Sgt Hulka Uncut

uncensored opinion and technical information on stuff

Why the yanks are unreliable partners on climate change

Mar 9

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

If you want a good reason why Australia should and must think for ourselves and act for ourselves on climate change, look no further than a current court ruling from America:

“Nine judges of the US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals will rehear a climate change nuisance case bought by Hurricane Katrina victims”

Now don’t get me wrong, I have sympathy for the plaintiffs, a large group of Mississippi residents, many of whom are likely lower middle class. They probably lots most of what they physically owned in Katrina, and the preparation and response to that natural disaster could have been far better, I think most reasonable people could agree. But unless the court is actually taking the case in order to set a precedent so that later cases can be won on their merits, I don’t see why they would rehear the arguments on this. This is because the plaintiffs have argued that emissions from the operations of several energy and chemical companies have contributed to global warming, causing a rise in sea levels and adding to Hurricane Katrina’s ferocity.

The merits of the argument, while seemingly logical, do not take into account the chaos generated by the global warming phenomenon, and so tying the emissions of any one company directly to any specific hurricane, or its path or ferocity, is not logical. You cannot make extremely specific predictions (or tie causality) to individual weather events based on general input of CO2. Who is to say who’s CO2 emissions pushed the cycle of hurricane ferocity or frequency to a worse position, or into a positive feedback loop? No one can, at this point. General emissions of CO2 drive average temperature rises in the atmosphere and higher moisture content in the air, and higher ocean levels that in some areas can exacerbate local weather events. But problems (like hurricanes) don’t manifest themselves as averages, they come as extremes, and they come as chaos. No one can reliably predict the occurrence of, or path of a hurricane or tornado, any more than we can predict an earthquake.

Second, the issue of Katrina’s ferocity is of issue. The claim is that the higher sea levels gave support to Katrina’s ferocity leading to the damages sustained, because at the end of the story, that’s where they want to go, right? The money. They (and their litigators) want to make a whole bunch of money out of this disaster, and being able to establish that the severity of damage is worse than otherwise would have been is key to their argument. Katrina was a Category 3 when it made landfall in Louisiana, making it the 6th strongest hurricane in the Atlantic history. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but only in the top 20% of recorded storms. So, making the case that it was particularly ferocious is a bit tough. And while tying the worst of the damage to the storm surge has some validity, one could argue that the particular path had as much to do with the severity of the storm surge as sea level rise.

But all of this is just the detail. The real problem to me seems to be the fact that these people have to attempt to get through expensive tort what they should be getting through reasonable regulation. And virtually any regulation seems to be anathema to the Americans. Unless we in Australia, and the rest of the world, want to become a place where suing someone is the means by which we primarily gain social justice, then we should proceed to get ourselves in order with respect to climate change legislation, so that in addition to the savings on energy efficiency alone, we can also say that we aren’t the major source of the problem, and we won’t be a good target to sue.

Cats, bad news for mice and the environment

Mar 5

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

Hey, while I am pretty much 100% convinced in anthropogenic global warming, I am willing to listen to well put counterarguments. Finally, after the littany of Sydney Morning Herald columnists and the Loony Lord sideshow from the UK, finally I find a piece of work that makes me scratch my head and go “hmmmm”.
Screen shot 2010-03-05 at 11.42.30 AM

[Bloom Box], Things which are probably bullshit . . .

Mar 2

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Economics, Good Ideas, Other Topics, Snake Oil | Comments off

. . . as our friends at Hungry Beast say. But hey, nobody does a launch of an 18 year old technology like the yanks. A former NASA scientist (to make it sound more sexy, no doubt) has brought us the trendily named Bloom Box, claiming it to be the big thing after ten years of development. Ah, unfortunately, not.

Oh, he has got a planar design, solid oxide fuel cell in those fridge size boxes, to be sure. The problem is, they aren’t new, having been first begun commercialisation in 1992 by companies such as Ceramic Fuel Cells Limited here in Australia, or UTC in America. These companies actually sell now what this bloke is saying you can have soon for $800k and hopefully for $3000 in a few years. Hell, the Australian company had their piece of kit doing demo work on top of the old office I had in the technology park back in 2000.

I don’t know exactly what CFCL sells their piece of kit at, and to my knowledge they are still only selling them to small companies, with a consumer product to be available “sometime in 2010”. My guess is that CFCL would probably offer their unit at a cost a bit less than what Bloom is saying for a similar sized application for small businesses. The big difference is that if you call CFCL or UTC, they actually have something to install when they take your money.

In my opinion, Bloom’s entrepreneur is most likely a hype merchant so insignificant I won’t even look up his name. My suspicions were raised when I first heard his release where he says he has some “proprietary software” that is the key to his Bloom Box. Uh huh, and mine has magic beans.

According to reputable news agencies on science and technology (National Geographic News), based on the information the company has made public, the Bloom Box technology is not revolutionary. They quote Friedrich Prinz, a fuel cell expert at Stanford University, the design of the Bloom Box appears to be fairly standard and that there was nothing obviously revolutionary about it. “They didn’t reveal any new physics or any new principles, but I don’t think they need to do that,” he said.

Note the end of the professor’s statement. What he means by “they don’t need to do that” is that solid oxide fuel cell technology is exciting and very interesting. It’s essentially “burning” something, but not in the physical sense, more in the chemical sense, through a reactor that can be coated onto thin plates. It’s basically a chemical engineer’s wet dream, so I will go on, or you can do your own research elsewhere. The heart of the fuel cell is a high rate chemical battery that produces the electricity

Solid Oxide Fuel Cell

You feed it the same type of stuff you feed an internal combustion engine (methane and air) and it produces electricity (only in DC form as opposed to AC) and it also produces waste heat you can recover at high temperature for other use (like heating water for your house). But the cost of the fuel cell to manufacture is pretty high, because the methane you use to feed it is just a good source of what you really want to feed it – hydrogen. So you basically have to put a miniature stripper and reformer on the front of the rig. Plus, coating the anodes and cathodes of the reactor and getting them spaced out exactly as you require is expensive assembly work.

However, the real current manufacturers (CFCL and UTC) of solid oxide fuel cells do intend to get their equipment down in cost for home application in the next year. And then let them work the kinks out of the technology at their demonstration plants and then we will see whether I will be buying one for my back yard.

But you know, probably I will anyway just to mess around with it. Either that, or I am starting the home nuclear reactor this year. Besides, all the cool kids will have one. I thought so enough at the depth of the financial crisis that I started buying stock in the company. There’s your free stock tip for the day, for those tuning in that made it this far.

Of Climate Change and Pinkbats

Feb 25

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Climate Change | Comments off

It is unfortunate that in the attempt to do something (direct action, anyone?) about climate change, this government has administered a program that has been a victim of cowboy installers, and its own impatience to do some good. However, while much of what is alleged by the opposition is not proven about the scheme, there is no overlooking 4 bodies.

The law, I believe it says, is that the safety of a worker is a shared responsibility between the worker and his employer. In the case of these deaths, it looks to have been shared between younger, uneducated workers in conjunction with their irresponsible employers who were participating in an industry expanding rapidly, and too often new to the business of insulation installation.

The Minister for the Environment, and his Department, has apparently taken a risk assessment on board too slowly, and the modifications to the controls applied to the companies in the program have not been heeded, or failed, to achieve the desired result. It is very possible that personnel within the Department should be reprimanded, and if so perhaps the Minister should pay with his job. I think Peter Garrett is a great man, and a knowledgeable and capable manger of things, and he will be back if he goes for now.

This reminds me of another conversation I was having with a business partner about the close out of corrective actions from audits he has performed recently. There are apparently dozens of them laying there, identified, rated for risk, assigned . . . and forgotten. Any number of these could contribute to a serious incident. It is no good to close out an investigation, audit or inspection and identify the things you should do, but then not hold yourself to completing them.

The Liberals Next Terrible Idea

Feb 21

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Other Topics, Politics | Comments off

The Liberals have announced that if they take government, they will quickly move to sell Medibank Private and use the money to pay off government debt. This is another simple sounding “we are fiscally responsible” proposals from Abbot’s team that is meant to gain them populist support from Joe Six-packs that have to live within their family budget, and therefore see the model easily extrapolated to the government finances. The truth is that the sale of Medibank Private would have almost no effect on government finances, according to all independent experts surveyed, and will lead to the worst effects on the finances of the middle class over the medium to long term of almost any change the government could make.

Currently, competition in health insurers in Australia is very high, with many providers (30) nationally and 5 of them being larger companies, but none of which has a dominant position and all with highly competitive offers characterised by lots of attempts to differentiate form one another through minor tweaks in their plans, and lots and lots of spending on advertising. The Australian health insurance market would be the envy of places like the US with respect to competition, if their consumers were to examine it.

The Liberals have announced the industry is healthy, as well as competitive, so there is no continual need or interest in maintaining its ownership in one of the large health insurance companies. Their earmarking of where the funds raised from the sale would go may have some populist support, but their long term economics are also bad for the public purse. Once again, I think you need to see who is for this type of thing to fully evaluate it. Large health insurance company CEOs, like NIB’s CEO, are all for the sale, and he says that the government has no real role in the industry. He has lots and lots and lots of interest in a possible sale of Medibank, so he is not an independent observer, but his opinion is where the Liberal’s opinion comes directly. I don’t know, but I would suggest that his company so spends as much on lobbyists for its position as it clearly spends on advertising to convince you it has the best deal.

If the sale took place, the Liberals estimate that it would raise about $3.5-4.5 billion dollars in revenue. Independent estimates put the value down closer to the $2 billion dollar mark. But really, neither amount seems like a big deal as far as the government’s budget, or in the wider market of a $1.2 trillion dollar economy (US$1,055 billion[1]). More importantly, it will remove something I will call “the public option”, from the marketplace.

The public option company, Medibank Private, doesn’t exist to dominate the market, pay excessively large salaries to it executives, and even though it makes a tidy $120 million after tax a year, to turn the most fantastic profit, given that it should really be spending the whopping majority of its budget on paying actual medical claims from its subscribers. I mean come on folks, isn’t that what you buy into one for, the catastrophic assistance, along with your glasses and physio? So, if the government is going to allow the silliness of private health insurance to exist, it has to participate. And it has to compete and even spend as much on advertising, on average, as the private insurance companies, and continually try to rebrand its product as better than the others, when all of them are essentially only selling statistics.

If the proposal were to go forward based upon the Liberals winning government at the next election, Medibank would probably be broken into two smaller private companies through IPOs in order to make it look like they will further maximise competition. In fact, the lack of a public option company in the marketplace would (I think) lead to very fast consolidation of these highly competitive medium-sized companies and their tiny brothers. Whatever money is required to be spent in the short term by this all-private marketplace will be spent in order for companies to cannibalise and join with others in order to gain the largest market share possible. Following that, maybe 3 years later, and maybe as many as 10, we will then start to see the kinds of rapid rate rises in premiums that we see in the USA, where a very small number of insurers hold near monopoly power over US consumers.

An essentially not-for-profit supplier is what keeps cost down in health care in Australia, and this is exactly what the “Public Option” is in the debate in the USA over health reform. The public option there has amazingly stable public popularity throughout the acrimonious debate there since August (56% presently and as much as 80% over all the polls in the last 7 months [averaging somewhere in the 60s]), despite a huge amount of disinformation and outright lies by those who oppose health care reform in the USA. Major health care and insurance companies will spend hundreds of millions of US$, maybe even billions, by the time the argument is finished there, to defeat a public option from coming into being.

The bottom line though is this; these companies provide to consumers a service that you cannot live without sometimes, health care. And while I will not oppose those who wish to waste their money doing so, I personally will never voluntarily participate in a system where a private company with a profit motive can sit in judgement over whether I get a specific piece of health care, or not.

[1] CIA World Factbook

Missing the Point

Feb 20

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

I read the other day a couple of really good points by a lead climate change scientist (Joseph Romm) that strike a chord with me because of what I have been saying about energy efficiency and CO2 emissions reductions. You can check out all of what he has regularly to say here.

The key points I found are:

3) Those who favor taking action are saying: “Because the warming that humans are doing is irreversible and potentially catastrophic, let’s buy some insurance — by investing in renewable energy, energy efficiency and mass transit — because this insurance will also actually make us richer and more secure.” We will import less oil, invent and export more clean-tech products, send fewer dollars overseas to buy oil and, most importantly, diminish the dollars that are sustaining the worst petro-dictators in the world who indirectly fund terrorists and the schools that nurture them.

4) Even if climate change proves less catastrophic than some fear, in a world that is forecast to grow from 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion people between now and 2050, more and more of whom will live like Americans, demand for renewable energy and clean water is going to soar. It is obviously going to be the next great global industry.

China, of course, understands that, which is why it is investing heavily in clean-tech, efficiency and high-speed rail. It sees the future trends and is betting on them. Indeed, I suspect China is quietly laughing at us right now. And Iran, Russia, Venezuela and the whole OPEC gang are high-fiving each other. Nothing better serves their interests than to see Americans becoming confused about climate change, and, therefore, less inclined to move toward clean-tech and, therefore, more certain to remain addicted to oil.

What strikes me about these completely true points is that they are unlikely to be challenged by even those most ardent of climate change deniers, not because they are true, but because they have nothing to do with climate change. And that is what is important, because I believe that it is nonsense to be arguing science at this point with the remaining .05% of climate change deniers. What we should be arguing is not whether anthropogenic climate change is real, but rather how bad it will be, and what we can do to ameliorate the worst of the effects and in the meantime do things that are good for many other reasons as well.

If they had a brain in their heads, all the red meat-eating, libertarian, nationalistic xenophobes would be falling over themselves to join the lentil-eating, sandal wearing hippies to change the energy game as soon as possible. Energy independence and emissions reduction go hand in hand, and those who recognise that already are working to own the future. That’s why all the major oil companies are investing in some form of renewable energy, and the world’s users of energy with the greatest rate of increase (China) are doing the same.

Once they own the game, and we all have nowhere else to go for our next major source of power, you can bet they will put all the pressure they can bring to bear on swinging us all away from burning the magic dirt.

Where Paths Diverge

Feb 20

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Other Topics | 1 Comment

Hey, all of you (or probably more accurately, both of you) who have been reading my prototype set of articles here, I have just heard word today that the blog is ready to start up at An Meá (my company) where all of my articles on climate change will be published. However, as some of them may be considered inappropriate for publication there, due to my sometimes colourful use of language, or the fact that they have nothing to do with climate change. That’s cool, since it is a company site, but frankly it takes a shitload of work to think up something to write, and then draft an article on it, so I plan to publish all my work here. It will also allow me to publish articles on other topics I think are important or interesting, and as I have become sort of addicted to the cathartic nature of doing so, and will therefore continue.

Feel free to comment at will as you wish, and provided you aren’t a troll or spammer, I will likely not censor your work either. But keep in mind this isn’t a democracy. If you comment enough and have something useful to contribute (whether I agree with you or not), I can also possibly make you a contributor.

Definitions for Stupidity

Feb 20

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

Weather – the current state of the atmosphere with respect to heat or cold, wetness or dryness, calm or storm, clearness or cloudiness.

Climate – the average course or condition of the weather at a place over a period of years as exhibited by temperature, wind velocity, and precipitation.

I hate to insult your intelligence if you already had a grasp of the two concepts above, but unfortunately too widely in the news at present, I see a lack of basic understanding of these simple words that needs to be addressed.

See, a couple of interesting things are happening in North America this week. First, two snowstorms have hit the east coast of the USA, dumping an all time record amount of snow on places like Washington DC. At the same time, the Winter Olympics in Vancouver is at risk due to a lack of snow there.

The first item above has been picked up pretty quickly by those who deny climate change to try to show that climate change is all a hoax due to the fact that a single weather event has occurred. The problem the deniers have is apparently a lack of understanding of the terms weather and climate, accompanied by a failure to understand the science of thermodynamics. I can possibly excuse the latter, provided they don’t attempt to attack it simply due to a failure to understand it, but I cannot excuse not level of stupidity that is required to treat the terms weather and climate as interchangeable.

The current weather outside is an example of nothing unless it is joined over a long period of time by similar weather events that form a trend which may then demonstrate something in relation to the climate at a location. To suggest otherwise is analogous to seeing a single bird flying through the air and declaring it as proof that gravity no longer exists.

Furthermore, the increased incidence of big freak snowstorms are exactly the kind of evidence that supports climate change theory. A discussion of climate change and how it will almost certainly manifest itself (thank you again, J Willard) is covered in some detail here (starting in paragraph 7). If you don’t want to read it all, I will summarise for you: heating of the atmosphere due to anthropogenic climate change will manifest itself as greater weather chaos, not as similar changes in weather all over the world.

The example we see at present in North America is an example of greater chaos in weather. Note, however, that nether I or any of the other climate change believers that I know about have made the claim that the lack of snow for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver proves our case for anthropogenic climate change. We haven’t done this because it would not be supported by a reasoned scientific evaluation of the facts. Vancouver is actually a pretty warm and wet area as far as places that receive regular winter snow are concerned. This year’s lack of snow at this time, while regrettable, is not particularly uncommon. Until climate change really kicks in, organisers should probably stick to the continental divide if they want guaranteed dry fluffy snow for their tv events.

So, despite its high profile as an event where we could whip up lots of frenzy and possibly recruit people to our side of the argument, we on the side of science haven’t done so. But you decide for yourself who the fanatics are.

J Willard Gibbs

Feb 20

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

{Originally posted Feb 11}

I’d like to take an opportunity on the day of his birth in 1839 to take some time to celebrate the achievements of a fellow that you likely haven’t heard of, J. Willard Gibbs. Simply put, he is known as the father of modern thermodynamics. J. Williard Gibbs provided the basis upon which virtually all of the science that I use on a daily basis to provide, or attack, arguments on climate change. Pretty much everything to do with climate change comes down to issues of entropy, enthalpy and free energy transfer, along with the second law of thermodynamics, which is called a “law” because it has done its time as a theory for so long and been so well supported by all the empirical evidence collected to date, and by the by work of Gibb’s that it is no longer called a theory. That’s the way science works. If you haven’t noticed by now, I love how science works.

It would be nice to say that J. Willard Gibbs received the recognition that he deserved in his lifetime, and he did receive significant recognition of his peers. In 1901, Gibbs was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London, the peak scientific award of his time, for being “the first to apply the second law of thermodynamics to the exhaustive discussion of the relation between chemical, electrical, and thermal energy and capacity for external work.” This work allowed engineers like me to apply elegant theoretical science to everyday application in things like internal combustion engines, boilers and turbines.

As importantly, Gibbs work is directly connected (by the authors themselves) to the following Nobel Prizes that followed after him:

Johann van der Waals – Physics in 1910 for his equations of state for gases and liquids
Max Planck of Germany – Physics in 1918 his work in quantum mechanics.
William Giauque – Chemistry in 1949 for his studies in the properties of matter at temperatures close to absolute zero.
Paul Samuelson – Economics in 1970 for his work on the foundations of economic analysis, in which he explicitly acknowledged the influence of the classical thermodynamic methods of Gibbs.

The general public will likely never know or acknowledge the contribution of J. Willard Gibbs to the things that make their everyday life after the industrial revolution what it is, but I would like to do so today, as I have quietly done every year since I was an undergraduate in chemical engineering and discovered the work of the man. Just one simple beer in his honour, as he probably would have liked, given the simple he led in New Haven, Connecticut for virtually all of his 64 years of life.

No better tribute to Gibbs can be paid than that of another important scientist, so I will leave the last word to him:

“Willard Gibbs is, in my opinion, one of the most original and important creative minds in the field of science America has produced.” – Albert Einstein, physicist

Odds and Sods

Feb 20

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Climate Change | Comments off

Well, the internet service has been doo doo where I am at presently, so you have been spared a lengthy rant on Miranda Devine based on my read of her column the other day on how we who are on the side of believing in the scientific method are “fanatics”, and we get all the air time from the pinko media. Unfortunately, her opinion is pretty hard to square with the facts, even those from just the last week if you take all the free publicity that Lord Monkton got from the ABC on breakfast, the evening news and the 730 report, not to mention the column inches in support he received from the Sydney Morning Herald (including her own column).

This is a tactic (or unknown pathology) of reactionary conservatives – a strange from of projection where they whine about something they accuse those they don’t agree with while doing the very thing they are accusing their opponents of.

Fortunately, Media Watch did good job of skewering the reactionaries above and their corporate sponsors. But frankly, who watches that?

About as many as listened to Malcolm Turnbull’s logical and reasonable analysis of the CPRS legislation that he intends to cross the floor to support as it comes up for a vote.