No shock there. Didn't Obama say something about rewarding our friends and punishing our enemies? Most people outside Atlantis did not suspect that we would be "the enemy within" (to quote Michael Savage, although he and all of us consider the lefties the enemies within).

J;

The principal debt holder for Solyndra was a billionaire named George Kaiser, who inherited an oil fortune from his father and bought the Oklahoma legislature to turn his large oil fortune into an even larger banking fortune. (He bought Bank of Oklahoma and convinced the state legislature to ban branch banking, thus eliminating competition from any bank not based in the state.)

George is a big lefty do-gooder but, when he was about to lose $300 million the day before Solyndra's collapse he visited the White House and "poof" the US Treasury magically paid off the loan, putting George Kaiser, a private citizen ahead of the US Government in the line of creditors; strictly illegal, but hardly reported by the media. Did you guess, before you read this far, George Kaiser was a large bundler for the Obama campaign?

One is not surprised in this day of "political science" (?) and a willing press.

The calculations of which you ask have been done.
Bjørn Lomborg, economist and statistician, a believer in 'climate change', has done detailed net present value calculations of costs and benefits. He found that the costs of prevention vastly outweigh any benefits.
For not following the politically correct line, even tho' a believer, he has been soundly abused and denigrated.

See also the work of economist Richard Toll who until recently was an IPCC reviewer.
There are others.

More to the point, anthropomorphic climate change does not exist, there are thus no costs. What is staggering is the amount of money governments are spending on trying to stop something that does not exist, and whipping up the scare.

A very well publicized study reported:
in answer to a questionnaire, 97% of scientists accepted anthropomorphic climate change.
Analysis of the numbers, who the questions were sent to, and the responses corrected the figure to 2.7%. The correction is not widely reported.

"Makes you wonder if any of them are right."

No, I know they are mostly wrong. Precisely where they say the their Data means this "?". The exact, measured data can be completely correct and accurate, but at the point where they must take their data, develop it into a cohesive conclusion, and postulate an analysis, they ALL fail because they approach a problem looking for an answer they know in advance. Give me a scientist who when you ask him about global warming says "What?" and I'll be excited about reading his conclusions from the data. But if he already believes that GW is real and man caused, but has not studied the data, OR already believes that GW is hogwash, but has not already studied the data - the man would need to be King Salomon to not be trying to make the data match his convictions.

That is why when the MSM claims that "X" number of scientists already believe that GW is settled "science". (which is one lie to start with) You can know two things. 1. That they only asked scientists not working in this field (if they work in the field of climatology, they CAN'T say this) 2. That they attended school within the past 30 years and have been programmed with this being "Settled Science" from grade school up and are recounting what they have been told was true - by people who did not know the truth, who were recounting reports from others who did not know the truth from others who "decided" what "Settled Science" would be.

I am one mammal who is in favor of global warming.

15 meters has been pretty good and while I don't work 10 meters much, due to the lack of a decent antenna for that band, I do listen and when I hear it coming up, I head down band. Evening 75 meters has been very hash filled for several weeks, far ahead of the typical summer hash, but perhaps that will just mean that 15 will be cooking longer this cycle.

A great visual can be found at http://www.spaceweather.com and it's a good source for all observational data too.

What you're saying agrees with my rough guesses. We buy all renewable electricity, and it's only a few cents a kWh more than non-renewable. That made me think solar and wind are comparable to coal or natural gas as long as the sun is shining. If everyone wanted to switch to solar and wind, it wouldn't work b/c you'd still need to maintain productive capacity for times when there is low wind/sun.

You can say the same thing about any politicians, but it just seems like Democrats are less organized. I recall going to an event with Howard Dean in Madison in which the organizers reserved a small atrium for the event, a room that holds about 80 people for Dean coming to Madison!
I went to another fund raiser event at someone's house ten years ago, and they couldn't tell someone the max we were allowed to contribute that cycle. Disorganized.

My favorite one is the race for WI governor. They're running someone from Madison, who is an executive at a large bike company she inherited a significant stake in. She may be great, but her life hits all the stereotypes about Madison. They need someone from Superior or something. It almost seems like they want to lose.

The 11-yr sunspot cycle affects radio reception. My personal unscientific observations from one location are thee more sunspots the warmer the weather. 88-89 was an amazing cycle. During the recent sunspot cycle, we had some cool summers and my radio reception indicated a weak sunspot cycle. I have not written down any data. It's all anecdotal. I notice b/c I enjoy cool summers and I enjoy strong sunspot cycles for using the 21 and 28MHz bands. Weak sunspot cycles are good for lower frequencies <5MHz, but the effect isn't that pronounced.

I've known people who usually do well trading futures primarily based on season trends.

I'm not knowledgeable about the costs of climate change, but I know they're staggering. I don't think they're overblown, except for claims blaming particular weather events on climate change.The thing is we'd have to pay some of those costs anyway as climate changes over time. Human activities are making them come faster. There should be a way to do a time-value of money calculation to work out what stream of short-term payments would be equivalent to the future increased costs. This is similar to the amortization calculation you do on a faster pick-and-place machine or when evaluating types of pavement that have various maintenance schedules.

Possible contributor along with gravitational compression. Earth's core is supposedly liquid iron.

"Faliures"....I never mentioned any failures, all I am complaining about is being stuck with the costs of ridiculous and wasteful public policy pushed by nitwits of you "ilk"

Lucky;

No. We've been poking around the Bakken since the 1950's but Bakken geology and North Dakota topography are wrong for Atlas Shrugged. Rand's fictitious oilfield had to be in a mountainous area with restricted access, the reason for Hank Reardon's bridge. Western North Dakota is almost flat, with easy access. She may have known of Rangely, the biggest oilfield in Colorado, which was discovered in the '30s, but not produced until 1943 because of its remote location. Or, she might have been thinking of the San Juan Basin in southern Colorado.

The Bakken does, however, exemplify her story. It's a great resource, discovered and developed by entrepreneurs struggling against nonsensical government regulations which enrich the political supporters of those in power. Barack Obama's refusal to make a decision one way or the other on Keystone delays the alternate route across the Canadian Rockies and makes Buffett's BNSF Railroad billions of dollars while reducing the profits of the evil right wing oil tycoons in North Dakota. Barack Obama and Warren Buffett together add about $19 per barrel to the cost of Bakken crude, while reducing the efficiency and safety of the enterprise. Rand was right. We're living her nightmare.

The reason for the lack of organization among Democrats on this is that each of the major players has a different set of Orren Boyles to have to pay back. With Obama, it is the solar energy types like those at Solyndra.

We already have found efficient ways to manage the effects, although the effects are way overblown and the remedies for such overblown effects are overoverkill.

You are exactly correct on this. Biofuels become competitive when gasoline is around $4.50/gallon. H2 becomes competitive when gasoline is around $5-6/gallon, but then only via the least environmentally friendly method possible. Solar will never become cost competitive. The capital costs are coming down some, but will always be too high.

and, couldn't we attribute geothermal to the "radioactive" (actually, nuclear, in the parlance) source which is earth's core? -- j

Hi Wanderer.
The Bakken Shale - could Rand have known about this? It seems to match the AS story.
Ellis Wyatt- one of my fav characters in part I. Played better than written in the book.

We're way outside my area of knowledge, but my understanding is we're in an interglacial period of an "ice age". People colloquially call the glacial maxima within the current ice age "ice ages".

We've been in a trend of declaciation for thousands of years, with exceptions due to "noise" like the little ice age. (Maybe it's not random noise. I am not knowledgeable.) I do not know what triggers an increase in glaciation. My understanding is we're far from that now. The notion that greenhouse gases could actually slow change if we go past a glacial minimum and start cooling again doesn't ring true to me, but I have no idea.

I know nothing about those details. I haven't even had one class on climatology. If it turns out burning stuff doesn't affect the global environment, though, I'm going to have a bonfire celebration. It sounds impossible, but I remember hearing a *joke* in the 80s about what if they found out all fat isn't bad for you. So anything's possible. I hope our wishes come true.

What's Li-Ion pollution? I take my Li-Ion cells to be recycled, and I hope they don't pollute. If you short them out, they fail spectacularly and stink up the place. I have no idea how toxic the fumes are, but I get out quick when someone smokes one!

I don't get the thing about the world coming to the end. I can't tell if that's a straw man or you're just stating a simple simple fact-- the world won't end until the sun starts turning into a red giant.

My impression is Democrats aren't organized about this. If they're like me, they know there's a problem but they don't know what to do about it. All those alternative energies seem like a drop in the bucket to me. People want to think that maybe they'll scale up and become more efficient, but I haven't seen the evidence for that.

#jbrenner It being too expensive is a huge problem, since we're trying to replace what drives our whole economy. I'm confident we will or we'll find efficient ways to manage the effects.