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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (51428)	5/14/2014 12:05:00 PM
From: Eric	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86355

In the last couple summers the Pacific Northwest had very poor air quality with all of the Siberian fires burning in Russia. In the Seattle area we had bad air quality for weeks. Some of Cliff Mass's comments from his Weather Blog: cliffmass.blogspot.com cliffmass.blogspot.com

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (51428)	5/14/2014 1:04:59 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86355

Hi Wharf Rat; Re: "They usually don't produce smoke laden with radioactive dust coming from a big crater."; Radioactivity and craters don't cause "nuclear winter" which is the subject under discussion. Now if you'd like to retreat from your claims on nuclear winter to the new, weaker, position that all of mankind would be killed by craters and radioactivity we can do that. But state your position clearly. Re: "Might as well drop some in the middle of the grain belts thruout the world, while we're at it."; Wheat fields go for about $3000 per acre so a square mile is worth about $2 million. That's the equivalent of about a half dozen single family houses. Pilots who have to get rid of live munitions drop them on farms instead of cities, LOL. I mean really. Why do I argue with a complete idiot? Re: "They should burn quite nicely."; Oh, so that's why I read about so many firestorms in wheat fields, LOL. Get in your car. Drive to a wheat field. See how much stuff there is available to burn in a square meter. Now go to a forest and do same. Compare results. Repeat in a modern city and a city made out of paper houses. You will learn why firestorms are not supported by wheat fields or modern cities. Honestly, google wildfire+wheat and see what you get. If wheat fields were subject to giant wildfires, you'd be reading about wheat wildfires around harvest every year because wheat is grown in vast factory farms. When was the last one you saw mentioned? The grass in California burns nicely when they're in drought because the water content is extremely low and they let it grow from year to year. Re: "A few in the tundra regions,, too. That should get the methane cooking off."; The cool thing about lefties is that their closet has a huge number of frightening bugabears. Here's the wikipedia standard picture of tundra: Doesn't look very flammable, does it, LOL. So you think that setting off a few thousand nukes is going to "get the methane cooking off". The basic problem is that you really don't have a feel for the numbers involved. You think that the tundra is a tiny place and it's easily melted, but that nuclear weapons are infinitely powerful. A single nuke can set off a fire storm that is, at most, a few square miles in area. The earth's tundra is about 4.5 million square miles. To set it on fire with a few thousand bombs is impossible. To set it on fire at all is impossible. That's why you don't read about tundra wild fires, LOL. A talking point of the global warming alarmists recently is the measure of how much heat the earth is absorbing due to CO2. Because they have no compassion and little sense, they measure it in terms of "number of Hiroshima bombs". They say that the world is accumulating heat at the rate of 4 Hiroshima bombs per second. Thus the effect of ten thousand nukes is about 10,000/4 = 2500 seconds = 42 minutes of global warming, LOL. No big deal. Re: "(NASA LANCE MODIS Rapid Fire hotspot analysis of extreme fire outbreak in the Amur region of Russia on April 28, 2014. In this shot, the Amur runs west to east through the frame. To the right is the Pacific Ocean [off frame] to the left is a corner of Russia’s massive Lake Baikal. The red spots indicate currently active fires." What's your point? These are forest fires. No tundra is involved; this is southern Siberia, near the Chinese border and Lake Baikal. And they're tiny compared to the record US forest fires and I've little doubt that they're tiny compared to record Russian forest fires. Re: "Try 100 of them [i.e. "them" = biggest ever fire in the US, the size of Connecticut] scattered thruout the hemisphere all at the same time ...." I think your basic problem is that you just don't get the numbers. Connecticut is 5500 square miles. Of the two nukes dropped in war only Hiroshima started a firestorm. The burned area was 4.4 square miles. Doing the math, it takes 125 bombs to set an area the size of Connecticut on fire. Twice that if you want to estimate that only half the bombs start firestorms. The earth is big. Nukes are little. And forests can only be set on fire when conditions are right. And it's very unusual to have vast regions of forest ready to burn. For example, you know that when it's wet in the PNW it's dry in California and vice versa. Re: "... plus the crater dust"; If you want to start fires, you do an air burst. The heat from the explosion lights things on fire through infrared radiation. There is no crater and no crater dust. The bomb at Hiroshima was an air burst. You can visit a building which survived at ground zero. There was no crater and no crater dust. You either get extensive fires or extensive crater dust, you can't have both at the same time. ----------------------------------------------------------- Here's an example of a nuclear scale event in the Russian forest. The Tunguska event was an air explosion of 3 to 30 Megatons. Modern nukes are considerably smaller. It blew down the forest. Trees were scorched for 2.5 miles in all directions. Did it start a fire in the Russian forest the size of Connecticut? No. Was there a firestorm? No. Was there a forest fire? Investigators found the trees scorched but the trunks still whole years after the event. No charcoal: en.wikipedia.org I recall that one of the stupidest things the Japanese did in WW2 was trying to set Oregon on fire, LOL. Trees grow where there's water. If you'd been in the Boy Scouts you'd know that live wood doesn't burn very well. Wooden cities burn nicely because the wood is dead and dry. Here's the wikipedia article on the Japanese Fire Balloon, the Fu-Go: en.wikipedia.org -- Carl