NOAA shows 2010 to be the slowest starting storm season in a decade.

TORNADO TOTALS AND RELATED DEATHS...THROUGH FRI APR 23 2010
NWS STORM PREDICTION CENTER NORMAN OK
0252 PM CDT SAT APR 24 2010

      ...NUMBER OF TORNADOES...    NUMBER OF       KILLER
                                   TORNADO DEATHS  TORNADOES
     ..2010.. 2009 2008 2007  3YR             3YR             3YR
    PREL  ACT  ACT  ACT  ACT   AV  10 09 08 07 AV  10 09 08 07 AV
JAN   41   28    6   84   21   37   0  0  7  2  3   0  0  4  1  2
FEB    1   -    36  147   52   78   0  9 59 22 30   0  2 12  3  6
MAR   36   -   115  129  170  138   1  0  4 27 10   1  0  3  10 4
APR   75   -   226  189  167  194   0  6  0  9  5   0  3  0  3  2
MAY    -   -   201  461  252  305   -  5 44 14 21   -  3 10  4  6
JUN    -   -   270  294  128  231   -  0  7  0  2   -  0  4  0  1
JUL    -   -   118   93   69   93   -  0  1  0  0   -  0  1  0  0
AUG    -   -    60  101   75   79   -  0  0  1  0   -  0  0  1  0
SEP    -   -     8  111   52   57   -  0  2  0  1   -  0  1  0  0
OCT    -   -    65   21   86   57   -  1  0  5  2   -  1  0  3  1
NOV    -   -     3   15    7    8   -  0  2  0  1   -  0  2  0  1
DEC    -   -    48   46   19   38   -  0  0  1  0   -  0  0  1  0
    ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----  --  -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
SUM  153  28  1156 1691 1098 1315   1 21 126 81 76  1  9 37 26 24

Graphics can be found here showing severe weather summaries.

Unfortunately though, 10 people have died in one tornado just this weekend: here.

We’ve presented on the Orwellian British society before, it truly seems a place where environmentalism power has run amok.  And as is typical, those seeking power are the least likely to use it responsibly.

Revisiting the craziness we have this from the Daily Mail.  There are now nine separate recycling containers required of the citizenry to use, under penalty of 100 pound fines, and if that isn’t paid, the resulting penalty is 1000 pounds.  My keyboard doesn’t have the pound sterling key, and I’m not inclined at this time to look up the ASCII code.  Suffice it to say, that if you put your banana peel in the wrong container, you will be fined $200.  Not, ‘you may be fined’, but ‘you will be fined’, the British use recycling infractions as a money revenue source.  I’ve read outlandish accounts on El Reg of for example, an individual who put vegetable waste in the wrong bin and was refused trash pick-up.  Where should vegetable waste go, in the kitchen bin, or the garden bin?  Guess right, or it’s a fine.

Here are the rules:

The containers include a silver slopbucket for food waste, which is then tipped in to a larger, green outdoor food bin, a pink bag for plastic bottles, a green bag for cardboard, and a white bag for clothing and textiles.

Paper and magazines go in blue bags, garden waste in a wheelie bin with a brown lid, while glass, foil, tins and empty aerosols should go in a blue box, with a grey wheelie bin for non-recyclable waste.

Got it?  If not a helpful graphic has been thoughtfully included by the Daily Mail:

In their version, there’s a helpful “expand” button for clarification.

A local resident provides this information:

Mrs Butler said that whereas previously, only one wagon would collect their recycling, now up to three different lorries and crews do the job.  

So, three trucks are now used to do the work previously performed by one.  How efficient, and so full of savings.

And the program has had the somewhat predictable side-effect:

A report for the Environment Department last week revealed that the burning of household rubbish by those trying to evade recycling rules has now become the greatest source of highly poisonous and cancer-causing dioxins in the environment.

And:

Binmen also frequently refuse to take rubbish containers they view as contaminated. Last week in Andover in Hampshire dustmen refused to take away a bin they said was contaminated with a handful of fruit pips.

I’m not sure what fruit pips are, but I would expect the trashman to pick them up if I placed them in a bag by the curb, especially if it were only a handful. 

And what is the purpose of this madness?

The new system was introduced by the local council to help boost recycling rates from 26 per cent in 2008 to a target of 50 per cent by 2015.

The purpose is to simply increase the percentage of recycling.  We’ve discussed before the implications of that pursuit, and the fact that recycling is garbage.

If only there were something more reasonable to do with waste?

Michael Mann is likely learning about the Streisand Effect, where attempted censorship of online material only causes the material to spread faster.

Censorship creates online hydras.

Mann is threatening to sue the group Minnesotans For Global Warming over parody videos the group has made, the second of which is clearly fair use and I’m not even an attorney.  The first, okay, maybe it doesn’t fall under the “parody” provision of copyright law because it used infringing material from another group, but that other group didn’t threaten to bring the suit, Mann did. The other group, JibJab did ask YouTube to take the video down.

“I hope Dr. Mann does sue us,” Said Davis, “The legal discovery process would give us an opportunity to expose Dr. Mann’s research – or lack thereof to public and legal scrutiny.”

Let me do my part, I will play the hydra and update these links as they’re taken down:

The original video:

I would expect the legal budget of Michael Mann to be insufficient to pay attorneys fees to send every blogger scary sounding letters, spread the word, become a head on this good hydra dear reader.
 

rageunderground has produced the following tCotCC approved vid:

I keep a list of articles for ideas for posts like everyone else.

This is an older one, but one I want to present nonetheless: here.

This is a discussion on American Thinker regarding alarmists decrying melting on the west side of Antarctica that happens to be located over a volcanic zone.  These same alarmists of course fail to discuss the increasing ice forming elsewhere on Antarctica.

It’s all how you market the message.

Hippies have set sail on a boat made of plastic bottles to teach the author and good reader about environmental responsibility: here.

What can we learn from this bunch?

We learn that these five are willing to use a composting bathroom for three months aboard a boat made of plastic bottles with a garden.  A garden?!  What are they going to grow in three months?  Garnish?

Obviously, this is all just a show only a banking brat could fund.

The 12,000 plastic bottles of the Plastiki are filled with carbon dioxide, this is listed in the article as one of the “Green credentials” after stating that the Plastiki “takes recycling to a new level”.  Really?  I wonder how carbon dioxide was placed in the bottles?

Carbon dioxide is created for industrial purposes in processes such as mixing acids with crushed coral.  How green!  The Plastiki is filled with carbon dioxide created for the specific purpose of filling the Plastiki’s bottles.  What’s going to come of the carbon dioxide when the voyage is over?  Are we to believe it is going to be sequestered in a Rothschild holding somewhere?  The net carbon footprint of this journey is very much positive.

Yes, the Plastiki does take recycling to a new level, an anti level where sycophant journalists who no doubt wish to prawn and preen a banking heir don’t state the obvious: this journey is a detriment from, not a contribution to, environmentalism.

The good reader can follow the Plastiki here.

El Reg is reporting on an ice core taken of the Larsen ice shelf.

This core is a record breaking 445.6 meters long and was cut into 1 meter sections which will be returned to the US National Science Foundation in the next few months for study.

We await the analysis.

The pollution of waters in Asia is a well established ecological and health concern.

Now, Marubeni Corp has come up with a brilliant idea for solving the problem: concrete that purifies water.

The blocks are impregnated with soybean bacteria, which consume pollution as they progress through their life cycle, presumably reproducing as well, as the concrete is described as working indefinitely.

This raises the thought of simply dropping globs of this concrete every few feet in the worst polluted riverways, in addition to the likely intended purpose of building retaining walls and other waterward structures made of the concrete.

From the article:

Pitch Lake is a poisonous, foul smelling, hell hole on the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago. The lake is filled with hot asphalt and bubbling with noxious hydrocarbon gases and carbon dioxide. Water is scarce here and certainly below the levels normally thought of as a threshold for life.

And yet the aptly named Pitch Lake is teaming with microbial life!  In fact each gram of lake material contains ten million living cells.  These cells eat hydrocarbons and respire metals.

This is an incredible find and really makes a trip to Titan that much more compelling.  I would still favor Europa first.

One of the central premises of tCotCC is that we are focusing our green resources (energy, attention, money, concern) poorly.  Rather than worry about taxing trace gases, we should concern ourselves with pollution, species preservation, and habitat protection.

The Mother Nature Network is reporting on the autopsy of a gray whale that died after stranding on a beach.

Found in its stomach among natural foods were: pants, a golf ball, 20 plastic bags, towels, duct tape, and surgical gloves.

The Mother Nature Network reports the man-made items were only 1-2% of the contents of the stomach (by weight, or volume?), and likely didn’t cause the whale to strand itself on the beach.

It is however fairly disgusting that these items were available to this creature to eat.

This so close to the report of a garbage patch in the Atlantic similar to the garbage patch in the Pacific, shows how polluted the oceans are becoming.

This is an international issue, and not solely the responsibility of any one nation to clean.  It’s not clear that any one nation is more responsible than another, but American consumerism no doubt contributes a significant amount to the problem.

We need to address this issue with ships designed to sieve the seas in areas of dense garbage.  The waste collected should be burned to fuel the ships to what extent possible.  The rest, hauled ashore and dealt with appropriately.  The marine life lost during the sieving would be an acceptable loss, and I believe it would be minimal as a large ship would sufficiently announce itself and scatter the fishes.  In the long run, I expect more fish and birds would be saved than killed, and whales would no longer be found to have consumed what our specimen in the MNN article did.

I know I’m treading on non-observed, and therefore non-scientific speculative ground here, but I posit that if the Earth’s core were largely comprised of the elements models suggest, then it should have cooled due to conduction, convection, and radiation long ago.

I believe the Earth’s core is comprised of more thorium, uranium, and other radioactive elements than we currently understand to be there. This is where the sustained heating is coming from, this is what drives magma chambers and hot smokers. I recognize no fusion occurs in a body of Earth’s mass.

I also believe that plate tectonics could not function if the Earth were truly contracting as some suggest. There would be no room for slippage, only subduction.

Like biscuits rising in the oven, I think the Earth is ever so slightly expanding due to the radiative heat from the core, and new earth arises and fills the voids in the cracks between the plates, but not at all necessarily up to surface heights. Otherwise, I believe, the crust exposed core-side would simply be melted from underneath and there would be no plates, only a fused mass, and there would be no frictional force to move the plates exceeding the frictional force between the plates. If the Earth were truly contracting, the forces locking the plates together should be increasing, thus limiting slip, and there should only be subduction zones powered by the spreading of the mid-ocean ridge.  If the Earth were contracting, the only exit for the increasing pressure from the mantle/core heat would be fissures and volcanoes.  If the Earth were contracting, we should see a decrease in plate tectonics and earthquakes, and an increase in volcanism and hot smokers.

The only reason plates can move is of course (in my opinion) due to the frictional force between the plate and the upper mantle being greater than the frictional force between the plates themselves. The frictional force between the plates is being reduced by the slight separation caused by the slight expansion of the biscuit-Earth rising.

I know, I’m on unsupported scientific ground here. But Earth’s earth rising like a biscuit in an oven does account for our belief that early on there were mostly shallow oceans and not nearly as much land as today.

I have really no evidence at all for this belief, only a curiosity as to why the ocean floor extending from the mid-ocean ridge is so much younger than the ocean floor elsewhere. How to account for new earth while there is old earth, and apparently no zone where subduction is happening rapidly enough to swallow all the new earth being created around the globe into the small subduction zone?

It would seem to me that if the Earth were staying relatively the same size or contracting, there should be a very active subduction zone somewhere, and I’m not certain we’ve identified one.

I am not aware of any study that has tried to correlate the amount of earth subducting at the various subduction zones with the amount accreting from the mid-ocean ridge.  This value should be negative if the Earth is contracting, and positive if the Earth is expanding.

Any help here would be appreciated.

I would like to present again for the reader’s consideration an accurate depiction of the Earth:

The above graph is true to scale, one pixel equals one kilometer.  The blue pixels represent the average thickness of the crust under the oceans of 5-10 kilometers.  The brown pixels represent the average thickness of the continental crust of 35-70 kilometers.  The oceanic crust is properly represented as 70% of the surface.

As a different analogy, the reader is asked to consider what happens to a hard boiled egg left too long in the boiling water?  The thin shell cracks and spreads, the volume of the egg having increased slightly.

Whatever price Sea Shepherd may have paid this year, as detailed most recently in our thread here, they seem to have accomplished a positive goal in halving the number of whales taken as desired by the Japanese this year in violation of international law.

Yes, the above sentence does leave ambiguous who is in violation of international law.  Did I omit a comma after “year” intentionally, or was it an oversight?  Are both parties in violation of law in my unattributable opinion, or just one party?

Popcorn, next year, here.

We chronicled the recklessness of the Shen Neng 1 pilot previously.

Following up, we learn that the ship’s paint is killing the corals.  The paint was cleverly engineered to prevent barnacles and other marine organisms from bonding and adhering to the hull of the ship and thus increasing drag.

What a drag, then, that the paint has the same effect when applied to coral reefs directly.  The paint is a toxin, and will remain so, preventing organism growth wherever the paint has flecked off the hull and landed.

Good, then, to see the captain faces a steep fine and the navigator on duty faces a much steeper fine and jail time.  Sorry, it’s Australia, so it should be reported as gaol time.

An estimated two mile trek of damage up to 750 yards wide, what a travesty.  That means the a$$holes on board the Shen Neng 1 heard the hull dragging for a considerable period of time and thought, “this shortcut across the reef is great-why didn’t we think of this before?”

And before I receive a lecture on momentum, I would like to point out rudders.

I cannot even begin to assess which of the five individuals pictured here is the more inspirational or funny.