Don't Go Being Politically Insane You Climate Change Skeptics

[Mr King]

[DougK]

On 10/22/2025 at 9:14 AM, rmgill said:

In parts of the US, old houses have coal burning fire places too. My Great grandmother's house in Albany had a tiny little fireplace. It wasn't until years later that I realized it was for coal.

 

Quite a few have coal chutes, too. Truck pulls up and shovels or dumps it into the basement.
A lot of my family were tobacco farmers with old homes. The one my grandmother lived in (and mom was born in) was not what you'd call "insulated" (thus the layers of quilts that could pin you to the mattress). Heat was from the always fired wood burning stove and  fireplace. It was for wood, but a bucket of coal was always on the hearth so the fire could be given the equivalent of a shot of nitrous for a burst of heat. It was not "bought", but being the '50's, steam had only just started to fade from the rail system so "coal picking" was still a thing (walking the tracks picking up bits of coal that had fallen from trains). The RR's did not appreciate it & it was technically "not permitted" but everyone did it.
Ft. Knox still used a lot of coal when I served and those shacks at some ranges had pot belly stoves and a coal supply. I've been in those shacks at night guarding tanks/ammo and had them glowing BRIGHTLY trying to keep warm.

Edited November 8, 2025 by DougK

[Ivanhoe]

Yeah, there's a bunch of B&W photos of young boys walking the tracks looking for coal. 

Not hard to imagine a one- or two-mile track walk and coming home with a pound of coal, quite a benefit for the family. 

Everybody has their pet explanation of the inexorable increase in longevity, I argue that the steel plow and the cast-iron stove had major contributions thereof. 

 

[DougK]

1 hour ago, Ivanhoe said:

Yeah, there's a bunch of B&W photos of young boys walking the tracks looking for coal. 

Not hard to imagine a one- or two-mile track walk and coming home with a pound of coal, quite a benefit for the family. 

Everybody has their pet explanation of the inexorable increase in longevity, I argue that the steel plow and the cast-iron stove had major contributions thereof. 

 

...and I imagine indoor plumbing & diet. I'm not speculating because some of my family did not have that until the late '60's. I distinctly recall bathing in the kitchen with a pan of warm water heated on the woodburning stove (always lit in cool weather...also practical because scratch-made biscuits were prepared 2 and sometimes 3 times a day). And then the "chamber pot" and outhouse were consigned to oblivion. 
For those familiar with the Southern tradition of fried fruit pies, they were not a luxury...practical necessity because trying to bake in a wood burner is difficult and some did not have electric ranges until the '60's. No one had piped gas...that was something that was delivered. In many ways, a Nineteenth Century existence. I spent my summers living there (now here) a lot as a boy. Priming tobacco was often done with a mule (for up and down the rows). I have driven a mule. "Gee, Haw & Giddup"). A tractor, if available, was used to pull the slides of tobacco back to the tobacco barn where the women tied the leaves to sticks to be flu-cured.
Also helpful was the transition to "not farming", which meant better diets. By better, I mean less salt-packed country ham from a hog slaughtered right there, store-bought milk instead of fresh milked stuff filtered through a cheesecloth (delicious) and biscuits with country gravy at almost every meal. Lots of heart disease and athero until my generation.
I would take nothing for the experience, but it's nice to be comfortable.
One of my aunts and uncles with their two boys at tobacco priming time. The boys were my cousins and ~10 years older than me so photo from ~1940. My dad's family was largely Canadian and I showed them this pic they were flabbergasted because all they knew about "The South" was from Hollywood and a fucking Neil Young song. Concealed the faces because no one is awake to ask permission of.

Edited November 9, 2025 by DougK

[DougK]

1 hour ago, Ivanhoe said:

Everybody has their pet explanation of the inexorable increase in longevity, I argue that the steel plow and the cast-iron stove had major contributions thereof. 

 

Further to....steel plows and such. One of my uncles actually ran himself over with a disc harrow when he fell off the tractor after one too many draws on the jug of "water" he kept on there him. Lucky SOB fell into a trough in the rows so instead of becoming six or eight pieces, he just had lacerations and contusions. Only put his teeth in to eat so when I brought my Brasieira to town for introductions she advised me on leaving that "I didn't understand a word that he said."
I told her I only got about half myself. Not much of an exageration, either.
I swear I'm not making a word of this stuff up.

Edited November 9, 2025 by DougK

[LT Ducky]

Early 1950’s (I was 10) in southeast Pennsylvania my maternal grandmother cooked on a coal stove, house was heated with coal, anthracite in both. Ex wife’s grandmother cooked on wood stove into early 1960’s, she was from Eastern Europe and that was what she was comfortable with.

Barracks in Fort Jackson and Indiantown Gap were heated with coal.

[DKTanker]

15 hours ago, DougK said:

Ft. Knox still used a lot of coal when I served and those shacks at some ranges had pot belly stoves and a coal supply. I've been in those shacks at night guarding tanks/ammo and had them glowing BRIGHTLY trying to keep warm.

Still in use in 1978 while I was in AIT.  One of the tank ranges, might have been Steel Range, there was a warming shack kept heated by a coal burning stove.

[Ivanhoe]

https://dailysceptic.org/2025/11/07/the-false-temperature-claims-that-underpin-the-cop30-alarmist-agenda/

Quote

The current Net Zero fantasy rests on catastrophising tiny temperature rises that frankly are not even measured properly, demonising CO2 boosts that are helping Earth return to a more healthy biosphere and atmospheric balance, inventing ‘tipping points’ using junk computer models and insulting the intelligence with untestable tales claiming humans are making the weather worse.

Yeah, since COP30 is going on, expect to be flooded with alarmist new coverage of the "we're all gonna die if we don't implement socialism RFN!"

[DougK]

2 hours ago, LT Ducky said:

Early 1950’s (I was 10) in southeast Pennsylvania my maternal grandmother cooked on a coal stove, house was heated with coal, anthracite in both. Ex wife’s grandmother cooked on wood stove into early 1960’s, she was from Eastern Europe and that was what she was comfortable with.

Barracks in Fort Jackson and Indiantown Gap were heated with coal.

Ft. Jackson. Yuck, Pooey! I hated that place, but at least i did BCT in Winter/Spring. Plus I cornered into an extremely uncomfortable issue regarding a Drill Sgt. who was WAY out of line (extorting money and "favors" from wives/GF's of Basic trainees for favorable treatment). And I was the trainee/platoon leader, a most awkward position. Justice prevailed and the DS was removed overnight...but it was a LONG lonely walk down to the Senior DS's office. Happily, SFC Roosevelt Martin was an honorable guy & he appreciated how I handled it. This was in the first two weeks of my service.

[DougK]

1 hour ago, DKTanker said:

Still in use in 1978 while I was in AIT.  One of the tank ranges, might have been Steel Range, there was a warming shack kept heated by a coal burning stove.

By 1978-79 I was out and working for an industrial roll coating/laminating company (Huge Cerutti presses like a newspaper would use, but the product was the base film web for both the Polaroid AND Kodak instant film products for SX-70 & PR10. 
Kodak (it would be decided in court) was infringing on Polaroid patent but I routinely went to Polaroid and Kodak Park, which ran on coal. George Eastman had a philsophy after almot being shut down in the early years....control ALL of your raw materials.
You will recall that this was the period of a serious UMW strike and coal was not being delivered to man key industries. Kodak did not care as they had ironclad contracts AND a coal pile outside Kodak Park that was 50 yards wide and half a mile long (while other business were starving for the stuff). There in balmy Rochester, NY, Kodak Park entrance featured blooming flowers 365 days a year....steam pipes ran under the lawn at the big plaza entrance so the ground was always greenhouse temp, even in Winter!
You know a company is big when they operate their own diesel locomotive repair shop!

Edited November 9, 2025 by DougK

[Ivanhoe]

I've been hoping to read of a successful waste heat greenery adjacent to one of those mini-nuke plants. 

[sunday]

1 hour ago, Ivanhoe said:

I've been hoping to read of a successful waste heat greenery adjacent to one of those mini-nuke plants. 

Will the byproduct of a railway tunnel do?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropenhaus_Frutigen

Quote

The Tropenhaus (English: Tropic House) in Frutigen, Switzerland, is a commercial project using geothermal energy from hot water flowing out of the Lötschberg base tunnel for the production of sturgeon meat, and caviar and formerly exotic fruit in a tropical greenhouse in the Swiss alps.[1] In 2007, the project received the Prix Evenir, the Swiss petroleum industry's CHF 50,000 award for sustainable development.[2]

 

[DougK]

5 hours ago, Ivanhoe said:

I've been hoping to read of a successful waste heat greenery adjacent to one of those mini-nuke plants. 

Would sea life count? WAY down on the Southern tip of Taiwan sits a resort & national park, lots of water activities. Also down there is a nuclear power station that uses the bay for cooling water/heat exchange. On one road trip that took us all the way down the West coast, my hosts and I stayed at the Kenting resort over a weekend (I did not see one other Westerner the entire time down there) I had the opportunity to go SCUBA diving. The water is well, unexpectedly warm and the sea life VERY abundant. And lots of sea snakes (highly venomous but highly docile). I did not feel the need to handle them, though they are apperently very tolerant of it. There is a very rich assortment of animal and other life in those clear waters.
Taiwan has had a lot of nuclear power facilities since 1978, but the last station closed this year, opting for "green" energy sources. I wonder how that will work out.
https://taiwaninsight.org/2025/05/20/its-getting-serious-taiwans-phasing-out-of-nuclear-energy-and-furthering-its-transition-to-green-energy/

[Rick]

It's snowing now on the banks of the Ohio  river. I would sure like a little global warming about now!

[rmgill]

On 11/8/2025 at 9:38 AM, Ivanhoe said:

https://scitechdaily.com/fatal-flaw-in-carbon-cycle-could-plunge-earth-into-global-freeze/

 

Too much CO2 can cause warming and cooling. Is there anything that CO2 can't do?

 

And plant growth!!!

[NickM]

7 minutes ago, rmgill said:

And plant growth!!!

And plant growth fuels wildfires 

[Ivanhoe]

We're back to global cooling;

https://pjmedia.com/stephen-kruiser/2025/11/13/climate-alarmist-nonsense-comes-full-circle-with-threat-of-new-ice-age-n4945935

I'm going to get ahead of the market and start up a polarfleece farm.

 

[Ivanhoe]

The silver lining in the collapse of the Gulf Stream is that Britain will completely freeze over, solving the immigrant problem and the real estate shortage problem simultaneously.

Nice!

 

[bojan]

"Ice age" and "rising sea levels" just don't go together...

[Ivanhoe]

1 hour ago, bojan said:

"Ice age" and "rising sea levels" just don't go together...

Sure they do, with Climate Change all things are possible. And sometimes simultaneously. Most people don't know that Schroedinger's Cat was a climatologist.

 

[rmgill]

Something I find interesting is the revision of temperature data to remove weather stations that have been gone for years but which data was still being ‘found’. Something we were told, even in this thread was not happening. 

[NickM]

1 hour ago, rmgill said:

Something I find interesting is the revision of temperature data to remove weather stations that have been gone for years but which data was still being ‘found’. Something we were told, even in this thread was not happening. 

well that sounds 'muy interesante'--do you got a linky? 

[Tim Sielbeck]

 

[rmgill]

I was looking at temperature data sets when this sort of stuff was noted like 15 years ago. Very odd to see temp data for stations the Japanese captured in WWII. 

Later a very old friend noted he had grad students for climate science coming to him with data they waned him, a mathematics grad student to make work when they had gaps in the data set. He kept telling them he could not smooth over zero values as math doesn't work that way. You can't divide by zero. I guess they just started fabricating data...as is evidenced from above. 

[Ivanhoe]

When there are dropouts in the data (which happen with 1990s A/D converter chip design), depending on the nature of the data one can use interpolation (linear or otherwise). One can also get spikes. Imagine an A/D converter chip converting an analog voltage level to an integer, lets say 32 bits unsigned. When the chip gets flummoxed it can output a 32-bit unsigned zero (32 zero bits) or a spike (32 one bits). 

Empirical data crunchers I used to work with very clearly stated in all their reports and papers how those two cases were handled. Their software was readily available so that interested parties could verify repeatability.

Here's the best "coffee-table" explanation of repeatability vs reproducibility;

https://www.labmate-online.com/news/news-and-views/5/breaking-news/what-is-the-difference-between-repeatability-and-reproducibility/30638

I vaguely recall a brief squabble over color contour plots; an industry guy could not reproduce the same contour plot using our data. It turned out to be the default interpolation method used in our vs. their plotting software. 

A major problem with surface temp data is that the dropouts are far too long to be interpolated. The temptation is to backfill with numerical predictions from some model, but then you end up comparing apples to orange/broccoli hybrids.