The Evil European

Anti-Christ gets a little burnt!

After years of negotiation the ink is finally dry on the second most expensive scientific project after the International Space Station. ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, though will hopefully be more successful than the hobbled space station has been.
The €10b cost is being half funded by the EU member states, the rest coming from Japan, China, India, South Korea, Russia and the USA, and will be built down in Cadarache, Southern France, which is already home to a nuclear energy research centre.
With construction beginning next year, its hard to say if the project will live up to expectations.
Nuclear fission was meant to produce 'electricity to cheap to metre'...but has ended up as one of the most expensive forms of power. At least fusion has none of the nasty radioactive waste products.
Even at the very worse, the skills and knowledge gained from this project, even if it fails, should be a boon for both research communities in the EU and around the world. Fingers crossed and watc this space

"The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."

Albert Einstein


"What most people don't seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one."

Margaret Mitchell

The Lonesome Electric Chicken

I laughed so hard I nearly pissed myself.

Over the years I have had to deal with climate change flat-earthers who, because they have gained a tiny bit of knowledge, some how feel that they can claim with a HUGE degree of certainty that climate change is just some massive hoax by the left-wing/greens/UN/aliens/'insert enemy here'.

This was what made this article in The Guardian so amusing. Its the same old same old of bad science and worse journalism. What it shows is that a lie repeated often enough is still a lie, just that morons and idiots believe it.

Here are some of the more amusing elements of the article.

"Published in two parts on consecutive Sundays, it runs to a total of 52 pages, containing graphs, tables and references. To my correspondents, to a good many journalists and to thousands of delighted bloggers, this paper clinches it: climate change is a hoax perpetrated by a leftwing conspiracy coordinated by the United Nations.

So which was the august journal that published it? Science? Nature? Geophysical Research Letters? Not quite. It was the Sunday Telegraph. In keeping with most of the articles about climate change in that publication, it is a mixture of cherry-picking, downright misrepresentation and pseudo-scientific gibberish. But it has the virtue of being incomprehensible to anyone who is not an atmospheric physicist.

The author of this "research article" is Christopher Monckton, otherwise known as Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. He has a degree in classics and a diploma in journalism and, as far as I can tell, no further qualifications. But he is confident enough to maintain that - by contrast to all those charlatans and amateurs who wrote the reports produced by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - he is publishing "the truth".

And.....

"James Hansen, he did not tell the US Congress that temperatures would rise by 0.3C by the end of the past century. He presented three possible scenarios to the US Senate - high, medium and low. Both the high and low scenarios, he explained, were unlikely to materialise. The middle one was "the most plausible".

As it happens, the middle scenario was almost exactly right. He did not claim, under any scenario, that sea levels would rise by several feet by 2000. But a climatologist called Patrick Michaels took the graph from Hansen's paper, erased the medium and low scenarios and - in testimony to Congress - presented the high curve as Hansen's prediction for climate change. A memo sent in July from the Intermountain Rural Electric Association, a US company whose power is largely supplied by coal, revealed that Michaels has long been funded by electricity companies. "In February this year, IREA alone contributed $100,000 to Dr Michaels." Michaels, it says, meets periodically with industry representatives to discuss their activities in countering stories about climate change.

Pat Michaels's misrepresentation of Hansen's claims was picked up by Michael Crichton in his novel State of Fear, and somehow transmuted into an "error" of 300%. Monckton gives no source for his claim about Hansen, but Crichton's novel features in his references. The howlers go on and on. There is scarcely a line in Lord Monckton's paper which is not wildly wrong."

The rest of the article can be found here

A number of different issues spring to mind.

Firstly, bullshit dressed up as science is still bullshit, its just harder for the lay public to
realise this. Its one of the oldest tricks in the book.

Secondly, such debates point to an ever growing desperation among those whom see climate change as some massive conspiracy. The debate among the scientific community is over (though that does not mean that we understand everything). We are moving into a phase of identification of the problem to try and do something about it. The fact that voodoo science is being used not to disprove climate change, but to say that 'yes it happens but its not that bad or not our fault' is a significant shift.

Thirdly though, it points to a weakness within the wider community, within the media, within politics, and within the scientific community to communicate not just what climate change is about, but what science is.

Science is not the ultimate truth, science is a methodology to understand the world around us. It can be developed, it can be refined, it can be challenged. It is open and ever changing, but there are points within this process were we can say with a huge degree of certainty that we understand how and why processes happen. The terminology within science can also be misinterpreted. You only have to look at the 'debates' around the Theory of Evolution to see how the theory side of it is used to denote 'lacking any proof or evidence'. The reality is that it is growing developing and changing, but the central premise is still sound and being re-enforced each and every day.

Anyway, the point I want to make is that the Daily Telegraph is a shitty paper; that bullshit is still bullshit no matter which way you look at it; that the general public are ignorant; and most importantly, climate change is real, that something needs to be done and its getting the flat-earthers scared! Oh, and that Micheal Crichton is a shit author. (And I have to stop relying on Wikipedia!)

I know, bad Chemistry joke but I could not resist.

Anyway, one of the great changes in reducing CO2 emissions is the transport sector. Basically, modern transport, and the extensive production and consumption system based around it is hooked on liquefied animal remains. Road transport is a major and growing source of CO2 emissions and while alternatives are very slowly beginning to come on stream for electricity production, given transport very nature, ie MOVING, it represents a major challenge.

Three main technologies are in the pipelines; biofuels, electric and hydrogen. Its the last of this which I am going to talk about, due to an interesting article in 'Wired'.

"The automaker is taking that premise to the road with a limited test release next year. BMW said it will put 100 of the hydrogen models into circulation in the United States, Europe and Asia. The cars will be loaned to high-profile people, BMW says, such as celebrities and politicians. If the cars become sufficiently popular, BMW says it can go into full-scale production, without commenting how much the model will cost.

The test drive confirmed the vehicles are road-ready. But some major issues need to be worked out, particularly with acquiring and storing the liquid hydrogen fuel."

Road Testing BMWs Hydrogen 7

BMW has gone and produced 100 BMW 7 series powered by Hydrogen. While many car companies have already produced hydrogen powered vehicles, these have tended to be fuel-cell powered. What BMW has done is produced an internal combustion engined hydrogen vehicle. The fuel efficiency of combustion is currently higher than fuel cell.

While this is an important step, the more significant issue is less to do with the car, but what is done next; how to make hydrogen cars an attractive alternative, economically and environmentally?

Off the top of my head, the approach I would be to make hydrogen produced from sustainable energy sources tax free across Europe with the idea of stimulating both clean hydrogen production and development of sustainable energy sources (wind, solar, even biofuels which can be processed for hydrogen). Many cities, and the whole of Iceland (which we will get back to in a minute), are already working on hydrogen vehicles, though these tend to be fuel cells, so there is a limited but growing market. If that market can be expanded my car makers given positive signals from national governments and the European Union that their vehicles will be tax free and the fuel tax free, it would help to develop the fueling infrastructure.
The second element is the production side, which is were Iceland comes in. As demand increases, production expands and should encourage an expansion of production infrastructure which should help to drive down the costs of clean energy sources. This in turn would help to make sustainable energy sources more competitive and more in demand and so on. The Icelandic connection is that Iceland has huge amounts of geothermal energy that can used to manufacture clean, cheap hydrogen, if there is a market for it.
Its all a bit chicken and the egg.

All untested, all unquoted, pure of the top of my head!

As I mentioned in my previous blog, the First World War was the first 'industrial' war. This reminded me of an article I read a few days earlier in the Guardian about the use of robots in warfare.

"By 2015, the US Department of Defense plans that one third of its fighting strength will be composed of robots, part of a $127bn (£68bn) project known as Future Combat Systems (FCS), a transformation that is part of the largest technology project in American history.

The US army has already developed around 20 remotely controlled Unmanned Ground Systems that can be controlled by a laptop from around a mile away, and the US Navy and US Air Force are working on a similar number of systems with varying ranges. According to a US general quoted in the US Army's Joint Robotics Program Master Plan (http://tinyurl.com/yl7s52 - 13.8MB PDF), "what we're doing with unmanned ground and air vehicles is really bringing movies like Star Wars to reality". The US military has 2,500 uncrewed systems deployed in conflicts around the world. But is it Star Wars or I, Robot that the US is bringing to reality? By 2035, the plan is for the first completely autonomous robot soldiers to stride on to the battlefield.

The US is not alone. Around the globe, 32 countries are now working on the development of uncrewed systems. In the UK, Qinetiq, the former Defence Research Agency which owns Foster-Miller, manufacturers of the Talon system, confirmed that it has developed remote bulldozers and earthmovers and that its technology could also be installed in tanks - and scientists at Qinetiq told the Guardian two years ago that it had built a robot fighter plane. When flown on test flights, they said, the fighter is accompanied by two crewed fighters, whose role is to shoot it down if it malfunctions."

Launching a new kind of warfare

For me, this would seem to represent as significant change to warfare as the trench warfare of the First World War.

Firstly, as mentioned in the article, the use of robots to murder people (war is murder) creates a degree of separation that goes beyond the current one we see in modern warfare. In a modern conflict, while actions can be done at a distance, such as in an aircraft or tank, you are still 'there'. If controlling the same tank or plane, or even infantry, can be done in another country or even half way across the world, it represents an even greater distance. It becomes little more than a video game. The use of automated machines is an even greater degree of separation.
In away, this seperation already exists. We have generals telling other people to kill other people, but at most stages, people are involved. It just seems to be taking this degree of separation to its next logical conclusion, but after the horrors of the First and Second World War, as well as the industrial murder of the Holocaust, is this a road we want to go down? We already see in day to day life, people are not people. We are consumers, collectives, statistics, problems. The logic of this thinking is highly disturbing. (I am not very articulate, but you get my drift. I am sure some guy or girl out there has a name for this).

The second issue is what I call the Volvo syndrome. Volvo (not just Volvo but they are known for it) make safe cars, in a safer cars people are more willing to take chances as they will more insulated from danger. Apply that to robot warfare and the danger is that the threshold for warfare will drop for nations with robotic militarises. No troops in danger, no body bags, no bad press. The only opposition will be from the international community and national populous, but as been shown in the past, that can be overcome with calls to nationalism and tribalism, by demonising the enemy.

The scary thing is, the governments and companies that are developing these new technological horrors are not interested in discussing these issues. For them, its effective strike ranges, kill rations and combat effectiveness....which is just another way to say 'kill people'.

The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month

Armistice day commemorate the end of hostilities in World War One, or the Great War, the future was to bring more horrors, and all those that lost their lives. It was in many ways the first war of the industrial age, mass production enabled mass slaughter, and in only 21 short years, more fighting and even more death. As more and more wars have followed, it is used to remember even more lives lost.

As a child growing up playing war games, you romantisice war, just as was done during the beginning of the First World War, not truly understanding the horror it brings. It was only in a high school English class, reading a poem written by a soldier in the trenches, did this reality dawn on me. Kind of took the 'fun' out of war, and while I am no pacifist, war is, and should always been seen as a last resort and a failure.

Its a shame that many war are stilling being fought, and while in Europe our cities are not being bombed, and former enemies are now close friends, industrial warfare is still killing many soldiers and civilians. It strikes me as rather hypocritical that the West, the UK, France, Germany, the USA and Russia, are the main suppliers of weapons to many of the warzones around the world.

In Flanders Fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae

Flight Patterns

This a stunning example of our urge and need to travel. For, its beauty is only matched by the way it highlights the challenges of the future in addressing climate change and carbon dioxide emissions. But within these patterns are linages and nodes, which can be joined together in more ways than one.

Turkey court clears archaeologist

A court in the Turkish city of Istanbul has acquitted a 92-year-old academic of charges of insulting Muslim women and inciting religious hatred.

BBC News
Placing an issue into a wider context...something many people dont want to do.