Posted on 06/23/2008 6:39:08 AM PDT by hreardon
Professor David J C MacKay tells The Register that he was first drawn into this field by the constant suggestion — from the BBC, parts of the government etc — that we can seriously impact our personal energy consumption by doing such things as turning our TVs off standby or unplugging our mobile-phone chargers.
Anyone with even a slight grasp of energy units should know that this is madness. Skipping one bath saves a much energy as leaving your TV off standby for over six months. People who wash regularly, wear clean clothes, consume hot food or drink, use powered transport of any kind and live in warm houses have no need to worry about the energy they use to power their electronics; it’s insignificant compared to the other things.
(Excerpt) Read more at theregister.co.uk ...
Well, many of those lefties skipped bathing years ago. :)
the ideal life of the american socialist professorate that take their directions from the europeans,
would be a small french village, a la degas’ or pissarro’s milk cows returning from the ideal fields and the sun setting through the trees.
no cars, no freeways, no scientists, no technology, no brains. all good little socialists.
Snort -as if the sustainable energy debate actually involved sanity !
This is a great discussion, because his numbers show that all those politicans and others who say, let's just switch to renewables, basically do not have a clue.
He estimates just how much of Britian would have to be covered with windmills to actually produce enough power .
Hint: they won't like it. As a bonus: the book is a free download.
“Sounds like we may have the Al Gore crowd telling us how often we can bathe before long....”
Well, they already only use one square to wipe.
;^)
What they are creating is an equivalent of the bible of Carbonanity. ( I just coined it) The rule book that you measure your carbon output of your life by.
no cars, no freeways, no scientists, no technology, no brains. all good little socialists.
***************************
And immediately hold your arms up in the arms when the Nazi’s come marching through.
Everything will be O.K when all the humans are dead.
Heavyweight physics professor weighs into climate/energy crap
There, fixed it ; )
My Grandfather watched every microwatt of power he used.
I once purchased him a microwave. I noticed it was never plugged in. I realized it used power to run the clock.
I once saw his night light in his bedroom. It was at the end of a cord next to his bed and it had a switch on it.
He was way ahead of his time.
Just an extension of Obama's now famous, "...we can't sit around in our homes with the thermostat set to 72..." remark.
We Americans can't practice good hygiene by bathing in warm water...wasting soap and polluting our water supply...
It seems that none of you have read the article. Only the snippet posted here.
Also, though, The Register is grossly anti-American.
“ MacKay tells us that the entire human race could power itself — transport, domestic, industry, the lot — at hugely profligate American levels using nothing but fission for around a century. Since it’s unlikely that everyone will suddenly ditch fossil and ramp up to that level of use overnight, realistically you’re talking about at least a couple of centuries; longer if people only fancied being Europeans rather than Americans. It wouldn’t even cost much, compared to renewables.”
I’m not sure what the other posters ahead of me read, but it seems the professor is very, very skeptical whether alternate energy can really contribute much at all.
You actually read the post before commenting? I’m shocked, shocked I tell you.
Yes. If only we could all live like the Hobbits!! Oh, how clean and pretty it would be!
Do you realize he spent more money on the cord and switch than he ever saved in a lifetime of turning off a 4 Watt bulb?
Waste not, want not generation.
It took a LOOOOOOOOOG time for the author to get off the subject of wind and around to nuclear power. I am offended by the typical British arrogance about “hoggy Americans”, though. I guess the Brits already stopped using electricity...
The “carbon cap” crowd doesn’t NEED suggestions. What they need is a fetch upside the head.
Not merely junk science, but NO science is applied when they make their “principled arguments” against the conversion of energy to wealth. And that is what all this is about, too many people converting too much energy to wealth, what about all the slugs who don’t WANT to convert the energy, or enjoy the wealth?
“We’ll run out of sources of energy!” Nonsense. For as long as the sun shall shed its light upon the earth, there is plentiful energy. “Peak oil” is a myth, a bogeyman to frighten the timid and unknowledgeable - petroleum is constantly being formed, from both biological and abiotic sources. Push comes to shove, WE, humanity, can MAKE oil, from either reformulation of methane, natural gas, or by transformation of organic materials through Thermal Depolymerization, which uses superheated steam and pressure, to do in hours what may have taken nature to do over eons. Actually, we do not KNOW if nature took “eons” to form petroleum, it may have been formed in a series of compressions and superheating of organic materials, and the entire deposit in a particular field was formed within hours, just like in the laboratory.
Or, a form of petroleum, kerogen, may be created by using certain varieties of algae, in a carefully controlled environment, precisely feeding the culture metered quantities of nutrients, INCLUDING the despised carbon dioxide, and access to the right wavelengths of light. Endless production of hydrocarbons, of whichever variety is desired, so long as the culture does not get poisoned by introduction of some factor that causes it to stop generating the kerogen.
Now, a primary, non-sun source of energy is this same nuclear energy suggested elsewhere, but until a major portion of the population of this country gets over its superstitious fear of all things atomic, this is not a viable option.
I blame either inferior education, or lack of any education whatsoever.
Very good information at the links. Thanks for posting.
Although the professor seems to have bought in to the need to become carbon neutral, his slides contain very good data on what is feasible for sustainable energy, including nuclear.
I’m going to download the book and read it.
Me too. This kind of "bottom line" analysis with reasonably reliable numbers has long been missing from the energy debate. I read the whole thing and agree with the concluding paragraph:
"No matter what your feelings about MacKay’s results and his politics — just for instance, he’s quite sympathetic to the idea of not paying that part of your taxes which goes to the military (a few per cent, in the UK) — you disregard his maths and physics at your peril. His work is a serious contribution to the energy debate."
Wait a minute... You read the article before posting about it? You must be new around here - we don't allow that kind of tomfoolery!
When I was in college I went through a big time Ayn Rand phase.
In the 1970's she had a newsletter in which she commented on current events. She wrote that environmentalists are motivated by a powerful hatred for humanity which springs from a deep-seated desire to destroy themselves. At the time, I thought this was a bit over the top. In the 35 years or so since, I've come to believe she was probably right on the money.
If we aren't allowed to bathe regularly that is going to do a lot more damage to the environment than a fleet of SUV's!
My grandmother was terrified that if she removed the burned out light bulbs beofre my Dad came down to change them for her, the electricity would leak out.
She was born in 1883.
OK, so we have at LEAST 1000 years of uranium around, and that is assuming the ENTIRE world uses power at the levels we use them in the US. No energy crisis there...
There’s also a thing called a thorium energy amplifier reactor which would be a lot more efficient. If it works as its Nobel prize-winning designers predict, known thorium reserves would run six billion people at American luxury for sixty thousand years.
Now we're into EONs...
The whole energy crisis is of our own making...
yeah right. STOP TAKING BATHS! Albore and Tipper need to set a good example for us there.
She was born in 1883.
There were old people in my childhood who would say "Close the light" when they wanted it turned off. Ever wonder why the hardware on lamps is threaded 1/8 Pipe Thread?
GASLIGHTS!
People alive at the transition persisted in thinking "Gas". Conversion fixtures, shades, etc. screwed right in.
I don’t question your opinion of the Gorites having known a few, but read the article it is very informative and blows out of the water most of the energy production ideas put forth by those same Gorites. The numbers for wind and solar are staggering for a country as small as Britain. Do the math and you will see that in the near term there is no way we power this Country and our present economy with wind and solar.
So in plan G we have to include substantial additional pumped storage facilities, capable of balancing out the fluctuations in wind on a timescale of days … Most major lochs in Scotland would be part of pumped storage systems.
MacKay made no effort to cost plan G, but he offers maps and figures indicating the staggering scale of the engineering. Britain would be literally covered with — and girdled by — massive wind farms, tidal barriers and wave barrages, and every sizeable body of water in the land would rise and fall to the strange new tides of the national grid. We would have literally rebuilt the British Isles as a single mighty renewable generator, pouring concrete and erecting steel on a scale so far matched only by human habitation — industrialising the land and sea in a way that would make intensive agribusiness look like a wildlife refuge. And still we’d be importing power.
I learned awhile back that wind, solar, and other 'free' power sources had limited roles to play.
However, when I drive out of town aways (less often these days) I note some houses/homesteads with hi-tech windmills, others with solar panels, and others with the old timey hot water exchangers...individual use of small systems to provide part of the owner's needs.
Seems to me that there's a lot more to gain, easier to realize and less an infringement on the planet, by taking some of the load off grid, when conditions allow, in that manner.
Why not encourage home owner's associations to establish locally generated supply for some of their needs and credit them against their power grid usage?
All of these bits of technology exist today and with some encouragement should be readily improved upon. Ramping up nuclear generation to meet a demand rate reduced by some practical degree would probably lead to similar technological improvements.
Then there'd be enough petroleum left over to keep my big-block Ford on the road as long as I'll be needing it.
PS: This isn't a new idea, check out
http://www.solarschoolhouse.org/history_solarthermal.html
(i.e., "Because people had to rely on imported coal or wood for fuel, many found solar a cheaper alternative. The huge discoveries of natural gas in the Los Angeles basin during the 1920s and 1930s killed the local solar water heater industry.)
Yes, I found that very interesting too. He'll probably be called a shill for the Bush administration though, because the president has been campaigning for nuclear plants and more clean coal burning plants since his first term, and everybody KNOWS Bush hates the environment.
I think it was a recycled lamp cord.
I think its a female thing. Most women turn the thermostat up to a higher temperature so the room will heat up FASTER. Even after explaining to my my wife numerous times that our heating system is either on or off, she still does it. I know she understands but there is something innate that overrides.
Windmill tilting should have remained a solitary venture.
In a cursory scan of the book, that assumption is one thing that he does not address other than to buy into it or, at best, to say it's too potentially important to ignore. Thus he deflects the burden of proof, leaving his opponents the challenge of proving a negative.
For someone who proclaims, "We need simple numbers, and we need the numbers to be comprehensible, comparable, and memorable" he does a good job at using junior-high math to look at unraveling the "innumerate codswallop" around current proposals for sustainable energy. As a trained physicist, I believe the next and best use of his talents would be to advance beyond the algebra and start "cutting ... emissions of twaddle" embedded in current climate models that use demonstrably simplified boundary conditions that profoundly effect their applicability.
Algebra will go a long way toward revealing the requirement for special needs education in policy circles but it is lack of critical evaluation of the fundamentals of differential equations used in climate models which demand MacKay's attention.
If this is the same David McKay I have read, he is a world-class Bayesian statistician and information theorist. He should apply some of those skills to assessing the empirical case for AGW. AGW would not, I believe, fare well.
You have to go entirely into the realm of theoretical models, unvalidated by predictive accuracy, and with no consideration of other explanations for GW in order to get too scared about AGW. The actual empirical data is, for example, much more supportive of the solar hypothesis than it is AGW.
In Bayesian model selection, the complexity of the solution is automatically factored into the posterior distribution. Given that, I think it would be hard for McKay to justify the hundreds to thousands of parameter climate models over a single input solar model. Or over my favorite model--take the same time period as the AGW guys and draw a straight line with a ruler. Has about the same predictive power as the AGW models and is much simpler.
In information theory, it is possible to assess how much mutual information there is between your known inputs and what you are trying to predict. Again, I don't believe there is enough information in the hundred or so years of data the AGW guys use to tweak their model parameters to justify predictions the AGW guys claim. I would like to see McKay's take on that also.
But he probably won't. He appears to have tiptoed as close to political incorrectness as he is willing to go. If he actually subjected the AGW models to statistical and information theoretic analysis, his results would likely take him into permanent disgrace with the Chuch of Global Warming--maybe even excommunication. In his position, I doubt I would risk it either.
Some of the best lookig lamps that ai have ever seen are old or new kerosene lamps that have a fitting that goes on top of the kerosene reservoir that converts them to electric lamps.
Really pretty lamps. I qill be doing this with several antique lamps that I have.
[bookmark]
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
