Thor’s Hall

An interesting perspective has been presented over at Defense Tech today.  My interest in “cyber war” has always been focused on how do you short circuit an attack to minimize penetration and damage to critical systems. 

It seems that the Strategic Thinkers are working through another angle.  Does a cyber attack, justify a conventional counter attack.  In other words, if you attack my natural gas infrastructure, can I warm up the bombers and visit your place?  The scary extension comes when the thought process moves to invoking Article 5 of the NATO charter.

Go here to read the whole article.

Who knew that these guys were out there, sitting in their labs and crunching numbers like this.  Even more interesting is going to be what the global warming crowd can do with things like this.

From NASA….

The Feb. 27 magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile may have shortened the length of each Earth day.

JPL research scientist Richard Gross computed how Earth’s rotation should have changed as a result of the Feb. 27 quake. Using a complex model, he and fellow scientists came up with a preliminary calculation that the quake should have shortened the length of an Earth day by about 1.26 microseconds (a microsecond is one millionth of a second).

Perhaps more impressive is how much the quake shifted Earth’s axis. Gross calculates the quake should have moved Earth’s figure axis (the axis about which Earth’s mass is balanced) by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters, or 3 inches). Earth’s figure axis is not the same as its north-south axis; they are offset by about 10 meters (about 33 feet).

By comparison, Gross said the same model estimated the 2004 magnitude 9.1 Sumatran earthquake should have shortened the length of day by 6.8 microseconds and shifted Earth’s axis by 2.32 milliarcseconds (about 7 centimeters, or 2.76 inches).

Gross said that even though the Chilean earthquake is much smaller than the Sumatran quake, it is predicted to have changed the position of the figure axis by a bit more for two reasons. First, unlike the 2004 Sumatran earthquake, which was located near the equator, the 2010 Chilean earthquake was located in Earth’s mid-latitudes, which makes it more effective in shifting Earth’s figure axis. Second, the fault responsible for the 2010 Chiliean earthquake dips into Earth at a slightly steeper angle than does the fault responsible for the 2004 Sumatran earthquake. This makes the Chile fault more effective in moving Earth’s mass vertically and hence more effective in shifting Earth’s figure axis.

Gross said the Chile predictions will likely change as data on the quake are further refined.

A while back I wrote a piece that pointed to the science that supported the conclusion that solar activity has a greater impact on terrestrial climate than any other factor.  The data looked a lot better than man made influence on increasing greenhouse gases.

Now we find some additional theories about solar activity and it’s impact on humankind.  Interesting stuff, it looks like the grid is at risk as well.  Check it here.

Geeky cool engineering stuff below. Be warned…

This is so fracking cool.  I wonder if we could come up with a more user friendly energy source though.  Think of the cool crowd control applications particularly if you could quickly recharge and fire.  Say a 1 sec cycle.  Boom…Boom…Boom.  With people seeing this big vapor ring coming their way before they are knocked down…

No matter what you think of NASA they do capture some of the most incredible stuff.  Like these photos of a volcanic eruption.    Or you can try this link or this one that has an animation of the images as well

A Saturn V / Apollo launch. I miss those

Atlantis is in place, fueled and ready to go.  Crew is boarding.  Weather looks good.  There won’t be too many more of these space shuttle flights as the platform ages, and the budgets continue to shrink.  Take the time to be an active spectator in these historic flights.

Follow today’s events at  http://spaceflightnow.com

Evidently our friends at the UN are holding a “Global Warming” summit in Copenhagen this week.  Ok, that’s good.  So, the wonderful folks in the media start an article on this event as:

The worst-case scenarios on climate change envisaged by the UN are already being realised, say scientists at an international meeting in Copenhagen.

OK – I think we know where this conference is going.  Folks have their mind made up and all 2500 of them are just going to spend our money to rattle off our sound bites.

In a statement outlining their six key messages to political leaders, they say there is an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climate shifts.

Even modest temperatures rises will affect millions of people, particularly in the developing world, they warn.

—————————–

The meeting was also addressed by Lord Stern, the economist, whose landmark review of the economics of climate change published in 2006 highlighted the severe cost to the world of doing nothing.

He now says the report underestimated the scale of the risks, and the speed at which the planet is warming.

He urged scientists to speak out and tell the politicians what the world would be like if effective measures against global warming were not taken.

He said that if the world was to warm by 5C over the next century there would be dramatic consequences for millions of people. Rising seas would make many areas uninhabitable leading to mass migrations and inevitably sparking violent conflict.

“You’d see hundreds of millions people, probably billions of people who would have to move and we know that would cause conflict, so we would see a very extended period of conflict around the world, decades or centuries as hundreds of millions of people move, ” said Lord Stern.

“So I think it’s very important that we understand the magnitude of the risk we are running.”

So here’s the deal, in my simplified engineer’s mind.  Climate change has been with this planet since it’s inception.  It is incredibly arrogant of humans to believe that we are the cause of climate change.  AND it is potentially disastrous for us to believe that we can change the cycle.  The bulk of the scientific community is in a circular argument that is based completely on terrestrial events and approaches.

There really is not a damn thing we can do about extra terrestrial events (solar activity, etc) that could be a major cause of climate change.  But if the cause is not human activity then why would we try and change human activity to solve the problem.  Hence, the scientists tend to make the data say what they want it to say and they do not look at data that says, “Yo, the SUN has a major contributing factor here”.

Message 1:

• Don’t treat the symptom, find the cause and treat it.  If not treatable, cope with the situation and implement gradual change.

In my professional life, Organizational Change Management is a key to success.  I look at events like this climate conference and I see a disaster.

Message 2:

• Guys if you want to implement change come up with a realistic plan that takes measured steps that show verifiable improvement.  Implement those steps, then communicate the results build enthusiasm by showing success.  Getting on the grand political stage and calling a natural climate cycle a catastrophe is not a recipe for success.

Oh, by the way, what happened to that Ice Age that we were on the brink of in the 70′s.  Did I fall asleep and miss something?

BBC article is here

Nevermind.

At least that is what it seems like around here lately.  So, common sense observations appear to be backed up by scientific fact.

The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.

——————————————————————————————————–

The AGW theory is based on data that is drawn from a ridiculously narrow span of time and it demonstrates a wanton disregard for the ‘big picture’ of long-term climate change. The data from paleoclimatology, including ice cores, sea sediments, geology, paleobotany and zoology, indicate that we are on the verge of entering another Ice Age, and the data also shows that severe and lasting climate change can occur within only a few years. While concern over the dubious threat of Anthropogenic Global Warming continues to distract the attention of people throughout the world, the very real threat of the approaching and inevitable Ice Age, which will render large parts of the Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable, is being foolishly ignored.

Yeah it looks like increased CO2 levels are normal, and lag the climate change by about 800 years.  Who would have thought to look at the big picture.  Now, where did I put that Ice Axe and those Crampons, I might need them.