Sgt Hulka Uncut

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Archive for category Science

Measures of devotion

Feb 22

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Climate Change, Evil Motherfuckers, Good Ideas, Politics, Science | 5 Comments

An update on my post from Monday. Today we find out that Peter H. Gleick, founder and president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security is the person that duped the Heartland Institute into releasing a number of its confidential documents regarding its funding and plans to attempt to refute the science of climate change and counter or attack those that believe in the scientific method and the weight of evidence in favour of the arguments regarding anthropogenic climate change.

The links to the above go to the Boards of the two organisations above so that readers can do their own research where it matters, at the top of the organisations. I encourage interested parties to also look further into the funding of both, as that information is as illuminating of the agendas of the two groups as anything published on their websites.

Based on his admission, Peter Gleick will now almost certainly face the full force of the best law money can buy from his adversaries, and the truth is that he should. He obtained the confidential information he released through deception, as he has admitted in his statement published by the Huffington Post. If that is a criminal act, or breaks a civil code, he should be tried, convicted and sentenced appropriately. However, that will not diminish the substance of what he collected, as was covered in my previous post.

In the progress of whatever trial ensues, we will find out for sure which of the documents are real and which are fake, as Heritage has claimed both. But you can’t have it both ways, either the documents are genuine and therefore the alleged theft substantive, or they are fake and there is essentially no case to answer.

Perhaps Peter Gleick wants it that way so that his legal journey is well publicised. If that is the case, it will be a demonstration of one of the only real ways to counter the climate deniers. Because the truth is that the climate deniers are funded by phenomenally rich arseholes and corporations they control, and the likes of the Pacific Institue and DeSmogBlog are funded on a pittance in comparison. The only thing the latter have to provide a balance to the war chest of the evil are the scientific facts being on their side and their devotion to the scientific method. I hope that the measure of devotion that Peter Gleick is demonstrating ends up being worth it to him, and worth all the money that Heritage can scrounge together to fund their side of the story to unfold.

Leaking schadenfreude

Feb 20

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Climate Change, Evil Motherfuckers, Science | Comments off

If you’d like to use the wayback machine, here is an interesting follow up to my post of 30 November 2009 regarding the fake Climategate fiasco.

In the intervening period, three separate investigations have cleared everyone at the University of East Anglia and everyone they were in contact with at other universities of the claim that, “climate scientists had tampered with data to support evidence of global warming.” Furthermore, the investigations pretty much showed exactly what I suspected was going on in my earlier post. So, no conspiracy, no lost data showing climate change isn’t real, and no illegal or unethical acts on the part of climate scientists. But there’s a kicker.

It turns out that leaking of massive amounts of documents can occur to both sides of an issue. And one of those parties (the US Heartland Institute) on the climate change denial side that was party to a number of the FOIA hassling requests to the climate scientists has just had a bunch of its internal documents leaked to the public. And they show some pretty interesting stuff such as:

• the desire to identify and fund science writers to attack Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change reports;
• fundraising and development of communications strategies to counter “warmest” science (because they always have to have a catchy name to call people – actual science would really be sufficient);
• planning to develop school curriculum material to counter an alleged “alarmist perspective” by teachers; and
• lobby against the well known “liberal-bias” to maths*

The Heartland Institute has already admitted the authenticity of the documents while saying that someone purporting to be from the Institute duped someone from there into emailing them to the requestor. See how hard it is to keep a conspiracy a secret, even when one really exists?

Now if we “cui bono” (follow the money) as I am a big fan of, we find that the largest contributors of the Heartland Institute are our friends the Koch Brothers (not pronounced cock, although I understand the confusion) and Altria (tobacco) and Reynolds American (also tobacco). Nice to see where $7.8 million a year comes from. Good thing they don’t waste much of that on information security and will email out lost of confidential stuff to anyone who claims to be a member.

Pity though, that the actual scandal over this revelation will not make even a minor ripple in the mainstream news, as opposed to the fake scandal of before. But the truth is, much of what should be the independent media is also in the pocket of the right wing authoritarians that fund climate change denial.

But for the time being, we can enjoy any little victory that comes.

* OK, I made this last one up in this context, but it’s generally something they believe.

And another one

Feb 10

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Climate Change, Science | Comments off

From NASA today we find out:

NASA’s latest global surface temperature analysis confirms the long-term trend of the earth’s gradual warming. “Even with the cooling effects of a strong La Niña influence and low solar activity for the past several years, 2011 was one of the 10 warmest years on record,” said NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) director James Hansen. 2011’s global average surface temperature was 0.51ºC warmer than in the period 1951-1980, the mid-20th century baseline GISS used. It continued the trend in which nine of the 10 warmest years occurred since 2000.

But that whole climate change thing is a bunch of bunk. Nothing to see here, move along . . .

Zero degrees of balance

Feb 6

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Climate Change, Science, Snake Oil | 3 Comments

A repeated theme I touch on here is the false equivalency that is presented in the media as a whole on issues such as climate change. In reading and listening over the past week, I have come across a couple of things that I want to use to illustrate this point again, so that readers can help identify it when it happens.

The false equivalency typically works in one of two ways, either by giving equal time or voice to both sides of an argument, regardless of the weight or validity of the two sides, or by treating both arguments as “faith”, even if one is wholly based on the scientific method and has a wealth of empirical evidence to support it, and the other is just a belief based on nothing more than a single instance anecdotal evidence. Some journalistic outlets do the false equivalency thing to appear to be fair, and others (like anything owned by Rupert Murdoch) do it as a means to obfuscate genuine debate.

The latest example of this crappy practice is at the Wall Street Journal, where they gave over their opinion page on 27 January to a letter from 16 “concerned scientists and engineers” in No Need To Panic About Global Warming. Interestingly enough, the WSJ declined to print a rebuttal on the basis that they were only supplying “the other side of the argument” and that the position of the actual Union of Concerned Scientists is already well known. The rebuttal can be found signed by 250 members of the National Academy of Science in the peer reviewed journal Science right here.

Note that I am not going to attack the 16 authors of the WSJ piece on the fact that they are working outside their area, as I feel (like climate deniers don’t) that anyone who agrees to follow the scientific method is allowed to have a view on scientific issues. What I will attack them on is a line from their piece, “cui bono” (follow the money), because thats one of my favourite games, baby. As I have said before and I will say again, anytime a right wing authoritarian accuses you of something, you can bet they have done it already. The 16 say follow the money because all these academics get their money from government grants and they need to keep those coming. Really. Well, cui bono with regard to these 16 and you will find (credit to Media Matters):

Roger Cohen and Edward David are both former employees of ExxonMobil. William Happer is the Chairman of the Board for the George C. Marshall Institute, which has received funding from Exxon. Rodney Nichols is also on the boards of the George Marshall Institute and the Manhattan Institute, which has been funded by Exxon and the Koch Foundations. Harrison Schmitt was the Chairman Emeritus of the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy, which was funded by oil refiners and electric utilities in the 1990s, according to a Wall Street Journal report (via Nexis). Richard Lindzen also served on the Economic Advisory Council of the Center, was funded by ExxonMobil through the 2000s.

See, the truth is that while you may be able to scrape together 16 people to support most anything (especially if you have a shitload of cash), and some of them might even have impressive resumes, the fact remains that the vast vast vast majority of people that work in peer reviewed area of climate science agree on the specific points raised in the rebuttal:

(i) The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our
atmosphere. A single cold and snowy winter in Washington or Europe does not alter this fact.
(ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due
to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.
(iii) Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth’s climate, but are now being
overwhelmed by human-induced changes.
(iv) Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, including increasing rates of sea-level rise and alterations
in the hydrologic cycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic.
(v) The combination of these complex climate changes threatens coastal communities
and cities, our food and water supplies, marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments, and far more.

Now, while these points above are concerning, I note that they don’t anywhere say “panic”. They do say “do something”, which is what I and others have been advocating for years, and while their should be some urgency, given how hard it is to change inertia, that does not equate to freaking out or being irrational.

Which brings me to the other form of equivalency that really pisses me off: when I hear anyone (but typically a climate change denier) claim that belief in climate change is like a religion and anyone who believes in it is irrational. Excuse me, but fuck off. A logical and evidence based conclusion that is founded in the scientific method and is continually peer reviewed by actual expertise so that it can be tuned is not a religion, and frankly I see some projection going on there. Bill Maher (and his writers) do such a good job of addressing this issue in another context that is equally valid, I will just give time over to him.

Try this for an experiment. The next time you meet someone who denies climate change, ask them their views on god. I have 2:1 that they are big believers that either their god will save them, or better yet that its all part of the rapture.

OK, I am starting to have some questions of my own

Mar 17

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Economics, Good Ideas, International, Other Topics, Science | Comments off

No news may be good news for a bit, but after a while if there is no news (information) you start to wonder if people are keeping bad things from you. Certainly that is what the Japanese people are expressing on TV and with their feet as they start to proactively evacuate totally. TEPCO does not have a great record about being open and forthright in it communications about incidents. The ominous sign is the still the evacuation of the plants, with only 50 staff remaining, where 1000 once worked, and perhaps this is why the people in Tokyo who can are voting with their feet.

Yesterday, US Energy Secretary, Steven Chu (a real smart guy with tons of credibility) told Congress: “If workers have to be permanently evacuated from the site it is unclear if the damage can be effectively contained.” Unfortunately, that is true. I know that if I was managing an emergency situation at an industrial facility during a persistent fire and chemical spill, I would need a lot more than 50 guys to regain control of the situation.

So, significant questions need to be directly asked by journalists now. The first has got to be cooling. What precisely are they doing with the cores of these three reactors? Do all three have a continuous flow of water, what is the temperature down to at present, and are they ensuring capacity and supply of coolant in redundant forms yet on each reactor. Is #4 at cold shutdown? The spent fuel rods in #4 reactor building have also clearly lost their cooling bath, as fires re-ignite there daily, and steam is almost always coming out of the building. How much and how long were these spent fuel rods dry, what is their temperature at present, and are we supplying coolant flow to them yet?

Clearly, reactors that have triple redundant cooling systems that can lose pumping and liquid supply lines at every line of defence during earthquakes and the resulting tsunamis have got to go. I mean if they can build an earthquake proof container for a little patch of sun on earth, then surely we can build water-proof containment systems for our backup pumps, earthquake-proof piping as much as possible (segmenting in solid sections?, flexible connections?) and provide quick reconnection facilities on standby for re-establishing cooling, monitoring, and electrical and mechanical control?

And if we can’t make these plants catastrophe proof, then we can’t build more. Let’s completely convert over to electricity supply bridging only with gas and fuel we can grow (but not eat) on the way to solar, wind, wave, geothermal (I mean fuck, the world ain’t running out of that on the ring of fire) as fast as possible, regardless of the cost. And I don’t say that lightly. I don’t mean regardless of the cost, so let’s let the big corporations rip off the whole program of conversion over to renewables, and control the energy game at the end of the transition.

I mean that whatever it costs to convert over to renewables on a macroeconomic scale, let’s pay it, and the sooner the better. You need research money to finish up the conversion of a useful scientific invention into a renewable power source at the home or industrial level? You got it. You need capital to take your electric plant off coal and onto gas? Here’s a low interest loan. Are you a massive power user (steel) that if given enough capital at low cost could become a power producer, and make your business carbon-proof from dirty international competition? I’ve got some cash for you too. However, each of you had better spend the money on what you said you will, and stay out of corruption and theft with my money, because I will be watching. In fact, your project accountant will actually be employed by me. Work for you, take all instructions from you, but I pay the salary, and get monthly reports form him/her. That’s all the oversight I need.

But there is a decision to be made, and it is as old as democracy itself. What is government’s role? Because only government’s (and maybe Warren Buffett) have the money and credit to accomplish a massive conversion to renewables. If you don’t want to do that, by doing the kind of things I outline above, then I guess we have to head back to find out if there is anything more I can do to make the nuclear plants safe from incident, and the waste safe for eternity.

And finally, I have a long-term question. As time goes on, I am wondering if there is no way to catalyse chemically a nuclear reaction, and is there such a thing as an intrinsically safe nuclear reactor?

Update on yesterday

Mar 15

Posted by Sgt Hulka in International, Other Topics, Science | Comments off

As this drama still plays out in Japan, I have continued to do research on the subject, and the information available from actual experts supports the facts presented by me yesterday. The IAEA provides more support for what I provided.

That the nuclear incident is still occurring, and not abating as yet also supports my evaluation on what a complete loser Dolt is.

The final update I want to make is that it is highly inappropriate to compare this incident to the incident at Chernobyl. They are completely different reactor designs, have completely different containment systems and were managed completely differently. So it will be very seldom when a comparison to Chernobyl will be appropriate to the situation in Japan.

In the washup of all this, we may decide to reduce or eliminate the use of nuclear power worldwide. But let’s do it on a reasoned evaluation of the facts, and not emotionally.

He has got to be paid a lot to be such an arsehole

Mar 14

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Evil Motherfuckers, Good Ideas, Other Topics, Science | 3 Comments

Andrew Bolt* gave a performance so untruthful and offensive on the weekend Insiders, that I really think he has got to be having this shit fed to him and rehearsed beforehand. No one could honestly hold this many stupid views in one head. His positions on the weekend once again included his greenhouse denial schtick, along with saying that the Coalition actually believes his view on the subject and are just faking it with a token effort to allow for a change of subject. He also used the current lie-attack approach with respect to Ross Garnaut. I hesitate to tell you about it, but will risk spreading its use, as I think it is important to be able to identify it when you see it, as it fits into a wider ploy by cultural conservatives and shills of big business. The lies that Dolt was allowed to share included:

• The lie is that there is zero risk to Australia due to the nuclear accidents in Japan caused by the earthquake, and then tsunami.

• The lie that the Greens will just use this as a beat up so they can stymie the development of nuclear power

• The lie is that Ross Garnaut is not credible to listen to for any reason on the climate change issue, as he is only an economist, and not a climate scientist, and he is paid by the government for his views.

The lies fit into a broader tactic by the cultural conservatives of doing something really shitty, then accusing you of it, falsely and in a pre-emtory manner, to hide their “crime”. They did it to Tim Flannery a couple weeks ago on Q&A, and I’ve heard it from another Coalition climate change denier a week before that.

And Dolt does it here again. Because this time, he used one lie to sell another. While attacking Ross Garnaut’s credibility on one issue, he used Ziggy Switkowski, who has not worked in the nuclear power industry ever to my knowledge, and while very involved with ANSTO as a director, his degree in nuclear physics has got to be 35 years old. After getting his business degree at Harvard, he served in series of company management roles, including Telstra. There is also the fact that he is a big proponent of nuclear power in Australia. Why shouldnt he be, as he was appointed by the Howard Government to look into the nuclear power issue. But hey, not that it is such a bad thing. As I have said before, there is a role for nuclear power in getting us off the magic dirt. Ziggy isn’t a bad guy, and I think he is smart and does have credibility on his issues.

Just like Ross Garnaut does. But Dolt smears Ross as a paid government lackey, and treats a distinguished, professor, diplomat, researcher and company chairman as if he was a one trick pony. And the funny thing about this smear is that it exposes the stupidity of Dolt. Having an economist study climate change and report on its effects is precisely the person to have do it on behalf of the government. You want to have a dispassionate and non-partisan person evaluate the cause and effects that can also apply the scientific method.

But the deniers first act these days is to now say that any scientist on your side of an argument has no credibility, as his field is not exactly climate science. This is a vile and disingenuous strawman of an argument and needs to be exposed. They have no basis upon which to be supported by a consistent theory and evidence in science, so they attack all science itself. Tim Flannery is just a geologist. By that measure, we have no reason to believe Isaac Newton, a farmer who was trained as a mathematician.

But then the bastard went on. Dolt also downplayed the significance of a nuclear incident on the 200,000 evacuated, in the hundreds of those exposed to heightened radiation, some needing treatment, and the potential future risk (at the time on Sunday morning) by saying we should be worrying about the missing. How about we worry about them all, you fucking moron. How about we make a serious effort to address the probable meltdown of two nuclear reactors at about 8 effected by the quakes and tsunami while we also mobilise in the millions people to find the wounded, bury the dead and start to rebuild their lives. Andrew Bolt abused the suffering of one effected people to make his point (a lie, I remind you) about another. He is the worst of humans and should be forced to go work on the recovery and containment effort directly at the site of the nuclear plant where the hydrogen explosion took place on Sunday morning, with his wife and kids (if he has any) living in a nice camp trailer across the street.

So basically, let’s leave this idiot behind, and work into some facts about the reactors in Japan, figure out where we are at, and put together evidence for the future. How about that? Right, well the first thing we want to do is understand what we are dealing with here through some research. Then we will put some facts into context and see where to go from there.

The first thing to understand is that the reactors that have released radioactive caesium and have had to have radioactive steam vented from them (indicators of a probable meltdown) are boiling water reactors (BWR) from the 1970s. Wiki says:

“The family of nuclear reactors known as light water reactors (LWR), cooled and moderated using ordinary water, tend to be simpler and cheaper to build than other types of nuclear reactor; due to these factors, they make up the vast majority of civil nuclear reactors and naval propulsion reactors in service throughout the world as of 2009. LWRs can be subdivided into three categories – pressurized water reactors (PWRs), boiling water reactors (BWRs), and supercritical water reactors (SWRs). Various agencies of the United States Federal Government were responsible for the initial development of the PWR and BWR.”

So as not to confuse anyone, radioactive caesium (Caesium-137) has a half-life of about 30 years, decays by beta emission to barium-137, which is also radioactive (gamma ray emitter) with a half-life of 2.55 minutes. Beta emitters aren’t as big a deal as far as health goes immediately, provided you aren’t too close to a concentrated emission source, but they area chronic health problem generator (cancer) if you consume them. However, gamma radiation is real bad in an acute sense, and this is the radiation that kills people in nuclear blasts and through radiation sickness in months after one. So, once again, the risk posed is an additional cancer causing element that you might be exposed to by ingesting or inhaling radioactive particles from a burning or venting nuclear plant. We have a definite chronic health problem, and a vector by which it is getting into the environment. So, the risk is not zero here in Australia, or anywhere.

Now, how close are we to real real bad in Japan. For that, we have to go back to the engineering of the plants. We now need to know how bad the meltdown is, and whether secondary containment has been broken. I have to get a bit techy again for a moment, so bear with me. In the BWR, the nuclear reaction is used to directly produce steam to run a turbine to make electricity. The nuclear reactor runs on the fission reaction of radioactive uranium, and the control rods used in the reactor control the rate at which the uranium decay reaction occurs. Pull the control rods back – faster. Push them all the way in – very slow. Lose control of the rods, and you lose control of the reaction, and things get as hot as the sun on that little patch of earth. BWR also use a lot of circulating water to control the reaction rate and keep the temperature down while the steam is generated. Lose control of the cooling water, and you can get too hot and lose control of the control rods, and then you go down that bad chain of events again. So, plants like in Japan have double and triple duplicate systems to move cooling water around in a reactor in an emergency. They also have containment systems, with the reactor itself being contained within a 2 metre thick pre-stressed, steel-reinforced, air-tight concrete dome. This is inside a building that also serves as containment. Hydrogen that got broken down from water in the reactor in Japan during this current incident leaked into and then exploded inside the second building that we all saw on tv. You know it is a hydrogen explosion because of the fast shock wave that proceeded the debris of the building being ejected and the lack of fire afterwards.

What we now need to do is find out how the core is. If it’s a melted ball of fuel and rods that doesn’t function at all, then the cleanup may require entombment. If the core was shut down well enough that it still operates as a functioning unit, but was only seriously overheated, the cleanup may be “only” recovering it, cooling it down as far as possible, and salvaging the bits that can be reused. It all depends on the state in which the shutdown got to prior to emergency cooling water loss, how hot the core got, and how much nuclear material melted and where it was finally contained as a solid mass again. We shall see, based on the facts that emerge.

Then, at that time, we will start to debate what the root causes were that led us to this point, whether we knew we might get here before in the evaluation of this plant from 1971 over the years, and the soundness of the logic of having 53 of these facilities in Japan, right on the edge of the ring of fire in seismic terms. Certainly looking at the photos already, we can see that the nuclear plant at Fukushima took the earthquake and tsunami better than the surrounding infrastructure.

Before:
Screen shot 2011-03-14 at 10.22.00 AM

After:
Screen shot 2011-03-14 at 10.22.13 AM
The problem appears to be that while the civil infrastructure held up well, the electrics, piping and backup generation capacities were knocked out by the duel disaster. In most likelihood, the core concrete containment structure was not cracked by the earthquake. But as I said we shall see.

I hear as I upload this that there is another 3 m tsunami headed for NE Japan, and there has been another explosion at Fukushima just now, meaning we now have 2 reactors where this has occurred.

Lets hope those civil engineers got their shit very right, and the cooling water is not lost this time.

But don’t take my word for it, do some research of your own, as I am just a chemical engineer.

* – I am just going to call him Dolt for short now, since it sums him up accurately, and he doesn’t deserve a full human name in my world.

A bit of balance, please

Mar 11

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Climate Change, Good Ideas, Politics, Science | Comments off

A simple search this morning using the words “carbon tax Australia” leads to pretty much all negative positions on this tax. Virtually nothing on the other side (but thank you Wikipedia).

But the real problem is not the tax, or the ETS, or even the alternative direct action approach, but that once again the deniers* have been allowed to sneak back in and present their flawed case along with those who disagree on the proposed way forward on a solution. If you go to the no carbon tax websites that headline a simple search, you will be linked through to the bunko artists, who appear to be a large and reasonable group. But they are not. The reality is that the vast majority of the people who believe in the scientific method, who work in the area of climate science, ocean science, thermodynamics or other related scientific and engineering fields, where the scientific method and the evidence that supports it, believe that anthropogenic climate change is real, and that it will not be positive for humans or the earth. Furthermore, the scientific organisations that they make up, and the peak organisations that represent those organisations, publish peer reviewed findings and recommendations through the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

This is the report that you would have heard all the hyped up controversy about a while back, and that a couple figures and a couple paragraphs in a two 800-page reports were incorrect in. Pity they weren’t perfect, but they state the heavily considered opinion of the 99.99%.

Unfortunately, what you get as “balance” in the news coverage remains what I identified above. Bunko artists given 50% of the time to make their case.

Ross Garnaut today said that he believes that public education is the most important thing that has to happen, and that “If there was a deal to limit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 450 parts per million – required to limit warming to 2 degrees – Australia’s ”fair share” would be a reduction target of 25 per cent.”

So, while we should be discussing the merits of whether the renewable energy targets should be eliminated (no) and whether Australian companies should be able to buy cheaper international permits to meet their obligations (yes), we are still talking about the science as if there is a real debate. Other than this article by Ross in the SMH, and his appearance on ABC2 today, the coverage of the major papers and news has been balanced at least equally to the climate change deniers, and several of the major Newscorp and Fairfax columnists (Piers Ackerman, Miranda Devine, Paul Sheehan and Andrew Bolt) are all active climate change deniers.

Those supported by the scientific method are left to the occasional story by Ross Garnaut or Tim Flannery. Hardly balance where it matters, in swaying public opinion.

Charismatic, reasonable appearing liars get away with it all the time. I lived through Ronald Reagan’s presidency. We all lived through W. The basis of their ideologies have been found to be either wilful misrepresentations, or grossly incorrect. Wealth doesn’t trickle down from the rich, they concentrate it, and war is a lie. But one is viewed as a hero still, and the other isn’t in jail when by all rights he should be. The charismatic people who are playing this lie out again are the same folks who have a vested interest in delay, and who own the media to a large extent.

It is not a fair fight, and as I have said before, the correct argument is falling on deaf ears in a public that has been conditioned by the media that is supporting the lie to have tuned out already. Climate change is so last year’s story. Facts are boring, details are too taxing on the attention span, and the truth requires all of us to modify our behaviour a bit. So fuck that, right?

But in the interest of supporting Ross Garnaut’s call for more education, I will keep on providing my view on the topic. I’d feel guilty otherwise.

* – Unfortunately, when 99.99% of all peer reviewed scientists do not agree with you, you can no longer be called a sceptic, but rather something closer to a person with a mental disease.

A point on the floods

Jan 18

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Climate Change, Science | Comments off

I note that 2010 has been reported to be the second hottest year on record after 2005, and that 9 of the top 10 hottest years on record start with a 2. I also note as we watch the floods in Victoria (a couple 1 in 200 yr events) immediately following the major floods in Queensland with their massive losses and areas covered that are bigger than many countries, which are proceeded by major floods in 2010 in the USA, Europe and Pakistan, that there is a direct tie-in to climate change.

Remember, climate change isn’t about the weather, to which I would include these individual events. But climate change is about shifts in weather patterns such as la nina and el nino, that do lead to localised weather events which are extreme. Remember that the heating of the planet by a couple degrees isn’t likely to be manifested as a uniform rise everywhere. It is far more likely to manifest itself like any system that more heat is added to, through the addition of more chaos. Think of a pot of boiling water that moves and mixes itself more and more rapidly until it boils. The previous example of this I noted that appear to be on the increase are cyclones (hurricanes).

Another effect of the rise in temperature is the carrying capacity of air to hold water. All gases can contain more water vapour as they rise in temperature. This larger mass of water is then available to be removed from the air in localised events (torrential rains) as have been tied to all of the flooding events identified above. Clearly, lots of additional water has been stored in the atmosphere in 2005 as compared to cooler years, and this year it has been triggered to fall in large amounts, through the otherwise normal patterns driven by the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) of la nina and el nino.

The patterns here in Australia tend to mean we have no “average” weather, but instead have periods of drought followed by periods of flood, with this years floods breaking what is about a 9 year drought most everywhere. The only difference in this year’s rains are the extreme volumes of them over almost the whole country. So, while I think the patterns are normal, I suggest that the volumes of rain that have caused the floods we have this year may be a local sign of a global problem of climate change.

This year’s idea

Jan 6

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Climate Change, Good Ideas, Science | Comments off

Not my idea, of course. I am not really the big idea kinda guy. Big ideas are why I hang around guys like my mate Sean and Steve. I’m more the “how the hell are we going to do that” kinda guy. But I read a good idea that you can find out more about here when I was catching up on what my professional organisation is up to this year.

They solicited ideas from about 100,000 people to get 7,000 ideas from which to choose, and then selected this one:

“Make it so people in developing communities can use agricultural waste they produce for energy for cooking and heating.”

A very good idea. So I am going to see what I can come up with this year to do that. I will start with some research on the places where the solution could be applied through the partners in the program, Engineers Without Borders. I will first try to see what kind of waste characterisation they have, along with the volumes of waste produced to assess them as a fuel source. Then I need some data on fuel requirements for, say 200 L of hot water per person per day. Then some pretreatment options and a process for conversion, design, sizing, economics and a bunch of other stuff. I will post what I find out as I go.