OT: Honest Analysis of Solar Power

l views yet again

Nice try. But if you want to label a view either "political" or "foolish" y ou have to explain why. Since the basic argument about anthropogenic global warming is scientific, you've missed the point that the science is quite s olid enough to make both the "denialist" and "it doesn't matter positions" look decidedly foolish.

The only political part in the anthropogenic global warming question is wor king out how we take the collective action which is obviously necessary.

The people who object to that are objecting to the word "collective" - as f ar as they are concerned, every problem has to be solved by the application of the free market. They don't seem to have noticed that we can't buy anot her planet, in the same way that they earlier found it difficult to appreci ate that you can't buy another ozone layer, or a new set of lungs if you've wrecked the set you were born with by smoking cigarettes.

Sadly, the foolish political view is all yours.

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cal views yet again

you have to explain why. Since the basic argument about anthropogenic glob al warming is scientific, you've missed the point that the science is quite solid enough to make both the "denialist" and "it doesn't matter positions " look decidedly foolish.

orking out how we take the collective action which is obviously necessary.

far as they are concerned, every problem has to be solved by the applicati on of the free market. They don't seem to have noticed that we can't buy an other planet, in the same way that they earlier found it difficult to appre ciate that you can't buy another ozone layer, or a new set of lungs if you' ve wrecked the set you were born with by smoking cigarettes.

more naive green-pov.

The park service installed a few solar panels on an adjacent maintenance building was all that happened. I doubt that the president was involved in the decision, much less considered it a significant installation. If the panels had been installed on the main house, I might have reconsidered my political observation, but a few panels to power perhaps a lawn sprinkler controller, is not an environmental policy statement.

Huh? Could you please decode that?

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tical views yet again

h" you have to explain why. Since the basic argument about anthropogenic gl obal warming is scientific, you've missed the point that the science is qui te solid enough to make both the "denialist" and "it doesn't matter positio ns" look decidedly foolish.

working out how we take the collective action which is obviously necessary .

as far as they are concerned, every problem has to be solved by the applica tion of the free market. They don't seem to have noticed that we can't buy another planet, in the same way that they earlier found it difficult to app reciate that you can't buy another ozone layer, or a new set of lungs if yo u've wrecked the set you were born with by smoking cigarettes.

There's nothing naive about my point of view

I've ploughed through the AIP website (and read a lot of printed material o n the subject as well).

Since you seem to be a brainwashed right-winger who declines to even try to construct an argument, this really isn't a plausible claim.

You sound like James Arthur, who sets aside a generation of climate science on the basis of what he was told at a dinner party by a failed would-be cl imate scientist.

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litical views yet again

ish" you have to explain why. Since the basic argument about anthropogenic global warming is scientific, you've missed the point that the science is q uite solid enough to make both the "denialist" and "it doesn't matter posit ions" look decidedly foolish.

is working out how we take the collective action which is obviously necessa ry.

- as far as they are concerned, every problem has to be solved by the appli cation of the free market. They don't seem to have noticed that we can't bu y another planet, in the same way that they earlier found it difficult to a ppreciate that you can't buy another ozone layer, or a new set of lungs if you've wrecked the set you were born with by smoking cigarettes.

on the subject as well).

to construct an argument, this really isn't a plausible claim.

ce on the basis of what he was told at a dinner party by a failed would-be climate scientist.

You sound like someone that thinks he can mind read, but cant. Why do such people always come up with silly explanations?

NT

James Arthur isn't a nitwit, but he is a right-winger, and believes all sorts of lying right-wing nitwit propaganda.

The argument is that solar panels only generate seven times as much energy over their life-time as as it costs to manufacture them in the first place.

According to right-wing nitwit theory, this is less than the energy yield required to keep our society running the way they want it to run, so solar panels become "under-unity" energy generators, not generating as much energy as they need to.

It's nonsense from start to finish, but rational argument doesn't get you anywhere if you want to keep on digging up fossil carbon, selling it as fuel and dumping the damaging CO2 produced in the atmosphere, for free.

I wonder where the "mind-read" came from? Perhaps NT entertains the delusion that I think he has a mind? He comes across as a pre-programmed parrot - and not an African Grey parrot either.

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litical views yet again

ish" you have to explain why. Since the basic argument about anthropogenic global warming is scientific, you've missed the point that the science is q uite solid enough to make both the "denialist" and "it doesn't matter posit ions" look decidedly foolish.

is working out how we take the collective action which is obviously necessa ry.

- as far as they are concerned, every problem has to be solved by the appli cation of the free market. They don't seem to have noticed that we can't bu y another planet, in the same way that they earlier found it difficult to a ppreciate that you can't buy another ozone layer, or a new set of lungs if you've wrecked the set you were born with by smoking cigarettes.

on the subject as well).

to construct an argument, this really isn't a plausible claim.

ce on the basis of what he was told at a dinner party by a failed would-be climate scientist.

It was one of the model-writers, employed by the government on one of the major climate models at the time--not failed at all--and nothing to do with a dinner party.

IOW you got every detail wrong, and made several up.

He said the models became uncorrelated with observed reality within a year or so.

Just looking at the models, anyone can see they're hopelessly naive--they'r e not faithful representations of known physical processes. They're collecti ons of fudge-factors and subjective characterizations.

Go ahead--extrapolate out two centuries. The moon's made of cheese, we're a ll under water, and the polar caps exploded. Twice.

Cheers, James Arthur

Bush's house is very green--passive solar, local stone, etc.

That's a pretty deliberate set of conscious decisions. Does O's house have PV?

The link noted that the people who received Carter's panels for free, pulled 'em out as being inefficient.

"For one thing, Unity College found them inefficient and has removed them."

Cheers, James Arthur

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political views yet again

olish" you have to explain why. Since the basic argument about anthropogeni c global warming is scientific, you've missed the point that the science is quite solid enough to make both the "denialist" and "it doesn't matter pos itions" look decidedly foolish.

n is working out how we take the collective action which is obviously neces sary.

" - as far as they are concerned, every problem has to be solved by the app lication of the free market. They don't seem to have noticed that we can't buy another planet, in the same way that they earlier found it difficult to appreciate that you can't buy another ozone layer, or a new set of lungs i f you've wrecked the set you were born with by smoking cigarettes.

al on the subject as well).

y to construct an argument, this really isn't a plausible claim.

ence on the basis of what he was told at a dinner party by a failed would-b e climate scientist.

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Bill has next to no company here that buys into his green views. Its not as if this is a dumb newsgroup.

NT

"...has 25,000 gallons of rainwater storage, gray water collection from sinks and showers for irrigation, passive solar, geothermal heating and cooling." Hmmm... I don't see solar electric power.

Just about any house that has sufficient property, a good solar location, and adequate funds, has already installed some form of solar heating or electric. Same with new home construction. It's not a political statement, but rather simple economics. In the long term, it's cheaper than paying the utility providers, especially after incentives.

Ummm... the White House is Obama's house.

However, if you mean his Chicago house... See any panels?

Ummm... perhaps you were as confused as the press and myself by assuming that the panels were solar electric panels. It would seem that they were solar water heater panels, not solar electric:

It would appear, that they were removed because they were rotting away: "For about twelve years, sixteen of the Carter Panels produced hot water for our campus cafeteria. Today, the maintenance crew is carefully moving those sixteen panels into storage. The roof rack holding the panels has not

to take them down before the mounting deteriorates further."

However, there was some testing of the "solar panels" for efficiency done by the students: See the first comment. "My team found that our solar panel had 24% efficiency, which means

solar thermal technology can get upwards to 70% efficiency."

Yep. Solar water heater panels, that were corroding away after 30 years in storage, might be a bit lacking in efficiency.

loset-green.html

Probably not. He lives a little further north than Dubbya, where the insola tion is lower, and owns rather less land over which to spread solar panels

- Dubbya's family were oil millionaires.

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A little more context might help.

A solar panel might make inefficient use of the sunlight falling on it - no ne of them convert all the energy available to electric power, and more mod ern panels tend to convert more of it - so Unity College might have replace d them with more modern panels. In fact it's difficult to imagine that stat ement being made in any other context. The Carter era is quite a while ago.

James Arthur would tend to suppress any suggestion that the panels were rep laced, rather than simply removed. One can't call him dishonest, but he doe s tend to be selective about the portion of the truth he presents, to the p oint of being downright misleading.

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foolish" you have to explain why. Since the basic argument about anthropoge nic global warming is scientific, you've missed the point that the science is quite solid enough to make both the "denialist" and "it doesn't matter p ositions" look decidedly foolish.

ion is working out how we take the collective action which is obviously nec essary.

ve" - as far as they are concerned, every problem has to be solved by the a pplication of the free market. They don't seem to have noticed that we can' t buy another planet, in the same way that they earlier found it difficult to appreciate that you can't buy another ozone layer, or a new set of lungs if you've wrecked the set you were born with by smoking cigarettes.

rial on the subject as well).

try to construct an argument, this really isn't a plausible claim.

cience on the basis of what he was told at a dinner party by a failed would

-be climate scientist.

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Right. The context was that his models didn't work, and he decided that nob ody else's did either. "Not failed at all" is something of a stretch.

Find your (James's Arthur's) original post.

ear > > or so.

Climate models are not supposed to correlate with observed reality except i n the broad sense that the right amount of heat moves from the equator to t he poles by more or less the right routes. Climate models aren't weather mo dels.

Since James Arthur was talking about work that precedes any data from the A rgo buoy program, the deep ocean current routes were unknown at the time - a chunk of unobserved reality.

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If they were only that, they wouldn't be much use. James Arthur has similar reservations about Keynesian economics - though there his obsessive affirm ation of the perfection of the wholly free market does explain why he's out of touch with reality.

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It seems unlikely that the polar caps could explode, even once, even with t he kind of model that somebody of James Arthur's expertise would write, or would imagine that somebody else would write.

Getting us all under water - or those of us who only live 10 metres above s ea level, which *is* a real possibility - involves having the Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps slide off into the sea.

The Greenland ice sheet will do it eventually - if people as silly as James Arthur conspire to prevent us doing anything to forestall it - as the Laur entian ice sheet slid off Canada at the end of the last ice age, and it loo ks as if the West Antarctic ice sheet is equally unstable.

The computer models that predict when that might happen are even more compl icated than climate models - mainly because it is a mechanical question, an d we don't known much about what the bottoms of the ice sheets look like, b ut the history of the end of the last ice age makes it clear that the ice s heets are going to slide off sometime in the next few centuries, if we keep on dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. The happy thought that they might melt in place makes modelling simpler, and puts off the sea level rise for quit e a lot longer, but it's just more of the denialist wishful thinking which James Arthur and John Larkin tout around here at regular intervals.

as if this is a dumb newsgroup.

"No company" is more wishful thinking. The group may not be dumb, but a lot of it is right wing.

talks at some length about the mechanism that persuaded some clever - but r ight-wing - physicists that political consequences trumped scientific accur acy on several similar issues that predate anthropogenic global warming.

And my views aren't "green". They are more survivalist.

you have to explain why. Since the basic argument about anthropogenic glob al warming is scientific, you've missed the point that the science is quite solid enough to make both the "denialist" and "it doesn't matter positions " look decidedly foolish.

Lets examine how scientific:

CO2 levels went up: YES scientific confirmed by measurement

CO2 is green house gas: YES scientific

man is causing CO2 increase: speculation, there are other possible cause s

the climate is changing: speculation, measurements ambiguous

temperature will rise: speculation from unproven simulations

oceans will rise: speculation from simulation

YES, there is a scientific basis for the THEORY AGW, but the conclusions ar e speculative at best. The theory has not been scientifically proven to be true.

Yes you can trot out a list of scientists that say they believe in AGW, (to keep their jobs) that does not constitute a scientific proof.

Bill, I do not call you disparaging names, please return the favor.

Mark

A newgroup mostly of high iq successful people, and nearly all right wing. What an odd coincidence.

fwiw i said next to no company

NT

h" you have to explain why. Since the basic argument about anthropogenic gl obal warming is scientific, you've missed the point that the science is qui te solid enough to make both the "denialist" and "it doesn't matter positio ns" look decidedly foolish.

ses

Wrong. The carbon isotope content of the C)2 in the atmosphere is changing

- Suess Effect

as more of it comes from the fossil carbon we are burning as fuel.

Wrong.

Wrong. It's already rising - quite rapidly in the Arctic - and the mechanis m is obvious.

Not exactly. There's some ten metres of sea level rise tied up in the Green land and West Antarctic ice sheets. The GRACE satellites show that both are losing mass steadily, but not all that fast. The problem comes when the ic e starts sliding off even faster - as it did from the Canadian ice sheet at the end of the last ice age. The process is hard to simulate, because the interesting stuff is going on at the bottom of the ice sheet, which is inac cessible.

are speculative at best. The theory has not been scientifically proven to be true.

No scientific theory is ever "proven to be true". Anthropogenic global warm ing is the best explanation of what we are seeing at the moment, and there is no alternative explanation that fits the data anything like as well. It predicts consequences that any prudent observer would want to avoid.

to keep their jobs) that does not constitute a scientific proof.

There is no such thing as scientific proof - as Popper pointed out, any val id scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable, and there's always going to b e a better and more complete hypothesis somewhere down the track.

At the moment anthropogenic global warming is the only viable explanation o f what's going on with earth's climate. There are a few alternative hypothe ses, but none of them look remotely plausible.

See if you can dig up anything - try to avoid denialist sources, since they push the alternative explanations, but ignore the responses in the literat ure that demonstrated the the ideas were rubbish.

The scientists who endorse AGW would probably lose their jobs if they didn' t - not for being non-conformist but rather for not knowing the literature as well as they should. Lindzen is famously non-conformist, and it hasn't c ost him his job, mainly because he puts up interesting alternative explanat ions, and everybody has fun shooting them down.

I don't have to call you disparaging names - I just have to point out that you don't know remotely enough about what you are talking about.

not as if this is a dumb newsgroup.

lot of it is right wing.

. What an odd coincidence.

Which isn't accurate.

is - in part - about the way a bunch of successful high IQ people - "Fred S eitz, Fred Singer, and a few other contrarian scientists" - "joined forces with conservative think tanks and private corporations to challenge the sci entific consensus on many contemporary issues".

They were endorsing total nonsense, and presumably knew it - which is more than can be said for the "high IQ" right-winger around here, who mostly hav en't heard of the Suess Effect. Why they felt it politically necessary to e ndorse pro-free market nonsense is spelled out in the book.

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s not as if this is a dumb newsgroup.

a lot of it is right wing.

ng. What an odd coincidence.

Seitz, Fred Singer, and a few other contrarian scientists" - "joined force s with conservative think tanks and private corporations to challenge the s cientific consensus on many contemporary issues".

e than can be said for the "high IQ" right-winger around here, who mostly h aven't heard of the Suess Effect. Why they felt it politically necessary to endorse pro-free market nonsense is spelled out in the book.

the green confusion continues

as if this is a dumb newsgroup.

Lets try being real here.

1. Hardly anyone here agrees with your green views
2. Hardly anyone here is going to agree with them
3. There seems little mileage in debating it with you
4. This is a group of mainly electrical/electronic engineers. What could tr on engs do that aligns with your views & wishes? Design devices to save ene rgy, and not design throw away junk. Pretty much all of us do those already , mostly for other reasons. So what can you ever gain by arguing here and c onvincing no-one?
5. If you really want to make a difference for your cause, why not use your elec eng skills to design something that will achieve that instead.

... which begs the question of what. So a few random spur of the moment tho ughts: a lighting control sensor system that reduces domestic & commercial energy use an affordable heating control system that considers all available inputs, e g including whether windows & doors are open, and uses passive heating & co oling as part of the operational strategy as well as active heat. a lower energy appliance a better light bulb etc etc

NT