Thanks one and all, readers and repliers. I've had more response here in a day than in a month on my website and otherwise.
Dear PictAtRandom, Totally agree, solar power for remote parts of Africa and everywhere else similar looks the best thing. I am an enthusiast (but lazy) for electric bikes, have built and sold one at a fine profit, would like to power them off panels on the shed or house roof. Very tricky up over the bike, blast from passing trucks, etc. See
Practical solar transportation plans at SolarVehicles.org, an open-source project to build fuel-less solar energy transportation. for the V series three-wheeler solar vehicles from Montreal, they are inter alia superb for rural use. The plans are public domain. Jeff has a magnetic perpetual motion drive now, but the earlier vehicles are totally reaL Let's hope he has found a chink in the armour of physical reality with his latest, but I am ever a skeptic.
Could we have predicted the last century's temperature rise from the mag shifts? To spot the driver of a global rise of 0.6 degrees C in a century, might be hoping for too much. Compass declination records go back to the sixteenth century for London, but as far as I know, are more than a bit sparse for the Antarctic area and for Siberia, early on. I would guess that if we had good data for those places from way back, we could probably have predicted the local anomalies there in advance. I am simply going on the assumption that deep electric current and magnetic shifts propogate to the surface one hell of a lot faster than heat does, particularly as the heat is partly from the physical convection of lithic material within the mantle plumes. Someone shoot me down if this is nonsense.
On Indian summers. I think we can get past this problem, if we wake up and act. I am trying to get our local member, the current energy minister for Queensland, on the phone, to suggest a Sasol-type coal-and gas-to-liquids plant is urgently needed here. Then back to Sasol in South Africa, who know how to do it and have done so for 50 years. I am not a Sasol shareholder, by the way, but will go for broke if they want to play. Solar is excellent, but will not run our semi-trailer fleet, just yet. And that is what we use to ship our wheat etc., to hungry folk here and elsewhere. So, natural gas and coal conversion first, at least for here. And of course, all the elecrtic vehicles that will do the job locally.
Of course we should measure the ice changes, the more of that the better. Some of the ice thickness data is very conflicting, suggesting that the overall ice mass in Antarctica is increasing, That is not illogical in a warming sceario, as more water evaporates and some descends as ice. Some of the argument that Antarctica is losing ice comes from the unexpected observed extra rise in sea levels of about 2 mm, I think. That rise is assumed to prove the ice is melting overall. But if the 50 million water bores worldwide drawing down the world's aquifers are pushing water into the oceans, that logic collapse.
I am not suggesting climate change is not happening, of course it is and always has, and particularly up here on an interglacial peak. I am just saying that fossil fuel emiissions are very likely not the main driver. A chemistry man of long experience emailed me to say that the laws of thermodynamics and a long-established chemical equation say very clearly that when the temperature of the oceans rises, carbon dioxide will be given off into the atmosphere. I will dredge it up and post, am sure he will not mind. He was scathing of the poor grasp of basic chemistry by the IPCC.
Dear Cbacba,
Ta muchly for that link, will peruse those next.
P.S. "Nil carbon carborumdum" to corrupt and dog-Latin the old adage. That is, (or tries to be) :"Don't let the carbon grind you down." What's "shortage" or "zero"? Anyone?
Hooroo,
Peter.
p.s.ravenscroft@gmail.com