HURRICANES NOT CAUSED BY CLIMATE CHANGE

There is a new article out by some distinguished atmospheric scientists (Pielke, Landsea, Emmanuel, Mayfield, Laver & Pasch) in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society which pisses all over the Greenie claim that hurricanes are increasing because of global warming. You can read it here (PDF).




The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy

A recent book by Peter W. Huber and Mark P. Mills under the above title was recently published. Below are two reviews of it. You can read the Preface of the book itself here. First an excerpt from the Preface (p. xxiv to xxv):

..."These are the seven great energy heresies we propound in this book:

1. The cost of energy as we use it has less and less to do with the cost of fuel. Increasingly, it depends instead on the cost of the hardware we use to refine and process the fuel. Thus, we are now witnessing the twilight of fuel.

2. "Waste" is virtuous. We use up most of our energy refining energy itself, and dumping waste energy in the process. The more such wasteful refining we do, the better things get all around. All this waste lets us do more life-affirming things better, more cleanly, and more safely.

3. The more efficient our technology, the more energy we consume. More efficient technology lets more people do more, and do it faster - and more/more/faster invariably swamps all the efficiency gains. New uses for more efficient technologies multiply faster than the old one get improved. To curb energy consumption, you have to lower efficiency, not raise it.

4. The competitive advantage in manufacturing is now swinging decisively back toward the United States. Steam engines launched the first industrial revolution in 1774; internal combustion engines and electric generators kicked off the second in 1876 and 1882. The third, set in motion by two American inventors in 1982, is now propelling the productivity of American labor far out ahead of the competition in Europe and Asia.

5. Human demand for energy is insatiable. Life is energy in unceasing pursuit of order, and in tireless battle against the forces of dispersion and decay.

6. The raw fuels are not running out. The faster we extract and burn them, the faster we find still more. Whatever it is that we so restlessly seek - and it isn't in fact "energy" - we will never run out. Energy supplies are infinite.

7. America's relentless pursuit of high-grade energy does not add chaos to the global environment, it restores order. If energy policies similar to ours can be implemented worldwide, our grandchildren will inhabit a planet with less pollution, a more stable biosphere, and better-balanced carbon books than at any time since the rise of agriculture some five thousand years ago."

Review 1:

As is probably clear, these folks are going against the now frequently seen `energy crisis' theme that is getting quite a bit of play in books like `The End of Oil'. I had seen this book once before, and when I found it again I decided I should read it to challenge some of my own opinions on the subject.

The main point that the authors hammer home (repeatedly) is that our use of energy, going back to the steam engine (if not earlier), is to use it to get more energy, and to increase the effective power of that energy. The steam engine was devised by Watt to pump water out of coal mines, so more coal could be pulled out. Nowadays we use lasers (very `ordered' power) to create computers that we can use to find more energy (among other things). They say that increasingly we are paying not so much for the basic fuel but for the additional hardware and processing that goes into making the energy `ordered.' `The virtue of waste' line comes from the inevitable output of heat as we increase the order of the energy (2nd law of thermodynamics).

They argue convincingly that gains in efficiency in the use of energy tend to increase our demand for it. While it's true that if we just kept using exactly the things we use today but increase the efficiency, we'd need less energy, but in fact we just keep creating more and more uses of electricity, and demand continues to rise.

They show one breakdown of the use of different types of energy, and show that most of our transportation is fueled by oil, while most electricity is created from gas and nuclear, and heating uses oil and gas. They don't really deal with the `Peak Oil' argument of world production levels, and instead make claims based on historical trends of increasing efficiency in pumping oil. While there may well be a vast supply of 'sand oil' up in Canada, the economics of the situation will have to change quite a bit before there's a reason to extract it. Moving cars from internal combustion to increased use of electricity is discussed in detail.

They acknowledge that we will probably be able to come up with increasingly efficient solar collectors and wind energy collectors, but argue that these increases will need to trump increases in nuclear power efficiency to really make headway. (It is interesting to note that some formerly `green' voices have started talking about nuclear power.)

Review 2:

One virtue of reading is occasionally a book makes you rethink a pet topic. I admit to being a bit of a bug on the subject of energy conservation. In the past twelve months, I signed up for 100% renewable energy with our local electric utility, I travelled to Canada to import a car capable of 50 mpg--which Toyota doesn't sell in the States - and I went through our house swapping out 60-watt and 100-watt incandescent bulbs for compact fluorescents by the dozen. But after reading THE BOTTOMLESS WELL, seemingly a paean to pedal-to-the-metal energy consumption, I'll live with my choices, but I no longer see SUV drivers as evil personified.

Iconoclasts, contrarians, original thinkers- authors Huber and Mills are all these. The apple cart they overturn goes back years: the OPEC oil shocks of the 1970s, public disenchantment with nuclear energy after Three Mile Island (later Chernobyl), widespread fear about global warming induced by gas guzzlers and sippers alike, mass acceptance of "guilt" about Americans using more than their fair share of energy ... the list goes on.

Overturning these worried givens for many social policy discussions is a tall order. Yet, in this compelling and stylish meditation on energy, at times showing an intellectual reach bordering on the metaphysical, the authors pull it off. They offer a documented, cogent vision of the future to lead us out of the Land of Chicken Little (and away from that well-intentioned Kyoto Protocol).

For starters, this is one well-written book. Any nonfiction book whose first sentence sums up the book's overarching argument hits the ground running for me: "What lies at the bottom of the bottomless well isn't oil, it's logic." Emblematic of that logic is the Scottish inventor James Watt. Coal was always around as fuel in Great Britain. Primitive steam engines existed before Watt came along. But Watt came up with a steam engine regulator (or logic device) that brought amazing power to steam engines, compared to the earlier Newcomen engine. That combination plus plentiful coal touched off the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. The Brits never looked back.

Today, in the Information Age (or the Post-Industrial Revolution), America occupies some of the primacy Great Britain enjoyed more than 200 years ago. The logic converting raw energy into power is now written in silicon (our cars are more and more networked computers with attached wheels). The central argument in THE BOTTOMLESS WELL is that America's primacy in logic devices will ease our adaptation to the day the gas pumps go dry.

Huber and Mills don't think current declines in worldwide oil production, coupled with increasing demand in such places as China, need spell an energy catastrophe. Our future is electricity and for that we have two fuel sources. Coal and uranium. The world's supply of each will last millennia. With silicon chips, we now can render emissions of a car engine cleaner than ambient air. We can do the same for coal-burning power plants. Also with silicon chips (and enough concrete), we can ensure safe uranium-fuelled power plants that confirm Chernobyl was a primitive-technology aberration.

One of the book's more pointed jabs at popular misconception has to do with the idea Americans are hell-bent on laying waste to the environment and polluting the planet. Americans, to be sure, consume more energy than anyone else. So all those SUVs we Americans drive guarantee we contribute far, far more than our share to global warming, right? Well, as Michael Crichton learned with his recent novel, STATE OF FEAR, some people don't want to be troubled by observable data when it comes to the global warming controversy. Not if it's outside their schema of bumper sticker logic. So what if in a mere generation, at the current rate of reforestation, America has as many trees as when the Pilgrims landed in the 1600s?

Well, that might be one of the whats that leads to, as Huber and Mills point out, an odd thing. Based on more reliable data than make the case for global warming--the North American continent is a net carbon sink! That is, on balance, Canadians, Americans, Mexicans and the terra firma they occupy are absorbing, not emitting carbon dioxide. Sounds like a punt for the Kyoto Protocol Team and possibly novelist Crichton is not an apologist for Halliburton, or some similar lefty fantasy I recently read.

There's much more in this book than a review can fairly capsulize (I won't attempt the Second Law of Thermodynamics in twenty-five words). If the book lacks anything--and to be fair, this is outside what the authors gave as the book's scope--I'd like to see something about how the transition to less reliance on petroleum can be gracefully negotiated. We can't one morning wake up to gas lines and expect to muddle through again, if we're out of gas for good. But that's another book and THE BOTTOMLESS WELL for now is a worthwhile update about what our energy future looks like and how digital technology can take us there with the power of logic.






Climate Catastrophe Cancelled: What you're not being told about the science of climate change

Researchers at the University of Calgary, in cooperation with the Friends of Science Society, have released a video entitled: Climate Catastrophe Cancelled: What you're not being told about the science of climate change

At a news conference held in Ottawa, some of North America's foremost climate experts provided evidence demonstrating that the science underlying the Kyoto Protocol is seriously flawed; a problem that continues to be ignored by the Canadian government. Scientists called on the Canadian government to delay implementation of the Kyoto Protocol until a thorough, public review of the current state of climate science has been conducted by climate experts. Such an analysis has never been organized in Canada despite repeated requests from independent, non-governmental climate scientists.

Carleton University Professor Tim Patterson (Paleoclimatologist) explains the crucial importance of properly evaluating the merit of Canada's climate change plans: "It is no exaggeration to say that in the eight years since the Kyoto Protocol was introduced there has been a revolution in climate science. If, back in the mid-nineties, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would not exist because we would have concluded it was not necessary."

Contrary to claims that the science of climate change has been settled, the causes of the past century's modest warming is highly contested in the climate science community. The climate experts presenting in the video demonstrate that science is quickly diverging away from the hypothesis that the human release of greenhouse gases, specifically carbon dioxide, is having a significant impact on global climate. "There is absolutely no convincing scientific evidence that human-produced greenhouse gases are driving global climate change", stated climatologist, Dr. Tim Ball. He added that the Canadian government's plan to designate carbon dioxide as a "toxic" under CEPA is irresponsible and without scientific merit. "Carbon dioxide is a staff of life, plain and simple. It makes up less than 4% of greenhouse gases and it is not a toxic."

IPCC assertions about the unprecedented nature of the past century's warming, or the widespread beliefs that we are experiencing an increase in extreme weather, accelerated sea level rise and unusual warming in polar regions are also shown in the video to be wholly without merit.

The idea for the video was initiated by the Friends of Science Society, a registered not-for-profit group of geologists, environmental scientists and concerned citizens, "in an effort to make the science of climate change available and understandable to the general public", stated Dr. Doug Leahey, President of Friends of Science Society. Commenting on his decision to get involved with the video project, University of Calgary's Professor Barry Cooper stated, "Universities are in the education business. In a democracy like Canada, education and informed discussion of public policy are tightly linked. The public, media and government would benefit by hearing from all sides on this important issue in order to make as informed a decision as is possible."

You can access the video here

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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