An Ambitious Project

If you've never had to pay a huge bill for electricity or natural gas or heating oil or propane, you've either been miraculously blessed or you haven't lived long enough. I have nothing against fossil fuels and I don't resent the companies that produce and deliver them. Such fuels are incredibly efficient at delivering unbelievably great amounts of "work" with unbelievably tiny amounts of waste. In fact, we've become rather too efficient at making them burn without leaving enough carbon dioxide to replenish the supply in the atmosphere.  Currently, the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is less than 4/10ths of one percent.  It would be far more beneficial to plant growth around the planet if it were closer to about a full three percent.  More on that subject further down the page.

A house on the way there

Twyla and I traveled to a remote spot in western NC to buy an old porcelain on steel wood cookstove. The house it was in was being renovated rebuilt, by a 70 year old Viet Nam veteran who served with special forces and Navy SEALS. (Hang the ridiculous celebrities of today, this is the kind of person that impresses the socks off of me.) The house was probably built sometime before 1900, judging by the exposed timbers and such.  I wish I had taken more pictures. It was at the very end of a road that was only gravel a half mile after the winding blacktop ended.  I'm talking about a single lane blacktop that you could only go 15 mph on, not because of a sign, but because of necessity, and you wouldn't want to go any faster than that for fear of missing out on the great scenery.  It was somewhere north of the French Broad River.

1913 Karr: most parts removed

The stove that we bought from this gentleman was a KARR model built in Illinois in 1913.  A comparable model stove in really good condition on eBay would sell for about $3,000. Twyla spent enough time looking on the internet when we were trying to decide on what stove to get. We found the add for this particular stove in a publication at the grocery store.  The stove is quite a bit worse for wear than most, as you can see in the picture, but I'm Mr. Fix-it, and the sweat equity and challenge made the $350 price seem very reasonable. The first pic of the stove shows it after we unloaded it in the driveway.  The top sections and 100 pounds of other parts are sitting elsewhere waiting to be de-rusted.  There are a few things that need to be repaired; new hinges, etc.  I've got a vendor working on the estimate for all the exhaust parts I'm going to need to install this thing.  You can't see it from the front, but it even has a water jacket with plumbing connections so that it can heat water.  The next set of pics shows the place in the house where this baby is going to set. It's like the breakfast area off the kitchen, pretty much centrally located relative to the whole house.

Step one was to take out this built in shelving unit.  This is where you get to see the late 60s/early 70s decorating style. That nasty pattern was there originally, and then somebody built the shelving in a long time ago. The more neutral looking linoleum was installed around the shelving several years ago.

Then we went to Home Depot and found some 12" tile on sale for just 90 cents a square foot to install. Dark grout was a must. I've got a lot of experience doing ceramic tile, so it only took a couple of hours to install it, and the next day I put the wood trim around the perimeter.  Our hope is to eventually have all the carpet ripped up and replaced with hardwood. I'm pretty good at that as well, and some 3/4" red oak would be perfect in here.

With some hard work and the blessings of Adonai, we will be pumping plant food out of the chimney come November.That's right; plenty of wonderful CO2.

If that information shocks you, you might want to stop reading right now, because this blog is going to be a big defender of genuine science and not give any quarter to the idiotic crap that passes for science in the major media. Consensus of people with Ph.D. behind their names is not scientific. And in case you didn't know, most of the "scientists" who have signed on to the global warming hoax have their fields of study in things other than meteorology or earth sciences that would be relevant to the atmosphere.  And even among those who seem to have relevant credentials, the information leak on the East Anglia University data fraud demonstrates that such people don't really care about facts, they just have an agenda to promote global socialism.  Facts are facts independent of opinion. Computer models that don't include vital variables such as water vapor and solar cycles are just so much nonsense. This is why over 17,000 credible scientists have signed on to a petition debunking the belief in global warming.  You should be able to find plenty of links on the internet by reasoned, rational scientists who have thoroughly debunked this hoax.  You can start with Dr. Ian Plimer.  If you want more links, just ask.

The thing that I love about real science is how experimentation and observation makes it so easy to debunk the garbage out there. My favorite example in this case, is that you can seal a greenhouse and pump more than ten times the normal amount of CO2 into it, and in a matter of hours the chloroplasts in the plants will detect the extra level of carbon dioxide and respond by stepping up absorption and conversion to energy storage, thus returning the atmosphere inside the greenhouse to the previous gas ratios.  This has been demonstrated over and over.  If we produce more CO2, the planet won't get warmer, we'll simply have more plant growth.

I could go into details about chlorofluorocarbons and ozone, but this post is long enough, and if you are really interested in this stuff you probably already know that it's a hoax, but if you need more information, I'll help point you in the right direction.