How Australia Perfected Solar Power and Then Went Back to Coal

[Guest Captain1]

All relevant points Ocky,

 

 

 

But instead of others crucifying him with innuendo based on these connections (& the fact that he can't be too good if he could only earn $400 K from his mining connections), I suggest that you watch & read his stuff, consider the criticism of him by all others and make up your own mind on the correctness of the technical & related arguments that he makes on the history of Global Warming.

 

 

 

It is ridiculous, in my contention, for Aussies to ring their hands and alter government policy just because we have 10 hot days which the BOM declares as the hottest since 187osomething, when it can be clearly demonstrated that the entire world has been going through similar warming and cooling cycles for millions of years.

 

 

 

A simple example is that the Thames was frozen solid not many hundreds of years ago and the last IceAge was bugger all time ago in geological terms, with numerous other similar swings before that.

 

 

 

I'm the 1st to admit that I like his stuff because it aligns with & reinforces my own view, but I defy anyone to shoot down his logic and his science.

 

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEsygjXunTs

 

 

 

Regards Geoff

 

 

[Dafydd Llewellyn]

Oh, dear; I hoped it would not degenerate into a debate on this. For what it's worth, I was in CSIRO when the first results on CO2 levels started to come in, from Cape Grim. And it was fascinating to sit in the lunch group and listen to people, with no more than the bare data, say "It's all those SUVs".

 

The Cape grim station equipment was so sensitive, by the way, and the air it samples so clean, that it spotted the "blip" in the CO2 level when it arrived, from the F-27 doing a "control" low-level air sample, 600 miles upwind. The rise in CO2 levels is unarguable; but it's the only part of the climate debate that is.

 

One of the first principles of debating is to attack the argument, NOT the man. So when the argument turns to "what is his personal interest?" I turn off. I want to see the science, not the politics; and to me, the science is unconvincing. I worked in the CSIRO Division of Cloud Physics, the climate computer modellers worked in the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric research. The computer models regularly predicted something, which we went off and measured - and nine times out of ten, the measurement showed the computer model was wrong. Climate is simply several orders of magnitude too complex to successfully model, with what we have to date. It will take several more decades to get any accurate idea.

 

I won't go into detail here, but the most telling part of the issue of CO2, to me, is in the area of its absorption spectrum. If you want to learn more about this, look up "Fraunhofer lines" and "Gas absorption spectrum". The conclusions it leads to are incomplete, but they do NOT justify the predictions of Gore etc.; they do suggest some warming, but much less than the predictions of around 2005 or so. I think the increasing cost of fossil fuel will do more to limit any man-made contribution than anything else; and the volcanic etc contribution makes mankind's efforts look silly. If Rudd etc had been real in their expressed concern, they'd have eliminated government tax imposts on biodiesel. They did no such thing; therefore I conclude that the argument was about revenue, not climate. Climate was merely the excuse.

 

 

[turboplanner]

Do you agree with Graham Pearman's work?

 

What do you consider a more significant cause of sea level rise - Increased Ocean temperature, or Increased Ice melt.

 

(These are not intended to be trick questions, just interested in your viewpoint)

 

 

[octave]

Captain my posting about Ian Plimer was not crucifying him but in your earlier post you said "When evaluating the data that we all receive, we need to bear in mind that the scientists at CSIRO/BOM/UN & elsewhere will do anything for a funding grant or national publicity" so if we are factoring in motivations then my posting is fair and relevant.

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest Andys@coffs]

.....Being connected to the grid means that anything larger than the 2kW solar capacity I have is just a waste of money as I can't even use what I produce now & the return on what I export is pathetic. How anyone connected to the grid can justify a 3 or 4 or more kW system beats me. Most don't seem to be able to explain the logic of their decision to put a big system in. The main reason is I suspect the BS supplied by the solar system retailer..........

Or in my case the existence of a 66c/kWh feed in tariff for a few more years yet. Like I previously posted such subsidies are IMHO wrong, but given it was legislated, they were going to give it to someone, then better that someone was me for once!

 

First thing I do when the scheme ends is get rid of the gross export meter and replace it with a Net one because as you said, paying 7 times more for power usage that you consume that you didn't create is entirely unacceptable even if the whole system is fully paid for at that stage and likely still has 80% of its useful life left.

 

Andy

 

 

[turboplanner]

Good point Turbs (I'm sure you meant "Liquified" Propane Gas)

An interesting story:

 

When I was designing fork lift trucks we built a version with a Holden engine converted to run on Lithium Propane Gas (LPG)

 

As gas conversions became popular in the automotive industry (before thousands of valves were burnt out), and Esso started developing Bass Strait gas fields, it became known as Liquid Petroleum Gas.

 

As we know from our chemistry classes an element changes from a solid to a liquid and then to a gas with increasing temperatures so can have three names, such as ice, water and steam.

 

To call a gas a liquid never made any sense to me, but I never bothered about it, but your comment prompted some research and this is what I found.

 

Lithium Propane (3CH7Li) is sold by several overseas companies mainly Chinese as that description

 

Elgas, in their simplified explanation for the general customer base say:

 

Natural Gas is mainly Methane (CH4), and it contains (usually stripped out for sale as "Natural Gas"):

 

• Ethane
   
  
• Propane
   
  
• Butane
   
  
• Pentane
   
  

 

Propane Gas (C3H8) boils at -42 degrees C and is pressurised in bottles/vessels (and from our chemistry we know that boiling point can be lowered as pressure is increased)

 

• in the bottle it is a liquid under pressure
   
  
• when released to atmosphere, boils becoming a gas
   
  
• Elgas describe the Propane product as a Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG)
   
  
• The "LPG" tag is not used in the USA where it is marketed as Propane
   
  

 

I'm not convinced by the "Petroleum" tag because petroleum according to Wikipedia was a greek name denoting rock oil, and today refers to products derived from crude oil (except for the gas sellers) so I suspect there is some oil industry ownership, or perceived marketing benefit in using "petroleum).

 

So, where did the Lithium go? I ran out of time to see if there is a Lithium component around Natural Gas or Propane, but perhaps it was once added and has since been removed. An intriguing hint of this is that Lithium is used for treating some mental disorders.

 

 

[Dafydd Llewellyn]

Do you agree with Graham Pearman's work?What do you consider a more significant cause of sea level rise - Increased Ocean temperature, or Increased Ice melt.

 

(These are not intended to be trick questions, just interested in your viewpoint)

I haven't followed the argument for the last few years; there was so much conflicting garbage that I found better things to do.

 

Obviously (I hope) the melting of floating ice has zero direct effect on sea level - though it does alter the Earth's albedo somewhat, which may increase the sun's heat going into the sea, and thus ocean temperatures, and thereby, sea levels. Melting of ice that is on land, has a direct effect on sea level - but it also reduces the weight of the land mass, which then rises, because it is floating on the magma. So I have no idea what the net effect actually is. Even such an apparently simple matter has multiple effects, and I doubt we have sufficient data to accurately evaluate them.

 

 

[turboplanner]

Well Graham was the person who worked at the CSIRO and coined the term "greenhouse effect" and went on to sit on the IPCC, and among other interesting things advise the US President of the day in conjunction with his US counterpart, and around 2000 he was able to clearly enunciate the results of tests including ice core sampling going back I think about 600,000 years, but as you say massive conflict occurred, agendas were run, and he left the CSIRO and the IPCC, and tragically the IPCC became infested by people who disgraced their scientific qualifications by deciding to touch up test results to get governments to take faster action, which then destroyed the credibility of IPCC, and today the static is so vast, that it's not worth even trying to find out the truth.

 

However we do have a few facts:

 

1. The core samples give us the temperature figures for 600,000 years

 

2. The CSIRO has a satellite photographing the Antarctic Ice Melt

 

3. Your opinion agrees with others, that a rise in ocean temperature will cause sea level rise rather than ice melt around the artic and antarctic areas (and there are hundreds

 

of sondes measuring water temp

 

 

[fly_tornado]

 

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/01/new-satellite-maps-show-polar-ice-caps-melting-at-unprecedented-rate

 

 

[turboplanner]

I was present in a mass webcast with one of the Guardians main environmental journalists around 2002 and he was pushing the global warming agenda then.

 

Australia's advantage is that the CSIRO can task our own satellite to record our own data with great accuracy, so we actually know what is happening, where it is happening and at what rate. (When I say "we", I mean CSIRO who aren't doing a particularly good job of reporting back to the people who paid for the Satellite and monitoring staff.)

 

 

[Dafydd Llewellyn]

Yes, well, I live just about on the 2000 ft AMSL contour, by choice.

 

The term "greenhouse effect" is misleading; the basic in Vs out radiation balance that determines the Earth's temperature and the effect of various gases in the atmosphere on that can be assessed in a qualitative way, by looking at the Earth's radiation spectrum, and the absorption spectra of the various gases. Water vapour is vastly more important than CO2 in this regard. This shows what nonsense is being spouted very clearly.

 

What comes out of that is that, at low levels in the atmosphere, there was sufficient CO2 well before the rise in the latter half of the 20th century, to absorb all the portion of the radiation spectrum that CO2 CAN absorb, in the first kilometre or so of the atmosphere; so doubling the CO2 concentration would merely halve that distance. That energy is re-radiated in all directions, and the portion of it that is headed "outwards" is re-absorbed in the next layer of the atmosphere, so one ends up with a succession of energy balance calculations, considering the atmosphere rather like the successive layers of an onion, until one gets to the point where the outermost layer finally does not have sufficient CO2 to absorb it all, and what escapes from all the relevant gases dictates the Earth's thermal balance. It's a fiendishly complex analysis, and I do not pretend to be sufficiently knowledgeable to do such calculations; but to me, this is much more relevant than what IPCC has been doing. The big question is not the direct effect of CO2, but the "amplifier" and "damping" effects of the change in CO2 on the Earth's albedo and the atmospheric water vapour, and we have only wild guesses as to those effects, except that 600,000 years of history you mention, which shows the the Earth is, in the long term, pretty stable.

 

What IS certain, is that there are too many people on the planet.

 

 

[Dafydd Llewellyn]

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/01/new-satellite-maps-show-polar-ice-caps-melting-at-unprecedented-rate

Yes, the climate is changing. But to what extent is that due to man-made CO2?

 

 

[fly_tornado]

Ask a climate scientist! Not a journalist or a politician.

 

 

[fly_tornado]

Have you guys seen this infographic?

 

 

Only in Australia

 

 

[Dafydd Llewellyn]

Ask a climate scientist! Not a journalist or a politician.

Do you really imagine they know, at this stage? I don't. However I'm dead sure there are better ways to use coal, than burning it for electricity. A responsible Government should be pushing bio-fuel technology.

 

When it comes to electric cars or aircraft, that is not eliminating pollution; it's merely exporting it to the power station and the battery manufacturer. You have to look at the whole chain, from the coal mine to your domestic appliance or whatever. It's loss, loss, loss all the way. Picking up fallen timber and burning it avoids all those intermediate inefficiencies. Applying that to an aircraft leads to the notion that the most concentrated energy source for transportation and distribution is an important factor.

 

 

[coljones]

To call a gas a liquid never made any sense to me, but I never bothered about it, but your comment prompted some research and this is what I found.

 

Lithium Propane (3CH7Li) is sold by several overseas companies mainly Chinese as that description

Hello Turbs can you provide a link to Lithium Propane?

[bexrbetter]

The Polar Ice Caps are currently increasing in size and have been doing so for a while - and it's been pissing off the GW radicals that they have been doing so

 

 

 

[fly_tornado]

Bex you wanna buy a bridge?

 

 

[octave]

According to these people the Antarctic is growing in parts but the Arctic is indeed reducing http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

 

 

[Bandit12]

At least now when I see a peacock without any friends, I know I can blame it on Wind Turbine Syndrome, and can recommend that it move to an area where only fossil fuels are used

 

 

[turboplanner]

Hello Turbs can you provide a link to Lithium Propane?

It would be interesting to know if the Lithium is still there, and if not why it was removed and whether that caused the higher combustion chamber temperatures.

 

http://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/summary/summary.cgi?q=all&cid=53436750#ec

 

http://sci-toys.com/scichem/jqp014/6093461.html

 

http://www.chemfrog.com/chemical_info/482199/

 

http://www.molbase.com/en/search.html?search_keyword=lithium%20propane&paid_chemical&gclid=Cj0KEQjwspCgBRCiwOjBxeCcm-kBEiQAooz6t5PRWa6VbUu49kg_8RhOY073bGNgcDkqDBEpGo_P7GcaAu168P8HAQ

 

 

[turboplanner]

Have you guys seen this infographic? Only in Australia

or.....only a post by FT - it does say anecdotal and it looks like it has been done by a practical joker.

[fly_tornado]

you're entitled to your opinions but you can't change the anecdotal evidence

 

 

[turboplanner]

...especially the anecdotes written by the Grimm borthers.

 

 

[kgwilson]

The Polar Ice Caps are currently increasing in size and have been doing so for a while - and it's been pissing off the GW radicals that they have been doing so

It is not the ice caps that are increasing it is the sea ice and paradoxically that is as a direct result of a warming world.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2014/mar/11/climate-change-antarctic-sea-ice-expedition