Andy Semple

Nature’s ticking time bomb: Yellowstone Super volcano

Seriously, if the super volcano that is Yellowstone National Park were to blow, then we’d all see some real deadly climate change.

Forget imaginary anthropogenic global warming, for the past two million years, this volcano has erupted roughly every 600,000 years. The last major eruption, which produced a caldera that stretches 80 kilometres by 50 kilometres across the park occurred 640,000 years ago. These blowouts occur on a regular basis, as steady as the blasts from Old Faithful geyser.

So we’re overdue. It’s not a matter of if that supervolcano will erupt, it’s a matter of when.

An eruption is inevitable, and geological evidence indicates that it will be soon.

Geologists have been collecting data going back to 1923. The land around Yellowstone has been steadily rising as pressure builds below, but starting in 2004, that bulging of the land has surged to three times the annual average, the highest ever recorded. The bottom of one end of Yellowstone Lake, which overlies the massive caldera, has risen enough to spill water out of the other end, killing trees. Other sections of the surrounding forest are dying because their roots systems are being cooked by the subterranean heat.

Numerous hot springs along trails have begun to boil, severely injuring some tourists, requiring some paths t be shut down. Elsewhere, new vents have been opening deeper in the parks, observed by passing airplanes, spewing steam and gouts of highly toxic vapours that have kill bison beast on the spot.

It’s a powder keg waiting to explode.

So what can we expect if she erupts? In a word – cataclysm.

First, it would be the loudest explosion heard by mankind in over seventy thousand years. Within minutes, a hundred thousand people would be buried by ash, incinerated by superheated pyroclastic flows, or killed by the explosive force alone. Magma would spew fifty kilometres into the air. The chamber would release a volume of lava large enough, if spread over the entire US, to cover the country to the depth of 15 centimetres (5 inches). But most of that flow would be confined to the Western states, wiping out the entire Northwest of America. For the rest of the country – and most likely the world – ash would be the real killer. Estimates (watch the two doco’s below) say it would cover two-thirds of North America in at least a metre of ash, rendering the land sterile and uninhabitable. But worst of all, the ash blown into the atmosphere would dim the sun and drop the earth’s temperature by twenty degrees celsius, triggering a volcanic winter that could last decades, it not centuries. Picture worldwide starvation, the chaos, the death.

And it’s happened before. Only seventy thousand years ago. A supervolcano erupted in Sumatra. The volcanic winter that followed in its wake wiped out most of the human population, dropping our numbers down to only a few thousand breeding pairs worldwide.

The worse thing however, is there is nothing we can do to stop it. 

  

  

  

 

 

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Which part of “Global” don’t you understand, Flannery

Special thanks to Steve Hunter for permission to reproduce his cartoons exclusively on Andy’s RANT!

Steve Hunter is a freelance cartoonist and illustrator and lives in Buderim Queensland.

 

 

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How Fossil Fuels are actually greening the Planet

Surprisingly, it turns out that the plants aren’t complaining about the extra CO2, only the humanoid Ecotards are. 

Via Reason TV

  

 

 

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The Chart that shows the Global Warming doomsdayers are wrong

Via the Daily Mail

The graph above blows apart the ‘scientific basis’ for Britain reshaping its entire economy and spending billions in taxes and subsidies in order to cut emissions of greenhouse gases.

Steadily climbing orange and red bands on the graph show the computer predictions of world temperatures used by the official United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The estimates – given with 75 per cent and 95 per cent certainty – suggest only a five per cent chance of the real temperature falling outside both bands.

But when the latest official global temperature figures from the Met Office are placed over the predictions, they show how wrong the estimates have been, to the point of falling out of the ‘95 per cent’ band completely.

The graph shows in incontrovertible detail how the speed of global warming has been massively overestimated. 

Meanwhile…

TAXPAYERS have already seen their power bills rise by almost $200 a year on average under the carbon tax - and now they will have to fork out for it a second time.

NSW Treasurer Mike Baird said almost $1 billion was predicted to be wiped from the state's declining economy as the Gillard government raided its coffers under the tax.

He said consumers, who have been stung with energy bill increases of 52 per cent in the past three years, were already contributing $580 million to the federal government this year. And in what he described as a "double hit," new Treasury modelling revealed the state-owned electricity generators would also forgo $355 million in revenue to the federal government.

Climate Change has been subverted by the watermelons of the green movement. There aims: to extend the powers of government; to raise taxes; to weaken the capitalist system; to curtail personal freedom; to redistribute income; to bring ever-closer the advent of an eco-fascist New World Order. 

Update:

And the Carbon Tax is now being blamed for the record number of company closures

The carbon tax is contributing to a record number of firms going to the wall with thousands of employees being laid off and companies forced to close factories that have stood for generations.

Soaring energy bills caused by the Government's climate change scheme have been called the "straw that broke the camel's back" by company executives and corporate rescue doctors who are trying to save ailing firms.

New data from the corporate regulator reveals insolvencies have hit a record high over the past 12 months, led by widespread failures in manufacturing and construction, which accounted for almost one-fifth of collapses.

The Australian Securities & Investments Commission reports there were 10,632 company collapses for the 12 months to March 1 - averaging 886 a month - with the number of firms being placed in administration more than 12 per cent higher than during the global financial crisis
While the high Australian dollar is seen as the main factor behind manufacturing closures, experts say the carbon tax is adding to increasing cost burdens for many firms struggling to stay afloat.

Peter Macks, principal of Adelaide-based insolvency firm Macks Advisory, said the carbon tax was "quite debilitating" for a number of hotel operators who he said had been "struggling for a long time".

Well done, Labor…

 

 

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Game Changer: Safer Nuclear Power at half the Price

It would seem sensible to me to spend R&D money on this very promising development rather than continuing to subsidise unless ‘renewables’ such as wind and solar.

Via MIT Tech Review

Transatomic Power, an MIT spinoff, is developing a nuclear reactor that it estimates will cut the overall cost of a nuclear power plant in half. It’s an updated molten-salt reactor, a type that’s highly resistant to meltdowns. Molten-salt reactors were demonstrated in the 1960s at Oak Ridge National Lab, where one test reactor ran for six years, but the technology hasn’t been used commercially.

The new reactor design, which so far exists only on paper, produces 20 times as much power for its size as Oak Ridge’s technology. That means relatively small, yet powerful, reactors could be built less expensively in factories and shipped by rail instead of being built on site like conventional ones. Transatomic also modified the original molten-salt design to allow it to run on nuclear waste.

…The new reactor is expected to save money not only because it can be built in a factory rather than on site but also because it adds safety features—which could reduce the amount of steel and concrete needed to guard against accidents—and because it runs at atmospheric pressure rather than the high pressures required in conventional reactors.

A conventional nuclear power plant is cooled by water, which boils at a temperature far below the 2,000 °C at the core of a fuel pellet. Even after the reactor is shut down, it must be continuously cooled by pumping in water. The inability to do that is what caused the problems at Fukushima: hydrogen explosions, releases of radiation, and finally meltdown.

Using molten salt as the coolant solves some of these problems. The salt, which is mixed in with the fuel, has a boiling point significantly higher than the temperature of the fuel. The reactor has a built-in thermostat—if it starts to heat up, the salt expands, spreading out the fuel and slowing the reactions. That gives the mixture a chance to cool off. In the event of a power outage, a stopper at the bottom of the reactor melts and the fuel and salt flow into a holding tank, where the fuel spreads out enough for the reactions to stop. The salt then cools and solidifies, encapsulating the radioactive materials. “It’s walk-away safe,” says Dewan, the company’s chief science officer. “If you lose electricity, even if there are no operators on site to pull levers, it will coast to a stop.”

The new design improves on the original molten-salt reactor by changing the internal geometry and using different materials. Transatomic is keeping many of the design details to itself, but one change involves eliminating the graphite that made up 90 per cent of the volume of the Oak Ridge reactor. The company has also modified conditions in the reactor to produce faster neutrons, which makes it possible to burn most of the material that is ordinarily discarded as waste. A conventional reactor produces about 20 metric tons of high-level waste a year, and that material needs to be stored for 100,000 years. The 500-megawatt Transatomic reactor will produce only four kilograms of such waste a year, along with 250 kilograms of waste that has to be stored for a few hundred years.

 

 

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The real figures on Global Warming don’t match the hype

Via the Telegraph

…What the graphs do not show is the actual level of global temperature, as it is measured above freezing point. In other words, they leave out by far the greater part of the total picture. So the respected Canadian environmental writer, Lawrence Solomon, recently had the bright idea of publishing in his Financial Post newspaper column a graph showing the temperature changes of the past 15 years in proper perspective, using figures from the most prestigious of all official temperature records, compiled by the UK Met Office and its Hadley Centre.

The result, as can be seen here, is startling. By including that huge part of the data usually left out, we see that the line looks virtually flat. The actual changes look relatively so small, compared with those rises and falls of several whole degrees the world survived in the past, that any idea that we are facing catastrophic warming pales into insignificance. In recent months, even such fanatical proponents of the warmist orthodoxy as Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, James Hansen of Nasa, and the Met Office have all had to concede that since 1997, the warming trend has stalled virtually to a standstill.

Of course, there was a modest temperature rise in the 20th century, as a continuation of the warming that began 200 years ago as the world naturally emerged from those centuries of cooling known as the Little Ice Age. But the 0.5C rise between 1976 and 1998 was no greater than the 0.5C rise between 1910 and 1940 (with 35 years of cooling between them, so that the net rise in the past century has been only 0.8C).

Yet it was on that modest rise in the 1980s and 1990s that the whole of the greatest and most expensive scare in history was launched on its way, with all the terrifying political and economic consequences we see around us today. The very last people to recognise this, alas, will be our politicians, because they seem incapable of looking properly at the evidence.

The price we are all increasingly having to pay for their gullibility is incalculable.

 

 

 

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The Sun, not a harmless essential trace gas, drives real climate change

Watch the videos below and then ask yourself the question, “Does the sun, and not a harmless essential trace gas (CO2), drives real climate change?”

  

  

 

 

 

 

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DC Snowstorm scrubs Global Warming hearing

Oh the irony…

Via Politico

The snowquester has claimed yet another casualty: Wednesday's House hearing on global warming.

The House Science, Space and Technology Committee announced early Wednesday that it's postponing its environmental subcommittee's scheduled 10 a.m. hearing on the state of the science behind climate change. As a reason, it cited "weather."

The panel hasn't announced when the hearing will take place.

The session was apparently designed to shore up the knowledge of subcommittee members ahead of expected new carbon regulations from President Barack Obama. As of Tuesday evening, a committee spokesman had insisted the show would go on.

…Scheduled witnesses included Judith Curry, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and leading storm and climate expert; William Chameides, dean at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University; and Bjørn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. Lomborg sometimes rankles climate activists for his position that climate change is a real and man-made phenomenon, but that it’s not as bad as folks make it out to be.

The full committee also canceled a 2 p.m. hearing on government efforts to track and deal with asteroids and meteors.

First there were protesters protesting in the cold weather about global warming and now the politicians have suspended their gabfest because of more snowy weather…

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Proof why global cooling is far worse than global warming

A picture is a thousand words…

This time last year, Taylor’s Bulbs near Spalding, Lincolnshire, was carpeted with nodding daffodils; this year their leaves are still making their way out of the ground.

A perfect illustration that plant life struggles in cold conditions and we shouldn’t fear if the planet warms up. Ask yourself this question, would you rather be warm and comfortable or cold and miserable?

And remember, Carbon Dioxide is food for plants.

  

 

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The Windfather: How the Mob is moving into renewable energy

All the major political parties are involved in the renewable energy scam so it isn’t really a surprise to me that organised crime is now also involved.

Via Dailybail

Traditionally the mafia controls operations in gambling, prostitution, protection, extortion, and loan-sharking, yet recent evidence shows that they might actually be adding renewable energy to that list.

Italian police have recently discovered links between the Sicilian crime families known as the Cosa Nostra, and wind and solar power companies in the area. Law enforcement officers have taken around a dozen crime bosses off to jail, along with corrupt officials and company executives; they have also seized around 30 per cent of Sicily’s wind farms, and have frozen more than $2 billion worth of assets.

Back in 2010 a similar police operation saw the seizure of over 40 companies, land, buildings, factories, bank accounts, stocks, cars, and yachts from the Sicilian business man Vito Nicastri, also known as the ‘Lord of the Wind’ due to his investments in wind farms and solar panel factories.

It is likely that the Mafia has been attracted to renewable energy for several reasons; Sicily is a sunny, windy island that offers great alternative energy opportunities; much like Germany and Spain, Italy has been awarding generous subsidies to try and encourage the development of renewable energy projects; and also, the renewable energy industry offers a legitimate business which is likely to be around for many years and can provide a good front for the family.

 

 

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