@ my wits' end

Laser fusion test results raise energy hopes

From the BBC:

“A major hurdle to producing fusion energy using lasers has been swept aside, results in a new report show.

The controlled fusion of atoms – creating conditions like those in our Sun – has long been touted as a possible revolutionary energy source.

However, there have been doubts about the use of powerful lasers for fusion energy because the “plasma” they create could interrupt the fusion.

An article in Science showed the plasma is far less of a problem than expected.

The report is based on the first experiments from the National Ignition Facility (Nif) in the US that used all 192 of its laser beams.

Along the way, the experiments smashed the record for the highest energy from a laser – by a factor of 20….”

Read the full article here

Some hopeful news for a change:

Levitating magnet may yield new approach to clean energy.

There’s a difference between scepticism and denial. One is healthy, the other is often one-eyed, fanatical, or both. There are a number of things I don’t understand about the climate change denial industry:

Why do denialists have to be so obnoxious? They invariably use the same sarcastic, sneering tone that Richard Dawkins uses when reviling creationists in his best-selling books. Although I agree with Dawkins’ views on evolution, I suspect that his methods only serve to entrench the beliefs of those whom he belittles—he ends up preaching to the converted. The same argument applies with the denial industry. If they have faith in their beliefs, why not state their truth calmly and lucidly and let the facts sway the skeptical?

Ian Wishhart’s recent book Air Con is a case in point. Sneering is the most apt adjective for the tone of the whole book. I read the book in the hope of finding some insight into the denialist case. I was disappointed. After the first 3 or 4 chapters I’d had it with the half-truths, the interminable ramblings and the lies of omission; I gave up on it.

Where’s the problem?

As a denialist, is it not possible to accept that, even if you’re right, the actions promoted by anthropogenic climate change supporters would be good for the planet no matter what the global temperature graph looks like 20, 50 or 100 years on? Why not just get over it?

• What’s wrong with replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy sources?
• What’s wrong with denying the oil producers the wherewithal to continue to fund extremist Islam, anti-Western jihadist, and fanatical terrorist groups?
• What’s wrong with reducing atmospheric pollution?
• What’s to like about the coal industry?
• What’s wrong with creating new hi-tech technologies, new green industries, and new clean jobs?
• Who doesn’t want much more energy efficient cars which transfer the reduced amount of pollution they do generate from exhaust pipes to power plants far from choked city streets?

Most of all, how can you be so certain? Scratch the most prominent denialists and you’ll find that they’re doing very nicely out of it – like Bjørn Lomborg (a political scientist) with his money-making books and lecture circuit, or they’re like David Evans (a mathematician) who pads his résumé, or they’re working for big oil, or they’re just plain out-there, like the physicist at Auckland University who seemed to claim that the sun must be driving the change because it’s very big!

I’m not a climate scientist, I’m a retired engineer. My income has depended upon my success in monitoring processes in thermodynamic systems and I can spot a trend as well as anybody.

When the denial industry tell me that the planet’s been cooling since 1998 I know that they’re either mistaken, can’t read a graph, ignorant, or lying. One El Niño induced anomalous year notwithstanding. That tired argument is particularly mystifying when one considers that the last decade is the warmest on record even though we’ve been in a low period of solar forcing for the latter part of it.

When they tell me that Arctic ice cover is increasing while they confuse extent with volume my eyes glaze over.

When the realities of Milankovitch Cycles are ignored and they equate cooling of Pluto with Earth’s climate I smell a very dead and decomposing rat.

For me there’s no choice

Most of all I ask the denialists, “What if you’re wrong?” What will you tell your grand-children? If you’re right, it won’t matter too much, we’ll have made some overdue changes to the way things are done and my grandchildren will benefit.

If you’re wrong, and you succeed in sowing enough doubt, you could doom millions, maybe billions, to a far more apocalyptic outcome than would otherwise be the case.

Old Man Gaia speaks

We should listen. In the video below Dr Jim Lovelock talks about space flight, and his pessimistic view on the likelihood of medium-term survival for a few billion of us.

James Ephraim Lovelock, CH, CBE, FRS, postulated the Gaia hypothesis long before the dangers of climate change were acknowledged, or even suspected. At the age of 90, when most of us have our feet up (if we’re still above ground) he’s released a new book – The Vanishing Face of Gaia: a Final Warning – and Richard Branson has invited him to become an astronaut, possibly to stop him opening a brothel called Virgin.

He’s someone worth listening to. It’s easy enough for those with an  anti-anthropogenic-climate-change agenda to dismiss Al Gore as just another politician with a barrow to push and a high carbon lifestyle to maintain but Dr Lovelock is not so easy to write off.

However!

I have a couple of relatively minor bones to pick with him.

First bone

He maintains that anyone who thinks that expending vast quantities of fuel to toss a few people 100km above the earth on a jolly in Richard Branson’s space adventure is either “gravely mistaken or a damned hypocrite.”

I disagree. In the unlikely event that I were given the same offer I can think of very little I’d rather do but I hope I’d have the moral fortitude to say “Thanks Sir Richard, but no thanks.”

Bone two

He views trees in plantations as a waste of time. You can’t recreate an ecosystem he says.

1. OK, you can’t recreate an ecosystem, but plantations are still invaluable carbon sinks and they provide renewable carbon based material to partially satisfy our profligate habits.
2. Although you can’t recreate an ecosystem you can extend an existing one by planting adjacent to it or by creating corridors between islands of forest and you can create a new forest and let nature take its course over time via the birds. the bees, and the wind. The more diverse the plantings the quicker the development of a sustainable ecosystem will be. It may not be as diverse or as pristine as the original but it will be an ecosystem and given time, invaluable.

Annie Leonard’s been thinking …

Annie’s video is a must see for everyone who’d like to keep our planet viable.

It’s a must see if you don’t give a stuff about the planet but you need an excuse to get off the madcap consumer roller coaster.

How did big business create a system that puts consumer products on the shelf for a fraction of their actual cost? We’ve all wondered about it. Annie went to find out and it changed her life. She will tell you how this obscene system started, how it functions and why—one way or another—it can’t last.

She’ll tell you the real cost of our addiction to stuff and why your grandchildren will pay for it tomorrow just as the world’s poor are paying for it right now.

From Annie’s website »

The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something, it’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

Click on the play movie button to see Annie’s movie »

Visit Annie and The Story of Stuff: click right here

America’s 21st century isolationism

Soon after awful events of 11th September 2001, the US consulate in Istanbul moved from the beautiful old Palazzo Corpi in the inner city into this concrete and barbed wire monstrosity:

For nearly a century the old consulate was a part of the city; a relatively friendly place for Turks to visit and a somewhat benign window on America.

If you’ve ever visited a US embassy anywhere in the world, or been subjected to the sullen official faces and the apparent assumption of your guilt at any US immigration or customs post you’ll be aware that I used the word “relatively” advisedly. Nevertheless, just like airport security around the globe, US diplomatic posts have taken siege mentality to a new level of paranoia.

Now the Istanbul consulate is a place of armed guards, bullet-proof glass, bomb-proof walls, x-rays and fingerprinting. As Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times a few years ago, it’s a place so locked down that even the birds don’t fly. Mr Friedman begins his new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, reflecting on that 6-year-old article and how the United States’ preoccupation over a self-inflicted conflict with radical Islam has led to it’s inability to tackle the real problems of our planet.

I recommend Mr Friedman’s new book unreservedly.  Some critics find his prose style too idiosyncratic—that’s as may be, but in my not-so-humble opinion he gets his vital message across in an interesting and informative way. He describes the mess we’re in, he expands upon it using interesting, illuminating anecdotes and reliable quotes. Best of all he proposes constructive solutions to the mess we’re in.

Those solutions aren’t going to fix our planet, but they could help to ensure that we’re faced with a mere disaster, rather than a planet-wide catastrophe.

The sad truth

It’s sobering to reflect that if the US hadn’t built this menacing zigurrat, they may have been severely punished. When terrorists attacked the British consulate and the HSBC bank in Istanbul and killed 30 people, the preferred target—the US consulate—was spared because the terrorist group considered the new building to be impregnable.

There has to be a better way to deal with radical Islam than the mindless confrontation employed so far. We’ve made a bad situation a many times worse.

To compound our stupidity, we continue to pour billions of dollars into funding the fanatics throughour own profligate addiction to their petroleum. Over to Mr Friedman:

“The big geopolitical redline that is being crossed as we enter the Energy-Climate Era involves the massive transfer of wealth—hundreds of billions of dollars a year from energy consuming countries to energy-producing countries, as the price of oil and gas has soared and stayed high.”

“This unprecedented financial transfer is strengthening nondemocratic actors and trends in many oil producing countries. It’s giving power to leaders who have not earned it by actually building their economies or educating their people. And it’s strengthening the most conservative hard-line clerics all across the Muslim world, who tend to get their financing from Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other oil-rich Persian Gulf states.”

As if our own success in destroying our planet weren’t effective enough, we’re directly and unnecessarily financing those who would bring us to total ruin even sooner.

Time to Act

Nothing really new here, but it puts the scenario for the next century or two in perspective. If you care about our children you should pay attention to this week’s editorial in Nature Journal.

Read it here.

These folk aren’t looney-left green extremists. They’re science folk firmly grounded in reality.

Even a complete halt to carbon pollution would not bring the world’s temperatures down substantially for several centuries.

Leaving your car in the garage won’t make a detectable difference. Keeping informed, spreading the message and making sure the politicians are paying attention will.

The most sensible thing we could do right now is to put a variable tax on oil and coal to create a price floor of at least US$100 per barrel equivalent —  irrespective of OPEC’s prices . This would create a more level playing field and allow the developers of alternative energy sources and technology sufficient certainty to keep them in the business. This needs the leadership of the U.S.A.

It must be done.

As a bonus it would help to stop the developed world transferring vast quantities of their wealth to oil-financed terrorists.

The following article was originally published February 1st, 2008 by Gwynne Dyer and is re-published here with the author’s permission. Gwynne can open doors. He did so last year and came up with some disturbing stuff from folk who know what they’re on about. Over to Dr Dyer:

Panic in the Trenches

It’s an old joke: everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.  The same, unfortunately, is true for the climate.

They ARE talking about it. They were at it again in Honolulu last week, discussing mandatory, internationally binding commitments on greenhouse gas emissions (although Russia and India refused to allow any mention of that subject in the final statement). At the Bali meeting in December, China even hinted that it might consider something like binding emission caps in the long run. But there is no sense of urgency.

Not, at least, the sense of urgency that would be required to take actions that would invalidate the prediction, in the latest issue of the journal “Science”, that climate change may cost southern Africa more than 30 percent of its main crop, maize (corn, mealies), by 2030. No part of the developing world can lose one-third of its main food crop without descending into desperate poverty and violence. Continue reading ‘Climate change reality from Gwynne Dyer’ »

Some connected items caught my eye.

First, Jeanette Fitzsimons got riled up on FrogBlog about the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). It’s no surprise that she’s not happy that the ETS is likely to be put on hold.

I like Jeanette. She’s one Green MP who isn’t a totally head in the sand Watermelon. The Green Party may be in trouble when she’s gone. Nevertheless, she’s bound by dogma in her views on the ETS.

Days prior to Jeanette’s post, Lord Stern spelled out the bad news on global warming.

“Much of Southern Europe would look like the Sahara,”

“Do the politicians understand just how difficult it could be? Just how devastating four, five, six degrees centigrade could be. I think not yet.”

“Many of the major rivers of the world, serving billions of people would dry up in the dry seasons or re-route.

“What would be the implication? Hundreds of millions of people would have to move, probably billions. What would be the implication of that? Extended conflict, social disruption, war essentially, over much of the world for many decades.” Continue reading ‘Climate reality and Green dreams’ »

Habitat loss, pollution, desertification, over-population

It’s not just about climate change…

Jonathan Schell is an insightful writer and scholar. A man of many accomplishments. With spare elegance he has encapsulated my generation’s legacy to our children’s children in this quote:

“Taken in its entirety, the increase in mankind’s strength has brought about a decisive, many-sided shift in the balance of strength between man and the earth.”

“Nature, once a harsh and feared master, now lies in subjection and needs protection against man’s powers.”

“Yet because man, no matter what intellectual and technical heights he may scale, remains embedded in nature, the balance has shifted against him too, and the threat that he poses to the Earth is a threat to him as well.”

Jonathan Schell

Believe it. Those cupfuls of oil add up.

Whether you’re a climate change evangelist or a climate change skeptic, you can’t escape the fact that we’re fouling our grandchildren’s nest and squandering their heritage.

Whether or not you believe that our output of greenhouse gasses is contributing to climate change, it’s undeniable that the measures which need to be addressed in order to limit pollution and to husband non-renewable energy sources are the same measures as those which the proponents of anthropogenic climate change promote.

One world, one people, one chance

If nothing else disturbs you, contemplate the source of funding for Al Qaeda, Hamas, Abu Nidal, Islamic Jihad and dozens of other groups. Every time we buy petrol or diesel we’re contributing to their cause. Those groups obtain most of their funding from oil money: mainly, but not exclusively, from Iran and America’s bosom buddies in Saudi Arabia.

We’re funding an openly declared war upon ourselves.

A quote from the Middle East Forum 5 years ago:

The Saudi government has admitted to spending more than $87 billion over the last decade in an effort to spread Wahhabism. This money has been spent on the creation of Mosques, schools, and other institutions that have constituted the breeding grounds for the foot soldiers of the global Islamic terrorist movement. Political considerations, and oil, have prevented Washington from holding the Saudis accountable for their role in promoting terrorism.

A briefing by Rachel Ehrenfeld
September 19, 2003

I suspect that the soon-to-be-resumed rising cost of oil will eventually be seen to have been a very good thing in every conceivable way.

We only get one bite of the cherry.