When I was at MIT the Dean of Mechanical Engineering was an Electrical Engineer. After graduating he went to work for an electric company, Westinghouse, where was was put to work solving a problem with an electric motor which had a vibration problem. He did so well that he was assigned to solve other vibration problems. In time he rose to the top in the field of vibrations. It so happens that vibrations are part of the Mechanical Engineering domain.
• World, here I come, I just got my ABCs!
• Good, now we’ll teach you the rest of the alphabet.
The Captain
flunked out of MIT which did not turn out too badly, I’ve got from D to …
Yep, there are many great climate scientists whose initial area of expertise was physics. But, being a physicist doesn’t by itself give you any expertise in climate science, and it appears that Happer has no discernible expertise, just opinions that conflict with the actual science.
Um, there isn’t one thing called freon. What we think typically of as freon is dichlorodifluoromethane or more commonly R-12. That’s the stuff that was used in basically all refrigeration refrigeration up through the 1990s.
It was developed in the 1930s by General Motors. So that means the patent (if there was one) would have expired in the 1950s.
As far as crackpot conspiracy theories go, I give this one a 9 for nuttiness but only a 6.5 for execution. Most people don’t know anything about CFCs or how patents work and this was long enough ago that many people weren’t even born when this all happened. So the total addressable market is pretty big. But conspiracy theories work better if you involve the government. Involving the government would explain how Du Pont was able to keep the conspiracy running without exposing themselves.
From 1917 to 1919, DuPont invested $50 million in GM, becoming the automaker’s largest stockholder. Pierre S. du Pont, the chemical firm’s president, served as GM’s president from 1920 to 1923 and chaired GM’s board from 1923 to 1929. By that time, GM had surpassed Ford Motor Co. as the nation’s largest car manufacturer.
o o o o o o o o o o
But conspiracy theories work better if you involve the government. Involving the government would explain how Du Pont was able to keep the conspiracy running without exposing themselves.
On this day in 1957, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co., a major chemical company, to divest itself of its 23 percent stock holding in General Motors Co. The shares, it said, interfered with the free flow of commerce.
Climate alarmism doesn’t just waste trillions of dollars. It also harms the poor. It means more old people that can’t keep their homes heated. It can kill tens of thousands.
Climate change is a real challenge and we should fix it. But smartly.
He is not a fan of global leaders propose at the various summits.
Thanks! I watched one of his uTube videos quite some time ago. Bjorn Lomborg makes a lot of sense, the problem is not climate change per se, it’s
• Climate Change Religion, and
• Climate Change Politics
I fully embrace going to renewable fuels, not because of CO2 but because it makes a lot of sense even ignoring Climate Change Religion and Politics. As I have often said, distributed is better than central planning. Wind and solar, specially solar, are distributed with lots of benefits, a more reliable grid, lower cost to the consumer, and very importantly, less pollution from tailpipe emissions.
At the core of the renewable revolution is storage, until recently there was no practical large scale distributed solution. Batteries to the rescue.
The Captain
an atheist even about Climate Change
If CO2 is a poison why do we love beer, champagne, and soft drinks? Why do we use baking soda – NaHCO2? They should all be on the BANNED LIST!
BTW, I was watching a Climate Change documentary where they commented that the northern hemisphere was hotter than the southern hemisphere. Had they been sailors they would know why!
Onshore and offshore winds
These effects are what takes place during the sea breeze and land breeze. For instance, if the atmospheric pressure is high, and with a clear sky, the land warms up in the daytime and gets cold by nighttime. The result of this is that wind will blow from the sea at daytime towards the land, while at night, it will blow from the land towards the sea.
There is more ocean down south and more land up north. If they take the temperature during the day, the north is warmer, during the night, the north is cooler.
At the same time, the warming rates of the two hemispheres change over the decades. The following graph was about the possible effect of A-bomb testing. The green line shows the average Northern Hemisphere temp minus the average for the Southern Hemisphere. There appears to be a 60-year cycle.
I wouldn’t draw any conclusions about ‘appears to be a 60 year cycle’ from a graph that doesn’t even cover 120 years. It’s possible there are long term ocean current cycles causing such a phenomenon, but I don’t think we know that to be the case.
I expect that the difference in temp between northern and southern hemispheres has continued to climb over the last ~10 years not shown in the graph, as the global temperature has continued to climb.
captainccs is correct in relating this difference to there being more land up north than in the south. The north, where there is more land, warms more quickly because there is less thermal mass closely linked to the surface. If we assume both north and south are exposed to the same amount of incoming energy, more of that energy stays at/near the surface over land, where it can only penetrate a couple feet under ground. In the ocean, the sun’s rays can penetrate deep into the ocean before being converted to heat, and while most of it is converted to heat in the top 10 meters or so, the ocean water mixes, so some of that heat can be carried even lower.
Now, with global warming as more of the sun’s incoming energy is trapped near the Earth’s surface by increasing concentration of heat-trapping gasses like CO2 and CH4, in areas over the ocean, more of that energy is transported down below the surface area than over land, so it warms less at the ocean surface than the land’s surface.
I assume that is the case as well. However, as the graph shows there are periods of multiple decades where the south was warming more, so the situation is more complex than we are thinking.
When exactly does concern transition to “alarmist”? If a poorly designed baby crib is estimated to have a 0.1% chance of causing infant suffocation, is it alarmist to pull it off the market when it might result in lost jobs?
Risk assessment is all about probabilities for which there is always uncertainty. When the best available modeling based on the best available data suggest that there is a significant chance of catastrophic events occurring if global temperatures increase >3C, should that be ignored as alarmist?
Ironically the only reason renewables have reached their current level of economic competitiveness is because of Climate Change Politics. You know, stuff like tax breaks and other incentives, or large government grants supporting research in renewables.
Al Gore has accomplished far more for humanity than Bjorn Lonborg.
That’s only part of the reason! Without battery storage, wind and solar are very inefficient. Tesla’s serendipitous adoption of lithium ion batteries had a lot to do with making renewables economically viable.
Tesla would probably have gone bankrupt a few years ago without government-mandated carbon credits. It was a major revenue source back in the days when it wasn’t a profitable company. Even today, carbon credits are a significant revenue source.
“Climate Change Politics” made it possible for Tesla to be currently competitive with all those Chinese EV and battery makers.
Keep in mind, carbon credits come with no cost. Those are great margins. If you look at trailing 12 month from 2022 Q2, one can see the significance of the credit revenue:
In the last trailing twelve months (TTM) alone, Tesla generated US$1.6bln in revenues from selling carbon credits, comprising approximately 10% of its US$16.1bln underlying earnings.
10% of net revenue is nothing to sneeze at. In 2022 Q3 Tesla received $286M in credits, comparable to 2021 Q3 of $279M so I suspect the rest of the year will be much the same in terms of 12 month trailing average.
The importance of these credits for the development of Tesla is pretty obvious. For example, in 2019 Tesla had a net income of -$862M but made $593M in carbon credits.
Sort of depends on what 0.1% chance means. A 0.1% chance each night? Or in a baby’s life, etc.
But in any case 0.1% of 3.6M babies born in the US last year would be 3600 babies dying if they all had the same crib design.
