Google and Global Warming

Two Google engineers, Ross Koningstein and David Fork, worked on an ambitious renewable energy project at Google. The idea was to solve the petroleum/global warming problem but, at the end of the project, they felt the plan had failed.

They write about their results in IEEE Spectrum. http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change
They now say that existing technologies like wind and solar are too costly to stave off climate change.

"....we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope,” the engineers said. “Our society needs to fund scientists and engineers to propose and test new ideas, fail quickly, and share what they learn.”   

As a review by The Register of the IEEE article states: “Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”
 
Koningstein and Fork further state that, while the cost of replacing fossil fuel is overwhelming, there is another crushing concept in their research. Carbon stays in the atmosphere for one hundred years. James Hanson, former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote a paper in 2008 saying that exceeding 350 parts per million CO₂ in the atmosphere would likely have catastrophic effects. We’ve already past that limit. Right now, concentrations of CO2 is around 400 ppm. If Hanson is right, we will be stuck with current CO2 levels for one hundred years. While stopping CO2 production is worthwhile, some option to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is more important.

Fossile Fuel (Energy Week)

Cheap energy is the current whipping boy. But some understanding of it must be conceded as well. 

Thomas Newcomen in 1712 produced the most important single technological advance of the industrial age. He invented a crude steam engine that ran on coal. It was by most subsequent standards terribly inefficient but it was efficient enough to allow British miners to work in coal mines; it was able to pump the mines dry so the miners could work safely. Thus began the incredible modern industrial age, a machine that enabled men to produce more energy than the machine needed.

By every means this improved the lives of men. The famous wealth chart is the most dramatic. The wealth of the Western man was virtually flat through history; wealth was transferred, not developed, by theft or, worse, war. Except for those rare episodes--like the Spanish stumbling on South American gold, the wealth of the West was stagnant through history. Until Newcomen. Then the wealth curve became a hockey stick.

And everything changed. We no longer froze in the dark, died of heat prostration or starved. Machines cut lumber for good houses. Irrigation and fertilizer nourished increasing crops. Relief efforts arrived in hours or days, not months or years. 

Climate-related deaths are down 98 percent over the last 80 years. Affordable and abundant energy is the cornerstone of human progress. And fossil fuels are the most affordable and abundant — alternative energy sources are either too expensive, too difficult to access or simply inefficient. There may be trouble now with fossil fuels. It may hide some significant downsides. But they can not be replaced at their availability or cost. That gap must be considered. And it is the third World, those trying to take advantage of the available and cheap energy sources that the West has enjoyed for the last two centuries, that will suffer most from its decline.

Cab Thoughts 2/11/15

"In the realm of ideas, everything depends on enthusiasm; in the real world, all rests on perseverance."- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Two groups of researchers in Asia have found fossils of early hominids that do not quite fit sapien, habilis or Neanderthal.

 

Obama, in his State of the Union address, called for the elimination of the tax break for education in 529 accounts. With all the trouble with education costs this decision might seem strange, especially when he reversed his position a few days later. And, as such, it may not seem important. But it really is.
First, some background. There is about one-third trillion dollars in tax exempt 529 accounts and the estimate for the next 20 years is 2 trillion dollars. There is one half trillion dollars in Roth IRAs and there will be much more with time. There are trillions of dollars in tax deferred/exempt accounts in insurance plans and every year--over the last 6 congresses--laws have been proposed to overturn those insurance exceptions.
So what does all this mean? Obama's decision aside--because he is certainly not a consistent or decisive thinker--the government is generally willing to make promises that seem to fit into a general philosophy but is equally willing to violate either the spirit or the specifics of those promises shamelessly. Secondly, these politicians are primarily interested in the money either personally or to forestall the problems their poor or self-centered decisions will inevitably cause. Third, no one can count on these people.

 

There are a lot of former physicists wandering around investment houses. One guy has a funny view: Stocks and bonds are matter. They are things. They are particles. They literally are physical objects. Credit and volatility are not matter. They are forces very similar to gravity. As credit is the willingness or ability to repay, it is a feeling, a sensation, a psychological construct. But it is not a thing. So the complex--almost mystical--behavior of economic forces on things he sees as, to some extent, immeasurable and unpredictable.



Saturn's moon Titan is a world with active weather -- including times when it rains a liquefied version of natural gas.   

 

An interesting assessment of terrorism, which is described as the policy of the weak. Damage to people, big damage, rarely has much effect. The example used is the Battle of the Somme, in 1916, early in the first war. On the first day of the battle 19,000 members of the British army were killed and another 40,000 wounded. By the time the battle ended in November, both sides together had suffered more than a million casualties, which included 300,000 dead. Yet this unimaginable carnage hardly changed the political balance of power in Europe. It took another two years and millions of additional casualties for something finally to snap. The flaw in terrorism is that it leaves the enemy largely intact and permits him to dictate most of the action.

Terrorism is an attack on a society's perceived safety. The impact--and success--of terrorism is entirely a function of the society's magnification of the event.

 

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/02/money-laundering.html

 

Ditzy David Duchovny, only six years before landing the role in X-Files, was a Ph.D. student studying literature at Yale University, planning to become a writer.

 

Angelina Jolie is more admired around the world than Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama, according to a new survey.

 

The top drug dealer on the online black market website Silk Road was Connelis Ja Slomp, aka “SuperTrips”, a 23 year old man from the Netherlands who made over $3 Million from selling drugs on the website Silk Road. The man shipped 104 kilograms of MDMA, 566,000 ecstasy pills, four kilos of cocaine and other drugs through the mail to customers who bought his product on the website, according to court records.

An aside note: In New York State, out of all Molly capsules and powder seized in the state over 4 years, only 13 percent contained MDMA.

 

The Confederate submarine, the hand-cranked H.L. Hunley, sank the Union warship Housatonic in winter 1864 and then disappeared with all eight Confederate sailors inside. Its remains were discovered in 1995 in waters off South Carolina.

Ultracrepidarian: adjective: Giving opinions beyond one’s area of expertise. noun: One who gives opinions beyond one’s area of expertise. From Latin ultra (beyond) + crepidarius (shoemaker), from crepida (sandal). Earliest documented use: 1819.  This word comes with a story.

The story goes that in ancient Greece there was a renowned painter named Apelles who used to display his paintings and hide behind them to listen to the comments. Once a cobbler pointed out that the sole of the shoe was not painted correctly. Apelles fixed it and encouraged by this the cobbler began offering comments about other parts of the painting. At this point the painter cut him off with “Ne sutor ultra crepidam” meaning “Shoemaker, not above the sandal” or one should stick to one’s area of expertise.

Columbian authorities arrested 2,038 people in 2012 who were involved in various kidnapping and ransom incidents. 

 

Rigel, the star that is Orion’s western “foot”, is just 8 million years old.  The stars of Orion’s Belt are even younger. They formed about 5-6 million years ago, around the same time our ancestors Australopithecus were spreading across the African continent.

 

Gallup defines a good job as 30+ hours per week for an organization that provides a regular paycheck. Right now, the U.S. is delivering at a staggeringly low rate of 44%, which is the number of full-time jobs as a percent of the adult population, 18 years and older. Gallup's CEO says that has to be 50% with a bare minimum of 10 million new, good jobs to replenish America's middle class. In a recent article he is critical of the government's unemployment numbers. If someone is unemployed and has subsequently given up on finding a job -- or if you've stopped looking over the past four weeks -- the Department of Labor doesn't count you as unemployed. If you perform a minimum of one hour of work in a week and are paid at least $20 -- maybe someone pays you to mow their lawn -- you're not officially counted as unemployed. Those working part time but wanting full-time work--if you have a degree in chemistry or math and are working 10 hours part time because it is all you can find --the government doesn't count you as unemployed.



What is.....House Resolution No. 41?

 

Princeton University's first big benefactor, John Green, sold opium in the Pearl River Delta with Warren Delano, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's grandfather. Boston's John Murray Forbes's opium profits financed the career of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and bankrolled the Bell Telephone Company.

 

Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British scientist who helped developed the atomic bomb, was arrested in 1950 in Great Britain for passing top-secret information about the bomb to the Soviet Union. Fuchs' capture set off a chain of arrests. Harry Gold, whom Fuchs implicated as the middleman between himself and Soviet agents, was arrested in the United States. Gold thereupon informed on David Greenglass, one of Fuchs' co-workers on the Manhattan Project. After his apprehension, Greenglass implicated his sister-in-law and her husband, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. They were arrested in New York in July 1950, found guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage, and executed at Sing Sing Prison in June 1953.

 

Interesting. Diana Taurasi's Russian team, UMMC Ekaterinburg, is paying her more than her WNBA salary to take the WNBA season off. UMMC Ekaterinburg pays Taurasi $1.5 million, while her 2015 WNBA salary would've been right around the maximum of $109,500. She was last year's runner-up MVP.

 

The combination of oil and small business continue to influence the recent recovery. America’s oil & gas boom has added $300–$400 billion annually to the economy. Without this contribution, GDP growth would have been negative and the nation would have continued to be in recession. The typical U.S. firm in the oil & gas industry employs fewer than 15 people.

 

The Rule of St. Benedict:  Benedict (c. 480 AD to 543 or 547 AD) was a religious ascetic whose rules for ascetic living were highly representative of ascetic principles in other philosophies and religions. The early Middle Ages have been called "the Benedictine centuries." 

 

AAAaaaaaannnnnnnddddd....a graph:

 

Books on Climate Change: Little Ice Age

The second book on Climate Change is "Global Crisis: War, Climate Change; Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century," by Geoffrey Parker, which tries to show a "fatal synergy" between climatological and political factors that produced turmoil from Europe to China in the period called "the Little Ice Age" (LIA) between the 1640s and 1690s. Unusual weather, protracted enough to qualify as a change in climate, correlated strongly with political upheavals as to constitute causation for the author.




Whatever caused the LIA — decreased sunspot activity and increased seismic activity were important factors — it caused, among other horrific things, "stunting" that, Parker says, "reduced the average height of those born in 1675, the 'year without a summer,' or  during the years of cold and famine in the early 1690s, to only 63 inches: the lowest ever recorded." Such temperature declines "decreases the number of days on which crops ripen by 10%, doubles the risk of a single harvest failure, and increases the risk of a double failure six fold." For those farming at least 1,000 feet above sea level this temperature decline "increases the chance of two consecutive failures a hundredfold."
His conclusion: It is not surprising that more wars took place during the 17th-century crisis "than in any other era before the Second World War."




Correlation and causation are difficult concepts for most and probably should be avoided. But the fragility of the period--and the suddenness of the change--is provocative.

Books on Climate Change: The Third Horseman

Two new books have arrived with different slants on climate change. This is a thumbnail sketch of the first,

"The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century,"  by William Rosen. A second one will follow.

The Horsemen of the Apocalypse are four torments of mankind as seen and described by John the Evangelist in The Book of Revelations. The four riders are seen as symbolizing Conquest, War, Famine and Death respectively who precede the Final Judgment.
The third rider is Famine.
The third rider is the only rider with whom there is sound, actually speech. "When He broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, “Come.” I looked, and behold, a black horse; and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; and do not damage the oil and the wine.”--Revelation 6:5-6
 "....and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine". This suggests to some that the black horse's famine drives up the price of grain but leave oil and wine supplies unaffected (though out of reach of the ordinary worker). The various political and economic views may make of these pronouncements what they will.

Rosen's book is a story like a dream of Pharaoh: Feast matures to famine.

From the end of the 9th century to the beginning of the 14th, the Northern Hemisphere was warmer than at any time in the last 8,000 years. Warming increased the amount of arable land — there were vineyards in northern England
The need for land on which to grow cereals drove deforestation. The warming period allowed populations to grow. A population explosion gave rise to towns, textile manufacturing and new wealthy classes. Huge economic, demographic and social evolution rode the wave of production. Warriors got greedy.

Then, near the end of the warming period, came the sudden and severe winters of 1309-1312, when polar bears could walk from Greenland to Iceland on pack ice. Early in that century, 10% of the population from the Atlantic to the Urals died. The cold conspired with rain to decrease the food supply. In 1315 there was rain for 155 consecutive days and topsoil was washed away. Upwards of half the arable land in much of Europe was gone; hunger resulted in early death, the death of babies. Even cannibalism. The Brothers Grimm began to write stories of terrible deprivation. Two separate animal epidemics killed nearly 80 percent of northern Europe’s livestock. Wars between Scotland and England, France and Flanders, and two rival claimants to the Holy Roman Empire destroyed much of the remaining farmland. One eighth of the European population died.
The Third Horseman, Famine, rides a black horse, and carries a set of scales; Famine is the result of imbalance.

If you survived, the Bubonic plague--the “Black Death”--followed in the mid-fourteenth century. The Black Plague was so terrible--it killed one third of the population of Europe, towns disappeared--that we forget the terrors of the Great Famine.

Sunday 2/8/15

In the Gospel today, Peter's mother-in-law is sick with a fever. Christ cures her. So He does throughout His public life. 
Thomas Jefferson reconstructed a bible without Christ's miracles and wrote of the result: "A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus." 
The purpose of miracles can be debated, especially with Jefferson's acclamation of the Christian philosophy as profound without them. Christ's healings, though, point to a serious problem among men: Inequality. Despite the rantings of politicians, the greatest inequality of man is that of health. Christ is gently intervening there, as He does later with the great equalizer, Death.

Cab Thoughts 2/7/15

Republics are created by ideals and preserved by process.--Aleric Phlogiston

Dr. Seuss was Theodor Seuss Geisel who took his pseudonym in his senior year at Dartmouth. He was a bit of a goofball and he continued his life with that purpose. When he was a student at Oxford, and banned by school regulations from driving a motorcycle, he tied dead ducks to his handlebars to pass his vehicle off as that of a poultry deliveryman. When living in New York City and finding himself with a telephone number one digit different from a local fish market, he would send his own cardboard fish to those who called him with their order. When trying to quit smoking in his fifties, he carried a corncob pipe empty of tobacco but full of dirt, in which he had planted radish seeds; he would suck on the pipe while riding the bus, stopping every now and then to take out an eyedropper of water and squeeze a few drops into the bowl. To anyone who took the bait he would explain that he was "Watering the radishes."
At the age of eighty, Geisel had his anti-nuclear war Butter Battle Book on the best-seller lists for months; at eighty-two, he published his last book with the wonderful title, You're Only Old Once. He told reporters that "Age has no effect on me. I surf as much as I ever have. I climb Mount Everest as much as I ever have...."

The Taliban said Wednesday that they captured Mullah Abdul Rauf Khadim, a renegade insurgent and ex-Guantanamo detainee who was in Afghanistan recruiting for the Islamic State, in this messy internecine conflict between violent Islamist regimes. You would think homicidal maniacs would all be on the same side.

Hating machines is embarrassing, but I have hated machines. I hated a car so deeply that I got rid of it before it was paid for, threatened the president of the company with legal action unless he let me out of the contract and refused to even look at a car from the company since. I'm beginning to feel that way about my iPhone. First, it seems to be a credit card with a phone attached. Second, it is so complex that it is very hard to work. There is a small button on it that you can inadvertently activate that turns the phone off. I am always finding one of these little quirks and have to seek help from a mildly indulgent twenty-year-old at the accursed Apple store who patiently guides me through the obvious. Now that I think of it, maybe I just hate twenty-year-olds.

 

Rod McKuen has died. I never had a lot of regard for him. He was fond of synesthesia, the mixing of senses--also a neurological quirk. "A loud yellow shirt" is synesthesia. His famous book title, "Listen to the Warm" is as well. I've always thought of it as sort of a linguistic trick and not very notable. When I looked it up I learned it was a technique favored by Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. This is an example from Shakespeare: "To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion..." And a famous one from Dante on Inferno: “Back to the region where the sun is silent.” So....I'll just be quiet.

75% of German sailors in U-Boats in WWII were killed in action.

In each of the last 6 years, more businesses have closed in the United States than have opened.  Prior to 2008, this had never happened before in all of U.S. history.

The Alaskan pipeline used to transport 2 million barrels of oil a day. It now sends one half million. Why? The area of drilling in Alaska has been shrinking by federal law and that has been dramatically impacted by Obama's recent executive order. Less and less oil available domestically requires more and more imported from the people who hate us. Why would anyone think that a good idea?

A theater group at Mount Holyoke College recently announced it would no longer put on The Vagina Monologues in part because the material excludes women without vaginas. Inclusion, I guess, has its negative side.

 

David Stockman talking about Obama's recent remarks about income inequality, mainly as a function of stock market growth: "...[Obama]... is talking about a symptom, but he's clueless as to the cause. The cause is not capitalism. The cause is not some entrepreneur out there trying to invent something and improve the performance of his business. The problem is in the Eccles building [home to the main office of the Fed] and in the 12 people sitting there and thinking that interest rates are some magic elixir that'll cause this very troubled and difficult economy to revive," Stockman said. "It's not true," he said. "These people are dangerous and destructive, and they're creating this massive income inequality that, sooner or later, is going to cause a huge political reaction."
He expects the market to decline--as it has a bubble-like artificiality--and believes then the credibility of all the central-bank-dominated policy will be totally repudiated. Scary stuff.

Benedict Cumberbatch's ancestors owned Cleland Plantation, in Barbados, in the 18th and 19th centuries. This totally worthless bit of information is being dredged up because of his recent public use of the word "colored," currently on the Index of Forbidden Words. I am sure he will be gleefully punished for this most unfortunate (and evil) genetic association for which he is apparently responsible.

 

A report released Wednesday by the World Resources Institute, which the New York Times calls a "prominent environmental think tank," blasts bio-fuels as land hogs that will raise the price of food while doing little to meet the world's energy needs or fight global warming. Just amazing.

Scabrous: adjective: 1. Rough: having small raised dots or scales. 2. Salacious. 3. Difficult to deal with; knotty. From Latin scaber (rough). Earliest documented use: 1585. 

 

Who is.....Eddie Slovik?

 

The Muslim Brotherhood called for “a long, uncompromising jihad” in Egypt just days after a delegation of the Islamist group’s key leaders and allies met with the State Department, according to an official statement released this week. “The fact that the Brotherhood issued its call to jihad two days after its meeting at the State Department will be grist for endless anti-American conspiracy theories about a supposed partnership between Washington and the Brotherhood,” said Eric Trager, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). “The State Department should have foreseen what an embarrassment this would be.” I love when these guys are referred to in the news as the "Muslim Bros.," as if they were like Warner Bros. or the Super Smash Bros..

 

Golden oldie: 
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/01/heizenberg-and-politics.html
 

The Price of Inequality by Stiglitz is ostensibly about "income inequality" that results from crony capitalism, moneyed access to government power and other influence. But this is only distantly related to inequality; its major element is corruption. The inequality--which I would not deny--is a by-product of corruption and that is where the focus should be. So why the emphasis upon the side-effect? The problem is, if corruption is the cause, why would anyone expect the corrupt politicians to make it better?

One recent survey discovered that 55% of Americans believe that the American Dream either never existed or that it no longer exists.

If anyone believes in the insights of the Fed, then they should believe this from the Philadelphia Fed's Charles Plosser:

".... if we believe that monetary policy is doing what we say it’s doing and depressing real interest rates and goosing the economy and we’re in some sense distorting what might be the normal market outcomes at some point, we’re going to have to stop doing it. At some point the pressure is going to be too great. The market forces are going to overwhelm us. We’re not going to be able to hold the line anymore. And then you get that rapid snapback in premiums as the market realizes that central banks can’t do this forever. And that’s going to cause volatility and disruption."
Sooooooo.........what does this mean? And, if it means that the Fed is beginning to see less and less of a result in monetary manipulation, what happens when everyone else either believes this guy or figures it out for himself?

After adjusting for inflation, median household income has fallen by nearly $5000 since 2007. More than 101 million U.S. adults do not have a job right now.

The plans of government management are always stymied by the realities of the work-a-day world. News out of Detroit is that what is selling as gas prices fall are..............big trucks, SUVs and high-performance luxury cars.

 

AAAAannnnnddddd......funny picture: