Maybe not.

Anybody who has taken a college physics course or studied thermodynamics knows there are no free sources of energy. Of course, actual science, these days is seldom taught anywhere but in the secondary schools. “Scientific indoctrination” is the crap that the teacher’s unions are pushing in the primary K-12 system - global climate is mankind’s fault, yada yada . . .

Alternatives to fossil fuels will take decades to develop and deploy to the point that we can abandon burning coal and oil for energy. The reality may be that worldwide, that may never happen. Hydroelectric, solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear are generally out of the reach of third world nations from both fiscal and technology standpoints.

Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso posted an article at CO2 Science that analyzed a recent paper by Goncalves da Silva, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the State University of Campinas (Brazil). They conclude that the good professor sees the flaws in the free energy model:

So what does the professor finally conclude? He finds that “the new technology may actually be an energy sink, instead of an energy source, relative to the global total primary energy supply for many years or decades, depending on its intrinsic energy costs and deployment path, even though stated aims for its gross energy output are achieved [italics added].” Consequently, he says that “to achieve terawatts output from renewable sources, in order to displace massive quantities of fossil energies, will be a slow process, extending over many decades,” and that we should “not place undue hope in new energy technologies to save the world from fossil energies until well after many decades of deployment.” Or, we would add, if ever!

Emphasis mine. The entire post is here.

This is an interesting article on the SOHO website. The speeding of the internal plasma circulation is connected with the deepest solar minimum in a century.

One of the outstanding questions facing solar physicists is the origin of the solar magnetic cycle: What drives the 11-year sunspot cycle? We have just passed an extended and deep minimum, unlike any in the past 100 years. The late onset of the new solar cycle (#24) and the unusually deep minimum between cycles 23 and 24 took all experts by surprise, which suggests that there is a fundamental lack in our understanding of the origin of the solar activity cycle.

Image: Artist’s concept of the Sun’s meridional circulation, a large scale flow that transports solar plasma from the equator to the poles and back like a giant conveyor belt. Credit: Science@NASA

The Sun’s meridional circulation is a massive flow pattern within the Sun that transports hot plasma near the surface from the solar equator to the poles and back to the equator in the deeper layers of the convection zone, similar to a “conveyor belt”. The flow is rather slow, with typical speeds of 10-15 m/s (20 to 30 mph). The structure and strength of this meridional flow is believed to play a key role in determining the strength of the Sun’s polar magnetic field, which in turn determines the strength of the sunspot cycles. One class of dynamo models predicts that a stronger meridional flow produces weaker polar fields, whereas another class of models predicts stronger polar fields (and a shorter sunspot cycle) for the same flow. [more]

The 7.2 Baja earthquake of April 4, 2010 and numerous aftershocks have displaced the land around Calexico, CA, about 31 inches. From NASA:

NASA Radar Images Show How Mexico Quake Deformed Earth

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA has released the first-ever airborne radar images of the deformation in Earth’s surface caused by a major earthquake — the magnitude 7.2 temblor that rocked Mexico’s state of Baja California and parts of the American Southwest on April 4.

The data reveal that in the area studied, the quake moved the Calexico, Calif., region in a downward and southerly direction up to 80 centimeters (31 inches). The maps can be seen at: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/UAVSARimage20100623.html .

A science team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., used the JPL-developed Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) to measure surface deformation from the quake. The radar flies at an altitude of 12.5 kilometers (41,000 feet) on a Gulfstream-III aircraft from NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif.

The team used a technique that detects minute changes in the distance between the aircraft and the ground over repeated, GPS-guided flights. The team combined data from flights on Oct. 21, 2009, and April 13, 2010. The resulting maps are called interferograms.

Overview of the UAVSAR interferogram of the magnitude 7.2 Baja California earthquake of April 4, 2010, overlaid atop a Google Earth image of the region. Major fault systems are shown by red lines, while recent aftershocks are denoted by yellow, orange and red dots. Image credit: NASA/JPL/USGS/Google

Click on the image to enlarge.

(More)

The new solar cycle antes up a massive CME for Fathers day. From SpaceWeather.com . . .

FATHER’S DAY BLAST: Consider it a Father’s Day gift … from the sun. This morning around 1 a.m. UT, magnetic fields on the sun’s eastern limb became unstable and erupted, producing one of the most spectacular explosions of the year. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the action:

The explosion did not cause a solar flare (a flash of electromagnetic radiation) but it did hurl a massive cloud of magnetized plasma into space. Because of the blast site’s location on the eastern limb, the cloud will not hit Earth. There won’t be any geomagnetic storms or auroras.

Why would that be significant? Well, it would allow for a full 4PI (360×360°) view of the sun. The animated movie of the sun on STEREO’s Website currently has a gap in the coverage of the sun. The spacecraft are in a heliocentric orbit drifting away from the Earth, one leading and one lagging. This diagram shows the current position of spacecraft A (ahead) and B (behind). The scale is in astronomical units, the average distance between the earth and sun.

Sun-monitoring instrumentation on spacecraft like SOHO and STEREO have gone a long way in discovering what makes the sun behave in mysterious ways. Also, the data coming back (when not intentionally distorted by the IPCC, the CRU or NASA’s James Hansen) can be used to chart the relationship between solar activity and global climate.

Solar activity has been increasing in recent months. This extraordinary video depicts a “plasma ring” coronal mass ejection (CME) as captured by SOHO. Watch the lower right corner for the ring ejection.

It’s true, but not on a global scale . . .

Increases in local temperature averages are due, in large part, to URBANIZATION. For those of us who bother to seek out actual scientific studies, we can clearly see that Urban Heat Islands are the cause of localized increases in temperature. Consider this study from the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change:

The Urban Heat Island of Mexicali, Mexico

Urban Heat Island Effect - Click on the image to enlarge

Background

Mexicali City borders the United States at the northern end of Mexico’s Baja California. It is an urban settlement that had its beginnings in the first decade of the 20th century. At that point in time it had an area of approximately 4 km2; but by 1980 it covered an area of a little over 40 km2, and by 2005 it covered something in excess of 140 km2.

What was done

Working with daily records of maximum and minimum temperature from six weather stations “in Mexicali City and its surroundings” covering the period 1950-2000, and with “a climatic network of rural and urban weather stations in Mexicali and its valley and the Imperial Valley, California” over the “contemporary period (2000-2005),” the authors characterized the spatial and temporal development of the city’s urban heat island over the latter half of the 20th century and the first five years of the 21st century.

What was learned

Garcia Cueto et al. state that Mexicali City “changed from being a cold island (1960-1980) to a heat island with a maximum intensity of 2.3°C in the year 2000, when it was compared with rural weather stations of Imperial, California,” noting that “the replacement of irrigated agricultural land by urban landscapes, anthropogenic activity and population growth, appear to be the major factors responsible for the observed changes.” And from the “more updated information (2000-2005),” they found that “the greatest intensity of the urban heat island was in winter with a value of 5.7°C, and the lowest intensity in autumn with 5.0°C.”

What it means

The results of this study clearly demonstrate that population growth and the clustering of people in cities can lead to localized warming (in areas where temperatures are routinely measured) that is both more rapid and much greater (by as much as an order of magnitude, in fact) than what climate alarmists typically attempt to characterize as the “unprecedented” warming of the 20th century. And that population-growth-induced warming — spread across the world — has likely contributed, in large part, to what they wrongly construe to be CO2-induced global warming.

Simply said, CO₂ is NOT a dangerous gas.

Or should it be SUN-IMPACTOR COMET? I saw this yesterday on SpaceWeather.com:

SUNGRAZING COMET: Today, the sun had a comet for breakfast. The icy visitor from the outer solar system appeared with no warning on April 9th and plunged into the sun during the early hours of April 10th. One comet went in, none came out. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) had a good view of the encounter.

The comet was probably a member of the Kreutz sungrazer family. Named after a 19th century German astronomer who studied them in detail, Kreutz sungrazers are fragments from the breakup of a giant comet at least 2000 years ago. Several of these fragments pass by the sun and disintegrate every day. Most are too small to see but occasionally a big fragment like today’s attracts attention.

This has been an active year for big, bright sungrazers. There was one on Jan. 4th, one on March 12th, and now one today. Normally we see no more than 3 or 4 bright ones in a whole year; now we’re seeing them almost once a month. It could be a statistical fluctuation or, maybe, a swarm of Kreutz fragments is nearing perihelion (closest approach to the sun). Stay tuned for doomed comets!

Click on the thumbnail image for full-size movie.

March 14th - 3/14 - You know - the ratio of the circumference of a circle to it’s diameter - three-point-one-four something . . .

This image is from the October 1934 issue of Modern Mechanics magazine. The accompanying article contained elaborately illustrated and annotated details about how the aerial airport dirigible could work:

Sun’s Rays to Drive
Aerial Landing Field

Recent experiments in the conversion of the sun’s rays into electric power have led to an unusual idea in aerial equipment. It is a dirigible that not only would get its power from the sun but also provide space for a landing field in the air.

The ordinary cigar-shaped dirigible would in effect have a slice taken from the upper half of the gas bag. This would provide a large deck on which could be mounted solar photo cells, an airplane runway, and a hangar. Planes could land on the dirigible, floating over the sea, to refuel for trans-ocean passenger service.

Another unusual feature of this design, in addition to the landing field, is the use of sun rays to power the motors of the dirigible. Scientists estimate that the sun can develop as much as 86,300 kilowatts or 115,000 horsepower per hour in an area of a square mile. Photo cells convert the sun’s energy into electricity. When this can be done on a practical basis, the roof of an ordinary house can be used to develop electricity for the home.

Fun to think about, but as we know almost eighty years later, it is impractical. This image reminds me of a similar platform in the Art Deco fantasy, “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.”

Click on the image above to view the original Modern Mechanix article.

Tomorrow night, when the full moon rises over North America, it will be a “blue moon,” the first such occurrence to fall on December 31st since 1990.

The modern definition for “blue moon” is the second full moon to occur within a calendar month and tomorrow’s full moon will indeed be the second to occur in the month of December, 2009.

Cartoon Image courtesy of NASA.

But wait - there’s more to the blue moon phenomenon . . .

From NASA

Most months have only one full Moon. The 29.5-day cadence of the lunar cycle matches up almost perfectly with the 28- to 31-day length of calendar months. Indeed, the word “month” comes from “Moon.” Occasionally, however, the one-to-one correspondence breaks down when two full Moons squeeze into a single month. Dec. 2009 is such a month. The first full Moon appeared on Dec. 2nd; the second, a “Blue Moon,” will come on Dec. 31st.

This definition of Blue Moon is relatively new.

. . .

The modern definition sprang up in the 1940s. In those days, the Farmer’s Almanac of Maine offered a definition of Blue Moon so convoluted that even professional astronomers struggled to understand it. It involved factors such as the ecclesiastical dates of Easter and Lent, and the timing of seasons according to the dynamical mean sun. Aiming to explain blue moons to the layman, Sky & Telescope published an article in 1946 entitled “Once in a Blue Moon.” The author James Hugh Pruett cited the 1937 Maine almanac and opined that the “second [full moon] in a month, so I interpret it, is called Blue Moon.”

That was not correct, but at least it could be understood. And thus the modern Blue Moon was born.

. . .

The modern astronomical Blue Moon occurs in some month every 2.5 years, on average. A Blue Moon falling precisely on Dec. 31st, however, is much more unusual. The last time it happened was in 1990, and the next time won’t be until 2028.

Today marks the first day of winter in the northern hemisphere. It’s the shortest day of the year for the Los Angeles area; the solar disk will be above the horizon for only 9 hours and 54 minutes today at our latitude.

The diagram above illustrates the orbit of the Earth around the Sun and highlights the passage of our planet through eight significant portals recognized by cultures for many millennia. Those are the two equinoxes, the four cross quarter days and the two solstices. Today, we pass through the winter solstice for the northern hemisphere.

For more information about the science and lore of these several special days, check out the website Archaeoastronomy.com and have a look around.