Plastic bags to the rescue

Another post by our good friend Loren Ibsen:

I was discussing plasma arc gasification with a friend of mine the other day. Basically, this process involves generating a 650V electrical arc in an inert gas like nitrogen. At high temperatures, this creates a plasma field that rips apart material at the atomic (not sub-atomic) level. The idea is to feed trash into the field, collect the resultant energy and byproducts like synthetic gasoline formed when the elements are reconstituted into useful molecules, and eliminate the need for landfills.
The essay below is adapted from an email I sent to this friend. Now that you know something of plasma gasification, the piece will make more sense:
I stand accused of being in love with big projects to address the problems we face, and I fully cop to that. However, I also love small projects that make sense. Today I saw two of my neighbors at Walmart. Their child's elementary has come up with some kind of half propaganda/half fundraising/half-assed scheme that is everything you would expect of a "public-private partnership". Walmart will give the school 5 (count them: five) whole American dollars for every giant (4 feet high by 2.5 feet diameter) clear landscaper's sack crammed full of shopping bags.
This project has been going on all year at school. The teachers have hectored the students into dicking around collecting bags and wasting school time and resources storing these things. That's when they aren't using valuable class time preaching the litany of evils that plastic bags are responsible for.
Of course, my neighbors have fully bought in. What else is a "stakeholder" there for, if not to bleat assent to the consensus of the flock? They are predisposed to believe, as are the teachers who should presumably know better. But just as the Judas goat works its spell by telling the doomed what they want to hear, all the while believing its own lies, such are the educators to whom we've entrusted our children. (Yes, I've mixed sheep and goats. Pretend that was intentional--a clever reference back to the unholy chimera of public-private partnerships.)
And the payoff to this program? One semester of kids' and adults' time, storage,transportation and opportunity costs have yielded 12 sacks, or $60! I like these people, so I was merciful. But, good Gaia, $60!?! Maybe the teachers would do better to teach their pupils some classical economics, not to mention science and math. It sounds good to "Think globally while acting locally", but remember that the predicate is that you first "THINK".
These kids probably already know what a condom is, but ten to one they couldn't tell a male from a female thread. I'm pretty sure though that they do know they are doing penance because we screwed the Indians. Instead of wiping the tears off Iron Eyes' face (ecofreak insult, not racial-the guy wasn't even really a "Native American"), they should be learning scale ratios so they can build a demo plasma gasifier for the school. At least then they could do something useful with all those bags (i.e., burn them).
Of course, it is more fun, and in keeping with the times, to seek out witches when you are in a burning mood, and what better symbol of progress and wealth to demonize than one of the best inventions ever, the plastic bag? I didn't have the heart to tell these people that if we were to eliminate all plastic bags tomorrow, we would save .16% (please read that again--0.16%) of the oil America uses each year. That's generous, since a dynamic calculation would need to account for the increased use of paper and the attendant transportation costs of this heavier, weaker material. I was just glad they didn't go after plastic bottles (0.02% at last count). No doubt that will occur next semester. Their boy is in an advanced class, after all.
What happened to the optimism that made this the best damn country on Earth? (C'mon, in your heart you know it is.) We kicked Hitler in the nuts, gave the Commies a serious beatdown, built Hoover Dam, faked a Moon landing, and still manage to feed the world. We've produced the best scientists, engineers, mathematicians and pretty much own the Nobel in economics. Now we're going to teach our kids to rummage around like raccoons?
I say big projects for a big people. Honestly, if you were a kid again, which would you rather grow up to be, a "photovoltaic technician" or a !!!.PLASMA GASIFIER!!! Doesn't that just sound like something out of E.E. "Doc" Smith and the Lensman Series? 50 years ago if you had gone into a bar and declared you were a !!!PLASMA GASIFIER!!!, that alone would have guaranteed you'd get laid, maybe right there on the spot. While the photovoltaic technician might have made it to first base on a slow night, ultimately he would sleep alone. If that's what American guys want to be, we are in trouble. And if somehow American women are now selecting for mere scavengers, things are worse than I thought.
The truth is that we will never need less energy than we use today. We need a hell of a lot more if we plan to make something of ourselves. Put today's relatively lame solar panels on Enkidu's hut to help him break out of mere subsistence. (By the way, that's merely a slightly inapposite Gilgamesh reference--don't rush to be so offended; I've said plenty enough here to be justifiably pissed about without you waving the PC wand.) As for me, I want plasma gasifiers, fission, fusion, and giant space based solar arrays. Give me underwater turbines and land based solar collectors if your vision is so limited, but I want energy, and a lot of it and I want it now.
Let's burn all the oil we need, if that is what it takes to raise us out of poverty (yeah, you heard me--a hundred years from now, people will look back on our standard of living like we look at cavemen, or the thirld world). When that runs out, burn coal, tar sands and shale. Burn the waste and burn the byproducts. Burn it all! Then burn it again to be sure. That's a recycling program worth talking about.
For those who think it's stupid to burn a wonderful product like oil--a material capable of being transformed into almost anything the human mind can dream up, keep in mind that government and agribusiness have decided our best alternative is to burn food. They've chosen a winner and screwed up as usual. I for one don't want to tell Enkidu that his kid won't grow up to be the scientist that perfects the genetically engineered microbe that gives off hydrogen (this is a real project, by the way) because he starved after we poured his dinner into a three cylinder Smugmobile so we could drive plastic bags to Walmart like coals to Newcastle.

Could it be too late to save Canada?

This is a great article.
Error Theory: Time to start adding a thicker blanket of greenhouse gases

Who is Jennifer Marohasy?

This is a link to a broadcast from ABC Radio National of Australia regarding the recent global warming summit ignored by the media:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/counterpoint/stories/2008/2191714.htm
This above link will direct you to either a real audio or windows media player, her segment begins at the 27:39 mark and continues to the 40:43 mark.
In summary, the earth has cooled in the last 10 years...interesting that CO2 has increased in this time.
Here is the print article link:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23411799-7583,00.html

Jennifer Marohasy's credentials:
Director Australian Environment Foundation
Senior Fellow, Institute of Public Affairs.
FYI she's funded in part by some oil companies...oh well, algore uses alot of oil so i guess he's helped to fund her.

I'm dreaming of a white...Easter?

looks like a snowy blustery Easter for our fine French speaking Canadians.
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20080321/weather_east_080321/20080321?hub=TopStories

The limitless atmosphere

Miklós Zágoni, a NASA scientist, says the global warming models are wrong. He then resigned from NASA.
Apparantly NASA thinks the atmosphere is a zillion miles high and he doesn't. Now i'm no scientist but i've seen what happens to space aliens when they are shot out of the airlock on sci-fi movies...they pop!
I guess the idea of the article is that the current models used to determine global warming are predicated on the fact that the atmosphere is limitless which it isn't.
This spells trouble for Canada because I was counting on algore's theory to be correct and we could then heat them up.

Here's the link to the full article:
http://www.dailytech.com/Researcher+Basic+Greenhouse+Equations+Totally+Wrong/article10973.htm

Maybe warming ain't so bad

I know, I know...this is pretty pedestrian, but funny none the less. I guess there could be a flip side to warming. If you ask me, though, you better start polishing your mukluks.

Hey Abbot!!!

I started this blog for just this type of post. I received this via email from Loren Ibsen and hope it is just the first of many. Enjoy:


So the founder of the Weather
Channel, John Coleman, says CAGW is a scam. Maybe he's right, maybe wrong, but nonetheless I hear the consensus crumbling. I predict 2008 is the year. When it does happen, it will be the Glacier Calving Heard Round the World.

I will keep harping on "The Consensus" because I am concerned that we are losing one of Western Civilization's great contributions to the world: the scientific method. It's part of the broader "assault on reason", if you will. The thing that scares me is how ready people are to sell our birthright for a mess of outrage.

Because there is always the need to anticipate and prevent misunderstanding (where that misunderstanding is honest), let me state that I am not saying warming and/or climate change aren't happening, nor that humans have no impact. My position, with which I hope you will agree, can best be expressed as the following equation:
Improper Methodology + Correct Answer = BAD SCIENCE.
To elaborate:
What we are seeing now has made me realize that we are not immune from the mass hysteria that has driven extreme religious movements through history. It is especially incumbent upon the believers, and those whose preexisting policy preferences predispose (PPPP) them to accept the theory to be rigorous in not only the work, but in insisting that dissenters be allowed to respond.

Proponents should be required to show their work and properly archive their data so that others may properly review it. This has been an accepted part of peer review and the scientific process as long as I can remember. At least, that was the ideal as it was taught to me in grade school so many years ago. Why is it not so now? Why can a major proponent refuse to share information (collected on the government dime) with a skeptical scientist on the grounds that he "knows" the scientist is just going to try to poke holes in the work?

That is the whole point of science. Nothing is ever proven, only falsified, and work that withstands or adapts in light of methodical scrutiny is seen (or traditionally has been) as stronger for it.

Cheap rhetorical tricks abound. It is human nature that this be so. And, yes, it goes on on both sides of this debate. One side call the other "deniers", a despicable attempt to demonize the opposition by evoking comparison to Holocaust denial, while the other refers to the "warm-mongers." (That is, I do, but mostly to needle the True Believers.) This is to be expected on the political side, but we should all insist that science be above that. There really are larger issues at stake here. Anyone who professes to be concerned about the Bush administration's politicization of science must be concerned about the state of global warming science, if the protestations are more than mere angling for partisan advantage.

Science requires that we revisit prior hypotheses and predictions to scrutinize them for errors when they fail to act as expected. For example, when we are told that CAGW will lead to more and bigger tropical storms, the relevant experts who say nay are shunted aside. When the prediction fails to hold, we are told not that the hypothesis has been modified, but that the prediction was only ever for bigger storms, not more. The record is flushed down the memory hole. Meanwhile, every named drizzle has been touted as "proof". Then, when the most recent hurricane season turns out to be the weakest in 30 years, we are told that any one season is not predictive (true, just as it was when the data "favored" the believers). To add insult to injury, the resulting droughts from the lack of rainfall (no storms, remember?) are then blamed on climate change.

I keep thinking that an homage to Abbott and Costello is in order (when is that ever untrue?). I haven't worked it out yet, but the idea would be something like this:
....
Costello: so, tell me how this works again.
Abbott: look, dummy: Global warming is on first, global cooling is on second, and climate change is on third.
C: wait, I'm already confused. I thought global cooling came first.
A: that was the old lineup. Try to keep up. Now global warming leads to
global cooling. If the runner gets by those two, it's up to climate change to mop up.
C: so if I drink water from a plastic bottle, I'm heading for global warming?
A: at first. Keep it up and the ice in greenland will all fall into the ocean (stage whisper) ...in about a thousand years.... Then you get cooling.
C: but I thought we had cooling right now.
A: who told you that? Haven't you been listening? (aside: boy, the state of education today!)
C: no, no. I heard that Antartic ice cover set a record this past winter.
A: but Arctic ice was at a record low this summer.
C: so ice was low in the summer?
A: global warming!
C: and high in the winter?
A: global cooling!
C: it seems like you have an answer for everything, all right.
A,C (together): CLIMATE CHANGE!
C: hoo-boy!
....
(work in progress. All rights reserved. The one exception is that I will hand over the concept free of any restriction to Rush Limbaugh should he see it as good material for a skit. There, I said it: RUSH LIMBAUGH! Feel free to disengage your critical apparatus and brush off your ad hominems. Go on, DO IT! Prove me right about everything I just wrote.)

In summation:
1. Yay for science, reason, the classical tradition, the Enlightenment and rigorous skeptical inquiry.
2. Boo for mystical thinking, obscurantism, substitution of policy preferences for science, and the spirit of Lysenko.

From NPR no less...

read the whole article but paragraph 4 is definitely the best:

"There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant," Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. "Global warming doesn't mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88520025

Is Al Gore really Blofeld?

I got an interesting email from a friend of mine we'll call Kurt Foster:

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jZFrUDFVEuhk2So73AEDIyYrJ50g

This Blog you have created is great. I’ve enjoyed the posts so far and after reading about the dire straights Canada may be in I have to wonder if there is any relationship to Japans efforts to cut global warming by shortening the length of their professional baseball games (see link above). By cutting the length of play by 6 percent they figure they can reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by 209 tonnes over 864 games, whatever that means (I’m in construction too). This is a result of their enlistment and participation in the Kyoto Protocol. Now I don’t know much about the Kyoto Protocol but what is the relationship with the recent climate change not just in Canada but in most of North America? What is the actual agenda of the Kyoto Protocol? Kyoto Protocol/SPECTOR? Is Al Gore really Blofeld? There may be a more sinister motive lurking beneath the surface.

School's out for EASTER??

Quebec children get holiday as snow piles on roofs

What would Alice Cooper say about this?

Smudge pots to the rescue

Could this funny device save Canada? Maybe the econuts could take some old washing machine drums and hemp tie them to some old recycled bong pipes and fill them with their eco-oil. I'm sure they all have a lighter somewhere to get them lit.

Name that epoch...

Being the scholar that I am I learned what the pleistocene epoch is and that we are currently in the holocene epoch. How often is it in history that you can name the coming age? We have a rare opportunity to lay credit to someone for what's about to come...how bout the "algorestocene epoch?" I suspect the coming glaciation of Canada will be liked just about as much as algore so it seems fitting to use his namesake. I like it.

Just for kicks you might take note that wikepedia lays blame for global warming to carbon dioxide as well. Go figure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoch_%28geology%29

The Oracle

KUSI weather man, John Coleman, who wants to sue algore. I guess some don't really see the debate as over. Check out his links from the KUSI weather page: http://www.kusi.com/weather

ice age

YIKES
I guess I had better count my blessings I only had a little hail come my way. That looks like it was awfully cold.

Help Canada

It's saturday night here in San Diego and a hail storm just pelted all of the blossoms off of my fruit trees. Thanks alot algore. So, how bout we get going on looking at exactly what global warming is doing to Canada and how we can help them. I think i'm gonna cozy up to a nice wood fire in my fireplace tonight and maybe start it with a duraflame or something like that.