ADAMANT

The 100 Billion Years War

What in Hades?

If ever there is war in heaven , the armorers will head for the stockroom in search of bars of samarium 147. Because  while nowhere near as strong or keen as steel, weapons forged from it are guaranteed  to last-  the rare earth metal has a half life of 106 billion years, about eight times the age of the known universe.

This factoid  is good for more than tweaking the noses of those who take the works of John Milton literally , or base their chronology on the Begats in  Genesis. Samarium 147  has a companion isotope , Sm146, with a half life a thousand times shorter , and science  has used the two to forge the tools for dating the oldest rocks on Earth.

The oldest rocks we know, which originally crystallized  about 3,850,000 years ago , making them  less than a billion years younger than the solar system itself, come from  near the oldest Viking settlements in the New World, in Southwest Greenland, edging out those from western Australia by a hundred million years or so. Both date to a geological epoch when the Earth was indeed void and without form.

3.85 Giga-Years ago, most of  it was still bloody molten, with the first solid rock just beginning to solidify , lumps left from the earth's nebular coalescence still underfoot, and protocontinental islets   bobbing about like incandescent icebergs in a frequently asteroid-blasted magma ocean . Some think they  rafted together like white-hot  pack ice into the first masses of something resembling land, under conditions so  hellish that this first and worst of times on planet Earth is  called "The Hadean Era"

Things are a thousand degrees or so cooler now, but as climate has regained a degree in the last century, glacial retreat in Greenland has yielded better access to a wider variety of the oldest rocks .  These are beginning to shed light on a very basic qustion- how sell stirred was this hellish cauldron ?

In Science (21 December 2007:  Vol. 318. no. 5858, pp. 1907 - 1910)   Vickie C. Bennett, Alan D. Brandon, and Allen P. Nutman  report on  two rare earth element  isotopes resulting from samarium decay in the the oldest rocks.  It appears there is a  coupled  excess of neodymium-142 excesses (from decay of now-extinct samarium-146; half-life, 103 million years) and neodymium-143 excesses (from decay of samarium-147; half-life, 106 billion years), relative to chondritic meteorites, that distinctively date the formation of silicate magma reservoirs in the Earth's  first 30 million to 75 million years.

This differs enough from   the oldest rocks in Australia  to  reveal that despite  the high temperatures and all the pummeling by asteroid impacts, the  primordial lumpiness of the  early Earth's mantle persisted for at least the first billion years of Earth history:" Temporal variations in 142Nd signatures track the incomplete remixing of ...domains  formed in the Hadean mantle."

It should take the usual idiotarians less than an eon to  proclaim that all this really means is that Greenland is not so hot after all, and that any warming there is the devils work and not an act of God or man.

Candle In The Wind

It's not enough that The Vatican has enlisted on the side of carbon neutrality in the Climate Wars. The Jerusalem Post reports :

" a campaign that has spread like wildfire across the Internet... encouraging Jews around the world to light at least one less candle this Hanukka to help the environment.

"The founders of the Green Hanukkia campaign found that every candle that burns completely produces 15 grams of carbon dioxide. If an estimated one million Israeli households light for eight days, they said, it would do significant damage to the atmosphere.

Tom Wegner,  who heads the public relations firm Update Marketing Media, spread the campaign via mass e-mails "To tell a child on the eighth day that we are not lighting the last candle as a sacrifice for the environment ... will prevent the release of a huge amount of carbon dioxide."

While one rabbi "warned that the campaign would take away from the light of Torah that each and every candle symbolizes" another "called the environmentalists "crazy people...they should encourage people to light one less cigarette instead,"

Either seems unlikely  to threaten an Ice Age. With  3.3  million Jewish households globally, the 26 million candle savings could translate into a maximum of ~ 400 tons of CO2, while owing to the low carbon content of tobacco relative to paraffin candles, the cigarette alternative would  reduce emissions by at most 16.

However, the Lord moveth in mysterious ways his carbon footprint to reduce. In an apparent demonstration of Intelligent Design,  both carbon dioxide sources are completely offset by  the Sabbatarian   nation's  statistically  conspicuous drop in fossil fuel  consumption on its Biblical day off.

Meanwhile back in Bethlehem,  though 'tis the season for anti-smoking activists to complain about cathedrals full of second-hand Frankincense and Myrrh, traditional church candles have largely escaped Green ire.  Beeswax is, after all, a biofuel.

That does not get Aloes off the hook.  Incense from the wild Aqullaria tree is an ecumenical object of desire, and unsustainable Christan, Muslim, Buddhist and Shinto demand has seen it banned in 169 countries by the CITES Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. Lord knows what will be next-- Balm of Gilead, Goper Wood?  Or will the neoGrinches go gunning for bigger game, like partridge-bearing pear trees and flaming plum puddings?

I've helped light two dozen tapers on a bona fide London Christmas tree whose balsamic glow expanded as its needles warmed --the tapers probably totaled a couple of hundred watts. I suppose a lump of coal in a Christmas stocking may reasonably approximate the carbon footprint of a single Chanukah candle, but  there are other holidays to consider. Igniting tar barrels on Guy Fawkes Day may not long survive, and  If Greens set their sights on The Great Pumpkin, and mandate renewable jack-O'lantern lights, kids  may end up foraging for candy on All Tallows Eve.

These are waters deep as Galliee , and I think I'll drop mathematics in favor of eggnog until somebody can tell me how many candlepower equal  a Yule log, and how many cords add up to a pillar of fire? 

Absence Speaks

And draws a loud and clear answer from that hammer to hypocrisy, Berard-Henri Levy, who brings it down hard on those unseen at a funeral in Sindh:

The best, the most beautiful way of responding would have been for Angela Merkel, George Bush, Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy to have gone immediately to Pakistan for her funeral.

We should have seen, standing behind Benazir's body, as they once did behind Anwar Al-Sadat's and Itzhak Rabin's, the largest possible number of government leaders and heads of state, to make the funeral a global demonstration on behalf of the values of democracy and peace.

We would have wanted the French president to interrupt his vacation to bid farewell to this great lady, now a martyr, on her last voyage. But no. The man who just rolled out the red carpet for Moammar Gadhafi contented himself with a short communiqué, not responding to those who had begged him to find a gesture or at least words which would honor this assassinated heroine. Beyond Mr. Sarkozy, the entire community of democratic heads of state has been astonishingly moderate, prudent, indeed pusillanimous.

The Party Of The Night

Think a Mitt & Mike have troubles? Hang on to your Gore-Lieberman button,  and  Try this

 Oozing from its ageless crypt  beneath City College Alcove 1.5, it spread up the East River like a black mist, arching over to the Miskatonic and into the headwaters of another stream, until, as the Hunter's Moon rose over New Haven, an eldrich chanting was heard in an oval henge of stone :

Boola , Boola , Cthulhu, Cthulhu,
Boola , Boola , Boola Cthu !
Iä! Yog!  Iä! Yog!  Iä! Yog!  Yale!

And In The Opposite Corner

A few blogs , and not more than a dozen major science journal editors and the usual pathetic gaggle of investment banking heavies, Aspen regulars and  real, as opposed to Peace Prize,  Nobelists have united in calling on wannabe Presidential Candidates  to stage a Great American Science Debate as to what policies should prevail in the next Administration.

Since  many  A-list blogomerates said to be Conservative feature countdown clocks reminding us how long it has been since they challenged various worthies to debate climate change, the metaphysical status of blastocytes and toenail clippings, or the  finer points of Cambodian geography, it will be interesting to see how  CEI , AEI, Junk Science and various outposts of  Dittocephaly  field this one.

I do hope they rise to the occasion, or the bait, as the case may be, as there is a terrible dearth of politicized science in America. The problem is that for the Real Deal to exist, both sides have to have some inkling of what it is that they are trying to politicize.
Arranging a fair cat-fight on these subjects is an editorially parlous business, as  invitations to the Science Editors of National Review, The Weekly Standard, The American   Human Events , The Washington Times , The New York Post , The Wall Street Journal , The American Enterprise, or The American Spectator  are invariably returned postmarked:
                            NO SUCH PERSON AT THIS ADDRESS

NUCLEAR ELEKTRA

......Hazards Of The Course

A pistol wielding suicide bomber has killed Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi not three miles from where her father Zulfikar Ali was juridically assassinated 26 years ago.

I was at school with the striking and sharp tongued Pinky, who lived at former Ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith's house on Francis Avenue , but ate and was tutored in Harvard's Eliot House, where  the security afforded Singapore PM Kew as a Visiting Scholar also assured  her safety. Here's an old snap of her by the portrait of her then-still-living father she presented to her Radcliffe Common Room.

A Pakistan Peoples Party rep who was at Rawalpindi General Hospital, said she died at 6:16 local time, which was about three hours ago. The press says a crowd chanting "Dog, Musharraf, dog",  broke the glass door at the main entrance to the emergency unit. Javed Cheema of the Interior Ministry says she was killed either by her assassin's bullets or shrapnel pellets packed into his suicide vest. At least a dozen others died, and cars are already being torched in Islamabad by riled PPP  crowds. Tomorrow's funeral could be Homeric, with the whole government on the short list for Hades.

A few years after I last saw her-- by the time I got to Pakistan she was in exile -- her brother Murtaza was assassinated in front of her home in the Byzantine aftermath  of the War In Afghanistan that precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Seeking strategic depth in her nation's wars with India, she  sanctioned the ISS subsidy of the Taliban, and gave free rein to  the nuclear ambitions of Abdul Qader Khan. What a family. What a life.

The Commisar Did It

John O'Sullivan,unjustly  exiled editor of the late National Review , relates that the latest Russian rage is P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves books,  banned by Stalin in 1929, lest the  worldly joys of the "English heaven"  distract faithful Bolshevik writers from the wonders of the worker's paradise as they squatted in their newly commandeered Tammany Hall, formerly Moscow's Angliski Club.

John says a Tory MP friend of the late humorist  " has long maintained that an early Wodehouse short story was on Tolstoy's bedside table the night he died."

"From one heaven  to another" JO'S concludes. Readers of another genre must be wondering  if the sainted count 's  butler put some of the newly discovered wonder metal polonium in his tea.

May In December

My erstwhile nemesis, Lord May, Unhappy with Gordon Brown, has begun to make some  becomingly  Tory like noises in Nature :

Even more important, in my opinion, than higher teaching loads and the increasingly fierce competition for grants, is the extreme growth of bureaucracy... universities have matched or exceeded the growth in bureaucrats seen in the civil service. This growth is only partly justified by need.

One issue that Brown might address is that the current number of central administrative staff is roughly equal to the number of faculty for four major UK universities

A rather different issue that has emerged during the Blair decade is the tendency to invite people from the world of business to advise on the management of universities... I think there is an important lesson to be learnt here.

Critical Theory & Climate Modeling

Lexical Forcing Of  Optical Depth & Metaphoric .Breadth In The Op-Editorial Climate Optimum
 

Journal Of The Modem Language Association Vol XVII. Winter 2007-8, p 79-81

In today's climate of opinion, the One Dimensional  Editorial  Language Model (ELM) articulated by Marcuse finds new pertinence in globally reifying Hansen's thesis that “Truth is responsible for warming.”

Yet the George Mason school of semiotics( CF Michaels & Singer, 2005)maintains it is less truth that is responsible for carbon dioxide than the warming paradigm, and eventually the futility, of worrying about the signification of water vapor in the work of Lindzen and Fish. 25 years ago, long before the term “global warming” became chic, semioticians focused on the prospect of a mini-Ice Age in consequence of MacLuhans postulation of cool media. Not until Lacan promoted the use of post-ecologistant reading to read and attack The American Meteorological Society did many realize that in the end, all temperature is text.

In the post-Althuserian work of Baliunas, a predominant concept is the concept of capitalist climate culture. In a sense, this mirrors Idoru, in which Gibson deconstructs climate constructivism; and the ELM computer modeling paradigm finds visual reification in the solarized scenes of The Matrix Reloaded. This is not lost on Vienna Circle structuralists like Singer, and the naive realists of the Frankfurt School, denying the Ibsonian angst of An Inconvenient Truth, affirm capitalist subdialectic stratosphere theory as a medium of semiosis.

Even if we were to concede the alarmists’ claim that the earth’s temperature might rise one degree Fahrenheit in the next century, pre-Lacanian models would still have failed to predict the significant cooling or lexical forcing of optical depth and metaphoric breadth the oceans have undergone. This is antithetic to how global warming would be construed in popular culture were readers to choose between Derridaist reading and the formalized carbonist nihilism of Viscount Monckton and Lord Bertrand Russell.

Why require the nations of this planet to spend the hundreds of billions of dollars necessary to reduce carbon dioxide and other emissions when it invites Althuserian anomie, and  we don’t even know if the earth’s climate is getting permanently hotter or if that temperature change is caused by human activity or if that change is even more dangerous than transgressive texts entering the scientific canon?

“Consciousness is fundamentally dead,” says Foucault; however, with the advent of Artificiality computer models of climate may singularize into generators of their own hermeneutic hierarchy. According to Albi , it is not so much consciousness that is fundamentally dead, but rather the paradigm, and embodying parametric atmospheric models in sentient algorithms. This, Legates and McIntyre would say, embodies the absurdity of consciousness as a post-modeling condition. Therefore, Bataille uses the term ‘capitalist discourse’ to denote the difference between global warmism, sexual identity and culture in the Cold War era.

The main theme of the works of Hansen is transgressive because  the role of the climate  software  writer as observer. Hence the feminist discourse of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit, who lost it when he claimed that oil companies and the coal companies in the U.S. have joined in a conspiracy to hire pseudo scientists to deny the facts in denial of  Habermas teaching that there are in fact none to falsify, since  the universality of rubber graph paper has concretized McLuhan's global village even while leading to ozone depletion in the cybersphere. 

The primary theme of Buxton’s model of the climate of capitalist subdialectic theory is the bridge between society and sexuality. Thus, the premise of constructivism states that society, surprisingly, has objective value. If  the Derridaist reading  of Gore's thesis holds, we have to choose between the  subconceptualist textual theory of logocentric  radiative variability  espoused by Spencer, and a postcultural theory in which anthropogenic warming is no longer the signifier.  If Heidigger never know that ancient lexa reduce to semantic monads, it is because in 1998, Willie Soon et al. of the Harvard-Smithsonian center for Astrophysics published a paper in the Oregon Journal of Intertextual Climate Research, arguing that there really had been a Medieval warm period.

How  has this anachronality of juxtaposition as dasein obviates temporal and lexical space in culturally framed post-Aristotelian models in contemporary America become a predominant concept in the distinction between figure and ground in the popular imagination Fish might say that Sontag uses the term ‘capitalist subdialectic theory’ to denote a self-falsifying  ELM paradox like "global warmism" in ways paralleling the multi-dimensional nature of the IPCC paradigm, but reflecting Marcuse’s one dimensional man , Milloy and Limbaugh therefore imply that we have to choose between climatic relativism and modernist pretextual theory ,or else face the consequences of Moore's law as the climate of opinion faces hermeneutic decay in the emerging era of cyberclimate.

The post-structuralist alternative to a Web 3.0 view of the climate debate is too horrible to contemplate- Al Gore's Nobel could inspire Rupert Murdoch to run for one too. To deconstruct that contingency, we have devised a transgressive textual canon by running random excerpts from a decade of Wall Street Journal editorials on climate change through the PoMo jargon generator so kindly linked by Arts And Letters Daily. 

Next week, weather permitting, Adamant readers with access to data compression software are invited to submit 17 syllable renderings of the IPCC report as a winter haiku.

 

Like A Fish Needs A Bicycle

Nature reports a" new world record in human powered computing has been set by MIT students who used bicycles to power one of the institute’s supercomputers for 20 minutes. As part of the ‘Innovate or Die’ pedal-powered machine contest a nuclear fusion reaction was modeled by the sweat of the students’ brows."

SynFuel To Thin Fuel

 Around The World On Eighty Whales

In the golden age of sail, overweight crew could be a treasure. "Sandbagging"  is an expression stemming from the yacht racing wheeze of illicitly shifting heavy ballast to make a handicapped boat go faster when the wind rose.  It was perfectly legal, however, to order all hands to sit on the windward rail, making 300 pound Bluto's handy in a pinch.  No longer.  Now one wannabe marine speedster is having liposuction-- but not to lighten ship.

Many a sailor has gotten tanked before, but Captain Pete Bethune is having his midriff squeezings refined into the human equivalent of whale oil to add to the fuel of his power trimaran. He aims  to kick its racing diet up a notch as he goes flat out for the biofuel Around The World marine speed record.

Alternative fuel delirium may rival America's Cup fever, but  when it comes to sportsmanship, turning marines into marine diesel just to win a blue ribbon is sailing pretty close to the wind-- especially since the race begins in Valencia.

RED BULL

...A Life of Picasso, Vol. III:
The Triumphant Years 1917-32
         by John Richardson

‘To my amazement, there were no paintings . . . but only packages, piled one atop another to the height, say, of Picasso . . . And do you know what there was inside? Banknotes! Yes, sir, banknotes, the largest denomination that existed in France then, which was enormous.’

Christian Zervos recollecting the day Picasso took him, as a favoured confidant, to his vaults in the Banque de France. The fortune had ridden out the Wall Street crash, and had been accumulating since before the First World War.

Empire's Wake

Was The Great White Fleet A Bully Iron Experiment ?

Ever since  oceanographer John Martin launched the ocean fertilization controversy two decades ago  by asserting : "Give me a half tanker of iron and I'll give you an ice age," ecologists have warned the impacts on  marine food webs might not be worth the risk. The subject is hotly, and at times bitterly debated from coast to coast-- Woods Hole to Scripps Institute to be exact, but that has not stopped boiler room operators from offering dubious carbon offsets based on little more than promises to drop scrap iron in the ocean. SEC oversight scarcely applies to such penny stock science, the supposed benefits being calculated from the paper ratio of iron in biomass to the weight of whatever may be thrown over the transom.

The subject deserves better, and

L'Ecotrahison Deneuve !

A Coal Fashion Statement Has Pulled Into
Vanity Fair Station, Under Its Own Steam

O Little Death Star Of Bethelehem

The grinches at NASA have aimed their instruments at a jet-producing  giant black hole  that is fortunately light years removed from the Holy Land, to snap the mother of all Debbie Downer Xmas cards using the Chandra X-ray telescope

The galactic center black hole , invisible in the dust lane at the top of the lower galaxy, is beaming gamma rays bright as sunlight at a companion , turning it into a Christmas tree ornament  of  x-ray fluorescence, as it ionizes the bejesus out of the dusty  interstellar medium. The blue streak is of radio noise as it blasts clear out the other side.

The glad tidings are that this 2.5 million parsec distant death star will run out of steam in another million years or so , before it can carve a wider swathe of destruction through the hapless galaxy. Meanwhile, wise men will give it a wide berth. The place is as hot as it looks.The artist's rendition is clearer than the messy reality--

Fancy That

This is only for  Tangled Web enthusiasts who follow  the Climate Wars on RealClimate as well as here, but it does have a high coefficient of irony--- 

Tis The Season

To indulge in random acts of intellectual  kindness

So let  me  offer  a  comforting  hypothesis to an orphan element left out in the cold by the atmospherically obsessed.  Could the  observation  that what goes around  comes around have a chemical sequel?

None dare equate the  lavish expansion of the Montreal Protocol with bureaucratic turf building, but the Canadian cowboys have been  corralling bromine atoms with comic zeal, slapping a ban on Halon aircraft fire extinguishers even as TSA was declaring  lobsters and toothpaste too flammable to fly on commercial flights. Yet few ask,as the regulatory web expands itself, what on Earth has become of all the bromine taken out of circulation?

It's an element  whose neurological effects are manifestly  paradoxical. Once valued for its sedative power in Tory circles -- Evelyn Waugh was a celebrated addict  of Bromo Seltzer and worse, the smelly halogen  became an object of high liberal anxiety once ozone became a cause. But lately, it has gone under  the cultural radar.

Where ever has it gone, in an age when  each sea worn shard of  blue Bromo Seltzer glass is treasured like an uncultured pearl of orient, and loaded halon fire extinguishers are passed down as heirlooms from one generation of yacht owner to the next?  Even ethyl bromide is gone, superannuated as its namesake  leaded gasoline, and no more a source of political controversy than the addition of fluorine to our vital bodily fluids, or the abstraction of boric acid and apricot pit elixirs from our medicine chests.

With so many elements gone, and Premo Levi out of print, what will restore the polemic balance of nature to its  vigorous Space Age  state, when you could  start a bar fight by chucking a dart at any square on the Periodic Chart?

The answer is in the air. As conservative radio subsides into the winter doldrums, and  editorial pages prepare to turn a new leaf leftward for the election year, the pouring forth of liberal bromides is on the rise like maple sap in February. Before long Hillary Clinton will sound as much like Elanor Roosevelt as Bill Moyers does already.

It is just as well. The first four years of any democratic administration are something best slept through, and with the bromide concentration of the airwaves ascending like a lullaby, the nation should  snooze soundly through the first few hundred fireside chats. People in Iowa and New Hampshire are already nodding.

The Missing Link

Though media evolve with alarming speed, they can devolve even faster.  Witness The Wall Street Journal .  Its  hard edged business section goes on grinding  out Pultizers, but its electronic back end, Opinion Journal has become a video arcade that hands out Kewpie Dolls for semantic aggression:  "This column is highly skeptical of global warmism, and we wonder if those who claim to believe in it really do." € writes Editor James Taranto

Though he seems to echo Rush Limbaugh in  criticizing inconvenient science as "politicized"  and styling criticism of creationism " appalling in its arrogance and ignorance." he claims to "lack the time, the inclination and possibly the intellect to delve deeply into the science." which may explain why gravitationism and germ theory of diseasism have so far escaped his attention.

Very Boring How?

Something New Under The Gun

The Field reports an improbable and welcome novelty , which may appeal to upland shooting and astrophysics aficionados alike.

Low angle of incidence focusing applies to shotgun pellets as well as other energetic quanta, and the mandated switch to steel pellets now that shooting lead at waterfowl is quite illegal  carries an order of magnitude shift in Young's  modulus, necessarily entailing  a subtle switch in barrel geometry, as would a move to harder x-rays in a space telescope or synchotron collimator.  High pheasant hot shot Mike Yardley says an Italian arms firm has addressed the matter intelligently:

The barrels of the Fabarm Beta are rather unusual... bored on what the firm describe as the Tribore system. Apparently, this is patented (though... there is much precedent - over 200 years' worth - for the over-boring and taper-boring of guns).

Essentially...it - involves a barrel with an extended forcing cone leading into a wider than average bore... For some 20cm behind the choke area, moreover, the bore gradually tapers down to 18.4mm before leading into a choke which itself has a 40mm cone leading into a final, parallel section of 10mm. Fabarm claims the arrangement increases penetration and...I have no reason to doubt that based on my shooting tests...The test gun certainly shot impressively...at long range. www.vikingarms.com.

WALKING THE PLANKTOS

Admiralty Lawyers Avast !
Here be a new Tort: Carbon Offset Piracy

The Black Spot stalks the carbon footprints of Planktos Corporation, last seen trying  to inflict a hotfoot on the shoes of the fisherman.

Climateer reports the scalawags may have added a new misdemeanor to the annals of Admiralty Law : Carbon Offset Piracy. Having promised more carbon uptake by seawater than could plausibly  be delivered by shoveling rust over the transom of the cockleshell research vessel that is the main asset of the Enterprise, this merry crew has made off with the corporate flagship.

The yacht Weatherbird II possibly purchased with proceeds from scamming  the faithful into greening the Vatican , has sailed out of sight of its creditors'

Hence Climateer is asking :

Is Something Very Wrong With Planktos?
Planktos is thirteen days past the date on which their 3rd quarter financials were due at the Securities and Exchange Commission. This is odd for a few different reasons. 1) The company has no revenues...2) Planktos has moved its only tangible asset, the good ship Weatherbird II, outside of U.S. jurisdiction. The boat is carried on the balance sheet at $796,727... PLKT also showed a $797,194 receivable, probably not from operations (they have no sales)...

The marine saga continues-- Last week the Spanish papers reported Weatherbird II had hightailed it for High Barbaree, Agadir to be exact, but now she is in Madeira, having been refused entry at Las Palmas on a claim of medical emergency due to , you guessed it,  plankton poisoning.

The most recent account from the Spanish Mainsteam press, in   El Publico, says Cap'n George wants the EU & Spain to pay Planktos to investigate the "Cigatura Crisis " it claims to have discovered  en route to nowhere.  Is this  El Ultimo Suspiro Del Alabatroz , or will the conversion of cutlass rust into Sargasso blossom into the Treasure of the Indies ? The smart as paint money is laying two doubloons to a pottle of grog that these lascaradoes will end up keelhauled.

POSTSCRIPT 19 December:
Before the Securities & Exchange Inquisition could locate a comfy chair, or His Spanish Majesty's Admiralty a handy yardarm, Planktos  announced it would attend to Suspending Operations itself.

3 January: They seem to have deep sixed their obligation to The Vatican

Stay tuned - they may yet be seen sailing in company  with the gonzo French Nobel laureate who believes in the biological transmutation of iron into manganese?  There be a  process promising great riches in  synergy with cold fusion, as the two might convert ironic phytoplankton into manganese nodules .

Technetium fertilization futures may be the Next Big Thing--a boiling Strangelove Ocean full of mutant squid could revolutionize  carbon permit trading strategies--there is always business in great waters.
.........................They had a plan too>

OH, THE HUMANITY ! BALI ICING CAP MELTS

..Half  Of  Globe Inundated, Hordes Left Stranded As
Sea Level Rises 20 Feet After Bali Conference Eruption

Antarctica and many Pacific Island nations disappeared Friday after the Performance Artist Formerly Known As The Former Next President exploded from his collar at a UN conference on Fast Food & Climate Change. The wardrobe malfunction occurred as he  was attempting to metabolically sequester carbon from a supersized dessert.

The icing cake responsible for  the catastrophe, traced to EcoAction des Patisseries De Versailles, depicts a rain forest village being razed to stop slash and burn palm oil cultivation, and assure sustainable production Of Fair Trade coffee for future UNESCO conferences. 

The explosion wiped out the conference's carbon neutral food stalls, but Endangered Species Pavilion officials averted the treat of cannibalism among starving climate modelers and diplomats by allowing them to eat the exhibits raw to avoid greenhouse emissions

Among those complaining they were not allowed to eat cake were these   "International Climate Science Coalition  scientists ...
Viscount Monckton ( spokesman)
Vincent Gray (IPCC Expert Reviewer)
David Evans (Carbon Cycle Modeller / Rocket Scientist)
David Archibald (Climate Scientist / Solar Effects)
William Alexander (Engineering Scientist)
Greg Balle (Executive Director / Geophysical Flows)"
Some edifying excerpts from the climate and rocket science websites of the I.C.S.C.'s icy esquires :
Greg Balle :
"New Zealand  Libertarianz Finance Spokesman,"

Bryan Leyland
" I am a New Zealand based Consulting Engineer specialising in hydropower, power systems [ gas and coal ] and markets. ".

David Evans Associates "provides expertise in site applications, survey and mapping, site civil development, and right-of-way appraisals and negotiations for siting gas- and coal-fired power generation facilities."

Viscount Monckton has written five volumes of Soduku and owns a white lab coat.

No ants or icebergs were killed or injured in producing this post-conference postscript

A Mammoth Headache

The Northern Lights have seen strange sights, but nothing weirder than what befell a gaggle of woolly mammoths lumbering across the Siberian tundra some 30,000 years ago-- the sky lit up with a bang as they were struck by a hail of micrometeorites  the size of shotgun pellets.

How many were struck dead  by larger fragments, or blind  by lesser ones is problematic, but nickel iron pellets have been found, only on the skyward side , of seven Yakutian  fossil mammoth tusks and a horned  bison skull found in Alaska according to a paper researchers Allen West and Richard Firestone  presented on 11 December at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

"We think that the micrometeorites came from an air-burst of a meteor 30,000 to 34,000 years ago,"  Firestone, a chemist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory  told Nature "We think a wave of meteoric material sprayed the region."

Some of the tusks are peppered with hundreds of the  2 to 5 millmeter nickel-iron  fragments, which  burned  grooves into the bone. Strangely, the  damage to the tusk was first noted  not by the fearless mammoth hunters of Yakutia,  but an observant  rockhound at a fossil sale in a motel in Arizona.

According to Nature :

Allen West,[ who lives in Arizona]  was looking for evidence of a meteorite that he and his colleagues hypothesize  caused the megafaunal extinction and decline of  the Clovis people in North America some 13,000 years ago. Recalling previous visits to the annual Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, West says, "A bulb went on in my head; I remembered seeing a room full of mammoth tusks there."  So he went to a motel that shows the fossils, and sifted through the tusks.

"I spent two or three hours looking at dirty old tusks, when suddenly there was a burnt hole," he says. He tested it with a small magnet, as he knew many meteorites were mostly iron. "Bang; it stuck right to the hole," he says.

West bought the 60-centimetre tusk for about US$200, and later headed to the warehouse of the company that he bought it from: Canada Fossils.

After three days of searching through the company's collection of some 15,000 tusks, West started to find more evidence of micrometeorites in a batch from the Yukutia Peninsula in eastern Siberia. His magnet again repeatedly hit the mark on tell-tale burn holes.

West bought these tusks too and took them to Firestone and his colleagues for geochemical analysis and radiocarbon dating

We Aim For The Stars

But this time we hit 16,000 Pounds in London

Wernher von Braun's 1934 doctoral thesis,

Design, Theoretical and Experimental Contributions to the Problem of the Liquid-Fuel Rocket

classified Top Secret by the Nazi's, has been auctioned by Bonham's

No, the buyer was not from Iran.

Bali : The Tromso Perspective

WHY WORRY ABOUT THE SNL WRITER'S STRIKE?

LIVE FROM OSLO & BALI  IT'S MONDAY NIGHT AT THE NOBELS!

You can't get away from the atmosphere in Northern Norway.  The Aurora Borealis blazes until the rise of the Midnight Sun 1200 miles from the North Pole , whereupon the air over the University of Tromso  starts to warm more avidly than in normal climes , because in the land of long shadows the sun shines  through the atmosphere's thickness almost horizontally even at not-very-high noon, and the radiative loss of heat is just as thickly muffled.

The oblique light can give rise to amazing sights, like shadows with halos and triple images of the sun. Along long with these northern specters comes a parochial tendency to equate natural  history in Ultima Thule with the way things ought to be throughout the world. The Rector Emeritus of Tromso's proudly self proclaimed Northernmost University shows this phenomenon at its most extreme.

Elsewhere in the world, global warming is as nearly impalpable as a plate glass window is invisible.  Not at 70 North, where  sunlight falls  almost sideways through the air, To understand how this can be,

The Green's Black Secret

Why Bother Thinking About Coal?

No one finds the truth more inconvenient that true believers. In Bali, Al Gore's Peace Prize only drove him to greater rhetorical violence in denouncing  America's dependence on its largest energy resource.

Al may go on bellowing about the world's immanent crucifixion on a cross of coal, even as Deep Greens dream of its becoming a road kill on the information superhighway. Yet despite decades of alternative energy evangelism, the wretched low tech fuel remains the mainstay of America's power supply, lighting half the nation's lamps and laptops from reserves reckoned in centuries.

That's what the National Academy of Science told Congress to expect at the height of the "Energy Crisis" a generation ago.  But while coal lingers in parental memory, the post-modern power industry has hunkered down so far that few children would recognize a lump of the black stuff if it fell out of a Christmas stocking.  Nor is solid fuel on Europe's domestic mind--most homes there are heated by Russian natural gas. Yet from Berlin to Bilbao, coal figures in executive nightmares. Carbon taxes mean Euros going up in smoke.

When natural gas burns, the exhaust gas is two thirds water vapor. But what you see coming out of a coal-fired power station plume may be less than half CO2,  because the hydrogen that makes natural gas "Green" is present in coal as well. The burning question is how much ?

The answer is  surprising.  Enough to matter --a lot.

Coal composition ought to concern to  environmental realists because  China, and India are set to build nearly 850 new plants to burn the stuff. These threaten to  bury Kyoto by creating  up to five times as much carbon dioxide as the Protocol seeks to reduce--2.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2012. Another 58  nations have 340 new coal-fired plants under development. Even Green Germany plans to build 26, while Russian coal demand is expected to triple by 2020 as thermal plants double their share of the electricity market.

The world can no longer afford to ignore what coal is  made of, for its low free market cost--just 12%  that of natural gas, assures  its growing use even in Green Europe, where a permit to burn a truckload can rival the cost of an ounce of gold.

While commonsense dictates a rebate for any CO2  saving  strategy, Green polemics have driven regulation in the opposite direction by equating coal and carbon. To do so is to ignore material reality-- coal is never pure carbon, it contains from roughly 50 to 90% on a dry weight basis. This variability has real implications for managing coal's impact on climate. Though high carbon 'hard coal' called anthracite exists-- anthrax is Greek for coal, it is as rare as high-hydrogen bituminous coal is common. Within this broad spectrum of fuels, the content of hydrogen rich volatiles varies by a factor of nine.

Among American coals that produce virtually the same amount of thermal energy per ton, some yield 40% less CO2 than others. An 8% improvement in what power plants burn would cut CO2 emissions as much as replacing half the nation's cars with the Prius !

America has high-volatile coal in abundance, and the hydrogen it contains already generates a considerable fraction of the nation's electrical power. How much more is possible?  Right now, the inconvenient truth is that nobody knows.

Half the available data are antique, lumping together hydrogen in hydrocarbons with the H in H2O.  So to avoid the risk of crucifixion for sharp analytical practice, I've had to lower my policy sights, from a geochemically possible 40%,to a very conservative  8%  goal.  Whatever the true numbers turn out to be, coal quality scarcely figures in the global warming debate, for though coal may be superabundant, chemical literacy is an all too rare political commodity.

Few Greens understand the geochemical paradox of rocks containing  volatile hydrogen, and fewer journalists grasp the elementary fact that, carbon atoms being twelve times heavier than those of hydrogen, coals containing nearly 90% carbon by weight can still be nearly half hydrogen.At its best , the atomic ratio of hydrogen to carbon in this solid fuel can approach that of liquid benzene or acetylene welding gas.

Atoms matter because they  burn one at a time. CO2 emissions can't be reckoned by  fuel weight alone because of  the twelve-fold difference between the number of atoms in a ton of hydrogen and one of carbon . This means switching from low to high hydrogen coal can redouble the CO2 saved by conserving electricity. Growing America's economy  will require far more electricity than  screw-in fluorescents can save. One way to accommodate growth while containing  greenhouse gas inflation is to reduce the CO2 emissions of  existing power plants by switching their fuel source to better coal fields.

Business as usual dictates that coal companies balk at this idea, but Big Coal lobbyists have not been alone in keeping this issue off the policy table. Natural gas spokesmen and Green activists share the responsibility. Solid fuel is easier to demonize than explain, and neither group stands to benefit from a shift to higher hydrogen coal. This has created a research vacuum. Billions are being spent to advertise the possibilities of alternative energy,but even hydrogen enthusiasts remain clueless as to how much of their favorite element the nation's hundreds of coal deposits each contains.

Only a few per cent of America's are being mined , and elementary geochemistry suggests the idle ones contain an opportunity for  CO2 reductions rivaling one of the giant "wedges"  made famous by An Inconvenient Truth. Yet  when it comes to  the potential  environmental merits of 'black hydrogen.' ardent Greens seem avatars of denial ,finding  It simply too far off message for ideological comfort.

In Uncommon Carriers, New Yorker writer John McPhee shrewdly pointed  out that transport cost has always dictated which coal gets dug first. What we burn now is a matter not of policy, but past economic contingency ,leaving  geological room for improvement even in Dick Cheney's back yard--some of the highest hydrogen seams in Wyoming's producing coal fields remain untouched. High infrastructure  costs make Big Coal's reluctance to move mining operations understandable, but the silence of the Greens is perplexing. With good coal so abundant, the specter of carbon taxes may help drive the bad out of circulation in the developed world, even as  hydrogen rebates for burning better coal help stem the flux of CO2 from nations that,  in the economic here and now, cannot afford the luxury of the fuels of the future.

The author has written on science technology and energy policy in Nature, Physics Today and Forbes. Copyright 2007 Russell Seitz

Under the Superdome

A Megatelescope Will Dwell

Thanks to Gordon Moore, astronomical telescope size will continue to double fast as the number of well heeled Silicon Valley foundations. The next generation, scheduled to collect its first light in 2016, is this 100 foot monster

A decade long commitment by his foundation will provide much of the three hundred million dollar cost of developing the Thirty Meter Telescope. The TMT will consist of a primary mirror with 492 individual 1.45-meter segments together measuring 30 meters in diameter, more than eight times the collecting area of the biggest instruments extant, the Keck telescopes in Hawaii. Thanks to Moore's Law, the mirror segments will be under ever more precise computer control  as software and sensors co-evolve, so that they will ever more closely approximate a perfect single mirror. This revolutionary technology was developed for the 10-meter Keck mirrors in the two Keck telescopes in Hawaii

Adaptive optics (AO) will enable the Thirty Meter Telescope to exceed the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope despite being immersed in the Earth's wobbly ocean of air. The TMT AO system will use six intense metal vapor laser beams to create six glowing pinpoints of light in a layer of sodium atoms sixty miles overhead in the Earth's ionosphere.

These bright artificial stars serve as references for measuring turbulence, allowing the AO system to compensate for blurring of starlight by light path variations in the air. This virtual guide star technology was first used to halt the  twinklingof the stars   through the nearly century old 100 inch Hooker telescope of Los Angeles Lick Observatory, and has since been developed further using  the Palomar 5-meter and  the paired Keck 10-meter telescopes.

Modern Artery

 A reader reports one of his"dearly departed co-workers spent a great deal of time creating a scale model in stents of Stone Henge. Stent Henge was created with pieces of scrap Nitinol self expanding vascular stents embedded in cured Sylgard 184 elastomer. It is a nearly perfect reproduction of the layout of the famous stone circle in England in a compact package just about the perfect size for a paper weight. It took nearly a year of work during slow periods. "

Knitting stents would make anyone nervous

But Who Was His Science Adviser?

Given the  platform of Independent candidate  Prophet Joseph Smith, who ran for the Presidency in 1844, it's surprising that  Latter Day Saint Mitt Romney should be catching flack for a Massachusetts judge's leniency in allowing a murderer bail .

Mormon missionaries, says Bill Kaufman's fascinating 2004 article in American Enterprise,  distributed Smith's views nationally In November 1843, as he ran against Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Martin Van Buren, on a platform  promising "more economy...less taxes" and a "judicious tariff" and to  "Break the shackles from the poor black man,"

To enforce his writ he asked for "full power to send an army to suppress mobs,"  a hardly surprising request  given that he asked that voters:

"Petition your state legislatures to pardon every convict in their several penitentiaries,blessing them as they go..."

The Sceptical Recycler

Geoengineering may be a Hot Topic, but just how new is it ?

California's Cool Cities initiative makes microclimate modification  with paint and shade trees sound like a  cutting edge discovery , but dig around and you'll find the first such municipal ordinance was drafted by Solon The Lawgiver circa 780 BC, , and  that in 1498, Christopher Columbus complained that Jamaica  was getting hotter because trees were being cut down.

I didn't have to dig that far to uncover a certain lack of novelty in Bjorn Lomborg's  last Guardian article, though I'm in no position to complain of his choice of subject -- I've invited Bjorn to dig around in Adamant 's Geoengineering sidebar for some more columns 

   FORBES    08.21.00                      GUARDIAN  11.18.07

PAINT THE TOWN WHITE           PAINT  IT WHITE

     RUSSELL SEITZ                          BJORN LOMBORG           
the greenhouse effect is not driven by fossil fuel burning, but by the power of the sun..The real problem is Earth's low albedo--it reflects only a small fraction of the sun's energy because most of its surface is dark compared to a snowfield or a coat of white paint.

Although it may seem almost comically straightforward, one of the best temperature-reducing approaches is very simple: paint things white.

Such white surfaces reflect three times as much as bare rock or desert soil, and up to ten times as much as deep water or black asphalt paving.

Cities have a lot of black asphalt and dark, heat-absorbing structures. By increasing reflection and shade, a great deal of heat build-up can be avoided.

we could lighten up the hundreds of thousands of square miles of roofs and roadways that already exist, starting with those expanses of asphalt that already contribute to cities being warmer than the countryside.

By increasing reflection and shade, a great deal of heat build-up can be avoided. Paint most of a city and you could lower the temperature by 10C.

this "White House Effect"...can suffice to raise the reflectiveness of most natural surfaces from 25% or less to 75% or more, at a materials cost on the order of around $250,000 per square mile. America's annual per capita share of such a global solution would cost as much as a couple of gallons of gas.... some things are cheaper than energy conservation.

These options are simple, obvious, and cost-effective. Consider Los Angeles. Reroofing... would lower air conditioning costs by about $170m and...lower LA temperatures by about 3C - or about the temperature increase envisioned for the rest of this century...we don't hear much about the smartest choices when it comes to addressing global warming.

Fe At Sea

Don't Try This In A Cast iron Bathtub
images courtesy of AAAS & University of Otago

The Big Dark

DO DARK DARK STARS EXIST?

Odd things may happen if and when a pre-stellar cloud condenses into the gravity well of a clot of neutralinos

Such a circumstance may have been commonplace shortly after the big bang, for dark matter outweighs the normal sort by a factor of six . Now a paper has appeared calculating the consequences- the  virial theorem predicts heating of the mixture by dark matter annihilation as neutralinos collide may be too great to allow condensation to normal stellar densities, resulting in giants stars that glow without nuclear fusion., kept from igniting by the radiation pressure of annihilation gamma rays within the enormous sphere

Up to 15,000 solar masses , and the size of the Earth's orbit, or larger, these  Dark Matter Stars may stlll be sulking out of observational sight but detectable by their energetic gamma rays-- over 100 gev for nu-nu driven processes

Douglas Spolyar , Katherine Freese and Paolo Gondolo give a preliminary account in a paper available from Arxiv Astrophysics --

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0705/0705.0521v2.pdf

and Science has a news report  for subscribers as well

The NR Counter-Evolution

The President's Classicist, Victor Davis Hanson, thinks the National Intelligence Estimate shows that Iran's inability to realize its nuclear ambitions is but one of the many fruits of our wise invasion of Mesopotamia.

As presumably is Libya's failure to send a manned mission to Mars. The scholarly world awaits Hanson's magisterial essay demonstrating that Xerxes turned tail on learning of Athens threat to weaponize Democritus' atomic theory.

Proof that intelligent prose still sprouts through the mould in National Review's in-box, comes from Charles Bork, a Yalie famed for following the Harvard salient for spring breaks in Afghanistan,  whose essay examining  the corellation of falling vemouth concentrations in Maritinis and  the decline of Western Civilization is a Must Read :
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZjU2ZmNhNTU3ODdhNjA0NDk4ZDJmN2JhN2QzOWNhNmU=

It is not for the faint of heart, as it alludes to Ohio vermouth and Amish Gin, either calculated to reduce  waterboarding to the status of a Humanist sacramental. As a counterexample to this horror, out of duty to the Geneva Convention I must reveal a Swiss Secret of State--the 13th blade of the Swiss Navy Knife.

Devised by the death-dealing  Gnomes of Zurich, It is designed to remove pips from unpeeled beerenauslese grapes prior to their being immersed like olives in seven centiliters of supercooled Willamine Morand, or other echt birengeist .

Once the grape freezes and splits, the supernatant liquid is poured into a chilled martini glass, and served to a potential belligerent, who is thereby deterred without recourse to the fleet of  Helvetian Confederation nuclear missile submarines lurking in Lac Leman.

Finally,
National Review Online asks its assembled pundits : 

"There is rioting in Sudanese streets calling for the death of a woman over a teddy bear named Mohammed.

What can we in the West possibly do with this — nationally, individually? How do we help? What must we learn from it?"

TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT BEAR

Rock Of Ages

   POSTMODERN GEOLOGY 102 A

Petrology for Deconstruction Majors 

Trinitite
The first rock to form during  the Postmodern epoch.

This violet to green, obsidian-like lithic, fused from the White Sands of southern New Mexico is an un-natural glass  emplaced in a shallow anticline , with a tritium age of 6.1 milli-eons, a few weeks older than the Terminal Showa formation of the Hiroshima district in southern Japan.

Younger deposits are known to exist in Kazakhstan ,the Lop basin in China, and synclines in India and Pakistan. A calcian variety has been reported from some recently vanished French atolls.  All are highly enriched in transuranic elements and look far older than their years.

Saddamite
More mafic than  Maccadamite,this high-temperature no pressure  metamorphic exists atop the holocene tar sands of Kuwait. Consisting of quartz grains in a matrix of carbon black with fossil impressions of boots, coots and camel tracks,  its petrogenesis defies explanation.

High porphyrin levels suggest a marine Cretaceous origin ,but no natural or commercial explanation exists for the infernal thermal fluxes required to pyrolize so much carbon There are no signs of natural catastrophe or nuclear winter in the vicinity.

Cryabase

Foundation stone of the infant science of neopetrology , cryabase is the only  terrestrial rock consisting entirely of condensed air. This paragon of igneous minimalism  contains native oxygen and nitrogen,  argon snowflakes  ,and  minute crystals of  Freon, neon, and radon.

Cryabase occurs as aircicles and frost-like masses surrounding liquid hydrogen tanks. Much feared by Space Shuttle pilots ,it is difficult to collect as geologists picks embrittle severely at frozen air temperatures. Attempting  to lick field samples is highly inadvisable.

Saganite
Phenomenally cold and dark variety of cryabase. A report in Science in 1983 stated that minute amounts in atmospheric suspension can lower global temperatures below freezing for 40 days and 40 nights, but the still unpublished type specimen seems to have reverted to apocryphite.

Saganite seems structurally related to Imhofite and the War of the Worlds symplectite  near Grovers Mills N.J . Immense deposits reportedly exist beneath the Enron gas dome and the Busang Borneo  megagold strike, but none has been offered for sale . Distinguishing features : highly refractory at a distance; melts under examination.

The Ground Zero Gneiss
Thus far known only from lower Manhattan and the Pentagon basement,  this so unique migmatite exhibits a portlandite matrix with corrugated layers of  galvanized iron , asbestos fibers , and exotic nickel alloy  laths whose grain structure suggests hot deformation. Zones of heavily mylonized gypsum contain mica-like books of carbonaceous schist with  angular markings. Unlike exsolved  graphic granites, which resemble garbled cuneiform, the GZG graphitites are highly legible, and appear to pertain to world trade.

The Tora Bora Metapeltites
Cave entrance exposures near the Waziristan-Pakistan syntaxis have yielded fugitive traces of these rare and much sought after products of repeated shock and awe.

Its distinuishing features are Seismic deformation and  clasts of lead, depleted uranium , kevlar and boron carbide.  Analytical  petrologists  hope to collect the $50 million reward offered for a specimen showing plastically deformed traces of the elusive  organic phase binladenite  in amounts sufficient for positive DNA identification.

The President's Classicist

Who says a National Council of the Arts seat is not worth a libation of warm spit ?

It's given the Vice President's Classicist the National Medal of the Humanities for public service on a par with Plato's contribution to Syracusan public diplomacy.

Professor Hanson succeeded in explaining 300 to 43, who doesn't seem to recall what Andover taught him about Xenophon's Anabasis, Athen's Sicilian Expedition or how Aeschylus' Persians ends

White House domestic affairs guru and Marvel Comics author  Karl Zinsmeister might earn the same gong by rescripting Anabasis, AKA 10,000  as a sequel to 300. It seems a natural, as it features a Spartan general arguing with a defeatist Athenian dogsbody named Socrates, who's always asking why invading Persia is a  better idea than drinking hemlock ?
Some sample dialog :

   10,000           Scene V:        After the battle of Cunxata
Xenophon:  The Perslamofascist Tyrant Cyrus is toast, General Clearchus! Now how .................... do we get out of Babylon and back to Neopolis in time for the election?
Clearchus : (coughing blood)                    Hang a right at the light on the road to Damascus.
Xenophon :                                                      Won't the Gods be angry if we cut and run ?
Clearchus : (pulls spear from ear)                            Depends which oracle you ask.
....................................................( Dies, and is carried into the sunset on his shield )

10,000 won't cost a dime more than 300 to make-- Industrial Light and Magic can clone the 300 Spartans they already have on disc.

Lastest With The Fastest

Janes   reports that the US Navy's fastest ship may be the last of its kind:

Cost hikes sink second LCS trimaran

The US Navy has admitted a share of the blame for the cost overruns that forced it to cancel General Dynamics' second Littoral Combat Ship prototype (LCS 4). Plans for the aluminium-hulled trimaran were torn up after the two sides failed to renegotiate contract terms to address rising design costs on the company's first ship, Independence (LCS 2)