Perspective?

The world is a whacky place. Everyone has an opinion and with the internet you can hear everyone's. There is a lot of silly crap on the internet. I am sure many think the things on this blog are crap. Crap, I guess is in the eye of the surfer.

The chart above is for GISS Temp Global Temperature anomaly from 1880 to 2010. I plot the overall trend in blue, the trend from 1950 to present in red and the trend from 1999 to present in yellow. The Y axis is actually in hundredths of a degree, even though it says 120, it is really 1.2 degrees above the average which looks to be around 1950ish. I plotted the trend from 1950 because that is when CO2 is supposed to have overtaken natural forces. The trend from 1999 is just because I had plotted the RSS trend from that date.

With the trends plotted this way you get the impression that warming is accelerating. That is the perspective of the global warming advocates. GISS (Goddard Institute of Space Studies) Temp is the warmest of the big three global temperature averages. It is the warmest because of the way they average the missing data around the North Pole. I believe they do the same thing with the South Pole, but since the averaging at the South Pole doesn't add too much to the overall average it is not a big issue.

The poles, in all the averages, are the coldest place on Earth and are not included in as "real" data. Some of the averages guesstimate, some don't, but the coverage is very poor. The Northern hemisphere land areas are very well represented in all the averages. The ocean coverage is pretty sparse. All of the averages agree well, but there is some controversy about how good Global Temperature Average is for much of anything.

I tend to go with the satellite data, mainly, because I am interested in the Tropopause, which is THE coldest place on Earth, it just isn't on Earth, it is above the surface. Many of the lukewarmers and skeptics use the satellite data, especially the UAH data, because it doesn't show as much warming. The warmers tend to prefer the surface station data. Why do the different groups pick different data sets? Because of their perspectives.

Personally, I don't have a serious agenda driven perspective of climate change. I do have, in my opinion, a perspective of bullshit! Choosing your data to amplify your agenda is bullshit. That is what people do though, choose their bullshit and defend it until it embarrasses them. What is really weird though, is people that don't have a clue, will ally themselves with some one else's bullshit and defend it like it was their own.

I pick on the tree hugging environmentalists a lot because they make the silliest mistakes trying to defend the bullshit they don't understand. The conservatives are more real world, if they don't understand it they just say so and that they trust so and so more than the other asshole.

Take the nuclear situation in Japan. There are still a bunch of the environmental types preaching gloom and doom because of the fallout. The situation is by no means great, but it is nothing as bad as the gloom and doomers say it is. I just read a report today that stated that just recently, people are exposed to more radiation from medical care than normal background radiation. It was in the New York Times of all places. Most of the gloom and doomers would not know a Becquerel if it bit them in the ass. That doesn't stop them from explaining in great detail how terrible 15 Bq/M2 is, how it will mutate your children and probably turn your Chihuahua in the Cujo. Radiation is something we live with every day, it is scary, but so is driving through Miami during rush hour.

The reason I started this blog was to try and post some real information on alternate fuels. Since I started, a lot of things that seemed promising have fallen by the wayside. Some because the promise they held turned out to not be so promising. Some because the perspective of the public has changed. This also is very human. It also leads us to making the same mistakes over and over again.

We have been through this fuel crunch before. The politicians made the same promises. They didn't pan out because things seemed to get better. So we are right back where we started. There is something a little different this time. There is the real potential to free ourselves from dependance on foreign oil.

Not everyone can do this right now. There are still a few issues to be iron out, but it is possible. While I am still trying to bring a few parts of the puzzle together, hydrogen has serious potential that can be realized.

The Home Hydrogen units are being dropped in favor for larger industrial scale systems or cheap fossil fuel reforming systems. Nanosolar, the maker of not great efficiency, but reasonable priced photovoltaic solar cells, seem to have come up with the right idea. Reliable, realistically priced energy is more important than cheap addictive energy or high efficiency unaffordable energy. With proper planning, home brewed power at twice the cost can be the bigger savings. Why, because we cannot count on the cheap energy we are addicted to.

The one big issue is the matter of scale. The home brewed system is a bit scary. It is a hard sell to get people to commit to a fairly large investment to get off the grid. With a reasonable priced home hydrogen generator, the sell will get easier. So I am going to focus more of my time on either designing a home brew system, which is not that difficult, or finding an existing system that fills the bill.

The compressor I mentioned before is a fairly large issue. That silly Shoe Box compressor has surprising potential. I would still prefer a Diaphragm compressor for safety and efficiency, but the cost needs to drop, which will not happen until a viable home market appears. More on this soon.

The electrolyzer looks easier than I expected. I still need to figure out a better case design to allow higher pressure, but PVC cells inside a water jacket to control heat, looks promising. The silly guys playing with Brown's gas actually had a few good ideas that just need tweaking. So I will start posting a few off the wall ideas for designs I may get around to testing.