Gordon Couger writes

I don't think that using farm crops for motive power has a place in and
energy plan in a world that is using more grain than it can produce already.

Well, it sure will need to keep the tractors running.

Inefficiently using food to make fuel when fuel is at an all time low price
is senseless.

Indeed. However oil prices are not currently at an all time low and
won't be in 20 years. Read the analysis.


--
Oz
This post is worth absolutely nothing and is probably fallacious.

BTOPENWORLD address about to cease. DEMON address no longer in use.
Use (whitelist check on first posting)

On Sat, 22 May 2004 05:55:55 GMT, "Steve Young"
topposted, with no attribution of quoted lines:

I think there might be a problem when you assume a 100 year return is
actually a 1 00 year return

Huh?

I think 'prove' is a tad strong, Phred, but assuming Gordon's
observation is correct, it would seem to indicate some climate
change. A back of the envelope calculation gives me that the
probability of four or more 100 year events within 60 years is only
about 1 %. However, before jumping to conclusion we'd better ask:
what is Gordon's event-type and can he show us the data?

"Torsten Brinch" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 22 May 2004 05:55:55 GMT, "Steve Young"
topposted, with no attribution of quoted lines:

I think there might be a problem when you assume a 100 year return is
actually a 1 00 year return

Huh?


"They" say things like, That was a 100 year flood, expected to occur only
every 100 years. (or snow, drought, whatever) But I have doubts about how
they calculate that. Example, where I live, a few years ago we had a "100
year" storm with flooding. But if you look at newspapers from the 1920's,
there were floods EVERY YEAR!. As more people build in river flood plains,
wouldn't you expect more flooding, people are moving to where the water is.
As more concrete if poured, there is less soil to absorb the water. It has
to go somewhere, and that's what we call flooding, when it goes where we
don't want it..

I've been in three different "100 year floods. I guess that makes me 300
years old

Steve Young writes
"They" say things like, That was a 100 year flood, expected to occur only
every 100 years. (or snow, drought, whatever) But I have doubts about how
they calculate that. Example, where I live, a few years ago we had a "100
year" storm with flooding. But if you look at newspapers from the 1920's,
there were floods EVERY YEAR!. As more people build in river flood plains,
wouldn't you expect more flooding, people are moving to where the water is.
As more concrete if poured, there is less soil to absorb the water. It has
to go somewhere, and that's what we call flooding, when it goes where we
don't want it..

I've been in three different "100 year floods. I guess that makes me 300
years old

Given 100 possible events, one should expect a '100 year event'
annually.

I don't think any more needs to be said.

--
Oz
This post is worth absolutely nothing and is probably fallacious.

BTOPENWORLD address about to cease. DEMON address no longer in use.
Use (whitelist check on first posting)

On Sat, 22 May 2004 14:58:47 GMT, "Steve Young"
wrote:
"Torsten Brinch" wrote in message
.. .
On Sat, 22 May 2004 05:55:55 GMT, "Steve Young"
topposted, with no attribution of quoted lines:

I think there might be a problem when you assume a 100 year return is
actually a 1 00 year return

Huh?


"They" say things like, That was a 100 year flood, expected to occur only
every 100 years. (or snow, drought, whatever) But I have doubts about how
they calculate that.

We do not need to get into the detail, but from a solid observation
series (preferably many hundreds of years :-) one can of course make a
good statistical estimate of what magnitude the event must have to
have only a 1 % chance of occurring in any given year. The problem
with some estimated 100 year events is that they do not have that kind
of solid base in observation. Say, if you have only 20 years worth of
data, you are thrust into making an extrapolation resting on a set of
assumptions, which reality may very well see fit to overturn in time.

Example, where I live, a few years ago we had a "100
year" storm with flooding. But if you look at newspapers from the 1920's,
there were floods EVERY YEAR!. As more people build in river flood plains,
wouldn't you expect more flooding, people are moving to where the water is.
As more concrete if poured, there is less soil to absorb the water. It has
to go somewhere, and that's what we call flooding, when it goes where we
don't want it..

I've been in three different "100 year floods. I guess that makes me 300
years old

Oh, so that's what you meant. That's the misconception that if
something has a 1 % probability of occuring each year (= a 100 year
event), then the probablity of it occuring within a 100 year period
is 1 (unity). The same type of misconception would lead one to believe
that if one cast a die 6 times then each of the faces will come up
once :-)

(Phred) wandered out of a yurt and mumbled:

A fairly serious problem with a model based on past weather is that,
if we assume climate is changing, then the basis of the model is
largely irrelevant. Mind you, that mightn't matter so much in terms
of "averages" in the short term future, but when it comes to
predicting extremes (e.g. "100-year events" etc.) all bets are off.

Modern climate models are not based on historical extrapolation from
past records. They are based on numerical solutions to partial
differential equations that govern the fluid dynamics for motions of
the atmosphere (and sometimes oceans). Since they're not
extrapolations from observations they aren't strongly tied to any
particular climate regime. Indeed, many of the same models applied to
greenhouse warming have been used to study climates of the distant
past; see e.g.,
http://www-lsce.cea.fr/pmip/publicat...rp111_009.html




--
"Music is, after all, a highly complex form of mathmatical
encryption. It's so powerful that in modulates human
emotion on soundwaves." Mike Spence

"Oz" wrote in message
...
Gordon Couger writes

I don't think that using farm crops for motive power has a place in and
energy plan in a world that is using more grain than it can produce
already.

Well, it sure will need to keep the tractors running.

Inefficiently using food to make fuel when fuel is at an all time low
price
is senseless.

Indeed. However oil prices are not currently at an all time low and
won't be in 20 years. Read the analysis.

Oil prices are very near all time lows if you look at an 12 month average
price, correct to constant dollars and take out all the taxes that much of
the world is piling on. The last few months may have got them off the floor
for a bit. Thee is no shortage of oil in the world today. Most of the USSR
and China have not been properly surveyed with modern methods. Iraq has not
had any exploration in 30 years and is using 30 year old technology in
production. In the fields that they have that still produces a great deal of
oil but we have no idea what modern methods could do.

We have skimmed the easy 20% off the US reserves that we have drilled and we
have chosen not to drill any more in California and off shore in California
and Florida. We also don't have a very good idea how much oil is in the
Artic that the greens have managed to get placed off limits.

We haven't built a new refinery in 30 years and the domestic oil drilling is
at an all time low. There is a 40 day wait for a tanker to unload in China
that is tying up a shipping to the point that we can't get rail cars in
Oklahoma until 4 to 8 week after wheat harvest. So there is a lot of oil
delayed in transit and new EPA rules come into effect next month that
fracture the gasoline supply even more. To the point that in some cases only
one refinery is making gasoline that one city will be using.

On the farm side we have used more grain and oil crops than we have grown
for the last 3 years and it looks like it isn't going to change any time
soon. If we use the entire supply of soybean oil to run trucks it wouldn't
keep them on the road two months. The EU may fair a bit better if you have
to raise canola for the meal for cattle you may have some surplus oil for
fuel and palm oil is cheap enough that it might work until it was used up
but it won't take long because it comes from a part of the world where there
are lots of hungry people and more on the way. There is already a market for
all the grain and oil at price above support prices and any competition from
fuel would quickly drive them very much higher. I nice deal for the farmer
but instead of having oil producing countries getting rich you have farmer
and oil producing countries making good money and a lot more people hungry.

The Green Revolution has bought us all the time it can we are back to the
point that we will shortly have more mouths to feed than there is food to
feed them if we are not already there. And pouring food in your BMW doesn't
look good to starving people.

If we were going to use farm raised fuel it should have been done for the
last 50 years when surpluses were a problem not the next 50 years where it
appears that shortages will be the problem.


Gordon

In article , Torsten Brinch wrote:
On Sat, 22 May 2004 14:58:47 GMT, "Steve Young" wrote:
[...]
"They" say things like, That was a 100 year flood, expected to occur only
every 100 years. (or snow, drought, whatever) But I have doubts about how
they calculate that.

We do not need to get into the detail, but from a solid observation
series (preferably many hundreds of years :-) one can of course make a
good statistical estimate of what magnitude the event must have to
have only a 1 % chance of occurring in any given year. The problem
with some estimated 100 year events is that they do not have that kind
of solid base in observation. Say, if you have only 20 years worth of
data, you are thrust into making an extrapolation resting on a set of
assumptions, which reality may very well see fit to overturn in time.
[...]

Yeah. I recall sitting by a motel pool drinking beer late one evening
several decades ago and discussing "rainfall cycles" (you know the
sort of thing, the 11/13/whatever year "solar cycle" etc.). The local
mathematical statistician pointed out that you would need a minimum of
300 years of annual data to "see" such cycles with any confidence. As
he said, humans are always looking for patterns in things and are very
good at finding them, even if they are not real ones.

(Incidentally, I don't know if that "300 years" was just a figure
plucked out of the XXXX ambience, or whether he had some knowledge of
the distributions when he made the claim. As he was supporting a
large team of scientists working on pastoral systems at the time, it's
quite possible it was the latter.)


Cheers, Phred.

--
LID

On Sun, 23 May 2004 14:01:37 GMT, (Phred)
wrote:

In article , Torsten Brinch wrote:
On Sat, 22 May 2004 14:58:47 GMT, "Steve Young" wrote:
[...]
"They" say things like, That was a 100 year flood, expected to occur only
every 100 years. (or snow, drought, whatever) But I have doubts about how
they calculate that.

We do not need to get into the detail, but from a solid observation
series (preferably many hundreds of years :-) one can of course make a
good statistical estimate of what magnitude the event must have to
have only a 1 % chance of occurring in any given year. The problem
with some estimated 100 year events is that they do not have that kind
of solid base in observation. Say, if you have only 20 years worth of
data, you are thrust into making an extrapolation resting on a set of
assumptions, which reality may very well see fit to overturn in time.
[...]

Yeah. I recall sitting by a motel pool drinking beer late one evening
several decades ago and discussing "rainfall cycles" (you know the
sort of thing, the 11/13/whatever year "solar cycle" etc.).

No I have never heard of that., Phred. I do recall sitting by a pool
at Uluru camp drinking beer with a friend decades ago too. But we were
talking about a girl... :-)

The local
mathematical statistician pointed out that you would need a minimum of
300 years of annual data to "see" such cycles with any confidence. As
he said, humans are always looking for patterns in things and are very
good at finding them, even if they are not real ones.

Funny, my friend had seen a pattern in things too. He said don't be
stupid, I've seen how she looks at you, just go'fer her.... er,
and he was right :-)

(Incidentally, I don't know if that "300 years" was just a figure
plucked out of the XXXX ambience, or whether he had some knowledge of
the distributions when he made the claim. As he was supporting a
large team of scientists working on pastoral systems at the time, it's
quite possible it was the latter.)

I recall reading an article by someone who had studied a lamination
series in sediment rock (I think the site was down somewhere in the
Flinders Range, but perhaps it is a mix-up in memory with a rather
strange regular lamination I've seen there myself, north of Wilpuna)

Anyhow, in that article the author had meticulously mapped and
measured the laminations in the rock bed laid down over a period of
many hundreds of years, and he indeed linked the patterns in them to
the solar cycle you mention. Of course lamination in _sediment_ rock
could only be linked to the solar cycle by the cycle itself being
linked to rainfall. Another startling thing I remember about his
observations was, that if true, that would mean that our fat old Sun
had very much the same activity cycle when that sediment ws layed
down, many hundreds of thousands of years ago, as it has to this day.

"Torsten Brinch" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 23 May 2004 14:01:37 GMT, (Phred)
wrote:

In article , Torsten Brinch
wrote:
On Sat, 22 May 2004 14:58:47 GMT, "Steve Young"
wrote:
[...]
"They" say things like, That was a 100 year flood, expected to occur
only
every 100 years. (or snow, drought, whatever) But I have doubts about
how
they calculate that.

We do not need to get into the detail, but from a solid observation
series (preferably many hundreds of years :-) one can of course make a
good statistical estimate of what magnitude the event must have to
have only a 1 % chance of occurring in any given year. The problem
with some estimated 100 year events is that they do not have that kind
of solid base in observation. Say, if you have only 20 years worth of
data, you are thrust into making an extrapolation resting on a set of
assumptions, which reality may very well see fit to overturn in time.
[...]

Yeah. I recall sitting by a motel pool drinking beer late one evening
several decades ago and discussing "rainfall cycles" (you know the
sort of thing, the 11/13/whatever year "solar cycle" etc.).

No I have never heard of that., Phred. I do recall sitting by a pool
at Uluru camp drinking beer with a friend decades ago too. But we were
talking about a girl... :-)

The local
mathematical statistician pointed out that you would need a minimum of
300 years of annual data to "see" such cycles with any confidence. As
he said, humans are always looking for patterns in things and are very
good at finding them, even if they are not real ones.

Funny, my friend had seen a pattern in things too. He said don't be
stupid, I've seen how she looks at you, just go'fer her.... er,
and he was right :-)

(Incidentally, I don't know if that "300 years" was just a figure
plucked out of the XXXX ambience, or whether he had some knowledge of
the distributions when he made the claim. As he was supporting a
large team of scientists working on pastoral systems at the time, it's
quite possible it was the latter.)

I recall reading an article by someone who had studied a lamination
series in sediment rock (I think the site was down somewhere in the
Flinders Range, but perhaps it is a mix-up in memory with a rather
strange regular lamination I've seen there myself, north of Wilpuna)

Anyhow, in that article the author had meticulously mapped and
measured the laminations in the rock bed laid down over a period of
many hundreds of years, and he indeed linked the patterns in them to
the solar cycle you mention. Of course lamination in _sediment_ rock
could only be linked to the solar cycle by the cycle itself being
linked to rainfall. Another startling thing I remember about his
observations was, that if true, that would mean that our fat old Sun
had very much the same activity cycle when that sediment ws layed
down, many hundreds of thousands of years ago, as it has to this day.
Torsten,

Where was this? I would be very intersted in seeing the work. Linking
sunspots to rainfall in modern times hasn't worked very well on a single
cycle scale in all the work I have seen tried. But linking how energetic the
cycle is to the average global temperature seems to have a pretty high
correlation. Particularly when there is a long run of them that are strong
or weak. The most outstanding being the Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice
age from 1645 to 1715.

Part of the warming in the last century was due to 3 very strong cycles and
I think the reason that the global warming suddenly petered out at the end
of the century was the last cycle was real dud. This cycle started off with
one of the biggest magnetic storms in history at the bottom or the last or
start of the next cycle when the magnetic storms on the sun reversed
direction. There seems to be no way to forecast how strong a cycle will be
except in retrospect.

Gordon