We have 40 year old cedar lap siding and I have to fill cracks with wood putty prior to applying an opaque brown stain. Some of the gaps above windows and between the horizontal siding and the angled siding beneath a gable are too wide for putty, so I am using an exterior non-hardening caulk. But knotholes everywhere need attention. If they look like they may be loose or soon will loosen I apply an exterior wood glue over and around the knot. The actual painting is the easy part and I am happy to do that with temps in the 50s.

It is Thanksgiving Day over here and I am thankful that by back is better, that my knees are still adequate for me to climb a ladder, that I have not fallen off the ladder, etc. Also, that we did not elect Romney and that the Republicans lost seats in both the House and Senate. Meager blessings for meager times.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

(Seriously, talk about plot lines that could easily be jettisoned? All it does it provide a feeder line to start "Accustomed to her face".)


-----
sapere aude

yeah, i know i got the titles muddled, sorry

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

Ad astra per aspera

Before scientists would take greenhouse effect warming seriously, they had to get past a counter-argument of long standing. It seemed certain that the immense mass of the oceans would quickly absorb whatever excess carbon dioxide might come from human activities. Roger Revelle discovered that the peculiar chemistry of sea water prevents that from happening. His 1957 paper with Hans Suess is now widely regarded as the opening shot in the global warming debates. This essay not only describes Revelle's discovery in detail, but serves as an extended example of how research found essential material support and intellectual stimulus in the context of the Cold War.

...

Meanwhile Revelle was studying (as usual with collaborators under an ONR contract) the results of a May 1955 test of a nuclear "depth bomb" that the Navy and AEC had exploded a few thousand feet underwater. His team found that the radioactive residues had spread out in remarkably thin sheets, stretching a hundred square kilometers but only a meter thick. Many years later Revelle recalled his surprise that "the water from one layer doesn't exchange with the water from another layer." It was one more example of how the huge resources of government nuclear programs made novel observational methods and data available for many kinds of research. In a 1955 report using the depth bomb test data, Revelle's group concluded that "radioactive wastes introduced into the upper layer might remain there for many years, and would be diluted by a volume of water only a fiftieth to a hundredth the volume of the ocean."(17) The same would apply to almost anything else introduced into the upper layer -- including CO2, a compound for which the Navy and AEC had no interest whatsoever.

...

The draft calculations by the three teams had all addressed mainly the steady-state rates of exchange between atmosphere and ocean. But the crucial question for global warming was a transient effect, the net flux of new CO2 into the water. And as Revelle knew from the carbonate chemistry problems he had been rethinking since the Bikini atoll studies of 1946, sea water is hypersensitive to change. To match an increased level of CO2 in the atmosphere, the number of CO2 molecules in the water would rise only as one factor in a cascading readjustment of the proportions of many types of molecules. In technical terms, sea water is a "buffered" solution, resisting the change in acidity that an increase of carbonates would involve. When some CO2 molecules were absorbed, their presence would alter the balance through a chain of reactions, and in the end some CO2 molecules would be expelled back into the atmosphere. To reach the new equilibrium, Revelle now calculated, the water needed to absorb only about a tenth as much gas as a simple-minded calculation would suppose. While it was true that most of the CO2 molecules added to the atmosphere would wind up in the oceans within a few years, most of these molecules (or others already in the oceans) would promptly be evaporated out.

...

Another two years passed before Bert Bolin and Erik Eriksson explained the sea water buffering mechanism in clear terms and emphasized what it meant. Unlike Revelle, they figured industrial production would indeed climb exponentially, and they calculated that atmospheric CO2 would probably rise 25% by the end of the century. Now the small community of geophysicists began to grasp that they could not rely upon the oceans to absorb all the emissions of fossil fuels.

I know you're all fascinated by this advanced thinking...

You can't be me, I'm taken

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

In "closing" mode on one project. Plus managing more than dozen other projects. Ah, being an entrepreneur is hard work

Wind power