All the examples we need are the subsidies and tax credits and laws and rules that favor renewable energy that cannot compete in a fair and honest market and cannot deliver a reasonable fraction of their capacity, that suck up our tax money that should be used to promote Nuclear and Clean Coal. It is not how we are using the Nuclear Power Plants that we have, it is how we are not building the ones we need because of junk CO2 science.
Comment on Nuclear power discussion thread by Herman Alexander Pope
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Comment on Nuclear power discussion thread by Agnostic
In addition to the interesting history of Thorium Fission:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
…the Bussard Polywell inertial electrostatic confinement fusion reactor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
is extremely interesting – not least because of the way it was funded.
There some developments in this area:
and there is even a forum that discusses issues relating to the Polywell “Whiffleball” fusion concept:
http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/
I find the Polywell concept to be extremely intriguing. It has been proved to work, but there are some engineering challenges yet to be solved. It involves rather arcane physics – stuff we learnt in high school – which makes it really easy to follow for lay-people. One of the goals is to use a boron + proton fusion which would result in no radioactive residue (ie emitted neutrons) at all.
The reason this project has flown so low underneath everyone’s radar is interesting. But it’s development is in the open now and has been up until now an extremely cheap project.
If the engineering problems can be overcome, the optimal size for this type of reactor would be about the size of jumbo jet engine, and producing roughly the same amount of power, which you would grid multiple units together to provide power for cities etc. It’s the holiest of holy grails, cheap plentiful energy potentially making arguments about other forms energy we may be having now somewhat irrelevant.
While it may not be with us yet, I don’t think it would be wise to take our eye off the potential for some ground breaking development to create a paradigm shift within the next 20 years. If I was a policy maker or an investor, I would be highly senstive to it.
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Comment on Pseudoscience (?) by David Springer
“Experiments to test our theories and hypotheses are conducted by the Earth itself.”
In other words control of variables is out of your control. That makes it something other than an experimental science, Doctor.
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Comment on Pseudoscience (?) by David Springer
The basic problem with climate science is a number of practitioners want the most consequential conclusions to be accepted like those conclusions were the result of real experiments when in reality those conclusions are the result of thought experiments. The earth doesn’t conduct experiments. You have a sample size of one, inability to replicate, and inability to isolate variables. That’s no experimental science and without that ability it won’t become an experimental science. You and your colleagues must come to grips with the fact that climate science is a soft-science with imminently escapable conclusions. Everyone not so desperate to be taken as seriously as a heart attack knows the difference between climate forecasting and chemistry.
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Comment on On the adjustments to the HadSST3 data set by Bart R
Greg Goodman
Taking into account the clear indications in the data that it is not very nice, acknowledging the limits of the tool I’m using, but hoping to clarify a bit, and I hope bring me back to topic.
Picture. Thousand words.
Presents a smoothed approximation of Girma’s derivative curve by taking an actual derivative curve of 5-year smoothed data(plot/best/mean:59/mean:61/derivative/mean:11/mean:13) in blue.
Adds a reference line representing zero (plot/best/scale:0.000001) in red to help the eye discriminate time ranges of rising and falling temperature trends.
Adds a reference plot, scaled and offset to not detract readability of the derivative curve (plot/best/mean:11/mean:13/scale:0.01/offset:0.01).
Looking at the derivative compared to zero, we see a clear change between the last half-century and all that went before on BEST.
The tendency to fall below zero drops dramatically.
This effect detected by eye warrants better formal analysis.
It is marked.
It is of a type that BEST has removed bias for.
From it emerges an indication there may be a real mechanism.
The most obvious reading is that the tendency of temperatures to fall for any appreciable span of time has dropped dramatically in the past fifty years.
Is it real, or spurious, or significant or not?
Does it show a bias in BEST’s method?
That’s up to proper analysis to determine, such as you call for on SST.
The HadSST(2) derivative curve tells a similar story.. and whoa, look at that wartime glitch!
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Comment on Nuclear power discussion thread by omanuel
No, David, I meant neutron repulsion. That is the form of energy that powers the universe as it expands and fills interstellar space with H and He [1].
The Sun produces H and He too, and discharges it in generating the energy that sustains life on planet Earth.
The entire universe consists of two forms (compacted or nuclear) and (expanded or atomic) of one fundamental particle [2]:
The Neutron Hydrogen atom (p+ and e-)
_Compacted Expanded
Charge separation occurs when a neutron decays. Coulomb repulsion is only important in the expanded (atomic) form of matter.
Neutron repulsion is the dominant energy source of the compacted matter at the centers of:
_a.) Heavy nuclei (A >150 amu);
_b.) Planets (Herndon et al [3]);
_c.) Stars like the Sun; and
_d.) Galaxies!
Structure, stability and reactions of compact matter are determined by interactions between nucleons (n and p+). That is why:
_a.) Lightest nuclei (A 150 amu) have neutron-rich cores and increasing instability up to A = 209, the heaviest stable nucleus.
A Hungarian scientist solved the mystery of Earth’s heat source in late 1977 [4] but disappeared. I only recently heard of his work.
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/
REFERENCES:
1. O. Manuel, “Neutron repulsion,” The Apeiron J., in press (2012)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10640850/Neutron_repulsion.pdf
2. O. Manuel “Is the universe expanding?” J. Cosmology 13, 4187-4190 (2011).
http://journalofcosmology.com/BigBang102.html
3. J. M. Herndon, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 93, 646 (1996); P. J. Valbracht et al Earth and Planet. Sci. Lett. 144, 185 (1996); D. F. Hollenbach and J. M. Herndon, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 98, 11085 (2001); “Are there nuclear reactors at Earth’s core?”, Nature 15 Many 2008: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080515/full/news.2008.822.html
4. Peter Toth, “Is the Sun a pulsar?”Nature 270, 159 (1977).
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v270/n5633/abs/270159a0.html
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Comment on Nuclear power discussion thread by omanuel
Typo correction:
The entire universe consists of two forms (compacted or nuclear) and (expanded or atomic) of one fundamental particle [2]:
The Neutron Hydrogen atom (p+ and e-)
_Compacted Expanded
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Comment on Nuclear power discussion thread by omanuel
Try again:
The entire universe consists of two forms (compacted or nuclear) and (expanded or atomic) of one fundamental particle [2]:
The Neutron Hydrogen atom (p+ and e-)
_Compacted Expanded
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Comment on Nuclear power discussion thread by omanuel
Last try:
The entire universe consists of two forms (compacted or nuclear) and (expanded or atomic) of one fundamental particle [2]:
The Neutron Hydrogen atom (p+ and e-)
_Compacted Expanded
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Comment on Nuclear power discussion thread by omanuel
Never give up!
The entire universe consists of two forms (compacted or nuclear) and (expanded or atomic) of one fundamental particle [2]:
The Neutron; The Hydrogen atom (p+ and e-)
_Compacted; The Expanded atomic form of matter
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Comment on Nuclear power discussion thread by Wagathon
There are a few AGW alarmists who are hypocrites when they pretend to wish for a better world by returning America to a society based on hunting and gathering. Those few are people like Al Gore Hollywood types. And, they’re small in numbers.
And, there are a lot a nuts and nihilists, of course–i.e., maniacs suffering from Hot World Syndrome.
However, the vast majority of AGW fearmongers–e.g., those that label skeptics as deniers and have made a cottage industry out of manipulating data and playing politics with science–are knowingly living and pushing a lie. These facilitators of climate porn are the academics and bureaucrats of the Western government-education industry and all of those who hate America, such as the Eurocrat socialists, despots and tin-pot dictators of the nations that comprise the UN.
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Comment on Pseudoscience (?) by Edim
Agree, geothermal flux (and its variation) is significant. The average geothermal flux is not only the heat conduction (which is low), but also a lot of convection (vents…).
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Comment on Nuclear power discussion thread by kim
What I find fascinating, Wagathon, is the borderline between true belief and cynical belief among the alarmists. I find the former territory to have a much higher population than the latter, and I find the population of true believers to be slowly emigrating across the border into neighboring doubt, since the moral tariffs at the border into cynical belief are too high.
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Comment on Nuclear power discussion thread by omanuel
I just received information on another report of the Sun’s pulsar core:
V.A. Kotov, “A pulsar inside the Sun?” Radiophysics and Quantum Electronics 39, 811-814 (1996).
http://www.springerlink.com/content/j549440457107v36/
The Crimean observation of solar oscillations in 1974–1982 showed that the basic period of pulsation of the Sun hidden in its deep interior was equal to P 0=160.0101±0.0001min. More recently, the period was changed to the new value P 1=159.9662±0.0006min, which almost coincided with the annual sidelobe of the former period P 0. The amplitude of the P1 oscillation has increased considerably over 1994–1995. We substantiate the hypothesis that a) the change in the period was caused by the interaction of the P0 oscillation with the rapid rotation of the solar core and that b) the latter has the form of a compact, highly magnetized object like a neutron star rotating with sidereal period P1.
Translated from Izvestiya Vysshikh Uchebnykh Zavedenii, Radiofizika 39, no. 10, pp. 1210–1214 (October 1996).
PS – Typo correction on my post above:
The entire universe consists of two forms (compacted or nuclear) and (expanded or atomic) of one fundamental particle [2]:
The Neutron; The Hydrogen atom (p+ and e-)
_Compacted; The Expanded, atomic form of matter
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Comment on Pseudoscience (?) by physicistdave
David Wojick wrote to me:
|>I see no such general claim in his statement, such as you allege.
Well, David, Veritas did write:
>>positive/negative feedback, resulting in warmer/cooler temps.
No, there is no reason to think negative feedback is “resulting” in cooler temperatures. That is an error.
DW also wrote:
>You on the other hand made some very strong general claims about the entire universe of negative feedbacks. You might want to be more careful, as there are logicians about.
No, I in fact acknowledged that in some very complex systems very funny things can happen. I merely noted that what scientists and engineers do generally see in many, many systems is that negative feedback diminishes the initial disturbance but does not reverse its sign. Yes, you can probably come up with exceptions; no, they are not very common.
As to logic, I very much doubt there is anyone here who knows more about it than I, happens to be a hobby of mine (Boolena-valued models of ZFC anyone?).
Look: there is a tendency among skeptics to assume that rejection of climate skepticism is due simply to politics, etc. Yes, that is part of it. But, when many skeptics, as we see in this thread, make statements that go against very, very well-established principles of physics, well, it is understandable that many people use that to discredit all climate skeptics, just as Gore’s silly statement about the core of the earth has been used by to skeptics to discredit consensus climate science.
Sauce for the goose / sauce for the gander.
Dave
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Comment on Pseudoscience (?) by Bart R
Rocketry is prettier.
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Comment on Pseudoscience (?) by Arno Arrak
Thanks for the kind words, Peter. You are right about the paradigm behind CO2 based AGW. Unfortunately their propaganda machine is able to suppress mention of any competing explanations. Take Miskolczi for example. His peer-reviewed paper that I cite has been out for more than a year now. No peer-reviewed articles opposing it have appeared, presumably not for lack of trying. And yet the press pays no attention to him despite the fact that his work demolishes the global warming dogma they push. Or take my paper on Arctic warming. I proved that it was warm water, not greenhouse effect that warms the Arctic but they are still babbling on about anthropogenic warming in the Arctic and the new temperature curves just out do the same.
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Comment on Pseudoscience (?) by NW
GeneDoc,
Economists can do controlled experiments. I do them. The real problem for us is finding “invariant conceptual objects”–that is, things like fundamental constants, or even distributions of constants, that can be counted on to be stable across experiments–much less externally valid (stable between laboratory and field contexts). Without this we can’t generalize point predictions from one explanatory context to another.
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Comment on NRC’s artless untruths on climate change and food security by Manniac
Got anything more than snark, Mr Scrooge?
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Comment on Pseudoscience (?) by physicistdave
tomfop wrote to me:
>I have characterised this elsewhere as “the perverse extension of uncontroversial science”. Do you agree?
Yeah, I think I do.
Some people on this thread have made unjustified, negative comments about physicists based on their own ignorance of science.
But, yes, there is a tendency for physicists — especially not very good ones — to over-reach. (This is, incidentally, much, much less true of the brightest physicists I have known personally — e.g., Dick Feynman and Luis Alvarez.)
We physicists have good reason to believe that we know all of the underlying laws that describe the behavior of the everyday physical world (I exclude consciousness, which I, at least, certainly do not understand!). When we take classes, we do homework/exam problems in which the situation is very well-defined, in which extraneous influences can be ignored, and in which we can make “reasonable” assumptions (ignore the mass of the string, the friction of the pulley, etc.).
There is an understandable tendency for many physicists to treat the real world as if ti were an exam problem: just assume solar forcing does not matter, or that the simplest models for cloud formation are acceptable, etc.
We learn these enormously powerful techniques in class, and, well, most of us have some sense of humility. But, the urge to misapply these tools to try to something “important” in the real world is understandable, even if the results stray so far from the scientific method as to start to slide from science into pseudo-science.
I’d bet it is less politics than just guys who want to be important (there is a Youtube video of Feynman discussing this point, by the way — he is very critical of wanting to be important versus just honestly seeking understanding).
Dave
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