Fractured Definition

Oxymoron — someone who believes that CO2 is more prevalent in our atmosphere than O2.


STAND UP FOR AMERICA!

Carbon Sequestering

Science is built on unbiased observation ... and I have seen a few things during these last shutdown weeks that have me sitting up and taking notice. Relaxing in my easy chair early every morning drinking my coffee, I have watched the Spring advance from my same observation spot for a number of years. I can see, through our big glass doors how the sun-rise position inches across the horizon from South to North.

Today this bright sunlight is not filtered through our big silver maple tree leaves behind our house ... like in prior years ... and so I have noticed something interesting this year —- the leaves are still in bud ... whereas in previous years at this time, they were in full large healthy green leaves when then I didn’t have to shade my eyes in the brightness. Now I do. Why are things different this year?

Because of the coronavirus lockdown, there is virtually no air traffic ... and very little car traffic. So this must mean substantially less carbon dioxide is being emitted. How much less is uncertain., but I would love to have a number. And, if Al Gore is right, this would be resulting in cooler temperatures. Yes, Spring does seem a little late this year ... but is something else also at work?

Are the trees still in bud because things might be slightly cooler? Or is it because they have not as much to eat? Maybe, just maybe, our flora has gotten used to a groaning larder of CO2 food ... and now we have put them back on a starvation diet? And that is why Spring has been delayed ... and I must shade my eyes in the early morning ... since the silver maple, out of spite, is not doing its shading job this year.

I don’t think that we realize how voracious feeders plants and trees are. With the advent of mankind burning hydrocarbons, we have put much more CO2 into our atmosphere,. Yet our flora is gobbling it up almost as fast as we can produce it. Carbon dioxide, at its low point, was about 0.03% of what we breath ... despite all we many animals exhaling this gas ... and our burning wood and coal to cook and stay warm. Now, burning oil and natural gas have put much, much more CO2 out there ... but our flora keeps digesting it almost as fast as we make it. Its concentration has risen to only about 0.04% (up 10 parts per million) ... showing how hungry our plants are. And, of late is now temporarily going back down because of the coronavirus halting travel.

Bottom line: Why are we spending billions on developing carbon sequestering technologies when Mother Nature has already given us one — flora, hungering to be fed CO2. Just plant a whole bunch more fast-growing trees.

Butterfly in Japan

Predicting American hurricanes can be very complicated, as they say, because some think such storms can be affected by a butterfly flapping its wings in Japan.

This may be a logical stretch, but it does explain why pandemics (and climate change) forecasting is a daunting “science” .... and often an unsuccessful task. Why? Well, think about the current COvID-19 pandemic. It is certainly possible that, if this virus lived only 7 minutes on a steel surface instead of 17 minutes, then this scourge might have died off in the Wuhan wet market before it ever got started.

So, please pay attention Greta Thunberg (and your handlers). You are so certain, in your narrow and inexperienced teenage world, that CO2 is going to destroy us all. There are many other things that are at play in our evolving global climate ... things you are unable to even imagine. So, please do us a huge favor ... stop lecturing the rest of us ... at least until you have your first grey hair.

And don’t be tempted to command us about pandemics too ...

Mars

I read recently that the atmosphere of Mars is 95% carbon dioxide ... see: Atmosphere of Mars. This surprised me since the atmosphere here on Earth is only 0.04% CO2. Now I understand that the Martian atmosphere is much thinner (1%) than it is on our planet, but it is still revealing and prompts the following observations:

- Mars obviously has no fossil fuels since it is questionable if it ever supported any life that left a legacy of hydrocarbons ... nor does it have any internal combustion engines. So where did this CO2 come from? The answer must be that there is a natural out-gassing from volcanoes and vents occurring there and, not having any plant life to convert this carbon dioxide to sugar and oxygen over the eons, this gas has kept building up. This also strongly suggest that this process must have happened, and probably still does occur, here on Earth.

- Being that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and given its huge percentage there, the temperature on Mars must be extraordinarily high. But no, it is cold enough there to freeze this CO2 into dry ice around it’s polar regions ... see picture above. Huh?

- Elon Musk is pointing to Mars as being the refuge that we must inhabit to escape from our Earth that is destroying itself with CO2-produced global warming. Why would we seek to flee to a planet that has many thousands of times more percentage of atmospheric carbon dioxide than we have here at home? Do government subsidies for electric cars and rocket ships have anything to do with this?

Afterward: Thinking more about Earthlings settling Mars — Mars obviously has no ozone layer like we do on Earth that protects us from the sun’s lethal cosmic rays. This would complicate the habitation process there enormously ... possibly too enormously.

Hydrocarbon Irony

I am surprised that so few people have pointed out the irony contained in Elon Musk’s SpaceX company sending one of his electric Tesla cars into orbit around the moon. Has anyone stopped to consider that the hydrocarbons burned to accomplish this piece of self-promotion was likely equivalent to those saved by thousands of his electric cars scooting about here in Earth? What about all the global warming that possibly resulted from this enormous amount of CO2 so produced? As a matter of fact, when is Musk’s SpaceX going to develop an all-electric rocket-ship so that we (and he?) can colonize Mars?

Fat chance!

Sergeant Schultz

German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz emulates Sergeant Schultz, “I know nothing.” See: Junk Science blog entry

Of course, CO2 is absolutely essential for any plant respiration and food production.

Photosynthesis

A bit ago I discussed the process here on Earth which captures and stores the sun’s energy ... photosynthesis ... see: Living Life. I called this process “magical” because I have never read a convincing explanation of how it really happens (try: Photosynthesis Process). We know it involves sunlight, chlorophyll, water and the very small amount of CO2 in our atmosphere (0.04%) ... and produces a hydrocarbon (glucose) and oxygen.

OK, I’m going out on a scientific limb here ... and conclude that, for this chemical process to take place, something like electrolysis needs to occur to separate water into its components, hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen then combines with the CO2 (chlorophyll acting as a catalyst?) to form glucose (C6H12O6 atoms ... an endothermic chemical reaction) which effectively then stores the energy of the sun.

But what process like hydrolysis separates water into the atoms hydrogen and oxygen? This is where I surmise nature’s magic. As it turns out electrons cannot really travel through space from the sun and break the bond between these two elements of water (an exothermic reaction). But, photons and neutrinos can combine under certain conditions to form electrons (look it up) ... and our sun produces these two subatomic particles, photons and neutrinos, in almost infinite numbers. My loopy surmise is that this is what happens and the electrons produced then break water into its two component atoms.

Crazy? I could be ... but to me this explanation makes more sense than the above photosynthesis  explanation.

24CO2 + 6H2O — 2C12H6O + 26O2

Living Life

The Earth is unique among all the planets we know in that it has evolved a way of capturing and storing the energy from the sun through a magical process called photosynthesis ... the basis of all life. And photosynthesis totally depends on one extremely scarce ingredient to start everything off ... CO2. And now, our most highly evolved life form, man, has decreed CO2 to be a pollutant ... and is trying to eliminate it from our atmosphere.  Are we f**king crazy?!

Sunspots

Climate scientists are sounding a warning. But this time it has to do with global cooling. It seems that lack of sunspots, like now, are a reliable predictor of lower global temperatures ... see: Daily Mail Article.

What? I thought that CO2 was the only driver of climate change? (Now it is sunspots ... and there are many others.)

Now, in order to save us from freezing, Al Gore, Barack Obama Jerry Brown and 97% of climate scientists are now pushing for more fossil fuel usage to increase CO2 to counteract our dimming sun. This we will have to do anyway to  burn to help us warm our homes.

Headlines

Trump calls for Russia to be brought back into the G-7

Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain has died at 61 in a suicide, CNN says

Krauthammer: Weeks to live ...

Trump floats idea of end to federal marajuana ban

Trump: First lady 'great' but cannot fly again for a month

Scientists at a company part owned by Bill Gates gave found a cheap way of converting CO2 into gasoline

Chinese hackers stole sensitive Navy underseas warfare plans ...

Google says will refuse to use A.I.  to help U.S. military

Trump says he's considering pardoning Muhammad Ali

Trump says EPA chief Scott Pruitt not blameless: 'We'll see what happens'

Australia to expel up to 60 imams, close 7 mosques

Tijuana 2018: Six murders per day

What Things Are

Girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice

Boys are made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails

Trans are made of snips and snails and everything nice

Republicans are bingo winners and pot-luck dinners

Democrats are for Greenpeace and a tax increase

Socialists are all for free health and share the wealth

CO2 is a life-giving gas decried by an ass [A.G.]

Male swells are all labido driven by an oversized ego

Scaramucci is now gone and also forgotten

Suggestion Box

A few things that could make our screwed-up world a might sight better:

- All the ransoms that need to be paid to unlock Windows computers locked by ransomware should be paid by ... Bill Gates.

- To save the planet, soft drink makers should replace their CO2 bubbles with nitrous oxide (laughing gas).

- President Macron of France (39) should honor his 64 year-old wife as "Cougar of the Year".

- To get rid of her persistant cough, Hillary Clinton should stop drinking so much chardonnay.

- If the US can hack North Korea's missile launches, we should direct the next one back onto Kim Jong Un's viewing site.

- Celebrities who are famous for being famous should be boycotted by the media

- Trump should fess up about his Russia collusion: 'Yes, I was hoping to get them to help us in our war against jihadism ...'

- Julian Assange should be given the US Medal of Freedom ... then placed in front of a firing squad.

- Student tuition loans, in the US and Britain, should only be paid directly to the colleges and not to the students.

20 More Questions

Why would any clear-thinking tourist travel to North Korea?

Do today's chefs' numerous tattoos make their food taste any better?

What were Barack Obama's SAT and LSAT scores?

What is the percentage of CO2 in our atmosphere?

Was the 2016 Russian hacking directed at the presidential election or rather to the Democrat party's nomination process?

How much was the United Airlines payoff to the screaming Kentucky doctor?

What has happened to Michelle Obama's White House vegetable garden?

Should a woman, who identifies as a man, have to pee into a urinal?

Will Elon Musk keep pulling off the impossible?

Does Planned Parenthood perform any mammograms in its many clinics?

How many dead children will result from the current remake of Obamacare?

Do Chicago black lives also matter?

In any alternative universe did Hillary win the presidency?

Why did the Obamaistas use the terms ISIL/Daesh instead of ISIS?

Will Keith Olbermann ever smile?

Where is John Kerry's wife, Theresa Heinz? Is she still alive and signing checks?

Will Venezuela's President Maduro win the next Kennedy Profiles in Courage Award?

What fast-food restaurant chain once used kangaroo meat in its hamburgers?

Should the comedy writers for SNL and Stephen Colbert still be getting paid?

Why do fools fall in love?

Headlines

These headlines are real ... they have all been discovered on Internet news sites. Guess which ones came from Politico?

EU death match: Le Pen vs. Macron

White House reception for conservative media ...

Uber secretly tracking IPhone users after they deleted app ...

Trump and Congress eye shutdown showdown over border wall

NYT refuses to use the term 'female genital mutilation' as it's 'culturally loaded'

Exclusive: New study says EPA's calling CO2 a pollutant 'totally false'

Sanders: 'The model of the Democratic Party is failing'

Willie Brown: 'Free speech is being buried at Berkeley'

U.N. elects Saudi Arabia to Women's Rights Commission

House Democrats grow bullish after Trump's stumbles

Five killed, 26 wounded in Chicago shootings over the weekend

Bibi: 4M lives would have been saved if allies had bombed death camps immediately

Pissing up a Rope

A scientist who is a true believer in global warming being caused by CO2 ... nevertheless confesses that the world is pissing up a rope (didn't quite say it that way) if we believe that we can cut carbon emissions anywhere near what was recently agreed to in the Paris COP21 conference ... See: CNBC Story. And even if the world does the best that it can do to meet this goal, this would cause mass starvation, huge quality of life impacts and ultimate world strife ... yet still at a cost of $15.4 trillion over the next 40 years ... no small change.

His name is M.J. Kelly, Professor of Engineering at Cambridge University and he believes that, given the tremendous cost of meeting the Paris agreements ... both in monetary and human terms ... that the world needs to have a more vigorous debate about the merits and demerits of carbon dioxide in our environment.

I second and third his argument. The slavish, almost religious following of those scientist and politicians who are trying to panic the world into treating CO2 as a pollutant ... need to step back and look at things a little more soberly. If they just remembered their high school science classes indicating that CO2 is the basis of all life on Earth, they might calm down enough to have Professor Kelly's debate.

A Convenient Culprit

Let me try explaining things one more time.

Yesterday at a party I was engaged in conversation with a well-educated man. The subject of global warming came up and I asked him what percent of our atmosphere was carbon dioxide? He answered, "3 or 4 percent." When I told him he was 100 times too high he was shocked. "You mean it is 0.04%?" I answered in the affirmative and added that plants on Earth are on a starvation diet of CO2 relative to the past when levels were ten or more times higher ... see Earthguide Article -- the source of the above chart. And levels were even two times higher when, exactly where we were then sitting, 650 thousand years ago we would have been covered by ice a mile thick.

The global-warming mania around the world exists because of ignorance ... ignorance of history and ignorance of science. Yes, according to recent satellite data (ground-based temperature measurements are now useless), our planet's temperature has increased a bit during our Industrial Age with the burning of fossil fuels. But this has only increased CO2 levels by at most 10 parts per million (+33%) over the last 150 years ... a mere bagatelle. And global temperatures have not increased at all for the last 17 years. This is embarrassingly known by scientists as "the pause" and is only discussed sotta voce. Politicians who claim that we are now hotter than ever are lying ... because they are conveniently basing these claims on ground-level measurements which are seriously biased by the recent effects of urbanization ... or, even worse, they are using altered raw data ... a scientific taboo.

My sincere hope is that, over the coming election year, politicians who wring their hands over global warming or climate change or climate extremes need to be asked the question I asked my party friend ... and, if they answer incorrectly, should be laughed off the stage. If they get it right, then should be asked what five other things might ever contribute to our planet's warming (like back when the Ice Age retreated)? And, if they can't name at least five other things (hints: solar cycles, slight changes in Earth's orbit, wiggles in the Earth's tilt, altering ocean currents, atmospheric particulates from vulcanization, methane level changes, water vapor changes, changes in our solar system's place in the Milky Way, tectonic plate shifts, any many more), they should again be ridiculed. If they can list five or more things, then they should be asked why carbon dioxide is then the primary suspect? This question can only be truthfully answered by the admission that it is the only convenient culprit that man might possibly control ... obviously a reducto absurdum and shows how unscientific the current climate science is  ... at which point this pol's eyes should brighten and his/her mind be changed ... otherwise he/she is a charlatan.

Wouldn't that be a seminal moment?

Semantics

There has been a subtle shift in the semantics being used by Obummer and John Kerry when crowing about the squishy results of the Paris Climate Accord. Instead of talking about reductions of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, they are now taking about targeted reductions in "carbon." Now this seems like a trivial difference but it truly isn't. Smoke is comprised mainly of unoxidized carbon and its reduction is a good thing ... with which most civilized people can agree. Whereas CO2 is the source of all life on Earth ... and its reduction is not necessarily a good thing. During the Carboniferous Period (360-300 million years ago) CO2 was 10 times higher than it is today, yet the Earth survived well ... thank you very much.

In fact this 60 million year period in our planet's formation is when most of the oil, coal and natural gas was laid down underground. Ponder on this for a moment. All the lush vegetation that was growing in this CO2-rich environment is the source of most all of the fossil fuels that we use today. 60 million years is 20 times longer than when the earliest man appeared on Earth and 30,000 times longer than the period of time since the birth of Christ. That's a good long time with a whole lot of vegetative growth ... and thus a whole lot of fossil fuels ... much more than I suspect we currently estimate. Yes, some day we will run out... but this is many lifetimes away ... and I believe that our sources of energy then will not be wind ... maybe sunshine ... but more likely safe fission and fusion.

So our administration's purposeful obfuscation of the term "carbon" to imply both smoke and CO2 is disingenuous and purposefully confusing. ... an attempt to lead the uninformed to its way of thinking. How very semantically Orwellian!

See also: Power Line Blog.

Peacock Tongues

In the corrupt and dying days of the Roman Empire, it's leaders indulged in excesses of all types ... sexual, criminal, foppish and gluttonous. They dissolved precious pearls in their wine and had sumptuous feasts of cock's combs and peacock tongues. I think we are beginning to see a distasteful replication of these Roman indulgences in our current cast of poltroon politicians. A few days ago I predicted the kind of excesses we might see at the recent Climate Summit in Paris ... see: The French Connection. I think I hit the nail on the head:

The above photo displays the extravagant excesses enjoyed by Obummer, John Kerry and other world "leaders" at one of their lavish "down on CO2" feasts in Paris while, at the same time, finding the unmitigated gall to lecture the rest of the world on how we need to do what they say ... and not what they do.

Which way to the vomitorium?

Tinfoil-Hat Time

An astrophysicist at CalTech claims to have found possible evidence of a parallel universe ... see: USA Today Story. Supposition of one or more parallel universes, with different rules of existence, have kept science fiction writers busy for decades. But, if this new evidence bears fruit, all types of new fanciful suppositions should now come bursting forth into the tinfoil-hat kook-a-sphere. For instance, how about the thought that, in this parallel universe, people can self-identify as black even though they have no African DNA. Or perhaps, men with penises can claim to be females and demand to be given access to women's locker rooms. Or perhaps one religion in this parallel universe can crucify apostates, burn them alive, enslave them, or demand tribute payments from them ... yet still be called a " religion of peace."

There, there might even be beings who chop up their unborn claiming that they are only hunks of protoplasm. Or, perhaps the prevailing economic rule states that "to each according to his need ... and, from each, according to his ability." In this wonderful parallel universe, the gas that is the fundamental basis of all life, such as our CO2, can be government-labeled a "pollutant." And there the wife of a former supreme leader might feel she should be the next supreme leader only because she lacks the equivalent of a Y chromosome.

This alternate universe surlely has a lot of strange goings-on.

Stupid Assumptions

In order to get through the day, we make a plethora of assumptions ... some smart, some stupid. Here is my list of some of the more asinine ones (yes, Bill, another list):

- All Hollywood actors are smart
- Socialism/Communism insures equal outcomes
- All American blacks are descendants of slaves
- TV ads tell the truth
- The media is unbiased
- America is a male-dominated society
- All politicians are patriotic
- Man never walked on the moon
- All natural foods are healthier for you
- CO2 causes global warming
- The gay agenda is totally benign
- Marijuana does not alter one's judgement
- 9/11 was an inside job
- Capitalism is spawned out of greed
- Liberals are not prejudiced
- Ronald Reagan was a dunce
- Religions are always a force for good

Remember that when you assume, you are thinking I am going to say "You make an "ass" out of "u" and "me." But then again, I might not ...

Afterward: My wife who tends towards P.C.ness questioned my statement about the stupidity of assuming that the gay agenda is totally benign. May I offer two examples supporting this assertion? #1 The gay tendency toward flaunting public lewdness ... see: Gay Pride-Exposed (and follow the link.) The #2 example is the lesbian couple who have put an Oregon bakery out of business for not supplying them a wedding cake.... see: Fox News Story. It would seem this punishment is a little harsh for a principled religious stand. But this lesbian couple seems far from acting in a benign and forgiving manner. There are many other examples of such vindictiveness.