Geological Events and Hubris

Old NFO has a post about the amount of ash being spewed into the atmosphere by Mount Sinabung in Indonesia. The volcano has put out the equivalent of 7 years of human made pollution into the atmosphere in just 2 days. It's a good reminder of how puny man's efforts are when compare to nature.

For example, the Hiroshima bomb was equivalent to about 15,000 tons of TNT. The largest nuclear weapon ever exploded was done by the Russians. It was called the Tsar Bomb and it was equivalent to 50,000,000 tons of TNT, or over 3,000 times the yield of the Hiroshima weapon.

I've blogged about volcanoes and the Volcanic Explosive Index before. The highest VEI is 8. That is equivalent to 150,000,000 tons of TNT or 3 times the Tsar Bomb. Why should we care? Well, just a little ways from Mount Sinabung is Lake Toba. The lake was formed over 70,000 years ago by the eruption of a super volcano. That eruption had an VEI of 8 and the theory is that it almost made mankind extinct. Another large eruption in recent history was Mount Tambora, also in Indonesia, that caused the year without a summer in 1816. That one had a VEI of 7, which is 1/10 of Lake Toba.

I hope that Mount Sinabung is acting like a relief valve and venting excess pressure from the nearby super volcano. If not, the anthropomorphic climate change folks may have to rethink their theory.

Green Lies and Taxes

By now you have probably heard about the agreement Obama made with the auto industry to increase the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. It will be achieved by raising the CAFE 5% every year starting in 2017. While everyone accepts that this will increase the cost of a car, how much that increase will be is uncertain, but the media gives us the good news that the fuel cost savings will make u p for the increased cost of a new car.

Really? Let’s take a look at it and see if that statement passes the smell test.

Let’s say you drive 15,000 miles per year and let’s say that you drive a car that gets 30 miles to the gallon. Over the course of a year, you will burn 500 gallons of gasoline (15,000 miles divided by 30 miles per gallon). If we assume that gasoline costs $4.00 per gallon, you will spend $2,000 for gasoline.

Now, if you suddenly get a new car that gets twice the mileage (60 mpg) it stand to reason that you will burn half as much gasoline and spend half as much money. Therefore, you will spend $1,000 on gas and your savings for the year will be $1,000!

Do you really think that this savings will offset the additional cost of the car that will meet Obama’s CAFE standard? Anyone? Bueller?

If the additional cost of these high mileage cars is $5,000, you will either need to drive 75,000 miles in a year or the price of gasoline will need to increase to $20.00 per gallon. Does either of these things seem likely?

How much are you personally willing to pay to improve the environment because, believe me folks, the additional cost of these high mileage cars will passed on to the consumer and the difference will not be balanced by fuel savings.

There is a saying that if you put a frog in hot water, it will jump out. But if you put him in cold water and slowly raise the temperature, he will stay and boil to death. The government is treating you like a frog. It will slowly ramp up the cost of automobiles hoping you won’t notice the personal cost.

Let’s call this agreement what it is – It’s a tax on the American people. It’s as much of a tax as if the government increased your tax bracket but they do it with regulations instead of changing the tax code. And the frogs don’t notice.

Changes in Latitude

Today I left the ice box known as Ohio. When I went to the car this morning, the temperature was 7 F. Several people had started their cars and left them to warm up unattended. I guess they weren't too worried about car thieves in sub freezing weather and, besides, they were probably rentals.

This trip was a good reminder of why I like the South. You don't need to keep ice scrapers in your car. You don't need two sets of tires (snow tires and summer tires). You don't freeze your fingers and toes trying to clean the windshields. If you fall on your ass its probably because you drank too much and not the ice underfoot.

Arriving in Houston it was a balmy 75 F.

More Ice Box

Temperature this AM was 9 degrees! I had forgotten the joys of scraping ice off of windshields in single digit temperatures. Nose mucous freezing. I drove for miles before the engine heated up enough to register on the dashboard gauge. Thank Allah for the heated seats in my rental "People's Wagon".

Saw the aftermath of a spin out on the way to the office. The car was backwards into a snow bank. Police were in attendance.

This afternoon, I noted that there had been enough melt to coat the roads in a thin film of water. With a temperature of 23 F, there will be patches of Black Ice tonight.

Into the Ice Box

Yesterday I flew up to Ohio to attend a meeting. Temperatures here are in the mid-teens, and that's during the day. The rental car was a block of ice. Its so cold that the snow squeaks when you walk in it. The local businesses don't seem to understand that they should clear their parking lots and sidewalks - they are covered in packed snow and ice. Tire ruts freeze into ice ridges. This is prime condition for "slip and fall" lawsuits. I bet the insurance companies are having fits.

I can't wait to get back South.

Hibernatin'

The trip to the Land of the Morning Calm was cancelled at the last minute. Then they decided to change the entire scope of the project. We've been scrambling to try to keep the same schedule for our deliverables but some of them may be a tad late.

Cold weather descended over the weekend. We prepared by plucking the citrus from our trees, covering a few tropical plants, setting up my insulated lean-to and heating light over the water riser to the house and getting in some good movies. It was a good thing that I wasn't in Korea because Saturday AM dawned to find that the downstairs heat pump was not functioning. Luckily, it was only a 50a fuse for the fan unit. A quick trip to the local hardware store took care of the problem. Had I had been overseas, it might have been a larger problem.

So the weekend was spent hunkered down and WOW (waiting on weather). The high pressure system that was sucking cold air down here is supposed to move off and a low will bring warm, moist air in from the Gulf.

Green Schemes

I had a couple of things come across my desk recently. They were electrical power generation ideas developed by entrepreneur - inventors who were seeking some engineering assistance or wanted us to incorporate them into a facility. The business development guy kicked them down to me for comment.

Let me start by saying one thing:

You Cannot Disobey the First Law of Thermodynamics.

The First Law states, very simply, that energy can be transformed (changed from one form to another), but cannot be created or destroyed.

Yes, I may be a Luddite in that I refuse to recognize the genius of your invention/machine/idea and stick with the old ways but I have never been mislead by the First Law and I won't ignore now on the pain of going to Engineering Hell. And your case isn't helped when you quote power generating capacities that don't make sense and are in units that don't exist. And how much sense does it make to capture the kinetic energy in the pressure from a natural gas well by expanding it in a mechanical device when there are oodles more energy available if you just burn the stuff?

And a video of your machine just chugging along with no load on it and no voice over describing how it works and what is happening just does not do it for me. You should try selling it to the Shark Tank or the Dragons Den.

And for that reason, I'm out!

Senate Roll Call Vote 295

There was a vote in the Senate yesterday that has gone unnoticed but may have a big effect on your life. David Vitter introduced an amendment to HR 2996, the funding bill for the Dept of Interior, Environment and other agencies that would prohibit the Climate Change Czar, Carol Browner, from directing any activities of the agencies funded by the act. To me, that seems reasonable. Carol Browner has not been approved by any Senate confirmation process so why should she have any power to direct federal agencies? Well, in a partisan vote, Senator Vitter's amendment was tabled. The voting record is here. Carol Browner's resume, along with the resumes of her fellow czars, can be found here.

Folks, this is why you will wake up one day and find that everything has changed and you won't know how it happened. You will not hear about this vote on the news but it could have grave consequences for the country, the economy and your life. Your freedoms will be taken from you in pieces so small that you will never know it happened. They will be taken in obscure votes such as this one until what you thought was your government is no longer there. If you trust our president to give power to people that evade a vetting and approval process, then you are probably OK with this situation. I am not!

More Junk Science from Obama

Steven Chu, Obama’s Energy Secretary has stated that if we paint our roofs and roads white, we will offset the effects of automobiles on global warming by 11 years. Can the Nobel Committee make him give his prize back?

First we have the idea of some geo-engineering experiment to block the sun's rays and now we have the proposal to paint everything white. These suggestions show a clear lack of understanding of basic thermodynamics, especially radiation heat transfer. And these guys are shaping our energy policy.

The earth has a property called “albedo”. Albedo is a measure of the reflectivity of an object. On a macro scale, the albedo of the earth is determined by the fact that our rock is covered 71% by water. The amount of surface area of the earth covered by roofs and roads is miniscule. Painting your roof white will not change the albedo of the earth. It will change the albedo of your house, but that may not be desireable, especially if you live in northen climes.

The earth is heated by the suns rays. These rays are in the UV and visible spectrum. They pass easily through the earth’s atmosphere and heat the ground/ocean. We know that hot objects give off radiation and some of that heat is radiated back into space, but that radiation is in the infrared range of the spectrum and these rays don’t penetrate the earth’s atmosphere all that well so most of the heat remains trapped under the blanket of air that makes up our atmosphere.

Think of your car on a summer day. I don’t care if your car is white or black, the sun's rays come through the windows and heat up the interior. The heat stays tapped inside the car because the hot car seat cannot radiate its excess heat back through the glass.

You can go paint your roof white if you want to. It might reduce your air conditioning bill by a few dollars. Me, I won’t waste the paint.

More Unintended Consequences

The London Times is carrying a story about compact fluorescent bulbs and mercury poisoning in China. You should know by now (and if you don't, you've had Rectal-Cranium Disorder) that fluorescent bulbs contain mercury. If you break one, you have to take special caution when cleaning it up. You can't toss them in the trash. They have to go in the hazardous waste pile. But now we know that the Chinese that work in the factories that make these things are being poisoned by the mercury they contain. So, as you pat yourself on the back for being soooo environmentally aware, know that a poor Chinaman is suffering for you.

The link to the article is here.

Global Warming Cure??

Obama Science Advisor John Holdren’s idea of injecting sulphur dioxide (SO2) into the atmosphere sounds like “we had to destroy the world in order to save it”. I decided to do some back of the envelope calculations to test the feasibility of his idea.

We know that volcanic eruptions have caused global cooling (volcanic winter) in the past so let’s look at them as a model for Dr. Holdren’s idea.

Volcanic eruptions are classified by their “Volcanic Explosivity Index” (VEI). This is a number between 1 and 8 that relates to the amount of material the volcano ejects. The amount of material ejected is measured in cubic kilometers. A cubic kilometer is a cube that is over a half mile on a side. An eruption with a VEI of 8 ejects 1,000 cubic kilometers of stuff. One with a VEI of 7 ejects 100 cubic kilometers of stuff, and so on by factors of 10. For comparison, let’s look at some well known eruptions.

Mount St. Helens in 1980 had a VEI of 5
Mount Pinatubo in 1991 was on the high end of 6
Mount Tambora in 1815 was on the high end of 7

(By the way, the USA has had a couple of 8s back in prehistoric times. Where? Yellowstone!)

Mount St. Helens didn’t seem to cause much of a volcanic winter. But Mount Pinatubo is known to have reduced global temperature by 1 degree F for about 2 years. Mount Tambora caused the year without a summer and widespread starvation. So, if we were to try to control global temperature, we’d probably like to start with a Mount Pinatubo sized event and go from there.

It is known that Mount Pinatubo put 20,000,000 tons of SO2 into the atmosphere to a height of 35 kilometers. We can estimate the amount of energy required to do that using high school physics. Multiply the mass in kilograms by the height in meters and the gravitational constant and you get the energy in Joules required to raise that weight to that elevation.

(18.16 x 10**9 Kg)(35 x 10**3 m)(9.8) = 6.23 x 10**15 Joules

(note that I use the double asterisk ** to indicate scientific notation)

Well, hell! I don’t have a clue what a Joule is so let’s get that into something we all can recognize.

It so happens that a kiloton on TNT yields 4.184 x 10**12 Joules. The Hiroshima atomic bomb was 12.5 kilotons. Therefore, if we wanted to inject an amount of SO2 equivalent to the Mount Pinatubo eruption, we would need to expend the energy equivalent to 119 Hiroshima atomic bombs.

If you prefer BTUs, we’d need 5.9 x 10**12 BTUs. That’s a lot of heat! I leave to the reader to convert that into units of your preference.

I know that this is a rather simplistic analysis but I think it makes the point that the energy required to attain even a modest, and temporary cooling of the earth is massive.

It Ain't Broke....

There is a saying in the oilfield that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Obama science advisor John Holdren would do well to follow that piece of Cajun knowledge. Instead, he advocates "geoengineering" the planet to correct global warming. He forgets that every time man has sought to "improve" something on the planet, it has wound up to be a dismal failure, if not downright dangerous. Just consider the invasive species that have been introduced to areas with no natural predators and how they have taken over the environment. Can you say Kudzu Vine? Nutria? Zebra clams? Murphy's Law of Unintended Consequences rears its ugly head every time.

But John Holdren wants to inject material into the atmosphere to block the suns rays. I guess he didn't read about the summer of 1816 when Mount Tambora did the same thing with catastrophic results for Europe and the USA. What if he actually succeeds in his crazy scheme and we can't grow any food because he starts a new ice age. Make sure you hold on to your guns because you will need them when the food riots start.

And its not like he has a stellar record for being correct. But I guess being the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard gives him a pass.

I wish we could call a "do over" on his confirmation. He scares the fecal material out of me.

Olympic Pollution

If you haven’t heard about the pollution in Beijing by now, you must have just come from a cave. The high levels of pollution in China are beginning to cause concern about the health, welfare and performance of the Olympic athletes. I haven’t heard this much concern about breathing since the Mexico City Olympics. It’s a lucky thing for China that they are still a totalitarian society because the leaders are able to institute draconian measures to cut air pollution. They have cut the numbers of cars allowed on the street in half and shut down industry in an attempt to clear the air. In short, they are willing to cripple their economy and cause untold disruption to business in order to present a pretty façade to the world.

The pollution in China should strike home the point that soccer moms driving hybrid cars and T. Boone Pickens building windmills in Texas is not the solution to the world greenhouse gas problem (if you believe there is such a thing). About ¾ of the worlds population lives in China and India. And as you can see from the recent boom in automobile buying in China, they have money and they all want modern conveniences. Now, this is not a bad thing. The bad thing is that they are following in the tracks of the same old hydrocarbon paradigm that the west did.

The hybrid automakers should be selling their cars in China and India. They should be building houses with roofs made of solar cell. They should be erecting windmill farms as fast as they can. If the population of those countries were directed toward hybrids and alternative energy, their purchasing power would fuel demand for those products. With a high demand, the price will drop. It will also help the balance of payments.

So the next time some Green Party hack chastises you for driving an SUV, ask him why he isn’t proselytizing in Beijing or Bombay.

More Inconvenient Truths

Am I the only one or do you too think that when you take a piece of special effects and pass it off as reality in a documentary that maybe you ought to forfeit any awards for that documentary? ABC News had the following information concerning Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth".

Al Gore's "traveling global warming show," the award-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," includes a long flyover shot of majestic Antarctic ice shelves. But this shot was first seen in the 2004 blockbuster "The Day After Tomorrow." Sculpted from Styrofoam and later scanned into a computer, the ice shelf "flyover" looks real.
Related

Karen Goulekas, the special effects supervisor for "The Day After Tomorrow" said the shot is a digital image. She was glad Al Gore used it in the documentary since "It is one hell of a shot." Both movies use the shot to convincingly portray global warming, but it is left to the audience to decide if this created image can both entertain and educate us about our changing planet.

Start the recall!