Leatherhead Matters

Bast and Taylor have just published a very useful survey of scientific opinion on climate change, which shows that scientists themselves are far from united in their view. The survey covered 530 climate scientists in 27 countries.

Most agreed warming was taking place, but a bigger minority strongly disagreed than strongly agreed with the proposition that it was mostly the result of human causes. More think current models cannot predict future climate change accurately than think they can. Only one third thought we could predict the next ten years, whilst more than a half thought we could not. The numbers thinking we can predict future climate change fell for more distant dates. More thought current models could not deal adequately with water vapour - the biggest greenhouse gas - than thought they could deal with it, whilst over 60% felt models could not handle clouds well, which have a big impact on temperatures. 70 % thought there would be some positive effects from global warming as well as 86% thinking there would be detrimental effects.

It is important to bear in mind some figures on the relative role of UK humans in greenhouse gas totals. CO2 is only 3.6% of total greenhouse gas - water vapour is by far and way the dominant one. The Uk is only 2% of total human activity on the planet, and human activity only accounts for 3.4% of the CO2 emitted - the rest comes from natural sources. This means that the UK human contribution to total greenhouse gas in the world is 0.0025%.

Published by John Redwood

Greens, environmentalists, politicians, government funded scientists and the media continue to monger their doom about climate change & global warming. We all like a bit of doom to make us value what we already have. But there are many in the scientific community who are not convinced about man made global warming. One such scientist is Dr Kelvin Kemm who writes in the South African “Engineering News“: 

I have repeatedly pointed out that there is little or no link between CO2 production by mankind and a rise in global temperature. In fact, indications are that it is the opposite – an increased temperature causes more CO2 to be ejected into the atmosphere.

In the time of the Viking settlements on Greenland, about 1 000 years ago, there was a period of warming. That is why the Viking settlements flourished and they could grow grapes and maize, which puzzled the archaeologists.

Then it cooled, and the last Viking supply ship arrived at the settlements in 1410, after which it all froze up.

The world then experienced the Little Ice Age, during the time of Shakespeare and Jan van Riebeeck. The Thames froze over, and there was a period of economic decline, in comparison to the economic boom during the Medieval period of global warming.

There was also an earlier warming period, known as the Roman Warming, during the period of Roman economic prosperity.

All of this warming and cooling happened without any contribution from any man-made CO2. Indications in our modern times are that the warming observed up to the end of 2006 has been due to a natural cycle in the intensity of the sun.

This was, by all indications, the same source of warming of the Medieval and Roman Warming periods.

 The New Energy Congress is an association for the purpose of reviewing the most promising claims to up-and-coming clean, renewable, affordable, reliable energy technologies, in order to come up with a weighted list of recommendations of the best technologies.

Since April, 2006, the New Energy Congress has been systematically voting on the following energy technologies, reviewing a new technology every few days, and weighing it against the criteria they established. Last update - May 18, 2008.

1. 

   Validated | Available for Commercial Purchase | Directory:Solar >
   Stirling Energy Systems utility solar - 20-year purchase agreement between Southern California Edison and Stirling Energy Systems, Inc. will result in 20,000+ dish array covering 4,500 acres capable of generating 500 MW, at a cost competitive to grid power. (http://stirlingenergy.com)

2. 

   Nanotech / Thin Film Solar >
   Nanosolar a leader in the drive to make solar affordable - Nanosolar has developed proprietary technology that makes it possible to simply roll-print solar cells with performance and durability similar to silicon-wafer cells, while cutting the costs, making solar affordable. The long-term limitation will be the growing scarcity of Indium. (http://nanosolar.com)

3. 

   Directory:Storage > Directory:Batteries >
   EEStor Ceramic “Battery” - Texas company is working on an “energy storage” ultra-capacitor device made from ceramics. It’s not technically a battery because it doesn’t use chemicals. It can allegedly charge within 5 minutes (from a substation) with enough energy to move a car 500 miles on about $9 worth of electricity — about 45 cents a gallon.

4. 

   Validated | Available for Commercial Purchase | Directory:Wind >
   Wind Farms - Wind farms present an economy of scale, enabling them to produce electricity in the price range of grid power.

5. 

   Directory:Batteries >
   Nanotube Super Capacitor Battery - MIT researchers are developing a battery based on capacitors that utilize nanotubes for high surface area, enabling near instantaneous charging and no degradation. Estimating ~5 years to commercialization.

6. 

   Plasma / Waste to Energy / Engines >
   W2 Energy Birthing Affordable, Renewable Petrol - Imagine a gasoline and diesel source that is CO2 neutral, sulfur-free, derived from renewable sources, superior in its power performance to fossil-based fuels, and costs less than 1/7 of fossil-based fuels. The company has also built an engine to optimize use of the syngas portion of the product. (http://www.w2energy.com)

7. 

   Available for Purchase | Directory:Concentrated Solar Power >
   SolarCube™ by Green and Gold Energy - Award-winning solar technology uses Fresnel lenses to focus sun’s energy onto photovoltaic cells. 5.8 cents per kWh. (http://www.greenandgoldenergy.com.au) (NEC Specialist: Richard P. George)

8. 

   Solar > Concentrated >
   Cool Earth Solar - Company has developed an inflatable solar concentrator technology that slashes materials costs, making solar farms competitive with commercial electricity generation systems within three years. (http://www.coolearthsolar.com) (NEC Specialist: Jon Bonanno, investor, board member)

9. 

   Directory:Solar >
   DayStar Technologies’ Silicon-Free Solar Cells - Daystar’s unique metal foil design is not vulnerable to silicon shortages. Striving to “make free energy affordable”, production of this thin film design is being ramped up to 20 MW per year. (http://www.daystartech.com/)

10. 

    Directory:Nuclear >
    Focus Fusion - Purports to be a far more feasible and profoundly less expensive approach to hot fusion, in contrast to ITER. Lawrenceville Plasma Physics’ is developing the Plasma Focus Device for hydrogen-boron nuclear fusion. 4-7 years to commercial. 1 cent / kWh anticipated energy generation cost. (http://www.focusfusion.org) (NEC Specialists: Thomas Valone)

  11-100.   Click HERE

First it was the solar bra. The technology may be great but the concept is crap. Using the surface area of the breast to capture solar energy (via solar panel bras) sounds neat, The new device generates enough energy to power your cell phone or your iPod. But, how often do you go out exposing your bras to the elements? Read more HERE

Now, advances in technology may harness breast movement to generate power. The physics of breast motion have been studied closely for the last two decades by researchers, most of them women. LaJean Lawson, a former professor of exercise science at Oregon State University, has studied breast motion since 1985 and now works as a consultant for companies like Nike to develop better sports bra designs. Lawson was enthusiastic about the idea but warned it would be tricky to pull off. Lawson explained:

Breasts move on three different axes: from side to side, front to back, and up and down. The most motion is generated on the vertical axis. Naturally, the bigger the breast, the more momentum it generates. Let’s face it—if you’re a double-A marathoner, you’re probably not going to get that iPod up and running.

Measurements compiled by Lawson and her colleagues show that a D-cup in a low-support bra can travel as much as 35 inches up and down (35 inches!) during exercise, while a B-cup in a high-support bra barely moves an inch.

Fabric and design are also important factors in distance travelled. Elastic fabric allows the breast to move more. Choosing between an encapsulation design, in which the cups are separated, or a compression design, where they are hugged close to the body, can also affect breast motion. An encapsulation design further reduces motion because two smaller masses are easier to control than one large one. “Also, if you have a really high neckline, the breasts won’t fly up,” Lawson said.

But, how do you convert the motion into useful energy?

Professor Zhong Lin Wang of Georgia Tech, is currently trying to develop fabric made from nanowires to capture energy from motion. The nanowires are about 1/1,000^th the width of a human hair. The nanowires rub up against one another and convert mechanical energy from the friction into an electric charge. According to Wang, the fabric is cheap to produce and surprisingly efficient; his team hopes to use it to create energy-generating T-shirts and other articles of clothing. A square meter of fiber produces about 80 milliwatts of power, which is enough to run a small device like a cell phone. Wang expects to have a shirt available for purchase within five years.

Bra patterns call for about a meter of fabric, which would probably mean that a regular bra could power an iPod. But the fabric could also be layered, doubling or even tripling the amount of energy produced.

If Professor Wang is successful perhaps he could adapt the technology for males. How would this work? Answers on a postcard please!

 H/T Slate

It’s that time of the year for crop circles to appear and this year’s star turn is probably one of the most complex mathematical  designs ever undertaken for the genre.

The pattern appeared earlier this month near Barbury Castle, an Iron Age hill fort above the village of Wroughton in Wiltshire.

Initially, crop circle enthusiasts were stumped as to its meaning and even a number of experts said it was ‘mind-boggling’.

Then retired astrophysicist Mike Reed saw a photograph of it and made the mathematical link.

Although  it appears complicated at first glance, the puzzle does make perfect sense if approached logically and taken step by step.

The coded image depicts 3.141592654, the first ten digits of Pi. How is it done?

Firstly, the diagram is divided into ten equal sections (a bit like a dartboard) because there are ten staggered edges located at strategic points around the crop circle.

To help understand how this is arrived at, look again at the photo above and imagine a giant ruler being aligned with the edges

That sets the basic framework. Next, each number in Pi is represented in the diagram by a corresponding number of coloured blocks.

Beginning in the centre with the arrow marked ‘Start’, the first number, three, is represented by three red blocks from clockwise.

Follow this round and this takes you to the decimal point, which is depicted by a small circle in the barley.

The number after the decimal point is one, represented by one green block.

The same pattern continues for each of the numbers - four purple blocks, one orange, five blue, nine yellow, two purple, six red, five green, then four dark blue, followed by three circles, or dots, acknowledging that Pi is infinite.

H/T Daily Mail

Interested in crop circles? Then visit HERE, HERE or, HERE

  Apologies if you thought this was a post about Loony Tunes and the cartoon character “Road Runner”.

It’s actually about a new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner which has just broken the world speed record by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. A quadrillion, also called a septillion, is one followed by 24 zeros.  The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the IBM BlueGene/L and has been  devised and built by engineers and scientists at IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Thomas D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day!

Roadrunner consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or about the power required by a large, shopping centre.

“Ok”, you may say, “So what’s the big deal?”

By running programmes that find a solution in hours or even less time — compared with as long as three months on older generations of computers — petaflop (one thousand trillion calculations per second ) machines like Roadrunner have the potential to fundamentally alter science and engineering. Researchers can ask questions and receive answers virtually interactively and can perform experiments that would previously have been impractical.

It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behaviour of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion. It will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater speed of the Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test global climate models with higher accuracy.

By breaking the petaflop barrier sooner than had been generally expected, the United States’ supercomputer industry has been able to sustain a pace of continuous performance increases, improving a thousandfold in processing power in 11 years. The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second.

British researchers have discovered that anti bacterial wipes, routinely used in hospitals may actually spread drug-resistant bacteria rather than kill the dangerous infections.

Experts have been saying for years that poor hospital practices spread dangerous bacteria, and yet many studies have shown that health care workers, including doctors and nurses, often fail to even wash their hands as directed. As a consequence of poor practice & congested hospitals (with high bed turnover) outbreaks of MRSA in NHS hospitals have soared to record levels.

Findings from a study of intensive care units at two Welsh hospitals suggest that even cleaning with antimicrobial wipes may not be enough depending on how staff use them. While the wipes killed some bacteria, a study of two hospitals showed they did not get them all and could transfer the so-called superbugs to other surfaces, Gareth Williams, a microbiologist at Cardiff University, said.

The researchers found that many health care workers cleaned multiple surfaces near patients, such as bed rails, monitors and tables with a single wipe and risked simply moving the infections around rather than cleaning them up.

“We found that the most effective way to prevent the risk of MRSA spread in hospital wards is to ensure the wipe is used only once on one surface,” Williams said.

The research findings  were presented at the American Society of Microbiology’s General Meeting in Boston.

One of the largest global suppliers of anti bacterial wipes is the US corporation Clorox. Looks like staff  in the largest single public health agency in the world  (the NHS) will now be encouraged to use a blizzard of wipes to disinfect hospital wards & equipment. Clorox’s 5 year share price ($) is shown in the chart below.

H/T Reuters

In all the acres of coverage of ‘climate change’, here’s something you may not have read.

At the end of May, Dr Arthur Robinson, of the University of Oregon, announced to a packed Washington Press Conference that 31,000 scientists had signed an online petition challenging the conventional wisdom that man-made C02 emissions were causing ‘global warming’.

He said he was aware that critics would claim this list was phoney, but said signatories had been carefully vetted and at least 9,000 had PhDs.

This went largely unreported on either side of the Atlantic. Any dissent from the great global warming scam, however valid, is dismissed as heresy.

And that’s the problem…global warming has become a religious movement, immune to scientific debate and emerging understanding in a still infant science.

Interesting article by Lawrence Solomon, executive director of Energy Probe, in the Canadian Financial Post:

  You probably haven’t heard much of Solar Cycle 24, the current cycle that our sun has entered, and I hope you don’t. If Solar Cycle 24 becomes a household term, your lifestyle could be taking a dramatic turn for the worse. That of your children and their children could fare worse still, say some scientists, because Solar Cycle 24 could mark a time of profound long-term change in the climate. As put by geophysicist Philip Chapman, a former NASA astronaut-scientist and former president of the National Space Society, “It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age.”

The picture shows a huge group of sunspots spanning a region 15 times larger than Earth, imaged by NASA’s SOHO spacecraft on July 15, 2002

The sun, of late, is remarkably free of eruptions: It has lost its spots. By this point in the solar cycle, sunspots would ordinarily have been present in goodly numbers.  Today’s spotlessness — what alarms Dr. Chapman and others — may be an anomaly of some kind, and the sun may soon revert to form. But if it doesn’t – and with each passing day, the speculation in the scientific community grows that it will not – we could be entering a new epoch that few would welcome.

Since 1900, Earth has experienced what astronomers call “the Modern Maximum” — the 20th century has again been a time of high sunspot activity.
But the 1900s are gone, along with the high temperatures that accompanied them. The last 10 years have seen no increase in temperatures — they reached a plateau and then remained there — and the last year saw a precipitous decline. How much lower and for how long the temperatures will fall, if at all, no one yet knows — the science is far from settled on what drives climate.
But many are watching the sun for answers, and for good reason. Several renowned scientists have been predicting for some time that the world could enter a period of cooling right around now, with consequences that could be dire. “The next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do,” believes Dr. Chapman. “There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the U.S. and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it.”

 

Full article HERE

So if Solomon’s prediction about the next solar cycle causing a mini ice age is correct, perhaps we should be pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere to try & offset the impact of cooling from solar cycle 24?

More seriously, perhaps what this emphasises is that the science of global warming/cooling is in its infancy.We shouldn’t be introducing half baked regulation & spending billions based on a flimsy hypothesis of global warming, until & unless we better understand it. The “Save Our Planet” project, beloved of our politicians & the greenies is still mainly hype over substance.

A new report on drugs in society by the Academy of Medical Sciences suggests there are increasing similarities in the future use of cognition enhancers by students with the current use of performance enhancing drugs in sport.”

The report discusses emerging classes of chemicals, as well as currently available drugs and their increasing use. The attention deficit therapy Ritalin is often used by college students to increase their powers of concentration. A recent survey also revealed that many competitive scientists themselves buy medicines online to allow them to work longer and harder.

The President of the AMA said:

It is likely that the use of cognition enhancers will increase, so an assessment of the social and economic impacts now will allow Government and others to consider ‘localised’ regulation around use in schools, universities and the workplace.

The use of psychoactive drugs by patients and healthy individuals will become an increasing feature in all our lives. Society must be prepared to respond to these developments. We must act now to harness the opportunities offered by advances in brain science to treat and prevent disease, but also to reduce the harms associated with drug misuse and addiction.”

The report’s authors fear that if left unchecked, drug users could obtain an unfair advantage in examinations. They note that plastic surgery is increasingly accepted as normal in society. Research among members of the public indicated that currently most view cognition enhancement with suspicion, drawing a distinction between caffeine and the narcolepsy treatment Modafinil, on grounds that coffee has been part of society for generations.

Public suspicions of cognitive enhancement fall into five categories according to the AMS:

• Unwanted or unknown side effects, related to a general fear of addiction and the absence of information about their long term effects.
• Devaluation of ‘normal’ achievements and the potential reduction in the intrinsic value of the effort and motivation involved in learning.
• Inequality, particularly if such drugs were expensive. Pressure to use and exacerbation of an already over-competitive culture.
• Control of people’s behaviour.
• Personality change, perhaps resulting from long-term use.