Feb 24
Reading a few headlines today, and thought, “Boy, I hate being pretty good at predicting the future, but only when it is bad news.”
And I first predicted it back in 2009
That’s the thing about climate change. It’s not picking the events that’s key to focus on, but looking at the trends. So predicting the chaos increase (entropy) is a no brainer when you add heat to a closed system.
I remember one of the funniest things I saw early in my life in Australia was a poster of all the rare fish endemic to NSW published by the NSW Department of Parks and Wildlife. A very detailed scientific poster showing habitat and a painting (or lithograph) of something like 20 species of fish with other scientific facts about them (latin name, etc.) and . . . well the ‘and’ is punchline which was a 1 to 4 star rating of how “good eating” they are.
OK, so its a little dark humour, but funny as shit to have a government department playing straight man to a joke they didn’t know existed. I am reminded of this again today as I read about the namer of my favourite bird (Gouldian Finch) and, as a conservationist, his proclivity to consume the birds he examined and described in paint and words. Mmm mmm, them Rosellas are gorgeous , and tasty.
Something for all of us to consider as we examine the conflicted and sometimes dark pasts of people with just celebrity or perhaps even our heroes as they continue to be exposed in the coming year. Beware the hero, because his arrival always heralds the demise of commoners such as yourself. Let’s just hope I don’t find out J Willard Gibbs died trying to make gold out of straw and shit or something.
Dec 20
. . . that these fucking morons aren’t in charge of my portfolio.
Sep 22
. . . or why the ABC should have all its funding eliminated for censoring me.
OK, in case you missed a very good Hard Quiz Last night in which Jim showed how to play (spoiler alert – by being a freak in his level of knowledge on his special subject AND on how to play game to win) you should try to catch it on iview, or wherever you stream or download content regularly (even, YouTube apparently) Here are the players:
OK, so my decision to try to get on the show was one of those really long considered decisions I have made in my life, prompted by someone sitting next to you while watching season 1 and saying, “You should go on that show, you’re a fucking smartarse”
Having really no response to that, and a computer in my lap at the time, I logged into the advertised site, answered a few details about myself, took a quick test, and bada bing, I’m in. OK, so it was a bit more detailed than that, as after the quiz I had to do a Skype interview with a producer and take another untimed test in person. Now, since I live in the remotest part of the earth, and doing it all remotely, I’m thinking I might have been the only person in the west that applied and they let me in to meet a regional diversity policy foisted on the show by a Senate Estimates Committee.
But, sitting in the green room with Jim and Carolyn I found out that they went to auditions in person in Sydney and Melbourne, with lots and lots of other people. So apparently the tests were a little harder than I thought, or there definitely IS a regional diversity policy. I was congratulating Jim after the taping about what an obsessive level of knowledge he had about the Rockford Files, a pretty obscure US tv show from the 70s. It turns out that he had only picked it so that it fit his plan to not just go on Hard Quiz, but to WIN Hard Quiz. He binge watched every old episode of the show (122 of them), wrote himself out ‘hundreds of pages’ of test questions and answers and memorised them, and also binge watched every episode of Hard Quiz to plan his tactics (when to answer fast and when to think a bit). Now that’s some commitment.
So, it was a really fun experience, but I now have to side with Dick Smith and Pauline Hanson to demand that all of the ABCs funding be cut for censoring me. Why? Well, they cut out both of my zinger lines, one of which would have fulfilled one of my lifelong ambitions of cursing on national television, and the other because it was too “political” obviously. Dicks.
In the introductions, Tom asked me “Why did you pick thermodynamics? So that no one could steal off you”. I said, “No it was just an obscure area of my university degree that I found myself repeatedly needing to explain in the past 20 years in order to discuss with people how things like climate change are real and clean coal is bullshit”.
Then, after the perpetual motion machine answer yo see int he episode, I said, “Thats also a lot like how clean coal works.” This is a 100% true and provable statement, and also funny (well, to me)
Now the ABC could not claim that they cut my first line due to content (the word shit) because Tom curses all the time, uses sexual innuendo like a maestro, and in fact said the work “fuck” later in the same episode. So clearly they are trying to stifle factual funny comment that disagrees with their alt-right view on climate change, ‘clean coal’, ‘cold fusion’, and anything else they disagree with. This is why they don’t meet their existing charter or the recent changes in media law that requires them to present material “based on the preponderance of evidence”.
For, if they were to do that, they would have to give me my own half hour show for a season (or maybe just a 1 hour special on 11 Feb) to lampoon complete unscientific crap like clean coal , and basically do a man-crush puff piece on J Willard Gibbs. I could probably get Andrew Dice Clay to narrate. But I digress.
So fuck the ABC and cut all their funding I say, as I have direct evidence of their extreme anti-science censoring of me. Who would have though that nonce Dick Smith would be correct?
Finally, to add insult to injury, they caused me to waste something like 2 to 3 minutes of my allotted 15. Bastards.
So, join my revolution. When I was a young fellow, I heard the world’s comic genius George Carlin identify the 7 words you can’t say on TV, and made a goal to do so. If you want to try, he also identified an excellent alternative. What you want to do is get on TV, but not be the focus of the camera, like in the shot but behind the presenter. And you want to mouth (not say) “I hope all you stupid fucking lip readers are looking in”.
Enjoy your day. I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
Jun 15
As a tiny bit of background, I have been working on the nuts and bolts of dealing with climate change for about 30 years, somewhat by accident. When I went to work as an environmental engineer back in the US, you couldn’t even get an environmental engineering degree precisely (I have a chemical engineering degree) as the subject area was confined to “can we make drinkable water?” and “Can we treat water with poo in it before discharge?”
When I started, we were only about 10 years past a Time article I read as a young lad wondering if we were going to go into another ice age, because of what was being discovered in relation to the elliptical motion of he earth and the slight wobble the planet has on its axis. [Fun fact: these factors are now used by climate change deniers as reasons why climate varies naturally and so we shouldn’t worry about it.] Anyway, I have worked on doing things that are called emissions inventories, and air emissions compliance testing, and computer automation of emissions logging and estimation based on mass balancing, and then how one might produce a scientifically verifiable emissions reduction certificate such a way that it could be traded in a market like any other commodity (think pig belly futures), and then finally developing and demonstrating the methods by which companies large and small could do their CO2-e accounting in a way that caused minimal extra effort through their normal expense reporting processes.
This was all done as a thread in my whole career behind the scenes of earning a crust doing whatever industry and industrial clients needed at the time in relation to HSE risk identification and management.
Now I have realised over the past few years that I have pretty much wasted my career working on something that we aren’t going to do, or do in time at least since the Abbott government got elected with their whole chain of lies about the carbon tax, and the fact that they won public opinion with their fear mongering. So, we aren’t going fix up the worst problems with climate change and really, I should have been concentrating on zombie plan research or something more likely to be useful. The basic problem is that people won’t listen to any argument that can’t be wedged into a 30 second sound byte and doesn’t come with a catchy slogan. But the truth is the truth, especially when that truth follows the scientific method. Whether or not we can translate scientific truth into peoples’ lived experience is another thing entirely, I have found, and that is why I am, at the end of the day, a failure professionally. I actually now do know a couple of ways to translate how a 2°C average temperature rise manifests itself in events people could experience (not any specific one, you understand but in a trend), but really its too late once I can show someone that. The key lies, I believe, in getting people to understand through lived experience the nature of entropy.
The problem with getting people to understand entropy is that its like dark matter right here on earth. Entropy is enthalpy’s weird cousin. Enthalpy is a type of energy we call heat, but entropy is essentially chaos. You cannot see, touch or sense entropy directly, but only in the effects it has around you. But understanding entropy is essential in understanding climate change, as well as bullshit like clean coal, which I promise you, I will get to eventually.
The guy that really did the seminal work on providing our understanding entropy in my opinion was J. Willard Gibbs, who is the father of modern thermodynamics and who won the Nobel Prize for it, before there was an it (he won for statistical mathematics). But why don’t we remember him? Probably because he was actually just a bit too far ahead of his time. Scientists joked at the time that the only person that could understand Gibbs’ work was Maxwell (that’s James C. Maxwell of electromagnetism Nobel Prize fame). Most people remember Einstein, however, and Einstein identified Gibbs as one of the scientists he most admired. And that makes Gibbs up there in importance with Newton, Einstein and Hawkings, in my book.
Anyway, there are 4 laws of thermodynamics, and Gibbs helped translate what the equations of state are when mass becomes energy, energy transfers between systems, as well as to put some boundaries on what happens to entropy (the state of chaos) during the interactions. So, it can be a little bit thinky and its easy to give up on trying to follow it. However, the understanding of thermodynamics is the basis for things like energy production in internal combustion engines, refrigeration and superconductors, so its very real and not some faith (or even fake news!). Thermodynamics is like translation of something in 2 dimensions (mathematics) into the third dimension where we need things like refrigerators. But with refrigerators comes Category 6 cyclones. See, now your saying, there aren’t any, since classification of cyclones only goes up to Category 5. Which is true . . . today. But by the time they have to add the Category 6 classification and we can prove to enough people that through their lived experience, they are seeing a manifestation of a massive rise in entropy in their atmosphere, its really is too late, and I mean in the second law of thermodynamics sense.
However, while I must accept that we as a species will fail to do anything substantive to stave all but the worst effects of climate change, I would like to stop the further huge waste of money along the way, as that is an issue that apparently does resonate with most Australians. And so we arrive at “clean coal” technology. The same laws of thermodynamics that hold true for the rest of our known world also specifically and directly apply to the combustion of solid fuel material to produce electricity, waste heat and waste gases materials.
Each and every “clean coal” technology ends up requiring supplemental inputs in energy and cash to make them viable even as demonstration projects. So, it was nice to see an industry insider finally admit as much this morning in the ABC news. But I will go further and state categorically that there is not and will not be in my lifetime a scientifically and economically viable “clean coal” combustion device of any sort that can satisfy the first and second laws of thermodynamics. The Chevron Gorgon carbon capture and storage (CCS) project is not an example of combustion to capture and storage, and there is no viable ‘clean coal” system in operation anywhere in the world. Notice how we never see one advertised as actually available for operation? They are all pilot projects or experimental demonstration installations that will never be scaled up by private investors (because private investors believe in mathematics). Which basically means money for ‘clean coal’ technology is just cash handouts in the millions for R&D in the fossil fuel industries to get them not to lobby against upcoming legislation (ala John Howard), or bullshit additional spending that Josh Frydenberg wants to allow the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to loan (waste) money on. They want to waste public money on this grift because they know people, once again, don’t understand thermodynamics, don’t want to, and want to believe in something like “clean coal”.
Under no circumstances is an apples for apples comparison of any hydrocarbon burning and CCS system competitive economically now or in the foreseeable future to any viable renewable energy production facility (PV solar, solar heat, hydro or wind) whether we look at the systems themselves or examine the whole of lifecycle mass and energy balance of them. There is simply no way that a combustion energy plant can produce enough energy for recapturing and liquefying all its gaseous emissions, then store them, while at the same time producing electricity for the grid. Its called a perpetual energy machine and its bullshit and has been known as such since Da Vinci’s time.
See, the best of “clean coal” technology is sold to you as a complicated engineering thing that is added to the front end and back end of a standard coal fired steam generator. The ‘best’ of it is a combination of fuel processing and combustion burner technology to maximise the amount of energy production of each molecule of hydrocarbon burned and minimise the amount of nasties produced while doing that (NOx, SOx, CO, CO2, etc). This technology does work, but it is very expensive and raises the cost of a coal fired plant a lot. And, it still doesn’t allow each molecule of coal burned to generate more energy than the first law of thermodynamics allows, meaning that about 2/3 of a molecule of coal becomes waste heat and only a third of it becomes electricity. Second, we have to capture all (or a significant part) of the waste CO2 that is produced in our coal plant as a result of the second law of thermodynamics and absorb or adsorb it into liquid or solid, then transport that liquid or solid material to long term storage, and that equipment is both costly and energy intensive. So what you get is a Rube Goldberg machine that costs more in materials and energy than it can produce. See a graphical representation of the mass and energy balance comparison between coal, clean coal and a couple of renewables below to simplify things a bit. Just skim the pictures and you tell me which is more expensive to build and operate.
To waste any more taxpayer money on this bullshit idea, that should be called as such at every opportunity, is criminal, especially while we also continue to subsidise the dirty fuel required to extract other dirty fuels, and build roads and railroads to service dirty fuel production, all the while hearing complaints about how wind and solar are getting “unfair” subsidies.
If we aren’t going to do anything about climate change, then lets at least be honest about it. We’re gonna live it up until your kids, or your grandkids start having to pay the piper. We simply don’t fucking care as a whole of society if there is even the slightest risk of it raising our electricity prices even perceptibly. But lets not buy any more of this snake oil like we are back in the days of the travelling salesman. I can move to America if I want that shit sold by their current orange carnival barker.
I note from the ABC the recent closing of the article on the Pluto flyby:
Following its encounter with Pluto and its satellites, New Horizons will continue its one-way journey. . . . Its radioactive power supply will last into the 2030s; NASA wants to focus investigations on two more objects in the Kuiper Belt but will need to secure more funding to make that happen.
With all the stupid shit we fund in the world, we can’t even find a couple million bucks to continue examining the world around us. Truly doomed as a species at this rate.
Mar 19
This is exactly how it works here in Australia in relation to taxing mining, addressing climate change and other issues, and she says it more succinctly than a 3 page rant from yours truly.
Some previous background on this issue can be found in an earlier post The Cruelty Index, and the associated video of the same title on YouTube.
This is a really tough issue, because we definitely want to be firm with lawbreakers, but not resort to cruelty, incredible amounts of monetary waste, or becoming international lawbreakers ourselves. Unfortunately this is exactly what we are doing with this government, or the last, for that matter. But there are solutions.
You can take it from me, or go to a more reputable source, like Mr. Julian Burnside QC, who published details of an approach that is fair, just, and not cruel or wasteful of money around the time I was last talking about this.
It’s personally an issue I have been trying to put forward solutions to since 2000 when the Howard government was throwing out “Babies Overboard”. I sent my ideas in writing in great detail at the time to a bloke named Mark Latham, who was trying to become the next Prime Minister at the time. But they were ignored, as the non-intelligent are prone to do with good ideas.
Actually, I am being unfair to Mark, as I don’t think the ideas even made it to the man himself, but I did get them into a brief exchange with the aide that operated his email account.
As an immigrant myself, I wanted to come up with a proposal that is:
• Firm on lawbreaking. In this case the people smugglers who operate boats for money to deliver asylum seekers to Australia;
• Humane and in-line with our international obligations;
• Fair from the perspective of the average Australian citizen; and,
• Fiscally sound, and even beneficial to the country in the medium term.
The first part of my solution is firm application of the law to people smugglers, who I believe can be classified as pirates under the law of the sea. The Australian Navy or Customs vessels that intercept asylum seeker boats shall take the vessel under control, capture and take all personnel on the vessel into custody and safety scuttle the vessel at sea. All passengers shall be taken to the nearest safe port where the government is a party to the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees. In many cases this will be Christmas Island, as a lot of our SE Asian neighbours are still not signatories to the convention, and frankly ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Once all vessel passengers are onshore, they shall be processed to determine valid asylum claims, criminal records, and complete health screening. This will include interviews with all passengers to make every effort to identify the people smugglers.
People smugglers will go into mandatory detention and prosecution, regardless of their age and have all assets stripped. Children amongst this group will be returned to their family in their home country, where this can be established, and after full interrogation and processing. Adult people smugglers will get life without parole, or the harshest penalty allowed for pirates following successful trial.
All remaining vessel passengers will be classified as refugees and processed for relocation to an acceptable interior location until such time as their asylum claims have been fully processed and put on a basic allowance from Centrelink. Housing can either be purchased on the basis of the allowance, or provided from surplus accommodation available in a host location.
Any local government area can apply to host refugees up to a limit of a small percentage of their population, if they can demonstrate availability of work for a portion of refugees they want to take. Infrastructure upgrades from the federal government to local communities will be made available to ensure the refugees can be housed, provided basic health care and schooling (mandatory for all ages unless proficiency in English and a skill can be demonstrated) where they will be hosted.
Any refugees being hosted on a temporary basis that are found to break the law in a significant way, or are serial offenders in minor lawbreaking will be sent to mandatory detention and deportation/prosecution at the first opportunity available. In short, fit in or fuck off.
All refugees will be allowed to work, pay taxes and fund superannuation, in a manner similar to people on 457 visas. Refugees that have valid asylum claims assessed will be provided with residency visas that require them to stay in the original hosting community for a period of at least three years, prior to being free to move anywhere they choose. Businesses and states that want to sponsor temporarily hosted refugees may apply to do so as they would people on 457 visas and relocate them for work.
If conditions improve in the home country of refugees during the period of temporary hosting to the satisfaction of the Australian government, refugees may be returned to their home country at no cost to themselves. Any refugee that wants to voluntarily return to their home country in the period from initial processing but before the three year period of temporary hosting is up may be returned to their home country at no cost to themselves.
This is a fair, firm and economically beneficial system that meets our international commitments and is no picnic for refugees. It should be applied to all, regardless of their manner of arrival. It will also be economically beneficial to Australia in the medium to long term because it can be statistically demonstrated that immigrants (regardless of their reason for arrival) cost a country a small amount in the first several years they are here, but pay back into the system much more in the 5 to 10 years after that. Don’t trust me on that, look it up. Immigrants, especially refugees, are extremely grateful to have an opportunity to start fresh, and can be educated on our rule of law, the benefits of learning English, and often bring skills and capabilities with them that we need. How much would some small towns with seasonal harvest work benefit from a workforce that was available and interested? Often refugees are also doctors, tradies and intellectuals like artists. We can use all three of those in small towns, or at least all the ones I remember.
In summary, we need not be a pushover to resolve the issue of asylum seekers, and can absorb them in a manner that is organised and beneficial for both the host and the refugee, while dealing appropriately with criminals.
Feb 14
OK, in an otherwise excellent post about the out of touchness of CEOs, Vyan goes way too far by saying:
“As a matter of fact most Investment people like Perkins, Zell or even Mitt Romney don’t actually do any real “work” at all, because their Money Does their Work For Them in the form of gaining interest and paying dividends.”
This is kinda bullshit. As a Director and company owner, I worked my way up from the bottom of a business I built myself with no outside investors gifting me anything, or inheriting the whole show. As a result of that, I also have a significant retirement investment account I manage myself and do quite well at, thank you. But if you think for a second that all the research, analysis and planning that I do to make sure I meet or exceed the markets I invest in isn’t work, then fuck you. If you think I shouldn’t use the advantage I have in intelligence, patience and opportunity to make the most of my time, money and ideas, then once again, fuck you. If I am smarter than you and as a result have a better job and am on the way to financial independence and you don’t like it, {ahem} well, you know the drill. It’s ok, I don’t need to be loved by all, but I bet I will be included in many people’s zombie plans, so I sleep OK.
What you should be focusing on is whether the whole package of labour, capital and ideas I am putting into a business and assess whether I am duly compensated for that. A good basis has always as a multiplier of the CEO salaries in comparison with the average worker salary. Way back after WWII it used to be in the 40s. When Ronnie the Raygun took office in the USA, it was 78. Its over 4000 today. Hmmmmmm, but what does the peak CEO do for the world? Isn’t he responsible for making the whole economy work, keeping liquidity maintained and other superhero type shit like that? well, fuck no obviously.
The same guys that inflate the big bubbles in the economy, overheat them with outright fraud and then watch as the fuckers explode while counting their fees based on the transaction, not the OUTCOME of the transaction, get 4000 times the average worker in their companies. And I understand that Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman’s actually spends the large amount of any given week wandering around the house in his undies eating chips, drinking beer and playing whatever Call of Duty is currently hot. And hey, I got no problem with that. You are basically describing my perfect weekend several times a year. But it ain’t worth 4000 times, is all I’m saying.
There’s a revolution coming, and things have gotten so out of balance in the balance between the return on money, ideas and labour in the world, that when it does occur, it’s going to be quite a shock to some, if the balance is corrected.
Jan 31
So, I’ve had a serious look at the shark cull issue, and want to add some analysis as a longer term lover of killing and eating beasts of all sizes. There is what appears to be an OK summary of the facts on The New Daily, and you can read them all for yourself and decide.
I wanted to read some more, as I was not convinced either way, and I want to avoid being biased, so I am going to need to see the estimates of the actual fall in $ from tourism directly attributable with Australia being seen as “dangerous” and then pull out of that body of danger that would surely include spiders, snakes, jellyfish, crocs and plants that are dangerous in this broad red land, and try to come up with something exceeding the $22 million anual cost estimate in the articles “for’ case.
And then I need to be able to answer the question, when exactly did tourists become fearful homebodies, and not see dangerous as a draw card?
I think it might be suss to spend $22 million for a reduction of 1 person killed per year so we can return to our normal rate of humans killed by sharks. Even if we could prove that what we proposed would do what we want it to. And the case for that is not good {cough, cough, by-catch, cough}
However, the facts on the side of which species are threatened and endangered are pretty solid. Here’s the “red list” details you might be familiar with from the IUCN, based on shitloads of peer reviewed evidence collection from scientists. Yeah, I know, those fucking scientists and the UN again. It’s like living with your mom, reading me regularly isn’t it?
So after examining the data, basically it’s easier to count the number of non-threatened species than threatened or endangered ones. For the common man, put it this way: you see a shark, I pretty much guarantee it’s either harmless and overfished to decimation by someone, or has lost or is losing habitat to the point that it is being killed out from fear and complacency and numbers are dwindling. Trust me, just about the last thing you want to be in this world is kinda slow, basically harmless, and look like a shark.
The sum of Colin Barnett’s current argument is that Australia is being seen as too dangerous and is losing more than $22 million a year due to fear of surfing at one south coast surf spot, and he has a constituency there that has raised it as a big deal to him. Well, I got news for you folks down south. There are a bazillion good surf beaches on this tropical island continent of ours. If yours just happens to be currently or permanently experiencing a high concentration of sharks where you like the curl, too fucking bad. Basically, you are saying that your right to surf right there trumps the right of another species to exist. And I am not being theatric. Lets say there were only 3700 humans left in the world. That’s the number of Great Whites estimated to be swimming around in the pool that covers 66% of the planet’s surface.
Now, I know humans are fucking scary, but if there were only that few, I’d be doing everything I could to save them. They are a peak predator and they are an indicator species for the health of the ecosystem. Honestly, this is just like the controversy I have run into everywhere I’ve lived. Doesn’t the grizzly bear, mountain lion, grey wolf, shark, tiger, black rhino and every other fucking scary peak predator, or even those just holding up their part of the food chain, deserve enough space just to survive? Do we demand, as humans, access to all the space in the world, anytime that it suits us to a point where we drive other species to extinction? We are one bleak fucking species if that’s the case.
But there is an alternative, you know, If government feels that the ‘do nothing’ case is not strong enough and is compelled to fuck with something.
If you want to go all ultra-protectionist and remove the dangerous killer from the water, outlaw swimming and surfing.