A Giant Leap Backward For Mankind

Posted on 08/07/2023 by Grumpa Joe

My mind is swirling with data I’ve learned about global warming. My latest fad is to watch youtube videos on almost anything that appeals to me. Last week I came upon a video about permafrost melting in Alaska. This morning I learned that for some unexplained reason the air temperature around the poles is 3 degrees higher than it is around the rest of the planet. Earlier this morning I watched a video of a scientist explaining and showing strange thermal activity going on in Yellowstone park. In my feeble brain the wheels are turning in the direction of a theory. Could it be possible that the man made global warming bull crap is the result of something happening in the Earth’s crust under Yellowstone Park? We are spinning our wheels furiously all around the planet with our smartest overpaid scientists working on theories about everything that can cause Carbon Dioxide to warm the earth and to melt the ice poles, and without being able to measure a tenth of a degree of air temperature rise.

My theory is much less complicated. I hold that the melting of the ice caps is the result of a leakage of molten iron at 6000 degrees Kelvin from the core into the earth’s crust. I can wrap my head around a temperature that high and so close to the planet (like within the planet) that could be the cause of something to worry about. There is evidence that the core is actually shrinking due to a unmeasurable temperature decline and causing earthquakes and volcano eruptions all around the “Ring of Fire” a known ring of connected volcanoes at the perimeter of a tectonic plate that encircles the Pacific ocean extending from the north pole to New Zealand and up north again past Japan to the north pole. What do volcanoes do? They erupt and spew hot molten magma into the atmosphere thus relieving the internal pressure of the plate. Where does the molten lava originate? My guess is that is comes from the 6000 degree hot spot.

Unrelated to this discussion, but related non the less, was a announcement made by my equally demented senior citizen partner, the President of the United States Joe Biden. If ever there was a proposal toward a pork barrel project to spend money on something so foolish is beyond my confused mind to comprehend. In his proposal we would block, or bend the suns rays away from earth to cool the planet. The first thing that comes to my mind is a Polar Vortex, an event that is predicted to happen this winter and will cause us to wish we had a big pile of coal behind our house to burn for warmth. We can’t measure any change in atmospheric temperature large enough to melt an ounce of ice, but we will block the sun from the earth? Come on let’s get real.

Truth be known the science world is basking in their glory over taking credit for fixing the millennium bug Y2K, and the hole in the Ozone layer, but I think they are in over their head on this one. All they have accomplished so far is worldwide panic over eliminating gas powered cars with electric ones that will require burning vast amounts of coal, and natural gas in massive power plants pouring their smoke up, up, and away from our daily sight to another part of the globe where it will combine with moisture and cause excessive amounts of acid rain to damage the environment. Just as in the Y2K era we panicked and traded our antiquated computers to handle four digit years which turned into a good thing world wide. Not because they fixed the bug, but because they increased computing capacity by a ginormous amount. Similarly, the legislated ban on fluorocarbon compound freon in air conditioners and refrigerators was designed to heal the hole in the atmosphere known as the ozone layer. Which by the way, opens and closes naturally every year. What happened was a massive increase in electrical efficiency by the replacement of antiquated appliances. I’m afraid this cure toward the electrical car will bring us the opposite, and become a giant leap backwards for mankind.

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Wasting a Gift

Posted on 14/05/2023 by Grumpa Joe

A Gift to Humans, From the Supreme Being

There are many things in life that I am unsure of, but there is one thing I am certain of, and that is that there is one Supreme Being that initiated the universe. Be it by the big bang, or what ever other method human scientists can attribute to the argument to support the concept for the creation of the Universe. I strongly believe that a single Being existed before the universe. Believing in a Supreme Being is not a matter of religion even though it is often confused as that. In my mind the Supreme Being is a matter of common sense with which we are all endowed.

Planet Earth is merely a single tiny entity within a universe with billions of stars, Nova’s, black holes, comets, and planets spread throughout. What I do not know, nor does anyone, is if there are other planets with life on them. Common sense and the law of probability steer me toward believing there is. I also believe that our knowledge of the universe if infantile, and that the mathematical laws of physics postulated by Einstein are not etched in stone, and can be challenged even if not understood. The limit on the ability to travel faster than light is one of those laws. Life within the Universe is inconceivable without the ability to travel faster that light. Visits to Earth by unidentified peoples can only be possible if they can travel much faster than that the limit which we have calculated within our physics.

The Supreme Being populated planet Earth with humans, and many lifeforms. The Being allowed humans to evolve into their current form. The Supreme Being also made certain that humans would have the ability to survive in this environment. He gave us the resources and the growth of knowledge to extract from Earth all that we need to survive and thrive. Among these resources were air, water, animals, and plant life to provide sustenance. As man evolved he learned to make fire, and to use animal skins to clothe and protect himself from the elements. Man discovered metals within the planet from which he learned to make into tools and weapons. Man learned that he needed protection from predators larger than himself, and he invented weapons to do so.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century in which we live today. Realize how man has evolved and progressed using the Supreme Being’s gifts to us on this planet. We continue to discover new and exciting elements to add to the periodic table, and each one eventually is found to be an essential to life and human development. One resource with which we have learned to use wisely is biological matter. Man has used the resources of the forests and jungles and the sea to his benefit. Trees for wood to build his buildings, to make paper, and foliage to extract chemicals for medicines, and to recycle into compost to nourish the soil in which all these beneficial things grow. At the beginning of the twentieth century man discovered one of the planet’s most useful gifts, oil.

At first, oil was not considered very useful, but man used his mind to discover uses for this mysterious liquid. Initially, he learned that it was a great substitute for keeping his home lighted. Instead of hunting for whales to extract its oils for this purpose, he learned to use kerosene. At each step of man’s evolution, he used the gifts endowed by the Supreme Being to his purpose. Men tamed large animals to carry loads, to till fields, and to transport loads across distances. Then came oil. Man invented mechanical devices to help him with his work. At first, he used the energy derived from burning wood to convert water into steam. After he realized oil could also be burned to produce heat his mind turned to inventing mechanical devices that would use oil to power them.

Man’s genius was stimulated by the Supreme Being’s gift of oil. His invention and knowledge expanded exponentially by using chemistry to separate oil into many components. The process was called distillation, and has yielded fine lubricating oil, tar, kerosene, gasoline, and more. We all know that gasoline is one of the most beneficial gifts we have on the planet. From oil came more gifts as chemists invented new materials using oil as a feedstock for plastics. Plastics may be a bigger gift to humanity than is gasoline. The number of different plastics and their applications are nearly endless, and many have become indispensable in our lives.

Man has not stopped inventing new uses for the gifts bestowed to us by planet earth. Yet we do not seem to appreciate that these are gifts, as is our intellect to invent, and to use them for our benefit. Throughout the entire evolution of man, he has adapted his circumstances to the gifts bestowed upon him. We are but now beginning to learn how to harness the power of wind and the rays of the sun to power our lives. What man does not want to believe is that the knowledge to turn solar and wind power into useful tools may take a century to develop. Man is over-looking the existing gifts he has been bestowed and dumping them in favor of the under developed resources of solar, and wind before there is a crucial need for them to be used. True, we need to develop them, but we don’t need to panic by leaving our greatest resource in favor of an infantile industry that at this time is not essential nor ready to do the job.

No doubt, man is correctly thinking about developing replacements for our most essential power source, but the time table to do so is not urgent. We have hundreds of years of fossil fuels remaining to consume before wind and solar become an emergency. As the time draws nearer to the end of fossil fuel, man will put his brain into high gear to shift the source of power towards his emergent needs.

Assuming man will succeed in electrifying the planet to eliminate fossil fuels he will be left with the horrifying prospect of finding substitutes for making plastics. Man has not thought this problem through to its finality. Think of a world without plastic. Think of plastic within your own life. Your clothes, tools, shoes, packaging, furniture, housing components, just to name a few are all composed with plastics. Man will be forced to continue to refine fossil fuels to make these products.

The elimination of fossil fuels is a direct rejection of the gift endowed upon him by the Supreme Being. Who is man to be so forward as to reject a magnificent gift as this from the Being? In my statements above, I exposed my belief in a Supreme Being, and now I want to expose another belief which is that for every positive in our life there is an equal and opposite negative. What this leads to is an equally negative Being that counteracts the positive one. The current rejection of the positive Being’s gift may be the work of His negative counter-force. There has to be some explanation for why such a beautiful gift is being rejected by man in favor of the current pipe dream to abandon the gift of fossil fuels to that of under developed power sources.

Jumping into an electric world before we are ready to convert completely away from fossil fuels is a mistake that will condemn planet Earth to extinction. Will we have to retrogress away from forward evolution and increased knowledge to achieve the goal of purifying the air, water and earth of pollutants? Do we really want to evolve backward to the Cro-magnon man who lived on a pristine planet Earth, and feared for his life from other larger carnivores, but breathed only the air polluted only by the gasses of volcanic eruptions?

The conclusion I want to direct the reader toward is to re-examine his conclusions about electrifying Earth completely before it is necessary, or even possible.  

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Oceans Rising

Posted on 04/06/2022 by Grumpa Joe

I just completed a book titled “The Power of Crisis”by Ian Bremmer. Mr Bremmer predicts that the three largest threats to the world are: global warming, pandemics, and disruptive technology. As I read the passages about how people living on islands in large oceans are losing ground to rising waters, I thought about the phenom of global warming. I’m not sure I totally buy into this problem yet. Most of the blame is being pointed toward the polar ice caps melting. I see a problem with that premise. Number one, ice is frozen water and water expands as it freezes. The net effect is zero. When it melts it loses volume and returns to normal. As an experiment I filled a glass with ice cubes and then poured water over the cubes to fill the interstitial spaces to the brim. If the global warming argument works then I should see a flood of water around the glass as the ice melts, but I didn’t. The ice melted and the frozen water contracted in volume and stayed in the glass. This will work as long as the ice and water are floating together. If, however, the ice is on land like a glacier, and the glacier melts, that is adding water to the lake, or ocean. There are other effects that will cause water to rise in an ocean. One is gravitational pull of the moon. Which causes tides to rise and fall.

Antarctica is a continent which means there is ground somewhere beneath the ice we see. They have even discovered lakes under the ice. What triggered me to think of melting ice is the many experimental stations working at Antarctica. These are huge communities of buildings built on the ice and heated. Within the big buildings are smaller mini houses which are homes and offices to the hundreds of people who live there year around working on various experiments. Each of the mini-homes is heated to a human comfort level. All of that heat goes somewhere, it just doesn’t disintegrate. I picture all this heat transferring from the heaters inside the mini-homes into the walls and out into the large external building, and through it’s walls into the air surrounding, and into the ground upon which it is built. Except the buildings are not sitting on ground, they are sitting on ice. I picture this Arctic village which is inside a large building gradually melting away at the base, and the water flowing downhill toward the ocean. I’d be willing to bet that the amount of ice melting at the South pole is greater from the experimental stations than it is from air temperature rising due to increased carbon dioxide.

Anyway, I digressed from the book. Covid has scrambled my brain to think negatively about the effects of global warming. Over the course of the life of earth there is evidence of several cycles of global warming that have occurred, all before the invention of automobiles, the discovery of oil and before there were billions of people on the planet. All of these cycles of warming occurred due to natural phenomena, and I believe that we may be riding along on the wave of another warming cycle which we will not be able to do anything about, except to adapt as it happens. I would be more inclined to learn how to build effective dikes than how to generate electricity using wind power. Or perhaps we should be learning how to tap the molten core of earth to generate the heat we need to run power-plant turbines.

The crisis being caused by global warming is in the minds of those who think reducing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere is the only answer, and who cannot shift their paradigm.

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Finally, Someone with Common Sense

Posted on 24/02/2022 by Grumpa Joe

Today, my buddy Jim sent me an eloquently written scientific piece about the stupidity of electric cars. A while back I wrote a piece on what I thought about electric cars, and it is in total agreement with this more science oriented piece written by engineers. Great minds think alike.

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THE ELECTRIC CAR ISSUES ARE GROWING IN CONTRAVERSY. HERE IS AN ANALYSIS WHICH MIGHT GIVE YOU A BIT MORE EDUCATED VIEW OF THIS TREND AND THE FUTUTE. 
 

The utility companies have thus far had little to say about the alarming cost projections to operate electric vvehicles (EVs) or the increased rates that they will be required to charge their customers. It is not just the total amount of electricity required, but the transmission lines and fast charging capacity that must be built at existing filling stations. Neither wind nor solar can support any of it. Electric vehicles will never become the mainstream of transportation!


In part 1 of our exposé on the problems with electric vehicles (EVs), we showed that they were too expensive, too unreliable, rely on materials mined in China and other unfriendly countries, and require more electricity than the nation can afford.  In this second part, we address other factors that will make any sensible reader avoid EVs like the plague.


EV Charging Insanity


In order to match the 2,000 cars that a typical filling station can service in a busy 12 hours, an EV charging station would require 600, 50-watt chargers at an estimated cost of $24 million and a supply of 30 megawatts of power from the grid. That is enough to power 20,000 homes. No one likely thinks about the fact that it can take 30 minutes to 8 hours to recharge a vehicle between empty or just topping off. What are the drivers doing during that time?


ICSC-Canada board member New Zealand-based consulting engineer Bryan Leyland describes why installing electric car charging stations in a city is impractical:


“If you’ve got cars coming into a petrol station, they would stay for an average of five minutes. If you’ve got cars coming into an electric charging station, they would be at least 30 minutes, possibly an hour, but let’s say its 30 minutes. So that’s six times the surface area to park the cars while they’re being charged. So, multiply every petrol station in a city by six. Where are you going to find the place to put them?”


The government of the United Kingdom is already starting to plan for power shortages caused by the charging of thousands of EVs. Starting in June 2022, the government will restrict the time of day you can charge your EV battery. To do this, they will employ smart meters that are programmed to automatically switch off EV charging in peak times to avoid potential blackouts.


In particular, the latest UK chargers will be pre-set to not function during 9-hours of peak loads, from 8 am to 11 am (3-hours), and 4 pm to 10 pm (6-hours). Unbelievably, the UK technology decides when and if an EV can be charged, and even allows EV batteries to be drained into the UK grid if required. Imagine charging your car all night only to discover in the morning that your battery is flat since the state took the power back. Better keep your gas-powered car as a reliable and immediately available backup! While EV charging will be an attractive source of revenue generation for the government, American citizens will be up in arms.


Used Car Market


The average used EV will need a new battery before an owner can sell it, pricing them well above used internal combustion cars. The average age of an American car on the road is 12 years.  A 12-year-old EV will be on its third battery. A Tesla battery typically costs $10,000 so there will not be many 12-year-old EVs on the road. Good luck trying to sell your used green fairy tale electric car! 


Tuomas Katainen, an enterprising Finish Tesla owner, had an imaginative solution to the battery replacement problem—he blew up his car! New York City-based Insider magazine reported (December 27, 2021):


“The shop told him the faulty battery needed to be replaced, at a cost of about $22,000.  In addition to the hefty fee, the work would need to be authorized by Tesla…Rather than shell out half the cost of a new Tesla to fix an old one, Katainen decided to do something different… The demolition experts from the YouTube channel Pommijätkät (Bomb Dudes) strapped 66 pounds of high explosives to the car and surrounded the area with slow-motion cameras…the 14 hotdog-shaped charges erupt into a blinding ball of fire, sending a massive shockwave rippling out from the car…The videos of the explosion have a combined 5 million views.”


We understand that the standard Tesla warranty does not cover “damage resulting from intentional actions,” like blowing the car up for a YouTube video. 


EVs Per Block In Your Neighborhood


A home charging system for a Tesla requires a 75-amp service. The average house is equipped with 100-amp service. On most suburban streets the electrical infrastructure would be unable to carry more than three houses with a single Tesla. For half the homes on your block to have electric vehicles, the system would be wildly overloaded.


Batteries


Although the modern lithium-ion battery is four times better than the old lead-acid battery, gasoline holds 80 times the energy density. The great lithium battery in your cell phone weighs less than an ounce while the Tesla battery weighs 1,000 pounds. And what do we get for this huge cost and weight? We get a car that is far less convenient and less useful than cars powered by internal combustion engines. Bryan Leyland explained why:


“When the Model T came out, it was a dramatic improvement on the horse and cart. The electric car is a step backward into the equivalence of an ordinary car with a tiny petrol tank that takes half an hour to fill. It offers nothing in the way of convenience or extra facilities.”


Our Conclusion

The electric automobile will always be around in a niche market likely never exceeding 10% of the cars on the road. All automobile manufacturers are investing in their output and all will be disappointed in their sales. Perhaps they know this and will manufacture just what they know they can sell. This is certainly not what President Biden or California Governor Newsom are planning for. However, for as long as the present government is in power,
they will be pushing the electric car as another means to run our lives. We have a chance to tell them exactly what we think of their expensive and dangerous plans when we go to the polls in November of 2022. 


 
 Drs. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris

 
 Dr. Jay Lehr is a Senior Policy Analyst with the International Climate Science Coalition and former Science Director of The Heartland Institute. He is an internationally renowned scientist, author, and speaker who has testified before Congress on dozens of occasions on environmental issues and consulted with nearly every agency of the national government and many foreign countries. After graduating from Princeton University at the age of 20 with  a degree in Geological Engineering, he received the nation’s first Ph.D. in Groundwater Hydrology from the University of Arizona. He later became executive director of the National Association of Groundwater Scientists and Engineers.


 Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition, and a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute. He has 40 years of experience as a mechanical engineer/project manager, science and technology communications professional, technical trainer, and S&T advisor to a former Opposition Senior Environment Critic in Canada’s Parliament.

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Car In My Dreams

Posted on 09/02/2022 by Grumpa Joe

Last week I watched a series of Youtube videos on enterprises begun by Elon Musk. In one particular business he showed Tesla making lithium batteries. They looked like a standard D cell. I thought to my self “is the Tesla car running on a shitload of D cells?” It would be interesting to break open a Tesla battery to see what was inside the case. Many times my curiosity has gotten the best of me when disposing of a large rectangular battery. Instead of tossing it I would take it apart. Inside the boxlike case was a series of standard batteries soldered together in series to produce the stated voltage.

This particular video came to mind and I thought why not? Why couldn’t we make a battery powered car by stringing a bunch of standard batteries together and hiding them under the hood and in the trunk?

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