No more till September

I had had ambitious plans to load up several new and old posts so there would be an uninteruppted stream on the blog. I was going to send the fifty half-written emails in my draft box, but of course most of them are just a half baked idea in the title without anything solid to back them up, or solid titles undermined by half baked prose.

So pretty much the same as what usually gets published. 

And I was going to go through the archives and re-publish from the beginning, but even that would have taken more time than I have had.

But it hasn't happened, and now it probably won't happen. Not until September when I get back from my travels. 

I'd like to be sending messages from the yacht, telling you how nice it is to be our of email contact, but of course I'll be out of email contact. 

Five stages on the slippery slope

Sometimes it just seems like you're not going to make it. You look at all the things you need to do and the time you need to do it in, and they just won't fit. You add up all that you need to spend on all the things you need to buy, and it's more than you're going to earn--there is still some month left over at the end of the salary. Like you're heading straight towards a cliff with no sign of slowing down and no chance to change direction.

That's how it seems every time I start thinking about the climate. Too many centuries of carbon is being taken out of the earth each year, and the pressures of the population and excesses of the economy seem too great for this to get any less. The corresponding levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have unthinkable consequences.

I know that carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring chemical, and if you look far enough back into pre-history you find it has been at much higher levels. I also know that this was a prehistory that humans did not live in.

The amount of atmospheric CO2 we have now just exceeded 400 parts per million, and I know that figure seems pretty small, and is not hugely different to the level of 350 ppm that scientists have said is safe.

In fact they both sound pretty small numbers. How could a gas making up such a tiny part of the atmosphere make any difference?

Here's a list of highly toxic gases. These will kill within an hour at 200 ppm or under.

Chlorine is lethal in one part per million, so a safe level of 350 ppm is starting to look pretty good, and 400 isn't such a small number after all.

And you may be thinking that the 2 or 3 degree rise in global temperature is no big deal. But what if it was your body temperature?

So you could really start worrying about this stuff. But you don't have to. There is another choice.

It's called denial.

Why worry, when you could bury your head in the sand and pretend it will go away?

There are five simple stages. Take your pick! Or why not start at the beginning, then you can work through them one by one?

• Stage 1: It's not happening
• Stage 2: It wasn't us
• Stage 3: It's not a problem
• Stage 4: We can't do anything about it
• Stage 5: It's too late!

Global warming denial has a history all the way back to 1991, according to this report in the New York Times of the coal industry trying to turn the fact of global warming back into a theory.

If you have an election coming up, look out for the party that is playing the global warming denial card. You know it makes sense for them, if they are really desperate. There are plenty of people out there who don't want to believe. Electioneers need to reach out to that demographic! And it makes sense for you too, as you feel there is some authority behind your disbelief.

Read more about it here at rationalwiki.org.

“Plot idea: 97% of the world's scientists contrive an environmental crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires & oil companies.”
—Scott Westerfeld

Global warming - time to take the gloves off

There's something very funny about this picture. I'm not sure why, but when the left uses comedy to attack people on the right, it comes across as being very funny, with some underlying truth and justice. When people on the right use comedy to attack people on the left, it just doesn't seem to work.

This picture is funny, but not in the way it is meant to be. In fact, I think deep down it is not meant to be funny, and that may be the difference. The left is in a constant state of struggle against authority. Even when the left becomes powerful, it must struggle against itself and the inherent evil in the corruption of power, and the absolute corruption of absolute power. This is essentially comedy. The right, on the other hand, is dealing in tragedy. Their desire, their goal, and their destiny is to stay in charge. They are ultimately the victims of their own actions. And so are the rest of us. So if you're on the left, you can laugh. In fact, you have to.

Anyway, there is a serious point behind this joke with it's pyrrhic victory at getting a laugh. Not that Obama is setting out to kill the all-american bird. That idea is probably what makes this funny, in a kind of tragic way.

The serious point is that wind turbines do in fact kill birds.
In 2009, Electricity company PacifiCorp had to pay a $10.5 million dollar fine for killing 232 Eagles and other protected species.

Oh no, that was from electrocutions on power cables. Nothing to do with wind power--just supplying electricity from coal and maybe even nuclear power stations.

The avian fatalities from wind turbines are a little more modest, but even so they are significant.

You'd think that birds would have to be really stupid to fly into wind turbines. Those gracefully sweeping blades look easy to avoid. In reality though, the tips are moving at a very high speed, causing vortices that can disrupt birds' flight. I won't go into the Reynolds numbers here though.


Of course when it comes to Eagles, and especially the balding variety, we are talking about protected species, who probably are stupid. If they were so good at survival, they wouldn't be in the sorry state that humans are trying to help them.


Designers are now working to make turbines that will not affect birds, but this may be one more of those examples of taking the option with the least damage. We can continue with fossil fuels, and risk wholesale damage to the climate. Or increase carbon-neutral generation and kill a few pretty animals. There is no black and white in this, just shades of green and grey. Wind generation still looks pretty green if the choice is between killing a few pretty animals, or irrevocably changing the climate and killing many pretty animals.


I wonder how many birds are killed directly by pollution from thermal power plants? And what about all those canaries down mines?

And if you're worried about birds being killed in turbines, how many birds get killed by collision with aircraft?

Meanwhile, the state of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany has reached 100% renewable generation, mostly from wind.

The German eagles are evidently doing alright.


(Let me apologise, too late, if anyone found my earlier comments eaglist. In future I will try to be eaglitarian.)

Using large pipes as rainwater storage

In this interconnected age, whenever you have a great idea and start googling it, you usually find that somebody else has had the same one. In fact, you often find that somewhere there is a lively forum dedicated to implementing that idea, with five-star experts who have been sharing their experience since before the internet was invented.

So when you do have an idea and can't find anyone else who has done it, you start to wonder whether you are just being stupid, and have missed something very obvious that will stop it from working.
For the water storage system, I've been thinking about using pipes, around 15 or 20 cm in diameter, and looking for inspiration and advice on my pan-pipe design, which I think will look a lot nicer than the horizontal pipe rainwater storage system. Either way, I can't find anyone else who has tried it. At least if they have, they haven't blogged, written a book or made a website about it, so it doesn't count.

The closest I can find is the Green Building in Louiseville, Kentucky, which looks to have spiral pipes for rainwater collection.

Then I actually talked to someone about it.

"Wouldn't they be really expensive?" Oli asked. He had laid some pipe before and was shocked by the price he had been charged. I wondered whether that was a supply chain issue, but looking on the internet for white pvc pipes, as thick as possible, the best I could find was 11,130 for 4m lengths of 150mm VU pipe from cut-man.jp. They also had VP, which was a little more expensive. I think the difference is in the wall thickness, 11mm vs 20mm, and there's more information here if you're really interested.

Each 4m length would hold about 70 litres, so the tanks alone would price the system above commercially available ones.

There is a good site recommending low-cost solutions here. But most of them are also low-beauty.