All good environmentalists detest renewables and are appalled at the money wasted on the industrial renewables corporations.
All the rest are unwitting marketing agents who provide free advertising for banks and multinational conglomerate profits. In the process they hurt the poor and scorch the Earth.
In short: The world spent $3.6 trillion dollars over eight years, mostly trying to change the weather. Only a pitiful 5% of this was spent trying to adapt to the inevitable bad weather which is coming one way or another. Both solar and wind power are perversely useless at reducing CO2, which is their only reason for existing in large otherwise efficient grids. Wind farms raise the temperature of the local area around them which causes more CO2 to be released from the soil. Solar and wind farms waste 100 times the wilderness land area compared to fossil fuels, and need ten times as many minerals mined from the earth. Biomass razes forests, but protects underground coal deposits.
The role of large wind and solar power in national grids is to produce redundant surges of electricity at random or low-need times. They are surplus infrastructure designed in a religious quest to generate nicer weather. They always make electricity more expensive because the minor fuel savings are vastly overrun by the extra costs of misusing and abusing perfectly good infrastructure, which has to be there to provide baseload and backup, and yet is forced to run on and off, sitting around consuming capital, investments, labor and maintenance. It is simply impossible to imagine a situation where unreliable generators have some productive purpose on major grids other than to generate profits for shareholders or their mostly Chinese manufacturers.
Despite the extortionate, futile mountain-of-money paid to wind and solar parasites, they produced a pitiful 3% of all the energy needed on Earth, while fossil fuels produced 85%.
Everyone who loves renewables should be asking themselves how much they hate the poor.
— Jo
h/t to Willie Soon.
___________
Surprising science – There’s no such thing as clean energy
Meticulous Research Review Questions Environmental Impacts and Feasibility of “Green Energy” Transition
Spending on Climate Change, Graph. 2020
A meticulous new review published in the scientific journal, Energies, conducted by a team of Irish and US-based researchers including CERES researchers, raises surprising and unsettling questions about the feasibility and the environmental impacts of the transition to renewable energy sources. Concern for climate change has driven massive investment in new “green energy” policies intended to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and other environmental impacts from the fossil fuel industry. The world spent US$3,660 billion on climate change projects over the eight-year period 2011–2018. A total of 55% of this sum was spent on solar and wind energy, while only 5% was spent on adapting to the impacts of extreme weather events.
Surprising environmental impacts
The researchers discovered that renewable energy sources sometimes contribute to problems they were designed to solve. For example, a series of international studies have found that both wind and solar farms are themselves causing local climate change. Wind farms increase the temperature of the soil beneath them, and this warming causes soil microbes to release more carbon dioxide. So, ironically, while wind energy might be partially reducing human “carbon emissions”, it is also increasing the “carbon emissions” from natural sources.
Wake Effect of Wind Turbines, photo.
Photographs showing two different kinds of “wake effect” at off-shore wind farms off the shores of Denmark. (a) Photograph by Christian Steiness shows the wake effect of cold humid air passing over a warmer sea surface, adapted from Figure 2 of Hasager et al. (2013), reproduced under Creative Commons copyright license CC BY 3.0. (b) Photograph by Bel Air Aviation Denmark – Helicopter Services shows the wake effect of warm humid air passing over a cooler sea surface, adapted from Figure 2 of Hasager et al. (2017). Reproduced under Creative Commons copyright license CC BY 4.0.
Green energy technologies require a 10-fold increase in mineral extraction compared to fossil fuel electricity. Similarly, replacing just 50 million of the world’s estimated 1.3 billion cars with electric vehicles would require more than doubling the world’s annual production of cobalt, neodymium, and lithium, and using more than half the world’s current annual copper production.
Solar and wind farms also need 100 times the land area of fossil fuel-generated electricity, and these resulting changes in land use can have a devastating effect on biodiversity. The effects of bioenergy on biodiversity are worse, and the increased use of crops such as palm oil for biofuels is already contributing to the destruction of rainforests and other natural habitats.
Perplexing financial implications
Surprisingly, more than half (55%) of all global climate expenditure in the years 2011‒2018 was spent on solar and wind energy ‒ a total of US$2,000 billion. Despite this, wind and solar energy still produced only 3% of world energy consumption in the year 2018, while the fossil fuels (oil, coal and gas) produced 85% between them. This raises pressing questions about what it would cost to make the transition to 100% renewable energies, as some researchers suggest.
As lead author Coilín ÓhAiseadha says: “It cost the world $2 trillion to increase the share of energy generated by solar and wind from half a percent to three percent, and it took eight years to do it. What would it cost to increase that to 100%? And how long would it take?”
World Energy Consumption, Oil, Coal, Gas, renewables, Graph, 2018
World energy consumption by source, 2018. Data from BP (2019).
Daunting engineering challenges
Engineers have always known that large solar and wind farms are plagued by the so-called “intermittency problem”. Unlike conventional electricity generation sources which provide continuous and reliable energy 24/7 on demand, wind and solar farms only produce electricity when there is wind or sunlight.
“The average household expects their fridges and freezers to run continuously and to be able to turn on and off the lights on demand. Wind and solar promoters need to start admitting that they are not capable of providing this type of continuous and on-demand electricity supply on a national scale that modern societies are used to,” says Dr Ronan Connolly, co-author of the new review.
The problem is not easily solved by large-scale battery storage because it would require huge batteries covering many hectares of land. Tesla has built a large battery to stabilize the grid in South Australia. It has a capacity of 100 MW/129 MWh and covers a hectare of land. One of the papers reviewed in this new study estimated that, if the state of Alberta, Canada, were to switch from coal to renewable energy, using natural gas and battery storage as back-up, it would require 100 of these large batteries to meet peak demand.
Some researchers have suggested that the variations in energy production can be evened out by building continental electricity transmission networks, e.g., a network connecting wind farms in north-west Europe with solar farms in the south-east, but this requires massive investment. It is likely to create bottlenecks where the capacity of inter-connections is insufficient, and does not do away with the underlying vulnerability to lulls in sun and wind that can last for days on end.
Hurting the poorest
A series of studies from Europe, the U.S. and China shows that carbon taxes tend to lay the greatest burden on the poorest households and rural-dwellers.
Although the primary motivation for green energy policies is concern over climate change, only 5% of climate expenditure has been dedicated to climate adaptation. Climate adaptation includes helping
developing countries to better respond to extreme weather events such as hurricanes. The need to build climate adaptation infrastructure and emergency response systems may conflict with the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, because fossil fuels are generally the most readily available source of cheap energy for development.
With regards to indigenous peoples, the review highlights the fact that all energy technologies can have severe impacts on local communities, particularly if they are not properly consulted. Cobalt mining, required to make batteries for e-vehicles, has severe impacts on the health of women and children in mining communities, where the mining is often done in unregulated, small-scale, “artisanal” mines. Lithium extraction, also required for manufacturing batteries for e-vehicles, requires large quantities of water, and can cause pollution and shortages of fresh water for local communities.
As lead author, Coilín ÓhAiseadha, points out: “There was worldwide coverage of the conflict between the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Dakota Access Pipeline, but what about the impacts of cobalt mining on indigenous peoples in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and what about the impacts of lithium extraction on the peoples of the Atacama Desert? Remember the slogan they chanted at Standing Rock? Mni Wiconi! Water is life! Well, that applies whether you’re Standing Rock Sioux worried about an oil spill polluting the river, or you’re in the Atacama Desert worried about lithium mining polluting your groundwater.”
Overview of the paper
The review, published in a Special Issue of the journal Energies on 16 September, covers 39 pages, with 14 full-color figures and two tables, detailing the breakdown of climate change expenditure and the pros and cons of all of the various options: wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, fossil fuels, bioenergy, tidal and geothermal. For the review, the researchers searched meticulously through hundreds of research papers published throughout the whole of the English-speaking world, in a wide range of fields, including engineering, environment, energy and climate policy. The final report includes references to 255 research papers covering all of these fields, and it concludes with a table summarizing the pros and cons of all of the various energy technologies. Research team members were based in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, and the United States.
The review was published as an open-access peer-review paper and can be downloaded for free from the following URL: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/18/4839 .
The full citation is as follows: ÓhAiseadha, C.; Quinn, G.; Connolly, R.; Connolly, M.; Soon, W. Energy and Climate Policy—An Evaluation of Global Climate Change Expenditure 2011–2018. Energies 2020, 13, 4839.
Funding: C.Ó., G.Q., and M.C. received no external funding for works on this paper. R.C. and W.S. received financial support from the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES), while carrying out the research for this paper. The aim of CERES is to promote open-minded and independent scientific inquiry. For this reason, donors to CERES are strictly required not to attempt to influence either the research directions or the findings of CERES. Readers interested in supporting CERES can find details at Link.
Hi jo
Excellent post on the hypocrisy/lies of so-called green energy. You mentioned the increase in the amount of minerals needed to transform to renewables but we need to remember that is not a one off thing. All these renewable technologies ware out over time and need to be replaced, so massive amounts of these minerals need to be continually used. Given that these are finite resources it would seem that these green renewable things are not really renewable at all!
Not to mention, which they never do, the disposal of all the non-recyclable used bits and highly toxic chemicals left when these things have to be decommissioned. In this way the true cost of renewable energy schemes are never really accounted for.
For example, when Western Australian governments first started spending millions of dollars subsidising roof-top solar who would have thought they would now be spending millions to build a big battery to fix the problems they created? Was that accounted for in the cost of renewables? And when they need to replace the old toxic chemicals with fresh stuff will that be added to the cost? No, but they will keep insisting that the cost of renewables is getting lower, yeah right.
If I were rich enough to have spare cash to invest I would put it into toxic waste disposal technologies. In 5 to 10 years this will be the next thing governments will be throwing millions of dollars at in an attempt to fix what they stuffed up.
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No need to wait 5 to 10 years. It was announced yesterday:
https://www.thefifthestate.com.au/waste/budget-on-waste-welcome-but-contains-too-much-recycling-of-announcements/
You just have to work out how to get a slice of it. I once had a look out the back of Lowenergydevelopments workshop. Piles of smashed solar panels there. That was years ago now.
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“aimed to create 10,000 new jobs in the sector”
They will be “green” jobs, is that correct?
20
Hi RW,
Yes lets ship all that waste off-shore, or store it in places where no one can see and kick it down the road, while the movers and shakers get rich!
/Sarc off!
40
And not long ago, 2019, a recycling business in South Australia announced closure, the cost of electricity and the unreliable grid supply was added top of the list of operating costs exceeding market value of recycled product.
60
I confirm that effect. A brother of a family friend had a good business going in Queensland recycling plastics. It had to close when electricity prices shot up and the market would not pay to cover the higher costs.
30
G’day DonS,
I’d be careful with your investment strategy. Seems to me that success in that area is dependent on the a availability of cheap, reliable power…
Cheers
Dave B
20
well, there will have to be gubbermint subsidies for the glean-up ( 😀 ) to occur …
All politicians will have to pay a third of their salaries (after tax) into a
Clean-Up-The-Mistakes Fund.
10
‘All good environmentalists detest renewables’
Great line. So true.
160
Yes, there are a lot of bad environmentalists out there.
Similarly, all good liberals should detest Socialism …
80
I’m just about to start reading Michael Schellenberger’s book; you might just be describing someone like him, or Patrick Moore (ex of Greenpeace, as opposed to Patrick Moore, the British astronomer).
10
Now another two ‘great’ environmentalists – HRH Prince William and David Attenborough, team up to announce ‘The Nobel Prize of Environmentalism’, the Earthshot Awards. I would venture to suggest that if these two misdirected, manipulated bozos have anything to do with it, the Earth really will be shot.
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… I don’t see any argument(s) against you, Gary! None at all!
10
This is any mining company’s dream. It is why the mining lobby in Australia has changed its tune. Why flog high volumes of coal at tiny margins when there are literally trillions to be made selling higher value commodities, even iron ore, at eye watering margins.
Engineering professionals are doing very nicely out of all of this. Who wants to rock the boat.
The largest energy company by market capitalisation is NextEra – they make and flog wind generators.
The largest automobile manufacturer by market capitalisation is – yes Tesla.
Big bets are being made on all this new resource hungry technology by big players. They want to keep the music going.
151
The Dollar at work!
Stuff morals, stuff rights, the Dollar is KING!
20
At some point, this massive borrowing for an ill conceived future will catch up to our politicians that going all in on globalization only helped China.
The products being returned has been more and more quality faults and failures.
Giving up our own manufacturing to foreign powers was not good governance…
Just stuck with a monetary system of debt as smart money moves around their holdings.
80
But by then they will be retired on huge pensions and not responsible!
10
And the answer is not 42
“Study Finds Ideal Climate for Life Is Five Degrees Warmer than Present”
https://climaterealism.com/2020/10/study-finds-ideal-climate-for-life-is-five-degrees-warmer-than-present/
Via a comment at SDA
50
More. Two GWPF papers on just HOW idiotic this is
https://www.iceagenow.info/in-order-to-save-the-planet-we-have-no-choice-but-to-destroy-the-planet/
30
In those two photos posted, we can call that “smoke” coming off the windmills just like those who promote unreliables endlessly call the water vapour coming out of cooling towers “smoke” or “carbon pollution”.
131
Those Photos should be on main stream medias every day!
Where are the Fifth Estate?
Bought and corrupted by……?????
20
Imagine the first politician to bite the bullet and tell the public the real truth about renewables.
That politician will be vilified, left right and centre by every journalist known to man.
However, one of those journalists, in an effort to win an award of some sort by really investigating it, trying to bring them down even further, will find the germ of something thought absolutely impossible. That journalist will then really begin to look into it, and find the truth, which he just WILL NOT believe. So, he/she will dig even deeper and find that hey, wait a minute, this really is a scam, and we’ve been lied to all along. His Editor will look at it all, and say ….. “you’re sure of this.” And then the truth will begin to dribble out. Watch the eyes open really wide then as everyone looks at what they said about it, hoping no one will check. Politicians will take their huge Super and run, just repeating the one word as they flee. Consensus, consensus. It will be like one great big snowball.
It’s still a way off right now, but it will come. I just hope I’m around long enough to see it.
Tony.
190
Tony – you can estimate the reaction from Michael Moore’s “Planet of the Humans” and the way Moore has lot a lot of supporters just for telling things as they are. However, even today there is the Flat Earth society (with, they say, members in all parts of the globe…) so it takes a while for a consensus to change. For too many people, their income depends on the consensus remaining the way it is, and so there will be a lot of resistance to a change.
100
I doubt there is a politician of the caliber to do what you say. In the USA, the few that have objected to the scam have been ignored. Meanwhile, the lady from NYC has gotten millions of dollars of free publicity for the “Green New Deal”. A journalist seems even less likely to be and agent of change.
We need to live long enough for a messiah to walk out of a dust cloud carrying a writhing green snake that turns into a fiery glistening Damascus steel sword.
But, some smart dude has said: “Hope is not a plan.”
70
Craig Kelly, MP for Hughes, has repeatedly tried to do that, but he is censured by the Libs and mocked as a crackpot by the media and the left.
These Duck Duck Go search results show how rabid the media are in trying to discredit him.
160
And Malcolm Roberts
30
Yes, my omission. Malcolm Roberts has been relentless in his scathing reports about the failure of renewables and the whole CO2 scam.
Unfortunately, being a One Nation senator, he is regarded as an even bigger crackpot than Craig Kelly.
40
Maybe the two of thm should join forces …
Potcracks Unanimous…
10
You are 100% correct! All energy sources cause pollution of some kind. But remember climate change is not about science. It is about wealth redistribution, hence the carbon tax.
140
And power grabbing by reducing individual choice
30
Hi Tony,
Sadly there are no politicians left. They died out a while back and no one even noticed they were an endangered species!
The current crop of so called politician’s are just there for the money!
30
Tony, the AGW/ climate change scam has been going since probably the early mid 1990’s. Some may say earlier. For me it was Al Gore which kicked it off big time. The first wind power generation facility (I hate the term windfarms) was established in Western Victoria in late 1990’s. So, that’s a little over 20 years. So, probably it’s going to take at least 20 years to turn around. But, if we get a 10 year period of below average world wide temperatures the turnaround may be quicker. I hope your super is good.
30
Michael Shellenberger in, ‘Apocalypse Never’ lifts the lid on the corruption and hypocrisy associated with the push for ‘renewables’in the USA.
00
Part of the problem here is that we’re only considering what is currently defined as “renewables”, which is mostly wind and solar power (both intermittent), with a bit of tidal power in some places that, though also intermittent, is at least predictable. Hydroelectric power does depend on rainfall, but is dispatchable and generally predictable enough to be useful where it’s installed. What we’re not considering is the possibility of new technologies.
For a long time (over 40 years) I’ve been pondering the Second Law of Thermodynamics (2LoT) and the paradoxes involved when it’s considered with Conservation of Energy (CoE). See http://joannenova.com.au/2011/05/so-what-is-the-second-darn-law/ for some classical explanations of the 2LoT. Note that considering that there might be an error in the 2LoT does make me into an official crackpot, and I’ll present the logic here with the sure knowledge that not many will want to discard their beliefs that 2LoT is absolutely true. Still, science does not depend on beliefs, or at least I hope not.
We know that matter is not continuous, but is instead composed of atoms. It may have missed most people that Kinetic Energy (KE) cannot exist on its own, but instead must be carried by some particle, even if that particle is a zero rest-mass photon. That particle must have momentum, which is a vector, even though the KE is itself a scalar. Heat is a collection of particles with KE where the direction is random and the momentum averages to zero, and we treat it as a scalar quantity even when it is a beam of IR photons. However, when we narrow our focus onto just one of the particles carrying that heat, we can see that that individual particle will have a definite momentum vector.
If we could redirect all those random-direction particles into going in one direction, then we wouldn’t have heat but would instead have a wind, and we know how to take energy out of a wind. However, since we regard heat as a scalar, that is regarded as being impossible. You can’t change the direction of a scalar, because it doesn’t have a direction.
That is why it may be useful to regard heat as being somewhat of a vector quantity, but where the momentum vector averages to zero over a long-enough time and enough particles (key point here is the large number of particles and interactions required for 2LoT to apply). How do we change the direction of those particles from random-direction to a single direction? The obvious thing to use is a field of some sort that acts on those particles. A conservative field does not change the total energy of a particle subject to it, but changes the proportion of potential energy (PE) to KE. The direction of the momentum is changed to be more-aligned to the field. Thus we do have a way to reduce the randomness of the directions of those particles and to convert heat (zero average momentum) to a wind (non-zero average momentum) without needing to input energy or changing the total energy of the particles.
The tricky thing here is that to really get this to work you need to produce a field that is net in one direction around a cyclic path, since almost all configurations end up with a zero net field around a cycle. I think I have a way that ought to do that using electric fields, but I’m still working on that to get experimental verification. At the moment, therefore, though there are some experimental verifications around (see the Lovell Monotherm, Fu’s experiment with gyrating photoelectrons, or nantenna arrays for example, or look at Dan Sheehan’s work), they are all very low power and not practically useful unless you just want to keep an LED glowing dimly. However, that’s a bit like saying it’s just a teensy bit pregnant – the 2LoT is either absolutely true or isn’t totally true, and any experimental evidence that it isn’t true should be able to be engineered to be better and more useful.
Assuming that I’m right, and we will be able to convert heat directly to electricity, then that will change the whole argument about “renewables”, simply because the environment holds a lot of heat and anything that consumes energy will return that energy as heat to the environment. This is a form of perpetual motion, but where energy is simply redirected rather than created or destroyed. If we consider Noether’s Law, then symmetries lead to conservation laws such as 2LoT, and the corollary is that if we can introduce the correct asymmetries then the conservation law no longer applies.
Though over the last few years I’ve written a fair amount on 2LoT while I was groping for the answer, the few paragraphs above encapsulate the basics pretty well. The big problem is the language, and that we tend to regard an average as a real number that is valid, whereas any average loses information that may make the difference between “it’s theoretically impossible” and “hey, it’s actually possible after all”. Once it’s shown to be undeniably possible, no doubt it will get improved by other people.
As such, I think the future of “renewables” is actually pretty bright. On the other hand, I think we will stop installing solar panels and wind turbines, simply because they don’t deliver power reliably and they cost too much.
I’ll add some links to the articles on 2LoT and momentum (which is even more crackpot) if needed.
34
The idea of extracting energy from Brownian motion, random movements of molecules, has been around a while (1900s?). What is needed is a gate that opens and shuts for each molecule according to its direction. The result would be a stream of molecules moving in one direction only. The gate had a name- Maxwell’s Demon.
Sounds simple, but in the 1950s specialists in the new field of information theory computed the energy required for just the information the gate needed, even if the movement were frictionless and weightless. Turns out that more energy must go in than could be got out.
100
Surely Simon, after forty years of “study”, you must now be aware of the “duality” and that in the real world there is No Such thing as a Photon?
KK
20
Look Here, we have a HUGE amount of Brownian motion in politicians and medical quacks to generate HUGE amounts of power, all going to waste!
/Sarc off
40
Lucky – that assumes that the Daemon actually notes down what she does, and that she requires energy to do so. The task actually requires zero energy, and no Daemon either, if you use a conservative field to redirect the momentum vectors of those particles.
The root of the problem is regarding KE (and thus heat) as a pure scalar quantity. For steam engines, that approximation works absolutely fine. When dealing with individual particles carrying KE, it implies an impossibility for something that is in principle simple.
For example, throw a tennis ball in a random direction. I will predict that no matter which direction you throw it, it will after a time be travelling downwards. Unless it gets caught by a flying pig, of course. Gravity does not exchange any energy with that ball, either. The total energy of that ball (in a frictionless and drag-free world, anyway) remains constant.
If you follow a dust-speck in air being shifted around by Brownian motion, you will see the speck go up and down and follow a random path. When it moves higher, work has been done on it, vice-versa when it goes down. On average for a lot of dust-specks, the net work is zero, but for one speck that variation in potential energy is very obvious.
That is the problem with averages. If the average is zero we tend to ignore it as inconsequential. If instead we focus on the individual parts of that process, some more things become possible that would not be if the energy exchanges were truly zero.
The obvious question though is why all the attempts to build a real Maxwell’s Daemon failed. Well, actually, they didn’t, but the results were puny and so the majority stuck to their beliefs based on an incomplete analysis of the situation. After all, this is stuff we learned early on and also got ridiculed for questioning. In the same way, it’s obvious that heat moves from hotter to colder. However, it doesn’t – that’s an emergent property of a random walk. Sometimes it’s not the obvious answer that’s the truth. A hotter body will also receive photons from a cooler one, since the beginning and end of the photon path is at the horizon of knowledge for that photon – it cannot know the temperature of either body, so the temperature makes no difference to the path.
Things get interesting when you question the validity of the hidden assumptions.
05
Kinetic energy?
” When dealing with individual particles carrying KE, it implies an impossibility for something that is in principle simple.”
As Will Janoshka described it this photonic energy is best thought of in terms of field potential which interacts with other fields.
The tennis ball analogy may perhaps be used with golf balls, but not with “photons”.
KK
10
KK – the tennis ball analogy is however valid for an electron in an electric field. Though the precise reasons for the wave/particle duality have not yet been explained, or to be precise, why a wave can bounce off another wave which gives that particle-like property, it is reasonable to simply use the particle properties without explaining them. Much the same with fields – we can explain what they do but not what they are.
The point, however, is that each amount of kinetic energy must be carried by a particle, and we cannot measure it to exist without that particle, and so that particle has a non-zero momentum vector. Fields can and do change that momentum vector, and it is how we know that there is a field there. Critically, an initial random set of directions will be aligned with the field, and so we have the required asymmetry to break the conservation rule.
One obvious method to make this practically useful is to use a photon to produce a photoelectron in the middle of an electric field. We know the principle works because solar cells use it. Technically difficult to produce the required depletion zone, though. In principle possible, just needs someone competent in semiconductors.
The important thing is that it is actually possible, so at some point someone will do it even if I don’t manage it.
04
Thanks for the response Simon: it’s obviously an interesting question for you.
Some time ago I wrote a response to a comment which was made to highlight the use of “Verbalism” by the global warming elite and associates; I hope you are laughing at the end.
http://joannenova.com.au/2019/09/weekend-unthreaded-277/#comment-2189282
KK
00
KK – the reason for putting the first comment up was that *someone* might get the logic and have that satori moment. Probably needs some sense that words do not describe the thing itself. Your “verbalism” comment was maybe more apt than you thought.
The problem turns on the difference between the average and what an individual particle does. It is certainly interesting, and may even be useful, but of course the solutions are not obvious because of the language and the definitions. A subtle error that makes no difference in most situations.
Since it took me such a long time to see what the problem was, I shouldn’t expect agreement until I can prove it. Still, it might cause someone to look again at what they were sure was totally correct, but could have exceptions.
Then again, I could be mistaken…. We’ll see when I have the data.
02
Sadly the Daemon is YOU!
The sheeple who are led to the slaughter!
10
E-M energy exists through the presence of electric and magnetic fields; by definition. Those fields interact at the speed of light through space; that speed a function of the electric permittivity and the magnetic permeability. Earth has been around for more than the 16 minutes it takes for the electric field between the sun and earth reach a steady state.
Before the Earth was born, the sun was emitting radiation in the direction of where the planet started according to the characteristics impedance of free space at 377 ohms. 16 minutes after Earth presented for duty, the impedance changed as a result of the existence of earth. That altered the electric field and the output of the sun toward Earth.
Although tiny, Earths mass influences the gravity field on the sun. Gravity also travels at the speed of light but the unified theory that ties it all together with electric and magnetic fields is yet to be sorted.
10
Rick – I’ve always reckoned the delay for a photon from the Sun to reach the Earth at around 8 minutes 20 seconds or so. For any photon, the place where it is absorbed is pretty-well by definition unknowable at the time the photon is emitted, because that distance is travelled at the speed of light. Thus no information about the destination is available – it’s beyond the horizon of knowledge. Much the same for the travelling photon as regards its source, for the same reason. Receiving a single photon from some source tells you nothing about the temperature of that source, either, and you can only build a spectrum and estimate the temperature of the source by using a lot of photons, and the more photons you collect the better your statistics get and the lower the uncertainty. If you only receive a single photon from that source, the only information you can tell is that the emitting body was above absolute zero temperature.
Thus when a photon is emitted the temperature of the source and destination make no difference. A body above absolute zero temperature will radiate photons depending only upon its own temperature, and it doesn’t make any difference whatever the temperatures are of the bodies that receive that radiation. Those bodies are beyond the horizon for those emitted photons, and it also doesn’t matter to the emitting body if its emitted photons are never absorbed.
The equivalent temperature of the radiation in a microwave oven is around 0.042K. It still heats the beans or pizza you put into it, because the radiation is absorbed, and each photon adds its quantum of energy to whatever absorbs it. Despite what our lying fingers tell us, that heat only flows from a hotter body to a cooler one, when we’re using photons to transfer that energy the temperatures of source and sink actually do not matter. All that matters is what energy the photons contain and how many photons are absorbed.
The temperature, that we give as single figure, is actually an average kinetic energy of the atoms of the thing we’re measuring, and defines one probability curve for the kinetic energy of any individual atom. If you just have one atom, then actually temperature has no defined meaning – instead we need to use the actual kinetic energy of that atom in our frame of reference. Also, of course, that individual atom will definitely have a single direction of travel and a certain amount of (vector) momentum.
I’ve been digging in the foundations for the last decade and a half, and found that some of the things I accepted as being true are not always true, but an approximation. I’ve also become far less certain about knowledge I used to be certain about – things are weirder than I thought they were. I’m however assuming that things only happen as a result of what forces and events happen right now, in the location we’re considering, and that a particle cannot know the future and has no memory of its past, but only has the location, momentum, and energy it has at the point in time it interacts with something else – no memory of what happened to give it those attributes. I think that assumption is true, but can’t prove that.
The net result, though, is that some of the things I used to think were impossible may actually be possible. Not easy, though, on a small budget. The key thing is how to engineer an asymmetry whereas most situations result in symmetry. Of course, you also need to lose that certainty that what you learned when young was indeed the truth and immutable, and that’s a big hump to get over.
Gravity is a whole ‘nother can of worms. NASA work out their trajectories as if gravity has infinite velocity, so instead of the bodies being where you see them to be they instead use where they actually are at this moment in time, since this gives the right answers. If you consider the Earth’s orbit around the sun, attraction to where the Sun appears to be (that is, where it was 8 minutes and 20 seconds or so ago) would lead to a spiralling orbit rather than an ellipse. Gravity also appears to not fall off with distance as Newton’s laws predict, so the outer stars in galaxies have a higher velocity than we expected. Though Dark Matter is invoked to explain this, you get the same problem with wide binary stars, and if you have two such pairs you can only propose an arrangement of Dark Matter that would explain one of those pairs, but not both at the same time. There’s a possibility that one of the theoretical explanations for these anomalies (Mike McCulloch’s) may result in a way to generate energy as well, so by a circuitous route gravity research could also result in a new type of “renewable” energy production (and thus is actually on-topic). Did I mention that the universe is really a lot weirder than we thought?
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“There’s no such thing as clean energy”
I would argue that natural gas is about as clean as possible. When properly combusted, it’s byproducts are water vapor and CO2, neither of which are dirty. The water vapor produced is as pristine as distilled water and the CO2 produced is plant food whose affect on the surface temperature, while finite, is so small, obsessing about is nothing but a consequence of ignorance.
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But!
There is about ten times more H2O than CO2
Is H2O a pollutant?
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Optimal combustion of hydrocarbons starts at 2 and converges to 1 H2O for each CO2. This still means more H2O then CO2, but the rationalization seems to be that H2O recycles through the hydro cycle, while the carbon cycle can be ignored because it has a longer period.
Interestingly enough, they ignore the consequences of hydro cycle connecting the surface and clouds as a single thermodynamic system relative to averages.
The lack of coupling between the clouds and surface of Venus means it’s upper clouds are an independent thermodynamic system in thermal equilibrium with the Sun. The surface temperature then follows based on the PVT profile of a compressed gas starting from the temperature of this cloud layer.
It’s the lack of this coupling, and not runaway GHG feedback, that makes the surface of Venus so hot. It would be just as hot with 90 bar of N2.
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The globalists have basically decreed they are not interested in anything but electrification of all transport and pushing rebewables.
Logically this makes no sense, but viewed religiously this “makes sense”.
You cant reason with crazy people…
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I saw a pro-windmill video about the construction of these monstrosities. The video is at: https://youtu.be/8NXLKRW1IEU
It saddened me because it shows the staggering resources that get invested (and wasted) in making these things.
Obviously the “investments” are worthwhile for those who profit from harvesting the taxpayer and consumer subsidies they generate which is there only real and immoral purpose.
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These wind generators are the new dragons, and we need a knight to tilt at them and slay them.
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Thanks David. Very interesting. They are monsters.
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“There’s no such thing as clean energy”
A brilliant summary of the situation in the first five paragraphs: magic.
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It was a propaganda coup by the Left to classify energy as either “clean” or “dirty” because it’s an almost meaningless concept. Just how they like to classify people in terms of “identities”.
Emissions controls on coal and gas power stations ensure the main product emitted into the atmosphere is harmless CO2 and water while the solid flash is used in concrete.
With nuclear power the used nuclear fuel is safely buried although this is extremely wasteful since, in the civilian nuclear fuel cycle the “waste” still contain about 98% or 99% of its original energy.
Properly engineered hydro just involves the redistribution of water which can also be used for irrigation after its potential energy has been extracted.
Unlike the above, windmills are extremely high impact on the environment in terms of visual and noise pollution and destruction
or clearing of vegetation and harm to wildlife and the other reasons Jo mentioned.
Solar subsidy farms also use vast amounts of land, usually formerly productive farmland.
Don’t forget the environmental damage of extracting rare earth metals in China, used in both windmills and solar subsidy extractors.
The “dirtiest” forms of energy in terms of impact are the unreliables, i.e. solar and wind. This is not even to mention their civilisation-destroying economic characteristics or the people killed by energy poverty.
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Not “solid flash” but “solid flyash”.
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Some feedback at
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2020/10/08/y2kyoto-no-such-thing-as-clean-energy/#comments
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I am an old man well past breeding time so have no axe to grind, but the problem is easy to see.
The ONLY graph I have seen that has a co-relation with the earths temperature increasing is the number of humans!
Reduce that number, DRASTICALLY and the warming effect gets resolved!
Who will vote for a WAR?
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War ? That’s noisy and messy…..
…..why not a nice new VIRUS !…
…..to cull out the population selectively
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Chad asked
… why not a nice new virus?
Patience Chad, it’s coming. Maybe in another two years or so …
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We can cripple our enemy and scare the sheeple so much they wont react and just walk right in, after all we bought the place with all those Yuan!
We can now officially declare the Yuan as the currency, goodbye Australia!
What will we call this great new land, Chingland sounds appropriate!
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Green steel is also a hoax but is gaining popularity among our lying politicians.
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Keep hearing about this “Green Steel” but no one ever defines or explains what it is. I guess if you’re “woke”
explanations are just so 20th century.
There is one process which has achieved quite remarkable reductions (up to 40%) in Carbon Dioxide emissions – the Tata Steel
Isarna process. However there is a whole one of these plants running with another under construction so it will take a while
to move the installed base of blast furnaces over – like a century or so. Blast furnaces are incredibly expensive beasts to build
and run – the return on investment typically is quite low (2% or less) but they remain in service for many decades. Changing that
technology isn’t something you’d do on a whim.
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Green steel means : 1. the electricity needed to make steel will be provided by “renewables”
2. This electricity will be used for electrolysis to release Hydrogen from water
3. This hydrogen will be used in the production of steel .
Blue Steel means .: 1. The electricity needed will come from fossil fuels
points 2 and 3 as above
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Unicorn fossils found in Outback Australia, somewhere close to Canberra!
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Civilisation is much like Marriage Give a little and gain much. Give nothing and get divorced!
May I recommend an old TV show ‘The Navy Game’ where an inept officer says ‘left a bit, ‘Right a bit,’ when steering the ship!
Now left a bit and right a bit may well get you to where you want to go, but depends upon the speed you are travelling at!
Hard Left or Hard Right is not advised!
Politics is much the same.
Education is sadly much the same.
Teach your children to revolt and get revolution!
Civilization has gone astray!
One Child, leads to a huge number of randy males that want to produce offspring. ‘
Oh Look there is a small country with fifty percent females lets take it over, kill all the males and we have all those females!
Whose next!
Well there is that big continent, Australia, with a small population lets take that over!
Consequences and unforeseen consequences!
I really should not take that medication!
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The Navy Lark. (BBC I think …)
“Left hand down a bit.”
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You are correct my aged memory let me down, Leslie Philips in ‘The Navy Lark’ is the left a bit right a bit show I remembered!
Don’t remember the ‘Left hand down’ though!
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Put aside a spare week or three, go to youtube.com and type The Navy Lark into the search field, settle back with your favourite beverage(s) and Enjoy!
Many of them if not all of the episodes are there.
Same with The Goon Show if you liked that too.
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Can you envision why China is so interested in Australia?
They are cramped, severely restrained by Geography Australia looks like all that open wasted space!
Let’s BUY it!
Gee those pills are working!
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Nah,
Just wait a bit and take it over. Walk in from the Port of Darwin, or get an invite fro Do Pi Dan.
Much easier. Do it after 5 pm Friday and no one will even notice.
Cheers
Dave B
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It would interesting to study a cost-benefit analysis spanning 50-60 years of wind and/or solar installations operational profit/loss resulting including replacement of equipment, including “firming” back up, as compared to a typical coal fired power station 50 accountable years and 80 years plus potential working life well maintained.
So original wind/solar installation, remove and replace at 20 years, remove and replace at 40 years to achieve 60 years.
I have read several good reasons to believe that original major shareholders tend to sell their shares before the first replacement is due.
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Hi Dennis, that sounds like a good money making idea, we can stack the data to prove our point and get millions of dollars while doing it!
I love this scheme!
NO ONE WILL EVER NOTICE!
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In this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fcUt5_sN6A you can see what different kind of problems ‘green’ energy can cause. Not green and not clean.
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