You turn a turbine through a magnetic field and you can wind up with an electric current. A more complex process, somewhat in reverse to the other, winds up turning electrical energy into macro movement in a motor.
We see in a generator chemical potential energy in coal, turned into heat energy by combustion, then going to turn this turbine using steam (ie converted to kinetic energy) and then the kinetic energy getting converted to electrical energy.
The point is the process by which one type of energy is converted to another is no mystery. It may be a mystery to me if put on the spot, but its something that can readily be revised or swotted up on. And so figuring out what causes extreme weather events amounts to applying this understanding to the atmosphere, sea and earth. How could it be otherwise?
So you have a cyclone whose kinetic energy is such that it is akin to a nuclear weapon going off every few minutes. Where is this energy coming from and how is it being converted? I’ve found someone who has done this exercise and put it into a book. So I’ll have to get the book rather than scraping away trying to figure it out for myself. But think of what poor shape the mainstream science is in that the exercise hasn’t been done and isn’t part of the normal understanding?
We have electrical energy in the form of charged particles coming in from the sun and the rest of the galaxy. We have electrical energy coming in via Birkeland currents. The earth has a magnetic field of its own. So we have everything we need to cause this energy transfer. We have all the components to turn electrical energy into kinetic energy. The kinetic energy in volcanic reactions, earthquakes or cyclones.
And this basic science is important. It can give us early warnings and save lives. It can tell us that we need to make more sturdy buildings and sock away freeze-dried food.
Well what about the warm water itself? Ought that not be enough to create these cyclones? Thats fine if you can show the process by which warm water gets converted to kinetic energy leaving cold water. And when you are done with that how about designing a tepid water generating facility.
This is all fine so long as you can show that the water has cooled much more than it would normally during the night or on an overcast day AND you have to show the conversion process.
But what is the transfer process of tepid water to energy on a scale that is equivalent to a nuclear bomb every few minutes? Matters of plausibility come into this. But any good electrical engineer ought to be able to show conversion from electrical to kinetic energy given a magnetic field, electrical currents and Coriolis forces as an engine starter.
You see the winds ought to only be feeble and mild without the input of electrical energy. But when you have solar winds, cosmic rays, magnetic fields …. and light of uv strength and above …… you have the opportunity to convert from one energy type to another and so cause these volcanic eruptions, cyclones, high winds and so forth.
Its just a straight application of space weather to the atmosphere and the earth. And that it isn’t being done generally, after billions of dollars of research in tangential fields, has to tell us that public sector science is no good, and its not ever going to be any good.
A Better World: Graeme Bird For High Office 
From elsewhere:
That case can certainly be made on the basis of the journals. But you appear to be saying two things.
1. The only worthy evidence is journal published evidence when the published fellow tells you outright what to think. But journal publications aren’t the only evidence. And they are only evidence under specific conditions.
Evidence itself is simply a special class of data. Its data BROADLY CONSIDERED (not just journal data) related to an hypothesis NARROWLY CONSIDERED by a process of reason.
So if you were able to find a journal article that asserted that alkaline water was healthful that would not be evidence since it would not be part of that tripod.
2. You are viewing matters from the point of view of a null hypothesis and a positive hypothesis. This has next to no value in either philosophy or in experimental design.
Always we must view things in terms of COMPETING HYPOTHESES. At least three unless you are being lazy. With each coming from an equal starting point. If you were fair dinkum you would be trying to show that alkaline water EXACERBATED cancer, or some such competing paradigm. And you would not be demanding more evidence for one hypothesis then the other.
Let me give you an example of this methodology in action. Here is a quick and lazy thread. But notice how I’m implicitly comparing two paradigms in parallel. Are extreme natural events created primarily as an internal matter within the earth system? Or are they substantially a feature of space weather? I think even in this tired thread I’m able to show that the latter alternative is by far the more plausible hypothesis. This is the way forward for you kids. And not the norms that pass for thought at the PZ Myers blog.
Always competing hypotheses must be on the mind of the scientist or enquirer. An enquiry must NEVER EVER EVER follow the skeptics model of the null (or mainstream) hypothesis versus the positive (or EXTRAORDINARY) hypothesis. Sagan was wrong. And not a particularly good scientist.
By: graemebird on February 25, 2011
at 10:41 pm
Consider how stupid mainstream science worker dingbats are with their view of the sun. In their view the insides of the sun are millions of degrees centigrade. And the sun is all gas just about. We know the surface is only about 5000-6000 degrees (I’ll check later) and the corona is millions of degrees. So dumb public servants have the above and below way hotter than the photosphere. Now this is simply impossible if the majority of the heating is coming from deep below. Its not only wrong its impossible. And to boot when we get to see below the photosphere we know its much cooler.
But public service scientists refuse point blank to submit to the requirements of logic. In their view peer review beats logic. This peer review dogma is a philosophy of irresponsibility and arrogance.
By: graemebird on February 26, 2011
at 4:47 am
Graeme Bird :
25 Feb 2011 6:22:13pm
All that you had to do, was to construct the best possible record for CO2 levels that you could, and then construct the best record for temperature that you could, and then show that the two are related in a causal way. In a way that goes beyond mere correlation.
It was a simple data and attribution problem. And yet you go to your site and its just a lot of jibber jabber. Just a bunch of excuses and second-hand dumb Coby Beck style arguments.
Reply Alert moderator
Graeme Bird :
25 Feb 2011 6:14:40pm
“Last year, concerned by the ever-increasing chasm between the urgent messages coming from the scientific community and the somewhat muted response from policy-makers, I concluded that the nation’s top scientific advisor to the government must be giving bad advice, so I set out to ask her directly.
As it turns out, I was wrong.”
You are wrong still. You don’t understand the subject. Your website is an evidence free zone. Stop being irresponsible and butt out.
Reply Alert moderator
By: graemebird on February 26, 2011
at 6:26 am
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/
Remember to stock up on food so that you can lend some to me.
By: graemebird on February 26, 2011
at 9:01 am
Reading this thread over is hard going because of the incredible and belligerent stupidity of people who fancy themselves “skeptics” and hang out at Randi’s. But still I did put a lot of effort into it and it may help the non-bigoted understand economics better.
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=127710
By: graemebird on February 26, 2011
at 9:54 am
DON’T BE AN IDIOT JOSEPH CAMBRIA. AND RIGHT ABOUT NOW ITS TIME YOU CONFESSED TO BEING A KEYNESIAN. YOU WERE ALWAYS A KEYNESIAN CAMBRIA. THANKS TO YOU DOING STAGE ONE ECONOMICS IN YOUR COMMERCE DEGREE. ECONOMICS 101 IS NOTHING MORE THAN KEYNESIAN FALLACY AND PROPAGANDA.
By: Bird Flaps on February 26, 2011
at 10:54 am
Graeme Bird:
February 27th, 2011 at 3:53 am
“Monitoring Australia’s climate is a high priority for the Bureau of Meteorology and we have developed a reference network of stations that have little or no urban influence to their climate records.”
Little or no? That means he’s admitting to some SOME pollution of the data through the heat island effect. So we have a one-dataset-fallacy going on here.
He could have more than one data-set and he could compile a trend graph on the basis of a few datasets. We could then get to look at a truncated dataset where ONLY stations where he is totally confident that no urbanisation effect is present are included. We could compare this purist and truncated dataset to others formulated on other grounds and assumptions.
This is like the economists when it comes to using metrics. They will refuse to use Gross Domestic Revenue over Gross Domestic Product for one excuse or another …… when they could use both. And they’ll pack their productivity metric with all sorts of gear until it becomes meaningless …. when they could use a half dozen ratios like the investment analysts used to.
Its pretty easy to use a throwaway line like “little or no urban influence” but a bit of thought tells us that he’s knowingly using dirty data and spinning it after the fact. Its better to have an honest and truncated dataset than a polluted and more comprehensive one. But what possible argument or excuse can there be when you can have both?
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By: graemebird on February 26, 2011
at 5:55 pm
http://www.mountainhouse.com/
Mountainhouse appears to be the best supplier of freeze-dried food that there is. They say their saches are good for 7 years. And their “number 10 cans” are supposed to be good for 25 years. But they do not ship overseas.
Much of what we need for our national security can be effected simply by long-term tax exemptions for single-purpose companies. Obviously freeze-dried food ought to be part of this program. As well as basement-building and particularly deep basement building wherein you have ten feet of soil to protect from nuclear blast and fallout. But in practice probably very strong and earthquake resistant basements building will have to be good enough.
The storage of ordnance and the accumulation of weapons at registered secure firing ranges is a practice that ought to be buttressed by a range of tax exemptions. But the actual carrying and home possession of weapons is more a matter of fine judgement.
By: graemebird on February 26, 2011
at 11:57 pm
Bill Still explaining the monetary system that the morons at Catallaxy all endorse. There is this terrible bullshit in faux-epistemology going around that you cannot know anything. Such nonsense allows the Catallaxians to be just as stupid as they wanna be.
By: graemebird on February 27, 2011
at 1:58 am
Bill Still making the case for government. Since this is the only reasonable pro-government case I’ve ever seen made, I thought I ought to try and put it about.
By: graemebird on February 27, 2011
at 2:16 am
“In defence of Julia Gillard”
Where’s the defense Samuel J. Samuel J going soft. She’s a liar. Scratch a neoclassical and you find some softheaded moron who somehow thinks the carbon tax is a good idea. This is the crudeness of their thinking. So crude are they they appear to think that the carbon tax is akin to a less broad-based GST. Does Samuel J think that Julias utter bigotry in favor of CO2-bedwetting is justified?
Neoclassicals constantly mixing up their crude models with reality? Is this the way Samuel is approaching climate science?
Well okay. I’m reading way too much into what Samuel J might be thinking. But its mystifying. Because here is this woman, letting us all down on account of her manic religion, and backing down on an election commitment when she could have gone to the next election on a carbon tax were she not a dishonest usurping weasel.
By: graemebird on February 27, 2011
at 9:51 am
From elsewhere:
“By the example of the famous white and black swans we see how narrow-minded that is. If all the swans you’ve seen are white, you can’t say there is a 100% chance that all swans are white since you can’t possibly have seen them all, let alone on this planet.”
Dummy. This is no scientifically proven proposition. Proven by way of convergent evidence. It was a prosaic assumption based on a single one-step example of inductive thought. One example of induction.
No one-step example of induction can ever prove anything. Notice the stupidity of Popperians and Humians to therefore conclude that induction is no good. The process of establishing a good theory or a proof requires many thousands of examples of induction. Never one inductive step. Philosophers can be boneheads like everyone else.
The global warming fraud is also, where not based on lies and data-rigging, is fundamentally based on a single inductive step. The idea that CO2 absorption and scattering of some IR in the lab will result in a planet-wide problem. Totally naieve philosophically and incompetent scientifically.
No-one proved that all swans must be white based on CONVERGENT EVIDENCE. Since the matter was never proven in the first place, your morons proposition was not sustained by the discovery of black swans.
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By: graemebird on February 27, 2011
at 9:30 pm
Strangely enough I seem to be almost alone in properly describing why that critique of induction is horribly wrong. Since it is itself an example of bad induction …. and since the mistake made is to mix up a single act of induction with a process involving multiple examples of induction mixed up with other tools.
This was the philosophers going off in a crazy self-serving tangent.
By: graemebird on February 27, 2011
at 9:34 pm