Ethanol.
Friday, October 23, 2015
Crony capitalism in nutty Iowa: Nearly 40% of Iowa's corn ends up as ethanol, not feed, driving up food and fuel costs
Since 2010-2011, Iowa has produced an average of 12.7 billion bushels of corn, with an average of 5 billion bushels going to ethanol production, as reported here.
It is estimated food prices would fall 13% by repealing the Renewable Fuel Standard signed by George W. Bush in 2005. Ethanol also reduces MPG by 25%, is bad for engines and does nothing to reduce carbon emissions.
Republicans should kill ethanol!
45 minutes after blaming Benghazi on a video, Hillary e-mailed Chelsea to say it was terrorism
 |
| "YOU LIE!" |
She lies like a rug, like the rest of Obama's vermin.
Kim Strassel lays it all out, here:
'At 10:30 on the night of the attack, Mrs. Clinton issued a statement about the violence, blaming the video. ... Here’s what the Benghazi committee found in Thursday’s hearing. Two hours into Mrs. Clinton’s testimony, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan referred to an email Mrs. Clinton sent to her daughter, Chelsea, at 11:12 the night of the attack, or 45 minutes after the secretary of state had issued a statement blaming YouTube-inflamed mobs. Her email reads: “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Queda-like group.” Mrs. Clinton doesn’t hedge in the email; no “it seems” or “it appears.” She tells her daughter that on the anniversary of 9/11 an al Qaeda group assassinated four Americans. ... The next afternoon, Mrs. Clinton had a call with the Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Kandil. The notes from it are absolutely damning. The secretary of state tells him: “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack—not a protest.” And yet Mrs. Clinton, and Ms. Rice and Mr. Obama for days and days continued to spin the video lie.'
Thursday, October 22, 2015
Recent Republicans who won the Iowa caucus but not the presidency
Gerald Ford, 1976
GHW Bush, 1980
Bob Dole, 1988
GHW Bush, 1992
Bob Dole, 1996
Mike Huckabee, 2008
Rick Santorum, 2012
Boston Herald bloviates against Trump, defends Bush for DHS, DNI and Patriot Act
Here:
“The FBI and the CIA and various agencies were not talking to each other,” Trump said. They didn’t like each other, they were jealous of each other, and a lot of things skipped through.”
All true. But who was the one man to successfully tackle that problem, to propose and get passed legislation to create a Department of Homeland Security, a director of National Intelligence, the Patriot Act?
That would be George W. Bush.
Oh yeah, creating another huge, unwieldy and costly bureaucracy which is unanswerable to the public, spies on its citizens, routinely lies to Congress and botched Hurricane Katrina response was a real resume enhancer for George W. Bush.
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Biden won't be a candidate in 2016
Announcing it live right now on the radio.
"Honey, it's going to be OK."
Yes, it will.
The thing about the Bush clan
Four years of George Herbert Walker Bush gave us 8 years of Bill Clinton.
Eight years of George W. Bush gave us 8 years of Barack Obama (in progress).
And you people seriously want us to consider !Jeb?
For the record Ben Carson has been a Republican for less than a year, Trump a conflicted Republican for 17 years
Story here.
Obviously Ben Carson has not been a conviction politician.
Donald Trump registered as a Republican in New York in 1987 (under Reagan), 2009 (under Obama) and 2012 (under Obama). In 1999 (under Clinton) he had switched to the Independence Party, in 2001 (under Bush) to the Democrat Party, and in 2011 (under Obama) he affiliated with no one, according to this source.
So that's seventeen years (12 + 2 + 3) as a Republican, two as an Independence Party member, eight as a Democrat, and one year unaffiliated.
Obviously Donald Trump is a conflicted Republican, but can't possibly be described as an Obama Democrat, if anything just an anti-Bush Democrat.
Caroline Baum should be Treasury Secretary: She knows there's no reason even to think defaulting on the debt is possible
. . . unlike the rogues running the place currently, who are playing chicken with the full faith and credit of the US government.
Once again Caroline Baum cuts through the silliness and explains that there's plenty of revenue to pay what must be paid, here:
'The U.S. Treasury can’t cover all its monthly payments with incoming monthly revenue. But it can avoid default . . .. In any given month, the tax revenue flowing into the Treasury far exceeds interest payments — by a lot. Last month, for example, the Treasury took in $365 billion in tax receipts and made $21 billion in interest payments. For fiscal 2015, which ended Sept. 30, those figures are $3.2 trillion in tax receipts versus $402 billion in net interest. The U.S. government’s ability to service its debt — the principal can be rolled over — should not be an issue. But Treasury has made it one, claiming in 2011 and 2013 that it lacks the authority to prioritize debt payments, something households do all the time. ... [I]n written communications with the House Financial Services Committee in May 2014, the Treasury admitted that it would be “technologically capable” to prioritize debt payments.'
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
Monday, October 19, 2015
Sunday, October 18, 2015
It's not just the satellite data showing a pause in global warming
The land record kept by NOAA does too. The decadal trend is actually slightly negative since January 1997: -0.19 degrees F per decade.
The warming models predict neither a pause let alone such a decline.
It's significantly warmer in Michigan, but it's nothing to get hysterical about
This graphic from Climate Central showing Michigan annual average temperature increasing 0.622 degrees F per decade 1970-2011 is pretty amazing.
I went to NCDC's Climate at a Glance page and reproduced that same result for myself just to verify it (0.6 degrees F per decade).
I went to NCDC's Climate at a Glance page and reproduced that same result for myself just to verify it (0.6 degrees F per decade).
But one has to ask, Why confine results to 1970-2011 (the terminus ad quem for the study, published in 2012, was 2011) when you can easily go back to 1895 and get a per decade trend result for a much larger sample?
The change in average temperature on a per decade basis for the whole available sample period 1895-2014 produces 0.2 degrees F per decade in Michigan, three times less per decade than for 1970-2011 alone. The result is identical also through 2011. Despite the significant warming since the year 2000, the long term trend remains unmoved and the current period of warming may actually have run out of gas.
 |
| Michigan average temperature is increasing 0.2 degrees F per decade 1895-2014 |
I thought it would be interesting to use the length of the sample period in question (42 years) and go back to the beginning of the record in 1898 and look at each 42 year period from then going forward to 1973 (which takes you through 2014) to see if there are any periods of decadal warming trend comparable to +0.6 degrees F per decade in 1970-2011. I chose 1898 to avoid some gaps in the record in some places in prior years in Michigan.
The results are graphed below.
It turns out there are five 42-year periods showing temperature trend of +0.5 degrees F per decade on the left side of the graph, beginning in 1903, 1912, 1914, 1915 and 1916. (Students of the Dust Bowl beginning in 1930, take note, as also those studying economics. Weak GDP of the era may be associated with warmer climate, as it also seems to be now.)
These correspond to six 42-year periods showing temperature trend of +0.5 degrees F per decade on the right side of the graph, beginning in 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964 and 1973.
If that were all that were to it, there would be no discussion of global warming today, despite the consecutive nature of the recent examples. The two data sets are almost a wash.
What is remarkable about the more recent data is the presence of four 42-year periods of +0.6 degrees F decadal trend (beginning in 1967, 1968, 1969 and 1970), and four of +0.7 degrees F (beginning in 1965, 1966, 1971 and 1972), all in conjunction with the +0.5 degrees F periods. It's a trifecta of warming data.
Still, overall the results show that there are two distinct periods where the decadal trend is consistently +0.2 degrees F or above: the 27 years from 1898 to 1924, and the 20 years from 1954 to 1973. In the former the average of the decadal uptrend is +0.3555 degrees F per decade. In the latter the average of the decadal uptrend is +0.4950 degrees F per decade. Clearly the latter period, contemporary with us, is significantly warmer than the former, by 39%, about which some of us have become hysterical.
The antidote to this is the trough of downtrend years in the middle of the graph which coincides with the period of the global cooling hysteria of the late 1960s and 1970s. The 42-year trend record went negative for 1928-1969 and stayed negative to flat until the period 1946-1987, nineteen years straight, twenty if you count the flat period 1927-1968. Year after year, the 42-year trends ended -.1 degrees F decadal trend or -.2. Many climate scientists predicted the return of an ice age while unbeknowst to them the seeds of a warming era were already germinating.
The record shows how quickly things can turn, for example 0.5 degrees F in trend in just seven years from 1923 to 1930, from above trend on net to well below it.
The decadal trend fell by a whopping 50% between 1917-1958 and 1918-1959, from +0.4 degrees F to +0.2.
More recently the decadal trend fell by 28.5% between 1972-2013 and 1973-2014, from +0.7 degrees F to +0.5. (It's entirely within the realm of possibility that decadal trend could revert to normal by the close of 2017.)
There was just one similar abrupt change to the upside. Between 1964-2005 and 1965-2006 the decadal trend shot up 40% from +0.5 degrees F to +0.7.
Otherwise the record shows incremental change in the trend from year to year, 0.1 degree F up or down at the most.
Don't be surprised when you see it.
Saturday, October 17, 2015
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)