Nuclear Safety

I suppose it was to be expected that the Greens and Greenpeace would immediately start screaming about a "nuclear blast" and "nuclear catastrophy" on the same scale as Chernobyl at the Japanese Nuclear Plant. What a pity they believe their own mythology, which has more to do with fiction such as the Forsyth novel "China Syndrome" than reality. The safety systems at the Japanese plant operated, shutting down the reactors immediately the quake began. With this design the fuel rods are ejected into metal canisters which isolates them and stops the reaction. Several news channels have carried this together with expert assessments, yet the anti-nuclear lobby continue to rant about "meltdown" and "nuclear blasts."

The problem in Japan at present seems to be to identify the cause of the explosion, which several news reports say is not in the Reactor House, and I have to say that the video footage I have seen suggests the failure of a pressurised system, possibly a high pressure hydraulic system. The second problem appears to be that some of the containment cells for the fuel rods have been damaged, allowing radiation to leak. One report suggests that the Japanese are preparing to simply flood the affected reactor chamber with sea water and boric acid. The acid absorbs the radiation and reacts with the radioactive isotopes, reducing the threat they pose. This does mean that the reactor will then have to be abandoned as the acid and the sea water will place it beyond repair.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the ignoramuses of the anti-nuclear lobby are already screaming for the immediate closure of all nuclear powerplants on the grounds that "it could happen here!" That is extremely unlikely. We are not located on a major fault, none of the power plants they want banned, closed and replaced with useless windmills are anywhere near such a fault and even if the core does 'melt down' - very unlikely in a PWR or AGR system - you don't get a "runaway chain reaction" such as that postulated in Forsyth's book.

At this point a little less hype and a lot more common sense and truth would be far more sensible than the Greenpeace anti-nuclear garbage being spouted to whip up fear.

International Climate Science Coalition

I've just located this blog and included it in my Blog Roll. It is run by Dr Tim Ball, based in Victoria, BC, Canada, but he opens with some fascinating stuff on droughts and floods in Australia.

And none of it based on 'computer models' either! International Climate Science Coalition is well worth following!

I wonder how long it will be before the fanatics from the 'Global Catastrophic Climate Change/The world will drown in melting Ice lobby launch an attack on his character or his credentials - or both?

Lent...

Has officially begun - that was really what the Carnivals of the last couple of days were about. So last night we attended a Eucharist and received the 'Imposition of Ashes' on our foreheads as a mark of the penitence that Lent is all about.

In former times it was about fasting, rather in the same manner as Ramadan is kept in Islam, though these days most Christians simply forgo some luxury they normally enjoy for the duration ...

I'm not saying - as I usually slip up somewhere down the line at least once!

Unsettled science ...

The climate is certainly undergoing some change, but are the models reliable and is the 'science' real, or the 'spin' and 'selective' stuff 'cherry-picked' and intended to prise funds from governments or serve the ideologies of various eco-terror groups or Marxist Socialists intending to destroy capitalism and impose their idea of Utopia? Sadly, on both sides of the debate there are those who will not accept any argument other than their own and once you add in the vested interests of the likes of the CRU at East Anglia University, Greenpeace, Fiends of the Earth and numerous other University "Climatology Faculties" and the UN's IPCC, the picture gets even more muddied.

The fact is that statistics are very tricky things to interpret and though they can show trends, they are NOT predictive - especially when fed into 'models' designed to deal with real hard data and show what has happened rather than what will happen.

I have taken the following from the Blogs "Watt's Up With That" and "Climate etc." both run by Climate Scietists, probably best described as not subscribing to the IPCC/Greenpeace vision of an Earth drowning in fabulous sea level rises due to melted polar ice or a planet roasting in a toxic superheated atmosphere like that of Venus. These comments are extremely informative and both from scientists ...

And the posts to which they are responding are very well worth the reading time.

Jeff Glassman

Epistemic level grading is a multi-pronged distraction.

It is nominated to be an official distraction for certified climatologists who may apply it to safely ignore external criticism. It’s a softer version of CRU ridiculing the quality of non-conforming journals, or conspiring to shun a journal that published a heretical article and suggesting the journal be stripped of its peer-reviewed status.

The levels are intended to distract the policymakers who fund climatologists and their labs, and who are supposed to restrict carbon emissions. The distraction is from those deemed not qualified to object, reducing science to selected expert testimony. Only the Preacher may interpret the Word — the others are heretics or the unwashed indigenous for the harvest of cultural imperialism.

The four levels are also a distraction from the fact that climatologists do not actually sit atop the tree of epistemology. In the epistemological hierarchy, climatology is subservient to the laws of physics, to thermodynamics, to system science, to science in general, and to ethics.

Putting on a Level 0 hat, here are some particular ripe examples:

Laws of physics: IPCC disregards the Beer-Lambert Law, which governs radiative transfer. It disregards Henry’s Law of solubility, governing CO2 flux, to make natural CO2 more soluble than the anthropogenic variety.

Thermodynamics: IPCC models the surface layer of the ocean in thermodynamic equilibrium, essential to the manufacture of its false bottleneck for human CO2 emissions.

System science: IPCC thinks feedback, which it adapted from system science, is either an illusory relation between correlated processes or a computer parameter calculated at run time. Feedback actually is the transfer of material, energy, displacement, potential, or information from within a system that modifies the system’s inputs. As a result, IPCC models climate open-loop, as, for example, with cloud albedo, and is unable to calculate any closed-loop gain.

Science: IPCC models climate without accounting for the known, dominant climate events of the past (e.g., the ice ages, the interglacial epochs, the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, sudden changes in the slope of temperature instrument record), and predicting only an unverifiable catastrophe. By inference, its models predict a near term trend in temperature, which has failed validation. IPCC models, which don’t even pretend to work in the long run of past epochs, nor in the short run of weather, are advertised to predict a looming, mid-term catastrophe. It’s like accounting with the least significant [and] the most significant figures obliterated, leaving just the middle, insignificant figures.

Duty & Ethics: IPCC violates its public trust by employing chartjunk to create faux fingerprints of human activity on atmospheric CO2. IPCC in its quest for recognition, control, and profit relies on an unvalidated model, at best a hypothesis, to foster public panic.

And
Peter Taylor says:
March 6, 2011 at 6:18 am

Joel Shore is concerned about propaganda and significance over the quotes from Phil Jones – up until that admission, the BBC had been totally propaganderised to believe that global warming had accelerated. Then behind the scenes, their key people read my book ‘Chill: a reassessment of global warming theory’ – which you might do also if you truly believe in applying the rigours of science – I would be glad to have your criticisms too. I also briefed their chief interviewer over the phone before the interview.

So then you get less propaganda and more science – such as how much statistically significant warming has their been – and Jones proffered the none since 1995 date. I would have said 1998, but have less acess to the statistics than he.

As for trends – the real science shows that there was an even steeper warming trend from 1920-1940, especially in the northern hemisphere but also global. And another trend from 1945-1975 that was also global and cooling (and not, as the modellers thought for 30 years, due to human emissions of sulphur – but they have not publicised that new science). Thirty year trends can be very misleading.

There is nothing new in the late 20th century warming signal – not the rate nor the amplitude and indeed the centennial trend is a continuation of a longer term recovery from the trough of 200 years ago – and it would be equally foolish to expect this trend to continue, since there is a larger cycle at play.

This IS the science, Joel, that the propaganda machine of AGW does not want to admit to. And by the way – there is a quiet revolution going on in the calculations of CO2's warming potential. Hitherto, the radiative forcing factor (RF) was calculated according to offline data codes largely within the private sector and spawned by NASA – it is a complex business and the paper trail of references eventually leads to some very grey literature. This is about to change. The writing on the wall says that the RFs have been way over-estimated. That means CO2 does not have the power the earlier modellers assumed – by the time it reaches 200 ppmv, its greenhouse work is all but done. That is why you find no evidence for either initiation or amplification of temperarure changes in the ice-cores. The effect of CO2 is not only too late (time lagged) but not enough to register statistically in the correlations. This was a mystery until now – and the simple answer is, CO2 has very little extra power to heat the atmosphere or surface at the levels that are relevant (from 200ppmv upwards).

Good science and statistical analysis will eventually show this and all of these models will be history. Climate change, however, will still be a major issue – which is why people like the sceptical Global Warming Foundation and others, do not embrace my work – because there are natural cycles and they could be heading downward – putting billions of lives at risk from extreme weather and food shortages. Mitigation remedies were always hopelessly misdirected – but adaptation strategies will require a lot of sound thinking and cooperation, maybe even some better modelling.

Skeptically Yours,
Brian Hall

Carnival - German style ...

Watching the Carnival in Frankfurt yesterdayI was struck by the fact that young, old and in between throw everything into this wonderful bit of celebrating their culture, their history and their present. "Carnival Clubs" spend most of the year planning, building and preparing their entries for the parades which take place on the weekend before Lent, the biggest happening on "Rosenmontag" (Rose Monday) and are televised. Today we have watched the parades in Mainz, Cologne and Dusseldorf courtesy of the ZDF television station and enjoyed the fun of watching politicians, religious figures and others in the news get a bit of stick - and the crowds enjoying the efforts of assorted brass bands, "City Guards," dance troupes, gymnasts and clubs mixed with and supported by a variety of businesses as they threw a party to end all parties.


In Cologne alone 300 tons of sweets were thrown from the floats and collected by the scampering kids. Bunches of flowers, packs of sauages, bags of bread and the ever popular "Berliner" - a jam filled doughnut - were also thrown, sold and distributed. The crowds numbered in the hundreds of thousands and the parades were huge - in Mainz the parade route is 7.2 kilometres and the parade procession itself was 7 kilometres in length. In Cologne the procession was 6.5 kilometres on a route of about 7 and so it goes on.


The pictures here are from my mobile phone and taken yesterday in Frankfurt. In my mind these parades are what bind people to their culture, they give an identity and they link the young to the old as each generation brings something of its own to the fun. It has been huge fun all weekend...

Home again ...

Well, the course is finished and the Monk is glad to be home again. It was good to be able to catch up with all his former colleagues and with his family, but it also flagged up just how setteled he now is in the Taunus.

On another note, he is concerned that a large number of hiis former students and friends are presently caught up in the rather bloody civil war in Libya, having learned from the news that the refinery they are based on has been attacked by Berber supporters of Gaddafi and apparently retaken by the opposition. With the total internet blackout, there is no way of knowing their situation either...

Working in the cold...

After a fashion, I should say. Yesterday we burned the four scenes our students will examine today and tomorrow, and I have to say that though it was a tiring day and a chilly one, we have some really interesting scenes ready for them now.

Ah well, my coffee cup is now empty, the class will be waiting soon, so time to post and go!