate Change and its Effect on World Food

by Walter Orr Roberts Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado

In February of 1972 earth-orbiting artificial satellites revealed the existence of a greatly increased area of the snow and ice cover of the north polar cap as compared to all previous years of space age observations. Some scientists believe that this may have presaged the onset of the dramatic climate anomalies of 1972 that brought far-reaching adversities to the world’s peoples. Moreover, there is mounting evidence that the bad climate of 1972 may be the forerunner of a long series of less favorable agricultural crop years that lie ahead for most world societies. Thus widespread food shortages threaten just at the same time that world populations are growing to new highs. Indeed, less favorable climate may be the new global norm. The Earth may have entered a new “little ice age”

There are strong signs that these recent climate disasters were not random deviations from the usual weather, but instead signals of the emergence of a new normal for world climates.

www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull165/16505796265.pdf

It’s lunch time. Back later. But perhaps that will amuse you.

And if you need something else to worry about

‘Thus ends roughly 90 years of post-Ottoman secularity.’

<http://takimag.com/article/turkeys_marginal_theocracy_guy_somerset/print>

Roland Dobbins

The Turkish experiment in timocracy seems to be ending in an Islamic State.

As I was about to go downstairs for lunch, I got a call from Bob Neely, a long time neighbor who is also a base in the choir my wife sings in. He used to live down the street from us but has moved up by Gene Autry’s place up the hill. His daughter Stephanie married Max Gladstone, whose Three Parts Dead is an imaginative new approach to heroic fantasy, and has done well enough that Tor has brought out a second book in the series, Two Serpents Rise. Max is in town for a day or so and wanted to bring over a copy of his new book. As it happens Peter has just finished making the Great Hall inhabitable again, so these were my first guests in the newly rehabilitated rooms here in Chaos Manor. Alas I couldn’t offer them tea because my electric water pitcher doesn’t seem to be working, but we have officially had entertainment in the room that has emerged from archeological layers of old computer books, computer parts, newspapers, old computers, tchotchkes from recent and ancient conventions, and useful stuff that was put down only to be lost in the swim. Which means that when I get a new hot water pitcher I can have tea parties up here again, and I will do so.

Thanks to those who pointed me to this: http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2013/12/10/mit-biosuit-system-dava-newman/ Apparently MIT is experimenting with the skintight space suit that appears in many of my early space exploration novels, and apparently some think they have a new invention. I’m pleased that the concept of the space activity suit is back in the wind and research is being done on it, because I have long been convinced that it’s the right way to go, and I’ll gladly forgive them for thinking they invented it, but I do hope they have not really forgotten the work that Litton industries and Webb Associates of Yellow Springs Ohio have already done. I can refer them to the 1971 document http://chapters.marssociety.org/winnipeg/sas/DevelopmentOfASpaceActivitySuit.pdf and there are many others, including a couple things I wrote a long time before that. The Space Activity Suit makes use of the fact that the human skin can be a perfectly good pressure container provided that it is reinforced. I know of experiments in the 1950’s using Spandex, and I was once in a chamber at Litton which was depressurized to 110,000 feet – as near space vacuum as makes no never mind – in one of them. It didn’t fit me perfectly and fit is very important in an SAS. Any void areas between you and the suit need to be filled with partly inflated sealed balloons which can expand to provide the padding.

Of course the suit needs a neck seal and helmet to deliver breathing air; the lung pressure takes care of pressurizing your system. It’s surprising how much work you can get done in a SAS because you are not fighting pressure changes within the suit when you move. The concept hadn’t been developed enough in the 50’s to warrant incorporating it into the Dynasoar Boeing was proposing, but it was promising and Webb at Yellow Springs continued the development work. I have always thought that would be the final solution to the space suit program.

Bunny Inspectors

http://www.salon.com/2013/12/12/brace_yourself_for_the_srirachapocalypse/?source=newsletter

Because of the smell? Have you ever been in Salinas during the garlic harvest? Or, downwind of a sugar plant in Louisiana during grinding? Sheesh.

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

We are doomed. Doomed I say. No Sriracha?

But the Bunny Inspectors are safe, in the new consensus budget which is going to eliminate needless government spending.