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* Posts by Michael

6 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Oct 2007

Windfarm lobby bows to ASA and cuts CO2 saving figures

Michael

What have you got against wind?

Wind energy is not a panacea for our problems, but the subtext of the article is that its actually worthless. Lighting and heating 214 homes is actually not bad. It has very low carbon emissions and is a pretty benign form of power generation.

Why don't you write about the massive radioactive emissions from conventional coal stations? Yes easily more radioactive material leaves coal power stations compared with nuclear ones. Uranium is a trace element - a few ppm - in most coals and the ash is 'hot' in more ways than one. Good job we make sure its safely contained in a powder from which we make construction materials!

And that's not to mention mercury emissions from coal fired power stations!

Get with the real story. CO2 emissions are - to the best of our imperfect knowledge - really really bad for the climate and ecological systems on which we rely. Wind energy is one small step on the way to reducing CO2 emissions. Don't knock it.

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Met Office: Global warming sceptics 'have heads in sand'

Michael
Stop

Stupidity or skepicisim?

Sketicism is a worthy standpoint. Cynicism is not. I suppose you apply your attitudes to all those geographers going on about their so-called 'spherical Earth' theory in order to keep their jobs. And all those doctors with their HIV theory of AIDS.

In fact the views you (El Reg) express on the global warming issue are not indicative of skepticism, but of cynicism and simple ignorance - that means not knowing stuff. This is not an insult - it is a comment on your lack of knowledge!

Test yourself with this question. Why is the Earth the temperature it is? It is a simple question devoid of political intrigue. Don't worry about a degree or so of likely recent warming just try to understand the broad answer to the question. When you have the answer you will understand why scientists who do know stuff are concerned by the 30% rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration.

Michael de Podesta

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Heavyweight physics prof weighs into climate/energy scrap

Michael
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Most of these numbers are well know and are wildly uncertain

Its nice that people are leaving their fields of expertise to stick their oar in here: the field needs all the help it can get. ANd there are no single solutions, but there are many partial solutions which when added coherently become very substantial. But this effort is very short of the mark. I won't go on and on but...

(a) Switching stuff and using low energy light bulbs >does< help. In my (rather high tech) house I brought electricity consumption down by 30% by this technique at essentially no inconvenience to me. Nationally, switching to low energy bulbs means that roughly 1 GWe of installed capacity can be switched off - about 2% o fUK demand or one power station we don't need to build.

(b) Having stated that the biggest problem is thermal (space heating) the article then concentrates on electricity generation which is quite a different problem. There is no doubt that thermally the best thing we can do is to insulate our homes, shops and workplaces. Estimates differ, but reducing space heating demands by 30% would not be hard.

(c) The authors assumed faith in clean coal is endearing. This is a technology which has never been demonstrated at scale, and the scale required is collosal. Taking world numbers of something on the order of 10 billion tonnes of CO2 per annum, this occupies a volume at a minimum 10 cubic kilometres. This volume has to be gas tight with an internal pressure of 50 bar and storage would have to be permanent. This volume would have to be built every year. For the UK the demands are proportionately less, but it makes storing nuclear waste look easy.

So well done for stimulating a numerical based discussion, but no marks for plausibility.

Michael de Podesta

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Big Climate's strange 'science'

Michael

This article is nonsense

The basic physics underlying the creation of the climate we enjoy on Earth is actually fairly well understood. Making predictions based on that understanding is very very hard, and climate models that attempt to do this are of necessity imperfect. But imperfect as they are they represent our best guess at what is going to happen. And they represent our best guess at the likely effects of various actions we might choose to take. What alternative method do you suggest for evaluiating alternative strategies?

It is true that there has been climate change in the past and that life and humans have survived. I also have no doubt that humans will survive any climate change even in a worst conceivable scenario. But that doesn't mean that we should just continue to act as we have. The consequences of Climate change >could< be genuinely catastrophic.

Incidentally, David Whitehouse's recent statements about there being no rising trend in Global Temperature are just balderdash, plain and simple. And I cannot imagine what kind of impairment woul dlead him to make such statements.

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US switches off the incandescent lightbulb

Michael
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CFs >reduce< mercury pollution

The new US law is welcome. And the issue of mecury in the light bulbs is interesting. Surprisingly, the environmental mercury emissions caused by using incandescent light bulbs are typically greater than CFs even though CFs contain liquid mercury. How?

Coal contains mercury, typically at the 0.1 ppm level. For a typical UK generating mix (30% coal) the excess emissions at the power station caused by the additional units of electricity used by incandescents cause typically 30 mg of mercury to be emitted over the lifetime of a single CF.

Each CF bulb contains about 5 mg of mercury (a little under a cubic millimetre), and because of this they should be safely disposed of. However emissions from power stations enter the environment directly and offer no easy way to reduce environmental impact.

If implemented in the UK this change will result in the reduction of UK generatibng requiriment by about 1 GW which means that one large power station will not need to be built.

How do I know this stuff? I'm a physicist.

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Judge rules Gore's film an inconvenient catalogue of errors

Michael

A pity

This shows the problem with polemical documentary. Because of a few sloppy sequences thrown in for dramatic effect, we get (in the public mind) a big question mark thrown over the whole issue of anthropogenic influence on climate.

Shame.

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