Climate Change

There is no doubt the climate is changing. The problem is which climate science is being published and provided to people. Without a complete story people cannot decide whether to prepare for increasingly hotter or colder weather nor can they tell which politicians are lying with an agenda in mind. Will you be supporting ideas and taxes that help you or enrich politicians and their friends?

Volcanoes

Consider. Recent reports of 2013 volcanic eruptions show 80+ eruptions this year. The average range of eruptions is 50 to 60 per year. 2013 has seen about a 50% increase.

Each eruption throws millions of tons of ash and gases into the atmosphere.  That mean more reflective particulate matter, a big concern in the late 70’s when everyone thought we were going to freeze to death from a coming ice age due to manmade particulates in the atmosphere. The USA’s EPA was formed to correct the problem and done an amazingly good job of achieving that goal within the USA.

But, one volcano can release several times more material in a day or even hours than humans can release in a decade, even at 70’s pollution rates.

Sulfur Dioxide is a common gas released by volcanoes. It is highly reflective when it forms an aerosol compound in the stratosphere.

All this means that we will likely see a 2C drop in global temperatures from 2013 volcanoes. How long will such a drop last? When Mt. Penatubo erupted in 1992 it dropped global temperatures 0.6C – 1.5F for 2 years depending on one’s information source and other effects lasted for years. That was just one big volcano.

Have you seen any of this 2013 information reported?

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Second Life Tier – Again?

Hamlet has an article on New World Notes about the loss of revenue we think the Lab is experiencing. See: Second Life’s Private Sim Revenue in 2013 Forecast at $48M, Down From $61M in 2010. Hamlet points to an article by Ener Hax: Second Life’s private sim watch, which is based on Tyche Shepard’s Grid Survey.

From the information we have it is pretty easy to surmise that 2011’s revenue from private sim leasing was about US$60 million. Using the same type of data we can surmise that 2013’s revenue is about $48 million. This is only region leasing fees income. That is a loss of about $12 million per year or about a 20% loss. Do you think management might notice that? For sure.

There are some other factors to consider in the overall equation. Wizard Gynoid points out in Ener’s article’s comments; in 2009 the Lab’s income was US$80-100 million with a 50% profit margin and roughly 2/3’s if the income was from region leases/tier. 

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