also looking for an old camp that has been shut down but not re-developed.

I am looking for rural. I have spent some time at a friend's family horse farm outside of Talladega. yes, I will research the river situation. any white water?

You mean, they don't KNOW they have a heavily redacted and modified version of the bible?

New site "Real Science" - much better!

Jan

I live in Pleasant Grove. The tornado of April 27, 2011, that also wrecked Tuscaloosa, missed my home by a quarter of a mile.
If you scroll around on the Google map link you'll find me close to Birmingham on the right.
I have not read your novels. So what kind of settings do you need? For landscapes, Alabma has a bit of a Southeast state's everything. It's hilly in the north and flat past Montgomery to the Gulf.
City scenes? The Southside of Birmingham is hip. Nearby Bessemer is a run-down mess.
Plenty of Mayberrys down here.
Centreville in Bibb (dry) County where I was stuck too long back in the 70s should still be one.
There's a lot of great river scenery especially north of where I live.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pleasa...

Oh, I like this map better than what I thought I had.

The problem with "tweaking" everyone's diesel engines to run on vegetable oil is the cost of making these alterations to a very large number of existing vehicles, and getting the alterations approved by the DoT (emissions check, and with the new truck standards that will be expensive). You may get by with changing your pickup to run on this stuff, but the biggest users of diesel are the enormous trucking fleets, and there's no way this change can be accommodated cheaply. In all probability a blend of diesel and vegetable oil might be given a pass. One other point is that it's very unlikely that enough vegetable oil can be produced to completely replace the supply of diesel now being used.

Ethanol has had an impact across the agricultural spectrum, and pumping up vegetable oil production to divert even enough to be used as a supplement will likely have a negative impact on everyone's grocery bill as well. Your figure of $4/gal tells me that the market isn't going to induce farmers to get into the game against diesel at $2.50/gal, and I don't think any in Galt's Gulch would be screaming for a government subsidy.

Global warming believers are the true deniers. They deny that the world’s temperatures have ever changed. They deny that there have been Ice Ages. They deny that there have been inter-glacial warm periods when crocodiles, elephants and lions roamed in Europe. There is plenty of evidence that Neanderthal men lived among hippopotamus, African elephant, spotted hyena, lion leopard, etc. during interglacial warm periods. Paleolithic plant studies have shown that global warm periods produce more rainfall and lush vegetation. The opposite is of course true of ice ages. In other words, warmer leads to more food and colder leads to less food. Do the climate change controllers think that they can keep global temperatures from changing forever? During recorded history, there have been many warm and cold periods. Vikings colonized Greenland during a warm period and had to leave 100 years later because of cold. There was a mini-ice-age during the nineteenth century. Plants rely on CO2 for growth and convert it into O2 and H2O. The climate change worriers are using several logical fallacies in their arguments. The fallacy of distraction from ignorance. Reducing CO2 emissions is not known to reduce global temperatures so it must be true. The slippery slope of increasingly unacceptable consequence is drawn, most of which are figments of someone’s imagination. The proposition is argued to be true because it is widely held to be true. The person’s character is attacked in the false dilemma that skeptics believe in a flat earth.

hey dino, we are thinking of setting our third novel in Alabama. Whereabouts are you? It's going to be all about black ops EPA. got a location suggestion for us?

Agreed.

My point was if one wants renewables, one should want vegetable oil based diesel engines. (Assuming one is not an ignorant zealot, seeking solar, wind or wave power because it is "cool") Economies for all other forms pale by comparison. Of course fossil fuels are cheaper, but not by that much. Vegetable oil is ~$4/gal, not too far behind diesel, and you don't need to desulfurize it.

The problem with vegetable oils is the injectors, particularly the new direct injectors. They rely on the much lower viscosity of diesel fuel to get good atomization. However, there is no problem with a diesel engine running on straight vegetable oil (SVO), if the injector is tweaked for it.

If one was to really believe fossil fuel needed replacement, an investment in this technology is far superior to $400M in solar panels, or worse yet, wind turbines.

Yeah, Flathead Lake is probably the remnant. Where I am in the Northeast we examined glacial lake deposits above 600' at todays sea level and I live at 460'. When the ice dam broke it was spectacular. Just like when the great dam on the Columbia broke and scoured the soil to bedrock.

There is a reason that nearly all of the biodiesel companies are out of business, and it's the simple fact that none of them have been able to beat the cost of regular diesel. The self-deception was a result of looking at "home brewed" biodiesel made from used cooking oils, where the food preparation establishments welcomed someone hauling away their trash. The concoction was easily made, and naturally cheap.

Mixing agriculture and energy sciences hasn't worked out so well. While the theoretical BTU production of oils like canola looks good on paper, the raw product isn't a perfect substitute for regular diesel, and the added post production processing is what breaks the bank.

Ethanol is a putrid substitute, allowed because the toxic aldehydes that are a combustion product, while harmful to people, aren't in the government list of pollutants. Like all of the "clean" energy sources, ethanol production is heavily subsidized. There's a good reason Brazil is reverting to gasoline, now that it's found a rich oil supply off its own shores.

Here in Texas we are having a wet spring. So what does that mean towards global warming? Nothing........ Coal is how San Antonio gets there power...

indeed, the effect of volcanoes is well known and proven. A supervolcano in the Pacific caused a mini ice age for 3 years back in the early 1800's.

Clearly engineers are not being consulted to work the problem. If people want clean solar power, vegetable oil in diesel engines works just fine. It is the highest energy per acre, by a huge margin, and it is almost carbon neutral. Ethanol is no substitute.

Solar cells are a not ready yet, and wind is a joke. Nuclear is a great transition, but imaginations stand in the way of solutions.

We have blown untold sums of socialist monies on what the cartoon-watching crowd consider "green" technologies.

Gnng! That's what I get for being too lazy to copy the link instead of retying it. It's https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/

I get all the LDS stuff I need from the pairs of well-dressed young men who are on a mission. My late father-in-law went to Lutheran seminary, and often had great fun with them, examining Scripture in Hebrew or Greek, and showing them the portions of the KJV from which Smith cribbed parts of the Book of Mormon.

Thanks for the links - but all I found at the latter is LDS info. Can you give me a hint on where the climate info is?

Jan

Wife reads iceagenow.info and steven.goddard.wordpress.com

She is currently working on a project to request proof-of-concept implementation of any plans intended to shut down our access to energy.

Must be why I've used more propane to heat my home the last three years.

I have found another article on climate change - one that is worthy of its own thread. Please see Common Core and Climate Change.

Jan

We the humans need to leave Mother Earth alone. She is quite capable of taking care of herself. If we the humans ever actually become the problem that is purported by the teeth sucking Liberals Mother Earth will shake us off like a hand full of ticks!

I have a cure for the supposed global climate change plant lots of trees.

would the connection not be through the air? . the
rainforest creates zillions of tons of O2 which we
breathe up here, yes? -- j

I don't think I changed the topic. I simply introduced some "unpleasant" facts into the discussion. You can argue the credibility of weather modeling until the cows come home, and it won't make a convert out of the climate change believers, but when faced with real numbers they can confirm themselves, some have actually revised their position.

Some European countries (e.g., Italy) are now renewing interest in Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs). There is also growing interest in the USA too. Small Modular Reactors (SMR) based on MSR technology have many advantages over more conventional solid-fueled reactors, including real-time separation of fission products from the fuel circulation loop, and with online addition of fissile fuel, and fertile depletion, you can effectively use all the uranium you mine, not just one half of one percent (natural uranium is 0.71 wt% U-235, the rest being U-238). This puts energy reserves for nuclear power into the millennia, not just decades.

these climate models are subject to tweaking, and
like East Anglia, it has been done. . this whole area
is a big worldwide scam to tear down the first world
to do a Cloward-Piven reshuffle of power, IMHO. -- j

Glacial Lake Missoula?