Miscellaneous Musings

The article below written by John Tomlinson was recently published in the Flint Journal, Flint, Michigan. He makes some very good points about what is happening now in American political life. His article follows:

No bull, global warming latest scare tactic

College introduced me to Bovine Scatology (B.S.) This science studies the work product emanating from the north end of a southbound bull. I mention this little known, yet important science because the global warming issue now falls under the rubric of B.S.

According to a recent U.N. Food and Agriculture Report, cattle produce considerably more greenhouse gas than humans. This manure, which incidentally is at the core of Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” (a global warming comedy), is apparently piling up faster than cigarettes in Barack Obama’s ashtrays.

So what is the greenhouse effect? Gases that make the Earth a giant greenhouse. Heat from the sun (ultraviolet rays) strikes the planet. It’s absorbed, then re-radiated into the atmosphere at a lower frequency (infrared).

Greenhouse gases prevent this energy from escaping our atmosphere. What the media (except for this fine paper) isn’t telling you, as Paul Harvey loves to say “is the rest of the story.”

To uncover what liberals conveniently forget to mention, let’s ask some questions.

First, what’s the primary greenhouse gas in the atmosphere? Listening to environmentalists, you would certainly say carbon dioxide (CO2).

But you’d be wrong. By far, the largest cause is water vapor – humidity. It accounts for at least 70 percent of the entire problem. Nobody disputes this.

What’s the next most powerful factor? Two recent studies, Israeli and Danish (confirming numerous others), clearly show it’s the sun. Water vapor (the stuff of clouds), when combined with the changing strength of solar radiation due to sunspots, accounts for 95 percent to 98 percent of all the alleged global warming.

We cannot affect these in any way.

Which greenhouse gas is next? Methane (from animals) is 23 times more potent than CO2 (from the report). After that? Weighing in at 296 times more powerful than CO2 (according to the report), is nitrous oxide (N2O), from agriculture.

In fourth place, at 365 parts per million (compared to 30,000 ppm for water vapor), is CO2. This tiny factor is given all the blame. Why? Because the wackos want to blame you and me and if they took the cause in order, the human contribution would be irrelevant. Then who could they blame – surely not the trees and the animals?

The global warming argument, is actually three arguments: 1) Is the Earth getting warmer? 2) What’s causing it? 3) What to do? According to Richard Lindzen, Ph.D., the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT, considered by many American’s top climatologist, none of these has yet to be answered.

Liberals have tried to scare mankind since the 1960s to effect a massive power grab. In the 1960s they used the fear of mass starvation, in the 1920s it was the coming ice age, the 1980s brought acid rain and in the 1990s it was the “ozone layer.” Now it’s the fear of global warming. Where’s the Bovine Scatology? Just follow the smell.

One of my interests for years has been good sound. Never having thousands of dollars to spend on sound, it has been necessary to do with less than perfection BUT with effort coming close. My latest endeavors have resulted in setting up a Slimserver, free, provided by Slimdevices: http://www.slimdevices.com/su_downloads.html.

Since free is important, Slimdevices sells Squeezebox, $300, and Transporter, $2,000, which are very good devices, BUT there exists Softsqueeze, free, http://softsqueeze.sourceforge.net/, which mimics the preceeding hardware devices. The two hardware devices and the software are clients to a Slimserver, free. Slimserver runs on a host computer and serves up whatever audio you place in your music directory. If you place a shortcut in the music directory Slimserver will also find and host the audio files on a second, third, ... hard. USB, FireWire, internal, CD-ROM, DVD drive. The drives are all found and used by Slimserver via the shortcuts in your music directory. Neat piece of software. Slimserver also serves Internet radio stations via their URLs. At this moment, my ears are hearing an old Jack Benny radio show about a couple of IRS agents who visit Jack.

Slimserver allows the creation of playlists which then serve the desired audio files to your client. It is a truly outstanding piece of software.