More on CFL’s

Well, it seems that CFL’s are heat sensitive; we have a handful of fixtures that have limited ventilation, and in every case the CFL in them has burned out prematurely. These 5 year bulbs have been lasting 2 weeks to 5 months in these fixtures. Yes, that’s five MONTHS at the outside. In the case of the longest living bulb we’d replaced one of those skinny screw in 75W halogens that were supposed to last 2 years (and had been in place for 3 years and still running when the CFL was installed.) Fixtures with plenty of ventilation (e.g. some reading lamps, floor lamps, etc.) tend to be somewhat more forgiving.

A little investigation shows that this is a common problem; the switching power supplies in the CFL’s run hot.

Speaking of heat, since we live in a cold climate where flourescents don’t work outside, I’m also wondering what we’re going to put in the outdoor fixtures when incandescents are illegal.

There are already plenty of hidden consumer costs with CFL’s; millions of homes have lighting with dimmer switches and these aren’t compatible with CFL’s therefore requiring replacement; there’s another hidden cost of finding (uglier) replacement fixtures for the ones that aren’t ventilated well enough for CFL’s; and then of course there’s the total energy budget problem written about previously that says CFL’s aren’t cost effective anyway…. Overall when you add up these problems it seems that CFL’s are a complete waste of time.

Someone want to remind me how this is supposed to be an improvement? First, it was low flow toilets that don’t flush human waste. Now we have light bulbs that cost more than what they replaced. Another fine example of politicians proving they know more than engineers… your tax dollar at work.

Evil Corporations Redux

It seems that the accusation of Exxon spreading global warming disinformation is now at such a crescendo that I hear this daily on every blog or web site discussing the subject. Skeptics are labeled as shills or useful idiots or assumed to be in the direct pay of Exxon. Let’s look at this.

(For the record I’m not paid by Exxon; in fact I’ve never met an Exxon employee in my life. Nor am I connected in any way to the energy industry personally or professionally. Nor am I a shareholder. On the other hand, Exxon guys, if you ever want to throw money at me, that’s cool too.)

This being in the pay of Exxon bit is interesting. One wonders what the accusers think. For the sake of argument we’ll take the accusations at face value. Let’s assume that the peak oil people are right. So now we have the Exxon guys out there killing themselves fighting global warming so that they have the luxury of not only going out of business at the fastest possible rate (declining oil supplies decline even faster when they’re being used up), but also being heckled into oblivion and widely reviled by the public and the government.

What a plan!

Somehow this doesn’t seem to be something that I’d expect of a corporation helmed by Ivy League grads with IQ’s on the far right of the bell curve. In fact, Ockham’s razor alone suggests that Exxon’s detractors and accusers are either blithering idiots or people who sought (and found) a convenient delusion.

So what of the accusations of Exxon funding disinformation? First, if *I* were the CEO, I’m thinking I’m running an energy company and my job is to know every tiny detail of that which can affect my company and my employees and my shareholders. That means I’m funding research, I’m funding a raft of scientific efforts, some that will probably never pan out, but essentially everything I can that will make my company better and stronger than my competitors. If that includes a lot of heavy duty investigation into the nascent GW “industry” and trying to head off damaging political silliness at the pass, so be it. This I would see as me doing what I’m paid to do. If that’s what Exxon’s CEO is doing, that’s right and proper. It’s part of what they pay him to do.

Now, does this make Exxon purely altruistic? No. They’re capable of supremely stupid moves just like any other business run by humans. Current gas prices and profit reports alone make them appear greedy (which they are), and I don’t see them doing much to mitigate this. They *could* rebate gas consumers and win friends. They don’t. They don’t have to, either. But overall the idea that Exxon is going to commit political suicide merely so that they can go out of business as soon as possible doesn’t sound like a plan that a real company would do.

What I think is that some people are predisposed due to political belief to assume that corporations are evil by definition. Exxon could donate $10 per household as a gas rebate, and these people would roast them for doing so, seeing an evil plot to buy public silence re AGW. No different than the joke where the Pope visits the US and loses his cap in the wind while on the Presidential yacht: Bush walks across the water to retrieve it, so the following day’s New York Times headline is — Bush Can’t Swim!

But… why is the public so skeptical?

Many people express a certain amount of incredulity that the same public who eagerly laps up cell phones and HDTV and other technical wonders brought to us via science are skeptical of global warming. They wonder if it’s a matter of believing in “convenient” science or they imagine themselves as witnessing some sort of Hari Seldonesque demonstration of group behaviour (a la psychohistory.) Less forgiving bloggers see this as symptomatic of idiocracy (great movie) and others see this as the result of a “vast right wing conspiracy” sort of problem as they imagine Exxon is busily spreading disinformation (and winning.)

I see this skeptical trend as healthy, proper, and unsurprising.

It wasn’t very long ago when the scientific consensus was that mankind had wiped infectious disease out. My early 1970’s textbooks said so. Stomach ulcers were genetic, or caused by stress, perhaps environmental stuff, something in your diet, and so on. And certainly cancer was among these things. This wasn’t just merely suspected. It was *known.*

Then a funny thing happened. A rogue scientist who didn’t buy the consensus looked at the problem another way and discovered that a bacterium, heliobacter pylori, was the culprit. Testing revealed that a simple antibiotic would take care of stomach ulcers, and it also reversed and stopped some lymphomas (cancer) as well. That was a first. All from H. Pylori. This thinking has been copied by others, and we now have a vaccine for cervical cancer. Some theorists (e.g. Greg Cochran, Paul Ewald) contend that most heart problems and cancers are also likely to be caused by infectious agents. So much for the consensus, the certainty, that infectious disease was wiped out and that cancer etc was caused solely by diet and environment.

The point is that we in the public have been told so much rubbish over the years in the name of consensus and “science” that has been later proven to be wrong (e.g. 15 years ago eggs were very bad for you; it’s carbs that are bad; no, wait, it’s red meat; no, wait, it’s trans fats…) that perhaps we’re a bit gun-shy and not necessarily prone to kowtowing Pavlovian style every time someone dares to grace us with his/her wisdom and claims it’s scientific fact, we have a consensus, and we know this with certainty. Especially when this is all very dire, you see, and it looks like somehow we’re going to get taxed silly for it, or if not, whatever “they” want is NOT going to be good.

Perhaps this could explain some of the seeming disconnect. Perhaps the public has had enough.

Engineering by Fiat

I’ve been reading some of the web traffic re various subjects and found a blog response re global warming from someone on the Calif Air Resources Board. She wants to classify CO2 as a pollutant, and the CARB wants to be able to dictate automotive specs. This got me to thinking.

In our house we had to replace the existing plumbing and toiletry fixtures, so we went out and got some nice new stuff to replace these. Problem is that the toilets are low flow, 1.6 GPF. These do not flush human waste well. It often takes multiple flushes (some savings!) despite these being advertised as having the power to flush a couple of dozen golf balls at once.

News Flash — humans do not excrete golf balls, which are nice and hard, slick surfaced, and regular sized. If this is the test the manufacturer designed, it’s stupid. It tests nothing but the ability to flush golf balls. Human waste is sticky, inconsistently sized, and often accompanied by tissue paper in various clump sizes; what is intended to be flushed gets interesting if the flusher is about 4 years old. (Seemingly 4 year olds consider the job unfinished unless half the tissue roll is used.)

After looking around one will discover that few people have good things to say about low flow toilets, and there’s quite the underground trade in these (3.0 GPF “regular” old toilets are now illegal.) What’s fascinating about this is that the legality of low flow toilets comes from upon high, no different than CARB. These people think they can dictate engineering by rule of law. You think low flow is bad? Wait until you see the next round of engineering wonders foisted upon us.

All this proves is one thing — you can’t dictate specs based on good intentions. Specs ought to be the result of research, and ought to be left to the engineers. This said, perhaps a clever engineer could have devised a 2.0 GPF toilet that worked well. In that case, the proper thing for the legislators to do would have been to say “the target is 1.6, so what we’ll do is encourage compliance by adding a tariff of $X per Unit Volume of flush” or somesuch to let industry compete for buyers based on price.

Anything but engineering by fiat. It’s not worked in the past, doesn’t work now, and isn’t likely to work in the future. And yet, CARB exists. CARB isn’t interested in engineering, isn’t interested in the free market, but it is interested in dictating terms. Mussolini would have been so proud.

Any questions?

Arithmetic, and $650 Billion for WAR

So goes the claim. Again I heard this today.

Ok, I’ll play.

Let’s assume every one of these troops was at home training and so on. We’d still have to pay them. Navy ships would still be patrolling wherever they’re needed. Not one dime difference in US Navy annual costs.

Essentially, the claim looks like what they’re doing is adding up the total budget for every department that has anything whatsoever to do with defense and lumping this into a war cost.

I beg to think differently. My guess is that the actual cost of the war is about 1/20th of the democrat politician’s claims. The big difference appears to be extra medical outlays and some equipment that is getting replaced sooner rather than later (it would get replaced whether it wore out in a desert somewhere or not.) The rest of the $650B is a fixed cost allocation to DoD to keep things running. Soldiers get paid whether they train or fight. The hazardous duty pay doesn’t add up to enough to make that big a dent (it’s part of the 1/20th as per above.)

Therefore, the $650 Billion claim has the earmarks of being aimed directly at those who look down upon the military (I support the troops but I don’t support what they’re doing — hah!) and/or have great fear of the dreaded military/industrial complex. We hear of the M/I complex often enough…

Maybe it’s time to discuss this. As I see it much of what we take for granted in modern life first started out as that which trickled down from the dreded M/I Complex. Computers? The military needed realtime ballistics, and later needed tiny circuitry and brains to be able to make ICBM’s work. Internet? A DARPA project. Superglue? Battlefield dressing. GPS? The list is endless; I could cover a great deal more but my fingers would tire as would your eyes. But you get the idea. Very few modern world advances are *not* connected to the dreaded M/I complex.

On the other hand there’s seemingly no end to the screeching about the military and the expenditures and so on (warmongering buggers the lot of them.) This screeching sounds a lot like the screeching about Evil Corporations and is designed to reach the ear of someone predisposed to assume corporations are evil. You know who you are.

Regarding the rampant misquoting of Eisenhower and his telling us to beware of the M/I Complex, what he was warning against was development of that which had no possible purpose other than making war and for no other reason than to feed defense related industry. In other words, avoid stagnation. His wise words were well heeded. Battlefield technologies developed by the dreaded M/I Complex has made it possible for US forces to defeat WWII sized armies with amazingly few casualties. In wars up to WWII casualties were enormous. Not any more. Night vision, cruise missiles, thermal imaging, all of these things were created to keep our troops alive. This stuff works. UAV aircraft will soon save more lives by doing the most dangerous stuff without pilots. The civilian world will benefit; soon enough most commercial travel will be in pilotless craft, and air travel will be even safer for it. Military expenditures are INVESTMENTS.

So… how do you measure the benefit to society with the lives saved and lives enhanced? Obviously, we carp and whinge and we make up stupid numbers to make outrageous claims with. $650 Billion for Iraq? I think not. The only surprise is the number of people who buy into this. How hard is this to figure out, anyway? It ain’t rocket science. It’s only arithmetic and common sense, which must be in short supply as of late.

Overall the US may have spent $650Billion in/on Iraq, but most of this isn’t on war, but building schools, pipelines, and so on. If the anti-war crowd would be kind enough to differentiate allocations, it would help. This way we can discuss the money spent as we ought to, i.e. saying $X for war, and $Y for political/humanitarian agendas.

Drake Equation and SETI

The Drake Equation is supposed to be a baseline estimate of the number of sentient species in our galaxy. The idea is to guesstimate the number of stars, the number of these with planets, the number of planets capable of harbouring life, and so on, until you get to a number that ought to represent the number of spacefaring civilisations. You can find this on the wikipedia if you want to see the whole thing. Ultimately this thinking is what drives the SETI stuff.

The big problem I can see with this is that it assumes concurrency. That is, N spacefaring civilisations existing at the same time. This is likely very wrong. The reason is simple. How long ago was our species exclusively hunting and gathering for a living? Not that long: say 12,000 years. Now, where will be be 12,000 years from now given the rate of technological advancement? Well, for one thing, I’m guessing we won’t be using radio, which is pretty much what SETI seems focused on. In 12,000 years we may have genetically modified ourselves to the point that people of today wouldn’t recognize their umpteen times great-grandchildren as human.

Assuming that there are/were/will be some 10,000 galactic civilisations, what are the chances in a galaxy that’s billlions of years old that most of them will be in that 150 year technical evolution stretch where radio is useful? Not many. As in, almost certainly 0 (zero.) Even our 24,000 year span from hunter/gatherer to who-knows-what (above) is a blink of the cosmic eye. Space is too big, too spread out, and too old.

Damn. I was sorta looking forward to meeting E.T.

BMI don’t think so

Read something interesting at junkfood science and had to follow up. Seems that the BMI scale is optimised for people in their 20’s. It’s common/expected/natural that we gain weight as we age. In fact it’s about 15 lbs between age 30 and 45 or so. Think of this as an evolutionary Good Thing. What this says is interesting:

1) BMI becomes increasingly meaningless as we age.
2) Whoever constructed this must be an idiot to not have at least a sliding scale based on age.
3) “Obesity crisis” claims based in any way on BMI are possibly lies. (Why?)
4) It’s dangerous. A low BMI is associated with heart problems, *not* a high BMI. Don’t believe me? Look it up yourself, and discover reality.

Napoleon was fond of saying “never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity” (kind of an Ockham’s Razor for divining intent?) so it looks like the BMI thing could well be just plain stupid. Or… it could be that the people who made this up are pretty clever and have advanced degrees and know full well what they’re doing.

Which is it?

Hard to say. It’s used hand in hand with the lipid theory. Billion$ in drugs/treatments and so on are at stake.

Peak Nonsense

Funny how all of the climate stuff is simultaneously driven by greenthink in the form of “Peak Oil” and/or discussion of $100/bbl oil. The NYT dotearth (Revkin) blog is frightening with the number of people (including university professors!?!) who manage to tie population control, food production, peak oil, global warming and so on into a giant socialist bandana. Apparently we can all bike to work, even those of us who must do so for 15 miles in subzero weather. Apparently we all live in cities; at least all of us with opinions that are meaningful certainly do. Makes you wonder where people think food comes from… (Why are all the greens urbanites, anyway? Did I miss something?) Many contributors want to see gas go to $10 a gallon to punish those who dare to drive to the store or go to a movie. We need to stop using gas NOW… and so on.

The upshot is that peak oil is upon us and disaster awaits; oilman Bush and his henchmen/cronies who are illegally squatting in the White House have sold the US up the river; people who drive SUV’s are traitors to humanity; Evil Corporations are profiting madly whilst raping the landscape —- I could continue here but I think we get the picture: republicans are the devil. I could probably buy a little bit of the green stuff except that this nonsense is always tied into it. This is like talking to kindly Uncle Herb and you’re enjoying the story until he brings up the bit about the aliens. Then you realize that Herb isn’t in full possession of all of his marbles. In fact, he’s not just plain nuts — he’s crazier than a shithouse rat.

Where were we? Oh yeah. We’re all awaiting certain disaster. Doom.

Meanwhile according to the Rocky Mountain News and Shell, it appears that the Green River Basin shale formation is capable of producing some One Trillion bbl of oil. In case you’re just coming up to speed here, that’s more than the Saudi’s have. It’s economically feasible to extract at any price over $30/bbl. I have reason to believe that this is accurate because the USGS says pretty much the same thing. This of course is pooh-poohed by some of the experts, but consider the recent experience of the Barnett Shale formation.

Never heard of this? Hardly surprising. Way back when, the USGS predicted that there would be a lot of hydrocarbons available in this region, just outside Ft. Worth. “Experts” said no. Quietly over the last 10 years the Barnett Shale is being developed and now produces some 30% of the nation’s supply of natural gas. The USGS estimate is that the region should yield well over 37 trillion cu ft, which is enough to power the US for a long long time. And yet… the greens are convinced that we’re dependent on foreign oil and so on. And they have political connections. Hence you’ve never heard of this, and it’s right under your nose. I don’t think many greens are aware of this either.

Of course the USGS has been vilified for suggesting that another 7 trillion barrels of oil ought to be found on either side of South America. Wrong wrong wrong sais the experts. Hmmm. Brazil just announced, what, some 60 days ago, that they’d verified a new 80 billion bbl field off their coastline. This is just the tip of the iceberg. USGS says there’s some 3 Trillion bbl of oil available in the USA, and that’s just the stuff they know about before tech advances allow them to get serious. There’s a lot of oil in Canada as well.

So much for the reality of Peak Oil as being a current problem.

Some people will read this and assume I’m denying Peak Oil. No. Assuming oil is a fossil fuel as advertised (and not abiotic as some would hope for) then sooner or later it’s going to run out. But… according to the USGS this isn’t going to be for a very long time, and so far, their record seems unimpeachable. By that time we’ll have figured out fusion and beaming power from space. No worries.

Consensus: 50 million believers must be right!

In the various blogs etc re Global Warming are a couple of pervasive themes I find troubling enough to make me a Doubting Thomas. First and foremost is the claim of consensus: surely even if one has doubt about the environmental impact of an anthropogenic factor, then certainly all right thinking people will agree to A, B and C, where A/B/C are starting assumptions. The problem is, I don’t agree.

Here’s why. We all know by now that going to Burger King and ordering a Whopper is the same thing as ordering a Heart Attack on a Plate. As sure as the sun rises, we know that there’s an obesity crisis, and we know that cholesterol is very bad. We know this not only from the countless magazine and newspaper articles, but we also know this from Statin commercials on TV and even casual conversations among friends and co-workers. We know that cholesterol is what gives you a heart attack. Being fat or overweight in any way is bad, bad, bad. Everyone knows this. But… it’s not true. Not in the least. NONE OF IT.

That’s right, read the medical studies and you’ll see that the Lipid Theory (cholesterol consumption changes blood chemistry, particularly lipids, which are fats) is demonstrably false. Study after study intending to prove that heart attacks and strokes are related to being overweight and/or consumption of dietary fats shows no correlation. None. In fact any correlation at all is precisely inverse — overweight people have FEWER heart problems. This isn’t me saying this, this is what clinical trials say. They’re out there. Read them.

And yet… after 40 years of the science and medical communities telling us that there’s a problem and this problem is cholesterol, we all *know* that cholesterol is a problem. No amount of data proving otherwise is able to make you think this isn’t so, and this is because the constant stream of Pavlovian conditioning has ingrained theory into certain knowledge. So much for the idea that we think for ourselves.

Gear switch. The people loudly touting scientific consensus and certain knowledge re carbon dioxide are also believers in the lipid theory. To my ear there isn’t any difference. It all sounds like the same screeching; they’re taking what they don’t really know but sounds reasonable and turning this supposition and/or suspiscion into what’s Known. This is a good part of my tendency towards skepticism.

Regarding the heart trouble and lipid theory, a Dr. Greg Cochran is someone we need to listen to. He figures heart problems are caused by biological agents (bacteria, most likely.) Why should we listen to him? Because he’s one of the guys who helped prove that ulcers weren’t caused by nebulous stuff like “stress” or foods like coffee or enviromental factors like power lines. They’re caused by bacteria. A simple antibiotic takes care of it. This thinking (the ability to actually think is rare, so please try to appreciate this guy a bit) is the same stuff that lead to the recent development of the vaccine for cervical cancer. Oh, and recent studies suggest that heart attacks are correlated to a bacterium that lives in the mouth.

The upshot here is that we know is very little, so when a discussion begins with “We know A, B and C for sure, so certainly we can start with A/B/C in our discussion…” you can probably count on A/B/C being wrong, misguided, invalid, or any combination thereof — hence natural skepticism. I don’t accept A,B or C. Prove these, and *then* we can discuss this stuff.

CFL’s

The word on the blogs etc says that CFL bulbs are more efficient than standard incandescents. I don’t think I agree with this.

You can’t dispose of CFL’s in the trash. Special handling is required. This is neither cheap nor energy free. Ever priced the construction cost in terms of energy needed? I doubt it.

Factor in the disposal/recovery costs, energy and otherwise, and it would appear that the life cycle of CFL requires roughly the same *total* costs as a std bulb. You may pay a slightly lower electric bill temporarily at your house but thankfully you have taxpayers who will pay more in taxes and/or garbage fees to help foot the disposal bill (recovery of mercury etc. has to be factored in.)

This reminds me greatly of the big flap over hybrids. When you compare the life cycle costs (how much energy is required to produce the hybrid, dispose of it, etc.) of the hybrid to a std auto, the std auto wins even if the buyer has to pay more for gas to run it. The TOTAL cost from end to end is important. And in the case of hybrids it takes more energy.

The point being that this doesn’t appear to be any different in the case of CFL’s. They may appear to be efficient, but that’s only until one bothers to think it through.