A small town with 100 homes will burn 10,000,000,000 BTU’s during a cold winter. All of this heat returns to the atmosphere. The colder the air, the more rapid the heat loss and more effect on the temperature.
Crossing the boundary from open space into a neighborhood on my bicycle, I typically see five degrees difference in temperature on a still night, due mainly to asphalt and heat escaping from houses.
Berkeley Earth makes no correction for this huge problem.
Heat reflected off buildings can also melt snow, which then allows the ground to absorb and release more heat. I have energy efficient windows that reflect a large portion of sunlight, enough that it melted the vinyl siding on my garage.
Yea, those that claim UHI isn’t that much of a factor should explain why the snow on the roofs of houses over the walls melts before that on the eves or overhangs. Why one can tell a well insulated home from one that is not so well insulated just by looking at the relative snow melt on their roofs. And how ice dams form in gutters.
what a conundrum…..
dear Lord…….
https://twitter.com/Dimashki4/status/566920600443428864/photo/1
Didn’t you mean to say ‘All?hu Akbar’?
And Obama had the Unmitigated Gall to lecture christians on deeds from a thousand years ago at the National Prayer Breakfast yet his Department of Defence, FBI and other departments have gotten rid of the term Radical Islam because it is Politically Incorrect?
http://media.breitbart.com/media/2015/02/obama-praying-smile-AP-640×480.jpg
Look at the shit eatting grin on the S.O.B.s face (and I insult dogs comparing his mother to a female dog)
Dear liberals: Please stop trying to save President Obama from the idiotic remarks he made about the Crusades and moral equivalence at the National Prayer Breakfast. (Breitbart does a fine job of reaming Obama)
Give me a break! Events on both sides from 1,000 years ago have little bearing of what is going on today. When is the last time a Christian chopped of a Moslem’s head or burned someone alive? Or destroyed two huge buildings with airplanes?
UM we destroyed entire CITIES with bombs including 2 nuclear bombs which killed mainly civilians: women, children, the elderly etc.
What about firing tons of depleted uranium into the desert….causing thousands of child births to deformed infants, some born without skin, and other radioactivity related deformities.
A US major, Scott Ritter, who headed up a weapons inspection program in Iraq labelled it as barbaric. He was (is) a christian
Doug Rokke, the scientist who headed up the US depleted uranium weapons program, also a christian, now speaks loudly against it’s use, both in civillian areas and militarised zones
It might not be such a graphic method of murder as a beheading, but death by cancer cannot be any more pleasant
Prof Doug Rokke on DU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQcCWaLXXJI
Maj Scott Ritter, on why Iraq was not about WMDs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVjSwGnIUII
emsnews
We didn’t start those wars but we helped in Europe and were the primary belligerent that ended the war against Japan and afterwards it was the US that carried by far the largest burden of reforming and rebuilding those conquered nations.
It is so easy for people to sit here now and condemn the war and the conduct of it when their own precious asses weren’t on the line. When they have no idea what it was really all about nor even understand that the stakes were survival of the nation.
Allow me to transcribe a little piece from the conclusion of an excellent book by a B-29 bomber pilot Gordon Bennett Robinson who was there. ‘Bringing the Thunder’. http://www.amazon.com/Bringing-Thunder-Missions-Stackpole-Military/dp/0811733335
………”There was a further aspect of not understanding-A failure to comprehend who and what our foes were…………………Then there were the people. We fought an enemy who was completely and absolutely uncivilized, unprincipled, cruel, inhuman, and sadistic. They brazenly, contemptuously, and boldly demonstrated all these attributes during their fourteen-year-long attempt to conquer East Asia and the Pacific Rim. The atrocities against the Chinese and other East Asian peoples were reported in the U.S. new media in the late 30s, but the young men of my generation, approaching college age, while noting the reports and the events, really pretty much ignored them. The barbarism had occurred or was occurring, on the other side of the world-Asians doing things to other Asians………..We didn’t see how such a conflict could affect us……
They killed people- almost all civilians-indiscriminately: men, women, children, old young, and the unborn. It has been estimated that as many as 350,000 non-combatants were slaughtered just for amusement by the Japanese soldiers in Nanking.
They rounded up tens of thousands of Chinese and then, herding them into fields, mowed them down with machine gun fire. The soaked them-alive-in gasoline and immolated them. The threw babies into the air, impaling them on bayonets as the fell, or threw them-alive-into pots of boiling water. They rounded up pregnant women, stripped them, and then used their bellies as targets for bayonet practice, or they placed bets on the sex of the fetus about to tumble from its mother’s womb cut out with a Japanese sword or bayonet………they would round up groups of men, strip them, and then castrate them, tossing severed testicles into the street to be devoured by packs of hungry dogs…..
There have been postwar writers who have characterized these atrocities as being exclusive acts of a rogue army, but all high Japanese officials, both military and civilian, knew about it and condoned it, including the emperor. In 1937, an incident of tow Japanese officer having a decapitating contest between themselves was widely publicized in the Japanese newspapers with the score being recorded for them as 105 and 106. They couldn’t decide which has passed the 100 mark first so the extended the contest another 50. They were characterized in the newspapers as “heros” and “brave warriors.” Brave warriors? For decapitating defenseless, unarmed human beings? ………. Don’t tell me the Japanese people didn’t know about all these atrocities. They supported the Japanese Imperial Army wholeheartedly even while devouring this kind of publicity…………
American prisoner deaths in the German P.O.W. camps averaged 1.1 percent, but deaths in the Japanese P.O.W. camps averaged 37 percent.
In May 1945, doctors at Kyushu University subjected eight B-29 crewment who were shot down over Tachiari to vivisection. They removed the airmen’s organs while they were still alive. These men were from the Marvin S. Watkins and Ralph E. Miller crews of the 6th Squadron of the 29th Bomb Group. The doctors cut out lungs, livers, and stomachs; they stopped blood flow in an artery to see how long death took; with one crewman, they drained the blood out of one side of him and pumped sea water in the other side of him-just to see what would happen. They dug holes in one airman’s skull and then stuck knives into the living brain-again just to see what would happen. All of this when the men were still alive………..
Most B-29 crewmen taken prisoner were murdered-either by the mobs who captured them or by the depraved guards who imprisoned them. Even after the Emperors surrender speech, the killing of American prisoners continued. The Osaka Kempei Tai commander ordered over fifty B-29 crewman beheaded following the speech. the same day Japanese guards at Fukuoka chopped sixteen airmen to death with their swords……….”
The descriptions I have transcribed here don’t even come close to describing the pure barbarity and extensive nature of the atrocities. And then there was the war fighting it’s self. What was it like to be an antiaircraft gunner on the USS Franklin CV-13 on 19 March 1945 or any of the 100s of other ships attacked by Kamikazes and stand at your post as certain death hurled towards you?
There is a simple fact of war and battles that cannot be denied. Shorter is always better no matter how intense and deadly the action. The quicker it ends the less people that die.
Thanks Rah, you saved me a lot of typing.
It’s fun telling half a story, but not honest. My family has served since the Revolutionary War, and sacrificed lives defending the country and values we hold dear. My own father died as a result of exposure to Agent Orange. He was not bitter, and would not have changed a thing. My father understood that for men to be free, sacrifices must be made. We all mourned his passing but we honor his sacrifices by not belittling the work our military took on, selflessly, to ensure that future generations were not slaves to cruel tyrants.
But some folks just aren’t deep enough to get that.
Gator
Those that would be critical at a minimum owe it to their ancestors and those that paid the price and carried the heavy burden of war to learn the history, the REAL history of it, and try to comprehend the way it really was, BEFORE they make their judgments. Go walk a mile in their shoes so to speak. That is what history is really all about.
Of all of our nations wars I have studied our own Civil War more than any other and I still cannot comprehend the mindset of men, cousins, fathers, and uncles, advancing shoulder to shoulder in line of battle stepping over the bodies of their dead and dying life long friends and relatives, to face the very thing that had cut them down.
The warriors of WW II were not the warriors of our Civil War. They were not the same people! Just as we are not the same people that the WW II generation was. And yet there is the common bond of country and cultures which bind us to them and we who would judge their actions owe them the debt of the benefit of the doubt until we are sure they don’t deserve it.
All I’m saying is, when it comes to weapons, the West has some of the nastiest, and uses them indiscriminately.
When the only justification of war is fear, then we have much to worry about.
“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”
— Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
All I’m saying is, when it comes to weapons, the West has some of the nastiest, and uses them indiscriminately.
Ever hear the phrase ‘War is Hell’? This ain’t little league baseball. Nasty weapons are what end wars, not air soft or squirt guns. Fear is one of the greatest weapons an army can wield. The Gurkhas have used long knives and fear for centuries, and successfully cleared areas without a fight, because the enemy was too frightened to stick around.
We don’t go to war seeking a tie. We go to war to break things and kill people, in as lopsided a manner as possible. ‘Proportional Force’ is the dumbest idea I have ever heard of when it comes to doing battle, it only means higher body counts, and longer conflicts.
And as for ‘indiscriminately’ using force, that’s what our enemies do. Strapping bombs to retarded girls, blowing up houses of worship, blowing up markets, attacking cafes, bringing down skyscrapers full of innocent civilians, shooting up schools full of children, and then there is that cage.
I understand what a war is, I am an ex soldier
But when it isn’t happening in your own country, and you feel the moral obligation to go to another country to perform those acts, what you are effectively saying is that you accept that another country who deems the morality of your nation to be slightly askew has the right to come to your country to correct it.
Indeed, it would appear that that is exactly what you believe the bombers have done already in the USA….ergo, fighting fire with fire.
I predict the winner to be the fire (and/or the companies involved in the manufacture and distribution of it)
But when it isn’t happening in your own country, and you feel the moral obligation to go to another country to perform those acts…
Enough bullshit strawmen Chris. We responded to attacks on us and our allies.
Emsnews, that was government (controlled by the Banksters link ) who did that not the christian churches.
If you want a present day example you have to go to Ireland.
Emsnews you might want to see how we bad americans treated those we conquered in the last 80 years and compare it similarly to the rest of the world. Sad thing is the EPA by banning DDT caused more death than the Department of Defense over the last 50 years for war.
“Chris Barron says:
February 16, 2015 at 11:44 am
All I’m saying is, when it comes to weapons, the West has some of the nastiest, and uses them indiscriminately. ”
“Indiscriminate?” Yea, that’s why every brigade has a lawyer attached to it now when in Iraq or Afghanistan to “advise” the commander on when and where he can use his forces and weapons. And why our Military have operated under the most restrictive R.O.E (Rules of Engagement) in it’s history in Iraq and Afghanistan.
During WW II in west Europe the both sides continually targeted church spires because they were obviously the best Artillery OPs and ideal for snipers. In Iraq and Afghanistan, God forbid we would do such a thing to the Minarets.
And please tell me what weapon of war isn’t “nasty”?
What weapon of war isn’t nasty ?
I only said that the use of some indiscriminate weapons was wrong. I don’t stand alone on this , the UN, NATO and many world view organisations have banned indiscriminate weapons.
The definition of an indiscriminate weapon can easily be found. A guided missile is not generally an indiscriminate weapon because it can be aimed at an enemy….whereas other types of modern bombs are banned, because their operation is less accurate, and the wounded cannot be confined to simply the enemy fighters, but civilians too
Because depleted uranium affects innocent civilians long after the war has ended, and affects those yet to be born, it is indisciminate. If you think “all is fair in love and war”, stop complaining about the use of innocents of the enemy’s side as weapons.
More bullshit strawmwen from Chrissy.
We discriminated. We did not shoot at children, born or unborn.
Do you have anything other than bullshit?
First off the case that expended DU weapons so in fact have harmful long term effects has not been made yet. In fact there have been plenty of research and studies that have determined it to be innocuous. At this time is appears that airborne particles may be a significant risk.
But your talking to a guy that was in Europe during Chernobyl with his family. And remained stationed there for over 2 1/2 years afterward. A guy that saw the dairy herds replaced around Bad Tolz. Saw that the local jagermisters started refusing meat from the kill for payment. That found our teams previously zeroed out dosimeters, stored in the canvas cases in a metal airtight suitcase, that was in turn stored with other equipment in a packed in a plywood team box in our team room 1 story underground in a steel reinforced concrete building reading 1/2 rad when we got back 3 weeks after having stored them.
And yet here we are over 28 years later and my wife, my kids, and I have so far not shown a single health problem that could be associated with radiation exposure.
The US has worked extremely hard to prevent killing noncombatants in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sometimes it has cost the lives of our warriors. In addition we have spent Billions to improve their lives and their own situation. And yet here you are going on about how we are knowingly poisoning them with DU.
Rah point taken. You have not suffered radiation sickness symptoms. Ergo nobody in the vicinity of Chernobyl has. I used to be a smoker and I do not have cancer. Ergo smoking does not cause cancer.
I wouldn’t call it a statistically significant result ?
Gator the UN banned DU weapons. The US and UK denied using them. The proof of there use is everywhere.
They were banned because they’re considered to be indiscriminate.
Call it bullshit all you want, but do try to explain why the people involved have all come clean and said they were the wrong weapon on the day ?
Did you not think Doug Rokke explained it clearly enough in the video ?
Your strawman arguments are childish. There is no comparison.
Hindsight is 20/20, and idiots acting like they are luminaries by pointing out past mistakes are beyond annoying, they are a plague on rational thought.
Chrissy The Wind Turbine Barron is displaying an excellent example of a Soviet/KGB Psy-Ops.
From the book Willing Accomplices: How KGB Covert Influence Agents Created Political Correctness and Destroyed America by Kent Clizbe
Gator don’t try wriggling out of it by blaming me….you are the one wrongly saying it has something to do with hindsight, but the truth is that the secondary effects of DU weapons inflicted through radiation poisoning are well known and moves for a unilateral worldwide ban have been in effect for nearly 15 years
It is well known that when a DU weapon is used, as a tank buster, as a bullet, as a bomb payload, that there are inescapable long term secondary effects for the population in the area where the weapon has been used.
High incidences of blood and lung cancer in Serbia, following the admission by NATO that DU weapons had been used there during operation ‘Merciful Edge’ confirms what we fear about DU weapons. The effects of DU were well known long before they were used in Afghanistan and Iraq
Although the level of radiation from DU weapons is relatively small, one of the main issues is that like all heavy metals, such as arsenic and mercury, uranium is highly toxic to humans and as the DU fragments readily decompose the risk to groundwater sources remains a great concern.
If the DU penetrators were made of arsenic or contained mercury, should we be so carefree as to not show any concern ?
Another one of Chrissy’s sick fantasies destroyed below. One must wonder if Chrissy ever tires of being wrong. 😆
Look at that picture closely, THOSE ARE CHILDREN!!! The guy next to the cage has squated down so it is not obvious.
I think it’s clear that they are children, because we know what a child looks like.
The guy who is squatting is just squatting.
Berkeley Earth makes no correction for this huge problem.
And others only make a passing nod to it.
Sadly, we’re dealing with crazies that just can’t seem to get Grubered enough. Bezerkeley will just use this observation as yet another vehicle to promote population control.
When I grew up in Colorado in the 50’s and 60’s natural gas was in abundance and sold for about a nickel per mmbtu. There was no significant insulation in any of the older houses similar to the one I grew up in. As a consequence, during the winter the icicles reached from the roof of the house to the ground and were massive. Heat poured through the single pane windows and up through the roof because there was very little insulation to stop it. The single pane windows would ice up inside with thick layers of ice from the water vapor condensing. The gas panel ray heaters were firing constantly.
Insulation is better now and the icicles have disappeared. No ice forms on the inside of the double pane windows. And life is better. As a family, our carbon footprint decreased significantly; but the population increased and overall gas consumption is way up in the US. Does this energy contribute to UHI similar to concrete and asphalt? I don’t think so but it has to add to the energy budget of the local area until it conducts itself up and away.
It is somewhat similar to the situation with thermometers located near the exhausts of air conditioners. There is some temperature influence but that influence depends on proximity and whether that heat can be trapped in a way the influences the thermometer.
Just doing a quick think about this subject. Has anyone ever done any UHI surveys between summer and winter? This might filter out what heat is contributed by UHI and what heat by fuel consumption.
Cities are even hotter in summer. Asphalt and lots of glass reflecting the heat.
And air conditioning units pumping out huge amounts of heat too
“Berkeley Earth makes no correction for this huge problem.”
Why? Because to them it is a benefit, not a problem.
Many people do not realize now, but Watts had an agreement with Mueller to confidentially share station siting data with him — with the promise that the results of Mueller’s analysis would not be released until Watts had published his (Watts) paper and the data was cleaned up for proper analysis. Mueller broke the agreement and prematurely claimed that UHI effects were minimal.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/31/clarification-on-best-submitted-to-the-house/
Muller conned Watts big time. Even now some people say that Muller was once a sceptic. ! Which of course was all a lie, a facade.
Muller is about equal to Gleike in morality and ethics.
Muller is the same Muller who proposed the Nemesis “dark star” idea that went nowhere and should have ended his credibility as a scientist (like the nuclear winter thing did to Carl Sagan). That is a case of total speculation and coming up with a crow-barred uniformitarian idea to explain catastrophic events. It is amazing how ANYTHING uniformitarian gets an easy pass, no matter how outlandish the idea is – while simple catastrophic ideas (comets or NEOs impacting Earth) are seen as too close to Noah’s flood – and its Biblical implications – to be accepted.
I look at Muller as a goofy gadfly who got into a national lab early in his career and that they are stuck with until he retires. I don’t take anything he says seriously, unless someone serious happens to say the same thing. It seems like they just let him do his cartoon science and hope that someday they will be rid of him.
He is also someone who LOVES the attention, so he HAD to interject himself into the global warming issue, waving and screaming, “LOOK! Over HERE! Look at what I am doing!”
Nobody ever talks about the heat, when discussing global warming …….But as a species we produce such huge levels of heat that we must be warming the environment, if not the whole climate.
Home heating, office heating, factories, cars….even cooking, all heat the environment.
I wonder if the temperature stations located near roads record higher temperatures at times of rush hour….considering that vehicle engines in rush hour are running at only 20% efficiency, roughly 80% of the energy they consume is wasted as heat, escaping directly to the environment from the engine block and the radiator
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/heat-island-sprawl.html
“Summer land surface temperature of cities in the Northeast were an average of 7 °C to 9 °C (13°F to 16 °F) warmer than surrounding rural areas over a three year period, the new research shows. The complex phenomenon that drives up temperatures is called the urban heat island effect”
Disinformation and other Psy-ops in the USA and the UK
The UK was not spared the attention of the KGB.
British Targets </b
From the book Willing Accomplices: How KGB Covert Influence Agents Created Political Correctness and Destroyed America by Kent Clizbe
Ooohh I’m an ex KGB agent now. !
Care in the Community doesn’t reach far enough for some with special needs, eh Gail ? 😉
Don’t flatter yourself, you are only a useful idiot to the KGB.
Chris the Idiot says:
February 17, 2015 at 9:57 am
Gator don’t try wriggling out of it by blaming me….you are the one wrongly saying it has something to do with hindsight, but the truth is that the secondary effects of DU weapons inflicted through radiation poisoning are well known and moves for a unilateral worldwide ban have been in effect for nearly 15 years
Depleted Uranium: The Myth that Won’t Go Away
The issue of whether or not depleted uranium (DU) from U.S. Army tank shells poses a health threat to our troops and civilians in Iraq is in the news again. Reports by the New York Daily News earlier this week purport that some members of the New York Army National Guard are suffering skin rashes that may be linked to DU exposure.
Before we delve into these reports, however, let’s review what science knows about DU.
Uranium is one of the more abundant materials in the Earth’s crust. It is present in most rocks and soils as well as in many rivers and seawater. Useable uranium occurs naturally in nature as a pitchblende ore. Pitchblende is mildly radioactive, which means that it spontaneously emits alpha particles. The level of radioactivity is very low, however, so there is no threat from mining and transporting the ore, and in any case, alpha particles, which are nothing more than helium atoms stripped of their two electrons, pose no threat outside the body.
The uranium normally extracted from pitchblende consists of a mixture of two different forms of uranium, called isotopes: Uranium-235 (U235) and Uranium-238 (U238). About 99.3 percent of this extracted uranium is U238; only about 0.7 percent is U235, along with a vanishingly small percentage of four other isotopes. U235 is the basis of most current nuclear power generation.
Depleted Uranium results from the enriching of this natural uranium. Since most nuclear reactors use U235 to produce energy, natural uranium has to be enriched so the percentage of U235 is sufficiently high for a reaction to take place. Uranium used in civilian reactors is enriched to about 20 percent U235, but submarine power plants use Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) with at least 50 percent U235, and weapons-grade HEU is 90 percent or more U235.
When the 0.7 percent of U235 is removed from natural uranium, what remains is a silvery, very dense metal consisting of U238 plus a small percentage of U235 and a negligible percentage of the four other isotopes. We call this Depleted Uranium or DU.
Notice two things here: (1) “Natural” uranium is more radioactive than DU, because the ingredient with the higher level of radioactivity has been almost entirely removed from DU; (2) Since natural uranium is, itself, not dangerous, then the resultant DU must be even less dangerous. Notice also, that DU is very dense.
From actual measurements, if a tank crewman were to stay continuously inside a “heavy armor” tank that uses DU armor panels, fully loaded with only DU ammunition, with the gun pointed to the rear to maximize any exposure – 24 hours a day, 365 days a year – he would receive only about 25 percent of the permitted annual dose. Since nobody sits inside such a tank 24/7 for an entire year, exposure levels from realistic times, such as 900 hours per training year, are about the same dosage you might receive from cosmic radiation on a round-trip between New York and Los Angeles.
These are proven facts. They result from actual measurements that anyone can reproduce. They are not open to discussion, argument, or conjecture. They are what they are, and nobody can change them.
When Staff Sgt. Ray Ramos developed a skin rash, and exhibited symptoms of weakness as reported in the New York Daily News, doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center conducted a biopsy that revealed his rash came from Leishmaniasis, a disease spread by Iraqi sandflies, and contracted by hundreds of G.I.s in Iraq.
However, Ramos and several of his buddies from the 442nd Military Police Company thought they might have been contaminated by DU, and requested urine analyses. The Army refused to conduct these expensive tests, but when they eventually were conducted by an outside agency and paid for by the Daily News, traces of DU were found in some, but not all, of them.
So what? No matter what anybody says, there simply isn’t any way for DU to cause the symptoms Ramos was experiencing. Neither I nor the Army doctors are taking issue with the fact of his symptoms. After all, the rash was plainly visible. The point is, however, whatever caused it, it couldn’t have been DU.
The Daily News reported that Dr. Asaf Durakovic and his colleague Prof. Axel Gerdes conducted the independent tests from which the Daily News drew some of its conclusions.
Durakovic is a nuclear medicine expert who used to work for the Army before he got involved with what I call the Anti-Nuclear Coalition (ANC). Gerdes is a geologist at Goethe University in Frankfurt who specializes in things “nuclear.” He too is active in the ANC.
The ANC is a loosely knit informal group of organizations that share several commonalities. Among these is a total rejection of anything nuclear.
The ANC consists primarily of left-wing, pseudoscientific environmental organizations whose core membership draws on the disaffected fringe elements of our society. Unfortunately, these organizations have large membership rolls made up of ordinary people who do not understand the nature of radioactivity, the greenhouse effect, atmospheric ozone, or the myriad of other causes championed by the ANC. Consequently, members are duped into supporting with their dollars and their votes scientifically untenable positions staked out by the ANC.
Over the past decades, the ANC has conducted a vast public campaign to frighten people about radiation. Its efforts have been so successful that, for example, the Germans have given up their nuclear power generation option for the time being, and most Americans and Europeans will tell you, if asked, that nuclear power is too dangerous to justify its use.
Scientists like Durakovic and Gerdes have become very large fish in a very public bowl, where they are able to push their private agendas under the guise of legitimate scientific research and popular support. They know perfectly well the minimal danger DU really poses, but why kill the goose that lays the golden eggs of research money, publicity, and political power?
Interestingly, there really is a potentially significant danger posed by DU, a toxic chemical problem very similar to that posed by lead when lead and lead oxide particles are inhaled or otherwise ingested into the system. Because lead is so soft, it is not a practical material for armor. DU, on the other hand, is very, very dense and hard, so it makes an ideal material both for armor, and for shells designed to pierce armor.
When a DU shell partially vaporizes on impact, or when DU armor similarly vaporizes when struck, some of the resultant particulate material can and does find its way into the bodies of those nearby. Normally, the body readily flushes this material right back out, but if the contamination is sufficiently dense, then problems can develop. Note, however, that these problems have nothing to do with radiation – it is strictly a chemical problem, one that is well-understood and easy to control.
The ANC is scaring the general public and many uninformed soldiers and their families with its well-funded propaganda campaign against DU. It has been so successful that last year the European Parliament called for a moratorium using DU.
The important thing for everybody to understand is that no one anywhere is trying to hide anything – there simply is nothing to cover up. When Army physicians resist testing for DU related radioactive contamination, the only reason is that they already know DU is not a problem. Far better that they probe into the real causes of whatever afflicts men and women returning from the front.
“DU poisoning” is analogous to “lead poisoning” from the old West. The only real danger is when a DU bullet pierces armor to penetrate a body – hopefully one of the bad guys. Such DU doses are nearly always fatal.
Chasing the DU myth is a silly waste of time. Our troops in Iraq have many concerns, from the terrorists and insurgents attacking them to a number of legitimate health concerns such as Leishmaniasis. DU is not one of them.
Once again Chrissy is talking out of his ass.
More info for Chrissy the idiot…
Studies in 2005 and earlier have concluded that DU ammunition has no measurable detrimental health effects.
A 1999 literature review conducted by the Rand Corporation stated: “No evidence is documented in the literature of cancer or any other negative health effect related to the radiation received from exposure to depleted or natural uranium, whether inhaled or ingested, even at very high doses,”[138] and a RAND report authored by the U.S. Defense department undersecretary charged with evaluating DU hazards considered the debate to be more political than scientific.[139]
A 2001 oncology study concluded that “the present scientific consensus is that DU exposure to humans, in locations where DU ammunition was deployed, is very unlikely to give rise to cancer induction”.[140] Former NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson stated in 2001 that “the existing medical consensus is clear. The hazard from depleted uranium is both very limited, and limited to very specific circumstances”.[141]
A 2002 study from the Australian defense ministry concluded that “there has been no established increase in mortality or morbidity in workers exposed to uranium in uranium processing industries… studies of Gulf War veterans show that, in those who have retained fragments of depleted uranium following combat related injury, it has been possible to detect elevated urinary uranium levels, but no kidney toxicity or other adverse health effects related to depleted uranium after a decade of follow-up.”[142] Pier Roberto Danesi, then-director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Seibersdorf +Laboratory, stated in 2002 that “There is a consensus now that DU does not represent a health threat”.[143]
The IAEA reported in 2003 that, “based on credible scientific evidence, there is no proven link between DU exposure and increases in human cancers or other significant health or environmental impacts,” although “Like other heavy metals, DU is potentially poisonous. In sufficient amounts, if DU is ingested or inhaled it can be harmful because of its chemical toxicity. High concentration could cause kidney damage.” The IAEA concluded that while depleted uranium is a potential carcinogen, there is no evidence that it has been carcinogenic in humans.[144]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium#Studies_indicating_negligible_effects
Even Wiki says it ain’t so Chrissy! 😆
Now go and find some Bigfoot video. Or maybe a long walk on a short pier.
Make that long walk on an Lake Ontario pier.
A perusal of this post and the comments did not seem to mention the summertime analog for this lost building heat – air conditioners.
By their very design, air conditioners take the heat out of buildings and expel it out of doors. We all know the effect if we have ever stood near the exhaust of an air conditioner. (That is the reason that met stations are not supposed to be sited near air conditioners, so they recognize the problem. But placing the met stations away from the direct blast may not be sufficient, not if there are air conditioners everywhere.) The total heat in the indoor-outdoor system is more or less the same. (Only the waste heat of the compressor is added to the system overall.) But the heat is REDISTRIBUTED from the internal space to the external space, thus adding heat energy to the very outdoor atmospheric volume being measured by thermometers in met stations. The indoor-outdoor balance is disturbed, even if the overall is not. But the excess heat is now outdoors.
The more buildings (and floors), the more air conditioning. The more air conditioning, the more watts added to the atmosphere. IOW, the bigger the city, the more heat energy pushed out where the met stations can measure it all.
Notice though, that the displacing of this heat energy has nothing directly to do with CO2 levels in the atmosphere. It is an element of “Land Use”, not CO2.
No, this is not the only “skewing” effect of land use, and it is not the major portion of land use, but it does exist, and it is one that gets ignored. And it is FAR higher percentage of land use UHI than CO2 is as a percentage of the atmosphere. If CO2 at 0.000400 of the atmosphere is important, then air conditioners are important, too.
I worked in offices in two sweltering cities that had NO air conditioning back during the 1966-1972 period, and those offices were more the norm than the exception. Try to find a non-air-conditioned office in a city now! I think it is fairly clear that the amount of air conditioning since around 1970 has multiplied by at least ten-fold, if not 100-fold. What percentage of air conditioners exist in cities? 75%? 85%? 90%? More? That, I think, parallels the perceived rise in global temps since 1970.
One other point: The warming has been attributed more to nighttime lows being not as low, rather than to daytime highs being higher. Thus, this “Air Conditioner Effect” is addressing the OTHER part of the warming. What does that mean? That cities might (according to the met stations) be cooler now than they might otherwise be? That cities overall balance might be globally cooling? With more efficient buildings in the first place, perhaps they reflect more heat energy than buildings in 1970; that is not unlikely. Without quantifying this, all I have is my engineering sense that that heat energy being measured at the met stations is not being measured and that it is an unknown. (I’ve only heard of one paper that addressed this, and I subjectively don’t agree with its conclusions. With only one paper, to me there has been no replication.)
You heard it here first: “Air Conditioner Effect”.
We are intentionally pushing heat energy out where the met stations can be affected by it. The effect is NOT zero.
Roy Spencer had two really good articles on the Urban Heat Island Effect:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/03/global-urban-heat-island-effect-study-an-update/
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2014/06/las-vegas-poster-child-for-the-urban-heat-island-effect-updated-corrected/
I know Dr Spencer wanted to do a paper on his findings.
There are also the micro-climate issues. See my comment at the bottom of Steve’s article UHI Deniers
URL: https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/02/14/uhi-deniers/