Archive for September, 2011
September 30, 2011
The fundamental problem with using subsidies for political purposes is that something that is fundamentally unsound and not viable is supported by tax-payer money in the hope that it will become viable. I take it for granted however that subsidies are nearly always misplaced, subject to and induce gross misuse and are generally counter-productive for the political objectives they have. In my experience subsidies tend to hinder rather than help the development of new technologies. They particularly reduce the pressure on the developers to reduce costs for new technologies and are too easily misused. The emphasis always becomes the maximisation of the subsidies that can be extorted rather than the proper commercialisation and deployment of the new technology.
Subsidies for electric vehicles are equally misplaced and sales in Europe demonstrate that these incentives are particularly ineffective. It is probably time to dismantle all such subsidies which only distort the market and to let the development and commercialisation of electric vehicles follow a more healthy course.
Incentives fail to stimulate European electric vehicle sales
New research from JATO Dynamics finds that despite a variety of subsidy programs, electric vehicle (EV) sales in Europe remain stubbornly unresponsive to financialincentives during the first six months of 2011.
Europe has a wide range of incentives in place, but they do not appear to correlate closely with sales of electric vehicles. For example, Spain (€6,500) and Great Britain (€6,400) have almost identical subsidies, but Great Britain registered almost five times the volume of EVs (599 versus 122) during the first half of 2011. Sweden registers an almost identical volume as Spain (111) but subsidizes each vehicle by only €470.
Denmark offers tax breaks that can potentially amount to €20,588 per vehicle, but there were only 283 registrations in the first half of 2011.
“The discrepancies highlight the apparent low influence of price on purchase decisions across the region,” says Gareth Hession, vice-president for Research at JATO. “It’s reasonable to conclude that sales are more affected by other factors such as the degree of urban geography, market maturity and charging infrastructure than was previously thought.”
Total registrations were only 5,222 in the first half of 2011.
Tags:counter-productive subsidies, Electric car, Electric vehicle, JATO Dynamics
Posted in Automobiles, Behaviour, Business, Politics | 1 Comment »
September 30, 2011
Image via CrunchBase
I have just returned after a weeks travel on an assignment and was disappointed to find the Spotify decision that new users must have an account with Facebook in order to sign up at all.
My son had introduced me to Spotify 6 months ago and I found it interesting and a channel for music that I used from time to time. I had always expected to increase my usage of Spotify. But I find their Facebook connection coercive and manipulative and – in my opinion – unethical.
I am much too old and much too old-fashioned to be in their target audience and my actions will not have any impact on them or their success or failure. But then I do not find the use of Facebook or Twitter to be a vital or a valuable or a necessary part of my daily life. No doubt their main target audience do not find Facebook intrusive and voyeuristic and manipulative as I do.
And since I find their actions unacceptable I have cancelled my account and uninstalled Spotify.
I shall have to get around to closing my Facebook account and clearing my computer of all their intrusive cookies.
Tags:coercve and manipulative business tactics, Facebook, Social Networking, Spotify
Posted in Behaviour, Business, Ethics | 4 Comments »
September 26, 2011
I am travelling this week.
I had an interesting – if rather depressing – discussion with a fellow traveler (a patent lawyer) at the airport yesterday. The discussion turned to the manner in which science which happened to be “in fashion” became political movements and the manner in which science itself took on politically correct dimensions.
Sometimes – as with eugenics – the political movement came first and the science followed to fit the movement. In fact, his contention was that even where the science had come first, the development of a political movement would always lead to subsequent science being constrained to support the imperatives of the movement.
I brought up the caase of AGW and how an uncertain science – in my opinion – had been hijacked by a political movement such that one particular hypothesis – which has still to be proven – had become the only politically correct or allowable science. I suggested that real observations might change what was considered politically correct. Since global temperature – if such a thing can be defined – has been declining for the last decade even though carbon dioxide has been increasing, I expected that new science would have to take these real observations into account in their mathematical modelling and that the strength of the dogma would eventually decrease.
My companion however disagreed. He suggested that all political movements had to be fundamentally and economically viable to survive. If the movement was lucrative – as AGW had become – then there would be a vested interest in maintaining the science it was based on even if the facts said otherwise. This would be achieved, he argued, by the “Science” allowing or accounting for some deviations – as for example with explanations made up for why a decade or two of cooling could occur without disturbing the central thesis of the “Science”. He cited medical science and examples of purported treatments which were continued for long periods after they were discredited because of the revenues that they were generating. He suggested that the chemical industry was the prime driver for the banning of some refrigerants (based on now outdated ozone depletion science) just so that they could shift production to newer refrigerants having much higher margins. Similarly he felt that the environmental benefits of switching to low energy lamps was minuscule but the lighting industry much preferred the margins and revenues generated by these to those generated by incandescent light bulbs which were suffering from intense competition.
His conclusion was that since the AGW “industry” was generating large revenues whether through carbon trading schemes or by the extraction of subsidies from taxpayer money for so-called “green” energy or “green” fuels, then the vested interest in showing that any conflicting measurements were a temporary aberration would be very strong. Since the timescales of climate change were in the order of hundreds of years, he felt that a mere 20 or 30 years of inconvenient measurements would do little to dent the momentum of a successful revenue generating “science”!!!
He made some good points. I am afraid that even 3 decades of cooling or the start of a mini-ice age will probably not suffice to dampen the ardour of the global warming enthusiast as long as the revenues from growing bio-fuels or getting subsidies for “green” energy keep rolling in. The AGW religion and its corresponding “science” will stop only if the revenues stop.
Tags:AGW, climate, climate change, environment, global warming, Little Ice Age, politically correct science
Posted in Alarmism, Business, Climate, Politics, Science | 2 Comments »
September 23, 2011
Juliet Davenport, founder and CEO of something carrying the subjective and emotive name “Good” Energy writes in the New Scientist blog today bemoaning the fact that climate sceptics are winning the argument by the use of emotion rather than science!!
Scientists – she believes – are not doing enough to help her cause. But she might carry a little more credibility if she attempted to use science rather than dogma and consensus. And of course if she did not have a vested interest in extorting subsidies from taxpayers. Clearly Al Gore has failed her in being “charismatic and campaigning”- but then he is no scientist and perhaps he does not count.
A charismatic campaigning voice from the scientific community would make a huge difference in helping to combat the small but vocal minority of sceptics who tend to resort to emotion rather than science to make their arguments. ……..
…. I can’t help but think it would be better to see all government departments arguing more loudly about the long term benefits of tackling climate change and the transition to a low carbon economy. To do that convincingly, however, they need to have information at their fingertips. Scientists have a huge role to play here, debating and responding to claims made through the media and simplifying messages for the public. They need to make the case that a low-carbon economy is not only necessary for tackling climate change, but also that it is technologically possible.
If we are going to act in time on climate change, it is vital that we keep up the pressure on the government to form a policy framework that we can then deliver.
The coming gas glut and the availability of shale gas – now even in the UK – must be giving her nightmares. Without climate change alarmism and the demonisation of carbon dioxide, the cost of wind and solar power would make them non-starters.
But the tide is turning.
Tags:carbon dioxide, climate change, environment, global warming, Juliet Davenport, Low-carbon economy, New Scientist, wind power
Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Energy, Renewable Energy | 1 Comment »
September 23, 2011
The news is packed today with reports about the CERN measurements which apparently show that some neutrinos have travelled at faster than the speed of light. Since the conclusions are crucially dependent upon a time difference of 60 nanoseconds in a total travel time of 2.43 milliseconds the conclusion may well be found to be in error.
But I hope not.
Wired News: If it’s true, it will mark the biggest discovery in physics in the past half-century: Elusive, nearly massless subatomic particles called neutrinos appear to travel just faster than light, a team of physicists in Europe reports. If so, the observation would wreck Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which demands that nothing can travel faster than light. ….
Over three years, OPERA researchers timed the roughly 16,000 neutrinos that started at CERN and registered a hit in the detector. They found that, on average, the neutrinos made the 730-kilometer, 2.43-millisecond trip roughly 60 nanoseconds faster than expected if they were traveling at light speed. “It’s a straightforward time-of-flight measurement,” says Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern and spokesperson for the 160-member OPERA collaboration. “We measure the distance and we measure the time, and we take the ratio to get the velocity, just as you learned to do in high school.” Ereditato says the uncertainty in the measurement is 10 nanoseconds. However, even Ereditato says it’s way too early to declare relativity wrong. “I would never say that,” he says. Rather, OPERA researchers are simply presenting a curious result that they cannot explain and asking the community to scrutinize it. “We are forced to say something,” he says. “We could not sweep it under the carpet because that would be dishonest.” The results will be presented at a seminar tomorrow at CERN.
The concept of light having a maximum speed is acceptable but that nothing can exceed this speed is somehow depressing and lacks elegance and it kills hope. It is even more confining and depressing if the universe is expanding. It “settles” science when science needs to be unsettled.
For the sake of wonder and discovery and challenge I hope that the measurements are correct and that some part of Einsteinian physics is turned on its head and that the dream of FTL travel remains alive.
“Make it so” – Star Trek
The Guardian: Faster than light particles found, claim scientists
Wall Street Journal: Roll over Einstein: Law of physics challenged
Tags:Albert Einstein, CERN, Faster-than-light, Neutrino, OPERA experiment, Special relativity, Star Trek
Posted in Future Transport, Physics, Science | 1 Comment »
September 22, 2011
Skipper Mansur Ali Khan, the Nawab of Pataudi in 1967: image THE HINDU PHOTO LIBRARY
Tiger Pataudi, MAK , the Nawab of Pataudi, passed away today at the age of 70. Captain of Oxford, captain of Sussex and captain of India.
He was a hero for me through my teens and beyond and was the first Indian captain who gave the Indian cricket team a belief in themselves and that they could win against any other.
He was a dashing batsman but it was his attitude which was his most vital quality and which earned him the nickname “Tiger”.
I had the privilege of watching him play in the 1960’s in England.
He had class.
RIP
MAK Pataudi: the eye of the Tiger
Tiger Pataudi was a prince among cricketers
Tags:India, India national cricket team, Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, Nawab of Pataudi, Oxford, Pataudi, Sussex, Tiger Pataudi
Posted in India, Sport | 1 Comment »
September 22, 2011
“Peak-gas” moves further into the future as recoverable reserves of shale-gas are found in more countries. The coming gas glut is getting ever more real. Now the UK – which was thought to have little shale gas – has found reserves of about 5,700 billion cubic metres of shale gas in Lancashire. Poland -which was thought to be the richest in shale gas resources in Europe has recoverable reserves of about 5,400 billion cubic metres. Till now the British Geological Survey had thought the country possessed only about 150 billion cubic metres.
The map of the world’s shale gas reserves is changing rapidly as exploration for this previously ignored resource intensifies. The gas glut is going to provide relatively cheap options for the use of gas based electricity generation into the foreseeable future. In fact the increase in the cost of electricity which has been driven by the use of renewables and misplaced penalties for fossil fuel could finally be reversed. Needless to say the “environmental” industry – instead of welcoming the finding of new resources – is in a state of denial – and looking for every possible objection to the use of shale gas. The use of intermittent wind and solar power – apart from being so expensive when deployed – always needs back-up capacity and gas fired power generation is the only real option. The gas glut comes just in time for the recovery of the world economy which is now badly needed.
Wall Street Journal: An area in northwest England may contain 200 trillion cubic feet of shale gas, putting it in the same league as some of the vast shale-gas plays that have transformed the U.S. energy industry. The figure for the area near Blackpool, released Wednesday by Cuadrilla Resources, a small oil-and-gas company with operations in England’s Bowland Shale, highlights the U.K.’s emerging position as a new frontier for unconventional gas exploration. But it inflamed environmental groups who say the technology used to extract shale gas is environmentally damaging.
The discovery of such vast resources—200 trillion cubic feet would be enough to meet U.K. gas demand for 64 years—comes at a time when the U.K.’s conventional gas fields are in steep decline and as it is becoming increasingly dependent on imports such as liquefied natural gas from Qatar and piped gas from Norway.
The response from the World Wildlife Fund was predictably alarmist.
In response to Cuadrilla’s announcement, the environmental group WWF called Wednesday for a moratorium on shale-gas production in the U.K. and said the country should be more focused on investing in renewables than increasing its reliance on fossil fuels. “The government should at the very least halt shale gas exploration in Britain until more research can be undertaken on both the climate-change impacts and contamination risks associated with shale gas,” said Jenny Banks, WWF-UK’s energy- and climate-change policy officer.
Tags:"Peak" gas, gas glut, Lancashire, Shale gas, WWF Alarmism
Posted in Energy, Gas, UK | 2 Comments »
September 21, 2011
In August I wrote:
Sometime soon the world’s population will exceed 7 billion. No one knows exactly when. According to the UN Population Reference Bureau, this will happen on 31st October in India or in China. The world’s 6 billionth living person was “suppposedly” born just 11 years ago in Bosnia, and world population is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. …
But I am no Malthusian and have a strong belief that the catastrophe theories are fundamentally misguided. Peak gas will never happen. Peak oil is a long way away and will be mitigated by new ways of creating oil substitutes as oil price increases. All the dismal forecasts of food production not being able to cope with population have not transpired. …..
Today Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, has an excellent piece on his blog which is also published in the Ottawa Citizen:
…… Clearly it is possible at least for a while to escape the fate forecast by Robert Malthus, the pessimistic mathematical cleric, in 1798. We’ve been proving Malthus wrong for more than 200 years. And now the population explosion is fading. Fertility rates are falling all over the world: in Bangladesh down from 6.8 children per woman in 1955 to 2.7 today; China – 5.6 to 1.7; Iran – 7 to 1.7; Nigeria – 6.5 to 5.2; Brazil 6.1 to 1.8; Yemen – 8.3 to 5.1.
The rate of growth of world population has halved since the 1960s; the absolute number added to the population each year has been falling for more than 20 years. According to the United Nations, population will probably cease growing altogether by 2070. This miraculous collapse of fertility has not been caused by Malthusian misery, or coercion (except in China), but by the very opposite: enrichment, urbanization, female emancipation, education and above all the defeat of child mortality – which means that women start to plan families rather than continue breeding. ……
Already huge swaths of the world are being released from farming and reforested. New England is now 80 per cent woodland, where it was once 70 per cent farm land. Italy and England have more woodland than for many centuries. Moose, coyotes, beavers and bears are back in places where they have not been for centuries. France has a wolf problem; Scotland a deer problem. It is the poor countries, not the affluent ones, that are losing forest. Haiti, with its near total dependence on renewable power (wood), is 98-percent deforested and counting.
Read the entire article.
Tags:doomsday postponed, Matt Ridley, Population growth, Population Reference Bureau, Thomas Robert Malthus, World population
Posted in Alarmism, Demographics, Energy, Food, Science | 1 Comment »
September 21, 2011
During daytime clouds shadow the earth from the sun’s radiation and have a cooling effect while at night they act as a blanket and decrease the radiation away from earth into space. For anybody who has desperately sought the shade on a warm day or has observed the absence of frost after a cloudy night, this might seem a pretty obvious and a rather trivial statement.
The alarmists’ view of global warming assumes that the net effect of clouds is to warm the earth’s climate and that it is one of the “positive feedbacks” for warming. But a new paper in September’s Meteorological Applications severely undermines these assumptions by showing that this feedback is strongly negative. To put the magnitude of this cooling effect into perspective, the net cooling effect of clouds is put at -21W/sq.m while the much-touted effect of a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is supposed to be only +1.2W/sq.m.
When this is coupled to the recent support for Svensmark’s hypothesis on solar effects for cloud formation from the CERN cloud experiment, and the lack of warming over the last decade while carbon dioxide has been increasing, it only emphasises that:
- the science of how climate varies is a long way from being settled, and
- the magnitude of carbon dioxide effects on climate are extremely small, and
- the effect of man-made emissions on the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is miniscule
Whether directly by incoming radiation or indirectly by the formation of clouds or through the transport of heat by the oceans and the winds, it is the sun which is the predominant forcing. Climate models which ignore solar effects and do not have the sun at their centre are fatally flawed.
Allan, R. (2011) Combining satellite data and models to estimate cloud radiative effect at the surface and in the atmosphere, Meteorological Applications, 18 (3). pp. 324-333, ISSN 1469-8080, DOI: 10.1002/met.285
Abstract: Satellite measurements and numerical forecast model reanalysis data are used to compute an updated estimate of the cloud radiative effect on the global multi-annual mean radiative energy budget of the atmosphere and surface. The cloud radiative cooling effect through reflection of short wave radiation dominates over the long wave heating effect, resulting in a net cooling of the climate system of − 21 Wm−2. The short wave radiative effect of cloud is primarily manifest as a reduction in the solar radiation absorbed at the surface of − 53 Wm−2. Clouds impact long wave radiation by heating the moist tropical atmosphere (up to around 40 Wm−2 for global annual means) while enhancing the radiative cooling of the atmosphere over other regions, in particular higher latitudes and sub-tropical marine stratocumulus regimes. While clouds act to cool the climate system during the daytime, the cloud greenhouse effect heats the climate system at night. The influence of cloud radiative effect on determining cloud feedbacks and changes in the water cycle are discussed.
Tags:Allan, CERN, climate, climate change, clouds, cooling effect of clouds, global warming, Henrik Svensmark, solar effects on climate
Posted in Climate, Natural Phenomena, Science | Comments Off on Net effect of clouds on climate is strongly cooling and not of warming
September 20, 2011
“Scientists” today enjoy a general reputation for being unbiased, objective, incorruptible and dauntless seekers after truth. With this reputation they also have little liability for their pronouncements or for the integrity or the quality of their work. This is not sustainable as the politicisation of science is increasingly unavoidable and temptations for scientific misconduct grow. To try and de-politicise science is impractical. More emphasis can be placed on developing ethical standards which should reduce the incidence of misconduct. But I think the key is to ensure that scientists carry some liability for what they do and that they do it honestly. A scientist is no less a professional than a lawyer or an engineer or a physician or an architect. They do have some liability for the quality of what they do. Incompetence, negligence or dishonesty carry penalties for other professions and scientists can not and should not be exempt.
Of course the scientific community is up in arms about the seismologists being tried for manslaughter in Italy, but they do need to be held accountable for their negligence or incompetence – if demonstrated. Wearing a white coat and calling oneself a “scientist” should not provide automatic immunity from accountability and liability.
Scientific American: By Nicola Nosengo
Six Italian seismologists and one government official will be tried for the manslaughter of those who died in the earthquake that struck the city of L’Aquila on 6 April 2009. The seven were on a committee that had been tasked with assessing the risk associated with recent increases in seismic activity in the area. Following a committee meeting just a week before the quake, some members of the group assured the public that they were in no danger.
In the aftermath of the quake, which killed 309 people, many citizens said that these reassurances were the reason they did not take precautionary measures, such as leaving their homes. As a consequence, the public prosecutor of L’Aquila pressed manslaughter charges against all the participants in the meeting, on the grounds that they had falsely reassured the public. After several delays, the public prosecutor Fabio Picuti and the defendants’ lawyers appeared this week before Giuseppe Gargarella, the judge for preliminary hearings, who had to decide whether to dismiss the case or proceed with a trial.
During the hearing, the prosecutor called the committee’s risk assessment “superficial and generic”, resulting in “incomplete, imprecise and contradictory public information”. Responding to the thousands of scientists who had signed a letter of support for the defendants, the prosecutor acknowledged that the committee members had no way of predicting the earthquake, but he accused them of translating their scientific uncertainty into an overly optimistic message. More specifically, the accusation focuses on a statement made at a press conference on 31 March 2009 by Bernardo De Bernardinis, who was then deputy technical head of Italy’s Civil Protection Agency and is now president of the Institute for Environmental Protection and Research in Rome. “The scientific community tells me there is no danger,” he said, “because there is an ongoing discharge of energy. The situation looks favorable”. ….
At the end of the hearing, the judge decided that the trial will begin on 20 September. …
The earthquake was surely not predictable and poor building standards surely contributed to the deaths but whether the scientists exhibited incompetence or negligence is a valid question. And if they did they need to be held accountable even if not perhaps for manslaughter.
Tags:Earthquake, Italy, L'Aquila, Legal liability, liability for scientists, Scientific misconduct
Posted in Academic misconduct, Natural Disasters, scientific misconduct | Comments Off on Scientific negligence goes on trial for manslaughter in Italy
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