Driver to drive?

[John Larkin]

On Wed, 4 Mar 2009 20:55:48 -0600, "Tim Williams"
<tmoranwms@charter.net> wrote:

"John Larkin" <jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote in message
news:33cuq4pnuo2ab67sd634en214fmof04123@4ax.com...
The sun dumps about a kilowatt per square meter of heat onto us. The
surface area of the earth is about 5e14 m^2, about 100,000 m^2 per
person. So if everybody consumes a kilowatt, which is unlikely, the
relative energy is insignificant.

Alright, you're getting there. That's about what the U.S. is burning right
now, for example. 10ppm isn't much, right? Well, consider if the world
average becomes the same. That's a bit more right there, but now we're
talking 10ppm for the whole world, still not much. Consider also if the
world population reaches its expected saturation value (what was it, 18
gigapersons?). That triples the total power output, but that's not another
order of magnitude, we're still safe. Alright, now consider that, even if
population growth is logistic, energy use will continue to grow
expoentially, following technology, which will continue to develop
regardless. If you figure it's doubling every 30 years (that's what a
healthy capitalist economy is supposed to need; if it's supported mostly by
technological advance, that would work out fairly well), you'll use up those
three orders of magnitude of "how much less power people are using compared
to total insolance" fairly quickly. I think I got a figure of three
centuries, which ain't long. And then you're not even working against
greenhouse gasses but sheer power output itself, and that's a whole hell of
a lot harder to cope with.

What would I do with four kilowatts of continuous electric power? I
can't imagine wanting anything like that, any more than I want to eat
8000 calories of food, or drink 12 gallon of beer, per day.

In my budget, electricity is essentially free; I spend more on lunch.
But I don't use anything like a kilowatt average; my household (3
people, four pets) doesn't average a kilowatt.

Extrapolation always leads to absurdities.

Even a few hundred average watts, to run some water pumps and
purifiers, or to supply some lighting so the kids could study, or to
allow cooking without hauling scarce wood for miles, could radically
improve the lives of the poorest people.

Cheap and clean electric power would be a benefit to mankind. Fission
could do that if it was managed sensibly.

So the ultimate message is, use less power. It is as true today as its
necessity 300 years from now. Quantum limits on fabrication and computation
are immensely small, there's nothing stopping us from being efficient.
Imagine using six orders of magnitude less power consumption, just by sheer
design alone.

Six orders is silly. We couldn't see at night, we couldn't toast
english muffins, we wouldn't have refrigerators or forced-air heat, no
running water, no TV or computing after dark.

John

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 5 Mar 2009 05:43:50 -0800 (PST), bill.sloman@ieee.org wrote:

On Mar 5, 3:07 am, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Wed, 4 Mar 2009 17:55:57 -0600, "Tim Williams"





tmoran...@charter.net> wrote:
"John Larkin" <jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote in message
news:e45tq4ho7b19cppfjlce70873d5lha7g0l@4ax.com...
If someone
invented a clean, cheap source of, say, fusion energy, they'd be
against it.                                            ^^^^^^

Actually, I'm against it too ...

See? What I said.

Um, John?  Since when have you EVER associated myself with "they", i.e., The
Warmingists?

My objection to widespread fusion power is simple to see with some
multiplications and a couple of centuries use.  In fact, Sloman understood
my statement correctly.  That's scary, John.

Tim

The sun dumps about a kilowatt per square meter of heat onto us. The
surface area of the earth is about 5e14 m^2, about 100,000 m^2 per
person. So if everybody consumes a kilowatt, which is unlikely, the
relative energy is insignificant.

The prime indicator of human misery is low availability of power.
Cheap electric power would lift a lot of people out of ghastly
poverty. Some people actually want to purge the planet of the pest
that is Man, and choke off energy supplies in the process; their
policies will indeed kill a lot of people, especially kids.

Not as many as the denialists, or as fast.

AGW skeptics hurt nobody; things like cap-and-trade, and burning food
to run cars, will kill people.

Hardly any countries have done anything about living up to Kyoto
agreements, and China and India and the rest of the developing world
will simply not restrict energy use (lots of nasty coal) for our
benefit. Climate tokenism just hurts the poorest people without
affecting CO2 levels (whatever consequences *that* may or may not
have.)

Longterm, the best thing to do is develop those countries, which takes
energy now. Development is the surest means of population control.

John

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 5 Mar 2009 06:12:59 -0800 (PST), bill.sloman@ieee.org wrote:

On Mar 5, 3:37 am, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Wed, 4 Mar 2009 18:23:24 -0600, "Tim Williams"





tmoran...@charter.net> wrote:
bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote in message
news:63e0231f-dfad-4c3c-9844-d2d690166bdf@v15g2000yqn.googlegroups.com...
Perhaps warmingists know enough physicis to be aware that nuclear
fission produces radioactive nuclear waste, which emits alpha, beta
and gamma rays. An ignorant savage like Rich may not appreciate that
these constitute emissions

Actually, they don't, since they don't emit beyond their container.  There
are a few exceptions, like krypton and xenon, which are only freed when the
fuel is exposed to atmosphere (such as opening the zirconium-clad fuel
bundles, or especially breaking down the fuel by careless reprocessing), and
the tritium (as tritiated H2 gas, H2O, etc.) that is produced by all
water-based reactors, but CANDU reactors in particular (being heavy-water
moderated).  Levels of both are an order of magnitude below regulatory
standards at currently operational facilities, and those standards are a
further order of magnitude or two below any potential health effects.
Nuclear is indeed a very clean technology today.

Tritium, krypton and xenon aren't a big concern because they spread out
fairly well.  Gaseous, they are quickly diluted by the atmosphere to
negligible levels.  Tritium in the groundwater is a bit more concentrated,
which is why it's monitored.

Probably of a bigger concern is the ~1% of CO2 still produced by nuclear
processing.  This includes (as far as I know) mining, transport, fabrication
and etc.  Considering coal is approximately 100% CO2 per electrical output,
it can be said that nuclear has negligible carbon emissions.

but the more sophisticated may understand
that nobody has yet worked out an entirely satisfactory way of
disposing of this waste in a way that can be guaranteed not to foul
the world we leave to our children.

France and Japan seem to have some ideas.  Right now, they both reprocess
their spent fuel; the U.S. doesn't.  The heavy stuff (thorium and up) can be
burned again (MOX fuel), getting rid of those pesky actinides, which are the
main reason spent fuel needs to sit under North America for 10kya by the
current regulatory standards here.  If the byproducts are seperated, it's
safe after just a couple of centuries encased in glass, a much easier
storage time, concievable even that the government that produced it will see
it become safe again.  And with rhodium as expensive as it is (especially
2003-2006), it's even economical to extract PGMs from the stuff after just
half a century.

Even without reprocessing, nuclear is still safe with low emissions.  Pebble
bed technology isn't very mature, but there's no reason not to use it.
Germany, of all places, even experimented with the stuff, successfully
operating a reactor for a decade or so.  It's hard to reprocess, so it's not
a proliferation threat either.  The pebbles are self-contained and ready for
disposal.

And speaking of disposal, I don't see why we don't just heap all the waste
into a deep hard-rock mine shaft (below the water table) with some sacks of
graphite, heap concrete on top and let it soak.  With a couple thousand tons
of waste in one place, it should get hot enough to melt and sink deeper into
the Earth's crust, never to be seen again for millions of years, in which
time there will be little more than depleted uranium leftover.  With
concrete on top, the byproducts will be fairly well contained, and it's deep
enough that it won't be a big deal for the water table, either.  It's going
to be deep enough, fast enough, that there isn't any concern of future
miners touching the stuff with their drill rigs.  And it's better than
dumping it deep in the ocean where it's still accessible for a few thousand
years.  I don't know, I've never heard this proposed, maybe the water table
doesn't work quite the way I think.  But it sounds good to me, at least if
you're not reprocessing the stuff, which sounds better to me.

Tim

Without political opposition, nuclear power would be perfectly safe
and fairly cheap, and very, very clean. Again, there are lots of
people who don't want a solution to the energy problem.

For a start, all those people living in Northern Europe when the
radioactive cloud let loose by Chernobyl passed overhead. I was living
in Cambridge at the time, and the radioactivity went over Scotland and
Northern England, but that was too close for comfort.

You must know nothing about the Chernobyl accident; read up on it. It
was an inherently unstable reactor, without containment, being run by
idiots. There are lots of modern reactor designs that could be run by
idiots and that could not ever breach containment. TMI didn't. No US
or Japanese or French commercial reactor ever has. It just takes good
engineering.

Your idea of "perfectly safe" doesn't give enough credit to the
creative power of human stupidity. There are qute a few safer
solutions to the energy problem.

Thousands of coal miners, oil/gas rig roughnecks, oil truck drivers,
electrical linesmen, and home workshop guys are killed by electric
power production every year. Not to mention those killed by
particulates. Energy is dangerous. Switching from, say, coal to nukes
would save a lot of lives, clean up the planet (less particulates on
the snow!), far less CO2 (if that matters.)

If the AGWers were sincere, they would be wildly pro-nuke. But they
aren't sincere: they have entirely another agenda, no less than the
choking off of human development by all available means.

John

 

[Jim Thompson]

On Fri, 06 Mar 2009 09:32:28 -0800, John Larkin
<jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Wed, 4 Mar 2009 20:55:48 -0600, "Tim Williams"
tmoranwms@charter.net> wrote:

"John Larkin" <jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote in message
news:33cuq4pnuo2ab67sd634en214fmof04123@4ax.com...
The sun dumps about a kilowatt per square meter of heat onto us. The
surface area of the earth is about 5e14 m^2, about 100,000 m^2 per
person. So if everybody consumes a kilowatt, which is unlikely, the
relative energy is insignificant.

Alright, you're getting there. That's about what the U.S. is burning right
now, for example. 10ppm isn't much, right? Well, consider if the world
average becomes the same. That's a bit more right there, but now we're
talking 10ppm for the whole world, still not much. Consider also if the
world population reaches its expected saturation value (what was it, 18
gigapersons?). That triples the total power output, but that's not another
order of magnitude, we're still safe. Alright, now consider that, even if
population growth is logistic, energy use will continue to grow
expoentially, following technology, which will continue to develop
regardless. If you figure it's doubling every 30 years (that's what a
healthy capitalist economy is supposed to need; if it's supported mostly by
technological advance, that would work out fairly well), you'll use up those
three orders of magnitude of "how much less power people are using compared
to total insolance" fairly quickly. I think I got a figure of three
centuries, which ain't long. And then you're not even working against
greenhouse gasses but sheer power output itself, and that's a whole hell of
a lot harder to cope with.

What would I do with four kilowatts of continuous electric power?

Wait until AGW hits ;-)

_Each_ of my A/C units is ~6KW

I
can't imagine wanting anything like that, any more than I want to eat
8000 calories of food, or drink 12 gallon of beer, per day.

In my budget, electricity is essentially free; I spend more on lunch.

Some day, your prince will come, and SFO will be a desert ;-)

But I don't use anything like a kilowatt average; my household (3
people, four pets) doesn't average a kilowatt.

Extrapolation always leads to absurdities.

Even a few hundred average watts, to run some water pumps and
purifiers, or to supply some lighting so the kids could study, or to
allow cooking without hauling scarce wood for miles, could radically
improve the lives of the poorest people.

Cheap and clean electric power would be a benefit to mankind. Fission
could do that if it was managed sensibly.


So the ultimate message is, use less power. It is as true today as its
necessity 300 years from now. Quantum limits on fabrication and computation
are immensely small, there's nothing stopping us from being efficient.
Imagine using six orders of magnitude less power consumption, just by sheer
design alone.

Six orders is silly. We couldn't see at night, we couldn't toast
english muffins, we wouldn't have refrigerators or forced-air heat, no
running water, no TV or computing after dark.

John

Just wait until carbon caps...

...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |

FDR gave us the New Deal. Obama thinks you deserve a Raw Deal.

 

[James Arthur]

John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:18:50 +0000, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 5 Mar 2009 05:57:18 +0000 (UTC), don@manx.misty.com (Don
Klipstein) wrote:

As best as I can remember, it's 7% or about that according to someone
giving an answer and probably providing a cite. (IIRC and the usual
similar "horse puckey disclaimers"). From atmospheric CO2 increase
around 35% from the 280 ppmv having some consideration being
"pre-Industrial-Revolution-baseline") as of when I asked the question
resulting in that answer.

7% increase of plant growth from 35% increase in atmospheric CO2
concentration? For a simple approximation at a mathematical relationship,
I see log(1.07)/log(1.35) indicating plant growth rate being proportional
to atmospheric CO2 concentration raised to the .23 power, though I suspect
such power to increase towards unity when our planet is/was "more CO2
starved" and to correspondingly decrease when atmospheric CO2
concentration increases past the 370-380 ppmv or whatever that was
relevant to 7% increase of plant growth that I remeber (how correctly?)
being result of increase from pre-industrial-revolution-"baseline" that
was/"was" 280 ppmv.
That's a great calculation for people who don't believe in evolution.
Why do you say that?

Only some plants growth rates are limited by CO2 concentration. Many
plants growth rates are limited by the available light intensity and/or
other environmental factors like water, temperature and humidity.

You also need water and plants tend to struggle to get it reliably
everywhere but in the humid tropics with daily rainfall. The result is
that they vary the stomata openings for diffusion according to water
stress. And the devious plants of the Crassulaceae and related C4 plants
using CAM photosynthesis only open their stomata only at night to
capture CO2 so as to avoid unnecessary daytime water loss.

One of the early papers of photosynthesis yield measured against CO2 and
light intensity is online at:
http://jgp.rupress.org/cgi/reprint/22/1/21

If I have done the sums right to convert from umoles CO2/litre to ppm
you can multiply by 37 so the range they tested was about 160ppm to
9000ppm. The peak productivity was around 5000ppm in ideal conditions.

At high light intensities where the process is truly diffusion limited
the yield tracks CO2 almost linearly, but at lower light intensities the
improvement was around 10% for a doubling of CO2 concentration. This is
still worthwhile enough that commercial greenhouses exploit it.


And conventional farmers will exploit it too, as they select breeds
that do better as the CO2 level rises. Plants are of course presently
optimized for, or lagging a bit behind, the existing CO2 levels.
Future-gen crop plants may have a very different response to CO2,
because they will have been designed to do so.

Most agriculture can provide lots of water and sunlight and
fertilizers, so adding CO2 might have substantial affects on yields.
Plants may also shift to needing, say, less water if they have more
CO2, which would benefit marginal farming cases.

John

In praise of carbon dioxide
Posted: June 07, 2008, 12:04 AM by NP Editor

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/6/6/in-praise-of-carbon-dioxide.aspx

"The [satellite survey] results surprised [NASA scientists] involved
in analyzing the NASA data. They found that over a period of almost two
decades, the Earth as a whole became more bountiful by a whopping 6.2%.
[...] each square metre of land, on average, now produces almost 500
grams of greenery per year.

Why the increase? Their 2004 study, and other more recent ones, point
to the warming of the planet and the presence of CO2, a gas
indispensable to plant life. CO2 is nature’s fertilizer, bathing the
biota with its life-giving nutrients. Plants take the carbon from CO2
to bulk themselves up — carbon is the building block of life — and
release the oxygen, which along with the plants, then sustain animal
life."

Experiment trumps theory.

Cheers,
James Arthur

 

In alt.engineering.electrical Michael A. Terrell <mike.terrell@earthlink.net> wrote:
|
| phil-news-nospam@ipal.net wrote:
|>
|> On Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:51:33 -0500 Michael A. Terrell <mike.terrell@earthlink.net> wrote:
|>
|> | I have no problem reading and identifying moronic concepts.
|>
|> You have no skill in reading electrical enginering or technology. All the
|> rest is fiction in your mind.
|
|
| Yawn. Another lame attempt to slur my name. The 'fiction' is that
| you believe the crap you dream up will work. What have you ever done in
| the real world? My design ideas are in space, aboard the ISS, used to
| track everything launched by NASA, the ESA, and by NOAA to track and
| control their LEO Weather Satellites. I also came up with the idea of
| uplinking a subcarrier channel to a C-band satellite from a different
| site than the main carrier. This was for United Video's microwave
| division for their EPG service on the WGN feed. It eliminated two
| leased phone lines from Salt Lake City where the mainframe computers
| were, to the WGN uplink in Chicago. It provided a more reliable service,
| and the savings of over $15,000 a month for the company I worked for.

You could have made a lot more contributions to the world if you had the
ability to read English and did not have the attitude of distorting what
people say so you gain the ability to make assertions that are really false
and lets you blame it on them. I'm not going to play your penis length
game. There's no way to verify the truth or significance in anything you
say.

Maybe you really did those things in the past and maybe they will work fine.
But your brain is certainly not keeping up. Damaged?


|> |> The unit is more likely to fail if you let the battery carry the full load,
|> |> instead of letting the battery share the load with what power it can get from
|> |> the available mains voltage.
|> |
|> |
|> | Then the battery is too small, or too old. An overly complex design
|> | isn't the answer to crappy maintenance.
|>
|> It doesn't matter what the battery size is, small, medium, or large. If you
|> power the loads entirely from the battery, it will last a shorter time than
|> if you power the loads half from the battery and have from the mains.
|
|
| If the battery size doesn't matter, then use eight AAA cells.

You are a complete lunkhead if you haven't figured out by now that this is
about comparing the SAME SIZE BATTERY with 2 different wiring schemes, one
where the battery carries the full load, and the other where the battery
carries half the load. If YOU can't figure out the basic concept that when
a battery only carries half the load, it runs longer, then I guess I need
notify NASA, ESA, NOAA, that they might some flawed engineering running and
their missions are at risk of things like premature battery failure. That
is, if you aren't lying.


|> |> And I did not specify a particular design. If you want to discuss the failure
|> |> modes of a particular design, then go ahead and spell out what that design is
|> |> and we can discuss how and why it might fail (break down). If you do that, do
|> |> keep in mind that it was your design, not mine.
|> |
|> |
|> | You didn't specify a design because you can't. It is another of your
|> | ignorant 'Gee Whiz!!!' ideas that won't work.
|>
|> Whether I can or not is irrelevant. I didn't try. So it doesn't matter.
|> What I did was ask about the concept. You suggested it would fail, so you
|> are the one that has a specific design in mind. YOUR DESIGN is a failure.
|> You said so.
|
|
| I didn't try to design anything, because your concept is so flawed.
| That is something you never see in the stupid crap you dream up. Your
| stupid idea would be dropped in ten seconds in a design review, and you
| would be told to clean out your desk.

You think that the concept of running a battery at half load to extend its
run time, relative to the same size battery running full load, is a flawed
concept?

Now I have to say it ... what an utter moron.

--
|WARNING: Due to extreme spam, googlegroups.com is blocked. Due to ignorance |
| by the abuse department, bellsouth.net is blocked. If you post to |
| Usenet from these places, find another Usenet provider ASAP. |
| Phil Howard KA9WGN (email for humans: first name in lower case at ipal.net) |

 

[krw]

In article <3Tdsl.1691$%u5.42@nwrddc01.gnilink.net>,
bogusabdsqy@verizon.net says...>

John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:18:50 +0000, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 5 Mar 2009 05:57:18 +0000 (UTC), don@manx.misty.com (Don
Klipstein) wrote:

As best as I can remember, it's 7% or about that according to someone
giving an answer and probably providing a cite. (IIRC and the usual
similar "horse puckey disclaimers"). From atmospheric CO2 increase
around 35% from the 280 ppmv having some consideration being
"pre-Industrial-Revolution-baseline") as of when I asked the question
resulting in that answer.

7% increase of plant growth from 35% increase in atmospheric CO2
concentration? For a simple approximation at a mathematical relationship,
I see log(1.07)/log(1.35) indicating plant growth rate being proportional
to atmospheric CO2 concentration raised to the .23 power, though I suspect
such power to increase towards unity when our planet is/was "more CO2
starved" and to correspondingly decrease when atmospheric CO2
concentration increases past the 370-380 ppmv or whatever that was
relevant to 7% increase of plant growth that I remeber (how correctly?)
being result of increase from pre-industrial-revolution-"baseline" that
was/"was" 280 ppmv.
That's a great calculation for people who don't believe in evolution.
Why do you say that?

Only some plants growth rates are limited by CO2 concentration. Many
plants growth rates are limited by the available light intensity and/or
other environmental factors like water, temperature and humidity.

You also need water and plants tend to struggle to get it reliably
everywhere but in the humid tropics with daily rainfall. The result is
that they vary the stomata openings for diffusion according to water
stress. And the devious plants of the Crassulaceae and related C4 plants
using CAM photosynthesis only open their stomata only at night to
capture CO2 so as to avoid unnecessary daytime water loss.

One of the early papers of photosynthesis yield measured against CO2 and
light intensity is online at:
http://jgp.rupress.org/cgi/reprint/22/1/21

If I have done the sums right to convert from umoles CO2/litre to ppm
you can multiply by 37 so the range they tested was about 160ppm to
9000ppm. The peak productivity was around 5000ppm in ideal conditions.

At high light intensities where the process is truly diffusion limited
the yield tracks CO2 almost linearly, but at lower light intensities the
improvement was around 10% for a doubling of CO2 concentration. This is
still worthwhile enough that commercial greenhouses exploit it.


And conventional farmers will exploit it too, as they select breeds
that do better as the CO2 level rises. Plants are of course presently
optimized for, or lagging a bit behind, the existing CO2 levels.
Future-gen crop plants may have a very different response to CO2,
because they will have been designed to do so.

Most agriculture can provide lots of water and sunlight and
fertilizers, so adding CO2 might have substantial affects on yields.
Plants may also shift to needing, say, less water if they have more
CO2, which would benefit marginal farming cases.

John


In praise of carbon dioxide
Posted: June 07, 2008, 12:04 AM by NP Editor

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/6/6/in-praise-of-carbon-dioxide.aspx

"The [satellite survey] results surprised [NASA scientists] involved
in analyzing the NASA data. They found that over a period of almost two
decades, the Earth as a whole became more bountiful by a whopping 6.2%.
[...] each square metre of land, on average, now produces almost 500
grams of greenery per year.

Why the increase? Their 2004 study, and other more recent ones, point
to the warming of the planet and the presence of CO2, a gas
indispensable to plant life. CO2 is nature?s fertilizer, bathing the
biota with its life-giving nutrients. Plants take the carbon from CO2
to bulk themselves up ? carbon is the building block of life ? and
release the oxygen, which along with the plants, then sustain animal
life."

Experiment trumps theory.

But leftist weenies don't like life. They want to destroy life,
whether born or not.

 

On Mar 6, 6:16 pm, John Larkin
<jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:18:50 +0000, Martin Brown





|||newspam...@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 5 Mar 2009 05:57:18 +0000 (UTC), d...@manx.misty.com (Don
Klipstein) wrote:

 As best as I can remember, it's 7% or about that according to someone
giving an answer and probably providing a cite.  (IIRC and the usual
similar "horse puckey disclaimers").  From atmospheric CO2 increase
around 35% from the 280 ppmv having some consideration being
"pre-Industrial-Revolution-baseline") as of when I asked the question
resulting in that answer.

 7% increase of plant growth from 35% increase in atmospheric CO2
concentration?  For a simple approximation at a mathematical relationship,
I see log(1.07)/log(1.35) indicating plant growth rate being proportional
to atmospheric CO2 concentration raised to the .23 power, though I suspect
such power to increase towards unity when our planet is/was "more CO2
starved" and to correspondingly decrease when atmospheric CO2
concentration increases past the 370-380 ppmv or whatever that was
relevant to 7% increase of plant growth that I remeber (how correctly?)
being result of increase from pre-industrial-revolution-"baseline" that
was/"was" 280 ppmv.

That's a great calculation for people who don't believe in evolution.

Why do you say that?

Only some plants growth rates are limited by CO2 concentration. Many
plants growth rates are limited by the available light intensity and/or
other environmental factors like water, temperature and humidity.

You also need water and plants tend to struggle to get it reliably
everywhere but in the humid tropics with daily rainfall. The result is
that they vary the stomata openings for diffusion according to water
stress. And the devious plants of the Crassulaceae and related C4 plants
using CAM photosynthesis only open their stomata only at night to
capture CO2 so as to avoid unnecessary daytime water loss.

One of the early papers of photosynthesis yield measured against CO2 and
light intensity is online at:
http://jgp.rupress.org/cgi/reprint/22/1/21

If I have done the sums right to convert from umoles CO2/litre to ppm
you can multiply by 37 so the range they tested was about 160ppm to
9000ppm. The peak productivity was around 5000ppm in ideal conditions.

At high light intensities where the process is truly diffusion limited
the yield tracks CO2 almost linearly, but at lower light intensities the
improvement was around 10% for a doubling of CO2 concentration. This is
still worthwhile enough that commercial greenhouses exploit it.

And conventional farmers will exploit it too, as they select breeds
that do better as the CO2 level rises. Plants are of course presently
optimized for, or lagging a bit behind, the existing CO2 levels.
Future-gen crop plants may have a very different response to CO2,
because they will have been designed to do so.

Most agriculture can provide lots of water and sunlight and
fertilizers, so adding CO2 might have substantial affects on yields.

It is also going to favour weeds, who will be busy evolving for their
own benefit, from a much wider distribution of genomes, and without
the additional cost of providing food for us. And how does agriculture
provide additional sunlight?

Plants may also shift to needing, say, less water if they have more
CO2, which would benefit marginal farming cases.

This presumably explains why paleology tells that stomata density
tends to drop when CO2 levels are high.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

On Mar 6, 6:38 pm, John Larkin
<jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Thu, 5 Mar 2009 05:43:50 -0800 (PST), bill.slo...@ieee.org wrote:
On Mar 5, 3:07 am, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Wed, 4 Mar 2009 17:55:57 -0600, "Tim Williams"

tmoran...@charter.net> wrote:
"John Larkin" <jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote in message
news:e45tq4ho7b19cppfjlce70873d5lha7g0l@4ax.com...
If someone
invented a clean, cheap source of, say, fusion energy, they'd be
against it.                                            ^^^^^^

Actually, I'm against it too ...

See? What I said.

Um, John?  Since when have you EVER associated myself with "they", i.e., The
Warmingists?

My objection to widespread fusion power is simple to see with some
multiplications and a couple of centuries use.  In fact, Sloman understood
my statement correctly.  That's scary, John.

Tim

The sun dumps about a kilowatt per square meter of heat onto us. The
surface area of the earth is about 5e14 m^2, about 100,000 m^2 per
person. So if everybody consumes a kilowatt, which is unlikely, the
relative energy is insignificant.

The prime indicator of human misery is low availability of power.
Cheap electric power would lift a lot of people out of ghastly
poverty. Some people actually want to purge the planet of the pest
that is Man, and choke off energy supplies in the process; their
policies will indeed kill a lot of people, especially kids.

Not as many as the denialists, or as fast.

AGW skeptics hurt nobody; things like cap-and-trade, and burning food
to run cars, will kill people.

Cap-and-trade isn't going to kill anybody. Burning food to run cars
was Dubbya's idiotic scheme to lock in the farming vote - he may have
claimed that this reduced CO2 emissions, but the advantage - if any -
was minimal and certainly wasn't what motivated the scheme.

Hardly any countries have done anything about living up to Kyoto
agreements,

Nothing like enough.

and China and India and the rest of the developing world
will simply not restrict energy use (lots of nasty coal) for our
benefit.

They may well do it for their own benefit, Anthropogenic global
warming is already starting to crimp their food output, and they
haven't got a lot of spare agricultural capacity.

Climate tokenism just hurts the poorest people without
affecting CO2 levels (whatever consequences *that* may or may not
have.)

Climate tokenism is foolish. Unfortunately, not doing anything at all
is even more foolish. Understanding why it is more foolish does take a
better grasp of the science involved than you seem to have.

Longterm, the best thing to do is develop those countries, which takes
energy now.

But not necessarily CO2-emitting energy sources.

Development is the surest means of population control.

Sadly, it isn't. Starvation and warfare can do an even better job, and
letting the climate continue to heat up is a great way of getting
both, and both play hell with development.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

phil-news-nospam@ipal.net wrote:

In alt.engineering.electrical Michael A. Terrell <mike.terrell@earthlink.net> wrote:
|
| phil-news-nospam@ipal.net wrote:
|
|> On Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:51:33 -0500 Michael A. Terrell <mike.terrell@earthlink.net> wrote:
|
|> | I have no problem reading and identifying moronic concepts.
|
|> You have no skill in reading electrical enginering or technology. All the
|> rest is fiction in your mind.
|
|
| Yawn. Another lame attempt to slur my name. The 'fiction' is that
| you believe the crap you dream up will work. What have you ever done in
| the real world? My design ideas are in space, aboard the ISS, used to
| track everything launched by NASA, the ESA, and by NOAA to track and
| control their LEO Weather Satellites. I also came up with the idea of
| uplinking a subcarrier channel to a C-band satellite from a different
| site than the main carrier. This was for United Video's microwave
| division for their EPG service on the WGN feed. It eliminated two
| leased phone lines from Salt Lake City where the mainframe computers
| were, to the WGN uplink in Chicago. It provided a more reliable service,
| and the savings of over $15,000 a month for the company I worked for.

You could have made a lot more contributions to the world if you had the
ability to read English and did not have the attitude of distorting what
people say so you gain the ability to make assertions that are really false
and lets you blame it on them. I'm not going to play your penis length
game. There's no way to verify the truth or significance in anything you
say.

Maybe you really did those things in the past and maybe they will work fine.
But your brain is certainly not keeping up. Damaged?

Keep throwing your hissy fits, Phil. You can't design anything, and
continue to show the world what a fool you are.

|> |> The unit is more likely to fail if you let the battery carry the full load,
|> |> instead of letting the battery share the load with what power it can get from
|> |> the available mains voltage.
|> |
|> |
|> | Then the battery is too small, or too old. An overly complex design
|> | isn't the answer to crappy maintenance.
|
|> It doesn't matter what the battery size is, small, medium, or large. If you
|> power the loads entirely from the battery, it will last a shorter time than
|> if you power the loads half from the battery and have from the mains.
|
|
| If the battery size doesn't matter, then use eight AAA cells.

You are a complete lunkhead if you haven't figured out by now that this is
about comparing the SAME SIZE BATTERY with 2 different wiring schemes, one
where the battery carries the full load, and the other where the battery
carries half the load. If YOU can't figure out the basic concept that when
a battery only carries half the load, it runs longer, then I guess I need
notify NASA, ESA, NOAA, that they might some flawed engineering running and
their missions are at risk of things like premature battery failure. That
is, if you aren't lying.

That wasn't what you stated. You said the battery size doesn't
matter, not how the same size battery was used. You claim I can't read,
yet you can't even read what you wrote.

|> |> And I did not specify a particular design. If you want to discuss the failure
|> |> modes of a particular design, then go ahead and spell out what that design is
|> |> and we can discuss how and why it might fail (break down). If you do that, do
|> |> keep in mind that it was your design, not mine.
|> |
|> |
|> | You didn't specify a design because you can't. It is another of your
|> | ignorant 'Gee Whiz!!!' ideas that won't work.
|
|> Whether I can or not is irrelevant. I didn't try. So it doesn't matter.
|> What I did was ask about the concept. You suggested it would fail, so you
|> are the one that has a specific design in mind. YOUR DESIGN is a failure.
|> You said so.
|
|
| I didn't try to design anything, because your concept is so flawed.
| That is something you never see in the stupid crap you dream up. Your
| stupid idea would be dropped in ten seconds in a design review, and you
| would be told to clean out your desk.

You think that the concept of running a battery at half load to extend its
run time, relative to the same size battery running full load, is a flawed
concept?

I never said that. I stated that a properly sized battery was need
but as usual, you can't read and comprehend anything. Properly sized
means that it has a reasonable reserve, and in exchange will give you a
longer run time, if needed before the power is restored, or a backup
generator comes on line. A larger battery is more reliable than the
Rube Goldberg crap you come up with. You need to learn the KISS method
if you want things to keep working.

Now I have to say it ... what an utter moron.

We know you're a moron.

--
|WARNING: Due to extreme spam, googlegroups.com is blocked. Due to ignorance |
| by the abuse department, bellsouth.net is blocked. If you post to |
| Usenet from these places, find another Usenet provider ASAP. |
| Phil Howard KA9WGN (email for humans: first name in lower case at ipal.net) |

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will not see your messages.

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your account: http://www.usenettools.net/ISP.htm

 

[Jim Thompson]

On Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:23:59 GMT, James Arthur
<bogusabdsqy@verizon.net> wrote:

[snip]

In praise of carbon dioxide
Posted: June 07, 2008, 12:04 AM by NP Editor

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/6/6/in-praise-of-carbon-dioxide.aspx

"The [satellite survey] results surprised [NASA scientists] involved
in analyzing the NASA data. They found that over a period of almost two
decades, the Earth as a whole became more bountiful by a whopping 6.2%.
[...] each square metre of land, on average, now produces almost 500
grams of greenery per year.

Why the increase? Their 2004 study, and other more recent ones, point
to the warming of the planet and the presence of CO2, a gas
indispensable to plant life. CO2 is nature’s fertilizer, bathing the
biota with its life-giving nutrients. Plants take the carbon from CO2
to bulk themselves up — carbon is the building block of life — and
release the oxygen, which along with the plants, then sustain animal
life."

Experiment trumps theory.

Cheers,
James Arthur

Unless you're a leftist weenie. Then things are as you dream them ;-)

...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |

FDR gave us the New Deal. Obama thinks you deserve a Raw Deal.

 

and China and India and the rest of the developing world
will simply not restrict energy use (lots of nasty coal) for our
benefit.

They may well do it for their own benefit, Anthropogenic global
warming is already starting to crimp their food output...

Really? How so?

What specific aspect of the climate has changed in a MEASURABLE way
enough to impact agricultural output in China a NEGATIVE way?



Mark

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:23:59 GMT, James Arthur
<bogusabdsqy@verizon.net> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:18:50 +0000, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 5 Mar 2009 05:57:18 +0000 (UTC), don@manx.misty.com (Don
Klipstein) wrote:

As best as I can remember, it's 7% or about that according to someone
giving an answer and probably providing a cite. (IIRC and the usual
similar "horse puckey disclaimers"). From atmospheric CO2 increase
around 35% from the 280 ppmv having some consideration being
"pre-Industrial-Revolution-baseline") as of when I asked the question
resulting in that answer.

7% increase of plant growth from 35% increase in atmospheric CO2
concentration? For a simple approximation at a mathematical relationship,
I see log(1.07)/log(1.35) indicating plant growth rate being proportional
to atmospheric CO2 concentration raised to the .23 power, though I suspect
such power to increase towards unity when our planet is/was "more CO2
starved" and to correspondingly decrease when atmospheric CO2
concentration increases past the 370-380 ppmv or whatever that was
relevant to 7% increase of plant growth that I remeber (how correctly?)
being result of increase from pre-industrial-revolution-"baseline" that
was/"was" 280 ppmv.
That's a great calculation for people who don't believe in evolution.
Why do you say that?

Only some plants growth rates are limited by CO2 concentration. Many
plants growth rates are limited by the available light intensity and/or
other environmental factors like water, temperature and humidity.

You also need water and plants tend to struggle to get it reliably
everywhere but in the humid tropics with daily rainfall. The result is
that they vary the stomata openings for diffusion according to water
stress. And the devious plants of the Crassulaceae and related C4 plants
using CAM photosynthesis only open their stomata only at night to
capture CO2 so as to avoid unnecessary daytime water loss.

One of the early papers of photosynthesis yield measured against CO2 and
light intensity is online at:
http://jgp.rupress.org/cgi/reprint/22/1/21

If I have done the sums right to convert from umoles CO2/litre to ppm
you can multiply by 37 so the range they tested was about 160ppm to
9000ppm. The peak productivity was around 5000ppm in ideal conditions.

At high light intensities where the process is truly diffusion limited
the yield tracks CO2 almost linearly, but at lower light intensities the
improvement was around 10% for a doubling of CO2 concentration. This is
still worthwhile enough that commercial greenhouses exploit it.


And conventional farmers will exploit it too, as they select breeds
that do better as the CO2 level rises. Plants are of course presently
optimized for, or lagging a bit behind, the existing CO2 levels.
Future-gen crop plants may have a very different response to CO2,
because they will have been designed to do so.

Most agriculture can provide lots of water and sunlight and
fertilizers, so adding CO2 might have substantial affects on yields.
Plants may also shift to needing, say, less water if they have more
CO2, which would benefit marginal farming cases.

John


In praise of carbon dioxide
Posted: June 07, 2008, 12:04 AM by NP Editor

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/6/6/in-praise-of-carbon-dioxide.aspx

"The [satellite survey] results surprised [NASA scientists] involved
in analyzing the NASA data. They found that over a period of almost two
decades, the Earth as a whole became more bountiful by a whopping 6.2%.
[...] each square metre of land, on average, now produces almost 500
grams of greenery per year.

Why the increase? Their 2004 study, and other more recent ones, point
to the warming of the planet and the presence of CO2, a gas
indispensable to plant life. CO2 is nature’s fertilizer, bathing the
biota with its life-giving nutrients. Plants take the carbon from CO2
to bulk themselves up — carbon is the building block of life — and
release the oxygen, which along with the plants, then sustain animal
life."

Experiment trumps theory.

Cheers,
James Arthur

Gaia. We are a part of the world.

John

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 6 Mar 2009 10:33:13 -0800 (PST), bill.sloman@ieee.org wrote:

On Mar 6, 6:16 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:18:50 +0000, Martin Brown





|||newspam...@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 5 Mar 2009 05:57:18 +0000 (UTC), d...@manx.misty.com (Don
Klipstein) wrote:

 As best as I can remember, it's 7% or about that according to someone
giving an answer and probably providing a cite.  (IIRC and the usual
similar "horse puckey disclaimers").  From atmospheric CO2 increase
around 35% from the 280 ppmv having some consideration being
"pre-Industrial-Revolution-baseline") as of when I asked the question
resulting in that answer.

 7% increase of plant growth from 35% increase in atmospheric CO2
concentration?  For a simple approximation at a mathematical relationship,
I see log(1.07)/log(1.35) indicating plant growth rate being proportional
to atmospheric CO2 concentration raised to the .23 power, though I suspect
such power to increase towards unity when our planet is/was "more CO2
starved" and to correspondingly decrease when atmospheric CO2
concentration increases past the 370-380 ppmv or whatever that was
relevant to 7% increase of plant growth that I remeber (how correctly?)
being result of increase from pre-industrial-revolution-"baseline" that
was/"was" 280 ppmv.

That's a great calculation for people who don't believe in evolution.

Why do you say that?

Only some plants growth rates are limited by CO2 concentration. Many
plants growth rates are limited by the available light intensity and/or
other environmental factors like water, temperature and humidity.

You also need water and plants tend to struggle to get it reliably
everywhere but in the humid tropics with daily rainfall. The result is
that they vary the stomata openings for diffusion according to water
stress. And the devious plants of the Crassulaceae and related C4 plants
using CAM photosynthesis only open their stomata only at night to
capture CO2 so as to avoid unnecessary daytime water loss.

One of the early papers of photosynthesis yield measured against CO2 and
light intensity is online at:
http://jgp.rupress.org/cgi/reprint/22/1/21

If I have done the sums right to convert from umoles CO2/litre to ppm
you can multiply by 37 so the range they tested was about 160ppm to
9000ppm. The peak productivity was around 5000ppm in ideal conditions.

At high light intensities where the process is truly diffusion limited
the yield tracks CO2 almost linearly, but at lower light intensities the
improvement was around 10% for a doubling of CO2 concentration. This is
still worthwhile enough that commercial greenhouses exploit it.

And conventional farmers will exploit it too, as they select breeds
that do better as the CO2 level rises. Plants are of course presently
optimized for, or lagging a bit behind, the existing CO2 levels.
Future-gen crop plants may have a very different response to CO2,
because they will have been designed to do so.

Most agriculture can provide lots of water and sunlight and
fertilizers, so adding CO2 might have substantial affects on yields.

It is also going to favour weeds, who will be busy evolving for their
own benefit, from a much wider distribution of genomes, and without
the additional cost of providing food for us. And how does agriculture
provide additional sunlight?

Farmers know how to control weeds. If you offered the average farmer a
10% increase in both crop and weed growth rates, I bet all of them
would sign up. We are agressively selective breeding and GM tweaking
crops, while nobody is doing that for weeds.

Plants may also shift to needing, say, less water if they have more
CO2, which would benefit marginal farming cases.

This presumably explains why paleology tells that stomata density
tends to drop when CO2 levels are high.

Yes; more CO2 means less interface surface and less water loss.
Photosynthesis is not particularly efficient at the whole-plant level,
so plants don't really need more sunlight.

Without having to know much biology, the general observation is that
when a multivariable system is fully optimized, everything trades off
against everything else. So if you make CO2 gathering easier, other
parameters can crank up.

John

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 6 Mar 2009 14:53:52 -0800 (PST), bill.sloman@ieee.org wrote:

On Mar 6, 11:16 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:23:59 GMT, James Arthur





bogusabd...@verizon.net> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:18:50 +0000, Martin Brown
|||newspam...@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 5 Mar 2009 05:57:18 +0000 (UTC), d...@manx.misty.com (Don
Klipstein) wrote:

 As best as I can remember, it's 7% or about that according to someone
giving an answer and probably providing a cite.  (IIRC and the usual
similar "horse puckey disclaimers").  From atmospheric CO2 increase
around 35% from the 280 ppmv having some consideration being
"pre-Industrial-Revolution-baseline") as of when I asked the question
resulting in that answer.

 7% increase of plant growth from 35% increase in atmospheric CO2
concentration?  For a simple approximation at a mathematical relationship,
I see log(1.07)/log(1.35) indicating plant growth rate being proportional
to atmospheric CO2 concentration raised to the .23 power, though I suspect
such power to increase towards unity when our planet is/was "more CO2
starved" and to correspondingly decrease when atmospheric CO2
concentration increases past the 370-380 ppmv or whatever that was
relevant to 7% increase of plant growth that I remeber (how correctly?)
being result of increase from pre-industrial-revolution-"baseline" that
was/"was" 280 ppmv.
That's a great calculation for people who don't believe in evolution.
Why do you say that?

Only some plants growth rates are limited by CO2 concentration. Many
plants growth rates are limited by the available light intensity and/or
other environmental factors like water, temperature and humidity.

You also need water and plants tend to struggle to get it reliably
everywhere but in the humid tropics with daily rainfall. The result is
that they vary the stomata openings for diffusion according to water
stress. And the devious plants of the Crassulaceae and related C4 plants
using CAM photosynthesis only open their stomata only at night to
capture CO2 so as to avoid unnecessary daytime water loss.

One of the early papers of photosynthesis yield measured against CO2 and
light intensity is online at:
http://jgp.rupress.org/cgi/reprint/22/1/21

If I have done the sums right to convert from umoles CO2/litre to ppm
you can multiply by 37 so the range they tested was about 160ppm to
9000ppm. The peak productivity was around 5000ppm in ideal conditions.

At high light intensities where the process is truly diffusion limited
the yield tracks CO2 almost linearly, but at lower light intensities the
improvement was around 10% for a doubling of CO2 concentration. This is
still worthwhile enough that commercial greenhouses exploit it.

And conventional farmers will exploit it too, as they select breeds
that do better as the CO2 level rises. Plants are of course presently
optimized for, or lagging a bit behind, the existing CO2 levels.
Future-gen crop plants may have a very different response to CO2,
because they will have been designed to do so.

Most agriculture can provide lots of water and sunlight and
fertilizers, so adding CO2 might have substantial affects on yields.
Plants may also shift to needing, say, less water if they have more
CO2, which would benefit marginal farming cases.

John

In praise of carbon dioxide
Posted: June 07, 2008, 12:04 AM by NP Editor

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/6/6/i...

"The [satellite survey] results surprised [NASA scientists] involved
in analyzing the NASA data. They found that over a period of almost two
decades, the Earth as a whole became more bountiful by a whopping 6.2%.
[...] each square metre of land, on average, now produces almost 500
grams of greenery per year.

Why the increase? Their 2004 study, and other more recent ones, point
to the warming of the planet and the presence of CO2, a gas
indispensable to plant life. CO2 is nature’s fertilizer, bathing the
biota with its life-giving nutrients. Plants take the carbon from CO2
to bulk themselves up — carbon is the building block of life — and
release the oxygen, which along with the plants, then sustain animal
life."

Experiment trumps theory.

Gaia. We are a part of the world.

The part that is working hard on setting up its own personal global
extinction.

Insanely absurd, unless you always trust extrapolation and always
ignore feedbacks.

John

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 6 Mar 2009 14:58:30 -0800 (PST), bill.sloman@ieee.org wrote:

On Mar 6, 10:42 pm, makol...@yahoo.com wrote:
and China and India and the rest of the developing world
will simply not restrict energy use (lots of nasty coal) for our
benefit.

They may well do it for their own benefit, Anthropogenic global
warming is already starting to crimp their food output...

Really?  How so?

What specific aspect of the climate has changed in a MEASURABLE way
enough to impact agricultural output in China a NEGATIVE way?

The aspect that this year gave northern China the worst drought in
half a century

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/05/china-food-farming

"Worst drought in half a century" implies that things were about as
bad 50 years ago. And presumably this drought isn't as bad as some
other drought farther back in time. And much of the water woes in
China are self-inflicted.

There have been floods and droughts somewhere in the world since the
dawn of recorded history.

John

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 6 Mar 2009 14:53:52 -0800 (PST), bill.sloman@ieee.org wrote:

The part that is working hard on setting up its own personal global
extinction.

Insanely absurd, unless you always trust extrapolation and always
ignore feedbacks.

If he doesn't understand a simple aluminum electrolytic, how can he
claim to understand the so called global warming?


--
http://improve-usenet.org/index.html

Goggle Groups, and Web TV users must request to be white listed, or I
will not see your messages.

If you have broadband, your ISP may have a NNTP news server included in
your account: http://www.usenettools.net/ISP.htm

 

On Mar 6, 7:23 pm, James Arthur <bogusabd...@verizon.net> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:18:50 +0000, Martin Brown
|||newspam...@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 5 Mar 2009 05:57:18 +0000 (UTC), d...@manx.misty.com (Don
Klipstein) wrote:

 As best as I can remember, it's 7% or about that according to someone
giving an answer and probably providing a cite.  (IIRC and the usual
similar "horse puckey disclaimers").  From atmospheric CO2 increase
around 35% from the 280 ppmv having some consideration being
"pre-Industrial-Revolution-baseline") as of when I asked the question
resulting in that answer.

 7% increase of plant growth from 35% increase in atmospheric CO2
concentration?  For a simple approximation at a mathematical relationship,
I see log(1.07)/log(1.35) indicating plant growth rate being proportional
to atmospheric CO2 concentration raised to the .23 power, though I suspect
such power to increase towards unity when our planet is/was "more CO2
starved" and to correspondingly decrease when atmospheric CO2
concentration increases past the 370-380 ppmv or whatever that was
relevant to 7% increase of plant growth that I remeber (how correctly?)
being result of increase from pre-industrial-revolution-"baseline" that
was/"was" 280 ppmv.
That's a great calculation for people who don't believe in evolution.
Why do you say that?

Only some plants growth rates are limited by CO2 concentration. Many
plants growth rates are limited by the available light intensity and/or
other environmental factors like water, temperature and humidity.

You also need water and plants tend to struggle to get it reliably
everywhere but in the humid tropics with daily rainfall. The result is
that they vary the stomata openings for diffusion according to water
stress. And the devious plants of the Crassulaceae and related C4 plants
using CAM photosynthesis only open their stomata only at night to
capture CO2 so as to avoid unnecessary daytime water loss.

One of the early papers of photosynthesis yield measured against CO2 and
light intensity is online at:
http://jgp.rupress.org/cgi/reprint/22/1/21

If I have done the sums right to convert from umoles CO2/litre to ppm
you can multiply by 37 so the range they tested was about 160ppm to
9000ppm. The peak productivity was around 5000ppm in ideal conditions.

At high light intensities where the process is truly diffusion limited
the yield tracks CO2 almost linearly, but at lower light intensities the
improvement was around 10% for a doubling of CO2 concentration. This is
still worthwhile enough that commercial greenhouses exploit it.

And conventional farmers will exploit it too, as they select breeds
that do better as the CO2 level rises. Plants are of course presently
optimized for, or lagging a bit behind, the existing CO2 levels.
Future-gen crop plants may have a very different response to CO2,
because they will have been designed to do so.

Most agriculture can provide lots of water and sunlight and
fertilizers, so adding CO2 might have substantial affects on yields.
Plants may also shift to needing, say, less water if they have more
CO2, which would benefit marginal farming cases.

John

In praise of carbon dioxide
Posted: June 07, 2008, 12:04 AM by NP Editor

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/6/6/i...

"The [satellite survey] results surprised [NASA scientists] involved
in analyzing the NASA data. They found that over a period of almost two
decades, the Earth as a whole became more bountiful by a whopping 6.2%.
[...] each square metre of land, on average, now produces almost 500
grams of greenery per year.

Why the increase? Their 2004 study, and other more recent ones, point
to the warming of the planet and the presence of CO2, a gas
indispensable to plant life. CO2 is nature’s fertilizer, bathing the
biota with its life-giving nutrients. Plants take the carbon from CO2
to bulk themselves up — carbon is the building block of life — and
release the oxygen, which along with the plants, then sustain animal
life."

Experiment trumps theory.

Sure. The fertilising effect of the extra CO2 is capturing about as
much CO2 at the US emits. Sadly, the rest of the world - in total -
emits three times as much as the USA and the carbon dioxide level in
the atmosphere keeps on going up. And the carbon capture depends on
the continued existence of the tropical rain forests that are
capturing some of the extra carbon dioxide. At little more global
warming, and they turn into deserts, if we haven't cut them down first

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16708-parts-of-amazon-close-to-tipping-point.html

I'd like to know which theory you think your "experiment" is trumping.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

On Mar 6, 8:07 pm, krw <k...@att.zzzzzzzzz> wrote:

In article <3Tdsl.1691$%u5...@nwrddc01.gnilink.net>,
bogusabd...@verizon.net says...





John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:18:50 +0000, Martin Brown
|||newspam...@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 5 Mar 2009 05:57:18 +0000 (UTC), d...@manx.misty.com (Don
Klipstein) wrote:

 As best as I can remember, it's 7% or about that according to someone
giving an answer and probably providing a cite.  (IIRC and the usual
similar "horse puckey disclaimers").  From atmospheric CO2 increase
around 35% from the 280 ppmv having some consideration being
"pre-Industrial-Revolution-baseline") as of when I asked the question
resulting in that answer.

 7% increase of plant growth from 35% increase in atmospheric CO2
concentration?  For a simple approximation at a mathematical relationship,
I see log(1.07)/log(1.35) indicating plant growth rate being proportional
to atmospheric CO2 concentration raised to the .23 power, though I suspect
such power to increase towards unity when our planet is/was "more CO2
starved" and to correspondingly decrease when atmospheric CO2
concentration increases past the 370-380 ppmv or whatever that was
relevant to 7% increase of plant growth that I remeber (how correctly?)
being result of increase from pre-industrial-revolution-"baseline" that
was/"was" 280 ppmv.
That's a great calculation for people who don't believe in evolution.
Why do you say that?

Only some plants growth rates are limited by CO2 concentration. Many
plants growth rates are limited by the available light intensity and/or
other environmental factors like water, temperature and humidity.

You also need water and plants tend to struggle to get it reliably
everywhere but in the humid tropics with daily rainfall. The result is
that they vary the stomata openings for diffusion according to water
stress. And the devious plants of the Crassulaceae and related C4 plants
using CAM photosynthesis only open their stomata only at night to
capture CO2 so as to avoid unnecessary daytime water loss.

One of the early papers of photosynthesis yield measured against CO2 and
light intensity is online at:
http://jgp.rupress.org/cgi/reprint/22/1/21

If I have done the sums right to convert from umoles CO2/litre to ppm
you can multiply by 37 so the range they tested was about 160ppm to
9000ppm. The peak productivity was around 5000ppm in ideal conditions.

At high light intensities where the process is truly diffusion limited
the yield tracks CO2 almost linearly, but at lower light intensities the
improvement was around 10% for a doubling of CO2 concentration. This is
still worthwhile enough that commercial greenhouses exploit it.

And conventional farmers will exploit it too, as they select breeds
that do better as the CO2 level rises. Plants are of course presently
optimized for, or lagging a bit behind, the existing CO2 levels.
Future-gen crop plants may have a very different response to CO2,
because they will have been designed to do so.

Most agriculture can provide lots of water and sunlight and
fertilizers, so adding CO2 might have substantial affects on yields.
Plants may also shift to needing, say, less water if they have more
CO2, which would benefit marginal farming cases.

John

In praise of carbon dioxide
Posted: June 07, 2008, 12:04 AM by NP Editor

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/6/6/i...

"The [satellite survey] results surprised [NASA scientists] involved
in analyzing the NASA data. They found that over a period of almost two
decades, the Earth as a whole became more bountiful by a whopping 6.2%.
[...] each square metre of land, on average, now produces almost 500
grams of greenery per year.

Why the increase? Their 2004 study, and other more recent ones, point
to the warming of the planet and the presence of CO2, a gas
indispensable to plant life. CO2 is nature?s fertilizer, bathing the
biota with its life-giving nutrients. Plants take the carbon from CO2
to bulk themselves up ? carbon is the building block of life ? and
release the oxygen, which along with the plants, then sustain animal
life."

Experiment trumps theory.

But leftist weenies don't like life.  They want to destroy life,
whether born or not.

A bizarre claim, even by krw's irrational standards.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

On Mar 6, 6:49 pm, John Larkin
<jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Thu, 5 Mar 2009 06:12:59 -0800 (PST), bill.slo...@ieee.org wrote:
On Mar 5, 3:37 am, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Wed, 4 Mar 2009 18:23:24 -0600, "Tim Williams"

tmoran...@charter.net> wrote:
bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote in message
news:63e0231f-dfad-4c3c-9844-d2d690166bdf@v15g2000yqn.googlegroups.com...
Perhaps warmingists know enough physicis to be aware that nuclear
fission produces radioactive nuclear waste, which emits alpha, beta
and gamma rays. An ignorant savage like Rich may not appreciate that
these constitute emissions

Actually, they don't, since they don't emit beyond their container.  There
are a few exceptions, like krypton and xenon, which are only freed when the
fuel is exposed to atmosphere (such as opening the zirconium-clad fuel
bundles, or especially breaking down the fuel by careless reprocessing), and
the tritium (as tritiated H2 gas, H2O, etc.) that is produced by all
water-based reactors, but CANDU reactors in particular (being heavy-water
moderated).  Levels of both are an order of magnitude below regulatory
standards at currently operational facilities, and those standards are a
further order of magnitude or two below any potential health effects.
Nuclear is indeed a very clean technology today.

Tritium, krypton and xenon aren't a big concern because they spread out
fairly well.  Gaseous, they are quickly diluted by the atmosphere to
negligible levels.  Tritium in the groundwater is a bit more concentrated,
which is why it's monitored.

Probably of a bigger concern is the ~1% of CO2 still produced by nuclear
processing.  This includes (as far as I know) mining, transport, fabrication
and etc.  Considering coal is approximately 100% CO2 per electrical output,
it can be said that nuclear has negligible carbon emissions.

but the more sophisticated may understand
that nobody has yet worked out an entirely satisfactory way of
disposing of this waste in a way that can be guaranteed not to foul
the world we leave to our children.

France and Japan seem to have some ideas.  Right now, they both reprocess
their spent fuel; the U.S. doesn't.  The heavy stuff (thorium and up) can be
burned again (MOX fuel), getting rid of those pesky actinides, which are the
main reason spent fuel needs to sit under North America for 10kya by the
current regulatory standards here.  If the byproducts are seperated, it's
safe after just a couple of centuries encased in glass, a much easier
storage time, concievable even that the government that produced it will see
it become safe again.  And with rhodium as expensive as it is (especially
2003-2006), it's even economical to extract PGMs from the stuff after just
half a century.

Even without reprocessing, nuclear is still safe with low emissions.  Pebble
bed technology isn't very mature, but there's no reason not to use it..
Germany, of all places, even experimented with the stuff, successfully
operating a reactor for a decade or so.  It's hard to reprocess, so it's not
a proliferation threat either.  The pebbles are self-contained and ready for
disposal.

And speaking of disposal, I don't see why we don't just heap all the waste
into a deep hard-rock mine shaft (below the water table) with some sacks of
graphite, heap concrete on top and let it soak.  With a couple thousand tons
of waste in one place, it should get hot enough to melt and sink deeper into
the Earth's crust, never to be seen again for millions of years, in which
time there will be little more than depleted uranium leftover.  With
concrete on top, the byproducts will be fairly well contained, and it's deep
enough that it won't be a big deal for the water table, either.  It's going
to be deep enough, fast enough, that there isn't any concern of future
miners touching the stuff with their drill rigs.  And it's better than
dumping it deep in the ocean where it's still accessible for a few thousand
years.  I don't know, I've never heard this proposed, maybe the water table
doesn't work quite the way I think.  But it sounds good to me, at least if
you're not reprocessing the stuff, which sounds better to me.

Tim

Without political opposition, nuclear power would be perfectly safe
and fairly cheap, and very, very clean. Again, there are lots of
people who don't want a solution to the energy problem.

For a start, all those people living in Northern Europe when the
radioactive cloud let loose by Chernobyl passed overhead. I was living
in Cambridge at the time, and the radioactivity went over Scotland and
Northern England, but that was too close for comfort.

You must know nothing about the Chernobyl accident; read up on it. It
was an inherently unstable reactor,

You don't seem to know what you are talking about. The reactor wasn't
"inherently unstable" alhtough it doesn't seem to have been well-
designed The idiots had to do something quite dramatically stupidn to
get it to blow up

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

without containment, being run by idiots.

Three Mile Island seems to have been run by the same kind of idiot,
but at least that reactor did have decent containment.

There are lots of modern reactor designs that could be run by
idiots and that could not ever breach containment. TMI didn't. No US
or Japanese or French commercial reactor ever has.

Yet.

It just takes good engineering.

And a certain amount of luck.

Your idea of "perfectly safe" doesn't give enough credit to the
creative power of human stupidity. There are qute a few safer
solutions to the energy problem.

Thousands of coal miners, oil/gas rig roughnecks, oil truck drivers,
electrical linesmen, and home workshop guys are killed by electric
power production every year.

A few at a time. Of course, if you really want to kill a lot of people
- say half the population of Europe - drop a nuclear bomb on a nuclear
reactor and thoroughly dipserse the tons of radiactive material
involved.

Not to mention those killed by
particulates. Energy is dangerous. Switching from, say, coal to nukes
would save a lot of lives, clean up the planet (less particulates on
the snow!), far less CO2 (if that matters.)

If the AGWers were sincere, they would be wildly pro-nuke. But they
aren't sincere: they have entirely another agenda, no less than the
choking off of human development by all available means.

Even for you, that's a remarkably silly claim. There are plenty of
people who do know enough science to know that anthropogenic global
warming is a real problem, and have looked at the potential solutions
in detail, and - quite reasonably - think that we can maintain and
eventually increase our energy consumption without putting the planet
at risk, even if we do have to give up venting carbon dioxide directly
into the atmosphere

Thomas L. Friedman's "Hot, Flat and Crowded" ISBN 978-1-846-14129-4
would tell you about it, if you were remotely interested in finding
out what rational people think about the subject.

Sadly, you prefer to concentrate your attention on the demented claims
of the lunatic fringe of the ecology movement - the arguments that
they present are sufficiently unsophisticated for you to follow, and
absurd enough that you don't have to put any effort into showing that
they are dumb.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen