Wednesday, May 18, 2011

The Climate Conundrum

The Climate Conundrum

All the solar energy (insolation) that hits the planet is known, about 1366 watts per square meter. That sounds like a lot, but it is all used or otherwise accounted for in natural processes. It makes the rain fall, the wind blow, and the plants grow. It makes the planetary surface warmer than the deep cold of outer space. We can play with it, and so long as we do not extract a very large amount of power from it, we will be fine. But if we would actually attempt to extract enough solar power to make a real difference, there would be consequences in weather and climate that we do not know much about, since we have such a paltry understanding of the dynamics of climate.

I am always amused when I read one of these climate studies - not the executive summaries that science journalists read, but the studies themselves - there is so much that they admit that they do not understand. It does not stop them from reaching sweeping conclusions though, ofter covered with weasel words like "we believe" or "likely" with no backup or calculation. Climate science is unique that way - no calculation is needed, just a well written exec summary to fool the rubes.

Early indications are that wind farms on land tend to create a warmer microclimate nearby and offshore wind farms cause onshore cooling. The reasons are unclear, but the folly of extensive deployment of wind extracting mechanisms will definitely have unintended, and largely unknown, consequences. Large solar electric or heat extraction similarly prevents the sunlight from reaching the ground, thus upsetting the ecosystem in ways both known and unknown. Hydro - well, nobody is gonna let us build any more hydro plants, so that does not matter. The little fishies would protest.

The real conundrum is that we use an enormous amount of power in the first world, and the third world wishes to join us in this endeavor. There is no known way to produce this power without upsetting a preexisting balance of ecology. It may well be that petroleum is the cleanest and safest, but that depends on the yet unknown danger of CO2, the last emittant, the one that we can not remove the way we removed the actual pollutants. But all these alternatives also change the ecology in ways both known and unknown.

That is why the green movement is against every single one of them. They have sued to stop photovoltaic and wind projects, and they are just getting started. Their answer they seek (just ask them, or read their blogs) is a Malthusian die-off of about half the world human population. The global warming scare is just a single manifestation of their desire to achieve this Brave New World of theirs, where humanity lives in harmony with the little piggies and fishies, and everyone is happy. They have banded together with the end of the worlders, and combined with careerists in academia and industry to formulate their scare. They probably believe their own bullshit. The fact is that earthly climate history is a story of ice ages interspersed with interglacial periods. We are currently deep into an interglacial. The sentient people in the physics community believe that, to the extent that something humanity is doing is extending the interglacial, that is a Good Thing, since humanity cannot survive another ice age.

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Update - In response to a question, I will add this bit:
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Hydro power is solar power in that the sun evaporates the water that falls as rain in the reservoir that spins the turbines. Wind power is solar power in that it is the heat of the sun that provides the convection that results in wind blowing. There is a finite amount of insolation delivered at the planet's surface, and it all does SOMETHING. We can capture it on a limited basis, but do you really think the greens will let us cover a desert area the size of Arizona plus New Mexico? The little salamanders will stop that one every time, so there is never gonna be enough power from solar to replace more than a fraction of the energy we use currently, and the third world wants to use energy like we do. The "Greens" want us to use energy like the third world does. All known practical energy sources must be exploited, and all leads pursued, but I fear that the profoundly unserious way humanity appears to be dealing with this impending problem will continue to take us in exactly the wrong direction. We need energy in increasing amounts. A sizable proportion of powerful humans (the greens) want us to use less energy, but they know we will never agree, so they put up spurious limits on energy generation expansion, backed up by religious dogma, which they label "science." Science is a process, while Warmist greens claim that "The science is settled," which is a profoundly unscientific statement. Science marches on, but inconvenient findings are scorned and ignored by the academic and media Warmist community. Meanwhile more and more scientists who formerly believed the orthodox position are changing their views. There are powerful career and social consequences for a scientist deviating from academic orthodoxy - just ask any physicist who questions string theory how his career fared after submitting that contrarian paper. But. Over time, the data and the reality will become clear - whatever it is.

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Update #2 Better insolation numbers
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Above I posted that total energy from the sun was 1366 watts per square meter. That number applies to a total of solar energy, much of which energy never reaches the ground. Clouds soak it up, "greenhouse" gases soak it up (yes Virginia, actual CO2 absorbs energy from both directions, which is why global warming can not be caused by CO2) and a large amount is reflected back into space (albedo). The maximum solar energy that does reach the ground is 746 watts per square meter in optimum conditions, which is, in the U.S.A. limited to relatively small area in the south west between about 9:00 AM and 3:00 PM for about 300 days a year. all other places in the United States see less than that. Then the efficiency of collection must be considered. Right now we are doing well at 10%, but even assuming huge strides in this area you must factor in that this is only possible during times when most people are not home. Storage of electricity is also woefully inefficient, so add it all up and you can easily see that covering every roof with photo-voltaic cells and filling every basement with next generation electric storage batteries will still not keep any modern home off the grid for more than a few hours at a time.

Monday, May 09, 2011

Greens are running out of solutions

Greens are running out of solutions

The religion of Thomas Malthus is running out of steam. A few of the adherents to this incoherent religion are beginning to scramble for ways to salvage their movement, and make it compatible with rational thought. The true believers have hijacked science and have called us, all of us, self destructive idiots, and thus lost most of the popular support they once had.

Walter Russel Meade has a nice essay on this, borrowing liberally from a recent piece on the dead end their movement has run into by George Monbiot in The Guardian. Money quote:
All of us in the environment movement, in other words – whether we propose accommodation, radical downsizing or collapse – are lost. None of us yet has a convincing account of how humanity can get out of this mess. None of our chosen solutions break the atomising, planet-wrecking project. I hope that by laying out the problem I can encourage us to address it more logically, to abandon magical thinking and to recognise the contradictions we confront. But even that could be a tall order.
But Mead goes much further than Monbiot. He deconstructs the failures of the movement and gets to their causes.
Malthusianism is a religious conviction that desperately needs to think of itself as a science. From Thomas Malthus and his mathematical certainties to Paul Ehrlich with his famine timetables and the Club of Rome with its ‘scientific’ predictions of resource exhaustion, Malthusians have made confident predictions about the future and claimed scientific authority for statements that turned out to be contemptibly silly. That is the brutal fate that often awaits people who can’t keep the boundaries between science and religion straight.
We can only hope that a soft landing awaits the movement, if only because humanity has actual challenges to meet, and having a fringe religion that claims to own the issue places itself in opposition to all the rest of us. This is entirely counterproductive, as we face a burgeoning population, all of whom require food, fuel, and housing, and few of whom will embrace a Malthusian solution that requires most of them to die.

Thursday, May 05, 2011

Malthusian Fears are Baseless

Malthusian Fears are Baseless

The New York Times has a piece out today that explores a human future that is projected to surpass ten billion souls in a few decades time, or by 2100. The comments are illuminating, replete as they are with believers in the Malthusian idea, promulgated in 1799, that humans will outgrow our environment the way fungi and rats do. Not surprising, but these comments betray a strait jacket in their thinking. They insist that we can not adapt to the future with the techniques and technologies of the past.

It is amazing the lack of imagination shown by the naysayers of a successful humanity. In 1950 the world had no way to support a doubling of the population, yet in 2000 we did, with a higher standard of living in every way it could be measured for everyone. The Malthusian believers make no attempt to support their point of view, they just assume it and repeat it, and get angry that their point of view is not accepted by all.

Personally, I have no desire to live in a world of contracting population, with houses and schools becoming empty and technology declining, and I have no reason to believe that this is our fate. What the Malthusian believers forget is that we are not rats, we each bring more to the world than we take from it. We are tool users and builders, innovators and problem solvers. More population will result in more specialization, more advancement, more luxury, and a higher standard of living for all, as it always has. We have no fresh water shortage, we have a water collection problem caused by central planning and allowing "experts" to decide how to allocate resources. I am certain that humanity will thrive, and that means expand. There is no limit to how much food we can grow, no shortages of any important commodity that can not be accounted for in the pricing mechanism. This is not ideology, it the only valid conclusion one could draw from the last ten thousand (or two million) years of human improvement.


UPDATE: Becker and Posner agree with me. (No surprise there)

Tuesday, May 03, 2011

Never Again

Never Again

Caroline Glick at a meeting of (mostly) Jews on the Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust, Yom ha Shoah. This something every Jew should listen to, as well as any non-Jew who wishes to understand the Jews. This is personal, this is not intended for outsiders. But it should be required listening for anyone who desires to understand.