BC Quakes

We interrupt my blog snooze to report a series of earthquakes off BC, the largest being six-ish.

These are strike-slip (shear) earthquakes in a zone of tremendous complexity.  I think they have gotten up to 7 in the last few years.  There were a bunch of 7's that worked their way up north, and I had 'predicted' a 7 way up in the Alaska armpit.  No such luck.

You will notice there is a wonderful 'clean' subduction zone up by Alaska.  This will shoot off M9's every couple of hundred years or so.  There is no such zone around these earthquakes.

In general, if the geology is a big mucky mess, then you get 'distibuted' earthquakes, and none get very high.  So, there should be no anxiety.  Lower down, towards Vancouver, it looks a bit smoother, but this is not high on world list of big, smooth subduction zones.

Enjoy your Christmas.  I'll get back to test edibles.  :)

These are shear earthquakes along a nice line.  Within the next week, there should be a 7 along the line, or maybe not....

Christmas Shutdown

Blah, I feel the blahs coming on.  I'll try to stop writing again.  It never works, as somebody does something stupid and I just have to say something.

If I actually succeed in shutting down, then here are the things to expect for the new year.

The last Arctic ice hole will close tomorrow.  However, the powerful scouring the underside of the ice will continue.  This will freeze up the Atlantic ocean, and some unknown consequence.

Our global temperatures will continue to go down.  We'll have our six months of snow on the ground.  Spring will be late.  July will be very hot, thus reviving all the gloomies.

We need one more year of cold before they can no longer live in 2016. 

Have a Merry Christmas!

First gummies come in from BC

Just in time for Christmas parties!  Everybody is talking about them as ideal for talking a lot, eating everything in sight and not remembering anything.

My high cbd stuff just puts you to sleep, no good at parties.  The gummies are pure thc at 15 ml for each gummy.

Bo-Bo-ing - A case of no physics

I never write the names right because of the history-destroying search engines of nusa.  But this is a fine example of new engineering without physics.

When sending off something like a capsule, or an airplane, you should have a full physics model, or don't do it.  They didn't know the physics of the plane, and now the capsule.  And nusa falls right in there.

So, after a massive reading of articles I can't find any more, I go through the failure:

Up in orbit, the capsule fired a thruster.  This was the main engineering failure because the thruster didn't light, and it was mindlessly thinking it was firing.  This slipped the capsule way off course.  If you have a full physics model, then you know what that thruster is going to do in terms of rotation and acceleration.  You measure that with simple accelerometers.

This is the most fundamental error for automated systems -- you must always have feedback.  An ATM gives out money, but a physics model measures the bills going out.  Otherwise you didn't pay the guy and think you did, or the machine spews out tons of bills.  They made that mistake a lot at the beginning.

The rest of the capsule action was a comedy of errors making up for the first one.  Finally, the capsule went into a panic state, firing all thrusters continuously to stay in one position.

Nussie tried to paper it over by saying that, had astronauts been in there they would have corrected sooner.  Huh?  People should go into this capsule-max?  People don't do rapid course corrections.  They are automated for a reason.  Was there a manual for correcting a false reading?  This is all looking horribly familiar.

There must be some heavy corruption here, more likely technical corruption, like diesels-gate.

BBC admits global warming has gone flat

Reference

This is quite exciting for me.  They are using an absolute reference from 'Level 0'.  Nobody uses that, but they do.  They said that last year was 1.1C, and now this year will 1.1C.  That's 'continuing the trend'.  Maybe next year will be 1.1C.

In the year 2015, it was 1.0C.  But 2016 must have been 1.3C.  All the comments say that Boris is right to abolish the bbc.  Such fun.

ps.  the last time I was so excited was when the two nasa guys said Greenland's glaciers were growing again.  Nobody has heard from them since.  Perhaps they are frozen in the glaciers.  :)

pps.  this article has gone viral (for me), which doesn't mean much...

Dec. 15 ocean currents

A bit late, but beggers can't be choosers.  It's not as though you find out anything about ocean currents in the popular press.  

There is a huge current pouring into the Arctic and screwing my hopes for a big Arctic ice volume by January.  But we have to conserve mass, so all this warm water will have an effect.

It's absolutely pouring through the Greenland Gap, the only outlet.  The current is stronger than ever, and reduced the Gulf Stream to a little phallic poke.

Click on the picture and look at the top.  The Arctic ice volume curve is just following the usual trend, instead of climbing more.  I blame all this on the weird current.  As well, I always wondered how a current disturbance in the Pacific could affect the Atlantic.  Now I know.  A ton of cold water can do a lot of things.

Tessie Funny Fictional Story

Man bought a refurbished Tessie S, which had been in an accident.  When they fixed it up, they forgot to put in the 12V battery that nobody knows about.  Like all electric cars and hybrids, this rotten little battery is required to start the main batteries.

So as he driving to a party up north in the cold weather, the gauge shows 10% left.  No problem, he was coming up to a charging station.  Then it went into psycho mode, because of no 12V battery.  Nobody could tow it because it locked all the wheels.  He had to get a sling lift to put it on the flatbed.  Went to the charging station and it would not charge.

Getting a tow to tessie service would have cost an arm and a leg.  So he called them, invoked his 7 days right of refusal, and told them where it was parked.

**car names have been changed to protect the innocent (me).  You know how 'HE' gets on social media.  :)

**this does not represent a real car, living or dead.

Extreme Cold Proceeds Normally

The big hole in the Arctic ice is now closing.  Polar bears are fine, the permafrost is fine.  The media has a field day with observations that are 3 years old.  In fact, all media time has stopped at 2016.

The ice volume build-up is at a standard rate.  I'll take a chance and say that the current volume line will power through the pack in January.  The world temperatures are static, which means that the seasonal southern warmth is equal to the northern cold.

A very cold air mass is descending on us.  The UK stays at the 5C temperature of the surrounding ocean.  All of this is due to the shifting heat transport of the ocean.  You can look at that and make 'predictions' based on physics, as opposed to blind faith.

ps.  You Brits don't have to move to Canada, Canada is coming to you!

This is after the election.

Use this as your screen saver.

Low plume pattern gives us cold

We've had this pattern earlier and it gives us very cold weather in Toronto.  You can see the Arctic air mass slowly descending.  But the plume patterns haven't been very steady.  In the past I could count on a month with a steady pattern.  But now it's only a week and then something new comes along.  The UK won't enjoy low plumes, they are a result of little heat coming up north.  If the plumes keep cutting under the UK, then it's very cold for them.

Alberta goes to war

Reference

Yeah, they will fill their room with thugs who just shout at everybody.  Those bullies will never get to the 'Cool Kids' table at the World High School Cafeteria, with the trudies.

I would suggest shaving a speck of the 'crony' salary to do 5 bucks worth of physics, but that would cut down on the Scotch.  They should go after "The jet stream is a river."  thing. 

Poor Alberta will continue to suffer doubly from 'climate change'.  First, their oil is 'evil', and second they get to freeze to death as the ice age descends on them.  Not a pretty picture.

Toronto's Climate Change Emergency

I have come to accept climate change, which means our climate is shifting into an ice age.  You can blame carbon dioxide if it makes you feel better.  The cold means we will be burning more to stay warm and that makes it colder.  A terrible feedback mechanism.

The climate emergency in Etobicoke is that the snow came early and mucked up the leaf pickup.  Then the snowplows came and rolled up huge balls of frozen leaves that are blocking the road everywhere.  Now we are getting more snow.

So, you may laugh.  But imagine driving and big dark giant leaf ball is rolling towards you.  That's worse than a newfie moose!  I don't what to do.  I am in despair and don't want to have children.

ps.  I'm going to try to take pictures of the giant rolling leaf balls, but it may be dangerous.

Giant leaf glacier ready to roll down the street.

Huge frozen leaf balls ready for the plough to start moving.

pps. instead of fatbergs in the sewer, we'll call these leafbergs on the street.  :)

The Jet Stream will kill us all

Reference

I have decided that I am no longer adding any physics to these things.  Who cares?

The jet stream is a fast-moving river of air that continuously circles the northern hemisphere from west to east.

I'm not going to argue with that!  A balloon placed in the Jet Stream over Canada will eventually find it's way back to Canada.  That experiment has been done hundreds of times.....  (nope).

We live in a world where we can just utter statements, and they will be picked up all over the world.  In actuality, it is the statement that circles the world.  Who needs experiments?

Fine.

ps.  ending this with real physics.  In the past 5 days, a spiral Pacific plume brought up Gulf air, while a high plume dug out Arctic air.  It will all come to hit us tomorrow.

Now, that's something!

pps.  The Jet Stream is a boundary effect, like a shadow.  It results from the meeting of warm and cold air masses, just like your shadow is an effect of your body meeting sunlight.  You don't expect your shadow to pick up a rock and hit you, and the Jet Stream can't actually move air around.  Those tropical plumes are the real 'rivers of air', and they move a lot of heat energy.

The Great Hearing Aid Scam

That was from my old guy, who is now dead.  There's too much money in the whole industry for me to say it.  Besides, any search for the above title would result in tons of phoney articles that turn it around and say "spend money on this".

My old guy told me to never get a hearing aid because it didn't help.  That's after he spent thousands of dollars for electronics that you can get on ammie for 5 bucks.  When you see this sort of thing, you must wonder about the physics of the whole scam.

The current approach is to get very tiny hearing aids that equalize the hearing notches from a lifetime of living.  They do the horribly involved hearing test, which is just to find the proper equalization.  The physics assumption is that this actually works.

Old guys like us find it difficult to catch conversations in a lot of noise.  At the dance recital the music was ridiculously loud and the young people were chatting away.  The wife and I couldn't understand a thing.

I love my noise-cancelling headphones, and the Ms. Google voice on the speaker is wonderfully clear.  I'm not suffering from notches in the hearing.  The brain compensates for that.  So, I need a noise cancelling headphone with AI to pick out the conversations.  I'm buying something like that on ammie.  It's large and cheap, and madeinchina.  Who needs the equalization?  If that is important, then use an app to fool around with it.  I've never found equalization does anything.

I'll let you know if it works.  I'm envisioning noise-cancelling earphones with your googs phone doing all the heavy AI.  It's like translation in real time.  Yeah!  a use for an AI chip.

ps.  I've tried it and it's fantastic for just over $100.  Haven't checked it in noisy conversations.

Big Warming Period without Carbon Dioxide

Reference

"Our work shows that very mild ocean warming, like what is happening right now, was the precursor of past ice retreat and that we should really worry about it today," lead author Dr. Catherine Beltran says.

The seven-year study led by Dr. Beltran of Otago's Department of Marine Science and Department of Geology, is the first ever study that uses molecular paleo-temperature tools to successfully reconstruct sea surface temperatures (SSTs) for the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctic for this geological period when atmospheric CO2 was low.



Good thing there is no warming in the Antarctic.

It's just 'imaginary' warming.  But the thing here that everybody misses is that there was a huge interglacial warming period with no carbon.  Would that ring any bells?  Nope, not here, it confirms that we will all die.

:)

ps.  it would be great to know what was happening in the north at exactly the same time.  I suspect the north was in a major ice advance, so the sea level would have been down at this time.  I don't think there is enough heat to warm up the whole world, so it just flip-flops.

pps.  if you wonder why a New Zealand university is going through so many hoops to defend 'carbon warming' while presenting results that utterly destroy it, then....

Clockwise rotating cyclone in the Northern Hemisphere

Here's something you won't see every day.  I've never seen it.  But we have a low-pressure storm that is rotating the wrong way.  Cute.  Shows that other forces can go against the normal tendency to be counter-clockwise.

I'm impressed, but I don't think anybody else likes these things.

Linux - Bluetooth

So, basically you like to write your blog in the morning on your Linux machine.  But 'new girl' always gets up and plays Stephen King horror audio books out loud as she gets ready for work.

What to do?  Dig out your noise cancelling Bluetooth headphones.  For Linux bt, buy a really cheap usb dongle thats says it works on Linux.  It's about $8 on ammie. 

Then you are in for a world of hurt.  Your kernel knows about bt and it should all work.  But it was the setup that killed me.  Finally I just turned on the headphones and used 'hcitool'.  It all worked!  vlc player had an audio place for the phones.  Amazing.  Wouldn't be able to do it again.

Toronto housing - money continues to flee the market

You can get a rough idea of the money flowing in the market by multiplying sales by price.  If you do a chart then the peak was in 2016, and then money went for a hike.  The cheery media is limited to saying the price went up a tad (for this month), but the market is too thin to tout that much.

If you look at the longer charts, then we've never had such a 'zombie market' with things so flat.  It either goes up or down.  (I'm digging into my memory for this, there are no long charts).  A zombie market means that someone is keeping the flesh from falling off.  We'll call out the banks for that, who are aren't foreclosing.  They are just firing all their staff.  

In our neighbourhood, we have abandoned monster house builds.  A nice house just sold for $826K, when it would have sold for well over a million at peak.  So, houses are at 30% and condos are being propped up by banks who don't want to put out the obvious signals.  I am amazed.  Can the zombies march for another year?

ps. and for something completely different, we had the Christmas dance recital where my daughter teaches.

Ocean currents - Dec 5, 2019

The only news is that the water continues to pour through the Bering Strait and into the Arctic ocean.

This has kept the 'Alaska Notch' open for a long time.  Hudson Bay will be frozen before this closes.

It is either 'breathing' or coming out the other side, where it destroys the Gulf Stream.

The UK is being hit by a big tropical plume, and perhaps the cold will happen after. 

Global temperatures hold steady

Yeah, the monthly global temps.  Rock steady, but I was expecting them to really drop.

The northern mid latitudes take a dive as we well know from all the snow.  The southern hemisphere has a slight rise, and the South Pole is flat as a board, despite all the ice 'melting'  ---- "I'm melting!"

Next I'll wait for the tide gauge at Bermuda.  It should be dropping more, since there is a bit of a lag from temps.

Don't forget that this linear trend is way below "Death From Carbon" plots.

ps.  don't forget that the UN has decided to only publish the absolutely worst "Hell on Earth" projections for clarity.

All the early lab experiments on ozone are gone

Wow.  I went back to look at the nasa experiments in an atmospheric lab.  They found that all the ozone reaction rate assumptions were off by a factor of 10.  When nasa went 'all in' on the ozone layer, they eliminated these results.  I had found a few in various papers.  Now the clean-up is complete.  I only found this, and some others.

14th Conference on Middle Atmosphere
P7.6

Impact of recent Laboratory Measurements of the Absorption Cross Section of ClOOCl on our Understanding of polar Ozone Chemistry: Part I, Theory

Markus Rex, AWI = Alfred Wegener Institute, D14473 Potsdam, Germany; and R. Schofield, T. Canty, R. J. Salawitch, and K. Bayes

Uncertainties of the photolysis cross sections of ClOOCl have long been a limiting factor in our theoretical understanding of the rate of polar stratospheric ozone losses. Previous work suggested that values slightly larger than current recommendations, which are based on laboratory measurements, result in improved agreement between model calculations of polar stratospheric ozone loss rates and observations while at the same time also leading to improved agreement between observations of the diurnal variation of ClO and model calculations of this species. But new laboratory work on the cross sections of ClOOCl suggest that its photolysis under polar stratospheric winter/spring conditions is nearly an order of magnitude slower than what would be required to explain the observations of ozone loss and ClO in the atmosphere and a factor of six slower than a value based on the current recommendations. We show the impact of these new results on our understanding of polar ozone chemistry.

For typical Arctic conditions calculated ratios of ClO/ClOx decrease by about a factor of two. The ozone loss rate by the ClO-dimer cycle, so far believed to be the most efficient ozone loss cycle, drops by about a factor of four and the loss rate by the coupled ClO-BrO cycle by nearly a factor of two. Overall ozone loss rates calculated based on the known ozone loss mechanisms drop by a factor of two to three and become much smaller than observations. Also the calculated levels of ClO become much smaller than those observed in the stratosphere. These results suggest that a major fraction of the observed ozone loss in the polar stratosphere is due to a currently unknown mechanism - a major challenge of our fundamental understanding of the polar stratospheric ozone loss process.

We will discuss potential new chemistry that would lead to improved agreement between calculations of ozone loss and ClO diurnal variations with in-situ observations in the stratosphere.
Poster Session 7, Stratospheric Chemistry and Ozone Recovery Posters
Thursday, 23 August 2007, 3:30 PM-5:30 PM, Holladay

Previous paper  Next paper

Browse or search entire meeting

AMS Home Page

It will gone soon.

This still exists, but all the links are gone.

This is why nasa will never do physics to test their assumptions.  They will send up experiments that can only confirm things on top of the assumptions.  Oh well, my super-expensive new air conditioner is working now, but nasa cost me thousands of dollars.  :)

ps.  this is the graph that 'shows' nasa was right.

The record is very short.  It shows that ozone levels go up and down.  Wouldn't some physics be good here?

Toronto Carbon Cooling

I am waiting for all my monthly charts which are late.  I'll just make fun of climate news.

Some old guy said that Canada would benefit from carbon warming.  Were we not having fun during the warming cycle?  Mild winters, hardly any snow, people building houses all year round.  It was great.  More of that would be good.  Of course, all the warmies called the comments 'insane'.

Another study said that all the previous mindless linear extrapolations of temperature were accurate.  Of course, we had a linear rise in temperature.  It was much less than expected, but it was linear.  And if you draw your line from the very bottom of 2000 to the very top of 2016, then it gets close to accurate.

And there's Australia.  Every year it becomes a landlocked desert under the high sun of summer with no ocean breezes.  It's hot and if you don't burn the brush every year, you get big fires.  But that's the big climate news at the moment.

And the trudies are going 'all in' with climate change.  Toronto is going to have 6 months of snow storms and -30 temps.  And wearing 'the goose' is now considered ostentatious.  What are we going to do?

:)

ps.  we should all come out with our fondest memories of the warming cycle.  Mine is opening the cottage at the beginning of May and having 6 months of summer.

pps.  a big casualty of the rotten continuous snow is the retail sector.  I just did all my Christmas shopping on ammie.

Ocean currents - Nov 30, 2019

Everything is about the same as 5 days ago, except the Bering Strait is pouring in the water again.

The famous notch in the Arctic ice is still open, and this might keep it open again.  Again, I have never seen this, and have no idea about the forces at work here.

ps.  Yeah, more stuff on how carbon warming is bringing us an ice age.  If people can swallow that, then that's something.

Canada's top brains to build nuclear reactors

A small reactor must be easy-peasy, right?  We don't have any brains left in the country to do this.  Wait until you see what they have done with the Darlington refurb.  It's just peachy.  And don't forget our nuclear waste efforts -- going great.

Now, up there we have curly-larry-whatever.  They won't pay a dime for physics.  If they did, then we wouldn't need the nuclear reactors.  If, however, we wanted some nuclear skill, then we should have followed my suggestion of a long time ago.

Burn to the ground that whole Chalk River mess.  Retire everybody there, since they really deserve retirement, all their hard work, etc.  Form a new nuclear research centre at Wesleyville, with a high-speed train to Toronto.  Keep my old company out of this.  Do everything new, with some big guns from South Korea.  Then we can think about building new nuclear.

Please remember our small Maple reactors.  The S. Koreans made them work, we didn't.  The most powerful management team from the old company went off to make our Maples work.  Hear anything about that?  


***this is marked as satire with a lot of sarcasm.

Fixing the toilet

Right now, I'd be walking the dog.  But I'm looking out the window at high-velocity horizontal ice pellets, and they are hitting the window like machine-gun fire.

And nobody is walking their dog in the UK, either.  Time to stay by the fire and read wonderful articles about the warmie 'End of Humanity'.  Or, you can fix your toilets....

If you are like me, you went all nuts when the city had their low-flush toilet push.  Some people hate these things, but I find you just have to hold the handle longer for a big load.  :)  After 10 years or so, all the internal plastic parts are starting to go.

I've had both things going now.  First, is a leak to the toilet bowl.  You might think 'change the flapper', but I did this and it's useless.  These things are designed to all fail at once, which is good engineering.  If you paid twice as much, it wouldn't last twice as long.

So, for a two-piece toilet, replace the whole flapper assembly.  Buy the Fluidmaster kit on ammie, with all the screws and gaskets.  Discover that it only has two screws, and your toilet has three.  Yeah!  Remember to trim the overflow hose, or FLOOD CITY!

But you want the gaskets, since the old ones have disintegrated.  All the black plastic has dissolved.  If you are changing anything on the toilet, change the feeder hose as well.  Only about $5 at ammie, as an add-on item.  Those gaskets also dissolve.

My second problem was a noisy shut-off valve on another toilet.  Both things can be treated independently.  Another fluidmaster valve replacement, and another replaced hose.  The Number One thing with this is that you are going to get debris into the valve, and it won't close right.  I was saved by the overflow, which does it's job.

Turn off the water, lift off the protection cap.  Then put your glasses on and look at the complicated mess underneath.  You will find a little trick of slightly lifting two plastic catches, and then twist off the top.  There you will find your little piece of broken-off junk from the old hose.  Pick that out and put it back together.  Happy, happy.

Now, go back to staring at the ice pellets.