FredHayek wrote: Costs have to be an important part of the equation. For instance, I am debating right now adding another solar panel. Right now with just the two of us we can go three or four days in the summer without having to fire up the generator, we could go even longer with another panel, so if the price goes down to $5000 or the effiency increases, I will be more likely to do it. The new solar panel still won't pay for itself, but I love not hearing the generator turn on.
Fred, I am pretty sure you have mentioned it before but it just sunk in that you are completely off the grid.
If a six pack is sufficient admission to see your set up send me a pm because I would be curious to see it.
Back in 1999 I installed wood stoves for some people who spent extraordinary amounts of money to prepare for the end. I have always wondered how they lived after the power did not go off. One fellow had more propane more and bigger propane pigs than Independent Propane. He had generators that looked like they would power a submarine.
ScienceChic wrote: FH, how much does running the generator cost you?
Curiosity killed the...
The generator doesn't cost much, but solar is a fixed cost, already paid for, while propane is a increased cost. Plus I like going without the noise.
Saturday night there was a pack of coyotes yipping and running outside our window, the generator turned on and they scattered.
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
A little while back, word filtered out that Pope Francis was going to devote an encyclical to climate change. As part of the preparation for the encyclical, there's a meeting going on at the Vatican Science Academy that's focused on climate change. Guests include everyone from Ban Ki-moon to Nobel Prize winning scientists. Not on the guest list was the Heartland Institute, most notable for putting up a billboard suggesting that people who cared about climate change might be just as deranged as Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber.
But Heartland decided to go to Rome anyway. I know this because someone has signed me up to its press mailing list, which offers up quotes from expertise-free "experts" that make you wonder whether some of them might need an intervention—
In the case of the meeting at the Vatican, Heartland starts off relatively restrained. "The Heartland Institute," its release says, "has brought real scientists to Rome this week to dissuade Pope Francis from lending his moral authority to the politicized and unscientific climate agenda of the United Nations."
While there are two people with scientific training among the people Heartland has brought, the group is also taking someone with a PhD in Scottish history and the former general counsel for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Virginia, along with Marc Morano, a former staffer for Sen. James Inhofe (the Oklahoma republican who has called climate change a hoax), who is now a full-time climate troll who publishes the contact information of scientists so they can be harassed.
When you are reduced to protesting against a respectable world leader for even entertaining credible scientists and other world leaders on a subject, then you've jumped the shark.
"Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe.” -King T'Challa, Black Panther
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it. ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. ~Winston Churchill
A content editor on Reddit’s science forum wrote Monday that the site has banned climate-change skeptics, and asks why more news outlets haven’t done the same.
“About a year ago, we moderators became increasingly stringent with deniers,” Reddit content editor Nathan Allen wrote in grist. “When a potentially controversial submission was posted, a warning would be issued stating the rules for comments (most importantly that your comment isn’t a conspiracy theory) and advising that further violations of the rules could result in the commenter being banned from the forum.”
Must not disrupt the echo chamber:
Allen then expressed surprise that removing an entire faction of commenters “resulted in a change in the culture within the comments. Where once there were personal insults and bitter accusations, there is now discussion of the relevant aspects of the research.”
“While we won’t claim /r/science is perfect, users seem happy with the changes made,” Allen said
dailycaller.com/2013/12/18/reddit-bans-c...al-warming-skeptics/
I'm personally not a denier, but I am skeptical of "settled science" and think that both sides need to be heard, especially when the predicted dire consequences of global warming have often not materialized.
If a climate change denier has no place to voice his opinion, does he still make a sound?
Earlier this year, Care2 writer Beth Buczynski debated the merits of publications eliminating the opinions of climate skeptics from their pages. On the one hand, it never seems right to stifle discussion, but on the other hand, is there a point where the facts are so overwhelming and the consequences so catastrophic that it’s time to move the discussion forward rather than entertaining the conspiracy theories of those who stand to profit from the preponderance of misinformation?
Right or wrong, banning global warming deniers is rapidly becoming more commonplace. Here are four publications that decided to make the plunge and their justifications for doing so.....
Antarctic ice floes extended further than ever recorded this southern winter, confounding the world’s most-trusted climate models.
“It’s not expected,” says Professor John Turner, a climate expert at the British Antarctic Survey. “The world’s best 50 models were run and 95% of them have Antarctic sea ice decreasing over the past 30 years.”
The winter ice around the southern continent has been growing relatively constantly since records began in 1979[/b]
Ah, yes, those pesky models... The "best 50 models" that are consistently wrong....
