Blogs / Cosmic Variance

I am not sure if this is clean, or it’s green, but at least it doesn’t emit CO2.  The net is full of stories recently about new, miniature self-contain nuclear reactors which supply  25 megawatts of power, when and where you need it.  The technology was developed at Los Alamos National Lab, and is now apparently being commercialized via a company called Hyperion Power Generation, Inc. 

The miniature power plant  is truck-sized and buried underground for the five years it operates.  HPG says it has no internal moving parts, needs no maintenance, and emits no pollution (though I am guessing there amy be a few neutrons and gamma rays flying around, which is a good reason to bury it; HPG doesn’t talk about this).   After five years, you replace it, like a battery.   

It may be a while before one of these is literally in your back yard, since you probably don’t need 25 megawatts of power, and also because one of the units purportedly costs 25 million dollars.  But for, say, a university like mine which already has its own power substation, it might be quite feasible to install one of these babies underground, and enjoy much cheaper power, selling any excess back to the power company.

But all this kind of set off my inner skeptic…let’s do the math. Present commercial rates for power are about about 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. These mini-nukes last five years, putting out 25 MW. My trusty HP-15c tells me that this represents 219 million kilowatt-hours per year, or just over 2 cents per kilowatt hour!  That would be a nice savings. (Note – original post was in error here!)

Then, on the company’s own web site FAQ it ways that each module puts out 25 MW electric power, but 70 MW thermal!  Definitely don’t want that in my back yard – and so does one need a 70 MW cooling tower? Or use the waste heat somehow? This kind of ruins the nice picture of the thing sitting quietly underground while a couple strolls on the surface…70 megawatts is like 30 sticks of dynamite exploding per second.

In addition, of course, anti-nuclear activists will howl in protest: there are the obvious issues of nuclear waste storage (we won’t open Yucca Mountain until at least 2017), uranium mining, terrorism during transport, and more.  

But there may be plenty of applications where this would seem to be a great solution, like remote locations or already secure places with big power needs. In the long run we will need more nuclear power plants to offset carbon emissions.   Maybe this solution is better than giant multi-gigawatt installations?

One of my postdocs has turned me on to blackle.com. The simple idea behind Blackle is that it’s identical to Google, except for the energy efficient black background:

It’s a cute idea, though they should have chosen dark blue and gone for “Bloogle”.

Via Climate 411, through the intermediaries of Matthew Yglesias and Bradford Plumer, here’s a dramatic example of the government driving innovation — the number of patents granted for sulfur-dioxide control technologies per year, with major air-quality legislation marked.

The graph is originally from this paper (pdf) by Margaret Taylor, Edward Rubin, and David Hounshell. It illustrates a crucial point that both liberals and conservatives should be able to come together behind: the engines of free-market creativity can be brought to bear on global problems whose costs are all in the externalities. But it doesn’t just happen, if the short-term profitable course of action in the absence of massive government intervention is to keep despoiling the commons. Rather than legislating specific responses to complicated problems, change the incentive structure so that (for example) not polluting is more directly profitable than polluting. Right now, it’s much cheaper to drag oil out of the ground and belch greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than to think hard about alternatives. It’s far past time that we put our fingers on the scales to reward the hard thinking.

Al Gore will share this year’s Nobel Peace Prize with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for their efforts to increase awareness of the challenges of global climate change.

Congratulations to them and all that, but doesn’t this seem like yet another example where the Peace prize is given to someone whose record when it comes to peacefulness is somewhat mixed? Don’t forget here folks, Al Gore is the guy who invented the Internet. Have you ever looked at the Internet? There’s no peace there at all.

Now if only he could bring peace to his own office.

There’s been a bit of blogospheric buzz about this story in the Guardian that accuses the conservative American Enterprise Institute of offering $10,000 to scientists who will contribute articles to a collection responding to the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC report pins the blame for global warming squarely on human activity, and warns that the rate at which atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are growing has been accelerating in recent years. The AEI, meanwhile, is known for such sober assessments as The Global Warming Joke. So there is some concern that the AEI is simply bribing scientists to go along with Big Oil’s party line. Personally, I think the Guardian article is getting a lot of attention because the polar bear picture is really cute.

At the Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler digs up the actual letter from AEI scholars Steven Hayward and Kenneth Green, as well as a note to AEI employees from President Christopher DeMuth. The argument of those on the We Call It Life side of the climate-change fence is that the AEI isn’t offering a bribe to scientists to distort their positions — they’re just collecting a bunch of articles from voices that might be skeptical anyway. Adler:

In these letters AEI was certainly seeking out prominent analysts willing to participate in a critical examination of the IPCC report, but I don’t think the letter suggests AEI wanted Professor Schroeder or anyone else to tailor their views to AEI’s agenda. Rather it looks to me like an effort to encourage those who have been critical of climate projections in the past to provide a detailed assessment of the new IPCC report.

All of which is completely true. Think what you will of the practice, but this is how the game is played (as Jack Balkin points out, more sarcastically). The point is, there’s no need to bribe scientists to be skeptical about climate change, or to hold any other industry-friendly minority position. There are enough scientists out there that there will inevitably someone who sincerely holds that view, as small as the minority might be. All you have to do is ferret them out, and then use your money to give them a megaphone in the public arena. The role of ExxonMobil’s cash isn’t to buy people off, it’s to dramatically amplify the voices of a small number of skeptics, so that the political discourse about the environment is dramatically different in tone and balance from the professional scientific discourse. And at that, they’re doing a fantastic job.

When I was an undergraduate (bear with me here) I spent a summer working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. I worked with Sallie Baliunas, a CfA scientist who was a fellow Villanova astronomy grad, and was running an ambitious project to track chromospheric activity on a large sample of Sun-like stars. Sallie is an outstanding astrophysicist, and was a great advisor, as well as a friend. It’s no coincidence that I ended up going to grad school at Harvard’s astronomy department; the physics department didn’t like people from smaller schools and wouldn’t let me in, and Sallie helped convince the astronomy department to accept me.

Sallie also was, and continues to be, very right-wing, of the libertarian variety. Letting the free market do it’s job was the best strategy in nearly any circumstance, she firmly believed. Her interest in stellar variability led her to contemplating the role of Solar variability in the Earth’s climate, and she became convinced that changes in the Sun were essentially the only important factor in explaining changes in the Earth’s temperature. In particular, that human-produced emissions had nothing to do with it. Nothing about this belief was influenced in any way by large piles of cash offered by oil companies. But, once her views became known, they were more than happy to provide platforms from which to spread them; she’s now an editor at Tech Central Station, as well as a fellow of the George C. Marshall Institute.

Nobody could be more sincere in their views about climate change than Sallie is. I also happen to think that she’s dramatically wrong, as do the vast majority of (much more expert) scientists working on the question. But this is how the game is played — no need to bribe people when you can influence the public debate much more easily, and without fear that your targets won’t stay bribed. Unfortunately, oil companies have a lot more cash to spend on this purpose than the atmosphere does. Which is why public-minded scientists who agree with the carefully researched views of the IPCC need to keep hammering on the importance of doing something to fix this problem, before the damage is irrevocable.

I did want to highlight this bit from AEI President Chris DeMuth’s note to his employees:

Third, what the Guardian essentially characterizes as a bribe is the conventional practice of AEI—and Brookings, Harvard, and the University of Manchester—to pay individuals at other research institutions for commissioned work, and to cover their travel expenses when they come to the sponsoring institution to present their papers. The levels of authors’ honoraria vary from case to case, but a $10,000 fee for a research project involving the review of a large amount of dense scientific material, and the synthesis of that material into an original, footnoted and rigorous article is hardly exorbitant or unusual; many academics would call it modest.

I would like to go on record as not thinking of $10,000 for a review article as modest at all. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder why I’ve been doing it for years now without any honorarium whatsoever. If the AEI would like some review articles on the cheap, call me! I promise to be original, footnoted and rigorous.

I had the great pleasure last night of meeting Melissa of Shakespeare’s Sister fame and some of the great cast of characters she has assembled over at her blog, including Mr. Shakes, Litbrit, Paul the Spud, and others. The occasion was a visit to our northern suburb of Evanston to catch Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth. In fact I had already seen the movie, but was more than willing to see it twice. I am quick to admit that I am not a Gore fan, and the thought of paying hard cash to see a movie that consists mostly of him giving a Keynote presentation (there was plenty of Apple product placement) falls somewhat below “drinks at Clooney’s villa in Tuscany with the gang” on my list of exciting ways to spend an evening.

But it turns out to be a great film, oddly compelling, with at least one priceless joke about gold bars. It’s not a science documentary — many graphs have no labels on their axes (much less error bars), and much of the evidence adduced is anecdotal and aimed at the gut rather than the brain. But what anecdotes they are. It’s hard to see pictures of Russian fishing boats stranded in a barren sandy landscape that once was a major lake bed without thinking that something needs to be done.

There isn’t any scientific controversy over whether or not climate change is happening, or whether or not human beings are a major cause of it. That argument is over; the only ones left on the other side are hired guns and crackpots. But the guns are hired by people with an awful lot of money, and they’re extremely successful at sowing doubt where there shouldn’t be any.

Their task is made easier by the fact that the atmosphere is a complicated place, and the inherent difficulties in modeling something as messy as our climate. But climate models are not the point. The point is not even the dramatic upward trend in atmospheric temperature in recent years. The actual point is made clear by the plot of atmospheric CO2 concentration as a function of time, which I just posted a couple of days ago but will happily keep posting until I save the planet.

Here is the point: We are taking an enormously complex, highly nonlinear, intricately interconnected system that we don’t fully understand and on which everything about our lives depends — the environment — and repeatedly whacking it with sledgehammers, in the form of atmospheric gasses of various sorts. Statements of the form “well, we don’t really know what that particular piece of the system does, so we can’t be rigorously certain that smashing it with a sledgehammer would necessarily be a bad thing” are, in some limited sense, perfectly true. They are also reckless and stupid. The fact that there are things we don’t understand about the environment isn’t a license to do whatever we like to it, it’s the best possible reason why we should be careful. And being careful won’t spell the doom of our economic system, bringing global capitalism crashing to the floor and returning us all to hunter-gatherer societies. We just have to take some straightforward steps to mimimize the damage we are doing, just as we very successfully did with atmospheric chloro-fluorocarbons to save the ozone layer. And the best way to ensure that those steps are taken is to elect leaders who are smart and determined enough to take them.

Every now and then the world is trying to tell you something, and events conspire in a flash of synchronicity to reveal a truth so deep and powerful that ordinary genius alone would have been insufficient to figure it out. Such was the case recently, when I was leafing through Garry Wills’ New York Review of Books article on Harvey Mansfield’s studly paean to all that is virtuous and masculine, entitled simply Manliness. (Now, it’s true that the sight of Professor Mansfield giving a high-five to Stephen Colbert demonstrated pretty clearly that, on the electrical-appliances scale of manliness, Harvey is less of a drill press or band saw and more of a cappucino maker or perhaps a motorized salad spinner. But that doesn’t affect the persuasive grandeur of his argument.) At the same time, I was mulling over the implications of An Inconvenient Truth, the global-warming scare-movie from noted beta-male Al Gore. Mr. Tree-Hugger himself would prance about in front of his fancy charts and graphs that looked like this:

And then, girly-man that he is, he would act all scared that the world was going to melt or some such nonsense. Crazy alarmist.

In a flash of insight, it hit me: this must be feminism’s fault, somehow. Those pushy women have tipped the balance of the universal order, and thrown Nature’s intricate equilibrium out of whack. Fortunately, I was handed just the tool I needed to prove this obviously-correct hypothesis by Brad DeLong, in the form of Gapminder World from Google. Check it out, peeps: here is a graph of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, as a function of the ratio of girls to boys attending school in different countries.

You can see it right there, science doesn’t lie. The correlation is clear as the Los Angeles haze — countries that educate women are dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Now, unless you’re crazy enough to think that it’s the CO2 that is causing all those girls to go get themselves an education, I think the implication is obvious: feminism is destroying the planet. We can now add this to Professor Mansfield’s insight that gender equality leads to less exciting sex lives, as one more level-headed condemnation of these tiresome females and their outdated Enlightenment aspirations.

You’ll read on a blog or hear on the news that it is Bike to Work Day in California on Thursday May 18th. On your way to buy that pint of milk, you’ll smile indulgently at the well-meaning cyclists out there during the whole of California’s Bike to Work Week, trying not to curse them (as perhaps you usually do at other times of the year) for getting in your way as you pilot your nice comfortable car past them, probably over-revving the engine and driving way too close to them as you do so.

You click on one of the websites of a participating local transport organisation and cleverly remark to yourself how amusing it is that the prize you could win for bringing your bike onto their subway, train, or bus system that special day is…. a bike. So if you don’t have a bike, you can’t participate, and so can’t win a bike….which would allow you to participate. Well, maybe you could borrow one and give it a try…..? Anyway…..

You’ll agree that it is in principle a good thing that those cyclists do (and you noted before that you’ve seen many more of them in the last few weeks due to the rising gas prices), and that it is a pity that your own special situation makes it impossible for you to join them, or perhaps use the bus or train, or some combination of them. Or does it? You make a mental note to try it next year. Or perhaps the year after…..

Happy Bike to Work Day!

-cvj

Again, apologies to Girls Are Pretty.

This is not a Physics Blog, in my humble opinion. I can’t find anything about that in the about page. It is a blog that happens to be written by physicists. Some physicists are interested in things beyond physics. Those who don’t like that can stop whining and simply use the categories under which we classify our posts to look for what they want, and filter out what -and who- they don’t want. Or they can just go away.

‘Nuff said.

So. On I go with the irrelevant. Time for an update on Public Transport issues, which as everyone knows is not just about my own travel choices and eccentric lifestyle. It is about environment, health, and the future of our planet, just to name a few things. You’ll recall my delight in the new, bigger, generally excellent buses that were introduced on my route earlier this year. See this post. Well, about a month afterwards, they put flat screen tvs on the buses. Three or four in each bus! I was all prepared to be huffy and hissy about this. Can’t people be left alone to read a book or have a conversation with their neighbour without now having to deal with the noise of tvs advertising stuff at them? C’mon MTA people, I’m grading homeworks, writing film scripts and midterms here – this is my office – do you mind?!

Well, sure, there is advertising (not as much as I would have thought), but there’s actual news -even international news- and weather updates, and they do not have the volume up very high at all. I grudgingly admitted that it was not so bad.

Well, imagine my surprise one day when they started showing educational material! I looked up, and there were pictures of galaxies from the Hubble Space Telescope. Another day they had something on extrasolar planets…. wow! If people insist on staring at moving images on a screen instead of talking or reading a book, why not put something educational on the screen? I’d like to shake the hand of the person who thought this up and made it happen.

This morning I snapped a shot for you to see:

[Update: Just to be clear on what I'm saying about this, I drop in part of a comment I made to a reader:

What I am saying is that it is indeed an evil, but given the way they chose to implement it right now it is not nearly as bad as it can be; someone had the idea of at least trying to make the "evil" do something good, and not just be blaring advertisements. Just trying to see the positive side here. Frankly I'm still shocked to see Hubble pictures on a public bus anywhere. On my way back just now there was another -different- program showing lots of nebulae of various sorts (from supernova remnants to stellar nurseries), and showing their names. There were so many I'd never seen or heard of before...and all so beautiful of course. Might capture the imagination of some kid...or a parent who would tell their kid. Or just a random member of the public. Goodness knows where that could lead.

]

In other transport news: Recall my post on the Expo Line, which starts construction this (more…)

It is Earth Day today! So go out and do something……earthy, ok?

Have a look at this (from Hecate, the blog of, um…. a good witch):

So, it’s finally here! All the Earth Day gifts are heaped under the Earth Day tree, while all the old familiar Earth Day songs play softly in the background. In just a little while, the children will wake up and gather round to hear the Earth Day story, unwrap their Earth Day gifts, and look inside their Earth Day baskets to see what Gaia brought them. Then, the whole family, all three or four generations, will head off to church, or temple, or synagogue, or grove and give thanks for our lovely Earth on Earth Day. Finally, everyone will head to Grandma’s for the traditional Earth Day feast, followed by naps, football, and lots of happy family time together. Truth to be told, you’re almost glad that all the fuss is over. Earth Day ads have been on the radio and tv for months and it seems as if every year, Earth Day gets more and more commercialized and we move farther away from the true meaning of Earth Day.

Read the full post here (apologies for linking you to a post with a title with salty language, but the point she makes in the rest of the post about commercialism -or not- of holidays is worth reflecting upon from time to time).

But seriously folks, do pop your head into your neighbourhood and see if there are any Earth Day events going on. Join in one.

Happy Earth Day.

-cvj

P.S. Consider making every day Earth Day.