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[ Sunday, July 13, 2008 12:03 ]

Legacy Journal: Sunday Chatter x 3: ABC, NBC, and CBS

Section:
Commentary

Summary:
The silly summer season of Sunday network election talk TV is again upon us. Today, the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger was front and center for the first one third of ABC’s This Week with George Stephenopoulos. What ever the California connection to Disney, natives would agree with Arnold that California is the most important state in the union, and McCain should not dismiss the state as a lost cause in his general election campaign. This week McCain will address both LA Raza group in San Diego and the annual NCAA meeting. How quixotic is that? Or is good politics now that Steve Smith is now driving the McCain Express bus and serious funds are starting to fuel the political machine.

Main:
Meanwhile George and his wife, Alexandra Wentworth, can spend serious time hanging out with their friends, like the Steinfelds and playing with the kids and the crabs at the Hampton beaches while others summer on ranches in Montana, music festivals in Aspen or Vail, attending media conferences in Sun Valley, Idaho or fly fishing in Jackson Hole Wyoming. Arnold and wife are on Senior Senator watch and have the Gulf Stream on standby near their Santa Monica home. Little of significance will be happening in Sacramento or Washington, DC between now and Labor Day.

As of today, Arnold’s sense of political realism is that:

* The Governator is on top of the early, numerous, and wide spread lightning cause fires in his state. Regional and Federal help has been sufficient to date and the weather is cooperating.

* There will be not drilling for oil off the coast of California. Off shore oil is a states rights issue.

* Global Climate Change is a reality in the minds of California voters, so why should the Terminator stand in front the Green train that has already left the station?

* Political gold is still to be mined in California.

* At the age of 61 year this month, he has a stake in and appetite for future National Service that does not necessarily include national elective office.

* Learning for experience an changing one’s mind is not flip-flopping, it is what smart people, successful business executives and long term survivors do everyday.

* Arnold may have come the United States knowing little English, but puts many crossover journalists, including Time editors, to shame when it comes to putting ideas and opinions into understandable sentences.

More:

Footnotes:

Posted by: webscribe2 on 07/13 at 12:03 PM
Basics: • Biography: • Business and Trade: • Calendar: • Sunday: • Changing Course: • Climate: • Global Warming: • Common Ground: • Community Service: • Culture Clash: • Popular Culture: • Energy: • Oil: • Environment: • Water: • IT3 Tech: • Internet Tech: • Google: • Calendar: • Media Watch: • TV Journalism: • New York: • Villages: • News: • Hot Spot: • Political Watch: • Voice: • Cross Over: • Punditry: • X Factor: • (0) Comments: • (0) Trackbacks: • Permalink:

[ Tuesday, June 03, 2008 07:20 ]

Legacy Journal: Water: the Wilds of Wyoming and Beijing, China---A western perspective.

Section:
Sports

Summary:
What do the sparse wastelands of Wyoming and the Olympic architecture of urban Bejing, China have in common?

Main:
Well, to some folks based in and writing for publication from New York City, both places are foreign, exotic, strange, and not easy to understand, a visit not withstanding.

* Take the current report about a spring of wet weather in Wyoming. The nytimes finds that newsworthy and a bit unusual. So, now it is now possible for trees to grow, meadow larks to sing, prong horn antelope and cattle to graze. Meanwhile, there may even be a hay crop from down by the creek. No wonder Jackie Kennedy wanted her son to get out of town for the summer and get some seasoning and common sense experience on a friend’s working Wyoming cattle ranch.

* And then there is the story of the National Aquatics Center, “The Water Cube” in Bejing the site of the 42 swimming events over two week during the 2008 Olympic Games. The place cost over $100 million in contributed funds from non mainland Chinese sources, was designed by an Australian firm, seats 17,000 and has a light weight, semi-translucent, petroleum based ,Teflon like ceiling. So, what is not to like about that?. A writer for the current New Yorker magazine finds much to comment on including the Chinese way of doing urban planning and residential relocation.

Apparently, some writers need to take a lesson from Frederick West Lander and get out of town and into the field of battle more often.

BTW: Frederick West Lander was an eastern engineer who went went west with the Army and later surveyed for the railroads as they snaked their way across the county’s arrid and hostile trans Mississippi frontier in a series of fits and starts.

Ball’s Bluff ( The Battle of Ball’s Bluff during the Civil War on the Potomic River near Washington.)
(by Frederick West Lander)

Aye, deem us proud, for we are more
Than proud of all our mighty dead;
Proud of the bleak and rock-bound shore,
A crowned oppressor cannot tread.

Proud of each rock, and wood, and glen;
Of every river, lake and plain;
Proud of the calm and earnest men
Who claim the right and the will to reign.

Proud of the men who gave us birth,
Who battled with the stormy wave
To sweep the red man from the earth,
And build their homes upon their grave.

Proud of the holy summer morn
They traced in blood upon its sod;
The rights of freemen yet unborn;
Proud of their language and their God.

Proud that beneath our proudest dome
And round the cottage-cradled hearth
There is a welcome and a home
For every stricken race on earth.

Proud that yon slowly sinking sun
Saw drowning lips grow white in prayer,
O’er such brief acts of duty done,
As honor gathers from despair.

Pride, it is our watchword; “clear the boats”
“Holmes, Putnam, Bartlett, Peirson-Here”
And while this crazy wherry floats
“Let’s save our wounded”, cries Revere.

Old State—some souls are rudely sped --
This record for thy Twentieth Corps --
Imprisoned, wounded, dying, dead,
It only asks, “Has Sparta more?”

More:

Footnotes:

Posted by: webscribe2 on 06/03 at 07:20 AM
Amazing: • Boot Camp: • Business and Trade: • Calendar: • Tuesday: • Climate: • Global Warming: • Culture Clash: • Popular Culture: • Earth Sciences:: • Energy: • Oil: • Environment: • Water: • Frontiersmen, Cowboys and Indians: • Going Green: • Heartland: • IT3 Tech: • Internet Tech: • Google: • Calendar: • Media Watch: • Print Journalism: • Nature: • New York: • Cities: • News: • Good News: • Sign of the Times: • Swimming: • Swimming Olympics: • (0) Comments: • (0) Trackbacks: • Permalink:

[ Sunday, May 25, 2008 13:20 ]

Legacy Journal: The facts on Global Warming

Section:
Book Reviews

Summary:
Freeman Dyson, FRS, the Princeton Theoretical Physicist, often writes for the public on science. He has a recent review for the New York Review of Books of two publications on the Question of Global Warming.">Question of Global Warming.

Main:
Dyson quotes the motto of the British Royal Society, translated by some as “ Let the Facts Speak”, in a section devoted to the prevailing intolerance and ostricism by elites in political power towards scientists who express skepticism regarding the current British administration’s stance on the issue of Global Warming: its cause, its nature, and its cure.

Predictably, Dyson begins his piece by giving the back of his hand to climate speculation by some scientists, computer models, and policy groups. He votes in favor data mined from the field of “precise observation science” like the Keeling Curve ---- in all its shapes?

More:

Footnotes:

Posted by: webscribe2 on 05/25 at 01:20 PM
Black and White: • Calendar: • Sunday: • Climate: • Climate Change: • Climate Chronicles: • Climate Consensus: • Global Warming: • Culture Clash: • High Brow: • Environment: • Advocacy: • IT3 Tech: • Internet Tech: • Google: • Calendar: • Science and Technology: • Physical Sciences: • Weather Watch: • (0) Comments: • (0) Trackbacks: • Permalink:

[ Thursday, April 17, 2008 12:30 ]

Legacy Journal: Steve Chu of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Section:
Briefs

Summary:
Chu is a University of Rochester graduate and trustee. As a major university based research administrator, Nobel Prize winner, national energy policy expert, his lecture today to an overflow crowd was up to date, fast paced, fact filled and well received. Dr. Chu is Director, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has been the formative influence in establishing Helios. Steve is the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and professor of Physics and Cellular and Molecular Biology of the University of California, Berkeley

“ We do not do nuclear weapons research.”

Main:
Amount his practical problem points are the following:

* California is a leader in energy efficiency legislation standards, research and capital investment in retrofitting and renewable sources of power generation.

* The industrial production of nitrogen fertilizers from ammonia and the “Green Revolution” prevented the food crisis predicted by the Malthusian popular professor of butterflys at Stanford, Paul Erhlich in his 1969, the Population Bomb..

* Heartland farmers should be putting 35 million acres of farmland back into producing crops for domestic and foreign food consumption, not alcohol for fuel. World price increases and shortages of basics like corn, wheat, rice, and soybean expose weak currency nations to the flame and flood of food riots.

* Diesel and jet fuel can not be biogenerated. Termite power in the form of multiple gut microbes may be a model for converting lignan protected cellulose (wood) into simple sugars.

* The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Helios Project concentrates on renewable fuels Jay Keasling is an colleague.

* Nuclear power production needs to increase. Current nuclear power plants are safe and waste problems are being solved

* The national electrical grid needs a DC upgrade to the tune of $ one Trillion dollars.

* The general approach should be a multi layered, but results oriented.

* Photovoltaic cells, Wind generators, fuel cells and gas turbines,at present, are orders of magnitude more costly than coal, hydro, and geothermal. Klamath, Oregon and the state of Utah are geothermal hot spots.

More:

Footnotes:

Posted by: webscribe2 on 04/17 at 12:30 PM
Cal Water Science: • Calendar: • Friday: • Climate: • Critical Questions: • Forecasting: • Global Warming: • Data: • Numbers: • Energy: • Environment: • Food: • Heartland: • IT3 Tech: • Internet Tech: • Google: • Calendar: • News: • Hot Spot: • Science and Technology: • Physical Sciences: • SeniorStatesmen: • (0) Comments: • (0) Trackbacks: • Permalink:

[ Sunday, October 21, 2007 13:26 ]

Legacy Journal: Water in the Lower Colorado River Basin: A view from New York

Section:
Environment

Summary:
“ Water will run uphill to meet a money honey-pot”

This Sunday, New York Times Magazine writer, JON GERTNER, examines spot water shortages in Colorado. The provocative title is, The Future is Drying Up.

To his credit, Gertner makes the important point that water is not consumed. It may be displaced or it may be transformed, but it not destroyed. His work as a contributor to Money Magazine and as a writer with tennessean.com of Nashville may have acquaint him with the potent combination of regional water, big science and energy as in the TVA.

Others have noted that water, like heat, is seldom delivered by nature at just the right place, at just the right time, in just the right quantity to satisfy every need and every hope.

Main:
First, Gertner introduces readers to Dr. Stephen Chu, head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at UC. Chu is a respected research scientist Physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in 1997 for work done Bell Labs where he surely knew the current UC President, and fellow Physicist, Canadian, Robert Dynes. He is also high profile in promoting big ideas that attracts funding. At an previous academic stop at Stanford with the help of James Clark funding, Chu became a biophysicist, and a Cellular and Molecular Biologist. Since moving to Berkeley, Chu has the Lab from Nuclear Physics and Atomic Radiation into the alternative energy and bio-fuels field and attracted mega-millions of research pledges from firms like BP. So what are Chu’s qualifications as a western water shortage expert? The Chu’s model based western water forecasts for the second half of the century are not a good start. For example, he appears to forecast a 67% probability of up to 70% of the Sierra snow pack “Disappearing”. Oops. The most casual summer hiker visiting places like Yosemite, the John Muir Trail, and the Desolation Wilderness is aware that the vestige patches of the winter snow pack are scant by late August. Snow in the Sierra is not a year to year cumulative event. Foothill water storage at sites behind dams like Shasta and Folsom are. But, Chu must be excused for his apparent excesses. He is not a westerner.

For starters, young Stephen attended early schools in NYC. That city is well known to have a reliable and long standing municipal water supply from to the Adirondacks. His undergraduate time at the University of Rochester probable acquaint him with water in abundance in the economically important Great Lake System, where shipping interests are concerned with every inch channel depth, and because of the local “Lake Ontario effect” on the western upstate NY weather pattern. Chu is also described as a swimmer.

In any event, Chu is energetic, fit, smart, is always looking for big problems that can be solved by Big Science, and is at the ready with audience tuned Power Point presentations.

Second, we are introduced to Bradley Udall of the well know Arizona branch of the Mormon Udall clan. As western enviromentalists, they put the Chu clan to shame. In addition a professional water manager from New Zealand is introduced. Here some interesting numbers like acre feet per year market rates that range from $ .50 to $12,000 and household use averaging 163,000 gallons per year appear. We suspect that the annual American per household “water footprint” that includes all direct and indirect forms of water use would be significantly greater.

Meanwhile, the Indian Nations, the tourist industry, the religious fundamentalists, ranchers, farmers, builders, young professionals, fishermen, hunters, Gary Hart, Tim Wirth and even the Coors folks are on board the train that has already left the station and is headed for ....... BTW, that train is diesel powered. Who paid the carbon tax?

In any event, today, snow is reported to be falling in Denver, and the Sierra snow pack is starting early this year. Book your reservations and get your tickets now. It the Denver half of the World Series is snowed out, you can always hit the ski slopes.

More:

Footnotes:

Posted by: webscribe2 on 10/21 at 01:26 PM
Cal Water Science: • Calendar: • Demographics: • Earth Sciences:: • New York: • News: • Hot Spot: • Power Play: • Science and Technology: • Physical Sciences: • Swimming: • Climate Change: • Global Warming: • (0) Comments: • (0) Trackbacks: • Permalink:

[ Friday, October 19, 2007 04:58 ]

Legacy Journal: Complex Systems Modelling, Forecasting, and the Weather

Section:
Environment

Summary:
Weather forecasters put their personal reputations, the public trust, and the lives of their customers on the line every hour of the day.

Main:
“The trouble with weather forecasting is that it’s right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it.” -------- Patrick Young

“The News is to Weather forecasting what History is Climate Change.” --- Webscribe2

In the interest of full disclosure, this wroter admits to a possible prejudicial bias and conflict of interest. A son- is-law is a academic Earth Science instructor with a background of field work in Arctic Alaska permafrost region, a nephew is a U.S.C.G. officer with duty assignments in Alaska and Florida, another nephew
is an Air Force Academy graduate and F-16 pilot on assignment with the Colorado Air National Guard with multiple prior assignments to the Persian Gulf, and I am an ecology bootcamp survivor where the focus was strongly influenced by the politics of the Sierra Club. A personal focus was the Arctic Ocean and UNClOS.

Today, a nytimes video clip features the U.S. Coast Guard and its possible new role in the Arctic Ocean if summer sea lanes and the US Senate ratifies the Law of the Sea Treaty, and recognizes UN and International authority over the “open seas”. The associated story by Rivkin gives some Arctic context and relevant links.

This is good news to business men in upstate New York and Canada. They are expected to develop port facilities in Hudson’s Bay for accessing ice free, trans Polar shipping lanes across the Arctic Ocean to ports in Asia. Some routes may be shortened by up to 5,OOO miles. Meanwhile long time traders, developers and investors in the U.A.E are building sand islands in the Persian Golf. They seem unaffected by the “Inconvenient Truth” of rising Oceans from melting Greenland and Antarctic ice induced by fossil fuel released carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Upstate, lakeside western New York weather is part of the complex and dynamic quilt-like global patchwork than is a mere nano slice of the whole. Here the weather is seasonal, has a distinct “lake effect”, and today is influenced by forces for west, south, north, and occasionally, the east. It was 70 at 0900, passing scattered, thunderstorms and sun breakthroughs are expected.

Meanwhile, EggHead, a science orented UC Davis new service blog re[prts that the that well respected journal, the Sacramento Bee is reporting a recent LA Nina effect in northern California, the Sierra and the Great Valleys. If true what does it mean and what is a rational person to do with that information? Cheer or Cry? Meanwhile, what about the Valley levees, the reservoirs, Tahoe water, Sierra snow, ag water, the Delta, fish in the Bay, hydroelectric power from the Feather River, the salmon run, and sweater sales at Macy’s?

The fact is that localized and particularized weather forecasting accuracy decline geometrically over time measure in hours. Pilots know that, farmers now that.their lives and livelihoods depend on that understanding. They understand the power of weather effects, and how little morals can predict and influence weather, let alone, climate change.

More:

Footnotes:

Posted by: webscribe2 on 10/19 at 04:58 AM
Cal Water Science: • Calendar: • Cherry Picking: • Earth Sciences:: • Fact Check: • IT3 Tech: • Information Tech: • Complex System Modelling: • Law: • Nature: • New York: • Regions: • News: • Global: • Hot Spot: • Science and Technology: • Natural Sciences: • Physical Sciences: • Timeline: • Global Warming: • (0) Comments: • (0) Trackbacks: • Permalink:

[ Friday, October 05, 2007 04:47 ]

Legacy Journal: Friday Fun Day

Section:
Briefs

Summary:
Sweep of week.

“Human beings are human beings. They say what they want, don’t they? They used to say it across the fence while they were hanging wash. Now they just say it on the Internet.” -----Dennis Miller

Main:

* Al Gore and his version of the way weather and climate work is now the fat target for humor and ridicule. A article in the Madison Wisconsin Badger Herald is but on recent example. Authored by Law 1 student, Ryan Masse, is laced with satire rather than science and black letter legal logic.

The irony is that a younger and thinner Al Gore is said to have variously enrolled at Vanderbilt Law, Divinity & Journalism programs. Hum, what a perfect background for combining his Harvard “science for poets” Population & Policy course , taught by Roger Revelle recently of UC San Diego and the Scripps Institure of Oceanography LA Jolla, California, whose the west coast brand of big science meshed with the spector of geometric global human population growth and its threat to the environment and natural resources. It was Paul Ehrlich without a butterfly net, but with a Keeling CO2 curve.

* Time Magazine also has a Global Warming debate article with a built in bias. The lead is a photograph of a coal-fired electric power plant belching vapor from a stack into the lower atmosphere. Note I say vapor as in water, not smoke as in “toxic pollutant”. But all of us already know that water vapor, as in Al Gore jet trail vapor, is the most abundant and significant of the heat trapping gases in the atmosphere. And what kind of gases are you exhaling today? Meanwhile, the smart Greens have learned the lesson that accepting a Challenge with a positive approach that includes the message that there is “Green to be made” has more appeal than the previous “ Cataclysmic End of Life on Earth” scenario.

* Not to be out timeed, Paul Samuelson of Newsweek and serious engineering types have picked up the Global Warming gauntlet and are running with it.

* Meanwhile, Texas voters have taken a giant hold step toward alleviating their doctor shortage. In 2003 state voters passed a constitutional amendment that capped non-economic awards for pain and suffering. Since then, doctors from New York, California, Florida and other areas have be immigrating to the Lone Star state. Out of state medical license transfer applications were up 30% last year according to the nytimes.

More:

Footnotes:

Posted by: webscribe2 on 10/05 at 04:47 AM
Calendar: • Demographics: • Earth Sciences:: • Media Watch: • Moral Authority: • News: • Hot Seat: • Political Watch: • Science and Technology: • Physical Sciences: • Tall Tales: • Wary Eye: • Word Play: • Rhetoric: • Climate Change: • Global Warming: • Certainty: • Dollars and Cents: • (0) Comments: • (0) Trackbacks: • Permalink:

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