Usefully Useless

Think back to June 2007, when Britain flooded pretty much top to bottom. That has the same underlying cause as the big freeze of 2009-2010. What cause would that be? Global warming.

Surely I have to be making some kind of bad joke?

Absolutely not. Let me explain.

Britain’s climate is controlled by the jet stream, in the winter it hovers over Britain, deflecting air masses which would otherwise be coming down from the Arctic, the jet stream’s moist but not so cold air from the North Atlantic (warmed by the Gulf Stream). This keeps us much warmer than our latitude would suggest, after all, we are as far north as Moscow, Edmonton and Minsk and further north than Winnipeg.

(Note: This is why usually in winter when we have snow, it’s when easterly or south easterly winds bring up air masses from the continent and it’s the source of the phrase ‘it’s too cold for snow’, since when it really gets cold in Britain, it’s usually a stationary winter anticyclone)

However, the jet stream never came north this winter, it remained over the Mediterranean, giving Spain some terrible floods in December 2009. Without the jet stream protecting us, the northerly winds from the Arctic could freely blow south over Britain, giving us the sort of weather our northerly latitude would otherwise consider to be perfectly normal.

Why would such a thing happen?

The jet stream changes course as it cools from summer to winter, but the jet stream was too warm to head north, so it remained in its summer position. Back in 2007 a similar thing happened, the jet stream didn’t cool down enough in the winter (2006-2007 was an exceptionally mild winter) to head south for the summer, so remained over us in its winter position and dumped off a ton of rain from the North Atlantic which gave Spain a hell of a bad drought and was meant to be distributed across the Mediterranean as far as Egypt, instead we got it all.

The same problem both times: The jet stream was too warm.

It’s August in 2090. You sit on your patio enjoying a glass of 2054 Derbyshire vintage, widely regarded as some of the best wine in the world after southern France became too hot to grow grapevines. While you would prefer a Cornwall champagne, it’s best to be prudent with one’s finances. The Sun is beating down from a clear blue sky as you read a report on the recent wildfires consuming the North Yorkshire moors. The Government’s bungling this year’s malaria outbreak, you notice from another report; 1,700 cases, up 4% from last year. Scandalous!

Why don’t people just not go to the malarial swamps of Norfolk? What’s there to see, a few century old ruins of cities and the Ipswitch Ruin Visitor Centre?

You go back inside after ten minutes, there’s only so much of the 45 degree heat one can take, even with a cool wine. The hum of the airconditioner takes some getting used to, though.

Your children arrive home from school after being on a visit to a museum. “Dad,” one of them calls, “Did we really used to have white bears? They look so funny!”

You reply that they didn’t live around here, but in the Arctic.

“The Arctic?” The child gives you a puzzled look. “Bears don’t live in the sea.”

You tell him that the Arctic used to be all ice, all year round. The child shoots you one of his grins and says “Dad, you’re so silly.”

Does all this come out of some crazy futuristic sci-fi movie? Nope, it comes from the Met Office’s UK Climate Projections 2009 report.

There’s been a lot said lately about generating your own power at home and so it’s time to do an analysis. The average home uses about 3,500 kWh per year (purely electricity – add gas and you get to 4,500 to 5,000). One kWh is enough energy to run a device needing one kilowatt (such as a kettle or a microwave) for one hour or a device needing half a kilowatt for two hours and so on. The going rate is £0.15 per kWh.

Wind Turbines

The basic idea is spin a rotor in the wind via a gearbox to an electrical generator. £1,100 (including a 30% grant) gets you a 1,000 watt turbine (A Windsave WS1000) with a rotor length of just over four feet – quite imposing (and noisy) on a mast. They need 20 mph winds to even start and cannot operate with winds over 55 mph. Peak efficiency is usually at 40 mph. For ours, the manufacturer claims it will provide 500 kWh per year.

The average wind speed for most parts of Britain is merely 20 mph and to make matters worse, wind turbines operate at the cube of the wind speed, doubling speed gets you 3x the energy. As 20 is half of 40, most wind turbines in Britain, certainly residential, would operate at a third of their design efficiency over the course of an arbitrary length of time.

Now if we take the manufacturer’s 500 kWh figure (usually a very optimistic sum) and work out what we’d get if it were running constantly at peak efficiency:
8,760 hours in a year
Generation rate of 1 kW
Peak possible of 8,760 kWh.
Actual generation 500 kWh
Efficiency is then 5.7% which is about right for an urban or suburban area (winds are very poor due to buildings causing drag). An exposed hilly area will do substantially better, but shorten the life of the turbine accordingly. The manufacturer says the turbine is good for 10 years, so we’ll use that figure to see how much money we save.

Most people pay an average of £0.15 per kWh, so if we make 5,000 kWh over the life of the unit, we’ve made £750 worth of electricity. However, we paid £1,100 for the unit! The net loss is £350 over ten years, or £35 per year. Put another way, each kWh made by the wind turbine has cost £0.22, or 68% more than the going rate. To say that’s a bad deal is putting it lightly.

A wind turbine is just like adding £35 a year to your energy bill!

Solar Photovoltaic Panels

Solar panels have been around forever, usually living in desk calculators. They’ve gotten a bit better over the years, so let’s take a look at one. For £874 we can get a 150wp panel capable of 9.72 amps in full sunlight (at just over 15 V). An overcast day, but still bright enough for shadows, will net us just under half that, about 4 amps. Of course direct sunlight isn’t always possible (the sun moves!) and the sun is weaker when it is lower in the sky. On a partially cloudy day, many solar panels operate above their maximum rating, since clouds are brighter than blue sky, so light from the clouds and sunlight combines.

Crunching the numbers, however, shows a sad tale. 15 hours a day is too dark for a solar panel to work in Britain. For 40% of the time, we’re clouded out – I’ll assume the panel operates at 25% efficiency to account for light cloud and heavy cloud. The remaining 60% of the time I’ll consider the panel works at peak efficiency.

So, we have 8760 hours in a year, we have to subtract 5,475 of those as too dark, giving us 3,285 hours to work with. 40% of those hours are only 25% effective, so we can divide them by four to simplify the mathematics.

3285 – 1314 = 1971
1971 + (1314/4) = 2,299.5; Call it 2,300.

We have the equivalent of 2,300 hours of full sunlight over the course of a year. It’s a huge overestimate, since it doesn’t at all account for the sun being lower in winter or the panel not being able to track the sun, but it’ll do.

At 10 amps and 15V (15V DC is normal), we are back to our 150 W rating for the panel, which gives us a grand total over a year of 345 kWh. That’s even worse than our wind turbine managed and we used extremely optimistic assumptions. The solar panel would provide us with £51.75 of energy per year, so taking an ungodly seventeen years to pay back what it cost to buy, which isn’t even including price for an inverter (so you can actually use the thing!) or fitting, all of which could very easily bump the cost to beyond that of the wind turbine above. The only saving grace is that a solar panel could well last upwards of 20 years, so produding a profit of about £160 if it is not replaced.

Just for the fun of it, if this panel were in direct sunlight constantly (e.g. on a spacecraft) it would make 1,320 kWh per year or about a third of your total electricity demand for that year. It would also make £197 worth of electricity per year, so paying for itself in just four years and five months. Sadly we are yet to get personal space programmes.

A solar panel is a bit better in terms of price effectiveness than a wind turbine, even in Britain, but only in the very long term. Will you really be using the same out-dated solar panel in twenty years time? You won’t be. If we replace it ten years down the line, we’ve only made 3450 kWh out of it, working out to be £517. The solar panel over ten years has cost £357, representing almost exactly the same as the wind turbine: £35.70 more on your electric bill every year.

Solar Thermal

For £2,000 you can install a system which would provide half of your hot water. You use around a third of your total household energy budget each year for heating water, which works out to be around 4,500 kWh (electricity and gas combined) – hence 1,500 kWh per year is used to heat water.

An indirect solar water heater can provide 40% to 50% of all hot water you’ll need, so we’ll take the 50% figure – 750 kWh per year. In 2008, British Gas customers paid £0.073 per kWh of gas. 750 kWh costs, then, £54.75 (which jives well with the yearly energy that most people use to heat water of £120).

Our solar thermal heater saves us £55 (we’ll round up) per year. Or, put another way, it will take over thirty six years to pay itself back. For our ten year comparison, the solar thermal heater generates 7,500 kWh which certainly improves on the figures for wind and solar electrical, but then the thing cost us twice as much! It saved us £550, but cost us £2000 per year, resulting in a net cost of £1,450 or £145 per year. That’s awful!

You know what else can cut your energy use in half for hot water? A £12 jacket around your hot water tank. That saves the same £55 per year, but pays itself back in under three months! The same calculations done, we’d save 7,500 kWh (which costs £550) and spent just £12, a net SAVING of £53.8

Is There Hope For Us Yet?

The bottom line, then, is that you need something capable of at least 300 watts for at least 6 hours per day (1.8 kWh per day or 660 kWh per year) and costing no more than £500. Does such a thing exist?

No. Unless you can get huge amounts of subsidy (and you can’t, the best is a 30% grant, we’d need closer to 70%) then microgeneration is extremely bad fiscal sense. It isn’t “green” due to the materials used to make these things essentially going to waste, it’s basically setting twenty pound notes on fire.

Until we get systems paying themselves back in the ten year timeframe, microgeneration is a fad. A dangerous waste of resources fad.

In summary:

Method         Cost per year (10 years)
Wind           £35
Photovoltaic   £36
Solar Thermal  £145
Tank jacket    £-54

From The Telegraph is a rather well written article which has about as much scientific accuracy as that American Creationist museum.

Point by point rebuttal mode engaged!

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, “the sea is not rising,” he says. “It hasn’t risen in 50 years.” If there is any rise this century it will “not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm”. And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by
Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.

“It hasn’t risen in 50 years”, right? See right. 118 tidal gauges all agree the sea level has indeed risen in 50 years. More here. Study after study, experiment after experiment, measure after measure: All of them show rising sea levels. How stupid does this guy think we are?

The next argument used is “latent heat needed to melt ice”. It’s got just enough physics in it to seem plausible, so I’ll explain what it is. When we heat ice, it warms linearly with energy put in, until it starts to melt. Then the ice stops warming, the energy isn’t raising temperature, it’s driving the state change from solid to liquid.

Now how this supports Mr ex-scientist’s junk I’m not quite sure. Nobody’s saying that melting ice will (or has) contribute much to sea level change, at least not in the short term (hundred years or so). The sea level rises will come from temperature changes. Warm water is larger than cool water, all liquids expand as they warm, just as solids and gases do. This is the principle that a thermometer works on and this knowledge is ladled out daily to children in elementary schools worldwide.

We don’t worry about melting ice raising sea levels (yet), we worry because it changes the energy we get from the Sun. Ice is white and reflects heat very efficiently back out into space, if we lose the ice, we absorb more heat. This melts more ice and…you get the picture.

The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on “going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world”.

Tidal gauges are pretty “real world” to me. Now why is it, Mr fired professor, that whenever an ex-scientist wants to draw some attention to himself, he always goes straight to the media. He doesn’t publish a paper. He doesn’t show any data. He goes to spin a yarn. This is what we see here, no paper, no data, no measurements, just a lot of hot air.

When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.

Another common tactic to use is “The Man is repressing me!” and here we see it used well. The Maldives aren’t worried about rising mean sea level, they’re worried about storm surges. We predict that tropical storms and hurricanes will become much more frequent. As New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina showed, a storm surge can temporarily raise sea level catastrophically. That’s what the Maldives are worried about. Mörner’s madness is irrelevant to them, same with Tuvalu.

Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. The only evidence the scaremongers can cite is based on the fact that extracting groundwater for pineapple growing has allowed seawater to seep in to replace it. Meanwhile, Venice has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr Mörner.

Nicely cherry-picked examples from our deceptive doctor. Unfortunately, as shown from the reams of data I linked above, he’s lying. The sea levels around Tuvalu have dropped in recent years (five of them!) but in the last 50 years, they’ve risen about 4 cm, as shown by tidal gauges at Tuvalu. That’s not much of a rise because sea temperature at Tuvalu hasn’t risen much.

One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC’s favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a “corrective factor” of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they “needed to show a trend”.

This is just wrong. Deceptive and very wrong. Satellite evidence has shown an upward trend since we started using it. IPCC scientists did not use a “corrective factor” to sneakily adjust the data. Satellite data needs to be calibrated to subtract things like storm surges, natural fluctuations due to warm and cool currents, seasonal variation and so on. If we didn’t, the chart would be up and down as a mess of noise. That’s why we “need to show a trend”, a trend up or down is lost when the data is very noisy. We eliminate the noise using “corrective factors”. High school students do this daily when they run an experiment several times and average their results. Using the raw noisy data will show no trend, it’ll show nothing. Suddenly, with a bit of understanding on our side, Dr Disaster’s claims seem to be no more than smoke and mirrors.

For more information, see Dr Mörner on YouTube (Google Mörner, Maldives and YouTube); or read on the net his 2007 EIR interview “Claim that sea level is rising is a total fraud”; or email him – morner@pog.nu – to buy a copy of his booklet ‘The Greatest Lie Ever Told’

Incredible! He’s selling something! You’d never have guessed!

I haven’t posted much lately, it’s purely laziness, so here’s a few stories that have caught my eye over the last few days.

BBFC defeated in Manhunt2 release. Morality, especially someone else’s morality, should not be law. The BBFC took a bloody nose in this one, its own regulation didn’t support its position and a government report due later this month supports removing the BBFC as the dominant authority on video game rating.

Glaciers receding faster than ever before. The base rate from 1990 to 1999 was 30cm/year, which is now increased to 150cm/year and still increasing. One glacier in Greenland lost 290cm in 2007, another in Norway lost 310cm in 2006. The number of worldwide glaciers which are actually getting bigger is now in single digits.

BBC’s iPlayer for mobile devices was “hacked” by nothing more complex than pasting the completely unprotected URL into a web browser. While offering unencumbered downloads is to be applauded, it wasn’t the intention here as the BBC don’t have permission or right to offer programming for more than 5 days after air.

Muslim ultra-conservatives win elections in Iran. Because everyone else was banned from running for not being Muslim-conservative enough. I shit you not.

It’s all over the web.

Scientists, especially in the field of climate change, are a conservative bunch. They put in the most favourable, the least changing data and work from that, it’s part of the scientific method’s defences against sensationalism. However, sometimes it means that results are too conservative.

As it is with climate modelling. Supercomputers or even your computer are put to task to model how the future climate will play out given the climate records of history. When put on the weather records of the 19th century, for example, they can successfully predict the weather records of the 20th century, even if the computer was given no knowledge of them.

Just last year a team of respected scientists predicted that the summer Arctic would be ice-free by 2040, but they’d grossly overestimated how much ice was actually there. Mapping the extent of ice is easy, but mapping its volume is not and they’d hugely underestimated the actual volume of ice. (To make this simpler, they’d overestimated the ice area but underestimated the ice depth)

Now, a new study from Maslowsky et. al. from the Naval Postgraduate School in California, USA, have used the most accurate and up to date data yet and arrived at a shocking conclusion; There will be no ice over the arctic at all in just five to six years. They used data from 1979 to 2004, even ignoring 2005 and 2007, where more ice was lost in the summer than ever before. If anything, their estimate is already too timid.

Maslowski is, however, known for undercutting the dates of most other researchers but never by this much. He contends that other models had overestimated the volume of ice and also underestimated the heat delivered by ocean currents and convection. He points out that ice loss from 2000 to 2004 was far in excess of the current models but his model predicted them most accurately.

The BBC also sought comment from Professor Wadhams of Cambridge University, who uses data from Royal Navy submarines to measure arctic ice. Wadhams believes that older climate models have not been using actual reality as enough of a guide. His data shows that the arctic ice is thinning faster than it is shrinking and that ice reflects heat back into space, so a loss of ice causes greater loss of ice.

The last word remains to be said and, like all science, Maslowsky’s work will need to be confirmed and scrutinised by independent researchers who are most likely already hard at work. If he’s right, however, the polar bear will be extinct in the wild by 2015.