Daily Archives: May 23, 2013

View 775 Thursday, May 23, 2013

Talk continues on carbon taxes, and there are political claims that Oklahoma deserved destruction since it produces oil and contributes to global warming and global warming causes extreme weather. Some of the rhetoric is frantic: we cannot continue spewing out CO2 into the atmosphere. We summed up what we know for sure a couple of days ago: CO2 levels in 1800 were about 280 ppm. In 1900 they were about 300 parts per million. Current levels are about 400. The error rates are in the order of 10% for the earliest estimates, and about 3% now.

This is a pretty dramatic rise in CO2. Up to now there is little evidence that the higher levels have caused harm, and considerable evidence that they have aided plant growth. If the growth rate slowed to a stop time would erase much of the growth in atmospheric CO2 concentration from the last century. While there may be benefits to the higher CO2 levels, I think few would regret a halt in their growth.

The problem with that is energy: there can’t be any economic growth without increases in the availability of energy, and the cost of energy is a very large part of the cost of economic growth. For the most part, any increase in low cost energy availability means an increase in production of atmospheric CO2.

All of this should be obvious although many of the AGW True Believers seem to be ignoring it.

There is, of course, an economical energy source that produces no CO2 whatever. The Believers will instantly say “Green Energy!” and their usual example is ground based solar energy. It’s true enough that it’s “green” in the sense that it doesn’t produce CO2 while it is producing electricity, although one could quibble over the CO2 produced in the production of solar panels. The problem is that except in special cases ground based solar is not an economical way of producing energy for economic growth. Indeed, most of the reason for its demand is tied to government subsidies. Ground based solar suffers from physical limitations: the Sun doesn’t shine at night, not much energy gets to the ground during bad weather, and the solar constant limits the maximum amount of power you can get per square meter even at noon on a clear day. There are inherent limits on electrical energy storage. Again no surprises.

A much “Greener” energy source is nuclear power. We keep hoping for lost cost high efficiency nuclear fusion power, but for the last forty years the estimate of the time needed to produce economically useful fusion power given major capital investment and a priority override to regulatory red tape has been thirty years. That is, we needed thirty years to get fusion-originated power into our houses back in 1970 (and I wrote stories based on that assumption). Came 1980 and we still needed thirty years to get there. And now in 2013 the last time I checked with the experts, the estimate is that we can do it with current science in about thirty years.

On the other hand we have plenty of experience with fusion based nuclear power. A recent Wall Street Journal article by environmentalists summarizes what’s known.

Going Green? Then Go Nuclear

We’re environmentalists, but pretending that solar power is ready for prime time is delusional.

By TED NORDHAUS And MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER

Over the last several decades, the cost of electricity from solar panels has declined dramatically, while the cost of building new nuclear plants has risen steadily. This has reaffirmed the long-standing view of many environmentalists that it will be cheaper and easier to reduce global warming emissions through solar electricity than with new nuclear plants. But while continuing price declines might someday make solar cheaper than nuclear, it’s not true today. Yet the mythmaking persists.

. . .

The cost of building and operating the Finnish nuclear plant over the next 20 years will be $15 billion. Over that time period, the plant will generate 225 terawatt-hours (twh) of electricity at a cost of 7 cents per kilowatt hour.

Since 2000, Germany has heavily subsidized electricity production from solar panels—offering long-term contracts to producers to purchase electricity at prices substantially above wholesale rates. The resulting solar installations are expected to generate 400 twh electricity over the 20 years that the panels will receive the subsidy, at a total cost to German ratepayers of $130 billion, or 32 cents per kwh.

In short, solar electricity in Germany will cost almost five times more for every kilowatt hour of electricity it provides than Finland’s new nuclear plant.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323716304578482663491426312.html

This is pretty much in line with what every other honest analyst comes up with. Nuclear is cheap compared to most other forms of energy generation. Its only real competition is from oil and coal.

If we want to continue economic growth while reducing the amounts of CO2 blown into the atmosphere, nuclear power is the way to go – at least until we get serious about space solar power satellites. I know, I know – I said all this in A Step Farther Out more than thirty years ago. It was true then and it remains true today. But so far as I can see, those who promise hope and change do so by subsidizing ground based solar, and hate boths pace and nuclear fission. And here we are.

Regarding the cold fusion report, I’m still waiting for input from some of our more expert readers, and I admit I have not been following this particular story very closely. We do have this:

Regarding Rossi and his E-Cat…

This report, taken in isolation, sounds impressive. But Rossi’s history and behavior are considerably less than impressive. He has a long criminal history in Italy, and has been caught in numerous lies about his current activities. Both the University of Bologna (on two separate occasions) and National Instruments have had to issue statements denying Rossi’s claims of a working relationship with them. His primary "expert" (Domenico Fioravanti) is a supposed retired NATO Colonel who seems not to have existed until Rossi presented him to the public (in 18 months, no one has been able to find any signs that such a person actually exists).

Rossi claims to have sold somewhere between 2 and 14 1-Megawatt devices, but they were all sold to "secret" customers. He has been selling "franchises" and claiming to have a factory in Florida to mass-produce the devices. But, when the Florida Bureau of Radiation Control investigated his public claims, he denied doing any manufacturing or selling in the United States.

I’ve been watching Rossi’s activities for over 2 years now, and it certainly seems to me that he is running an investment scam. I would love for his invention to be true, but if it is, then it will be the most extreme example of an "eccentric" inventor the world has ever seen. However, his behavior fits right in with several established con men (starting with John Worrell Keely, in the 1880s).

J

Which leaves unexplained the enthusiasm that Forbes has for the story; and I do not mean more than I say in that statement. I truly don’t know. I have seen no real explication of the fusion theory involved, and I have certainly seen no demonstration of a system that produces more energy than it consumes, or even a device whose output is a megawatt. A one-megawatt electrical device would not be small, and the cables to carry a megawatt of electric power would be difficult to hide. One would think that if several of them exist, it would not be that hard to get one of them to do a public demonstration.

As Descartes said (and Sagan made famous), extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. In the case of a cold fusion plant the claim is more than extraordinary: it’s a civilization changer. The upside of it being true is enormous; but it does need at least one existence identification.

View 776 Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Could this be the beginning of a new era?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2013/05/20/finally-independent-testing-of-rossis-e-cat-cold-fusion-device-maybe-the-world-will-change-after-all/

It purports to be an announcement of independent verification of low temperature fusion, with not merely measureable but commercially useful energy output.  I know little about any of this.

Mike Flynn sends this:

ADHD

You may find this interesting:

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/05/20/why-american-kids-have-adhd-and-french-kids-dont/

MikeF

The thesis is that the symptoms of ADHD are real but not due to biological factors: ADHD can be “cured” by non-medical means. Thirty years and more ago a major pediatrician referred cases to me during the brief period in which I toyed with the idea of doing psychological consulting. The cases were bright boys who were not doing well in school. I was able to help them, but it was a lot of work and I had to charge a lot for doing it, and I discovered I’d rather write; I’d never set out to be any kind of practicing psychologist.

What I found in my few cases was that you can teach kids to control themselves.  I was pretty sure of that since I had to learn it myself: in my case the incentive was teachers with the legal power of corporal punishment.  Since my pediatrician partner did not want to use drugs, and I legally couldn’t prescribe anything, it was convince the kids their lives would be better if they developed better habits, or admit defeat.  As I said, hard work, too hard for me: I discovered that I am not going to save the world one boy at a time.  But I did learn, as I had thought, that the techniques I had used to teach myself back when I was in grade school can be taught to bright boys, but it takes time and patience.

That doesn’t mean that there are not cases of ADHD that require drugs; it does mean that neither I nor my pediatrician referral source found any.

The author of the Forbes article tends to blame the parents. I’d prefer to blame the culture. But it is interesting that as the influence of the DSM had grown, so have the number of cases of ADHD.

Thirty years ago a national commission on education concluded that “If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightly consider it an act of war.”  We still have the same system of education, only now in Spades with Big Casino. It is not getting better, and the teachers unions are powerful enough to continue their war against the children of these United States of America.  For more http://www.edexcellence.net/commentary/videos/?show=425168643

Basically we have surrendered. Those who can find niches of decent education in this vast wasteland. But we don’t take it seriously any more. We have given up.

The schools don’t even pretend to teach all the kids to read now.  They just have good reasons for why they didn’t learn.  And an increasing number can’t read but are pronounced literate because the can read at grade level, which means that they can read controlled vocabulary books. And the costs of this rotten system continue to rise, and the effects of bad grade schools reach up into the increasingly expensive universities, which have to try in four years to remedy twelve years of awful education.

For those who wonder if their children can read, try nonsense words on them. If your child in second grade or above cannot read monopolyastrid and conviducation, that child can’t read.  By read I mean look at the word and figure out how it is pronounced. And if your teacher tells you that isn’t what reading is, then you have a problem you will never solve by any kind of action inside the school system. Get a good reading program. The best one I know is my wife’s rather hokey old DOS program which clunkily works on any version of Windows. About seventy lessons of half an hour a lesson will do the job. After that it’s a matter of finding good and interesting books that kids like. I’ve written a few. There are a lot of them out there. But first they have to be comfortable at reading. Seventy lessons will do it, and it will last the rest of their lives. You don’t have to wait until second grade. English upper and upper middle class pupils were taught to read at age four by nannies, and that worked for a hundred years. English four year old protoplasm is no better than your kids’.

I still haven’t given up on meaningful school reform and here and there it happens, but by and large the battle is lost. The teaching colleges no longer teach their student teachers that kids can and should be expected to learn to read English before the end of first grade; and since they have never been taught to expect that result, they seldom get it. Reading instruction in college is mostly diagnosis of problems, i.e. learning good excuses for why you didn’t teach the child to read.  And the beat goes on.