[jhowelb]

Anna Zacharias January 25. 2009 1:59PM GMT


RAS AL KHAIMAH // Snow covered the Jebel Jais area for only the second time in recorded history yesterday.

So rare was the event that one lifelong resident said the local dialect had no word for it.

According to the RAK Government, temperatures on Jebel Jais dropped to -3°C on Friday night. On Saturday, the area had reached 1°C.

Major Saeed Rashid al Yamahi, a helicopter pilot and the manager of the Air Wing of RAK Police, said the snow covered an area of five kilometres and was 10cm deep.

“The sight up there this morning was totally unbelievable, with the snow-capped mountain and the entire area covered with fresh, dazzling white snow,” Major al Yamahi said.

“The snowfall started at 3pm Friday, and heavy snowing began at 8pm and continued till midnight, covering the entire area in a thick blanket of snow. Much of the snow was still there even when we flew back from the mountain this afternoon. It is still freezing cold up there and there are chances that it might snow again tonight.”

Aisha al Hebsy, a woman in her 50s who has lived in the mountains near Jebel Jais all her life, said snowfall in the area was so unheard of the local dialect does not even have a word for it. Hail is known as bared, which literally translates as cold. “Twenty years ago we had lots of hail,” said Ms al Hebsy. “Last night was like this. At four in the morning we came out and the ground was white.”

Jebel Jais was dusted in snow on Dec 28, 2004, the first snowfall in living memory for Ras al Khaimah residents.

“I had flown there in 2004 when it snowed, but this time it was much bigger and the snowing lasted longer as well,” said Major al Yamahi.

At the base of the mountains, residents also reported severe hail on Friday night. “We had hail. Last night was very cold, but there can only be snow on Jebel Jais because it’s the tallest,” said Fatima al Ali, 30, a resident of a village beneath the mountains.

In Ras al Khaimah City, 25km from Jebel Jais, sheet lightning and thunder shook houses.

Main roads from Qusaidat to Nakheel were still badly flooded on Saturday, while temperatures at the RAK International Airport fluctuated between 10 and 22°C.

M Varghese, an observer at the RAK Airport Meteorological Office, told of the storms that hit the emirate on Friday night.

“We had thunderstorms with rain for more than 12 hours and we had around 18mm rain,” Mr Varghese said. “The rain, along with the cold easterly winds and low-lying clouds, could have bought the temperatures further down on the mountains.”

Giorgio Alessio, a meteorologist at the Dubai meteorology office, said: “In thunderstorms, the rain comes down very rapidly from higher levels, and the rain that usually forms can reach the ground in some places as snow. In the next few days the weather regime is completely different and will return to normal for the season, with a maximum temperature of 23°C or 24°C.

“The night might cool down in the desert below 10°C. There is variability in the weather from year to year but it hasn’t shown a trend in getting colder or getting warmer.”

The RAK Government plans to transform the 1,740m Jebel Jais into the UAE’s first outdoor ski resort, using Australian technology that will allow tourists to ski in temperatures up to 35°C.

[SSMrob]

How are they gonna profit ? How should they deliver the message to the world, wooden cart ? ..

Wow, you are getting duped pretty good by these tricksters in DC..

(nuts)

You need to do your homework..

How?

How about being on the board of several of these "green" startups? How about huge investments made in many of them?

Even McLame is invested fairly heavily in these "green" companies...

Also, they want to start another dot.bomb situation with the trading of green credits..

Back in the old days, the snake oil salesmen would come and go, now they stay in congress forever.. Poster children for term limits AND extreme late term abortion, all of them..

I still don't understand why we continue to hire the spoiled idiot children of rich politicians over and over again.. There ought to be a "one politico per family" rule put in place RIGHT NOW.

[CNC_Programmer]

Dear handlewanker,

Evaporative cooling has a lot going for it.

Best wishes,

Martin

Except in areas with high humidity. Once the humidity gets above about 40-50% it becomes worse than nothing. Having used it in El Paso, TX many years ago, I can tell you that humid days were miserable!

Leon

[handlewanker]

CNC, maybe we're very dry here, actually it hasn't rained much for the last ten years, and our(melbourne) dams are down to 23% capacity.

Pity the rest of the country gets monsoon downpours, (up North that is), while we're on water restrictions of an advised useage of 150 litres per day per household.

We're headed for high 30's for this week with Wed Thur and Fri being 40 to 41 deg C, then it starts to get hot, so the evap cooler will work overtime, even if I have to pee in it to help it along.

What I really could do with is some means to desalinate bore water, as the bore water round these parts is too salty to use on the gardens, or for drinking.

I made inquiries some 20 years ago about putting a bore in and they advised me that water could be reached at 20 metres (60 feet), but the salt content was too high to be of any use.

There's a guy in Texas (USA where else), and he markets a kit on Ebay for desalinating bore water by reverse osmosis, going about $2500 a couple of years ago, so if the water prices skyrocket due to the govenment going into a big desalination plant and overland pipelines, it might be a consideration.

I'm gonna gen up on reverse osmosis to see what is actually involved in getting it to work, parts wise that is, the pump is standard but the technology is a different issue to get the seperation of the water to happen.

I probably only need 50 litres a day to keep my garden alive.

I reckon if the humidity was very high I could build a condenser of sorts and wring the water out of the air, but it would have to be solar powered, otherwise it would end up costing a dollar a glass of water, and probably the rest.
Ian.

[SSMrob]

I reckon if the humidity was very high I could build a condenser of sorts and wring the water out of the air, but it would have to be solar powered, otherwise it would end up costing a dollar a glass of water, and probably the rest.
Ian.

Evap/boiling can get the salt out of the water.... Hrm, I wonder if there could be a good way to perhaps use your evap cooler to create humidity (vapor) and then subsequently recollect the humidity and there you are! You have both evap cooling AND fresh water! I know, sounds crazy.. lol... Of course, the salt would probably quickly clog your evap pads...

In all honesty though, a solar water distiller would probably work. I live in Arizona, and I am teaching the guys at my shop about subsistency (basically training them for what may be the apocalypse when the US collapses) and we occasionally build and learn about survival and subsistence living so they know how to do things when it all shuts down.. The solar water distiller is pretty important part of that..

[handlewanker]

Hi SSMrob, the simplest solar water distiller/collector is a shallow hole in the ground with a piece of plastic sheet stretched across it, with a stone placed in the middle to make it look like an upside down umbreller, and a tin can in the bottom of the hole to collect the water droplets that condense on the plastic sheet and run down to drip into the tin can.

If you're teaching survival tactics you no doubt know all about it.

The water evaporator cooler outlets cold air that has been cooled by the evaporation of the water, so it would require another much colder surface to condense the water vapour on.

One way would be to run the cold air now in vapour form through a metal tube that is heated by the sun and then pass the warm moist air onto a cool surface which will by the laws of physics condense back to water again (hopefully).

If something like this was going to be used to evaporate salt water, the salt water could be used to periodically flush the brine concentrate from the evap pads.

If you and your team give it a go I'd be interested to know if it works, I know the hole in the sand works, as long as you have hot sunshine to make the moisture in the hole evaporate, even if you have to pee in it to get some liquid back.

There's a simple device someone could market under the heading of survival gear, and it comprises of a solar photo voltaic array big enough to produce 12 volts at about 1 amp.

This is coupled up to a cool box that has one of those Peltier devices that convert electric power to cooling.

I recently bought, at an auction, a 6 bottle wine cooler using a Peltier device, that sits on the table top and will chill wine down to 4 degrees C in about an hour or so, (runs on 12 volts), but the side effect is that a quantity of water is produced that runs out when you open the door and is collected in a tray underneath.

It wouldn't take much to make a small portable unit, using the Peltier device and a solar cell, that was dedicated to producing condensate for drinking water when you're in the desert or on a boat with no water at all.

As it would run off of sun power, solid state, no moving parts, it would run indefinately without the need to carry batteries etc.
Ian.

[NinerSevenTango]

You could make an industrial-strength solar still for your saline well water for not much money, but it would take some work to build it and some work to operate it and keep buggers from growing in it. Just use the same idea as the survival still, only larger, over a solar-heated pool. Might work if you wanted to make a hobby of it.

[martinw]

Except in areas with high humidity. Once the humidity gets above about 40-50% it becomes worse than nothing. Having used it in El Paso, TX many years ago, I can tell you that humid days were miserable!

Leon

Dear Leon,

Excellent point, and my apologies for this late reply. In the UK, as an island in Northern Europe, we generally have pretty low humidity, and fairly low temperatures. It is very rare for ambient conditions to mimic TX.

Thank you for pointing out the problems that evaporative coolers might have in places other than on my own doorstep. I missed that...sorry.

Best wishes,

Martin

[Mariss Freimanis]

The history of how global warming was discovered:

Clinton to Gore: "D**n, that Monica is one hot babe!"

Gore pondering: "Poor Monica,.. she's hot.. again! Everyone talks.. about the weather.. but no one.. does anything about.. it."

Gore to Clinton: "I know!.. We'll sell carbon.. offsets and make millions of.. dollars!"

Clinton: "???..!"

Clinton to Gore: "Al, hehe, you've got something there; you know you're alright. You know that. Let me talk to some people I know and maybe we can do something about it."

Thus one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time was made by the brilliant thinker that brought us the internet.

Mariss

[martinw]

Thus one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time was made by the brilliant thinker that brought us the internet.

I saw a faintly strange presentation by Steve Jobs in front of a large audience in which the great man himself , Al Gore was present. Was the "inventor of the Internet" comment a genuine accolade, or a "p@ss-take"??

I apologise for not being able to judge the humour, or, indeed, the lack of it.

Best wishes,

Martin

[Mariss Freimanis]

Martin,

I follow the principle of "Never trust a person who lacks a sense of humor." It has held me in good stead over the years.

Look at the ludicrous Kafkaesque situation we are confronted with; an out of control global warming locomotive that flies in the face of all contrary scientific evidence and economic reality. We can either laugh or cry. Meanwhile the world is on the precipice of an economic collapse; one wrong step decides. Yet the circus audience still watches the "global warming" act.

There are others that live in a different universe than mine. Unfortunately our collective indifference has given them the reigns of power. They worry about global warming based on flawed computer models while the very world we call civilization may be crumbling around us. Talk about dilettantes living in an Ivory Tower!

The proof that we are an inferior civilization is that we still require politicians.

I am one man and there isn't a d**ned thing I can do to shake people back to their senses; to make them pay attention to what's important and what really matters. It certainly is not global warming. So I'm left being the lemming that watches while all the other lemmings go over the cliff.

The remedies offered for this non-existent problem, CO2, would have halted a booming world economy. Effected in the face of a 'perfect storm' economy that is gathering now, these remedies will precipitate a collapse. History's sense of humor is to provide us with the worst possible politicians at worst of times. Look at 1929 and how it lead to the events starting in 1939.

You asked about humor or the lack of it. I prefer to laugh because there is nothing else I can do. Otherwise I'm a leaf in a river and everything I hold dear gets carried by the current we are all in.

Mariss

[der_fisherman]

Actually the UK has normally between 55 and 75% humidity, that is neither low or high!!! "Middle of the road" so to say.....
This link shows it for am & pm over a year:-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/world/c...ml?tt=TT003790

[martinw]

You asked about humor or the lack of it.

Mariss

Dear Mariss,

I didn't express myself very well. I was not questioning your sense of humor. I was questioning whether the speaker who congratulated Al Gore for inventing the internet was being sincere. In fact, I made a mistake. The speaker wasn't Steve Jobs, it was Burt Rutan, the brilliant airplane designer. Here is the presentation..

[ame="http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=nwfSENkvJXY"]YouTube - Burt Rutan: Entrepreneurs are the future of space flight[/ame]

I'm not doing very well, am I?

Best wishes,

Martin

[jhowelb]

Czech president attacks Al Gore's climate campaign
Jan 31 05:07 PM US/Eastern

Czech President Vaclav Klaus took aim at climate change campaigner Al Gore on Saturday in Davos in a frontal attack on the science of global warming.

"I don't think that there is any global warming," said the 67-year-old liberal, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the European Union. "I don't see the statistical data for that."

Referring to the former US vice president, who attended Davos this year, he added: "I'm very sorry that some people like Al Gore are not ready to listen to the competing theories. I do listen to them.

"Environmentalism and the global warming alarmism is challenging our freedom. Al Gore is an important person in this movement."

Speaking on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum, he said that he was more worried about the reaction to the perceived dangers than the consequences.

"I'm afraid that the current crisis will be misused for radically constraining the functioning of the markets and market economy all around the world," he said.

"I'm more afraid of the consequences of the crisis than the crisis itself."

Klaus makes no secret of his climate change scepticism -- he is also a fierce critic of the European Union -- and has branded the world's top panel of climate experts, the UN's IPCC, a smug monopoly.

[jhowelb]

The real agenda!!!

Time for a new world order: PM

Phillip Coorey Chief Political Correspondent
January 31, 2009
Advertisement

KEVIN RUDD has denounced the unfettered capitalism of the past three decades and called for a new era of "social capitalism" in which government intervention and regulation feature heavily.

In an essay to be published next week, the Prime Minister is scathing of the neo-liberals who began refashioning the market system in the 1970s, and ultimately brought about the global financial crisis.

"The time has come, off the back of the current crisis, to proclaim that the great neo-liberal experiment of the past 30 years has failed, that the emperor has no clothes," he writes of those who placed their faith in the corrective powers of the market.

"Neo-liberalism and the free-market fundamentalism it has produced has been revealed as little more than personal greed dressed up as an economic philosophy. And, ironically, it now falls to social democracy to prevent liberal capitalism from cannibalising itself."

Mr Rudd writes in The Monthly that just as Franklin Roosevelt rebuilt US capitalism after the Great Depression, modern-day "social democrats" such as himself and the US President, Barack Obama, must do the same again. But he argues that "minor tweakings of long-established orthodoxies will not do" and advocates a new system that reaches beyond the 70-year-old interventionist principles of John Maynard Keynes.

"A system of open markets, unambiguously regulated by an activist state, and one in which the state intervenes to reduce the greater inequalities that competitive markets will inevitably generate," he writes.

He urges "a new contract for the future that eschews the extremism of both the left and right".

He mocks neo-liberals "who now find themselves tied in ideological knots in being forced to rely on the state they fundamentally despise to save financial markets from collapse".

He advocates tighter regulation and policing of global finances, and identifies the immediate challenge as restoring global growth by 3 per cent of gross domestic product, the amount it is expected to fall in 2009. Next week, as Parliament resumes, his Government will chip in with a second economic stimulus package.

Mr Rudd commits to keeping budgets in surplus "over the cycle", meaning deficits should be temporary. In a further sign the Government is not contemplating additional tax cuts, which would deliver a permanent hit to revenue, he stresses that stimulus measures have to be paid for when the economy recovers.

Mr Rudd singles out Thatcherism as a culprit, as well as the former Howard government. His essay implicitly attacks the Opposition Leader, Malcolm Turnbull, who this week urged the free market be allowed to dictate commercial property values as he slammed a Government measure to prop them up.

Mr Rudd's essay follows the blast Mr Obama gave Wall Street bankers yesterday for awarding themselves $28 billion in bonuses last year at the same time as they were being bailed out by taxpayers.

In a message to Mr Obama and the US Congress, Mr Rudd counselled against erecting trade barriers. "Soft or hard, protectionism is a sure-fire way of turning recession into depression as it exacerbates the collapse in global demand."

The message was reinforced in Davos yesterday when the Trade Minister, Simon Crean, described the "buy American" provisions of the new Obama stimulus package as "very worrying". "On the face of it, it looks like it contravenes commitments made to the World Trade Organisation," he said.

[martinw]

Dear jhowelb,

Great post about Davos. Thanks.

Best wishes,

Martin

[dynosor]

Czech president attacks Al Gore's climate campaign.

Thanks

I would like to suggest that when you post such as the above, you include the source. In this instance: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090131...20090131220756.

Not because you may have made it up, but because a link makes it easier to post to other sites, should others be led to do so.

[jhowelb]

Well, that's the reason Google exists. Just for purposes of research. For my part it's hard to be concerned a great deal after having certain denizens try to bash my brains in (rhetorically) and more especially with certain moderators leaping in to take up arms.

Simply put, I just don't care!

[phil c]

Just out of curiosity, has anyone seen any reports of the various global warming models being run backwards, to see if they predict the previous ice ages, or starting them with boundary conditions believed to exist say 200 million years ago and see if they accurately predict the actual climate record?

Since the infamous "hockey stick" temperatures appear to have peaked in 1998 or so , and now the debate has switched to climate change instead of global warming. I'd really like to know if any of the climate models do well with historical data. The climate has been changing for eons, so any worthwhile model would be highly valuable if it had some reliability to it going forward.

[jhowelb]

The one constant regarding any feature of planet Earth (or ant other for that mater) is change. Everything is changing and has been so since creation.

Computer models were created to prove a certain theory and can be used to prove anything that one chooses to prove right, wrong or indifferent.

Not that it makes any difference because the powers that be are gonna do what they want using one excuse or another anyway. Not even the ringing of revolution will stop them now. Keep a close eye on Russia over the next few days and take a lesson.