Joseph Fourier
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (21 March 1768 – 16 May 1830) was a French mathematician and physicist born in Auxerre and best known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series, which eventually developed into Fourier analysis and harmonic analysis, and their applications to problems of heat transfer and vibrations.
The Fourier transform and Fourier's law of conduction are also named in his honour.
Fourier is also generally credited with the discovery of the greenhouse effect.
Discovery of the greenhouse effect
In the 1820s Fourier calculated that an object the size of the Earth, and at its distance from the Sun, should be considerably colder than the planet actually is if warmed by only the effects of incoming solar radiation.
He examined various possible sources of the additional observed heat in articles published in 1824 and 1827.
While he ultimately suggested that interstellar radiation might be responsible for a large portion of the additional warmth, Fourier's consideration of the possibility that the Earth's atmosphere might act as an insulator of some kind is widely recognized as the first proposal of what is now known as the greenhouse effect, although Fourier never called it that.
In his articles, Fourier referred to an experiment by de Saussure, who lined a vase with blackened cork.
Into the cork, he inserted several panes of transparent glass, separated by intervals of air.
Midday sunlight was allowed to enter at the top of the vase through the glass panes.
The temperature became more elevated in the more interior compartments of this device.
Fourier concluded that gases in the atmosphere could form a stable barrier like the glass panes.
This conclusion may have contributed to the later use of the metaphor of the "greenhouse effect" to refer to the processes that determine atmospheric temperatures.
Fourier noted that the actual mechanisms that determine the temperatures of the atmosphere included convection, which was not present in de Saussure's experimental device.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Fo ... use_effect
ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING
Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING
THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR September 18, 2019 at 10:01 am
Paul Plante says :
Discuss this subject over beers?
Been there and done that, Sorin, and I can guarantee you that that conversation, if it can be called that, goes nowhere fast, just as it usually does when discussed by people on the internet.
People on beer who don’t believe that the climate can change, or that the activities of humans can affect the weather, and hence climate, usually get pretty belligerent once they have a few beers in them, whereas the ones who think the world is going to come to an end get maudlin and start crying in their beer about all these poor children like Greta Thunberg who are having their futures stolen from them so we can all drive around with big pick-ups towing our boat behind us so all the neighbors can see how well off we are.
This is about the best I have seen, since no screaming has started yet in here, and you are doing a good job of being objective and considering what has been offered so far.
So, is this a true statement then:
We are no longer at the point of preventing [climate disaster] from happening entirely – we are now at the point of minimising the damage.
end quote
And what is “climate disaster?”
Is that something that you could define, or find a definition of for us, because what the term is supposed to mean eludes me, who in over 70 years of life now, has been in some harsh environments, both hot and cold and wet.
As to “climate disasters, in 1886, an extremely severe winter wiped out over half of Teddy Roosevelt’s cattle herds out in the Dakotas, and after the disastrous winter of 1886–87, many of the cattle ranchers went out of business.
You would think with all those farting cows that AOC wants to ban, or equip with carbon-capture technology, that there would have been enough extra co2 in the air out there to keep it tropical.
And then, on the other side of the ledger, on May 31, 1889, we had the Great Johnstown Flood, which occurred after the catastrophic failure of the South Fork Dam, located on the south fork of the Little Conemaugh River in Pennsylvania, which was caused by excessive rainfall,
Were those climate disasters?
Or is that just the way it is for reasons the earth itself only knows?
And look at the dates there, Sorin, that cold winter and that excessive rainfall all happened within a few years of each other.
Why would carbon dioxide cause two such diverse events in such a short time period?
And in the early 1980’s, out in Wyoming, a bunch more cows were killed by the winter.
Again, with all those farting cows, why did that happen?
How could that have happened?
It goes against the physics, afterall, doesn’t it?
And then we had the Little Ice Age, which was a period of cooling that occurred after the Medieval Warm Period.
The Little Ice Age has been conventionally defined as a period extending from the 16th to the 19th centuries, although some experts prefer an alternative timespan from about 1300 to about 1850.
So much for consensus, ain’t it?
As to this discussion on this climate disaster which is going to deprive Greta Thunberg of her future, which she wants guaranteed to her, as socialists do (with them, it is always the responsibility of someone to provide for them which is how that system works, breeding weakness in society as it goes), the NASA Earth Observatory notes three particularly cold intervals: one beginning about 1650, another about 1770, and the last in 1850, all separated by intervals of slight warming.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report considered the timing and areas affected by the Little Ice Age suggested largely independent regional climate changes rather than a globally synchronous increased glaciation.
At most, there was modest cooling of the Northern Hemisphere during the period.
Several causes have been proposed: cyclical lows in solar radiation, heightened volcanic activity, changes in the ocean circulation, variations in Earth’s orbit and axial tilt (orbital forcing), inherent variability in global climate, and decreases in the human population (for example from the Black Death and the colonization of the Americas).
end quotes
Inherent variability in global climate?
No, wait, get that out of there – it goes against AOC’s model of impending climate disaster!
SCREECH, SCREECH, SCREECH, the sky is falling, the sky is falling, run, run, run!
Can you imagine having this conversation over some beers, Sorin?
And thank you for the extension of that offer of the famous Virginia hospitality!
And thanks once again to the Cape Charles Mirror for making this discussion possible in the first place.
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-178742
Paul Plante says :
Discuss this subject over beers?
Been there and done that, Sorin, and I can guarantee you that that conversation, if it can be called that, goes nowhere fast, just as it usually does when discussed by people on the internet.
People on beer who don’t believe that the climate can change, or that the activities of humans can affect the weather, and hence climate, usually get pretty belligerent once they have a few beers in them, whereas the ones who think the world is going to come to an end get maudlin and start crying in their beer about all these poor children like Greta Thunberg who are having their futures stolen from them so we can all drive around with big pick-ups towing our boat behind us so all the neighbors can see how well off we are.
This is about the best I have seen, since no screaming has started yet in here, and you are doing a good job of being objective and considering what has been offered so far.
So, is this a true statement then:
We are no longer at the point of preventing [climate disaster] from happening entirely – we are now at the point of minimising the damage.
end quote
And what is “climate disaster?”
Is that something that you could define, or find a definition of for us, because what the term is supposed to mean eludes me, who in over 70 years of life now, has been in some harsh environments, both hot and cold and wet.
As to “climate disasters, in 1886, an extremely severe winter wiped out over half of Teddy Roosevelt’s cattle herds out in the Dakotas, and after the disastrous winter of 1886–87, many of the cattle ranchers went out of business.
You would think with all those farting cows that AOC wants to ban, or equip with carbon-capture technology, that there would have been enough extra co2 in the air out there to keep it tropical.
And then, on the other side of the ledger, on May 31, 1889, we had the Great Johnstown Flood, which occurred after the catastrophic failure of the South Fork Dam, located on the south fork of the Little Conemaugh River in Pennsylvania, which was caused by excessive rainfall,
Were those climate disasters?
Or is that just the way it is for reasons the earth itself only knows?
And look at the dates there, Sorin, that cold winter and that excessive rainfall all happened within a few years of each other.
Why would carbon dioxide cause two such diverse events in such a short time period?
And in the early 1980’s, out in Wyoming, a bunch more cows were killed by the winter.
Again, with all those farting cows, why did that happen?
How could that have happened?
It goes against the physics, afterall, doesn’t it?
And then we had the Little Ice Age, which was a period of cooling that occurred after the Medieval Warm Period.
The Little Ice Age has been conventionally defined as a period extending from the 16th to the 19th centuries, although some experts prefer an alternative timespan from about 1300 to about 1850.
So much for consensus, ain’t it?
As to this discussion on this climate disaster which is going to deprive Greta Thunberg of her future, which she wants guaranteed to her, as socialists do (with them, it is always the responsibility of someone to provide for them which is how that system works, breeding weakness in society as it goes), the NASA Earth Observatory notes three particularly cold intervals: one beginning about 1650, another about 1770, and the last in 1850, all separated by intervals of slight warming.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report considered the timing and areas affected by the Little Ice Age suggested largely independent regional climate changes rather than a globally synchronous increased glaciation.
At most, there was modest cooling of the Northern Hemisphere during the period.
Several causes have been proposed: cyclical lows in solar radiation, heightened volcanic activity, changes in the ocean circulation, variations in Earth’s orbit and axial tilt (orbital forcing), inherent variability in global climate, and decreases in the human population (for example from the Black Death and the colonization of the Americas).
end quotes
Inherent variability in global climate?
No, wait, get that out of there – it goes against AOC’s model of impending climate disaster!
SCREECH, SCREECH, SCREECH, the sky is falling, the sky is falling, run, run, run!
Can you imagine having this conversation over some beers, Sorin?
And thank you for the extension of that offer of the famous Virginia hospitality!
And thanks once again to the Cape Charles Mirror for making this discussion possible in the first place.
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-178742
Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING
THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR September 15, 2019 at 5:48 pm
Paul Plante says :
And thank you to the Cape Charles Mirror once again for hosting this discussion, which lets an old disabled, certified poor person like myself have as equal access as do the well-to-do yacht owners who proliferate in the balmy clime of Cape Charles, Virginia (yes, I drove through one time with my windows down just to experience it first-hand, and I thought it was lovely, far better in fact than even San Diego or Burbank, California, or Marseilles, France, for that matter), and to Mr. Otton for bringing us back to the reality that a small group of people, at best 32% of the American people, called the Democrats are unilaterally attempting to enact an insane policy known as the “GREEN NEW DEAL (see, Cape Charles Mirror 7 April 2019 http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/g ... ent-138950 ) that will cause chaos in this country that will greatly impact the lives of the 68% of us who are not Democrats and who will be harmed by this while being denied a voice at the table, which brings us American citizens who care about due process of law, which is to say, citizenship as opposed to being a cud-chewing consumer as so many Americans have become, to this issue of the Democrats in Congress, and here we are talking directly about this AOC, inviting this young Swedish girl who is spouting nonsense to appear before something called the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, a select committee established in the 116th United States Congress in 2019 when Democrats regained the majority of the United States House of Representatives chaired by Congresswoman Kathy Castor of Florida, without someone standing there right beside her to question her “science” and to then rebut it, as it should be, given that it is nothing more than ignorant rubbish, and I say that as an American citizen who openly resents this spoiled and willful rich and manipulative Swedish teen-ager coming over here to tell me, “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is, even that burden, you leave to us children,” which is ignorant horse****, although not to the Democrats who are exploiting this girl to push their “green new deal” agenda in this upcoming presidential race, by having poor little Greta Thunberg come on camera to chide us all for being so morally irresponsible, which will have the Democrats on the panel openly weeping and possibly tearing at their clothes while flagellating themselves with chains to expiate their sins, which they will then project onto the rest of us, as well, while telling us to our faces as she did at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland this year, when she told government and business leaders:
“I want you to panic.”
“I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.”
end quotes
As to the existence of that particular committee, in November and December of 2018, youth climate activists with the Sunrise Movement pushed House Democrats to form a select committee with the mandate to draft “Green New Deal” legislation, working with incoming freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who proposed language for the committee’s authorization.
As can be seen, that was entirely one-sided, with no input from those of us who are not in favor of the Green New Deal for legitimate reasons the Democrats are keeping out of the record.
As to keeping us out of the discussion, which is very un-democratic, a hallmark of the Democrats, it is only necessary to go to their website https://climatecrisis.house.gov/ where they make it incandescently clear (The science is in. We know the cause. Burning fossil fuels and destroying tropical forests are driving the climate crisis.) that thank you very much, the discussion is over, we have all the facts and we have all of what we need to know, so go back home and STFU if you don’t agree with the green new deal, which makes you an obstructionist trying to steal the future of people like Greta Thunberg.
Which raises the existential question of why are the Democrats bringing this girl over from Sweden to try and turn our children and grandchildren against us by accusing us of stealing their futures because we are all a bunch of self-centered gluttons and wastrels, a characterization I frankly resent and find extremely insulting as an American citizen, which has me standing up in here to protest this Swedish trouble-maker appearing before our Congress without equal time for rebuttal being offered on behalf of the American people themselves, who are quite obviously being left out of the discussion by the Democrats.
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-177191
THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR September 16, 2019 at 6:25 pm
Paul Plante says :
It is absurd, Sorin Varzaru, at least from an engineering point of view employing thermodynamics and heat and mass transfer, if you have any of your own experts in those areas you want to bring into the conversation, to say that the heat energy produced by human activity has no impact whatsoever on the weather, and hence, the climate.
It is, however, far more absurd, and dangerously so, to insist, as these Democrats are doing, that humans can actually stop climate change, when climate change is a function of what the earth wants it to be, not the whims of 16-year old Greta Thunberg, who incidentally in my estimation as a grandfather and American citizen is the biggest fraud to be perpetrated on the public at large in the name of “science,” since the famous Piltdown Man hoax back in 1912, or AOC, for that matter, who is helping to perpetrate this fraud that is Greta Thunberg on us, in her own bid for considerable political power over our lives without our having a voice in the matter, which is tyranny.
As to the Piltdown Man, it was a paleoanthropological hoax in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human.
The inauthenticity of the hoax was described in 1953.
An extensive scientific review in 2016 established that amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson was its likely perpetrator.
In 1912, Charles Dawson claimed that he had discovered the “missing link” between ape and man.
In February 1912, Dawson contacted Arthur Smith Woodward, Keeper of Geology at the Natural History Museum, stating he had found a section of a human-like skull in Pleistocene gravel beds near Piltdown, East Sussex.
That summer, Dawson and Smith Woodward purportedly discovered more bones and artifacts at the site, which they connected to the same individual.
These finds included a jawbone, more skull fragments, a set of teeth, and primitive tools.
Smith Woodward reconstructed the skull fragments and hypothesised that they belonged to a human ancestor from 500,000 years ago.
The discovery was announced at a Geological Society meeting and was given the Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni (“Dawson’s dawn-man”).
The questionable significance of the assemblage remained the subject of considerable controversy until it was conclusively exposed in 1953 as a forgery.
It was found to have consisted of the altered mandible and some teeth of an orangutan deliberately combined with the cranium of a fully developed, though small-brained, modern human.
The Piltdown hoax is prominent for two reasons: the attention it generated around the subject of human evolution, and the length of time, 41 years, that elapsed from its alleged initial discovery to its definitive exposure as a composite forgery.
end quotes
And here we are once again, being confronted with an elaborate fraud, this one named Greta Thunberg, which fraud is being stage-managed by her father and PR dude, the famous Swedish actor Svante Thunberg, who is listed as a co-author of a book she wrote about herself entitled “Scenes from the Heart,” where we are informed that Greta has a “condition” that makes her far more intelligent than any of us churls or serfs out here spewing gobs of carbon dioxide into the air each day with our profligate lifestyle that Greta knows every American has, so that we should submit to her superior intelligence and do whatever it is she tells us to do.
Svante Thunberg, born 10 June 1969, the year I was in Viet Nam, father of Greta and manipulator of us, is a Swedish author, arts manager and producer, and actor, and he is the son of actors Olof Thunberg and Mona Andersson, so acting runs deep in that family as we can see in this YouTube video of Svante Thunberg smoothly spinning his web of lies to capture the minds of America’s youth, to twist them to his cause, which is promoting Greta as a serious financial asset:
Greta & Svante Thunberg – Straight Talk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiD04TRwebQ
Personally, I think every parent and grandparent in America should watch that video with their children and grandchildren to see exactly what kind of mind poison they are being fed here in the name of “science,” which this is a mockery of.
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-177783
SHE MEANS LISTEN TO THE DEMOCRAT SCIENTISTS AS OPPOSED TO THE REPUBLICAN SCIENTISTS ...THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR September 14, 2019 at 10:07 pm
Paul Plante says:
Thus, all of these politicians running their mouths at high speed telling us the untruth that the world is going to come to an end in ten years if we don’t enact the Green New Deal right now are themselves contributing greatly to climate change, assuming their model is correct that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, which shows some of the ignorance and hypocrisy and scientific voodoo at play here from those who want us to be scared so we are easier to manipulate, which takes us to Greta’s carbon fiber sailboat.
Carbon fiber is manufactured by refining oil to obtain acrylonitrile and then spinning this acrylonitrile and baking the spun yarn.
Due to the high baking temperature of 1000℃ or more, 20 tons of CO2 are emitted to manufacture 1 ton of carbon fiber.
So Greta’s crossing of the Atlantic in a high-tech, carbon fiber sailboat was hardly emission-free as we are being told by the media.
Why do you think they lie to us, Sorin?
Any guesses?
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-177191
CNN
"Greta Thunberg, 16-year-old climate activist, tells Congress to listen to the scientists and take real action"
By Leah Asmelash, CNN
18 SEPTEMBER 2019
Greta Thunberg has had a busy week.
On Wednesday, the Swedish 16-year-old climate activist appeared in front of Congress before a hearing on climate change, just days after she met with former President Barack Obama.
Thunberg, though, told Congress she didn't have any prepared remarks.
Instead, she said she was attaching her testimony -- the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's special report on global warming, which reported a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
"I am submitting this report as my testimony because I don't want you to listen to me, I want you to listen to the scientists," she said.
"And I want you to unite behind the science."
"And then I want you to take real action."
Strong words from the teenager, but this isn't the first time she's spoken up to governments.
Thunberg first made a name for herself while staging weekly sit-ins outside the Swedish Parliament, which led to over 100 similar protests worldwide.
Thunberg is in the US to speak at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York on September 23, but she's had other things on her agenda, too -- including appearing on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah in New York and receiving Amnesty International's top award in Washington for her activism.
But she didn't travel to the US by plane.
To cut down on emissions, Thunberg spent two weeks sailing across the Atlantic on a zero-emissions sailboat.
That's dedication.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... P17#page=2
Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING
THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR September 18, 2019 at 9:07 pm
Paul Plante says :
The so-called “smart grid,” which actually isn’t all that smart, wouldn’t prevent a black-out and doesn’t.
We have had power outages up this way all summer from weather-related events, and anyway, you took that one way over into the tules, because I wasn’t saying that the green new deal was going to cause black-outs.
What I was saying is that the great black-out is a preview of the carbon-free world the Democrats are going to force on us in their hysteria over supposed global warming due to carbon dioxide, which theory goes back to the 1820s and Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (21 March 1768 – 16 May 1830), the French mathematician and physicist who is also generally credited with the discovery of the greenhouse effect.
In the 1820s Fourier calculated that an object the size of the Earth, and at its distance from the Sun, should be considerably colder than the planet actually is if warmed by only the effects of incoming solar radiation.
He examined various possible sources of the additional observed heat in articles published in 1824 and 1827.
While he ultimately suggested that interstellar radiation might be responsible for a large portion of the additional warmth, Fourier’s consideration of the possibility that the Earth’s atmosphere might act as an insulator of some kind is widely recognized as the first proposal of what is now known as the greenhouse effect, although Fourier never called it that.
So, if we are not hysterical like Greta Thunberg and AOC and the Democrats, we can see that originally, the so-called “greenhouse effect” due to carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere was a good thing, not a bad thing, because it made life more livable for humans than it otherwise might have been, absent the greenhouse gases.
In the 1820s, Fourier concluded that gases in the atmosphere could form a stable barrier like the glass panes, and it was this conclusion may have contributed to the later use of the metaphor of the “greenhouse effect” to refer to the processes that determine atmospheric temperatures.
Except today, with constant satellite measurements, plus the science that Greta Thunberg, AOC and the Democrats ignore or discard, because it does not serve to make people scared like they need them to be, we know not only that carbon dioxide does not make a layer in our atmosphere like a pane, but that it is not well-mixed, either, which shoots that “pane of glass” theory being pushed by Greta, AOC, and the Democrats right in the ***.
And that takes us forward in time from Fourier to Svante August Arrhenius (19 February 1859 – 2 October 1927), a Swedish scientist who was originally a physicist, but often is referred to as a chemist, as he was one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry, a course I took in my training to become an engineer.
With respect to this discussion, Arrhenius was the first to use basic principles of physical chemistry to estimate the extent to which increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide are responsible for the Earth’s increasing surface temperature.
In developing a theory to explain the ice ages, Arrhenius, in 1896, was the first to use basic principles of physical chemistry to calculate estimates of the extent to which increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) will increase Earth’s surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.
Arrhenius wanted to determine whether greenhouse gases could contribute to the explanation of the temperature variation between glacial and inter-glacial periods.
In his calculation Arrhenius included the feedback from changes in water vapor as well as latitudinal effects, but he omitted clouds, convection of heat upward in the atmosphere, and other essential factors.
His work is currently seen less as an accurate quantification of global warming than as the first demonstration that increases in atmospheric CO2 will cause global warming, everything else being equal.
With respect to this hysterical bull*** we are being force-fed today by Greta, the little scared girl from Sweden, the manipulator AOC and the Democrats, circa 1906, Arrhenius wrote Världarnas utveckling (1906) directed at a general audience, where he suggested that the human emission of CO2 would be strong enough to prevent the world from entering a new ice age, and that a warmer earth would be needed to feed the rapidly increasing population:
“To a certain extent the temperature of the earth’s surface, as we shall presently see, is conditioned by the properties of the atmosphere surrounding it, and particularly by the permeability of the latter for the rays of heat.” (p46)
“That the atmospheric envelopes limit the heat losses from the planets had been suggested about 1800 by the great French physicist Fourier.”
“His ideas were further developed afterwards by Pouillet and Tyndall.”
“Their theory has been styled the hot-house theory, because they thought that the atmosphere acted after the manner of the glass panes of hot-houses.” (p51)
“Although the sea, by absorbing carbonic acid, acts as a regulator of huge capacity, which takes up about five-sixths of the produced carbonic acid, we yet recognize that the slight percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere may by the advances of industry be changed to a noticeable degree in the course of a few centuries.” (p54)
“Since, now, warm ages have alternated with glacial periods, even after man appeared on the earth, we have to ask ourselves: Is it probable that we shall in the coming geological ages be visited by a new ice period that will drive us from our temperate countries into the hotter climates of Africa?”
“There does not appear to be much ground for such an apprehension.”
“The enormous combustion of coal by our industrial establishments suffices to increase the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air to a perceptible degree.” (p61)
“We often hear lamentations that the coal stored up in the earth is wasted by the present generation without any thought of the future, and we are terrified by the awful destruction of life and property which has followed the volcanic eruptions of our days.”
“We may find a kind of consolation in the consideration that here, as in every other case, there is good mixed with the evil.”
“By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present, for the benefit of rapidly propagating mankind.” (p63)
end quotes
So WTF, Sorin?
Can the greenhouse effect be both a good thing and a bad thing at the same time?
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-178742
Paul Plante says :
The so-called “smart grid,” which actually isn’t all that smart, wouldn’t prevent a black-out and doesn’t.
We have had power outages up this way all summer from weather-related events, and anyway, you took that one way over into the tules, because I wasn’t saying that the green new deal was going to cause black-outs.
What I was saying is that the great black-out is a preview of the carbon-free world the Democrats are going to force on us in their hysteria over supposed global warming due to carbon dioxide, which theory goes back to the 1820s and Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (21 March 1768 – 16 May 1830), the French mathematician and physicist who is also generally credited with the discovery of the greenhouse effect.
In the 1820s Fourier calculated that an object the size of the Earth, and at its distance from the Sun, should be considerably colder than the planet actually is if warmed by only the effects of incoming solar radiation.
He examined various possible sources of the additional observed heat in articles published in 1824 and 1827.
While he ultimately suggested that interstellar radiation might be responsible for a large portion of the additional warmth, Fourier’s consideration of the possibility that the Earth’s atmosphere might act as an insulator of some kind is widely recognized as the first proposal of what is now known as the greenhouse effect, although Fourier never called it that.
So, if we are not hysterical like Greta Thunberg and AOC and the Democrats, we can see that originally, the so-called “greenhouse effect” due to carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere was a good thing, not a bad thing, because it made life more livable for humans than it otherwise might have been, absent the greenhouse gases.
In the 1820s, Fourier concluded that gases in the atmosphere could form a stable barrier like the glass panes, and it was this conclusion may have contributed to the later use of the metaphor of the “greenhouse effect” to refer to the processes that determine atmospheric temperatures.
Except today, with constant satellite measurements, plus the science that Greta Thunberg, AOC and the Democrats ignore or discard, because it does not serve to make people scared like they need them to be, we know not only that carbon dioxide does not make a layer in our atmosphere like a pane, but that it is not well-mixed, either, which shoots that “pane of glass” theory being pushed by Greta, AOC, and the Democrats right in the ***.
And that takes us forward in time from Fourier to Svante August Arrhenius (19 February 1859 – 2 October 1927), a Swedish scientist who was originally a physicist, but often is referred to as a chemist, as he was one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry, a course I took in my training to become an engineer.
With respect to this discussion, Arrhenius was the first to use basic principles of physical chemistry to estimate the extent to which increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide are responsible for the Earth’s increasing surface temperature.
In developing a theory to explain the ice ages, Arrhenius, in 1896, was the first to use basic principles of physical chemistry to calculate estimates of the extent to which increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) will increase Earth’s surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.
Arrhenius wanted to determine whether greenhouse gases could contribute to the explanation of the temperature variation between glacial and inter-glacial periods.
In his calculation Arrhenius included the feedback from changes in water vapor as well as latitudinal effects, but he omitted clouds, convection of heat upward in the atmosphere, and other essential factors.
His work is currently seen less as an accurate quantification of global warming than as the first demonstration that increases in atmospheric CO2 will cause global warming, everything else being equal.
With respect to this hysterical bull*** we are being force-fed today by Greta, the little scared girl from Sweden, the manipulator AOC and the Democrats, circa 1906, Arrhenius wrote Världarnas utveckling (1906) directed at a general audience, where he suggested that the human emission of CO2 would be strong enough to prevent the world from entering a new ice age, and that a warmer earth would be needed to feed the rapidly increasing population:
“To a certain extent the temperature of the earth’s surface, as we shall presently see, is conditioned by the properties of the atmosphere surrounding it, and particularly by the permeability of the latter for the rays of heat.” (p46)
“That the atmospheric envelopes limit the heat losses from the planets had been suggested about 1800 by the great French physicist Fourier.”
“His ideas were further developed afterwards by Pouillet and Tyndall.”
“Their theory has been styled the hot-house theory, because they thought that the atmosphere acted after the manner of the glass panes of hot-houses.” (p51)
“Although the sea, by absorbing carbonic acid, acts as a regulator of huge capacity, which takes up about five-sixths of the produced carbonic acid, we yet recognize that the slight percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere may by the advances of industry be changed to a noticeable degree in the course of a few centuries.” (p54)
“Since, now, warm ages have alternated with glacial periods, even after man appeared on the earth, we have to ask ourselves: Is it probable that we shall in the coming geological ages be visited by a new ice period that will drive us from our temperate countries into the hotter climates of Africa?”
“There does not appear to be much ground for such an apprehension.”
“The enormous combustion of coal by our industrial establishments suffices to increase the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air to a perceptible degree.” (p61)
“We often hear lamentations that the coal stored up in the earth is wasted by the present generation without any thought of the future, and we are terrified by the awful destruction of life and property which has followed the volcanic eruptions of our days.”
“We may find a kind of consolation in the consideration that here, as in every other case, there is good mixed with the evil.”
“By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present, for the benefit of rapidly propagating mankind.” (p63)
end quotes
So WTF, Sorin?
Can the greenhouse effect be both a good thing and a bad thing at the same time?
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-178742
Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING
THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR September 19, 2019 at 6:07 pm
Paul Plante says :
And Sorin, let me sincerely say that I am quite sorry to hear that real climate science makes you “tired,” given that it is nothing more than high school science that we are discussing here, and to be sure, I just googled “high school science, teaching Arrhenius,” and sure enough, just as I remembered from like 57 years ago when I was taught the subject in high school, the “Arrhenius Equation” is still taught, as it should be, so that our American children are able to think for themselves about this subject of carbon dioxide and its role in life on earth, where carbon dioxide, as any child growing up in the countryside growing their own food knows, is essential to life in that everything we grow that is green requires carbon dioxide to breathe, or it doesn’t live, so that they are not misled by manipulators like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Svante Thunberg.
The following formulation of Arrhenius’s rule is still in use today, and when it comes to “science,” it is the only science that there is, to wit:
Δ F = α ln(C/C subscript 0)
where C subscript 0 is the concentration of CO2 at the beginning (time-zero) of the period being studied (if the same concentration unit is used for both C and C subscript 0, then it doesn’t matter which concentration unit is used); C is the CO2 concentration at end of the period being studied; ln is the natural logarithm (= log base e (log subscript e)); and Δ F is the augmentation of the temperature, in other words the change in the rate of heating Earth’s surface (radiative forcing), which is measured in joules of heat energy per second, per square meter — a joule per second is one watt.
That is the “science” that all these so-called “consensus scientists” are working with, and it has been known now for some 123 years, which brings us back to public policy that impacts the lives of all of us being based on fraud, lies, deceit and deception, much as was the case with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution back when, which was based on lies, deceit and deception by the Democrats.
And that brings us to these words from United States Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on 29 June 2019, to wit:
In the 1970s, ExxonMobil had internal science that not only definitively proved that climate change was real, but they themselves, the oil company, invested in modelling to see how bad it was going to be.
Some of their models were so sophisticated that, back in the 70s, they were predicting our weather patterns as far out as 2012 – and many of them were accurate.
They knew exactly what was happening.
So what they did, starting the year I was born, around 1989, was to start funding a lot of media and lobbying campaigns.
They knew they couldn’t fund campaigns outright saying climate change is not real.
But they could fund campaigns sowing confusion.
So they would run campaigns saying we need to see more science, to sow doubt around the consensus.
For a very long time it worked, and it got very bad.
We came very close to acting on the climate in 1989, but the lobbying was so powerful that they effectively prevented action – we had almost 40% of Republican voters not believing that climate change was settled fact.
But I think because of our advocacy and our movement, those numbers have been dropping precipitously in just the last few years.
And in the last year especially, with our push for a Green New Deal, connecting everything that is happening to climate change.
People who cover increasingly worse hurricanes as though they are accidents, or just things that happen – now, every time a storm comes, we talk about climate change.
The other piece of it is not just acknowledging that it’s real, but prioritising it as a top issue.
We just received some very encouraging numbers yesterday – a year or two years ago, only 20% of Democratic voters, the more liberal voters in the country, saw climate change as a top issue.
With our action, and the youth organising that’s going on now, it has surged.
We’ve seen in very early voting states, something like 70% of Democratic voters think that a Green New Deal should be a top issue, and that they would support candidates who support it, and not supporting it is a red flag for many voters.
I think we’re moving, but it takes this radical action to move it.
We have historically had an issue with media coverage of the climate crisis – I think they don’t realise that not covering it is just as bad as denying it.
We have issues because much of our media is profit-driven, and if it doesn’t drive ratings they will not cover it as much.
But we simply don’t have a choice.
We have to do this.
end quotes
SHRIEK, SHRIEK, SHRIEK!
What Exxon Mobil had back in the 1970s was the same Arrhenius Equation that ALL of us alive back then had, including high school children, but AOC, who was born on October 13, 1989, doesn’t know that because she never bothered to learn, or was never taught, or just plain did not give a ****, being into modern expressive dance as she was back then.
And that brings us to an article in the Scientific American entitled “Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 years ago – A new investigation shows the oil company understood the science before it became a public issue and spent millions to promote misinformation” by Shannon Hall on October 26, 2015, where we are provided the following mindless bull**** by this fraud of a magazine, as follows:
Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News.
end quotes
To which I say, oh, get out of here with this bull****, will you!
In 1977 in America, there should have been no one under the age of 15 who were not aware of climate change, since we were modeling climate change with the same science which still exists today, in high school back in 1962.
But obviously, you can be real stupid, ignorant and uninformed and still be a feature writer for Scientific American as is the case here with this Shannon Hall, who is advertised as being an award-winning freelance science journalist based in the Rocky Mountains who specializes in writing about astronomy, geology and the environment, from an obviously biased perspective.
That spew of bull**** then continued as follows:
This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation — an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking.
end quotes
Now, I am over 70, and in 1975, I was inducted into Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society, which is the international honor society of science and engineering.
One of the oldest and largest scientific organizations in the world, Sigma Xi has a distinguished history of service to science and society for more than one hundred and twenty five years.
Scientists and engineers, whose research spans the disciplines of science and technology, comprise the membership of the Society.
More than 200 Nobel Prize winners have been members.
Sigma Xi was founded in 1886 to honor excellence in scientific investigation and encourage a sense of companionship and cooperation among researchers in all fields of science and engineering.
So regardless of what AOC or Greta Thunberg or Shannon Hall were aware of in 1977, I and many others in the “science community” were aware of what Exxon Mobil was doing, which was conducting their own research into the equation and WHY NOT?
Because they are an oil company?
What horse****!
So despite the bull**** being spewed by the Scientific American in 2015, which bull**** was then regurgitated by United States Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on 29 June 2019, there was no cover-up by Exxon Mobil, and no, I never worked for them, nor desired to, and I don’t own stock in Exxon Mobil, and there was no misinformation campaign by Mobil, which takes us back to the hysteria-mongering and misinformation that real stupid Scientific American article as follows:
“It’s never been remotely plausible that they did not understand the science,” says Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University.
end quotes
DUH!
It has never been remotely plausible that any high school graduate over the age of 15 since at least the 1950s if not before does not understand the “science,” so that hype and tripe from this Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University, above here about Mobil not understanding high school science can be dismissed for what it is – mindless drivel, which makes it plain that you can be a collitch perfesser at Harvard without having to know a ******* thing.
And what makes this truly obscene is that Arrhenius was trying to quell hysteria about climate change with his equation while the AOC manipulative crowd that is exploiting poor little Greta Thunberg, the scared girl from Sweden, are trying to use the Arrhenius Equation to sow fear and hysteria to get us off-balance so we can’t think straight and thus, will be easy meat for AOC to manipulate at her will.
So, when you are for the Green New Deal, which has already been proven by AOC herself to be nothing more than a fund-raising scam, you are for fraud, lies, deceit and deception.
Why?
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-179072
Paul Plante says :
And Sorin, let me sincerely say that I am quite sorry to hear that real climate science makes you “tired,” given that it is nothing more than high school science that we are discussing here, and to be sure, I just googled “high school science, teaching Arrhenius,” and sure enough, just as I remembered from like 57 years ago when I was taught the subject in high school, the “Arrhenius Equation” is still taught, as it should be, so that our American children are able to think for themselves about this subject of carbon dioxide and its role in life on earth, where carbon dioxide, as any child growing up in the countryside growing their own food knows, is essential to life in that everything we grow that is green requires carbon dioxide to breathe, or it doesn’t live, so that they are not misled by manipulators like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Svante Thunberg.
The following formulation of Arrhenius’s rule is still in use today, and when it comes to “science,” it is the only science that there is, to wit:
Δ F = α ln(C/C subscript 0)
where C subscript 0 is the concentration of CO2 at the beginning (time-zero) of the period being studied (if the same concentration unit is used for both C and C subscript 0, then it doesn’t matter which concentration unit is used); C is the CO2 concentration at end of the period being studied; ln is the natural logarithm (= log base e (log subscript e)); and Δ F is the augmentation of the temperature, in other words the change in the rate of heating Earth’s surface (radiative forcing), which is measured in joules of heat energy per second, per square meter — a joule per second is one watt.
That is the “science” that all these so-called “consensus scientists” are working with, and it has been known now for some 123 years, which brings us back to public policy that impacts the lives of all of us being based on fraud, lies, deceit and deception, much as was the case with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution back when, which was based on lies, deceit and deception by the Democrats.
And that brings us to these words from United States Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on 29 June 2019, to wit:
In the 1970s, ExxonMobil had internal science that not only definitively proved that climate change was real, but they themselves, the oil company, invested in modelling to see how bad it was going to be.
Some of their models were so sophisticated that, back in the 70s, they were predicting our weather patterns as far out as 2012 – and many of them were accurate.
They knew exactly what was happening.
So what they did, starting the year I was born, around 1989, was to start funding a lot of media and lobbying campaigns.
They knew they couldn’t fund campaigns outright saying climate change is not real.
But they could fund campaigns sowing confusion.
So they would run campaigns saying we need to see more science, to sow doubt around the consensus.
For a very long time it worked, and it got very bad.
We came very close to acting on the climate in 1989, but the lobbying was so powerful that they effectively prevented action – we had almost 40% of Republican voters not believing that climate change was settled fact.
But I think because of our advocacy and our movement, those numbers have been dropping precipitously in just the last few years.
And in the last year especially, with our push for a Green New Deal, connecting everything that is happening to climate change.
People who cover increasingly worse hurricanes as though they are accidents, or just things that happen – now, every time a storm comes, we talk about climate change.
The other piece of it is not just acknowledging that it’s real, but prioritising it as a top issue.
We just received some very encouraging numbers yesterday – a year or two years ago, only 20% of Democratic voters, the more liberal voters in the country, saw climate change as a top issue.
With our action, and the youth organising that’s going on now, it has surged.
We’ve seen in very early voting states, something like 70% of Democratic voters think that a Green New Deal should be a top issue, and that they would support candidates who support it, and not supporting it is a red flag for many voters.
I think we’re moving, but it takes this radical action to move it.
We have historically had an issue with media coverage of the climate crisis – I think they don’t realise that not covering it is just as bad as denying it.
We have issues because much of our media is profit-driven, and if it doesn’t drive ratings they will not cover it as much.
But we simply don’t have a choice.
We have to do this.
end quotes
SHRIEK, SHRIEK, SHRIEK!
What Exxon Mobil had back in the 1970s was the same Arrhenius Equation that ALL of us alive back then had, including high school children, but AOC, who was born on October 13, 1989, doesn’t know that because she never bothered to learn, or was never taught, or just plain did not give a ****, being into modern expressive dance as she was back then.
And that brings us to an article in the Scientific American entitled “Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 years ago – A new investigation shows the oil company understood the science before it became a public issue and spent millions to promote misinformation” by Shannon Hall on October 26, 2015, where we are provided the following mindless bull**** by this fraud of a magazine, as follows:
Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News.
end quotes
To which I say, oh, get out of here with this bull****, will you!
In 1977 in America, there should have been no one under the age of 15 who were not aware of climate change, since we were modeling climate change with the same science which still exists today, in high school back in 1962.
But obviously, you can be real stupid, ignorant and uninformed and still be a feature writer for Scientific American as is the case here with this Shannon Hall, who is advertised as being an award-winning freelance science journalist based in the Rocky Mountains who specializes in writing about astronomy, geology and the environment, from an obviously biased perspective.
That spew of bull**** then continued as follows:
This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation — an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking.
end quotes
Now, I am over 70, and in 1975, I was inducted into Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society, which is the international honor society of science and engineering.
One of the oldest and largest scientific organizations in the world, Sigma Xi has a distinguished history of service to science and society for more than one hundred and twenty five years.
Scientists and engineers, whose research spans the disciplines of science and technology, comprise the membership of the Society.
More than 200 Nobel Prize winners have been members.
Sigma Xi was founded in 1886 to honor excellence in scientific investigation and encourage a sense of companionship and cooperation among researchers in all fields of science and engineering.
So regardless of what AOC or Greta Thunberg or Shannon Hall were aware of in 1977, I and many others in the “science community” were aware of what Exxon Mobil was doing, which was conducting their own research into the equation and WHY NOT?
Because they are an oil company?
What horse****!
So despite the bull**** being spewed by the Scientific American in 2015, which bull**** was then regurgitated by United States Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on 29 June 2019, there was no cover-up by Exxon Mobil, and no, I never worked for them, nor desired to, and I don’t own stock in Exxon Mobil, and there was no misinformation campaign by Mobil, which takes us back to the hysteria-mongering and misinformation that real stupid Scientific American article as follows:
“It’s never been remotely plausible that they did not understand the science,” says Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University.
end quotes
DUH!
It has never been remotely plausible that any high school graduate over the age of 15 since at least the 1950s if not before does not understand the “science,” so that hype and tripe from this Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University, above here about Mobil not understanding high school science can be dismissed for what it is – mindless drivel, which makes it plain that you can be a collitch perfesser at Harvard without having to know a ******* thing.
And what makes this truly obscene is that Arrhenius was trying to quell hysteria about climate change with his equation while the AOC manipulative crowd that is exploiting poor little Greta Thunberg, the scared girl from Sweden, are trying to use the Arrhenius Equation to sow fear and hysteria to get us off-balance so we can’t think straight and thus, will be easy meat for AOC to manipulate at her will.
So, when you are for the Green New Deal, which has already been proven by AOC herself to be nothing more than a fund-raising scam, you are for fraud, lies, deceit and deception.
Why?
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-179072
Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING
THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR September 20, 2019 at 10:56 am
Paul Plante says :
So, today is what is known as “SREECH AND SHRIEK” day across the world, where hordes of people led by AOC and Greta Thunberg are going to be out on the street en masse ululating and chanting over and over, feverishly, “HEY, HEY, HO, HO, CLIMATE CHANGE HAS GOT TO GO,” which should make for some pretty exciting news coverage, anyway, if you like pictures of throngs of people all with their mouths wide open howling at the sky for it to stand still and stop changing.
Which brings us to the essential question of “if there is but one Arrhenius Equation, then how can there be any disagreement about climate change,” which is a very good question, the answer to which was touched upon by Wayne Creed in another edition of the Cape Charles Mirror, where he made a statement to the effect that models of reality are not reality and do not control reality,
The controversy comes in because the Greta/AOC crowd are treating the Arrhenius Equation as absolute, when in reality, it is an approximation, as are all models of physical systems.
While Arrhenius never intended his equation to be used in the manner it is being used in today, which is to strike fear into our hearts and minds that if we do not right now at this instant hand control of our lives over to Greta Thunberg and AOC and the Democrats, the world is going to end and be gone in ten or twelve more years, that is exactly what Greta and AOC and the Democrats are doing with it, which is a total perversion of science, which is what has me standing up in here saying “wait a minute,” because these lies being propagated by the hysterical set involve the lives of all of us, which is why this must needs be and remain a very public discussion, to counter this bull**** Greta and AOC and Svante Thunberg and the Democrats are peddling, especially on this day when they are all going to be out there shrieking about the world coming to an end as they chant slogans and wave signs saying HOORAY for their side, with the potential for acts of violence and smashing of things by them if they don’t get their way.
In his work “WORLDS IN THE MAKING – THE EVOLUTION OF THE UNIVERSE,” published March, 1908, Arrhenius had this to say about the times that caused him to come up with his equation, to wit:
The problem of the evolution of the Universe has always excited the profound interest of thinking men.
And it will, without doubt, remain the most eminent among all the questions which do not have any direct, practical bearing.
Different ages have arrived at different solutions to this great problem.
Each of these solutions reflected the stand-point of the natural philosophers of its time.
end quotes
Now, if you are a real “scientist,” whatever that empty word is supposed to mean anymore, when the most ignorant among us can now claim the title, as we are seeing with the case of Greta Thunberg, the poor scared little girl from Sweden who is running around with what she calls “the science,” we take that to mean just what it says – theories of how something happened are just that, theories, and theories of reality are not reality itself, and it is too bad that United States Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is unaware of that.
As to those times which spawned the Arrhenius Equation, the author himself stated thusly, to wit:
The theses of Mayer and of Helmholtz, on the manner in which the Sun replenishes its losses of heat, have had to be abandoned.
My explanation is based upon chemical reactions in the interior of the Sun in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics.
The theory of the “degradation” of energy appeared to introduce a still greater difficulty.
That theory seems to lead to the inevitable conclusion that the Universe is tending towards the state which Clausius has designated as ” Wdrme Tod” (heat death), when all the energy of the Universe will uniformly be distributed through space in the shape of movements of the smallest particles.
That would imply an absolutely inconceivable end of the development of the Universe.
The way out of this difficulty which I propose comes to this: the energy is “degraded” in bodies which are in the solar state, and the energy is “elevated,” raised to a higher level, in bodies which are in the nebular state.
end quotes
Yes, people, back then, and it was still being said when I was young, the operative theory that Arrhenius debunked was that indeed the world was going to end, and all life, on it, which includes you and me, and AOC and poor little Greta, because like your car on a trip, whether IC or an all-electric Tesla, which are quite fast, each day the sun shone down on earth used up some of its energy, so that it was going to run out of gas, and it would blink out, and doom for all of us, would follow!
SHRIEK! SHRIEK! SHRIEK!
Run for your lives!
The world is going to end when the sun runs out of gas!
No, wait!
Sorry, people, I grabbed the wrong cue card by mistake!
Oh, here it is!
Today’s headline – run for your lives, the world is going to end because it is going to overheat and cook us all like a side of beef at a Texas bar-b-cue if we don’t all get out there right now and shake brooms and sticks and clubs at the carbon dioxide in the sky and make it go away or we’ll all throw fits and lay in the road and block traffic, which should teach that nasty carbon dioxide a good lesson, alright.
And once again, my thanks as an American citizen concerned about this mounting hysteria intended to turn our children and grandchildren against us for the crime of stealing their futures from them by daring to create carbon dioxide when we exhale to the Cape Charles Mirror, which alone in America seems to be the only publication giving equal time to BOTH sides of this issue, instead of just Greta’s!
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-179326
Paul Plante says :
So, today is what is known as “SREECH AND SHRIEK” day across the world, where hordes of people led by AOC and Greta Thunberg are going to be out on the street en masse ululating and chanting over and over, feverishly, “HEY, HEY, HO, HO, CLIMATE CHANGE HAS GOT TO GO,” which should make for some pretty exciting news coverage, anyway, if you like pictures of throngs of people all with their mouths wide open howling at the sky for it to stand still and stop changing.
Which brings us to the essential question of “if there is but one Arrhenius Equation, then how can there be any disagreement about climate change,” which is a very good question, the answer to which was touched upon by Wayne Creed in another edition of the Cape Charles Mirror, where he made a statement to the effect that models of reality are not reality and do not control reality,
The controversy comes in because the Greta/AOC crowd are treating the Arrhenius Equation as absolute, when in reality, it is an approximation, as are all models of physical systems.
While Arrhenius never intended his equation to be used in the manner it is being used in today, which is to strike fear into our hearts and minds that if we do not right now at this instant hand control of our lives over to Greta Thunberg and AOC and the Democrats, the world is going to end and be gone in ten or twelve more years, that is exactly what Greta and AOC and the Democrats are doing with it, which is a total perversion of science, which is what has me standing up in here saying “wait a minute,” because these lies being propagated by the hysterical set involve the lives of all of us, which is why this must needs be and remain a very public discussion, to counter this bull**** Greta and AOC and Svante Thunberg and the Democrats are peddling, especially on this day when they are all going to be out there shrieking about the world coming to an end as they chant slogans and wave signs saying HOORAY for their side, with the potential for acts of violence and smashing of things by them if they don’t get their way.
In his work “WORLDS IN THE MAKING – THE EVOLUTION OF THE UNIVERSE,” published March, 1908, Arrhenius had this to say about the times that caused him to come up with his equation, to wit:
The problem of the evolution of the Universe has always excited the profound interest of thinking men.
And it will, without doubt, remain the most eminent among all the questions which do not have any direct, practical bearing.
Different ages have arrived at different solutions to this great problem.
Each of these solutions reflected the stand-point of the natural philosophers of its time.
end quotes
Now, if you are a real “scientist,” whatever that empty word is supposed to mean anymore, when the most ignorant among us can now claim the title, as we are seeing with the case of Greta Thunberg, the poor scared little girl from Sweden who is running around with what she calls “the science,” we take that to mean just what it says – theories of how something happened are just that, theories, and theories of reality are not reality itself, and it is too bad that United States Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is unaware of that.
As to those times which spawned the Arrhenius Equation, the author himself stated thusly, to wit:
The theses of Mayer and of Helmholtz, on the manner in which the Sun replenishes its losses of heat, have had to be abandoned.
My explanation is based upon chemical reactions in the interior of the Sun in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics.
The theory of the “degradation” of energy appeared to introduce a still greater difficulty.
That theory seems to lead to the inevitable conclusion that the Universe is tending towards the state which Clausius has designated as ” Wdrme Tod” (heat death), when all the energy of the Universe will uniformly be distributed through space in the shape of movements of the smallest particles.
That would imply an absolutely inconceivable end of the development of the Universe.
The way out of this difficulty which I propose comes to this: the energy is “degraded” in bodies which are in the solar state, and the energy is “elevated,” raised to a higher level, in bodies which are in the nebular state.
end quotes
Yes, people, back then, and it was still being said when I was young, the operative theory that Arrhenius debunked was that indeed the world was going to end, and all life, on it, which includes you and me, and AOC and poor little Greta, because like your car on a trip, whether IC or an all-electric Tesla, which are quite fast, each day the sun shone down on earth used up some of its energy, so that it was going to run out of gas, and it would blink out, and doom for all of us, would follow!
SHRIEK! SHRIEK! SHRIEK!
Run for your lives!
The world is going to end when the sun runs out of gas!
No, wait!
Sorry, people, I grabbed the wrong cue card by mistake!
Oh, here it is!
Today’s headline – run for your lives, the world is going to end because it is going to overheat and cook us all like a side of beef at a Texas bar-b-cue if we don’t all get out there right now and shake brooms and sticks and clubs at the carbon dioxide in the sky and make it go away or we’ll all throw fits and lay in the road and block traffic, which should teach that nasty carbon dioxide a good lesson, alright.
And once again, my thanks as an American citizen concerned about this mounting hysteria intended to turn our children and grandchildren against us for the crime of stealing their futures from them by daring to create carbon dioxide when we exhale to the Cape Charles Mirror, which alone in America seems to be the only publication giving equal time to BOTH sides of this issue, instead of just Greta’s!
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-179326
Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING
BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS
"Fusion reactors: Not what they’re cracked up to be"
By Daniel Jassby
April 19, 2017
Fusion reactors have long been touted as the “perfect” energy source.
Proponents claim that when useful commercial fusion reactors are developed, they would produce vast amounts of energy with little radioactive waste, forming little or no plutonium byproducts that could be used for nuclear weapons.
These pro-fusion advocates also say that fusion reactors would be incapable of generating the dangerous runaway chain reactions that lead to a meltdown — all drawbacks to the current fission schemes in nuclear power plants.
And, like fission, a fusion-powered nuclear reactor would have the enormous benefit of producing energy without emitting any carbon to warm up our planet’s atmosphere.
But there is a hitch: While it is, relatively speaking, rather straightforward to split an atom to produce energy (which is what happens in fission), it is a “grand scientific challenge” to fuse two hydrogen nuclei together to create helium isotopes (as occurs in fusion).
Our sun constantly does fusion reactions all the time, burning ordinary hydrogen at enormous densities and temperatures.
But to replicate that process of fusion here on Earth — where we don’t have the intense pressure created by the gravity of the sun’s core — we would need a temperature of at least 100 million degrees Celsius, or about six times hotter than the sun.
In experiments to date, the energy input required to produce the temperatures and pressures that enable significant fusion reactions in hydrogen isotopes has far exceeded the fusion energy generated.
But through the use of promising fusion technologies such as magnetic confinement and laser-based inertial confinement, humanity is moving much closer to getting around that problem and achieving that breakthrough moment when the amount of energy coming out of a fusion reactor will sustainably exceed the amount going in, producing net energy.
Collaborative, multinational physics projects in this area include the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) joint fusion experiment in France, which broke ground for its first support structures in 2010 — with the first experiments on its fusion machine, or tokamak, expected to begin in 2025.
As we move closer to our goal, however, it is time to ask: Is fusion really a “perfect” energy source?
After having worked on nuclear fusion experiments for 25 years at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, I began to look at the fusion enterprise more dispassionately in my retirement.
I concluded that a fusion reactor would be far from perfect, and in some ways close to the opposite.
Scaling down the sun.
As noted above, fusion reactions in the sun burn ordinary hydrogen at enormous density and temperature, sustained by an effectively infinite confinement time, and the reaction products are benign helium isotopes.
Artificial (terrestrial) fusion schemes, on the other hand, are restricted to much lower particle densities and much more fleeting energy confinement, and are therefore compelled to use the heavier neutron-rich isotopes of hydrogen known as deuterium and tritium — which are 24 orders of magnitude more reactive than ordinary hydrogen.
(Think of the numeral one with 24 zeroes after it.)
This gargantuan advantage in fusion reactivity allows human-made fusion assemblies to be workable with a billion times lower particle density and a trillion times poorer energy confinement than the levels that the sun enjoys.
Consequently, the proponents of fusion reactors claim that when they are developed, fusion reactors will constitute a “perfect” energy source that will share none of the significant drawbacks of the much-maligned fission reactors.
But unlike what happens in solar fusion — which uses ordinary hydrogen — Earth-bound fusion reactors that burn neutron-rich isotopes have byproducts that are anything but harmless: Energetic neutron streams comprise 80 percent of the fusion energy output of deuterium-tritium reactions and 35 percent of deuterium-deuterium reactions.
Now, an energy source consisting of 80 percent energetic neutron streams may be the perfect neutron source, but it’s truly bizarre that it would ever be hailed as the ideal electrical energy source.
In fact, these neutron streams lead directly to four regrettable problems with nuclear energy: radiation damage to structures; radioactive waste; the need for biological shielding; and the potential for the production of weapons-grade plutonium 239 — thus adding to the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, not lessening it, as fusion proponents would have it.
In addition, if fusion reactors are indeed feasible — as assumed here — they would share some of the other serious problems that plague fission reactors, including tritium release, daunting coolant demands, and high operating costs.
There will also be additional drawbacks that are unique to fusion devices: the use of a fuel (tritium) that is not found in nature and must be replenished by the reactor itself; and unavoidable on-site power drains that drastically reduce the electric power available for sale.
All of these problems are endemic to any type of magnetic confinement fusion or inertial confinement fusion reactor that is fueled with deuterium-tritium or deuterium alone.
(As the name suggests, in magnetic confinement fusion, magnetic and electrical fields are used to control the hot fusion fuel — a material that takes an unwieldy and difficult-to-handle form, known as a plasma. In inertial confinement, laser beams or ion beams are used to squeeze and heat the plasma.)
The most well-known example of magnetic confinement fusion is the doughnut-shaped tokamak under construction at the ITER site; inertial confinement fusion is exemplified by the laser-induced microexplosions taking place at the US-based National Ignition Facility.
Tritium fuel cannot be fully replenished.
The deuterium-tritium reaction is favored by fusion developers because its reactivity is 20 times higher than a deuterium-deuterium fueled reaction, and the former reaction is strongest at one-third the temperature required for deuterium-only fusion.
In fact, an approximately equal mixture of deuterium and tritium may be the only feasible fusion fuel for the foreseeable future.
While deuterium is readily available in ordinary water, tritium scarcely exists in nature, because this isotope is radioactive with a half-life of only 12.3 years.
The main source of tritium is fission nuclear reactors.
If adopted, deuterium-tritium based fusion would be the only source of electrical power that does not exploit a naturally occurring fuel or convert a natural energy supply such as solar radiation, wind, falling water, or geothermal.
Uniquely, the tritium component of fusion fuel must be generated in the fusion reactor itself.
The tritium consumed in fusion can theoretically be fully regenerated in order to sustain the nuclear reactions.
To accomplish this goal, a lithium-containing “blanket” must be placed around the reacting medium — an extremely hot, fully ionized gas called a plasma.
The neutrons produced by the fusion reaction will irradiate the lithium, “breeding” tritium.
But there is a major difficulty: The lithium blanket can only partly surround the reactor, because of the gaps required for vacuum pumping, beam and fuel injection in magnetic confinement fusion reactors, and for driver beams and removal of target debris in inertial confinement reactors.
Nevertheless, the most comprehensive analyses indicate that there can be up to a 15 percent surplus in regenerating tritium.
But in practice, any surplus will be needed to accommodate the incomplete extraction and processing of the tritium bred in the blanket.
Replacing the burned-up tritium in a fusion reactor, however, addresses only a minor part of the all-important issue of replenishing the tritium fuel supply.
Less than 10 percent of the injected fuel will actually be burned in a magnetic confinement fusion device before it escapes the reacting region.
The vast majority of injected tritium must therefore be scavenged from the surfaces and interiors of the reactor’s myriad sub-systems and re-injected 10-to-20 times before it is completely burned.
If only one percent of the unburned tritium is not recovered and re-injected, even the largest surplus in the lithium-blanket regeneration process cannot make up for the lost tritium.
By way of comparison, in the two magnetic confinement fusion facilities where tritium has been used (Princeton’s Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor, and the Joint European Torus), approximately 10 percent of the injected tritium was never recovered.
To make up for the inevitable shortfalls in recovering unburned tritium for use as fuel in a fusion reactor, fission reactors must continue to be used to produce sufficient supplies of tritium — a situation which implies a perpetual dependence on fission reactors, with all their safety and nuclear proliferation problems.
Because external tritium production is enormously expensive, it is likely instead that only fusion reactors fueled solely with deuterium can ever be practical from the viewpoint of fuel supply.
This circumstance aggravates the problem of nuclear proliferation discussed later.
Huge parasitic power consumption.
In addition to the problems of fueling, fusion reactors face another problem: they consume a good chunk of the very power that they produce, or what those in the electrical generating industry call “parasitic power drain,” on a scale unknown to any other source of electrical power.
Fusion reactors must accommodate two classes of parasitic power drain: First, a host of essential auxiliary systems external to the reactor must be maintained continuously even when the fusion plasma is dormant (that is, during planned or unplanned outages).
Some 75-to-100 MWe (megawatts electric) are consumed continuously by liquid-helium refrigerators; water pumping; vacuum pumping; heating, ventilating and air conditioning for numerous buildings; tritium processing; and so forth, as exemplified by the facilities for the ITER fusion project in France.
When the fusion output is interrupted for any reason, this power must be purchased from the regional grid at retail prices.
The second category of parasitic drain is the power needed to control the fusion plasma in magnetic confinement fusion systems (and to ignite fuel capsules in pulsed inertial confinement fusion systems).
Magnetic confinement fusion plasmas require injection of significant power in atomic beams or electromagnetic energy to stabilize the fusion burn, while additional power is consumed by magnetic coils helping to control location and stability of the reacting plasma.
The total electric power drain for this purpose amounts to at least six percent of the fusion power generated, and the electric power required to pump the blanket coolant is typically two percent of fusion power.
The gross electric power output can be 40 percent of the fusion power, so the circulating power amounts to about 20 percent of the electric power output.
In inertial confinement fusion and hybrid inertial/magnetic confinement fusion reactors, after each fusion pulse, electric current must charge energy storage systems such as capacitor banks that power the laser or ion beams or imploding liners.
The demands on circulating power are at least comparable with those for magnetic confinement fusion.
The power drains described above are derived from the reactor’s electrical power output, and determine lower bounds to reactor size.
If the fusion power is 300 megawatts, the entire electric output of 120 MWe barely supplies on-site needs.
As the fusion power is raised, the on-site consumption becomes an increasingly smaller proportion of the electric output, dropping to one-half when the fusion power is 830 megawatts.
To have any chance of economic operation that must repay capital and operational costs, the fusion power must be raised to thousands of megawatts so that the total parasitic power drain is relatively small.
In a nutshell, below a certain size (about 1,000 MWe) parasitic power drain makes it uneconomic to run a fusion power plant.
The problems of parasitic power drain and fuel replenishment by themselves are significant.
But fusion reactors have other serious problems that also afflict today’s fission reactors, including neutron radiation damage and radioactive waste, potential tritium release, the burden on coolant resources, outsize operating costs, and increased risks of nuclear weapons proliferation.
Radiation damage and radioactive waste.
To produce usable heat, the neutron streams carrying 80 percent of the energy from deuterium-tritium fusion must be decelerated and cooled by the reactor structure, its surrounding lithium-containing blanket, and the coolant.
The neutron radiation damage in the solid vessel wall is expected to be worse than in fission reactors because of the higher neutron energies.
Fusion neutrons knock atoms out of their usual lattice positions, causing swelling and fracturing of the structure.
Also, neutron-induced reactions generate large amounts of interstitial helium and hydrogen, forming gas pockets that lead to additional swelling, embrittlement, and fatigue.
These phenomena put the integrity of the reaction vessel in peril.
In reactors with deuterium-only fueling (which is much more difficult to ignite than a deuterium-tritium mix), the neutron reaction product has five times lower energy and the neutron streams are substantially less damaging to structures.
But the deleterious effects will still be ruinous on a longer time scale.
The problem of neutron-degraded structures may be alleviated in fusion reactor concepts where the fusion fuel capsule is enclosed in a one-meter thick liquid lithium sphere or cylinder.
But the fuel assemblies themselves will be transformed into tons of radioactive waste to be removed annually from each reactor.
Molten lithium also presents a fire and explosion hazard, introducing a drawback common to liquid-metal cooled fission reactors.
Bombardment by fusion neutrons knocks atoms out of their structural positions while making them radioactive and weakening the structure, which must be replaced periodically.
This results in huge masses of highly radioactive material that must eventually be transported offsite for burial.
Many non-structural components inside the reaction vessel and in the blanket will also become highly radioactive by neutron activation.
While the radioactivity level per kilogram of waste would be much smaller than for fission-reactor wastes, the volume and mass of wastes would be many times larger.
What’s more, some of the radiation damage and production of radioactive waste is incurred to no end, because a proportion of the fusion power is generated solely to offset the irreducible on-site power drains.
Materials scientists are attempting to develop low-activation structural alloys that would allow discarded reactor materials to qualify as low-level radioactive waste that could be disposed of by shallow land burial.
Even if such alloys do become available on a commercial scale, very few municipalities or counties are likely to accept landfills for low-level radioactive waste.
There are only one or two repositories for such waste in every nation, which means that radioactive waste from fusion reactors would have to be transported across the country at great expense and safeguarded from diversion.
To reduce the radiation exposure of plant workers, biological shielding is needed even when the reactor is not operating.
In the intensely radioactive environment, remote handling equipment and robots would be required for all maintenance work on reactor components as well as for their replacement because of radiation damage, particle erosion, or melting.
These constraints will cause prolonged downtimes even for minor repairs.
Nuclear weapons proliferation.
The open or clandestine production of plutonium 239 is possible in a fusion reactor simply by placing natural or depleted uranium oxide at any location where neutrons of any energy are flying about.
The ocean of slowing-down neutrons that results from scattering of the streaming fusion neutrons on the reaction vessel permeates every nook and cranny of the reactor interior, including appendages to the reaction vessel.
Slower neutrons will be readily soaked up by uranium 238, whose cross section for neutron absorption increases with decreasing neutron energy.
In view of the dubious prospects for tritium replenishment, fusion reactors may have to be powered by the two deuterium-deuterium reactions that have substantially the same probability, one of which produces neutrons and helium 3, while the other produces protons and tritium.
Because tritium breeding is not required, all the fusion neutrons are available for any use — including the production of plutonium 239 from uranium 238.
It is extremely challenging to approach energy breakeven with deuterium-deuterium reactions because their total reactivity is 20 times smaller than that of deuterium-tritium, even at much higher temperatures.
But a deuterium-fueled “test reactor” with 50 megawatts of heating power and producing only 5 megawatts of deuterium-deuterium fusion power could yield about 3 kilograms of plutonium 239 in one year by absorbing just 10 percent of the neutron output in uranium 238.
Most of the tritium from the second deuterium-deuterium reaction could be recovered and burned and the deuterium-tritium neutrons will produce still more plutonium 239, for a total of perhaps 5 kilograms.
In effect, the reactor transforms electrical input power into “free-agent” neutrons and tritium, so that a fusion reactor fueled with deuterium-only can be a singularly dangerous tool for nuclear proliferation.
A reactor fueled with deuterium-tritium or deuterium-only will have an inventory of many kilograms of tritium, providing opportunities for diversion for use in nuclear weapons.
Just as for fission reactors, International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards would be needed to prevent plutonium production or tritium diversion.
Additional disadvantages shared with fission reactors.
Tritium will be dispersed on the surfaces of the reaction vessel, particle injectors, pumping ducts, and other appendages.
Corrosion in the heat exchange system, or a breach in the reactor vacuum ducts could result in the release of radioactive tritium into the atmosphere or local water resources.
Tritium exchanges with hydrogen to produce tritiated water, which is biologically hazardous.
Most fission reactors contain trivial amounts of tritium (less than 1 gram) compared with the kilograms in putative fusion reactors.
But the release of even tiny amounts of radioactive tritium from fission reactors into groundwater causes public consternation.
Thwarting tritium permeation through certain classes of solids remains an unsolved problem.
For some years, the National Nuclear Security Administration — a branch of the US Energy Department — has been producing tritium in at least one Tennessee Valley Administration-owned fission power reactor by absorbing neutrons in lithium-containing substitute control rods.
There has been significant and apparently irreducible leakage of tritium from the rods into the reactor cooling water that’s released to the environment, to the extent that annual tritium production has been drastically curtailed.
In addition, there are the problems of coolant demands and poor water efficiency.
A fusion reactor is a thermal power plant that would place immense demands on water resources for the secondary cooling loop that generates steam, as well as for removing heat from other reactor subsystems such as cryogenic refrigerators and pumps.
Worse, the several hundred megawatts or more of thermal power that must be generated solely to satisfy the two classes of parasitic electric power drain places additional demand on water resources for cooling that is not faced by any other type of thermoelectric power plant.
In fact, a fusion reactor would have the lowest water efficiency of any type of thermal power plant, whether fossil or nuclear.
With drought conditions intensifying in sundry regions of the world, many countries could not physically sustain large fusion reactors.
Numerous alternative coolants for the primary heat-removal loop have been studied for both fission and fusion reactors, and one-meter thick liquid lithium walls may be essential for inertial confinement fusion systems to withstand the impulse loading.
However, water has been used almost exclusively in commercial fission reactors for the last 60 years, including all of those presently under construction worldwide.
This circumstance indicates that implementing any substitute for water coolant such as helium or liquid metal will be impractical in magnetic confinement fusion systems.
And all of the above means that any fusion reactor will face outsized operating costs.
Fusion reactor operation will require personnel whose expertise has previously been required only for work in fission plants — such as security experts for monitoring safeguard issues and specialty workers to dispose of radioactive waste.
Additional skilled personnel will be required to operate a fusion reactor’s more complex subsystems including cryogenics, tritium processing, plasma heating equipment, and elaborate diagnostics.
Fission reactors in the United States typically require at least 500 permanent employees over four weekly shifts, and fusion reactors will require closer to 1,000.
In contrast, only a handful of people are required to operate hydroelectric plants, natural-gas burning plants, wind turbines, solar power plants, and other power sources.
Another intractable operating expense is the 75-to-100 megawatts of parasitic electric power consumed continuously by on-site supporting facilities that must be purchased from the regional grid when the fusion source is not operating.
Multiple recurring expenses include the replacement of radiation-damaged and plasma-eroded components in magnetic confinement fusion, and the fabrication of millions of fuel capsules for each inertial confinement fusion reactor annually.
And any type of nuclear plant must allocate funding for end-of-life decommissioning as well as the periodic disposal of radioactive wastes.
It is inconceivable that the total operating costs of a fusion reactor would be less than that of a fission reactor, and therefore the capital cost of a viable fusion reactor must be close to zero (or heavily subsidized) in places where the operating costs alone of fission reactors are not competitive with the cost of electricity produced by non-nuclear power, and have resulted in the shutdown of nuclear power plants.
To sum up, fusion reactors face some unique problems: a lack of a natural fuel supply (tritium), and large and irreducible electrical energy drains to offset.
Because 80 percent of the energy in any reactor fueled by deuterium and tritium appears in the form of neutron streams, it is inescapable that such reactors share many of the drawbacks of fission reactors — including the production of large masses of radioactive waste and serious radiation damage to reactor components.
These problems are endemic to any type of fusion reactor fueled with deuterium-tritium, so abandoning tokamaks for some other confinement concept can provide no relief.
If reactors can be made to operate using only deuterium fuel, then the tritium replenishment issue vanishes and neutron radiation damage is alleviated.
But the other drawbacks remain — and reactors requiring only deuterium fueling will have greatly enhanced nuclear weapons proliferation potential.
These impediments — together with the colossal capital outlay and several additional disadvantages shared with fission reactors — will make fusion reactors more demanding to construct and operate, or reach economic practicality, than any other type of electrical energy generator.
The harsh realities of fusion belie the claims of its proponents of “unlimited, clean, safe and cheap energy.”
Terrestrial fusion energy is not the ideal energy source extolled by its boosters, but to the contrary: It’s something to be shunned.
Daniel Jassby
Daniel Jassby was a principal research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab until 1999. For 25 years he worked in areas of plasma physics and neutron production related to fusion.
https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion- ... -up-to-be/
"Fusion reactors: Not what they’re cracked up to be"
By Daniel Jassby
April 19, 2017
Fusion reactors have long been touted as the “perfect” energy source.
Proponents claim that when useful commercial fusion reactors are developed, they would produce vast amounts of energy with little radioactive waste, forming little or no plutonium byproducts that could be used for nuclear weapons.
These pro-fusion advocates also say that fusion reactors would be incapable of generating the dangerous runaway chain reactions that lead to a meltdown — all drawbacks to the current fission schemes in nuclear power plants.
And, like fission, a fusion-powered nuclear reactor would have the enormous benefit of producing energy without emitting any carbon to warm up our planet’s atmosphere.
But there is a hitch: While it is, relatively speaking, rather straightforward to split an atom to produce energy (which is what happens in fission), it is a “grand scientific challenge” to fuse two hydrogen nuclei together to create helium isotopes (as occurs in fusion).
Our sun constantly does fusion reactions all the time, burning ordinary hydrogen at enormous densities and temperatures.
But to replicate that process of fusion here on Earth — where we don’t have the intense pressure created by the gravity of the sun’s core — we would need a temperature of at least 100 million degrees Celsius, or about six times hotter than the sun.
In experiments to date, the energy input required to produce the temperatures and pressures that enable significant fusion reactions in hydrogen isotopes has far exceeded the fusion energy generated.
But through the use of promising fusion technologies such as magnetic confinement and laser-based inertial confinement, humanity is moving much closer to getting around that problem and achieving that breakthrough moment when the amount of energy coming out of a fusion reactor will sustainably exceed the amount going in, producing net energy.
Collaborative, multinational physics projects in this area include the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) joint fusion experiment in France, which broke ground for its first support structures in 2010 — with the first experiments on its fusion machine, or tokamak, expected to begin in 2025.
As we move closer to our goal, however, it is time to ask: Is fusion really a “perfect” energy source?
After having worked on nuclear fusion experiments for 25 years at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, I began to look at the fusion enterprise more dispassionately in my retirement.
I concluded that a fusion reactor would be far from perfect, and in some ways close to the opposite.
Scaling down the sun.
As noted above, fusion reactions in the sun burn ordinary hydrogen at enormous density and temperature, sustained by an effectively infinite confinement time, and the reaction products are benign helium isotopes.
Artificial (terrestrial) fusion schemes, on the other hand, are restricted to much lower particle densities and much more fleeting energy confinement, and are therefore compelled to use the heavier neutron-rich isotopes of hydrogen known as deuterium and tritium — which are 24 orders of magnitude more reactive than ordinary hydrogen.
(Think of the numeral one with 24 zeroes after it.)
This gargantuan advantage in fusion reactivity allows human-made fusion assemblies to be workable with a billion times lower particle density and a trillion times poorer energy confinement than the levels that the sun enjoys.
Consequently, the proponents of fusion reactors claim that when they are developed, fusion reactors will constitute a “perfect” energy source that will share none of the significant drawbacks of the much-maligned fission reactors.
But unlike what happens in solar fusion — which uses ordinary hydrogen — Earth-bound fusion reactors that burn neutron-rich isotopes have byproducts that are anything but harmless: Energetic neutron streams comprise 80 percent of the fusion energy output of deuterium-tritium reactions and 35 percent of deuterium-deuterium reactions.
Now, an energy source consisting of 80 percent energetic neutron streams may be the perfect neutron source, but it’s truly bizarre that it would ever be hailed as the ideal electrical energy source.
In fact, these neutron streams lead directly to four regrettable problems with nuclear energy: radiation damage to structures; radioactive waste; the need for biological shielding; and the potential for the production of weapons-grade plutonium 239 — thus adding to the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, not lessening it, as fusion proponents would have it.
In addition, if fusion reactors are indeed feasible — as assumed here — they would share some of the other serious problems that plague fission reactors, including tritium release, daunting coolant demands, and high operating costs.
There will also be additional drawbacks that are unique to fusion devices: the use of a fuel (tritium) that is not found in nature and must be replenished by the reactor itself; and unavoidable on-site power drains that drastically reduce the electric power available for sale.
All of these problems are endemic to any type of magnetic confinement fusion or inertial confinement fusion reactor that is fueled with deuterium-tritium or deuterium alone.
(As the name suggests, in magnetic confinement fusion, magnetic and electrical fields are used to control the hot fusion fuel — a material that takes an unwieldy and difficult-to-handle form, known as a plasma. In inertial confinement, laser beams or ion beams are used to squeeze and heat the plasma.)
The most well-known example of magnetic confinement fusion is the doughnut-shaped tokamak under construction at the ITER site; inertial confinement fusion is exemplified by the laser-induced microexplosions taking place at the US-based National Ignition Facility.
Tritium fuel cannot be fully replenished.
The deuterium-tritium reaction is favored by fusion developers because its reactivity is 20 times higher than a deuterium-deuterium fueled reaction, and the former reaction is strongest at one-third the temperature required for deuterium-only fusion.
In fact, an approximately equal mixture of deuterium and tritium may be the only feasible fusion fuel for the foreseeable future.
While deuterium is readily available in ordinary water, tritium scarcely exists in nature, because this isotope is radioactive with a half-life of only 12.3 years.
The main source of tritium is fission nuclear reactors.
If adopted, deuterium-tritium based fusion would be the only source of electrical power that does not exploit a naturally occurring fuel or convert a natural energy supply such as solar radiation, wind, falling water, or geothermal.
Uniquely, the tritium component of fusion fuel must be generated in the fusion reactor itself.
The tritium consumed in fusion can theoretically be fully regenerated in order to sustain the nuclear reactions.
To accomplish this goal, a lithium-containing “blanket” must be placed around the reacting medium — an extremely hot, fully ionized gas called a plasma.
The neutrons produced by the fusion reaction will irradiate the lithium, “breeding” tritium.
But there is a major difficulty: The lithium blanket can only partly surround the reactor, because of the gaps required for vacuum pumping, beam and fuel injection in magnetic confinement fusion reactors, and for driver beams and removal of target debris in inertial confinement reactors.
Nevertheless, the most comprehensive analyses indicate that there can be up to a 15 percent surplus in regenerating tritium.
But in practice, any surplus will be needed to accommodate the incomplete extraction and processing of the tritium bred in the blanket.
Replacing the burned-up tritium in a fusion reactor, however, addresses only a minor part of the all-important issue of replenishing the tritium fuel supply.
Less than 10 percent of the injected fuel will actually be burned in a magnetic confinement fusion device before it escapes the reacting region.
The vast majority of injected tritium must therefore be scavenged from the surfaces and interiors of the reactor’s myriad sub-systems and re-injected 10-to-20 times before it is completely burned.
If only one percent of the unburned tritium is not recovered and re-injected, even the largest surplus in the lithium-blanket regeneration process cannot make up for the lost tritium.
By way of comparison, in the two magnetic confinement fusion facilities where tritium has been used (Princeton’s Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor, and the Joint European Torus), approximately 10 percent of the injected tritium was never recovered.
To make up for the inevitable shortfalls in recovering unburned tritium for use as fuel in a fusion reactor, fission reactors must continue to be used to produce sufficient supplies of tritium — a situation which implies a perpetual dependence on fission reactors, with all their safety and nuclear proliferation problems.
Because external tritium production is enormously expensive, it is likely instead that only fusion reactors fueled solely with deuterium can ever be practical from the viewpoint of fuel supply.
This circumstance aggravates the problem of nuclear proliferation discussed later.
Huge parasitic power consumption.
In addition to the problems of fueling, fusion reactors face another problem: they consume a good chunk of the very power that they produce, or what those in the electrical generating industry call “parasitic power drain,” on a scale unknown to any other source of electrical power.
Fusion reactors must accommodate two classes of parasitic power drain: First, a host of essential auxiliary systems external to the reactor must be maintained continuously even when the fusion plasma is dormant (that is, during planned or unplanned outages).
Some 75-to-100 MWe (megawatts electric) are consumed continuously by liquid-helium refrigerators; water pumping; vacuum pumping; heating, ventilating and air conditioning for numerous buildings; tritium processing; and so forth, as exemplified by the facilities for the ITER fusion project in France.
When the fusion output is interrupted for any reason, this power must be purchased from the regional grid at retail prices.
The second category of parasitic drain is the power needed to control the fusion plasma in magnetic confinement fusion systems (and to ignite fuel capsules in pulsed inertial confinement fusion systems).
Magnetic confinement fusion plasmas require injection of significant power in atomic beams or electromagnetic energy to stabilize the fusion burn, while additional power is consumed by magnetic coils helping to control location and stability of the reacting plasma.
The total electric power drain for this purpose amounts to at least six percent of the fusion power generated, and the electric power required to pump the blanket coolant is typically two percent of fusion power.
The gross electric power output can be 40 percent of the fusion power, so the circulating power amounts to about 20 percent of the electric power output.
In inertial confinement fusion and hybrid inertial/magnetic confinement fusion reactors, after each fusion pulse, electric current must charge energy storage systems such as capacitor banks that power the laser or ion beams or imploding liners.
The demands on circulating power are at least comparable with those for magnetic confinement fusion.
The power drains described above are derived from the reactor’s electrical power output, and determine lower bounds to reactor size.
If the fusion power is 300 megawatts, the entire electric output of 120 MWe barely supplies on-site needs.
As the fusion power is raised, the on-site consumption becomes an increasingly smaller proportion of the electric output, dropping to one-half when the fusion power is 830 megawatts.
To have any chance of economic operation that must repay capital and operational costs, the fusion power must be raised to thousands of megawatts so that the total parasitic power drain is relatively small.
In a nutshell, below a certain size (about 1,000 MWe) parasitic power drain makes it uneconomic to run a fusion power plant.
The problems of parasitic power drain and fuel replenishment by themselves are significant.
But fusion reactors have other serious problems that also afflict today’s fission reactors, including neutron radiation damage and radioactive waste, potential tritium release, the burden on coolant resources, outsize operating costs, and increased risks of nuclear weapons proliferation.
Radiation damage and radioactive waste.
To produce usable heat, the neutron streams carrying 80 percent of the energy from deuterium-tritium fusion must be decelerated and cooled by the reactor structure, its surrounding lithium-containing blanket, and the coolant.
The neutron radiation damage in the solid vessel wall is expected to be worse than in fission reactors because of the higher neutron energies.
Fusion neutrons knock atoms out of their usual lattice positions, causing swelling and fracturing of the structure.
Also, neutron-induced reactions generate large amounts of interstitial helium and hydrogen, forming gas pockets that lead to additional swelling, embrittlement, and fatigue.
These phenomena put the integrity of the reaction vessel in peril.
In reactors with deuterium-only fueling (which is much more difficult to ignite than a deuterium-tritium mix), the neutron reaction product has five times lower energy and the neutron streams are substantially less damaging to structures.
But the deleterious effects will still be ruinous on a longer time scale.
The problem of neutron-degraded structures may be alleviated in fusion reactor concepts where the fusion fuel capsule is enclosed in a one-meter thick liquid lithium sphere or cylinder.
But the fuel assemblies themselves will be transformed into tons of radioactive waste to be removed annually from each reactor.
Molten lithium also presents a fire and explosion hazard, introducing a drawback common to liquid-metal cooled fission reactors.
Bombardment by fusion neutrons knocks atoms out of their structural positions while making them radioactive and weakening the structure, which must be replaced periodically.
This results in huge masses of highly radioactive material that must eventually be transported offsite for burial.
Many non-structural components inside the reaction vessel and in the blanket will also become highly radioactive by neutron activation.
While the radioactivity level per kilogram of waste would be much smaller than for fission-reactor wastes, the volume and mass of wastes would be many times larger.
What’s more, some of the radiation damage and production of radioactive waste is incurred to no end, because a proportion of the fusion power is generated solely to offset the irreducible on-site power drains.
Materials scientists are attempting to develop low-activation structural alloys that would allow discarded reactor materials to qualify as low-level radioactive waste that could be disposed of by shallow land burial.
Even if such alloys do become available on a commercial scale, very few municipalities or counties are likely to accept landfills for low-level radioactive waste.
There are only one or two repositories for such waste in every nation, which means that radioactive waste from fusion reactors would have to be transported across the country at great expense and safeguarded from diversion.
To reduce the radiation exposure of plant workers, biological shielding is needed even when the reactor is not operating.
In the intensely radioactive environment, remote handling equipment and robots would be required for all maintenance work on reactor components as well as for their replacement because of radiation damage, particle erosion, or melting.
These constraints will cause prolonged downtimes even for minor repairs.
Nuclear weapons proliferation.
The open or clandestine production of plutonium 239 is possible in a fusion reactor simply by placing natural or depleted uranium oxide at any location where neutrons of any energy are flying about.
The ocean of slowing-down neutrons that results from scattering of the streaming fusion neutrons on the reaction vessel permeates every nook and cranny of the reactor interior, including appendages to the reaction vessel.
Slower neutrons will be readily soaked up by uranium 238, whose cross section for neutron absorption increases with decreasing neutron energy.
In view of the dubious prospects for tritium replenishment, fusion reactors may have to be powered by the two deuterium-deuterium reactions that have substantially the same probability, one of which produces neutrons and helium 3, while the other produces protons and tritium.
Because tritium breeding is not required, all the fusion neutrons are available for any use — including the production of plutonium 239 from uranium 238.
It is extremely challenging to approach energy breakeven with deuterium-deuterium reactions because their total reactivity is 20 times smaller than that of deuterium-tritium, even at much higher temperatures.
But a deuterium-fueled “test reactor” with 50 megawatts of heating power and producing only 5 megawatts of deuterium-deuterium fusion power could yield about 3 kilograms of plutonium 239 in one year by absorbing just 10 percent of the neutron output in uranium 238.
Most of the tritium from the second deuterium-deuterium reaction could be recovered and burned and the deuterium-tritium neutrons will produce still more plutonium 239, for a total of perhaps 5 kilograms.
In effect, the reactor transforms electrical input power into “free-agent” neutrons and tritium, so that a fusion reactor fueled with deuterium-only can be a singularly dangerous tool for nuclear proliferation.
A reactor fueled with deuterium-tritium or deuterium-only will have an inventory of many kilograms of tritium, providing opportunities for diversion for use in nuclear weapons.
Just as for fission reactors, International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards would be needed to prevent plutonium production or tritium diversion.
Additional disadvantages shared with fission reactors.
Tritium will be dispersed on the surfaces of the reaction vessel, particle injectors, pumping ducts, and other appendages.
Corrosion in the heat exchange system, or a breach in the reactor vacuum ducts could result in the release of radioactive tritium into the atmosphere or local water resources.
Tritium exchanges with hydrogen to produce tritiated water, which is biologically hazardous.
Most fission reactors contain trivial amounts of tritium (less than 1 gram) compared with the kilograms in putative fusion reactors.
But the release of even tiny amounts of radioactive tritium from fission reactors into groundwater causes public consternation.
Thwarting tritium permeation through certain classes of solids remains an unsolved problem.
For some years, the National Nuclear Security Administration — a branch of the US Energy Department — has been producing tritium in at least one Tennessee Valley Administration-owned fission power reactor by absorbing neutrons in lithium-containing substitute control rods.
There has been significant and apparently irreducible leakage of tritium from the rods into the reactor cooling water that’s released to the environment, to the extent that annual tritium production has been drastically curtailed.
In addition, there are the problems of coolant demands and poor water efficiency.
A fusion reactor is a thermal power plant that would place immense demands on water resources for the secondary cooling loop that generates steam, as well as for removing heat from other reactor subsystems such as cryogenic refrigerators and pumps.
Worse, the several hundred megawatts or more of thermal power that must be generated solely to satisfy the two classes of parasitic electric power drain places additional demand on water resources for cooling that is not faced by any other type of thermoelectric power plant.
In fact, a fusion reactor would have the lowest water efficiency of any type of thermal power plant, whether fossil or nuclear.
With drought conditions intensifying in sundry regions of the world, many countries could not physically sustain large fusion reactors.
Numerous alternative coolants for the primary heat-removal loop have been studied for both fission and fusion reactors, and one-meter thick liquid lithium walls may be essential for inertial confinement fusion systems to withstand the impulse loading.
However, water has been used almost exclusively in commercial fission reactors for the last 60 years, including all of those presently under construction worldwide.
This circumstance indicates that implementing any substitute for water coolant such as helium or liquid metal will be impractical in magnetic confinement fusion systems.
And all of the above means that any fusion reactor will face outsized operating costs.
Fusion reactor operation will require personnel whose expertise has previously been required only for work in fission plants — such as security experts for monitoring safeguard issues and specialty workers to dispose of radioactive waste.
Additional skilled personnel will be required to operate a fusion reactor’s more complex subsystems including cryogenics, tritium processing, plasma heating equipment, and elaborate diagnostics.
Fission reactors in the United States typically require at least 500 permanent employees over four weekly shifts, and fusion reactors will require closer to 1,000.
In contrast, only a handful of people are required to operate hydroelectric plants, natural-gas burning plants, wind turbines, solar power plants, and other power sources.
Another intractable operating expense is the 75-to-100 megawatts of parasitic electric power consumed continuously by on-site supporting facilities that must be purchased from the regional grid when the fusion source is not operating.
Multiple recurring expenses include the replacement of radiation-damaged and plasma-eroded components in magnetic confinement fusion, and the fabrication of millions of fuel capsules for each inertial confinement fusion reactor annually.
And any type of nuclear plant must allocate funding for end-of-life decommissioning as well as the periodic disposal of radioactive wastes.
It is inconceivable that the total operating costs of a fusion reactor would be less than that of a fission reactor, and therefore the capital cost of a viable fusion reactor must be close to zero (or heavily subsidized) in places where the operating costs alone of fission reactors are not competitive with the cost of electricity produced by non-nuclear power, and have resulted in the shutdown of nuclear power plants.
To sum up, fusion reactors face some unique problems: a lack of a natural fuel supply (tritium), and large and irreducible electrical energy drains to offset.
Because 80 percent of the energy in any reactor fueled by deuterium and tritium appears in the form of neutron streams, it is inescapable that such reactors share many of the drawbacks of fission reactors — including the production of large masses of radioactive waste and serious radiation damage to reactor components.
These problems are endemic to any type of fusion reactor fueled with deuterium-tritium, so abandoning tokamaks for some other confinement concept can provide no relief.
If reactors can be made to operate using only deuterium fuel, then the tritium replenishment issue vanishes and neutron radiation damage is alleviated.
But the other drawbacks remain — and reactors requiring only deuterium fueling will have greatly enhanced nuclear weapons proliferation potential.
These impediments — together with the colossal capital outlay and several additional disadvantages shared with fission reactors — will make fusion reactors more demanding to construct and operate, or reach economic practicality, than any other type of electrical energy generator.
The harsh realities of fusion belie the claims of its proponents of “unlimited, clean, safe and cheap energy.”
Terrestrial fusion energy is not the ideal energy source extolled by its boosters, but to the contrary: It’s something to be shunned.
Daniel Jassby
Daniel Jassby was a principal research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab until 1999. For 25 years he worked in areas of plasma physics and neutron production related to fusion.
https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion- ... -up-to-be/
Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING
THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR September 21, 2019 at 6:37 pm
Paul Plante says :
In all seriousness, Sorin, where the hell do you live that you are so disconnected from the reality that the rest of us who don’t live in Never Never Land with Peter Pan, where life is beautiful all the time, live in that you end up thinking that all of us are sitting out here wantonly wasting resources and being profligate with energy, creating veritable clouds of carbon dioxide in our passing, so we can steal Greta Thunberg’s future to have for our own instead, as we are being accused of doing by this younger set in America who don’t know there is a sky above them, because they are always staring at the palm of their hand, while waiting for the Democrats to take over all three parts of our federal government so they can then send us to re-education camps where we can learn the “right path” by engaging in hard labor every day?
And let me tell you, as belligerent as you are getting right now, I’m damn glad I’m not anywhere near you, especially after a few beers, because I can see you starting to get puce with rage here, with those big veins in your head standing out, and poor Mr. Otton trying to hold you back before you pummel me and knock me to the floor so you can stomp me a bit before kicking me the rest of the way out the door.
You say that it’s obvious that we should stop burning coal for energy production ASAP. because it’s dirty, and Sorin, we, that portion of the American people who are still capable of INDEPENDENT ACTION have been doing that, dude.
If you did even the very basic type of research on the subject of coal that my four-year old grand daughter does on the computer, along with a lot of other “children” (read, young adults) her age, you would find that in America, right here where we, the American people are, as opposed to some other country or ignorant ****-hole, the U.S. coal industry is declining in the face of lower-cost natural gas, renewable energy and regulations designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect public health.
You would find, as any intelligent child does, that in the United States of America, as opposed to some benighted ****-hole like Zimbabwe or Kenya and Venezuela, utilities are accelerating their retirement of coal plants because they are increasingly uneconomical, but oh my goodness, don’t I sound just like a NATIONALIST there, talking about what we, the American people who aren’t ignorant are doing, as if we were somehow different or smarter than every one else on the planet.
You would find that in America, as opposed say, to Sweden, or China, coal demand is poised to drop by more than 2 percent each year as our economy continues to shut down coal plants in favor of natural gas and renewable energy.
You would find that in the United States of America, OUR country, the average share of electricity generated from coal in the US has dropped from 52.8% in 1997 to 27.4% in 2018.
So tell me, Sorin , if that is what children in America know, how come you don’t?
How come you think we are doing nothing, perhaps because the rich set down in Cape Charles with all their big boats and such are doing nothing, because to them, ostentation is what matters?
Then you say we should build houses with good insulation, because it’s more efficient to cool/warm, as if none of us out here where it gets a hell of a lot colder than the perfect year-round climate of Cape Charles, known as a garden spot of the world when it comes to having a climate that is just lovely every day of the week and all the year round, could possibly know that.
We people in America who live in places where it gets down below zero in the winter have known about insulation for longer than you have been alive, so that we can stay alive, unlike you people down there who can go out in your bathing suit all year round to do your surfing.
And you obviously do not know that energy efficiency in building construction in the Commonwealth of Virginia is MANDATED (oh, my goodness, SNIFF, SNIFF, regulations, which we Americans so hate) by the state’s energy code https://up.codes/viewer/virginia/iecc-2 ... ation#CE_1 with its intent stated in C101.3, as follows:
This code shall regulate the design and construction of buildings for the effective use and conservation of energy over the useful life of each building.
This code is intended to provide flexibility to permit the use of innovative approaches and techniques to achieve this objective.
This code is not intended to abridge safety, health or environmental requirements contained in other applicable codes or ordinances.
end quotes
If you go to this site by the Virginia Energy Efficiency Council https://vaeec.org/programs/building-codes/ you will see that it is educating (not sowing hysteria like they do in Sweden to scare little girls like poor Greta) children about energy efficiency in residential buildings, to wit:
Everyone wins when new homes are built to the most cost-effective and efficient standards.
Studies show that rigorous energy codes are among the most cost-effective ways to improve energy efficiency and provide immediate cost savings to new home buyers.
end quotes
And Sorin, those of us who aren’t stupid, and don’t have big boats, and a lot of money to waste, and who live where it gets cold know that to be true, which is why we do use the best materials and most modern techniques that we can to keep ourselves from ******* FREEZING OUR ***** OFF in the winter, which is on its way, no matter how hard we all get out there and screech that we don’t want the climate to change, we want it to be just like Cape Charles or Disneyland all year round, so we can go surfing too, instead of having to deal with shoveling snow.
And then you say to update the grid to reduce power losses and better handle events, as if that is not an on-going process by the power companies, who are publicly traded companies always looking to maximize return on investment.
And Sorin, you cannot reduce Joule Heating losses by using what you call a “smart network.”
You reduce Joule Heating losses by reducing resistance, and by having the source of power as close to the user as possible which is why Alcoa has its aluminum plants, which use a lot of energy, in northern New York by the St. Lawrence River.
From there you go to support electric vehicle research, because even now, it’s a more efficient way to convert energy to motion, and that too is going on, Sorin.
Consider this article from the HOUSTON CHRONICLE entitled “Demand for gasoline wanes as electric car sales advance: report” by Marissa Luck on Nov. 30, 2018, to wit:
Americans’ appetite for gasoline is slowing and could fall further as electric car sales continue to bite into gasoline demand.
Electric vehicles sales are expected to make up 36 percent of new car sales by 2040, or in the most extreme scenarios, 100 percent of new car sales in the U.S. Europe and China, according to new analyses by the energy research firm from Wood Mackenzie.
Wood Mac projected that that this rate of adoption of electric vehicles would displace 5.5 million barrels a day of oil, although in an extreme scenario that could be as high as 11 million barrels a day.
If the current pace of reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, a major cause of global warming produced by fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas and coal, the global demand for oil would peak in 2036.
If the pace accelerates, global oil demand could peak as soon as 2031.
That, of course, has big implications for the economy of Houston, where most of the world’s biggest energy companies have headquarters or significant operations.
“The global energy transition will continue to progress, led in large part to technologies and (carbon dioxide reduction) trends we’re already seeing in the marketplace – the rise of renewables, growth in electric vehicles, electrification of end-use demand, increasing efficiency,” said David Brown, senior analyst at Wood Mackenzie, in a statement.
The auto industry’s bullish outlook on electric vehicles was highlighted this week when GM announced it will stop making its hybrid, the Chevy Volt, in favor of focusing on electric and autonomous vehicles.
Fossil fuels, however, are not going to vanish.
Even in an extreme scenario, fossil fuels will still make up 77 percent of global energy demand through 2035, according to Wood Mackenzie
While Americans are still consuming lots of gasoline, demand is flattening as vehicles become more fuel efficient.
The could mean lower profit margins — even losses — on motor gasoline for refineries along the Gulf and East coasts, the U.S. Energy Department said in a note Wednesday.
Higher gasoline prices for most of this year has hurt gasoline demand, the Energy Department said.
In the short-term energy outlook released earlier this month, the Energy Department estimated that U.S. gasoline consumption fell 1.3 percent in October compared to the same time last year, the sixth month this year with year-over-year declines.
For the first three weeks of November, estimated monthly gasoline consumption averaged about 9.2 million barrels per a day, a decrease of 262,000 barrels per a day since last November.
“Gasoline production has outpaced demand,” the Energy Department said, “and inventories have increased beyond their normal seasonal levels, lowering gasoline prices and, as a result, gasoline margins.”
end quotes
The world is not static, Sorin, and people don’t stand still waiting for some Democrat to come along and tell them “okay, now it is time, children, to inhale!”
Change is happening all the time, and as Wayne Creed said in an earlier edition of the Cape Charles MIRROR, or another episode, depending on how you look at it, “IT IS THE ECONOMICS” which determine the direction things go in, not the Democrats and AOC and poor little scared Greta Thunberg.
And then you say invest more in fusion or molten salt reactor research, to which I, an engineer, say why?
What is it that we don’t know about them by this time, given that research into fusion reactors began in the 1940s and has been on-going since then?
For the record, collaborative, multinational physics projects in this area include the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) joint fusion experiment in France, which broke ground for its first support structures in 2010 — with the first experiments on its fusion machine, or tokamak, expected to begin in 2025.
However, ALL of the research done to date makes it clear that fusion energy production is pie-in-the sky for a host of reasons which are detailed in a paper from the BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS dated April 19, 2017 and entitled “Fusion reactors: Not what they’re cracked up to be” by Daniel Jassby, a principal research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab until 1999 who for 25 years worked in areas of plasma physics and neutron production related to fusion, to wit:
To sum up, fusion reactors face some unique problems: a lack of a natural fuel supply (tritium), and large and irreducible electrical energy drains to offset.
Because 80 percent of the energy in any reactor fueled by deuterium and tritium appears in the form of neutron streams, it is inescapable that such reactors share many of the drawbacks of fission reactors — including the production of large masses of radioactive waste and serious radiation damage to reactor components.
These problems are endemic to any type of fusion reactor fueled with deuterium-tritium, so abandoning tokamaks for some other confinement concept can provide no relief.
If reactors can be made to operate using only deuterium fuel, then the tritium replenishment issue vanishes and neutron radiation damage is alleviated.
But the other drawbacks remain — and reactors requiring only deuterium fueling will have greatly enhanced nuclear weapons proliferation potential.
These impediments — together with the colossal capital outlay and several additional disadvantages shared with fission reactors — will make fusion reactors more demanding to construct and operate, or reach economic practicality, than any other type of electrical energy generator.
The harsh realities of fusion belie the claims of its proponents of “unlimited, clean, safe and cheap energy.”
Terrestrial fusion energy is not the ideal energy source extolled by its boosters, but to the contrary: It’s something to be shunned.
end quotes
And there is also this:
A fusion reactor is a thermal power plant that would place immense demands on water resources for the secondary cooling loop that generates steam, as well as for removing heat from other reactor subsystems such as cryogenic refrigerators and pumps.
Worse, the several hundred megawatts or more of thermal power that must be generated solely to satisfy the two classes of parasitic electric power drain places additional demand on water resources for cooling that is not faced by any other type of thermoelectric power plant.
In fact, a fusion reactor would have the lowest water efficiency of any type of thermal power plant, whether fossil or nuclear.
With drought conditions intensifying in sundry regions of the world, many countries could not physically sustain large fusion reactors.
Numerous alternative coolants for the primary heat-removal loop have been studied for both fission and fusion reactors, and one-meter thick liquid lithium walls may be essential for inertial confinement fusion systems to withstand the impulse loading.
However, water has been used almost exclusively in commercial fission reactors for the last 60 years, including all of those presently under construction worldwide.
This circumstance indicates that implementing any substitute for water coolant such as helium or liquid metal will be impractical in magnetic confinement fusion systems.
And all of the above means that any fusion reactor will face outsized operating costs.
Fusion reactor operation will require personnel whose expertise has previously been required only for work in fission plants — such as security experts for monitoring safeguard issues and specialty workers to dispose of radioactive waste.
Additional skilled personnel will be required to operate a fusion reactor’s more complex subsystems including cryogenics, tritium processing, plasma heating equipment, and elaborate diagnostics.
Fission reactors in the United States typically require at least 500 permanent employees over four weekly shifts, and fusion reactors will require closer to 1,000.
In contrast, only a handful of people are required to operate hydroelectric plants, natural-gas burning plants, wind turbines, solar power plants, and other power sources.
Another intractable operating expense is the 75-to-100 megawatts of parasitic electric power consumed continuously by on-site supporting facilities that must be purchased from the regional grid when the fusion source is not operating.
Multiple recurring expenses include the replacement of radiation-damaged and plasma-eroded components in magnetic confinement fusion, and the fabrication of millions of fuel capsules for each inertial confinement fusion reactor annually.
end quotes
So, with regard to your simple question for me as to what I think the public policy should be on the topic of energy production, transportation, and do we need to come together as a nation and change anything or just carry on what we do now, I’m not waiting for that to happen, to be quite frank, because it will never happen, that the American people will come together on this, especially now when people are so very ignorant and hysterical as they are.
As to what public policy should be, I would go back to 1942, and pp. 251,252 of Fundamentals of Economic Geography by Nels A. Bengtson, Professor of Geography, and Chairman of the Department of Geography, University of Nebraska, and Willem Van Royen, Department of Economics, Brooklyn College of the City of New York; Board of Economic Warfare, Division of Resources and Supply, copyright 1942, where we have as follows:
The oil pools of California are characterized by high gas pressure, and therefore the flush output of wells is high.
The quality of the oil varies from light to heavy in different pools, some being of exceptionally high quality, but for the province as a whole asphaltic oils predominate.
In spite of low prices for such oils the great flush production long ago made wells highly profitable and led to veritable orgies of drilling.
Enormous production has been obtained from several pools in the Los Angeles Basin, which in proportion to its area must be classed as one of the most productive districts in the world.
Competition for the oil caused too close drilling and resulted in production so great that markets were unable to absorb the output.
Oil interests have finally become convinced of the truth long agitated by economists and geologists, that unrestricted drilling is uneconomical and that the rapid reduction of gas pressure which it entails lessens the amount of oil which ultimately be obtained from the area.
In recognition of this, California has a state conservation law, the intent of which is to prevent the waste of natural gas and thereby not only conserve it for industrial use, but, through maintained gas pressure, increase the amount of petroleum which may ultimately be recovered from the producing sands of the area.
Such legislation is distinctly forward-looking and reflects the sane view that wanton waste in utilizing natural resources is economically unsound, and that, therefore, the immediate profits of a few must be sacrificed for the ultimate advantage of the many.
end quotes
Do you think that makes me sound like an anti-capitalist, Sorin?
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-179803
Paul Plante says :
In all seriousness, Sorin, where the hell do you live that you are so disconnected from the reality that the rest of us who don’t live in Never Never Land with Peter Pan, where life is beautiful all the time, live in that you end up thinking that all of us are sitting out here wantonly wasting resources and being profligate with energy, creating veritable clouds of carbon dioxide in our passing, so we can steal Greta Thunberg’s future to have for our own instead, as we are being accused of doing by this younger set in America who don’t know there is a sky above them, because they are always staring at the palm of their hand, while waiting for the Democrats to take over all three parts of our federal government so they can then send us to re-education camps where we can learn the “right path” by engaging in hard labor every day?
And let me tell you, as belligerent as you are getting right now, I’m damn glad I’m not anywhere near you, especially after a few beers, because I can see you starting to get puce with rage here, with those big veins in your head standing out, and poor Mr. Otton trying to hold you back before you pummel me and knock me to the floor so you can stomp me a bit before kicking me the rest of the way out the door.
You say that it’s obvious that we should stop burning coal for energy production ASAP. because it’s dirty, and Sorin, we, that portion of the American people who are still capable of INDEPENDENT ACTION have been doing that, dude.
If you did even the very basic type of research on the subject of coal that my four-year old grand daughter does on the computer, along with a lot of other “children” (read, young adults) her age, you would find that in America, right here where we, the American people are, as opposed to some other country or ignorant ****-hole, the U.S. coal industry is declining in the face of lower-cost natural gas, renewable energy and regulations designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect public health.
You would find, as any intelligent child does, that in the United States of America, as opposed to some benighted ****-hole like Zimbabwe or Kenya and Venezuela, utilities are accelerating their retirement of coal plants because they are increasingly uneconomical, but oh my goodness, don’t I sound just like a NATIONALIST there, talking about what we, the American people who aren’t ignorant are doing, as if we were somehow different or smarter than every one else on the planet.
You would find that in America, as opposed say, to Sweden, or China, coal demand is poised to drop by more than 2 percent each year as our economy continues to shut down coal plants in favor of natural gas and renewable energy.
You would find that in the United States of America, OUR country, the average share of electricity generated from coal in the US has dropped from 52.8% in 1997 to 27.4% in 2018.
So tell me, Sorin , if that is what children in America know, how come you don’t?
How come you think we are doing nothing, perhaps because the rich set down in Cape Charles with all their big boats and such are doing nothing, because to them, ostentation is what matters?
Then you say we should build houses with good insulation, because it’s more efficient to cool/warm, as if none of us out here where it gets a hell of a lot colder than the perfect year-round climate of Cape Charles, known as a garden spot of the world when it comes to having a climate that is just lovely every day of the week and all the year round, could possibly know that.
We people in America who live in places where it gets down below zero in the winter have known about insulation for longer than you have been alive, so that we can stay alive, unlike you people down there who can go out in your bathing suit all year round to do your surfing.
And you obviously do not know that energy efficiency in building construction in the Commonwealth of Virginia is MANDATED (oh, my goodness, SNIFF, SNIFF, regulations, which we Americans so hate) by the state’s energy code https://up.codes/viewer/virginia/iecc-2 ... ation#CE_1 with its intent stated in C101.3, as follows:
This code shall regulate the design and construction of buildings for the effective use and conservation of energy over the useful life of each building.
This code is intended to provide flexibility to permit the use of innovative approaches and techniques to achieve this objective.
This code is not intended to abridge safety, health or environmental requirements contained in other applicable codes or ordinances.
end quotes
If you go to this site by the Virginia Energy Efficiency Council https://vaeec.org/programs/building-codes/ you will see that it is educating (not sowing hysteria like they do in Sweden to scare little girls like poor Greta) children about energy efficiency in residential buildings, to wit:
Everyone wins when new homes are built to the most cost-effective and efficient standards.
Studies show that rigorous energy codes are among the most cost-effective ways to improve energy efficiency and provide immediate cost savings to new home buyers.
end quotes
And Sorin, those of us who aren’t stupid, and don’t have big boats, and a lot of money to waste, and who live where it gets cold know that to be true, which is why we do use the best materials and most modern techniques that we can to keep ourselves from ******* FREEZING OUR ***** OFF in the winter, which is on its way, no matter how hard we all get out there and screech that we don’t want the climate to change, we want it to be just like Cape Charles or Disneyland all year round, so we can go surfing too, instead of having to deal with shoveling snow.
And then you say to update the grid to reduce power losses and better handle events, as if that is not an on-going process by the power companies, who are publicly traded companies always looking to maximize return on investment.
And Sorin, you cannot reduce Joule Heating losses by using what you call a “smart network.”
You reduce Joule Heating losses by reducing resistance, and by having the source of power as close to the user as possible which is why Alcoa has its aluminum plants, which use a lot of energy, in northern New York by the St. Lawrence River.
From there you go to support electric vehicle research, because even now, it’s a more efficient way to convert energy to motion, and that too is going on, Sorin.
Consider this article from the HOUSTON CHRONICLE entitled “Demand for gasoline wanes as electric car sales advance: report” by Marissa Luck on Nov. 30, 2018, to wit:
Americans’ appetite for gasoline is slowing and could fall further as electric car sales continue to bite into gasoline demand.
Electric vehicles sales are expected to make up 36 percent of new car sales by 2040, or in the most extreme scenarios, 100 percent of new car sales in the U.S. Europe and China, according to new analyses by the energy research firm from Wood Mackenzie.
Wood Mac projected that that this rate of adoption of electric vehicles would displace 5.5 million barrels a day of oil, although in an extreme scenario that could be as high as 11 million barrels a day.
If the current pace of reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, a major cause of global warming produced by fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas and coal, the global demand for oil would peak in 2036.
If the pace accelerates, global oil demand could peak as soon as 2031.
That, of course, has big implications for the economy of Houston, where most of the world’s biggest energy companies have headquarters or significant operations.
“The global energy transition will continue to progress, led in large part to technologies and (carbon dioxide reduction) trends we’re already seeing in the marketplace – the rise of renewables, growth in electric vehicles, electrification of end-use demand, increasing efficiency,” said David Brown, senior analyst at Wood Mackenzie, in a statement.
The auto industry’s bullish outlook on electric vehicles was highlighted this week when GM announced it will stop making its hybrid, the Chevy Volt, in favor of focusing on electric and autonomous vehicles.
Fossil fuels, however, are not going to vanish.
Even in an extreme scenario, fossil fuels will still make up 77 percent of global energy demand through 2035, according to Wood Mackenzie
While Americans are still consuming lots of gasoline, demand is flattening as vehicles become more fuel efficient.
The could mean lower profit margins — even losses — on motor gasoline for refineries along the Gulf and East coasts, the U.S. Energy Department said in a note Wednesday.
Higher gasoline prices for most of this year has hurt gasoline demand, the Energy Department said.
In the short-term energy outlook released earlier this month, the Energy Department estimated that U.S. gasoline consumption fell 1.3 percent in October compared to the same time last year, the sixth month this year with year-over-year declines.
For the first three weeks of November, estimated monthly gasoline consumption averaged about 9.2 million barrels per a day, a decrease of 262,000 barrels per a day since last November.
“Gasoline production has outpaced demand,” the Energy Department said, “and inventories have increased beyond their normal seasonal levels, lowering gasoline prices and, as a result, gasoline margins.”
end quotes
The world is not static, Sorin, and people don’t stand still waiting for some Democrat to come along and tell them “okay, now it is time, children, to inhale!”
Change is happening all the time, and as Wayne Creed said in an earlier edition of the Cape Charles MIRROR, or another episode, depending on how you look at it, “IT IS THE ECONOMICS” which determine the direction things go in, not the Democrats and AOC and poor little scared Greta Thunberg.
And then you say invest more in fusion or molten salt reactor research, to which I, an engineer, say why?
What is it that we don’t know about them by this time, given that research into fusion reactors began in the 1940s and has been on-going since then?
For the record, collaborative, multinational physics projects in this area include the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) joint fusion experiment in France, which broke ground for its first support structures in 2010 — with the first experiments on its fusion machine, or tokamak, expected to begin in 2025.
However, ALL of the research done to date makes it clear that fusion energy production is pie-in-the sky for a host of reasons which are detailed in a paper from the BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS dated April 19, 2017 and entitled “Fusion reactors: Not what they’re cracked up to be” by Daniel Jassby, a principal research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab until 1999 who for 25 years worked in areas of plasma physics and neutron production related to fusion, to wit:
To sum up, fusion reactors face some unique problems: a lack of a natural fuel supply (tritium), and large and irreducible electrical energy drains to offset.
Because 80 percent of the energy in any reactor fueled by deuterium and tritium appears in the form of neutron streams, it is inescapable that such reactors share many of the drawbacks of fission reactors — including the production of large masses of radioactive waste and serious radiation damage to reactor components.
These problems are endemic to any type of fusion reactor fueled with deuterium-tritium, so abandoning tokamaks for some other confinement concept can provide no relief.
If reactors can be made to operate using only deuterium fuel, then the tritium replenishment issue vanishes and neutron radiation damage is alleviated.
But the other drawbacks remain — and reactors requiring only deuterium fueling will have greatly enhanced nuclear weapons proliferation potential.
These impediments — together with the colossal capital outlay and several additional disadvantages shared with fission reactors — will make fusion reactors more demanding to construct and operate, or reach economic practicality, than any other type of electrical energy generator.
The harsh realities of fusion belie the claims of its proponents of “unlimited, clean, safe and cheap energy.”
Terrestrial fusion energy is not the ideal energy source extolled by its boosters, but to the contrary: It’s something to be shunned.
end quotes
And there is also this:
A fusion reactor is a thermal power plant that would place immense demands on water resources for the secondary cooling loop that generates steam, as well as for removing heat from other reactor subsystems such as cryogenic refrigerators and pumps.
Worse, the several hundred megawatts or more of thermal power that must be generated solely to satisfy the two classes of parasitic electric power drain places additional demand on water resources for cooling that is not faced by any other type of thermoelectric power plant.
In fact, a fusion reactor would have the lowest water efficiency of any type of thermal power plant, whether fossil or nuclear.
With drought conditions intensifying in sundry regions of the world, many countries could not physically sustain large fusion reactors.
Numerous alternative coolants for the primary heat-removal loop have been studied for both fission and fusion reactors, and one-meter thick liquid lithium walls may be essential for inertial confinement fusion systems to withstand the impulse loading.
However, water has been used almost exclusively in commercial fission reactors for the last 60 years, including all of those presently under construction worldwide.
This circumstance indicates that implementing any substitute for water coolant such as helium or liquid metal will be impractical in magnetic confinement fusion systems.
And all of the above means that any fusion reactor will face outsized operating costs.
Fusion reactor operation will require personnel whose expertise has previously been required only for work in fission plants — such as security experts for monitoring safeguard issues and specialty workers to dispose of radioactive waste.
Additional skilled personnel will be required to operate a fusion reactor’s more complex subsystems including cryogenics, tritium processing, plasma heating equipment, and elaborate diagnostics.
Fission reactors in the United States typically require at least 500 permanent employees over four weekly shifts, and fusion reactors will require closer to 1,000.
In contrast, only a handful of people are required to operate hydroelectric plants, natural-gas burning plants, wind turbines, solar power plants, and other power sources.
Another intractable operating expense is the 75-to-100 megawatts of parasitic electric power consumed continuously by on-site supporting facilities that must be purchased from the regional grid when the fusion source is not operating.
Multiple recurring expenses include the replacement of radiation-damaged and plasma-eroded components in magnetic confinement fusion, and the fabrication of millions of fuel capsules for each inertial confinement fusion reactor annually.
end quotes
So, with regard to your simple question for me as to what I think the public policy should be on the topic of energy production, transportation, and do we need to come together as a nation and change anything or just carry on what we do now, I’m not waiting for that to happen, to be quite frank, because it will never happen, that the American people will come together on this, especially now when people are so very ignorant and hysterical as they are.
As to what public policy should be, I would go back to 1942, and pp. 251,252 of Fundamentals of Economic Geography by Nels A. Bengtson, Professor of Geography, and Chairman of the Department of Geography, University of Nebraska, and Willem Van Royen, Department of Economics, Brooklyn College of the City of New York; Board of Economic Warfare, Division of Resources and Supply, copyright 1942, where we have as follows:
The oil pools of California are characterized by high gas pressure, and therefore the flush output of wells is high.
The quality of the oil varies from light to heavy in different pools, some being of exceptionally high quality, but for the province as a whole asphaltic oils predominate.
In spite of low prices for such oils the great flush production long ago made wells highly profitable and led to veritable orgies of drilling.
Enormous production has been obtained from several pools in the Los Angeles Basin, which in proportion to its area must be classed as one of the most productive districts in the world.
Competition for the oil caused too close drilling and resulted in production so great that markets were unable to absorb the output.
Oil interests have finally become convinced of the truth long agitated by economists and geologists, that unrestricted drilling is uneconomical and that the rapid reduction of gas pressure which it entails lessens the amount of oil which ultimately be obtained from the area.
In recognition of this, California has a state conservation law, the intent of which is to prevent the waste of natural gas and thereby not only conserve it for industrial use, but, through maintained gas pressure, increase the amount of petroleum which may ultimately be recovered from the producing sands of the area.
Such legislation is distinctly forward-looking and reflects the sane view that wanton waste in utilizing natural resources is economically unsound, and that, therefore, the immediate profits of a few must be sacrificed for the ultimate advantage of the many.
end quotes
Do you think that makes me sound like an anti-capitalist, Sorin?
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-179803
Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING
THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR September 22, 2019 at 6:02 pm
Paul Plante says :
Did you miss anything?
Are you kidding me?
You missed everything, especially with respect to fusion, but hey, this is America, where you really don’t need to know anything, especially if you are running for high public office, so it is alright that you missed everything, and I hope you have a real great day!
But while we have you on the line here, before you go, let’s go down through your points one by one, because that is how important this conversation really is, to everybody alive in America today, to wit:
* Democrats are evil
That, Sorin is a value judgment that I myself would leave to the moralists and theologians out there to argue through, but, if you see them as evil in your scheme of things, then to you, they are, and I would not argue against you that exploiting and manipulating children and politicizing children for partisan political gain as the Democrats are doing with this climate change hysteria they are provoking with lies and deception is obscene, and where evil is defined as profoundly immoral and wicked, as in “their evil deeds,” with such synonyms as bad, morally wrong, and immoral, then yes, Sorin, we can say that those Democrats who believe it is alright to scare children with lies for political gain are indeed evil.
Moving right along:
* Greta is the devil incarnate
And again, Sorin, that is another value judgment, and while you might see it that way, to me, as a compassionate grandfather, I see her as a very troubled youth who is a victim of her parents and her society.
Consider this from the poor girl’s published bio, Sorin:
Thunberg says she first heard about climate change in 2011, when she was 8 years old, and could not understand why so little was being done about it.
Three years later she became depressed and lethargic, stopped talking and eating, and was eventually diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), and selective mutism.
end quotes
YEOW! you know what I mean, Sorin?
That poor little girl is a mess, and we should be feeling real sorry for her victimhood instead of condemning the poor damaged girl as the devil incarnate and calumniating against her like that when it is quite clear the girl is in need of some good psychiatric help, instead, which she apparently does not have access to in Sweden, poor thing.
And consider this from the puff piece about her in the GUARDIAN article “When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met Greta Thunberg: ‘Hope is contagious’ – One is America’s youngest-ever congresswoman, the other a Swedish schoolgirl. Two of the most powerful voices on the climate speak for the first time” by Emma Brockes on 29 Jun. 2019, to wit:
“Millions of children around the world, striking and saying, ‘Why should we study for a future that may not exist any more?’”
“This is not only me, but everyone in the movement.”
end quotes
That is Greta speaking, Sorin – does she sound like the Devil incarnate there, or just a confused little girl?
And while we are on the subject of the exploitation and manipulation of that troubled little girl, how about the NPR article “Greta Thunberg To U.S.: ‘You Have A Moral Responsibility’ On Climate Change” by Bill Chappell and Ailsa Chang on September 13, 2019, as follows:
Asked when she became so passionate about climate change, Thunberg says it started before she was 10 years old, during a school lesson that, as she recalls, made the entire class very sad.
“We saw these horrifying pictures of plastic in the oceans and floodings and so on, and everyone was very moved by that.”
“But then it just seemed like everyone went back to normal,” Thunberg says.
“And I couldn’t go back to normal because those pictures were stuck in my head.”
“And I couldn’t just go on knowing that this was happening around the world.”
end quotes
And it is not happening all around the world, but nobody in the media which is exploiting this little girl has the courage to tell this little girl she is wrong, and that is what is wrong, Sorin – they let this little girl stay scared so they can sell advertising, which is obscene.
And then we have THE NEW YORKER article entitled “The Fifteen-Year-Old Climate Activist Who Is Demanding a New Kind of Politics” by Masha Gessen on October 2, 2018, as follows:
Thunberg developed her special interest in climate change when she was nine years old and in the third grade.
“They were always talking about how we should turn off lights, save water, not throw out food,” she told me.
“I asked why and they explained about climate change.”
“And I thought this was very strange.”
“If humans could really change the climate, everyone would be talking about it and people wouldn’t be talking about anything else.”
“But this wasn’t happening.”
“I can become very angry when I see things that are wrong,” she said.
On a recent class trip to a museum exhibit on climate change, for example, she noticed that some figures in the show — statistics on the carbon footprint of meat production, for example — were wrong.
“I became very angry, but I’m quiet, so I just went to the exit and sat there by the doors.”
“I didn’t say anything until people asked me.”
end quotes
She needs you to give her a good hug, Sorin, not have you calling her the devil incarnate, which takes us to your next point,. as follows:
* Human driven climate change is a hoax (so all these scientists, are either mistaken or evil : https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/ ,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s ... _3Path.svg)
“Science,” Sorin, is not a democracy, where the majority rules.
And unless you happen to be in balmy Cape Charles, Virginia, or Disneyland, or Burbank, California, or San Diego, or maybe Papeete, Tahiti, where the climate is perfect just as you would want it to be 24/7/365, climate, which is nothing more than the state of the atmosphere at a place and time as regards heat, dryness, sunshine, wind, rain, etc., is constantly changing, so given that, climate change can hardly be a myth, can it?
And of course the activities of humans affect the climate, which is the state of the atmosphere at a place and time as regards heat, dryness, sunshine, wind, rain, etc.
Fourth grade children are aware of that.
And moving right along again:
* We don’t have to change policy because change is happening already
Policy is constantly changing, Sorin.
* We shouldn’t accelerate research in nuclear power because …
Because why?
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-180079
Paul Plante says :
Did you miss anything?
Are you kidding me?
You missed everything, especially with respect to fusion, but hey, this is America, where you really don’t need to know anything, especially if you are running for high public office, so it is alright that you missed everything, and I hope you have a real great day!
But while we have you on the line here, before you go, let’s go down through your points one by one, because that is how important this conversation really is, to everybody alive in America today, to wit:
* Democrats are evil
That, Sorin is a value judgment that I myself would leave to the moralists and theologians out there to argue through, but, if you see them as evil in your scheme of things, then to you, they are, and I would not argue against you that exploiting and manipulating children and politicizing children for partisan political gain as the Democrats are doing with this climate change hysteria they are provoking with lies and deception is obscene, and where evil is defined as profoundly immoral and wicked, as in “their evil deeds,” with such synonyms as bad, morally wrong, and immoral, then yes, Sorin, we can say that those Democrats who believe it is alright to scare children with lies for political gain are indeed evil.
Moving right along:
* Greta is the devil incarnate
And again, Sorin, that is another value judgment, and while you might see it that way, to me, as a compassionate grandfather, I see her as a very troubled youth who is a victim of her parents and her society.
Consider this from the poor girl’s published bio, Sorin:
Thunberg says she first heard about climate change in 2011, when she was 8 years old, and could not understand why so little was being done about it.
Three years later she became depressed and lethargic, stopped talking and eating, and was eventually diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), and selective mutism.
end quotes
YEOW! you know what I mean, Sorin?
That poor little girl is a mess, and we should be feeling real sorry for her victimhood instead of condemning the poor damaged girl as the devil incarnate and calumniating against her like that when it is quite clear the girl is in need of some good psychiatric help, instead, which she apparently does not have access to in Sweden, poor thing.
And consider this from the puff piece about her in the GUARDIAN article “When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met Greta Thunberg: ‘Hope is contagious’ – One is America’s youngest-ever congresswoman, the other a Swedish schoolgirl. Two of the most powerful voices on the climate speak for the first time” by Emma Brockes on 29 Jun. 2019, to wit:
“Millions of children around the world, striking and saying, ‘Why should we study for a future that may not exist any more?’”
“This is not only me, but everyone in the movement.”
end quotes
That is Greta speaking, Sorin – does she sound like the Devil incarnate there, or just a confused little girl?
And while we are on the subject of the exploitation and manipulation of that troubled little girl, how about the NPR article “Greta Thunberg To U.S.: ‘You Have A Moral Responsibility’ On Climate Change” by Bill Chappell and Ailsa Chang on September 13, 2019, as follows:
Asked when she became so passionate about climate change, Thunberg says it started before she was 10 years old, during a school lesson that, as she recalls, made the entire class very sad.
“We saw these horrifying pictures of plastic in the oceans and floodings and so on, and everyone was very moved by that.”
“But then it just seemed like everyone went back to normal,” Thunberg says.
“And I couldn’t go back to normal because those pictures were stuck in my head.”
“And I couldn’t just go on knowing that this was happening around the world.”
end quotes
And it is not happening all around the world, but nobody in the media which is exploiting this little girl has the courage to tell this little girl she is wrong, and that is what is wrong, Sorin – they let this little girl stay scared so they can sell advertising, which is obscene.
And then we have THE NEW YORKER article entitled “The Fifteen-Year-Old Climate Activist Who Is Demanding a New Kind of Politics” by Masha Gessen on October 2, 2018, as follows:
Thunberg developed her special interest in climate change when she was nine years old and in the third grade.
“They were always talking about how we should turn off lights, save water, not throw out food,” she told me.
“I asked why and they explained about climate change.”
“And I thought this was very strange.”
“If humans could really change the climate, everyone would be talking about it and people wouldn’t be talking about anything else.”
“But this wasn’t happening.”
“I can become very angry when I see things that are wrong,” she said.
On a recent class trip to a museum exhibit on climate change, for example, she noticed that some figures in the show — statistics on the carbon footprint of meat production, for example — were wrong.
“I became very angry, but I’m quiet, so I just went to the exit and sat there by the doors.”
“I didn’t say anything until people asked me.”
end quotes
She needs you to give her a good hug, Sorin, not have you calling her the devil incarnate, which takes us to your next point,. as follows:
* Human driven climate change is a hoax (so all these scientists, are either mistaken or evil : https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/ ,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s ... _3Path.svg)
“Science,” Sorin, is not a democracy, where the majority rules.
And unless you happen to be in balmy Cape Charles, Virginia, or Disneyland, or Burbank, California, or San Diego, or maybe Papeete, Tahiti, where the climate is perfect just as you would want it to be 24/7/365, climate, which is nothing more than the state of the atmosphere at a place and time as regards heat, dryness, sunshine, wind, rain, etc., is constantly changing, so given that, climate change can hardly be a myth, can it?
And of course the activities of humans affect the climate, which is the state of the atmosphere at a place and time as regards heat, dryness, sunshine, wind, rain, etc.
Fourth grade children are aware of that.
And moving right along again:
* We don’t have to change policy because change is happening already
Policy is constantly changing, Sorin.
* We shouldn’t accelerate research in nuclear power because …
Because why?
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-180079
Re: ON ENVIRONMENTAL HYSTERIA-MONGERING
THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR September 22, 2019 at 8:59 pm
Paul Plante says :
Well, I also have some sequestered carbon dioxide that I can gain energy from in my potato patch and my squash, etc., because everything we eat that is natural, Sorin, at least that which grows, is sequestered carbon dioxide.
Without carbon dioxide, life on earth would cease.
Nothing green could grow.
Check out NASA, Sorin – studies have shown that increased concentrations of carbon dioxide increase photosynthesis, spurring plant growth.
A plant will not grow or thrive in environments with less than 300 ppm in their atmosphere, and when modifying the growing environment to increase the yield of plants, a grower will increase their CO2 up to 2,000 ppm.
And the present carbon dioxide reading according to a NOAA scientific paper entitled “Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide” by Rebecca Lindsey on September 19, 2019 states thusly, with respect to CLIMATE CHANGE HYSTERIA, to wit:
The global average atmospheric carbon dioxide in 2018 was 407.4 parts per million (ppm for short), with a range of uncertainty of plus or minus 0.1 ppm.
Carbon dioxide levels today are higher than at any point in at least the past 800,000 years.
end quotes
GASP!
OMG!
HOW TERRIBLE!
WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE AND GRETA THUNBERG ISN’T GOING TO HAVE A FUTURE!
Which is bull****.
Look at the graph and tell me what you see, Sorin https://www.climate.gov/news-features/u ... on-dioxide because what I see is a line across labeled 300 ppm, and up until literally yesterday, the earth’s supposed CO2 level was BELOW 300 ppm of carbon dioxide, which means that NO GREEN PLANTS COULD HAVE BEEN ALIVE ON EARTH, if the other science is correct that plants cannot grow below 300 ppm, which should give you an idea of just how stupid this climate science bull**** really is.
To believe it, you have to suspend disbelief at how silly it really is.
And if you study some HVAC guidelines, you will find that 350-1,000 ppm of carbon dioxide is the typical level found in occupied spaces with good air exchange, and that is carbon dioxide caused by people breathing.
In the meantime, there are no VIABLE studies that predict carbon dioxide is going to cause the world to end in 10 or 12 years.
THE MODEL IS FATALLY FLAWED, regardless of how many people want to be so foolish as to sign their names to something.
So how much carbon dioxide do you want to remove from the earth’s atmosphere, Sorin, where it is a naturally occurring component?
And how are you going to accomplish that?
As to the scientific community, Sorin, it is a diverse network of interacting scientists and objectivity is expected to be achieved by the scientific method.
As to the scientific method, it is an empirical method of acquiring knowledge that has characterized the development of science since at least the 17th century.
It involves careful observation, applying rigorous skepticism about what is observed, given that cognitive assumptions can distort how one interprets the observation.
RIGOROUS SKEPTICISM, Sorin, i.e. science is not a democracy, no matter how many articles on “consensus” you want to post in here, because there is no consensus that carbon dioxide will cause the world to end in 10 or 12 years.
You say that scientific consensus is the collective judgment, position, and opinion of the community of scientists in a particular field of study, and consensus implies general agreement, though not necessarily unanimity.
And I point to a paper entitled “NASA Releases New CO2 Data, Refutes Conventional Wisdom – Analyses of a set of NASA data shows that water vapor greatly amplifies global warming, and carbon dioxide doesn’t mix in the atmosphere as quickly as assumed” by Ucilia Wang dated December 15, 2009, which gives us some real science, as follows:
SAN FRANCISCO — NASA has released the first-ever set of carbon dioxide data based only on daily observations by a satellite instrument, a new tool that will help researchers study climate change and improve weather predictions.
The data came from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) that NASA launched aboard its Aqua spacecraft in 2002.
Since then, AIRS has amassed information about carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, water vapor, methane and temperatures in the mid-troposphere (see multimedia presentations).
The mid-troposphere is about three to seven miles above the Earth’s surface.
For carbon dioxide, AIRS measures and tracks its concentration and movement as it moves across the globe.
Observation data is critical for scientists to validate their models or adjust them to better predict the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the weather and climate.
The data have already refuted a long-held belief that carbon dioxide is evenly distributed and do so fairly quickly in the atmosphere once it rises from the ground, said Moustafa Chahine, the science team leader of the AIRS project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco Tuesday.
“Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, carbon dioxide is not well mixed in the mid-troposphere,” Chahine said.
“You can see the jet stream splitting the carbon dioxide clump.”
AIRS data shows instead that carbon dioxide, which has seen its rate of increase accelerating from 1 part per million in 1955 to 2 parts per million today, would require about two to three years before it blends in, he said.
The atmosphere currently has about 400 parts per million.
How well and how quickly carbon dioxide blends in is important for understanding how much and how long carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere and affects the climate before some of it is scooped up by Earth’s natural scrubbers, such as the ocean.
And by extension, that knowledge would be crucial in determining what humans must do to minimize their emissions or use technologies to capture and sequester their carbon dioxide pollution before it escapes into the atmosphere.
Chahine said several climate models have assumed an even distribution because researchers didn’t have adequate data to show how the carbon dioxide is vertically transported through the atmosphere.
“The data we have now will help researchers improve their models’ vertical transport,” Chahine said.
end quotes
So much for your consensus theory.
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-180115
Paul Plante says :
Well, I also have some sequestered carbon dioxide that I can gain energy from in my potato patch and my squash, etc., because everything we eat that is natural, Sorin, at least that which grows, is sequestered carbon dioxide.
Without carbon dioxide, life on earth would cease.
Nothing green could grow.
Check out NASA, Sorin – studies have shown that increased concentrations of carbon dioxide increase photosynthesis, spurring plant growth.
A plant will not grow or thrive in environments with less than 300 ppm in their atmosphere, and when modifying the growing environment to increase the yield of plants, a grower will increase their CO2 up to 2,000 ppm.
And the present carbon dioxide reading according to a NOAA scientific paper entitled “Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide” by Rebecca Lindsey on September 19, 2019 states thusly, with respect to CLIMATE CHANGE HYSTERIA, to wit:
The global average atmospheric carbon dioxide in 2018 was 407.4 parts per million (ppm for short), with a range of uncertainty of plus or minus 0.1 ppm.
Carbon dioxide levels today are higher than at any point in at least the past 800,000 years.
end quotes
GASP!
OMG!
HOW TERRIBLE!
WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE AND GRETA THUNBERG ISN’T GOING TO HAVE A FUTURE!
Which is bull****.
Look at the graph and tell me what you see, Sorin https://www.climate.gov/news-features/u ... on-dioxide because what I see is a line across labeled 300 ppm, and up until literally yesterday, the earth’s supposed CO2 level was BELOW 300 ppm of carbon dioxide, which means that NO GREEN PLANTS COULD HAVE BEEN ALIVE ON EARTH, if the other science is correct that plants cannot grow below 300 ppm, which should give you an idea of just how stupid this climate science bull**** really is.
To believe it, you have to suspend disbelief at how silly it really is.
And if you study some HVAC guidelines, you will find that 350-1,000 ppm of carbon dioxide is the typical level found in occupied spaces with good air exchange, and that is carbon dioxide caused by people breathing.
In the meantime, there are no VIABLE studies that predict carbon dioxide is going to cause the world to end in 10 or 12 years.
THE MODEL IS FATALLY FLAWED, regardless of how many people want to be so foolish as to sign their names to something.
So how much carbon dioxide do you want to remove from the earth’s atmosphere, Sorin, where it is a naturally occurring component?
And how are you going to accomplish that?
As to the scientific community, Sorin, it is a diverse network of interacting scientists and objectivity is expected to be achieved by the scientific method.
As to the scientific method, it is an empirical method of acquiring knowledge that has characterized the development of science since at least the 17th century.
It involves careful observation, applying rigorous skepticism about what is observed, given that cognitive assumptions can distort how one interprets the observation.
RIGOROUS SKEPTICISM, Sorin, i.e. science is not a democracy, no matter how many articles on “consensus” you want to post in here, because there is no consensus that carbon dioxide will cause the world to end in 10 or 12 years.
You say that scientific consensus is the collective judgment, position, and opinion of the community of scientists in a particular field of study, and consensus implies general agreement, though not necessarily unanimity.
And I point to a paper entitled “NASA Releases New CO2 Data, Refutes Conventional Wisdom – Analyses of a set of NASA data shows that water vapor greatly amplifies global warming, and carbon dioxide doesn’t mix in the atmosphere as quickly as assumed” by Ucilia Wang dated December 15, 2009, which gives us some real science, as follows:
SAN FRANCISCO — NASA has released the first-ever set of carbon dioxide data based only on daily observations by a satellite instrument, a new tool that will help researchers study climate change and improve weather predictions.
The data came from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) that NASA launched aboard its Aqua spacecraft in 2002.
Since then, AIRS has amassed information about carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, water vapor, methane and temperatures in the mid-troposphere (see multimedia presentations).
The mid-troposphere is about three to seven miles above the Earth’s surface.
For carbon dioxide, AIRS measures and tracks its concentration and movement as it moves across the globe.
Observation data is critical for scientists to validate their models or adjust them to better predict the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the weather and climate.
The data have already refuted a long-held belief that carbon dioxide is evenly distributed and do so fairly quickly in the atmosphere once it rises from the ground, said Moustafa Chahine, the science team leader of the AIRS project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco Tuesday.
“Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, carbon dioxide is not well mixed in the mid-troposphere,” Chahine said.
“You can see the jet stream splitting the carbon dioxide clump.”
AIRS data shows instead that carbon dioxide, which has seen its rate of increase accelerating from 1 part per million in 1955 to 2 parts per million today, would require about two to three years before it blends in, he said.
The atmosphere currently has about 400 parts per million.
How well and how quickly carbon dioxide blends in is important for understanding how much and how long carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere and affects the climate before some of it is scooped up by Earth’s natural scrubbers, such as the ocean.
And by extension, that knowledge would be crucial in determining what humans must do to minimize their emissions or use technologies to capture and sequester their carbon dioxide pollution before it escapes into the atmosphere.
Chahine said several climate models have assumed an even distribution because researchers didn’t have adequate data to show how the carbon dioxide is vertically transported through the atmosphere.
“The data we have now will help researchers improve their models’ vertical transport,” Chahine said.
end quotes
So much for your consensus theory.
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/t ... ent-180115