Brrrrrrr!
Ohio is cold, Michigan is colder…
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Brighter Days Behind Us
It turns out that one of the paradoxical effects of human-directed climate change is that even as the earth’s average temperature increases, the intensity of direct sunlight hitting the surface is decreasing due to the scattering effects of aerosolized pollution and dust high in the atmosphere. So when some old person tells you that it was brighter and sunnier and generally less cloudy when they were a kid they are probably right. This effect is most pronounced in the temperate zones and has implications for the solar energy industry, agricultural crop growing, and will even begin to affect the earth’s average albedo (due to reduced dark plant growth in the northern tunda zones).
It’s interesting to note that Earth’s closest twin planet in terms of position and size is Venus, where a runaway Greenhouse Effect keeps surface temperatures around Venusian a toasty 480?C (894?F) but the entire planet is mired in a perpetual twilight gloom (verified by the Russian landers) due to the extraordinarily thick atmosphere (around 9000 kPa or around 90 times Earth’s atmospheric pressure). Venus’s oceans long ago boiled away in this runaway Greenhouse Effect. The oceanographic runaway Greenhouse Effect begins to occur over large bodies of water at around 27?C (80?F). Even ignoring current human-directed climate change, the increasing solar output of the Sun as it moves along a typical Main Sequence stellar evolutionary path means that sooner or later the Earth’s oceans will also vaporise and temperatures soar quickly to Venusian levels. Strange days indeed lie ahead of us…
Ohmura’s results suggested that levels of solar radiation striking the Earth’s surface had declined by more than 10% in three decades … Records show that over the past 50 years the average amount of sunlight reaching the ground has gone down by almost 3% a decade … levels of solar radiation reaching parts of the former Soviet Union had gone down almost 20% between 1960 and 1987 … “The cloudy times are getting darker,” says Cohen, at the Volcani Centre. “If it’s cloudy then it’s darker, but when it’s sunny things haven’t changed much.” … “If the greenhouse effect causes global dimming then that really changes the perspective,” he says. In other words, while it keeps getting warmer it might keep getting darker.
Earlier here.
When Munis Attack!
San Francisco’s local bus company, the “Muni”, often features notoriously suicidal and reckless drivers…
Seventeen people were injured Monday night when a Municipal Railway bus swerved off Mission Street and crashed into an adult video store … One of the injured, a 60-year-old man, was in critical condition with head injuries. The accident occurred at about 10:15 p.m. at Mission and Sixth streets when a 14-Mission double electric bus slammed into the Golden Gate Adult Superstore … Witnesses said the bus was eastbound on Mission Street when it veered off the road and onto the sidewalk at full speed. The front of the bus crashed through the wall and into the store, thrusting a streetlight into the second floor of the building, which houses several apartments.
Commemorating WMDs
Fintan emailed me a nice parallel concerning the display of the Enola Gay in a US national museum. Apparently this airplane has no distinguishing features aside from the fact that it conveyed the first atomic bomb that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Anyway, his point is that for USians to understand how this strikes many people, imagine if sometime around 2050 Al Qaida was to pay for a monument to be erected in Saudia Arabia to commemorate the airplanes that struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11th, 2001.
Oh Delilah
I’ve read several reports that the Undoubtedly Most Wicked Tyrant Of Our Age Hussein was caught due to a tip off by an underpaid flunky, but I’ve also seen this unusual angle - Hussein was making weekly phone calls to his wife and surviving son in Beiruit:
Samira is the woman who so fascinated Saddam Hussein, reviled as one of the world’s most evil dictators, that he kidnapped her husband, forced a divorce and persuaded her to marry him … Samira claims, however, that she is in regular contact with him. “If he cannot say something in detail on the telephone, I know I will receive a letter in two to three days giving me an explanation,” she said … “If I know my husband, he will not be captured“.
Who Needs Allies?
DynCorp is also now guarding Afghan’s putative President, Hamid Karzai.
[DynCorp was] a substantial financial backer of Bush’s election campaign, the company employs almost 25,000 staff, many of them former US military personnel, working in areas from security to aircraft maintenance … Several DynCorp employees were also accused of videotaping the rape of one of the women.
Postmodern Euergetism
In Hollywood, “celebrities” get to charge charities to make appearances at fund raisers. And there I was thinking they were doing it out of generosity…
Many celebrities appear at these events not solely out of the goodness of their hearts. They come to line their pockets. Actor David Schwimmer, who has made many millions of dollars starring in NBC’s “Friends,” received a pair of Rolex watches worth $26,413 in advance of a 1997 charity gala that had among its intended beneficiaries the John Wayne Cancer Institute.
But my favourite has to be Roseanna Barr, who got a charity to spend $60,000 fetching BBQ ribs from a specific Canadian mall…
The comedienne was hankering for fare from the Tunnel Bar-B-Que in Windsor, Canada .. Barr [was] to be the emcee of the upcoming SHARE gala while helping to launch her private foundation [they] whisked Barr and two of her associates onto a hastily chartered private jet for the 2,000-mile jaunt from Van Nuys to Canada. The flight cost $48,351, records show: $4,750 an hour for the plane, $1,350 for three flight attendants and a $1,009 in-flight catering tab that included $356 in Beluga caviar served with four mother-of-pearl spoons at $28 each. On top of that came limousines, an $11,500 shopping spree at a local mall and, of course, the barbecued ribs.
This is not charity, it’s selfish euergetism. One of the welcome social developments during the transformation of the Roman’s Mediterranean culture from secularism to Christianisation was the transition from euergetism to charity. Sadly, Hollywood seems to be harking back to an earlier model…
Open Wide!
So I keep seeing, over and over, tv clips of the captured Saddam Hussein (who in his bedraggled condition bears an uncanny resemblence to the Unabomber). They keep showing him opening his mouth wide and someone shining a light in there. I suspect the Pentagon is desperately looking for any weapons of mass destruction that might be lurking in his mouth or within his dental work — it’s their last, best hope!
Of course, displaying captured leaders and troops for public spectacle goes against the Geneva Conventions, but when has that ever stopped anyone?