The Libertarian

1917 - 2008 (90 y)

One of the greatest SF writers ever.

More.

The new review in Nature examines the factors observed by astronomers that relate to solar brightness. It then analyzes how those factors have changed along with global temperature over the last 1,000 years.

Brightness variations are the result of changes in the amount of the Sun’s surface covered by dark sunspots and by bright points called faculae. The sunspots act as thermal plugs, diverting heat from the solar surface, while the faculae act as thermal leaks, allowing heat from subsurface layers to escape more readily. During times of high solar activity, both the sunspots and faculae increase, but the effect of the faculae dominates, leading to an overall increase in brightness.

The new study looked at observations of solar brightness since 1978 and at indirect measures before then, in order to assess how sunspots and faculae affect the Sun’s brightness. Data collected from radiometers on

U. S. and European spacecraft show that the Sun is about 0.07 percent brighter in years of peak sunspot activity, such as around 2000, than when spots are rare (as they are now, at the low end of the 11-year solar cycle). Variations of this magnitude are too small to have contributed appreciably to the accelerated global warming observed since the mid-1970s, according to the study, and there is no sign of a net increase in brightness over the period.

Source.

VW (VolksWagen)’s chairman of the board, Ferdinand Piëch, reveals so in an interview with him on his 70th birthday. He promises that VW will have 100 kpl (km/l) cars on the road in 4 years - by 2011.

Piëch claims that such gasoline-powered, automotive vehicles are now marketable, because the components necessary (he doesn’t say which ones), which costs 35.000 € today, will be obtainable for 5.000 in two years.

Piëch has been calling the shots @ VW after he came on the board instead of Bernd Pischetsrieder, who was the person responsible for killing the Lupo 3L car, which, as the name implies, can drive 100 km on 3 liters of diesel, achieving a 33 km/l fuel efficiency.

I suppose it is fitting that I, a nasty capitalist, should describe exactly what I am doing for the environment. Let’s see:

My household has 3 persons living in it.

• In the last 8 months, we have thrown out our old refrigerator and freezer and replaced them with new ones, which are more power efficient and sport better insulation. I didn’t do a power measurement of the old ‘fridge, but the new freezer uses only 80 Watts when running, whereas the old used around 180 Watts; Also, the new one runs less of the time, because it uses better insulation (what materials exactly, i don’t know).
• The household has been using a lot of CFL (power saving) lightbulbs for a number of years, but anyway, I did a sweep of the household this spring, and now we’re almost exclusively using these Compact Flourescents (CFL’s). The only exceptions I wan think of is the chandelier in our living room (which we rarely use, anyway) and the bulbs in our vent above the stove, plus the halogen table lamps on my desktop.
• I am on the lookout for when LED bulbs become available for mass consumption, and when it does, I’ll start phasing out the CFL’s and the aforementioned halogens. I imagine this will begin to happen in 2-3 years.
• Being a computer geek, I have a small server park running 24/7, which of course consumes quite a bit of power. However, I began scaling it down last autumn; a year ago, I had two tower servers running all day long - in the fall, I retired the PC server, and moved the jobs it handled to a Virtual Machine on my Mac server. That alone saved me of 150 Watts of power consumption. Also, a year ago, I had 6 hard drives running more or less all the time - now I have only 3. (A 3.5″ hard drive running normally consumes approximately 10 Watts of power).
• Plus, the current PowerMac G4 Tower, which serves as my current server, will be replaced any day now when Apple releases their next Mac Mini - my PowerMac Tower uses approximately 100 Watts when running with two hard disks active - a Mac Mini with two hard disks active consumes only 50-60 Watts of power. (…plus it runs the x86 apps much faster, because they do not run emulated!)
• We currently have an 30-year old Texaco oil burner in the basement, which heats the house during winter. We are considering replacing it with a natural gas burner, which is not only much more efficient (and thus pumps less CO2 into the atmosphere per BTU of heat created), it also spares the environment of a lot of sulphur that is present in fuel oil.
• At the moment we have some artisans fixing up our outer walls because of some damage that have been done to them by the weather over the last 15 years - at the same time, they are refilling the hollows between the walls with more rockwool insulation, which will make our house lose much less heat in the winter half of the year.
• Last September, we replaced our old in-doors wood-burning stove with a new one which works by internal convection; the installation man informed us that the old furnace at most had an efficiency rating of 40% (ie. 60% of the heat produced went into the atmosphere) - the new one supposedly has an efficiency of 84% - more than twice as good (or from an inefficiency perspective, nearly 4 times better!). I’ve noticed the effect too in winter when we started making use of it - where we usually had to chuck 5 pieces of firewood into the old furnace to make some heat in the living room, with the new one, we only need to put in two to three pieces, and not only that, the wood lasts longer and produces a noticeably better heat, because the energy is not released as IR, but as warm air that rises up and circulates around all of the room.
• I am following the progression of the PV-panel technology, and when the moment is right, we will install a major solar power plant on our roof. I don’t know about the horizon, though, it may be as much as 10 years from now.
• In regards to household power use, a year ago, we consumed around 30 kWh per day - today, we only consume around 16 kWh/day. A 50% improvement is not bad, huh?
• While the household has three cars, only two of them are driven regularly, and although I myself am the one that drives the most (around 12.000 km/year, give or take), my car is the most fuel efficient of them - it is an old (but good!) Honda Civic model 1997, which gets a gas mileage of around 14 kilometers per litre. On a good day, it gets 16 (which is well above the national average), on a bad day it gets 13 (which is more or less the nat’l avrerage). The best non-hybrid gasoline-fueled cars in Denmark get 21 km/litre.
• I am on the lookout for Hydrogen-powered cars - when they hit the market, and an accptable hydrogen distribution network is in place, we will start phasing out our ol’ gas burners.

In regards to public policy and other initiatives:

• I often partake in the societal debate about new energy sources, energy efficiency and climate change.
• I strongly in favor of nuclear power, solar power, wind power, geothermal power and hydropower. I am strongly in favor that existing coal power plants be upgraded to using more efficient coal furnaces that has a higher energy output pr. ton of carbon emitted into the atmosphere. I am against building new coal power plants.
• I am in favor of bio-ethanol and other carbon-neutral energy sources for transportation.
• I am in favor of a heavy excise on traditional incandescant lightbulbs.
• I am in favor of a heavy excise on water, power and other resource use, PROVIDED that income taxes on low and medium incomes are also cut HEAVILY, or cut COMPLETELY.
• I am in favor of a heavy excise on carbon-based fuels used for, ex. transportation (gasoline, diesel), PROVIDED that there are no taxes on the transportation vehicles themselves (as you may well know, the tax on cars here in Denmark are so heavy that most cars today cost around 3 times their market value).
• I am in favor of experimenting with free collective transportation in metropolitan areas (which are also typically congested by private automotive traffic) to encourage use of these means of transportation instead and not use their cars for inner-city personal transport.
• I am in strongly favor of researching the necessities for constructing communal, low-resource-use superstructures like Paolo Soleri’s so-called “Arcologies”.
• I am in favor of a compulsory environmental insurance policies on all land owners - that way, if a land owner is judged as being likely to pollute his land, his insurance premiums will accordingly go up. Thus, a halfway market solution.
• I am in favor of a global plan to cut carbon emissions, PROVIDED that ALL nations partake with equal responsibilities (no favoritism towards China, Russia and Ukraine!) AND PROVIDED that it can be shown with a very high degree of confidence that that are concrete and tangible advantages of enacting such a plan.

Oh, and lastly, to save water, I only shower twice a week, plus I piss in the sink; all in all, that saves 28.000 liters of water every year. (But you already knew that, didn’t you? ;)

Portugal recently opened an 11 MegaWatt solar power center, producing enough power to supply 8000 households. The center consists of 52,000 PV cells covering an area of 0.6 square kilometers, supplied by 4 different companies, it will reduce carbon emissions by 13,000 tons per year as long as it is operational, and produce an expected 20 GWh/yr.

Earlier this year, the EU declared that by 2020, 20% of the EU power consumption would be supplied by renewable energy sources - at the moment, 6.5% of the energy use in Europe is delivered by renewable sources.

Source.

My comment: This is a sign of good progress, but collecting all the PV in one spot is contrary to one of the definite advantages of the technology, which is de-centralization.

And a good thing too, because as I wrote a few days ago, they offer more light for the Watt. What holds LED lighting back at the moment is the high price tags they carry, but that will, unsurprisingly, change before too long.

Conventional incandescent/filament lightbulbs are still the most common ones, and they are atrociously inefficient - only 5% of the energy released from an incandescent bulb is in the form of visible light - the remaining 95% is in the form of IR photons - heat. And as if that isn’t bad enough, the old bulbs only have a typical lifetime of 1000 hours.

Enter LED lightbulbs; they have a typical lifetime of 100,000 hours - 100 times longer than incandescent lightbulbs. That, and it offers at least 6 times more visible light per consumed energy compared to incandescent lighting. At the moment, an LED bulb costs around 60 US$, but according to news.com, the price has been halving itself every year, so by 2009, we should be able to get LED bulbs for 15-20$. At that price, the LED bulb pays itself off in saved energy bills after one year, if used heavily (such as in retail stores).

The US DOE (Department of Energy) estimates that 22% of electricity consumption in the US is due to lighting.

If 25 percent of the lightbulbs in the U.S. were converted to LEDs putting out 150 lumens per watt (higher than the commercial standard now), the U.S. as a whole could save $115 billion in utility costs, cumulatively, by 2025, said DenBaars, and it would alleviate the need to build 133 new coal-burning power stations.

This is a typical win-win - good for my wallet and good for the environment. What are we waiting for?

Oh, and another thing - the usual way to make white light by way of LEDs are to combine three LEDs: red, green and blue. This offers interesting opportunities for those of us who like other colors than plain white:

…the Sun!

The (approximate) vital stats of this huge gravitation-powered fusion reactor:

• Diameter: 1.392e6 kilometers (109 Earth diameters)
• Volume: 1.412e15 cubic kilometers
• Surface area: 6.087e9 square kilometers
• Mass: 2e30 kilograms
• Surface temperature: 6000 Kelvin
• Core temperature: 13.6e6 Kelvin
• Instantaneous radiative power: 382.7e24 Watts (make a note of this!)
• Instantaneous mass loss due to mass-energy conversion: 4.3e9 kilograms/sec.

So, what does this mean for humanity?

A damn lot of exploitable energy, that’s what it means!

Outside the atmosphere, the Earth receives circa 1366 Watts/m² (also known as the solar constant), which begins to sound really impressive when you consider that every square meter of Earth’s cross sectional area (= 128e6 km²) receives this amount of energy, for a grand total of 174.08e15 Watts - every second, all year long.

Of course, our atmosphere sucks up a bit of the solar radiation (including the potentially harmful UV-light in the shortwave bands), so we do not see all of this energy on the surface of the Earth. The insolation of Earths surface is slightly less than the solar constant; on a clear day, approximately 16% of the visual-band solar energy is absorbed by the gases and vapors in the atmosphere. That leaves us with 1147.5 Watt/m² to play with, at best.

For those of us who reside in the temperate regions of this Earth, we have to factor in that the sun is never at the zenith of the sky, so we have to angle up our solar receivers to catch as much of the photonic energy as possible. For example, here in Denmark (which is on the 56th northern latitude), a surface that is arranged horizontally on the ground soaks up around 1000 kWh/m²*yr, and if angled up at 45°, it will receive ca. 1200 kWh/m²*yr. Assuming a 12-hour day on average (the definition of the equinox), that means my potential solar panel will, averaging over a whole year, receive ca. 833 or 1000 Watts per square meter, for the above cases. (Again, this assumes that the weather is always clear, which is clearly unreasonable.) A dependable figure for long-term time-averaged insolation of areas typically clear of clouds and haze is 250 Watts/m², which also accounts for the nighttime absence of the suns rays.

In the future, “smart” solar receivers will angle themselves to maximize energy capture, depending on the latitude the solar panel is operating on. In wintertime on the Tropic of Cancer or the Tropic of Capricorn, you need to angle the panel at most 64° from the ground; here in Denmark we would need to angle the receivers up to 79° from the ground for optimal reception. On the other hand, if you live exactly on the equator, you would never need to angle the solar panel more than approx. 23° from the ground for optimal reception! (All this is due to the fact that the Earth’s axis of rotation is off by 23.5° compared to the Ecliptic. Geometry is interesting stuff.. :)

Now, how much energy does that leave us, realistically?

A typical, mass-produced, Poly-Chrystalline Silicon Photo-Voltaic (PV) solar panel today has a practical conversion efficiency that lies between 13 and 16% of the incoming photonic radiation. Of course, there are more advanced types of PV technology out there, which have higher efficiencies, but they are much more expensive and not commonplace, so for now, we shall assume that we can harvest 1/6th of the solar energy we receive from the sky.

250 Watts/m² divided by 6 is 41.67 Watts/m² (as a daily average). Let us assume that humanity as a whole currently consumes 12e12 Watts; that means we would have to produce a lot of PV panels to harvest enough energy for our human purposes:

12e12 Watts / 41.67 Watts/m² = 287.98e9 m² = 287.98e3 km²

So, with current-day technology, we need to erect ca. 288 thousand square kilometers of PV panels in the sunnier spots of the Earth to supply humanity with energy solely from the Sun. More, if we are to keep electricity generation local, to avoid using the lossy power grids.

Let us look further, and try to account for the future:

First, we must assume that humanity’s energy consumption as a whole will increase substantially; not because we in the industrialized world will consume more energy (we are already working on reducing our energy consumption), but because the developing world is rising in living standards, and they will want the same level of comforts as we do today in the western world; cars, computers, lighting, air conditioning and so on. And also, because the human population of Earth will probably double from today’s 6 billion to around 12 billion by 2100 or so. All these people need energy to go about their daily lives.

If we choose a round number and assume that to total energy use of humans will increase by a factor of 10x the next 50 years, then we will need 2.88 million square kilometers of PV panels to supply the Earth with power. This sounds like an awful lot, but keep in mind that the total surface area of the Earth is 2.82e17 square kilometers, so if we are to succeed in this mission, we would actually only cover a hundredth of a billionth of the total surface area of the Earth. Or expressed in figures: ≈ 0.00000000001 or 0.000000001%.

Now, that was an estimate in the pessimistic direction - lets look the other way:

PV technology will surely improve!

Already we have PV tech with an efficiency rating of around 33%, and with the nanotechnological fabrication advances that are constantly being made, we are closing on the magical 50% mark. Assuming we reach that, we would only need a third of the above total PV panel area to satisfy the total future energy needs of humanity - and that would amount to 960,000 square kilometers.

If we shoot high and hope for a very-high efficiency PV technology to be available to us in the future, 83% efficiencies are not reserved for the realm of the fantastic - with that, we would “only” need 576,000 square kilometers of PV paneling spread around the Earth.

With the future offering us unimaginably colossal manufacturing capacity via fully automated factories and molecular assemblers, this shouldn’t be an unreasonable goal for humanity. All we lack is the will to proceed.

Yesterday, Gore testified before the US Congress on the subject of Global Warming. One of the sound bites that slipped out of his head was that “humanity’s survival is threatened by global warming” or something to that effect.

Oh for fucks sake, how does he get away with crap like this? The survival of humanity and human civilization is NOT threatened by global warming! An absolute worst-case sea level rise of approximately 90 centimeters by year 2100, plus some more droughts and possible extreme weather is not a mortal threat to humanity, only to our way of life.

Then again, he is obviously a damn hypocrite, who thinks that the necessary change of lifestyle needed to bring about a stop to climate change should not apply to himself, only to the peons…

The controversial Danish professor of developmental psychology, Helmuth Nyborg, who has recently been in hot water (in Denmark no less!) because his research concluded that men statistically are more intelligent than women (by 5 IQ points), has produced another piece of research which is sure to cause more controversy - especially in the USA:

He found that religious people - theists - are generally less intelligent than their atheist counterparts. The average difference is 5.8 IQ points.

What he also found is that high intelligences that are religious, tend to choose religions that are not “of the book” (as the mohammedans say), that is, non-monotheist (like Christianity, Islam and Judaism).

The study is based on data from 7000 Americans (National Longitudinal Study of Youth).

As you may know, it’s a common creationist objection to the theory of evolution that there supposedly aren’t any transitional forms between various species.

Anyone who cares to do their homework will find that there are in fact many transitional forms; and more and more of them are discovered every year. And just a few days ago, an important transitional fossil was discovered by Australian paleontologists:

A fossil fish discovered in the West Australian Kimberley has been identified as the missing clue in vertebrate evolution, rewriting a century-old theory on how the first land animals evolved.

Monash University PhD students Mr Erich Fitzgerald and Mr Tim Holland were part of the research team, led by Museum Victoria’s Head of Science Dr John Long, that made the spectacular discovery by studying a 380 million-year-old fossil fish called Gogonasus, or Gogo fish, named after Gogo Station in Western Australia where it was found.

The fossil skeleton shows the fish’s skull had large holes for breathing through the top of the head but importantly also had muscular front fins with a well-formed humerus, ulna and radius - the same bones are found in the human arm.

“This new fossil proves that features of land-living tetrapods (four-legged vertebrates) evolved much earlier in their evolutionary history than previously thought,” Mr Fitzgerald, a researcher in the School of Geosciences, said. “This means that humans can trace their evolutionary roots, and adaptations for life on land, further back in time, to more than 380 million years ago.

“This little fossil fish, Gogonasus, is therefore the ultimate ‘Mother’ of all tetrapods.”

And here it is:

(source)

I was researching the taxation policies of the British political parties and so I visited the home page of the British Liberal Democrats (LDP). Keep in mind that the top of the British LDP recently said that from now on, their political top priority would be to stop climate change. Anyway, I found this:

And it makes me pissed. Mind you, the human influences on global climate might effect something like what the LDP is showing above. There’s only one itsy-bitsy tiny problem. For the above disaster scenario to come true, the human race must adhere to a “business as usual” scenario for at least a millennium, while all serious climate scientists today are restricting their climate forecasts and extrapolations no further than to year 2100, that is one single century ahead. Take a look at this:

It’s an elevation map of Antarctica, which is essentially a big chunk of ice - the chunck that the LDP propagandists are assuming will melt off before Christmas. The dark red spots in the above graphic is where the ice cover is approximately 4000 meters thick. The entire Antarctic glacial ice cover spans across 13.72 million square kilometers. The ice cover thickness is on average 2.5 kilometers. Multiply those two figures by each other, and you’ll find that the volume of ice on top of the South Pole is 34.3 million cubic kilometers (the US NSF says 24.576 million km^3, see sources below). Assuming that these numbers are accurate, and without doing further calculations, I’ll say that anyone who claims that the relatively mild climate changes that humans are currently causing (so far: 0.6° C since the 1960s), will melt off this entire volume of ice in anything shorter than a millennium, is full of crap. (Especially considering that the central ice cover thickness is actually increasing due to increased precipitation, exactly as the climate models predict - both in Antarctica and on Greenland).

(source1,source2)

But pay no attention to me, instead take a look at what the IPCC is saying in their “Climate Change 2001: Synthesis Report“, page 63, Figure “L”; here it is revealed (sorry, the print edition differs from the PDFs), that the median forecasted sea level rise is 40 to 44 centimeters by year 2100. The absolute worst-case scenario by year 2100, including various uncertainties in the climate models, amount to a sea level rise of 85 centimeters, which is nowhere near the 200 feet (approx. 61 meters) that scientists claim the sea level would rise if the entire Antarctic ice cover melted. Another interesting fact that these British wankers probably don’t know is that the majority of the climate change-cause sea level rise is attributed to the thermal expansion of water, and not to polar ice melt-off.

Summarizing: Yes, we eventually need to tackle the problem of anthropogenic (human-made) climate change (and I’m pretty sure we have good initiatives underway by 2100), but trying to change public opinion with blatant exaggerations bordering on lies is idiotic and downright immoral. But at least the LDP wants to lower taxes on income… *sigh*

Update: They also wants to ban nuclear power. Fools!

Water is essential for human life, and for terrestrial life in general. From an evolutionary perspective, it is no surprise that the majority of the human body is comprised of water, since all life evolved in the oceans, and hence, our far ancestors came from there. A number of critical body functions are performed by water or by help of water:

• Transport and distribution (by means of osmosis) of nutrients, salts, minerals, vitamins throughout the body
• Perspiration - regulating body temperature by evaporation of sweat from the skin
• Reduces friction in bone joints, reduces wear on bones when moving
• Cushions internal organs from physical shocks, especially the brain (via cerebrospinal fluid)
• Keeps blood from clogging and becoming too viscous
• Heat energy storage and distribution throughout the body

But exactly how much of our bodies are composed of water? Lets see; from various sources on the internet, I have gathered these figures: Water content of human body, as percentage of total body mass:

• Newborn infant: 73 - 77%
• Adult Male: 55-65% (females: slightly lower)
• Elderly: 45-50%

Water as a percentage of weight of various organs and tissues:

• Blood: 83%
• Kidneys: 82-83%
• Heart muscle: 80%
• Lungs: 79-80%
• Spleen: 76%
• Musculature: 76%
• Small Intestine: 75%
• Cerebrum (Brain): 75%
• Hepar (Liver): 67-70%
• Dermis (Skin): 70-72%
• Skeletal structure/Bones: 10-22%
• Fatty tissues: 15-20%

Some additions and comments: Approximately 66% of total bodily water is intracellular, that is, contained within the cellular membrane. The rest is extracellular (outside the cells), and 6-7% of all bodily water is contained in the blood plasma. Females have a lower water content than males, because they have a higher fat content in their tissues (note that fatty tissues have a relatively low water content). Alcohol and caffeine are diuretics, which means that they increase water excretion from the body (increases urine production). Proteins, sugars and fats bind water in the bodily tissues.

Further reading: Fluid and electrolyte balance,

If you wondered how tropical hurricanes are classified, look no further:

Hurricanes are classified not only from the top wind speed around the center, but also from the central barometric pressure. NB: Unlike “regular” storms, tropical storms (TS) are classified as any tropical depression (TD), where the wind speed exceeds 17.5 m/s.

Further reading: Beaufort scale, Saffir-Simpson scale,