Briffa is now a name that will go down in history, with Al Gore as one of the greatest perpetrators of fraud in the modern world. Steve McIntyre will go down in history, rather like the man who finally stopped Senator Joe McCarthy by saying: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" We'll probably forget McIntyre's name as we've forgotten the name of Joseph Nye Welch. We'll probably remember Al Gore. That's fair, the takedown has had many contributors, but baby it's over. The swastika has been blown off the Reichstag.
This is one of those huge monstrous collapses. It's a scandal inside of a fraud leaked by a hack. It's like Eliot Spitzer wrapped up inside of The Chicago Black Sox with a Piltdown Man on the side. It's like Enron on top of OJ in the middle of Iran-Contra.
Now that the actual source code that generated the hockey stick has been audited and outed by none other than Eric Raymond, all that's left is the fun of watching the suckers bail. Everybody who has been.. excuse me, every FOOL who has been measuring their carbon footprint is now going to have to explain that they've been practicing voodoo economics. Oh the unwinding!
Once upon a time, I might have been convinced that there was something to the IPCC conclusions about the infamous hockey stick of temperatures, but I've always been skeptical of the Green Movement. Well it turns out that this hockey stick has as its originating dataset, 12 trees.
Twelve trees whose growth rings were the basis of the conclusions that have shaken the world were selected by a dude named Briffa and another dude named McIntyre has called him on it. But it took years. Huh what? I mean to say quite plainly that the 'overwhelming majority of scientists' made their conclusion on the basis of a report whose original data was not made available for scientific review. The big bloody secret was that it was twelve measly trees.
So it's official. That thing I've been distrusting for all of these years is just another scientific animism. A 'scientific' sounding idea that people who don't understand the science take as the whole truth and nothing but the truth, when in fact they are merely taking it on the authority of scientists. Of course that's what I'm doing right now, except I'm being very specific. McIntyre said Briffa was mistaken, and Briffa admitted that there were only 12 trees.
So McIntyre looked at all of the conditions under which the 12 trees were selected, and took a larger data set from the area. Guess what he found? No evidence for global warming. The twelve trees nullified geological testimony. They misrepresented the truth. The truth is that the planet is fine.
Not long ago, I overheard some talk that all of the temperature variations that the Greenies have been talking about are explicable as epiphenomenon of El Nino. And I've published this claim that carbon dioxide is hardly poison, but that clouds and water vapor are the the big ballers of climate change - kind of back to what I learned as a kid. And of course the late Michael Crichton's State of Fear was all over these activists.
So now all you have to do is mention what should become common knowledge in a matter of days. The Yamal Dataset was faulty. The hockey stick was a myth. The 'scientific consensus' was false.
I'm truly enjoying riffing as I will from here on out, on Steven Berlin Johnson. He understands why. On page 47 he introduces one of those charts I think everybody needs to know like Maslow's Pyramid. He calls it The Long Zoom of Culture. It looks like this.
You might remember, if you were a geek like me, the old saying about how stupid people talk about themselves, ordinary people talk about other people and intelligent people talk about ideas. A presumably intelligent person would share this idea with you. I've heard it several times and find it impossible to resist the temptation to talk about myself hearing the idea several times. Paradoxical, that.
Nevertheless it's a good start. The question becomes, what ideas are worth talking about when you finally sit down with your brainy mates and not talk about yourselves and other people? Well, I like this long zoom because as you may know I got into the Long Now a year or so ago transitioning off politics at Cobb.
At that same time, I started reading Iain M. Banks' Culture novels and began looking at the sorts of social contexts from which scientific discovery might take its clues. Banks happens to be all the way out there at energy flows. Specifically, what happens to society if, relatively speaking, infinite energy and mindpower is at human disposal? I concluded that it becomes pleasure-seeking, which is to say fairly unhinged from the disciplines we have generated throughout history on Earth.
This also dovetails to the question I had not long ago about the cultural predisposition of what is considered a good solution to any social or personal problem. In that post, The Dirty Clothes Cycle, I asked what to do when my clothes, for lack of space, lie putrefying in the washing machine for hours:
Which solution to this problem I select depends upon my cultural
favoritism. I might admire chemists and demand the detergent. Or I
might admire carpenters and expand my closet. Or I might admire
self-improvement and increase the throughput. Or I might admire child
labor and make my kids do it. Or I might admire a revolutionary pose
and rant against all parts of the the clothing cycle at once. ...
Or I might dig on Christian charity and give more to the Salvation Army.
All of that supports my theory, inspired by Charlie Levy, inventor of the Xerox Documentor, that brains are a cheap commodity. But complicating that is the premise of Outliers. There is a deep sociological component to the successful individual. The right place, the right time, the right combination of luck and persistence; all the genius is not all you. People forget that their stomach doesn't work without microbes; our minds don't work in a vacuum either.
So just in case you're a researcher wondering if I understand, let me repeat the Sun God Theory. God is in the middle of the Sun and He communicates to other stars via electromagnetic propagations beyond our spectrum - nevertheless these forces act on our minds, they are part of a substrate of information that travels faster than light. Synchronicity (plate of shrimp) is remote entanglement.
Brains being a cheap commodity are therefore to be herded like cattle and directed from grazing to grazing. We just haven't mastered the greater methods, and all that paradigm is shifting in our information revolution. A nice Lorite Interrogator would be useful now that I think of it, because it enables conservatism without the benefit of an actual social network of people. Everybody needs a Club of Honest Whigs, but only a few of us can afford the time. I certainly can't but it's been what I've been wishing for forever.
I'm going to have to just leave this as a riff. It's too loaded to complete, and I haven't finished the book. My point is that I recognize the substrate of progress. I am only too aware of those forces that disrupt the links in the chain from the energy flows to the microbiologicals.
If you can stand the music of Shovelman you might find something of interest among the odd, whimsical and clever devices to be found at the Maker Faire. Their theme 'Remaking America' is more fanciful than likely but who could possibly be against whimsy?
I am not and will not stand against whimsy, but does this leach over into foolishness? I think it depends entirely on the intent of the inventors, which I started to consider when I looked at the steam powered scooter. Putting myself into the shoes of a steampunk mechanical engineer, I immediately thought how cool it might be to rev up my scooter and have nothing but safe and harmless steam come out. I'm sure you could pull a lot of greenie chicks with that move, unlike some slick dude in Chevy v8 even whose hair represents unsustainable dependence on foreign oil. But then on second thought, what's my steam deally using to create the heat? Well, I obviously couldn't burn coal, or fuel oil, or gasoline - maybe propane?
Yeah propane! Surely the accumulated bourgie biases against the hickness of propane can't survive an onslaught of enlightened conservationism. Well, my bet is that they'd collide and the end products of the reaction will be obscurity and mumbling. After all, propane has been a clean burning, cheap fuel for decades as any redneck or blackneck camper or upscale cabin owner knows.
But there's not only propane, there's also methane aka natural gas. Both can be compressed or liquified for easier transportation, and of course the technology for doing so it old, boring and reliable. And there's nothing sexy or sophisticated about it, well, not like steampunk scooters. So you'd have to hide your canister of CNG behind some facade to make the chicks think that the whole thing is run just on steam alone. Might as well add some patchouli oil to make your steam fragrant and claim that the air that goes in is dirtier than the air that comes out. That's the line that always kills 'em. To choose between methane and propane, well. That would be a commercial and scientific decision, something that has to make sense of markets and the dynamics of combustion. In other words, the rationality of making a truly rational choice for the heat source of your green steam would have to rely on dealing significantly with physical and economic reality. Exit whimsy.
Of course there aren't going to be any mass production of these clever devices. I find it unlikely that the Maker Faire is a real showcase for emerging technologies that would actually change America. Unfortunately for the clever dudes and dudettes around that way, there are other people with similar knowledge who are employed in organizations that tend to master markets as well as science. They are 'trapped' in the industrial complex of America engaged in this thing called 'business'.
Growing up as I did on the Left, it was a very hard lesson to learn that there was a difference between products and technologies. A product, you see, has to arrange and prioritize the assemblages of technologies in response to or anticipation of demand in markets. Unlike a Faire, where you pay to be an exhibitor of cool technology, a market pays you. Unlike punks and geeks, the market is not impressed that something can be done with technology. The market always selfishly asks, what's in it for me?
But markets can be twisted, and given enough disposable income and idiotic memes, people can be persuaded to demand all sorts of whimsical devices which are thus transformed into profitable products. Sometimes a better, more rational and efficient product comes along, and sometimes you're stuck with AT&T or Oldsmobile and you can't easily get out of your commitment. This is called buyer's remorse, something teenagers and wealthy weirdos basically don't understand. And so niche markets are maintained and everybody's happy. We know that teenagers with disposable income and showoffs with bank help to maintain the myth that 'if you build it, they will come', and it's a nice myth to have. But really, try to remind your kids exactly what a Faire is.
Cringley notes that we are on the verge of commercialization of plasma furnaces that can do 100 tons a day. I do like this idea very much:
Eric and Andrew Day propose going back to burning our trash, but
instead of using open-air incinerators or even high-temperature Basic
Oxygen furnaces, they like the idea of burning our crap in electric
plasma furnaces at temperatures in excess of 15,000 degrees Celsius.
Take everything that would have gone to the landfill, add to it, if you
like, everything that would have been recycled, and even leave in the
really bad stuff like medical waste, toxic waste, heavy metals, and
radioactive waste. Grind it all up into little chunks, some of which
could be in a chemical or water slurry, and pump it into the plasma
furnace.
Plasma furnaces have been around for decades and are already used
for disposing of medical waste in Japan. Most such furnaces are fairly
small, though the Days have found one manufacturer that can make a
plasma furnace capable of burning 100 tons of trash per day.
The plasma furnace, operating in a closed loop, generates a form of
synthetic gas that can be burned as a fuel as well as a glasslike inert
material that can be used as aggregate in concrete. That's what happens
when you run your Pampers and plutonium and anthrax and last Sunday's
chicken dinner through a 30,000-degree Fahrenheit flame that breaks
everything down to single atoms. The manufacturer of the plasma furnace
(it's in this week's links) says the syngas can be burned to generate
more power than the furnace uses, making it self-sufficient. The Days
go much further in their claims, but then they want to make the BIG
BUCKS. They say the furnace can be optimized to produce hydrogen and
carbon monoxide.
Moreover there are other downstream apps for byproducts. Plasma destroys most molecules down to their elemental components except for the heaviest elements which become molten slag. However..
If you were to blow compressed air through a stream of this molten material, you'd end up with rock wool.
Rock wool has the appearance of gray cotton candy. It''s light and
wispy, and according to Dr. Circeo, it has the potential to
revolutionize the plasma waste treatment industry. Rock wool is a very
efficient insulation
material, twice as effective as fiberglass. It's also lighter than
water, but very absorbent. Because of this, it could potentially be
used to help contain and clean oil spills in the ocean. Cleanup crews
could spread rock wool over and around an oil spill. The rock wool
would float on the water while soaking up the oil, making collection a
relatively easy process. Hydroponic growing systems can also use rock
wool -- farmers can plant seeds in slabs or blocks of it.
Currently rock wool is produced by mining rocks, melting them down and
then streaming the molten material onto spinning machines. The spinning
machines fling strands of molten material in the air. Today, the price
of rock wool is over a dollar a pound. Since rock wool would be a
byproduct of the plasma gasification process, it could be sold for as
little as 10 cents a pound. The price of insulation would decrease,
efficiencies in energy-saving techniques would increase and plasma
gasification plants would have another substantial source of income
apart from selling electricity back to the grid.
As one of the legs of the stool holding up the theory of 'warsocialism' the author, Jay Hanson, claims:
No alternative – even nuclear [5]–
has the potential to replace more than a tiny fraction of the power presently
generated by fossil fuels.
It has taken me about an hour this morning to follow a debate on the credibility of the study cited by Hanson. I have been convinced by information found here and most significantly here, that the "Storm-Smith" hypothesis is not credible and over-estimates by many times the energy costs of nuclear power, even taking into consideration the energy used in the construction of the plant, the milling and mining of uranium ore, and the full decommissioning of the plant. In addition, nuclear power can be produced from thorium as well which is three to four times as plentiful as uranium.
From the second site: (emphasis mine)
It is worth noting that the widely quoted paper by Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith
(SLS), which gives a rather pessimistic assessment of the Energy
Lifecycle of Nuclear Power, assumes a far larger energy cost to
construct and decommission a Nuclear Power plant (240 Peta-Joules
versus 8 Peta-Joules(PJ)). The difference is that Vattenfall actually
measured their energy inputs whereas Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Smith
employed various theoretical relationships between dollar costs and
energy consumed. This paper also grossly over-estimates the energy cost
of mining low-grade Ores and also that the efficiency of extraction of
Uranium from reserves would fall dramatically at ore concentrations
below 0.05%. Employing their calculations predicts that the energy cost
of extracting the Olympic Dam mine's yearly production of 4600 tonnes
of Uranium would require energy equivalent to almost 2 one-GigaWatt
power plants running for a full year (2 GigaWat-years). You can follow
this calculation here.
This is larger than the entire electricity production of South
Australia and an order of magnitude more than the measured energy
inputs.
I am therefore convinced that Jay Hanson's pessimism on the potential for nuclear energy to provide is based on faulty research. That in fact nuclear energy can efficiently provide a far greater share of American electric generation. This is not a fundamental problem in physics as claimed, merely a political and economic one.
The price of gasoline is beginning to be a pain in my butt. I'm paying $4.17/gallon and I'm commuting 120 miles every day in a car that gets 17 miles per gallon. I'm not freaking out, but I'm beginning to shop smarter for gas. I hate it when life makes me scrimp, but that's just me. So how long am I going to have to deal with this? Where is the silver lining? Well, here's a theory that I like:
But what happens if a global recession drops demand by 5%? Then prices can fall in half or even more, as they did in 1999. Note that the Asian Contagion recession was limited in global terms; the world's largest economies, the U.S. and Europe, were growing robustly even as southeast Asian economies suffered currency and credit contractions.
Even this limited downturn caused oil to drop from over $35/barrel to under $15/barrel. That begs the question: what would happen to oil prices if the major global economies actually shrink rather than grow?
I know, I know, recessions have been officially banned by the Federal Reserve and the other central banks. Uh, right. But let's say the Fed can't stop the U.S. sliding into recession, and the rest of the world declines behind it.
The whole thing sounds a bit hinky to me - a little wishful thinking thrown in for good measure. However, this is not the first time I've heard this theory. The other time? Just last week, listening to Richard A. Muller.
Muller certainly understands that the bulk of the uptick in the price of oil has everything to do with demand in Asia, China & India specifically. So what happens if China has a civil war? I happen to be one of those people who believes that China will have a civil war as their rich get richer and their middle-class inevitably connects with the rest of the world. China is still largely functionally illiterate. But my point is that a lot of things can and probably will go wrong in China. Their economy cannot sustain its current rate of growth. I think they're going to throw a piston. When that happens, watch out.
Aside from that, if we are to have a global recession, Americans will not starve. We'll just forgo some of our back-to-school and Christmas shopping, have another school shooting and buy more weed. But nobody's going to starve. If that's the total cost of kicking off a global recession that lowers the price of gasoline, I think a lot of Americans would be on board.
The other side of this though, is money that is being (or not being) sunken into the extraction of oil from shale. So is the smart money in Canada or not? That's the question, and it's tied to stuff way beyond the horizon. I think there are a number of oil bears who are having a field day as their Peak Oil Scenario is psychologically gaining traction because of woes at the pump, but oil bulls, we haven't heard from.
In the long term, I think it is much more likely that some economic or war event will affect the demand for oil long before the Peak Oil doomsday scenario plays itself out. Last month, demand for gasoline decreased 3% in the US. I sure as hell ain't gonna be driving 120 miles a day much longer.
From Dennis Prager this morning, Gwenyth Cravens speaks up about nuclear energy. As a proponent, I am beginning to take notes. I am surprised to learn new things about this fascinating option.
Firstly there have only been 59 deaths from Chernobyl.
Secondly, all of America's nuclear waste (and we do practically no recycling) since the beginning is 50,000 tons. That could be stored in a volume the size of a big box retail store. In comparison, we dispose of 160,000 tons of batteries every year.
I desperately tried to find something worth watching on TV last night as I downloaded new stuff for my XBox whose video input dominates the tube. I landed on a PBS science show, Nova I think. Since my kids, going to Southern California public schools are inundated with environmental information some of which is actually useful, I do my part to give them some perspective. Incidently, I gave Sprite a copy of the latest Imprimis on nuclear energy and she sternly told me that she's not concerned with global warming, just air pollution. Excuse me.So I figure it would be worth watching.
Well it turns out that Germany has this deal in which they guarantee to fix the price of electricity generated from solar for twenty years. As a homeowner you buy electricity for .20/kWH and you can sell it back to the grid for .50/kWH. Not a bad scam.
I now recognize how vulnerable children are to the promises of science and environmentalism - it is because they have no concept of economies and the extent to which this small interesting tidbit of capability fits into the realms of possibility. And while this Nova program showed very reasonable soundbites about how renewables are never going to handle much more than peak demand (Duh solar power doesnt' work at night), it was fascinating how quickly they went over to Germany saying that one man is making a difference and got that country to get 20% of their power from renewables, 'and it could go as high as 30%'. Then after that breathless prose they explain the details of the 20 year deal with the government.
The first word out of his mouth was anti-nuclear. Anti-fossil I can understand, and actually have some sympathy for. But the politics of energy are pretty interesting. So now I have decided to forget about healthcare completely. It's all about the energy, baby. I'm the pro-nuke guy.
"Today,
about 90 percent of the world's electricity is created through an
indirect and inefficient conversion of heat. It is estimated that two
thirds of the heat used by thermoelectric converters are wasted and
released. But now, researchers from the University of California at
Berkeley have found a new way to convert this wasted heat into electricity
by trapping organic molecules between metal nanoparticles. So far, this
method of creating electricity creation is in its very early stage, but
if it can scale up to mass production it may lead to a new and
inexpensive source of energy."
Gasoline prices are rising again, with one survey claiming a national record of $1.77 per gallon. Despite predictions of $3 a gallon before the end of this summer, even by today’s standards, the energy that drives the world’s economy is dirt cheap. Yet, recent books called Out of Gas and The End of Oil are solemn reminders that that will inevitably come to an end. The question is, how soon? New research predicts that supply may stop meeting demand sooner rather than later, with drastic consequences for civilization and planet Earth. Are those the fantasies of Chicken Little, or does the world face massive economic depression and even “energy wars" in the next 30 years? Warren Olney leads a spirited debate among energy reporters, economists, energy trade representatives and a Clinton White House Energy Department official.
It has been many years since I built some information systems for a power company. But Abiola reminded me with some terms I haven't heard in a while -Baseload, Intermediate and Peak. These are standard classifications of power generators that get their own P&L.
I happen to know that power generators who buy oil or natural gas watch those commodity futures years in advance and plan ahead. The ratio of baseload to intermediate to peak determines the price of power to customers. So it makes sense to me that any customer that is not buying long term power contracts is likely to get screwed. Peakers, in the case of the utility I was working for, were generally small generators that were not always online. They don't get as much maintenance and tend to be flaky. Consequently, the power they generate cost a lot more per MW.
If and when I start working again, I'll have the nerve to crank up my professional software and work out some models. These days I can't stand to look at the software. This Demand Side Bidding sounds interesting.
