Combined heat and power usually refers to incidental electricity generation, while heat is required.
But, all electricity eventually gets converted to heat. So, when we use resistance electric heating, we might as well run electric appliances. In the past, I've thought about lightbulbs and bread baking machines. Why stop there?
How about sucking water and CO2 out of the air, and turn them into hydrocarbons, using the waste heat to heat your home?
http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/12/jet-fuel.html
Personally I wonder about the capital costs when going all the way to jet fuel, but for people who want to go carbon neutral ... all those worries about carbon offsets go away when you suck the CO2 out of the air right in your home.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Obama, another Carter or worse?
My opionion on Obama is steadily going downhill.
I don't think a President needs experience or great knowledge. I watched the debate between Sarkozy and Royale, and I was stunned by Madame Royale stating that French nuclear power plants only generated 17% of French electricity demand, and Monsieur Sarkozy lamely stating that it was surely higher. Madame Royale was obviously confusing electricity and a particular measure of end use energy. And Monsieur Sarkozy should have stated that the measure was misleading and if France replaced nuclear energy with coal French CO2 emissions would rise by more than 50%.
But, in the end, nobody can be an expert at everything, for these details a President can rely on advisers. What a President does need to be good at is judging advisers, and judging the limits of his own skills.
I am deeply afraid that Obama is no good in either of those key areas. One speech on Iraq is meaningless as a test. An ape throwing dice could have made the right decision, if it's reducible to a simple yes/no judgment (leaving aside for the moment whether Iraq is such a decision and whether Obama made the right judgment).
I think Obama is exceedingly arrogant and partisan and hides that behind a veneer of eloquence. At the moment I think his presidency may turn out to be another Carter like episode, or much worse. Obama might actually bring about another great depression, double digit inflation, race riots or, and that's one of my greatest fears, a nuclear war with millions dead.
All right, maybe I am being a bit too apocalyptic here, but still, I fear that Obama embodies what people often think of Bush (hyper partisan ideologue unamenable to advice even when making a stupid decision). Except, I don't think Bush is actually like that, he isn't perfect, but both on the economy and foreign affairs, it can get much, much worse. Attacking a nuclear armed Pakistan would come to mind ...
I don't think a President needs experience or great knowledge. I watched the debate between Sarkozy and Royale, and I was stunned by Madame Royale stating that French nuclear power plants only generated 17% of French electricity demand, and Monsieur Sarkozy lamely stating that it was surely higher. Madame Royale was obviously confusing electricity and a particular measure of end use energy. And Monsieur Sarkozy should have stated that the measure was misleading and if France replaced nuclear energy with coal French CO2 emissions would rise by more than 50%.
But, in the end, nobody can be an expert at everything, for these details a President can rely on advisers. What a President does need to be good at is judging advisers, and judging the limits of his own skills.
I am deeply afraid that Obama is no good in either of those key areas. One speech on Iraq is meaningless as a test. An ape throwing dice could have made the right decision, if it's reducible to a simple yes/no judgment (leaving aside for the moment whether Iraq is such a decision and whether Obama made the right judgment).
I think Obama is exceedingly arrogant and partisan and hides that behind a veneer of eloquence. At the moment I think his presidency may turn out to be another Carter like episode, or much worse. Obama might actually bring about another great depression, double digit inflation, race riots or, and that's one of my greatest fears, a nuclear war with millions dead.
All right, maybe I am being a bit too apocalyptic here, but still, I fear that Obama embodies what people often think of Bush (hyper partisan ideologue unamenable to advice even when making a stupid decision). Except, I don't think Bush is actually like that, he isn't perfect, but both on the economy and foreign affairs, it can get much, much worse. Attacking a nuclear armed Pakistan would come to mind ...
Temperature trends
http://atmoz.org/blog/
Atmos has a few posts up on trends, eg we could look at the share price of Bear Stearns and work out whether we should buy it today ;-)
The problem with prediction solely based on trends, also known as extrapolation, is that the trend may suddenly change.
Let's look at an example from my area of work, suppose the world was a wet piece of wood, and global warming meant putting the world into an oven. We'd observe a nice steady temperature rise up to 100C, at which point, the temperature would stop rising, never mind we had a wonderful temperature trend at 99.9 C that told us we'd imminently reach 100.1C. At some stage the wood/world would dry out sufficiently for temperature to start rising again, and we'd get another nice trend, which we might be tempted to extrapolate, just to then be hit by the fact that the wood/world has caught fire and the temperature shoots through the roof.
What we need to judge whether there will be a temperature increase from now on, is not endless discussions about cherry picking 1998 and starting trends there, and endless statstical analysis of temperature data over the last few years / decades, it is an actual understanding of how the climate system behaves.
We are also interested in testing predictions, my opinion on this is that weather forecasts up to 1 week out are pretty good, 2 weeks out are reasonable, and beyond that we can't predict weather. We can predict the effect of a major change in forcings on climate (average temperature over longer time periods), but it's got to be major change in forcings for it to be a sufficiently robust prediction in the face of lots of other factors determining climate outcomes.
Atmos has a few posts up on trends, eg we could look at the share price of Bear Stearns and work out whether we should buy it today ;-)
The problem with prediction solely based on trends, also known as extrapolation, is that the trend may suddenly change.
Let's look at an example from my area of work, suppose the world was a wet piece of wood, and global warming meant putting the world into an oven. We'd observe a nice steady temperature rise up to 100C, at which point, the temperature would stop rising, never mind we had a wonderful temperature trend at 99.9 C that told us we'd imminently reach 100.1C. At some stage the wood/world would dry out sufficiently for temperature to start rising again, and we'd get another nice trend, which we might be tempted to extrapolate, just to then be hit by the fact that the wood/world has caught fire and the temperature shoots through the roof.
What we need to judge whether there will be a temperature increase from now on, is not endless discussions about cherry picking 1998 and starting trends there, and endless statstical analysis of temperature data over the last few years / decades, it is an actual understanding of how the climate system behaves.
We are also interested in testing predictions, my opinion on this is that weather forecasts up to 1 week out are pretty good, 2 weeks out are reasonable, and beyond that we can't predict weather. We can predict the effect of a major change in forcings on climate (average temperature over longer time periods), but it's got to be major change in forcings for it to be a sufficiently robust prediction in the face of lots of other factors determining climate outcomes.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Living 1 m below sea level
Finally, I've found a map telling me how far I live below sea level:
It goes down to the neighbourhood level.
And thanks to wikipedia for this map of the Netherlands. I live some 35 km North/North East of Amsterdam, which according to this map is right in the middle of the North Sea, more than 30 km from the nearest land and that's an island ...
The Hockey stick continued.
Maybe temperatures have indeed been extremely stable over the last 2000 years and the Hockey stick is real, but ...
1. With the proxies we've got I think the error margin is easily of the order of +/-1 C, to be honest some proxies (tree rings) I find virtually entirely worthless. And geographical coverage is abysmal for basically all proxies.
2. The Hockey stick isn't the reason I trust IPCC forecasts.
1. With the proxies we've got I think the error margin is easily of the order of +/-1 C, to be honest some proxies (tree rings) I find virtually entirely worthless. And geographical coverage is abysmal for basically all proxies.
2. The Hockey stick isn't the reason I trust IPCC forecasts.
Monday, March 10, 2008
The Hockey stick
What I want to write about is the reliability of climate change scientific data.
What I trust most are measurements that can be done in a lab anywhere in the world at any time. This ensures repeatability and cross-checking by multiple groups and what's being measured is a single value.
I may not understand how the measurement is actually done, but I think that can be safely left to the experts.
Therefore, I trust the statement that CO2 and H2O will trap heat via their direct radiative properties.
Their indirect impacts, such as cloud albedo changes, or even different rock/ocean/plant albedo due to enhanced CO2 uptake by plants or chemical reactions, are a less clear cut business.
And finally, the warming itself. We can measure temperatures to something like billionth of a degree, but world temperature over time requires averaging a lot of individual places and times.
Temperature measurements in the past cannot be repeated without time travel. At one time I thought bore holes might resolve this issue, but while they are great in terms of averaging out over time, their spatial coverage is downright awful.
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/03/08/3-of-4-global-metrics-show-nearly-flat-temperature-anomaly-in-the-last-decade/
Apparently, the arctic north of 82 degrees latitude has a big impact on recent temperature trends, yet there's no land there and therefore no boreholes (and therefore we can't judge from boreholes how unusual recent arctic warming is).
And also apparently, we just don't measure temperature close to the North Pole at all (the occasional ships or explorer passing by excepted and weather completely trumps climate when only the occasional measurement like that is available), meaning that even for the last ten years we cannot reliably distinguish between a trend of 0C per decade and a trend of 0.15C per decade for the world.
Hansen's errors for recent US temperature trends also don't exactly inspire confidence. The last ten years was a period where temperature trends were explicitly being looked at with great interest, and the US has a very dense station network. If we cannot measure a trend accurately for the US over the last ten years, how can we do it for the world over the last 1000???
And, if the temperature varies naturally over long time periods, say it fluctuates by 1.5 C from peak to trough in 1200 year cycles, then even being at the highest (lowest) in hundreds of years would be far from unusual. It would be something we'd have observed more than 50% of the time, if we had bothered to make the comparison at a random point of time over the last 10000 years.
Let's summarise, I believe the IPCC forecasts because I've got near 100% confidence in the laboratory measured radiation properties of CO2 and H2O and good confidence in models; I've got very little confidence in temperature history though, I don't buy the idea behind the hockey stick that we've had a thousand years of near temperature stability and a huge recent run-up that in and by itself marks out that something highly unusual is going on. At the very least I think it's exceedingly poorly supported and there's at least as good support for the notion that based on temperatures alone, there's little unusual as yet compared to past natural variability.
What I trust most are measurements that can be done in a lab anywhere in the world at any time. This ensures repeatability and cross-checking by multiple groups and what's being measured is a single value.
I may not understand how the measurement is actually done, but I think that can be safely left to the experts.
Therefore, I trust the statement that CO2 and H2O will trap heat via their direct radiative properties.
Their indirect impacts, such as cloud albedo changes, or even different rock/ocean/plant albedo due to enhanced CO2 uptake by plants or chemical reactions, are a less clear cut business.
And finally, the warming itself. We can measure temperatures to something like billionth of a degree, but world temperature over time requires averaging a lot of individual places and times.
Temperature measurements in the past cannot be repeated without time travel. At one time I thought bore holes might resolve this issue, but while they are great in terms of averaging out over time, their spatial coverage is downright awful.
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/03/08/3-of-4-global-metrics-show-nearly-flat-temperature-anomaly-in-the-last-decade/
Apparently, the arctic north of 82 degrees latitude has a big impact on recent temperature trends, yet there's no land there and therefore no boreholes (and therefore we can't judge from boreholes how unusual recent arctic warming is).
And also apparently, we just don't measure temperature close to the North Pole at all (the occasional ships or explorer passing by excepted and weather completely trumps climate when only the occasional measurement like that is available), meaning that even for the last ten years we cannot reliably distinguish between a trend of 0C per decade and a trend of 0.15C per decade for the world.
Hansen's errors for recent US temperature trends also don't exactly inspire confidence. The last ten years was a period where temperature trends were explicitly being looked at with great interest, and the US has a very dense station network. If we cannot measure a trend accurately for the US over the last ten years, how can we do it for the world over the last 1000???
And, if the temperature varies naturally over long time periods, say it fluctuates by 1.5 C from peak to trough in 1200 year cycles, then even being at the highest (lowest) in hundreds of years would be far from unusual. It would be something we'd have observed more than 50% of the time, if we had bothered to make the comparison at a random point of time over the last 10000 years.
Let's summarise, I believe the IPCC forecasts because I've got near 100% confidence in the laboratory measured radiation properties of CO2 and H2O and good confidence in models; I've got very little confidence in temperature history though, I don't buy the idea behind the hockey stick that we've had a thousand years of near temperature stability and a huge recent run-up that in and by itself marks out that something highly unusual is going on. At the very least I think it's exceedingly poorly supported and there's at least as good support for the notion that based on temperatures alone, there's little unusual as yet compared to past natural variability.
Saturday, March 08, 2008
Wood pellet price volatility
I've just been to a big pellets conference in Wels, Austria, and the big theme was that something needed to be done to avoid a repeat of the pellet price spike Europe experienced a year ago. It's done much to damage the reputation of pellets. Funnily enough the taxi driver who drove us to the airport explained to us that he's going to put a heat pump into his house rather than pellets and a significant contributing reason was pellet price volatility.
I am a big believer in intervention to avoid unnecessary price volatility, be it in the oil or food market. The same applies to pellets. We need government managed inventories, or, the easy solution at the moment:
let's just adjust co-firing in coal fired power plants to manage pellet supply. When there's a sudden run-up in price temporarily relax rewards for co-firing, and when there's a a sudden glut, let coal fired power plants soak it up.
I am a big believer in intervention to avoid unnecessary price volatility, be it in the oil or food market. The same applies to pellets. We need government managed inventories, or, the easy solution at the moment:
let's just adjust co-firing in coal fired power plants to manage pellet supply. When there's a sudden run-up in price temporarily relax rewards for co-firing, and when there's a a sudden glut, let coal fired power plants soak it up.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Low food price = food security???
Food is a valuable product, if we want investment in food production, high prices for the product are a great incentive.
Food production isn't fixed, we can raise the area devoted to it, and bring technology and investment to bear on it, and driving farmers into ruin by forcing prices to ruinously low levels isn't the way to enhance food security.
And with higher yields, we might also find that first generation fuels will always outperform second generation biofuels.
Food production isn't fixed, we can raise the area devoted to it, and bring technology and investment to bear on it, and driving farmers into ruin by forcing prices to ruinously low levels isn't the way to enhance food security.
And with higher yields, we might also find that first generation fuels will always outperform second generation biofuels.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Why 1st generation biofuels?
Many people like rural culture, including fields of corn or wheat, and are willing to pay farmers as stewards of the landssape.
And as alluded to in my previous post, local farm production provides a buffer when there are supply disruptions. Self sufficiency in food was the argument for EU farm subsidies when the system was first instituted. It's less of a concern today for EU countries, as the presumption is that it is much less likely today that the continent could be blockaded. In Arab countries it's still rather a significant driver.
And as Saudi Arabia is afraid of a wheat delivery stop, so is the West of an oil delivery stop, and in comparison with other liquid fuel supply options, first generation biofuels look pretty good
One of the biggest advantages are low capital costs. Most of the cost is in the feedstock and that's grown on an annual basis.
So, if there's a poor harvest, we can switch from biofuels to food for a year without having really expensive fuel conversion plants wastefully lying idle.
Investments in CTL or oilsands or domestic high cost drilling are multi year and massive, and the majority of the costs. This is a big problem when the circumstances change and make the project uneconomic. High capital costs create lock-in.
And so do multi-annual crops. Miscanthus and willow don't yield much for years, and clearing them again to allow standard annual crops to be grown is a big expense, which is why farmers want multi-year fixed price contracts.
The funny thing is that food vs fuel is said to favour 2nd generation crops, when in fact the opposite is the case.
Annual crops are a big boon to food security, in a bad patch of years for potatoes, it's easy to swith corn ethanol land to potatoes. Land where willow or miscanthus are grown is much harder to rapidly switch back to food.
And if it's done we've also got hugely expensive BTL facilities wastefully lying idle.
And as alluded to in my previous post, local farm production provides a buffer when there are supply disruptions. Self sufficiency in food was the argument for EU farm subsidies when the system was first instituted. It's less of a concern today for EU countries, as the presumption is that it is much less likely today that the continent could be blockaded. In Arab countries it's still rather a significant driver.
And as Saudi Arabia is afraid of a wheat delivery stop, so is the West of an oil delivery stop, and in comparison with other liquid fuel supply options, first generation biofuels look pretty good
One of the biggest advantages are low capital costs. Most of the cost is in the feedstock and that's grown on an annual basis.
So, if there's a poor harvest, we can switch from biofuels to food for a year without having really expensive fuel conversion plants wastefully lying idle.
Investments in CTL or oilsands or domestic high cost drilling are multi year and massive, and the majority of the costs. This is a big problem when the circumstances change and make the project uneconomic. High capital costs create lock-in.
And so do multi-annual crops. Miscanthus and willow don't yield much for years, and clearing them again to allow standard annual crops to be grown is a big expense, which is why farmers want multi-year fixed price contracts.
The funny thing is that food vs fuel is said to favour 2nd generation crops, when in fact the opposite is the case.
Annual crops are a big boon to food security, in a bad patch of years for potatoes, it's easy to swith corn ethanol land to potatoes. Land where willow or miscanthus are grown is much harder to rapidly switch back to food.
And if it's done we've also got hugely expensive BTL facilities wastefully lying idle.
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