Water harvesting system

My father put in a water harvesting system when he built his house twenty years ago. It still seems to work. Last time I visited, I helped my mother change the filters and clean out the gutters. Actually we should have done that the other way around. While cleaning the gutters, a certain amount of crap ended up washing down the gutters, and straight into the nice clean filter, so if you ever find yourself cleaning a water harvesting system, clean the gutters first!

​Three drains from the house, and one from the garage to the right, all come into one gutter. This then heads through a drainpipe into the filter butt.


Water goes through a grill to catch leaves and large debris, then a felt filter bag lined with a nylon gauze bag. The filter butt can take something like 100 litres, which quickly fills up if it is raining heavily since the roof has a large area, and it takes time for the water to get through the filter. Another piece of advice: it's a good idea to change the filter when it has not rained for a while, then it is a lot lighter.



When you don't need any more water, the large yellow pipe to the right of the filter butt can be put onto the drainpipe to bypass the filter. In fact when changing the filters, we should probably have put the bypass pipe on.

Filtered water then goes into a tank under the garage. There are two tanks, one being filled and the other supplying water to the house. You can choose which tank to fill by putting the hose into it, and the red taps will choose which tank is supplying water.

Wonderfully low-tech!

You can see how much is in each tank with these two old washing-up liquid bottles, filled with sand, which have floats attached to the other end of the strings.

Detailed calibration has been added.

An electric pump draws water from the tanks, either on demand from a float in a tank at the top of the house, or at the flick of the "over ride" switch.

From the pump the water goes through a chamber with a purification tablet on the left, then another filter on the right.



The pipes then run along the wall to another clearly laid-out junction where the harvested rain water can be switched off, and mains water can be switched on instead. The pipe goes into the house and up to a water tank above the bathroom, which has a ballcock that activates the pump when more water is needed.


This system still works after twenty years, providing most of the domestic water. There are a couple of separate taps of mains water in the house for drinking and cooking. I particularly like the layout and simplicity of this system, and if anything did go wrong with it, any handyman could quickly work out what was wrong and how to fix it. Financially it has probably not paid for itself, since their water is relatively cheap, and in fact my Dad admitted it was a bit of folly, but I'm sure he enjoyed making the system and was very satisfied to see it work.

It does provide some insurance against water shortages, which may now happen with increasing frequency, in and amongst the increasing floods! In many areas there is a cheap, regular and safe supply of water, and harvesting your own water is probably a low priority if you are building on a budget. Rain water harvesting is now mandatory in some Indian and Australian states, and many places around the world offer financial support for people harvesting water. And if you are building on a plot a long way from the infrastructure then a rain water harvesting system could save money.

Windows transparent, specs translucent, prices opaque

Japan is a country that seems to have its priorities wrong when it comes to building houses. Here, you'll find more insulation in an underwear department than in the walls of your house. The packaging of chocolate snacks has bigger air gaps than double-glazed window units. And more care is given to temperature control of draft beer than homes. 

While many Japanese manufactured products are among the best in the world, it became clear very early that Japanese windows are not. Within Japan there seems to be a stark difference between domestic production and exports. Companies that do export usually have
completely different product line ups, and different marketing strategies. International competition is tough and competitive, while the domestic market is characterised by franchises and conglomerates, so that choice to the consumer is limited.

Looking from an anthropological perspective, this may have something to do with low context and high context societies. In the low-context west, the priority is on finding the best solutions must be found for problems. In Japan, relationships, and especially long-term relationships are most important. If you're buying vegetables from your neighbourhood green grocer, then the relationship between you and the green grocer is important. While building a house, I can't help feeling that the most important long-term relationships are those among the architect, the builder, the suppliers and the sub-contractors. It seems like the poor sods who have to pay for it all, and then usually live in the building for the rest of their lives, are a bit of a nuisance and an interruption to this cosy clique. After the house is built, it's pretty unlikely the customer is going to be going back to get another one, and if they do need to build a new house, there's a fair chance it would be with someone else.

This is one reason to make the building industry resistant to imports and happy with what it gets. I'm quite sure this is not unique to Japan, and the building industry is conservative the world over. In fact people in general will usually choose the status quo rather than leap into the unknown.

The situation with windows is that the performance of imported windows, in terms of insulation and airtightness, is much higher than Japanese manufactured windows, and in fact when we were trying to compare the performance, it was quite difficult to find any quantified figures for the Japanese windows. The Japanese windows are cheaper, but in order to make a comparison, you need to know how much heat they are going to let out over their lifetime.

As I wrote before, the triple-glazed, wooden-framed, argon-filled windows located mostly on the South of the building will bring in over twice as much heat as they lose. Lower spec windows are
effectively leaking heat throughout the winter and will cost more the longer they are used. The economics change if you knock the house down and smash the windows after 17 years, which I think is the average life-expectancy of a building in Japan. But the windows will probably last 50 years, and the calculations I'm making for energy savings are also based on that. Without high-spec windows, the only way to get high energy performance from a building is to make the windows very small. And that seems to be what is happening with a lot of houses. This may look like a picture of a four-storey building, but in fact is it a two-storey building, and the windows are tiny. 

It was not a completely smooth ride getting imported windows, partly exacerbated by the fact that we dealt directly with a window importer rather than ordering the windows with everything else through the builders. At first the architect wanted us to use some Japanese windows, hoping to sneak them in where they were not so critical. The reality is that we're looking at a building envelope with a more-or-less uniform temperature, so everywhere is critical, and wherever you put something with a lower insulation spec into the envelope, that will immediately become a critical spot. 

We ordered the windows summer 2010, before the house was built, as part of an application for a 2.7 million yen NEDO grant, which was dependent on the building being finished by the end of January. Working back from that deadline, the windows needed to arrive in November 2010, ready to be delivered onto the building site. Unfortunately, it didn't seem that anybody was working forward to that deadline, and when we eventually got a building schedule, the date for the windows to go in was the following 23rd May, over six months later. They were since delayed another month due mainly to the weather, and partly due to a shortage of building supplies caused both directly by the Tohoku earthquake hitting factories producing building materials, and indirectly because of the extra demand in rebuilding.

I don't think there is a systematic attempt to keep imported windows out of Japan, but there are several mitigating circumstances.
* Japanese builders have long-term relationships with Japanese window manufacturers.
* There is little knowledge or understanding of insulation and what the numbers actually mean.
* Higher performance windows are more expensive, and the budget for windows is usually very small.
* Customers are unlikely to ask for high performance windows, and if they do, they are likely to be told it is impossible, unnecessary and expensive.

Windows make a massive difference to a house. When people are asked what they did wrong, the most common answer is the location, size, shape or style of the windows.

This includes edited content from  Are windows being framed? posted May, 2011. The content was still mostly true, although Japanese windows have got better, and if we were building today we would have probably used Excel Shanon. There is still plenty of aluminum to be seen, even in brand new houses.

Five energy generations of tall buildings: an historical analysis of energy consumption in high-rise buildings

Here's an interesting look at energy consumption in high rise buildings by Philip Oldfield, in the Journal of Architecture: Vol 14, No 5.

A lot of sky scrapers today use less energy than the first ones built at the end of the 19th century, but it is difficult to say that there has been a trend towards less energy consumption over the years, and there is no evidence that it has been a prime concern of builders and designers.

A fundamental in the energy efficiency of a building is its form factor. This is the ratio of surface area to floor area. Buildings lose or gain heat through surface area, and are basically used by floor area, so other things being equal a lower form factor will mean less energy consumption, since the heat lost in winter needs heating to replace, and heat gained in summer needs cooling to remove. 

The form factor seems to have taken a couple of steps backwards. The first was in the zoning of buildings. As high rise buildings began to sprout up around New York, they grew not only upwards but also outwards, reaching for the sky and spreading out into whole blocks. This cast big shadows, stealing light and air from the surrounding neighbourhoods, leading to the 1916 Revised Zoning Regulations limiting the bulk of buildings at certain heights.

Although this inspired a lot of Art Deco, it increased the form factor since taller and pointier also has more surface area to less floor space.

The zoning represents the second generation of energy, and buildings of this period have higher form factor, higher U values and more energy use.

The next generations was heralded by the glazed curtain wall in 1951. These statements in steel and glass brought the form factor down, but the U values kept going up, and they were still heated by steam, so the energy use kept going up. Apparently buildings from the late 60s used more than twice the energy of buildings from the early 50s. Doubling in twenty years! 

The oil shock of 1973 stopped those energy bills from rising, bringing in the fourth generation. Form factors were down below the first generation, and those glass facades were doubled up and the U values also came down below the first generation of sky scrapers.

The fifth generation, since 1997, is marked by environmental consciousness. Interestingly the form factors of these buildings have gone up. The U values have gone down as they are using triple glazing, and energy generation is being incorporated, as well as natural ventilation techniques.

I can't help feeling that basic design considerations and simple thermodynamics are being overlooked in favour of adding green dressing and making bold statements. Building a windmill in the middle of your skyscraper looks cool, but couldn't you just clad it with solar panels?

Creating an Ecosystem of doubt

The more interesting questions are why, and how, people are trying to stop us from believing that climate change is happening and was almost certainly caused by us. As well as the different stages of climate denial, there are different levels of deniers, and different motivations for denial. Some people are just trying to be annoying.

The first thing to say is that it is really easy to persuade people the climate science is fake. In many ways our brains are determined not to believe in it. Millennia of evolution have trained us to respond well to some threats, for example our fight or flight instincts are particularly well honed. We are not so good at coping with non-immediate threats, and our minds are usually bad at calculating low-level risk. If humans were good at working out probabilities we probably wouldn't have any casinos. 

"Don't they look funny out in the snow with their thick coats?"

At the same time we have a strong reaction to change, and a confirmation bias. We desperately want to believe that we can carry on as we are because things are going to stay more or less the same, and we will pounce on any evidence that supports this, and ignore information that suggests otherwise.

Also we suffer from loss aversion. Given the choice of gaining 100 quid or not losing 100 quid, we are much more scared of losing than happy to gain. In our psychology a bird in the hand really is worth two in the bush. Tackling climate change is often perceived as a personal loss, because a reduction in quantity of carbon suggests a reduction in the quality of our carbon-enriched lifestyles. In fact doing nothing about climate change threatens to be a personal loss for many people, but, see above, the losses won't come till later, and it may be someone else who is losing.

So, climate deniers have got a pretty easy job. Human psychology is on their side.

Next, in some parts of the world at least, climate change has become a political issue. This means we also have group mentality to deal with. The reasoning works something like this: Al Gore believes in Global Warming, Al Gore is blue, I am red, therefore Al Gore is wrong. This does not happen exclusively in the US, but the issue has been polarised to a large extent there. I've never been a fan of UK arch-conservative Margaret Thatcher, but unlike 97% of politicians she was a scientist, and she quickly understood the threat posed by climate change, and persuaded world leaders including George Bush senior to get behind the Kyoto Protocol back in the 1990s. Atmospheric carbon levels have been increasing steadily since then, but political action has not. 

So how do people attack climate change? 

Later I will give specific details of what people say, but the first question is which culture they are coming from. The idea of climate change comes from science, and that field has its own ground rules. They are different, for example, to religion or the law. Christianity has absolute truth that cannot be proved but needs faith to be believed. The law seeks truth beyond a shadow of doubt, and often there are two sides who must both try to prove that they are right. Science is not really concerned with truth, or being right, but in setting up hypotheses and trying to prove them wrong. 

Maths has proofs but is not really a science. Once something is mathematically proven it will be true for ever. Two plus two will always be four. If you are an engineer, and the twos are both large values then two plus two can be five, but I don't want to bring engineers into this.

The hard sciences of physics and chemistry have theories that can be experimentally shown to not be wrong. 

The theories in softer sciences, like biology, cannot always be shown to be true by experiment. For example, we cannot make an experiment to prove that evolution is happening in the same way that we can prove Newton's laws of motion. Theories are tested by observation, and if the observed facts obey the theory then it cannot be dismissed. Climate science is similar. We cannot go back to the 18th century, un-invent the steam engine and run the last couple of centuries without any anthropogenic carbon emissions.

And you'd probably believe he's walking on water.

So anyone attacking the theories of climate change from a religious perspective may be missing the point. They may also be attacking the very idea that the universe is controlled by theories that humans can divine, and that humans are capable of influencing any part of the divine universe. They may also be doing this from the pulpit, in positions of power over their communities.

People coming from a legalistic perspective may think that there are two sides in the case, that industrial civilisation is in the dock, and somebody has to find a shadow of doubt in the science. If someone was up on murder charges, and we were deciding whether to send them to the electric chair, then it may be reasonable to expect us to be 100% sure. This is not the case here, and many views of climate change predict that death penalties are already being handed out as people in power refuse to accept it is happening, and use that as an excuse to do nothing about our carbon emissions. The reality with climate science is that nobody is 100% sure that climate change is happening and is manmade, but they are very close to 100% sure, and there are no other theories that match the observed facts. 

Exactly the same applies to smoking causing cancer, or driving without a seat belt causing road death. And this leads nicely to another group of climate deniers who would also argue that we should do nothing about smoking or seat belts either. They don't want governments to legislate. They are not necessarily against the science, and may not like smoking, and may put seat belts on when they drive, but they have an ideological objection to governments telling people what to do. One way to stop the government legislating is to attack the climate science. 

So we have religious motivations for denying climate change, and political motivations from extreme libertarians. The legal profession is well equipped to deny climate science, but as a profession they usually do not act unless they are being paid. 

I wonder where the money is coming from? 

Notes and Further Reading

The US Environment Protection Agency still has some great scientific information on climate change. 

Verbal Warming: Labels in the Climate Debate. New York Times: 17th February, 2015

The Pope has called for action on climate change, which has been ignored by many. Protestants may have considered this to be a papist plot, and catholics on the right may have ignored this in favour of the rhetoric of their political allies. Guardian 24th October, 2016

Leaders of Islam, perhaps a much greener religion than Christianity, have produced a statement calling for action on climate change: Islamic Climate Declaration dot org

Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway

(By the way, the second photo was a result of lucky timing on the shutter, and photoshopping out the diving board.)

The coffee maker question

The teachers' room has a coffee maker. Usually five days a week, twice a day, someone makes coffee in the break time, has one cup, then the rest of the coffee sits in the pot, with the heater on, for 90 minutes until the next lesson has finished. 

The coffee maker uses a 1 kW heating element to keep the coffee warm.

There is a new coffee machine with a thermos flask pot, and no heating element.

It costs 10,000 yen.

Electricity costs 25 yen per kWh

If we buy the new coffee machine, how many weeks will it take to save the money?

Batteries: the missing piece in the renewable energy puzzle

Edison is famous for inventing the lightbulb, although that is not really the whole story. Lightbulbs were not much use without electricity, and electricity needs wire, plugs and generators. He also worked on batteries, and around the beginning of the 20th century electric cars seemed a more likely technology than petrol engines. With a lot of hype Edison produced an alkaline battery in 1903, but it came with problems of leaking acid and losing charge, and while he was going back to the drawing board for something lighter and more reliable, Henry Ford came out with the Model T, and the rest is history.

A little over a century later, batteries remain the main cost restraint of electric cars, and without energy storage or a radical change in the way we use electricity, most renewable energy will only
work with conventional power backing it up.

And so to South Yorkshire, where the seams of coal have been sealed, and solar power exceeds. And two companies, Moixa and the The Electricity Storage Network are developing the technology that Tesla is working on in the US.

Read the artcicle in the Guardian.

Heating on and on heating

We turned the heating on 29th November last year, a couple of weeks earlier than last winter, but close to the normal time. It had snowed the week before, and there had been rather too many of the kind of November days you get in England.

The underfloor heating goes on from 8 to 8:30 then from 9 to 9:30, and a week later, according to the T and D thermometers we have in the slab, it's now about a degree warmer at the top than the bottom.

Underfloor heating, called radiant heating in the US, seems to elicit strong emotions, both for and against. In the building pantheon, it is a god for some, and a devil for others. 

There seems to be a strong sentiment among Passivhaus proponents against underfloor heating. I don't think it's completely logical. 

Certainly badly implemented underfloor heating has problems. Typical mistakes are: 

1. Only heating part of the floor

2. Not insulating the other sides

3. Setting the temperature too high

4. Using the wrong floor materials

5. Not having a thick enough floor

6. Not distributing the heating elements evenly

7. Incorrect dimensioning

8. Using electricity

If only part of the floor is heated, the heat will obey the second law of thermodynamics and go to the part that is not heated. Our neighbour has underfloor heating in the living room, but it is in the slab which also runs under their garage. A significant amount of the heat they put in will be trying to heating their garage.

In a Passive House the first two problems won't happen, as long as the heated floor is within the thermal envelope. Since the heating demand is low, there should never be a need to set the temperature high. 

The advantages of underfloor heating are:

Underfloor heating visible before the walls went up

1. There is no need to add radiators or any other heating devices that will take up floor space and wall space, attract dust, produce noise and may leak.

2. The heat is evenly distributed, and will radiate through the whole building.

3. Underfloor heating may increasing the thermal mass of the building and store heat.

Here's a picture of our underfloor heating, but it had to be taken before the screed floor was poured. There is usually nothing to see, unless you have a thermograph. You can see in the picture below with a temperature difference less than 5 degrees. 

26 degrees enough to heat a Passive House

So why do the Passivhaus people seem to be so against underfloor heating? It may be partly sticking to the Passivhaus ideal that the house can be heated only by warming the incoming air. In that case why is there no similar disparaging of radiators? All you need for underfloor heating is a boiler, and in fact most houses have one of those for the domestic hot water. Where do you think we get our hot water from... the kettle?

Since the temperature for underfloor heating doesn't really need to be above 40 degrees centigrade, there are lots of other options for a heat source, such as ground source heat pumps or solar thermal. With the low heat requirement of Passivhaus, a slightly oversized domestic hot water supply should be able to cope with underfloor heating in its stride. Typical boilers use power in kilowatts. The heating requirement of a passive house is of the order of 10 Watts per square metre.

There may be more technical arguments against underfloor heating, regarding the efficiency of the heat transfer. All heat losses are within the thermal envelope and will end up eventually heating the house anyway. If you're in a poorly insulated house where you want to quickly make a room warm while you're there, and not waste too much energy keeping it warm when you leave, then you may not want underfloor heating and its inherent thermal mass. Passive houses are designed to stay at an optimum temperature, and heating is not a quick fix for comfort on demand, but keeping the thermal envelope topped up.

Compared to radiators, underfloor heating probably requires a more powerful pump to circulate the heating fluid since there is a greater resistance. But pumps draw negligible power compared to the heat they deliver. 

This article from Buildinggreen.com gives four reasons for underfloor heating being the wrong choice in low energy homes. If you're ripping up the floors of an old house to put underfloor heating in, it's going to be expensive. But if you're putting some pipes in while you pour a screed for a tile floor it may be no more expensive than radiators. The piping may even be cheaper than for radiators since all the pipes can go into the floor in the same place, while each radiator will need its own pipe. 

The argument against overheating in houses with high solar gain may be more pertinent. However, passive houses don't need the heating on for twenty-four hours, so the heating could be switched on after the sun goes down. There should be no problem with solar gain then. And it can still be switched on for those winter days when there is no solar gain.  

Perhaps some powerful character within the Passivhaus movement had a bad experience with underfloor heating. Maybe he tried it once and got burnt, sitting on an overheated floor with his pants off. 

Healthyheating.com: Radiant floor heating myths

Connectingindustry.com: Underfloor heating vs radiators; everything you need to know

List of weather recording and climate researching organisations that say the world is NOT getting warmer (let me know if I've missed any)

Climate Science or Political Fiction?

A local group who provide English-language tours of the castle invited me back to speak at their monthly get together on 23rd January. I've spoken to them a couple of times before about low energy building, and they seemed to like my last talk about reading, so I spent my credibility capital trying to communicate climate change. 

I started talking about what was true the year I was born, almost half a century ago. For example: 

• The earth's population was 3.5 billion 
• Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, South Vietnam were countries 
• Every Prime Minister had been a man
• Life expectancy in the UK was 72 years
• Homosexuality was a crime
• Carrots helped you see in the dark
• Saccharine and tobacco were good for you
• There were 9 planets in the solar system and none outside 

All of these things are no longer true.

Going further back, there are many more things that used to be true:

• The continents were fixed on the earth
• Time was the same everywhere in the universe
• The world was created around 7,000 years ago with animals and plants in their current form
• The earth was the centre of the universe
• The earth was flat

Nice image but actually just a dried out rice field after harvest

In the case of the last "fact" I asked how people knew it wasn't true. Someone said their elementary school teacher had told them, which I had to point out was not a very good reason for believing something, based on all the things I'd just shown them were no longer true a few years later. Someone else said that you could sea the curvature at sea, which is a good reason. I added my own proofs: first that I've seen the shape of the earth on the moon during a lunar eclipse. Also I had been around the world, and had to change the date on my watch when I crossed from Asia to America. 

So what, I asked, is science? A series of facts? People in white coats with difficult equations? Good questions? A model of the universe? A process for finding truth?

It's a little bit of everything, but most of all it is a model for understanding the universe. As an example I told them about Newton and Einstein. For Newton time was universal, space was flat and had 3 dimensions, and gravity attracted masses to each other. Einstein's universe was radically different: the speed of light was universal, space-time had 4 dimensions, space was shaped by mass, and time was changed by gravity and speed. 

Some eyes were starting to glaze over and I could see they were wondering what use relativity was. After all, Newton's science got us to the moon. Einstein explains Mercury's orbit, which was a little out of sync with Newton's predictions, and GPS uses Einstein.

GPS, Global Positioning System, uses triangulation by measuring the distance from three or four satellites using light rulers. As we know from Newton, the speed of light is constant, and it travels around 30 cm every nano second. So if you are listening to timed signals from a few satellites, and you can can time the difference between the arrival of those signals, then you can work out where you are. 

The problem is that clocks in the satellites are 20,000 km up and moving at 14,000 km/h. The lower gravity up there means that the clocks are running 45 microseconds per day fast, and the higher speed means the clocks are 7 microseconds per day slow. This doesn't sound very much, but when you think that a nano second—one thousands of a microsecond—is 30 cm, this would put the satellite's positions out by 10 km per day.

The lessons to learn so far, before we've even dipped our toes into global warming, are that science changes, and that pure science has practical uses. When Einstein was pondering the structure of the universe, he was not trying to help people find themselves on google maps, but that has been one result.

So are there any scientific facts? Short answer: No. There is just the best model we have. Ideas that nobody has proven wrong yet; ideas that are probably not wrong.

For example, you have a friend with a coin that seems to come up heads a lot. You'd like to see the coin, but your friend is reluctant to let you closely inspect it. You suspect it's a double headed coin. You can't be sure, so you have to observe him using it. If he flips it once and it comes up heads, this tells you very little. There's a fifty-fifty chance that a two sided coin would come up heads. Two heads in row has a one in four chance, which is still not particularly unusual. Even three heads in a row has a one in eight change of happening with a fair coin. The more heads you see the more likely it becomes that the coin is rigged. If you see a hundred heads in a row, the chance of the coin being fair falls to one in a billion trillion trillion trillion.

Back to Newton and Einstein, we've been flipping the coin a lot more than a hundred times and it has come up heads every time, so it is very unlikely that their science is wrong. And it's not so much that Einstein proved Newton wrong, it's more about limits to where their ideas work. Newton's laws are correct on earth and for most planets around the sun, and for most parts of the universe. Einstein's are more widely applicable but they do stop working when we get near to black holes, or when we start looking at the very small scale of quantum mechanics. 

Now that we've talked about what science is, we can look at some scientific questions:

Is the earth getting warmer?

Is the earth getting warmer because of human activity?

Is carbon dioxide causing the climate to change? 

I asked what my audience thought, and they all seemed convinced that the earth was getting warmer, with one or two people not convinced that it was because of CO2 and human activity. 

To bring the first question close to home, I talked about Lake Suwa, where priests have been recording the date of Omiwatari, a crack that appears across the lake as the freezing ice expands. Ignoring any irony that the phenomena is named after gods crossing the lake, this represents the oldest human record that can be related to temperature. Everyone around here knows that the lake has not been performing is trick recent, but looking at the numbers makes things clearer. The lake did not freeze nine times in the 15 years 1998-2014. In the previous 47 years it did not freeze eight times 1950-1997. Looking at the first 257 years of the data, there were only three times when it didn't freeze over (1443-1700).

So what? This is compelling stuff, but does it prove the earth is getting warmer? It proves that lake Suwa has not been freezing over, but this could be a local climate change, or could be caused by chemical changes in what has gone into the lake in industrial times. When you look at a similar study of river in Finland where the date of ice break up has been recorded there is another bit of evidence.

On my next Powerpoint slide I had a list of organisations who are recording weather and researching climate and have concluded it is getting warmer. Powerpoint crashed on my computer, and I had to reboot. I don't have a list of organisation who are recording weather and researching climate who say it is not getting warmer. I don't think there are any. 

So the ten hottest years on record have all been in the last twenty years, and nine of them in this century. Figures are just out for 2016, which broke the 2015 record, which in turn broke the 2014 record. This is the kind of thing we see in the Olympics, where everyone is trying to break records. So is someone trying to break the climate record? If weather was random, you would expect a roughly even chance of the temperature being above or below average. There is a one in eight chance that the temperature is above average for three years running. The chance of the weather being higher than every year on record is small, and the chance of this happening three years in a row is vanishingly tiny.

So we can't be sure that the world is getting warmer, but it is very very unlikely that it is following random patterns. Could there be any reason that it is getting warmer?

Quick Chemistry question: How much CO2 does 1 litre of oil make? (see bottom for the answer)

This is Watt's steam engine, invented around 1800. Coal was burned to make steam, which pushed and pulled a piston to power a pump. The pump got water out of the mine and allowed more coal to be dug out. More coal went into the furnace to make more steam, to pump out more water, to get out more steam. And so on, for a couple of hundred years. These engines started working on railways to take the coal further away, and to reach further to get out more coal. 

Coal was the first fossil fuel, followed by oil, then gas. People have been talking about phasing out dirty coal, but it has kept on growing. Now that China has stopped plans to build more coal power stations, the planet has hopefully reached the peak and will start using less and less coal, although the White House today hides a love of the black stuff! 

So what? We have an increasing global temperature, and an increasing level of carbon dioxide. Does that prove that we are causing the planet to get warmer? No! Correlation does not prove causality. We do have a mechanism though. 

In 1896 Svante Arrhenius proposed the greenhouse effect, observing that different molecules store heat in the atmosphere by absorbing low frequency radiation coming from the earth and instead of letting it all out into space, radiating some of it back to the earth. This phenomenon can be seen by comparing our planetary neighbours. Venus has a thick CO2-rich atmosphere, and temperatures around 460°C day and night everywhere from poles to tropics. Mars has a very thin atmosphere and in the summer gets up to a pleasant 20°C in the day time, and down to a less hospitable -70°C at night.

So we have strong evidence that the planet is warming. We have increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 that have come from human activity. Also we have a historic match between CO2 levels and global temperatures based on air trapped in Antarctic snow. We have a mechanism by which CO2 increases temperature. Does this prove that we are causing global warming? No, it does not, but it is the best explanation we have, and no scientists have disproved it. 

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." 

(Upton Sinclair)

There are plenty of non-scientists who are disagreeing, and this is called climate science denial. There are five stages:

Stage 1: It's not happening

Stage 2: It is changing, but it's natural

Stage 3: We are causing it, but it's not a problem

Stage 4: It is a problem, but we can't solve it

Stage 5: It's too late!

What examples can we find:

Donald Trump on Twitter:

"The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." (7 Nov 2012)

"The con artists changed the name from GLOBAL WARMING to CLIMATE CHANGE when GLOBAL WARMING was no longer working and credibility was lost!" (31 Dec 2013)

(In fact the change was encouraged by Republicans and explicitly suggested by a global warming skeptic who stated that "'climate change' is less frightening than 'global warming'" Luntz Research: environment)

"This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps, and our GW scientists are stuck in ice" (2 Jan 2014)

"I want to use hair spray... So Obama's talking about all of this with the global warming and the—a lot of it's a hoax, it's a hoax. I mean, it's a money-making industry, okay? It's a hoax, a lot of it." (December 30, 2015)

(First of all, he's confusing ozone with climate change. And which is more important, hair or the global climate?)

"Perhaps there's a minor effect, but I'm not a big believer in man-made climate change." (Washington Post, 21 March, 2016)

"I'm still open-minded. Nobody really knows." (Fox News Sunday, December 11, 2016)

"President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan..." (White House website, accessed January )

And looking to his pick for leading the Environmental Protection Agency: Scott Pruitt

"Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind." (National Review, May 17, 2016)

(In fact there is a consensus among almost all scientists that global temperatures are rising and that it is because of mankind: Skeptical science: Climate consensus)

Secretary of Energy: Rick Perry

"It's all one contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight," (2010 book: Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington)

Attorney general: Jeff Sessions

"I believe there are legitimate disputes about the validity and extent of global warming … Carbon dioxide does not hurt you. We have to have it in the atmosphere. It is what plants breathe. In fact, the more carbon dioxide that exists, the faster plants grow." (Senate floor, 2003)

(The last part is obviously true. Plants also need water, but water can make you drown!)

Then there is Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former CEO of Exxon Mobile who are being sued for climate change cover up. He was awarded the Russian Order of Friendship medal in 2013.

The cold war is most likely over, and now the Warm War has begun. This time, we have corporate interests uniting with people who believe in absolute freedom from regulation. While the US and Russia went head to head in the Cold War, they could be allies in the Warm War. The US has big corporations and Russia has little to lose and a lot to gain from global warming. 

Here is some basic physics telling us what will happen if the world gets warmer. Higher temperatures mean less ice. The sheets on Antarctica and on Greenland and other landmasses in the Arctic will melt and the sea level will rise. Many of the world's cities are on the coast. Russia's coastal cities are at risk, but Moscow should be safe. There is also a lot of frozen tundra that could thaw, and sea channels to the north of Russia that will open when the arctic ocean stops freezing over. 

Also with rising temperature there will be more evaporation from sea, leading to more moisture in the atmosphere. What goes up comes down, so there will be more rain, and heavier rainfall. An example of this already happening is the increasing floods in the UK. And heat is energy, and more energy means more weather, stronger storms and higher winds. And more energy means more chaos.

This is about as much as I could get through in the time available. I had much more to say, especially about the pathology of climate denial, but I had spent all the time getting to the topic. There were a few questions afterwards. Someone asked about the effects on the ocean, which I said I was very concerned about. I mentioned that bleaching had been observed on something like 70% of Okinawa's coral, which many people nodded about. 

And the big question was what to do about it. The most important thing, I told them, was to know what is happening. If you are an alcoholic, the first thing to do is to admit you have a problem. 

As people were leaving I heard someone saying that he thought global warming was probably just nonsense, and that it was all because of the sun's activity. Given more time to speak, or more time to prepare I would have addressed that exact point, and showed some scientific journals devoted to people researching solar activity. If there was any chance at all that solar activity could explain the facts of climate change then they would be jumping up and down shouting: "Over here! over here!" But they are not.  

Maybe next time.

References

Real-World Relativity: The GPS Navigation System 

Economist: Interview with Samuel Arbesman, author of Half life of facts 

A history of Saccharine 

Climate references 

Nature: Lake Suwa Omiwatari

Climate and politics

Guardian: Facts matter and on climate change Trump's picks get them wrong 

Huffington Post: Climate Change Trump White House 

Politico: Mad Dog sanest one among them!

https://www.whitehouse.gov/america-first-energy (accessed 22nd January, 2016)

Huffingtonpost: Exxon Mobil lawsuit 

Answer: 

One litre of oil produces 2.5 kg of Carbon Dioxide. Yes that's more than twice its own weight. Oil is almost all carbon, and when it burns each atom combines with two oxygen atoms from the atmosphere.