George Rebane
Our power here in western Nevada County went out at 315am. We set our phone alarms and got up at 630am, and started the generator. Turning on our local KNCO, we were advised to remain calm, safe, and that everything in the region was canceled for the day. A PG&E lady came on to read some prepared pap and informed us that power “may be restored” starting tomorrow noon. Another local politico advised us all to “be patient”.
I have been continuously checking the winds, both current and predicted, and found that there was no wind, measured and predicted, in the Sierra for the next 48 hours that exceeded 10mph. Whatever ‘high winds’ (20-25mph) there were to be, were on the central valley floor. In fact, the entire northwest of the US is unusually calm, save for that small Sacramento Valley floor pocket of light winds. Here in the Nevada City region it is DEAD CALM as is seldom seen – not even a leaf moving. You can do your own checking here.
For all intents and “public safety” purposes, there is no evidence that power needs to be shut off in these foothills. The outage, predicted and delivered, appears purely for punitive political purposes that is endorsed by a progressive leftwing government whose longstanding MO has been to get Californians to accept more and more abusive government control over their lives without so much as a murmur. In a state where a free and independent people dwell, government and their monopoly utilities would at this time have turned power back on while broadcasting apologies for having turned it off for no reasonable purpose.
But long ago that ceased to be California, where we have been taught to hunker down and accept everything from the most onerous and useless/stifling environmental regulations, highest gas and fuel prices in the Union, sky high taxes, piles of human shit and needles covering our city streets and sidewalks, crumbling roads and bridges, welfare/homeless/illegal alien capital of the country, broken public education system, corrupt (and unfunded) public employee pension system, historical exodus of companies and middle-class wage earners, …, and more of the same on the way.
We now have an under-educated ‘woke’ electorate who are fed a daily diet of pap from our lamestream outlets, putting the blame for their dire straits on the state’s successful businesses and the well-to-do who can still afford to live here. These are guilty of taking from the poor and giving to the rich, and according to all Democrat politicians (especially those in Sacramento and running for president) they must be squeezed much much more in order to redistribute their ill-gotten assets and achieve social justice in a fundamentally transformed America.
And now we are being conditioned to patiently accept the power distribution schedules of third-world countries as the latest new norm for our once golden state.
[10oct19 update] California’s historic Great Blackout continues. The people are finally getting sufficiently pissed since no one has seen any dangerous winds in NorCal that might affect public safety. The PG&E officials are keeping a stiff upper lip and passing the bullshit. (more here) Here in the Sierra foothills there has been no wind all night, and looking out my window at our forest, there is not a single leaf moving – dead air. Our politically punitive punishment continues (The Federalist agrees). Which brings us to the whole deal about the National Weather Service and NOAA.
These guys (again) totally blew it on their prediction of high winds. You have to understand that these are our crack meteorologists, weather mavens, and, yes, climate scientists who run a pot load of computer models, all of which basically operate the same way. They solve a bunch of hairy atmospheric heat transfer and circulation equations numerically in an iterative manner. That means that there is no set of equations that take in current weather station data, and a specified future time – e.g. tomorrow at 6pm – and give you the weather (say, temp, humidity, wind speed/direction) in a one-shot solution.
Instead you have to divvy up the atmosphere into small cubes (smaller is better), use some physics to make sure they all tie at a given moment in time, say, now, and then increment time by a skosh, say, a minute or two (again smaller is better), and then compute what happens in each of the little cubes of atmosphere. Make all the cubes tie again, and then repeat the process for the next time step – this is called iteration. And the whole shebang is known as numerical weather prediction which is explained in more detail here.
So let’s say that we’re going to compute weather for western US for the next few days, that requires us to look at what’s happening over around 1/8 of the globe, in the northern hemisphere mostly to the west of us. If we divvy up the atmosphere into 2Kft cubes up to, say, 30Kft, then we’re going to have to crunch the numbers on about 2,575,000,000 of such cubes that all have to fly in tight formation where they touch each other (each cube has six faces). And that’s only for one instant in time. Now if we have to do that for, say, every 2 minutes going forward, you get the idea of the magnitude of number crunching that’s needed, and why the job is relegated to super-computers.
It needs to be said, because it’s never mentioned by the climate hysterics, that every succeeding iteration for every cube accumulates error due to a bunch of realworld factors that include weather measurement errors, model equation approximations, finite word length (not enough digits in the crunched numbers), discretization error (the cubes and time steps are too coarse), … . We won’t get into the existing errors in the equations attempting to capture known science, and forget about the atmospheric science we still don’t know. The bottom line is that such discretized, iterated models accumulate errors which grow with each iteration. That’s why it’s almost impossible to have reliable/accurate long term (say, 10-day) weather predictions. And hopefully this gives you numerate non-techies and idea of why the weather is calm when it is supposed to be red flag windy. As I’ve mentioned above, the power shut-off policy includes a punitive political layer, which is another whole part of this threatened new norm of turning us into a third-world country every fall.
Let me conclude this diatribe by pointing out that NOAA’s general circulation models (GCMs) all operate on the same computational principles outlined above. And to predict the evolution of climate, the GCMs have to take into account a whole lot more parameters, many more sub-models of additional (poorly known) physical processes, deal with landmass and ocean effects, cover the entire globe, solve for many more variables, and iterate time out into future decades. So you can get an idea why none of the dozen or more competing GCMs give the same answer and can accrue enormous errors the further out they project.
After all this is said and done, the final nail in the GCMs’ predictability coffin is that climate is a stochastic process that requires a lot of fancy probabilistics in the equations, and all the GCMs are deterministic number crunchers – they iterate to one answer for each of the cubes, and give you no idea what the error is in the delivered answer. To attempt to glean an error, you’d have to ‘Monte Carlo’ a given GCM, running a gazillion simulations into the future by sampling its bazillion parameters from their presumed probability distributions. No one has ever done that because 1) of the scope of the problem (it’s BIG), and 2) it would give us a politically incorrect appreciation for all the bought and paid for climate hysterics that we have heard over the last 25+ years. Best just to panic with everyone else so you can show them that you too are woke.
Meanwhile, bitch to your elected reps about why you have no power.
[later, 245pm] I tried the PGE website again; this time it was almost working. Going to my home on their outage map, and clicking on my location, the following ‘Outage Details’ came up –
As you can see (click on the image), these guys are really idiots in the mold of govt bureaucrats which is what monopoly public utilities become in fairly short order. They declare that the cause of our power outage is “Unknown”, and promise that “PG&E will be assessing the cause.” The biggest mystery is why their top and middle managers are not being quickly replaced today. This outage should provide their board and HR departments sufficient cause to start looking for some new blood with brains.
rebanesruminations.com 
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