“THE ST. LOUIS TORNADO ‘A far more terrible story of death and destruction is that of the St. Louis tornado of May 27, 1896, which lasted but half an hour, killed 306 persons and destroyed property to the amount of … Continue reading →
via Real Climate Science
May 28, 2023 at 11:17AM
By Paul Homewood
I have been highlighting these problems for years, so it’s nice that Ruth Bloomfield, who is I believe a property journalist, sums it all up better than I ever could:
In Britain’s battle to cut carbon emissions, the government sees heat pumps as a key weapon. Unveiling the latest energy efficiency plan in March, energy secretary Grant Shapps doubled down on Boris Johnson’s offer of a £5,000 grant for anyone willing to install one. These smart bits of home technology work by transferring thermal energy from the air, ground or water. They are powered by electricity, which can be generated from solar or wind power, providing cheap and fossil fuel-free heating and hot water. So what’s not to like?
The concept is nothing new. In 1856 the Austrian scientist Peter von Rittinger worked out a technique for drying out salt in salt marshes using an early iteration of the heat pump, and in 1951 the Royal Festival Hall in London opened with a water source heat pump fed by the Thames.
Yet despite their obvious attractions, domestic heat pumps remain outliers. According to the European Heat Pump Association there are now around 20 million air and water source heat pumps in operation in Europe, providing heating to about 16 per cent of residential buildings. The other 84 per cent of buildings are heated the old-fashioned way. In the UK, 55,000 heat pumps were fitted in 2021. During the same period, 1.5 million people installed new gas boilers.
Heat pumps became a political hot topic that same year when Johnson, then prime minister, announced he wanted to phase out gas boilers and offered substantial grants to anyone who would replace one with a heat pump. This, he hoped, would result in 600,000 heat pumps being installed every year by 2028. Offers of free money tend to go down well with the public – consider how insane the housing market went during the pandemic stamp duty amnesty. But the silence in response to this £450 million offer has been deafening.
If you drill down into the reality of heat pumps, the idea of a £5,000 cheque from Downing Street starts to lose its appeal
The latest figures from Ofgem show that fewer than 10,000 installations were completed under the scheme between May 2022 and March this year. The reason for this lack of uptake is simple. If you drill down into the reality of heat pumps, the idea of a £5,000 cheque from Downing Street starts to lose its appeal. For a start, a heat pump costs, on average, about £10,000. For an air source model that rises to around £20,000. You can buy a decent, energy efficient combi boiler for about £2,500.
And what ministers seem unable – or unwilling – to grasp is that heat pumps are not simple, plug-and-play options. To start with, you need space. An air source heat pump requires around 10 square feet of outside space – bad luck, flat-owners – plus new pipework to deliver the heat it produces. Homeowners also need space indoors for a heat exchange unit (of about the same size as a normal gas boiler) plus a hot water cylinder (which those with combi boilers can often do without).
Ground source heat pumps are even greedier, space-wise. The most cost-effective system involves digging shallow trenches in the garden. These need to be around 100 metres long and up to two metres deep, meaning that anyone with a less-than-sprawling garden can forget it. And even those with plenty of space can come up against obstacles – Blur singer Damon Albarn has reportedly received complaints from parish councillors that the sight and sound of the two ‘intrusive’ heat pumps outside his Devon farmhouse could disturb walkers on the nearby footpath in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
If space is not an issue, your existing radiators could be. Heat pumps have far lower flow temperatures than boilers, which means they require a much larger radiator surface area than a normal boiler does. This means either supersizing your radiators (impractical, ugly) or installing underfloor heating (expensive, disruptive). And of course there is no point producing lots of lovely, clean heat if your house isn’t well insulated. Think not just loft insulation but also wall and floor insulation, and double, ideally triple, glazing.
Collectively these practicalities mean that the only time installing a heat pump is going to be feasible is during a major renovation of a substantial house or a self-build – which means the only real beneficiaries of this flagship policy are well-off home improvers, grand designers and property developers. Ordinary, regular people living in ordinary, regular homes don’t have a hope.
What ministers seem unable to grasp is that heat pumps are not simple, plug-and-play options. To start with, you need space
The problems don’t even end with cost and space. Buying a heat pump isn’t like choosing a new phone. Professional advice on the type of system you should have, its size, how it should be installed, where, how to set it up and work it and how to maintain it is alarmingly patchy. If you want a heat pump you’re going to have to be prepared to brush up your GCSE physics and get your head around the technology because you are going to need to ask the right questions and work a lot of this out for yourself. Any errors will be expensive; while many homeowners adore their heat pumps there have certainly been cases of amateurs lumbered with bulky, expensive and inefficient heat pumps for want of good advice.
So why is the government still so sure that heat pumps are the great white hope in our battle against carbon emissions? Perhaps the answer can be found at the school gates, where many affluent mums ditched their previous status symbol of choice – a four-wheel drive – in favour of earning brownie points on the middle-class dinner party circuit with tales of how much they love their Kia e-Niros.
Politicians also love to burnish their green credentials, and the government’s constant pressure to ditch gas boilers and embrace heat pumps feels like it stems largely from a desire to prove themselves to be at the cutting edge when it comes to green technology. Promoting loft insulation – which is lacking in almost a third of Britain’s 25 million homes with lofts, according to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and is cheap and easy to install – is a far less sexy rallying cry.
But beware of ministers bearing gifts. A chronic lack of policy thinking-through puts anybody idealistic enough to attempt to harness heat pump technology at risk of being left – literally – out in the cold.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-inconvenient-truth-about-heat-pumps/
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
May 28, 2023 at 10:41AM
Essay by Eric Worrall
Police used a water cannon to clear the road block.
Netherlands arrests more than 1,500 climate activists
Climate activists blocked parts of a motorway in The Hague to protest against Dutch fossil fuel subsidies.
More than 1,500 people have been arrested during a demonstration by the Extinction Rebellion climate group in The Hague, Dutch police said.
Activists blocked a section of a motorway in the centre of the city on Saturday, in protest against Dutch fossil fuel subsidies.
Police said they had used water cannon to disperse activists blocking a major road in the city and arrested “a total of 1,579 people … 40 of whom will be prosecuted” on charges including vandalism.
…
Personally I was impressed by the amount of fossil fuel everyone was wearing. All those bright coloured clothes and banners are produced from the products of oil extraction. I mean, doesn’t anyone wear cotton anymore?
Al Jazeera also reported one of the climate protestors bit a police officer. Perhaps the aspiring cannibal was driven insane by one climate friendly insect protein meal too many.
via Watts Up With That?
May 28, 2023 at 08:36AM
A year or so ago I sent a “tongue in cheek” letter to the RAS Observatory Magazine. This is a less serious publication by the RAS that has Meeting reports and a very good section of book reviews.
They refused to print it. So my questions therefore remain unanswered. As this is an “Open Thread” I am posting it to see what thoughts others might have and if anyone out there with more knowledge than me could answer some of the questions.
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Universes, Black Holes and an Engineer
One of the few benefits of the Covid Lockdowns was the chance to clear the piles of un-read books. One such book was “The Cosmic Revolutionary’s Handbook” 1. In this the science behind the Big Bang is laid out in a form of challenges that deniers (skeptics) of the Big Bang must address to prove their case. On page 223 the authors, Luke A Barnes and Geraint F Lewis, state that in querying the Big Bang “… retired engineers are significantly over-represented among amateur cosmologists.” Having had an interest in Astronomy since I was knee high to a 2-inch refractor in the 1940’s, acquired a fascination with cosmology from my almost first astronomy book, “Frontiers to Astronomy” by Fred Hoyle in late 1950’s and then working for over 40 years, mainly in Civil Engineering with a dash of Astronautical Engineering, I feel well suited to turn the accepted theories of the Universe on their heads.
But I realise my astrophysical knowledge is severely lacking and so have refrained from doing this. Alternately I have set out some facts and questions for which I know not the answers in the hope that answers can be provided. Remember, as an Engineer, I will be wearing mainly a Newtonian Hat.
The starting of this stems from the well-known fact that the mass of a Black Hole is proportional to the radius of the Event Horizon. Taken to an extreme the approximate mass of the Universe combined with the perceived radius of the Universe is commensurate with the Universe being a Black Hole. This statement appears in many books on Black Holes but never seems to be taken much past a simple observation. For example, a black hole 30 billion light years across would contain about 5 x 1022 solar masses and have about 4 atomic mass units (amu) per cubic metre.
Questions 1. If the Universe is a Black Hole what are conditions like at the Event Horizon? Are they violent or calm? Is the Event Horizon a smooth sphere with a very large radius with a radius constant to a very small variation? What is this variation?
Like any Black Hole the escape velocity at the Event Horizon will be the speed of light.
Question 2. What happens when an object falls through the Event Horizon?
An object the size of the Earth will increase the Black Hole’s mass and hence it’s radius by a few centimetres. The mass of the Sun by a few kilometres and the mass of a galaxy by billions of kilometres. The gravity gradient outside such a large black hole will be small so for most objects spaghettification will not be a problem.
Questions 3. Are the changes in radius instantaneous over the complete Event Horizon? Or do they ripple around the surface (“Wrinkles in Time”, I feel a Nobel Prize coming on!!)? Is there a range of sizes to these ripples that depends on the size of the object entering? Are these damped out over time?
Moving up the mass scale the object colliding could be an equally large Universe. Two such Universes would form a single Black Hole with double the mass and twice the radius of each individual Universe.
Question 4. Does this merging take place instantaneously with the 2 event horizons forming one?
Thinking Newtonian, the merging would take place just as the 2 bodies touched. If 3 such bodies met, less likely but possible, they would not even need to touch but have gaps between them many billions of light years wide. For example, 3 black holes with a radius of 100 billion light years would form a black hole with a radius of 300 billion light years when the mutual gaps were still more than 140 billion light years. 4 such bodies at the nodes of a tetrahedron would have even bigger gaps at the time of merger. There are many examples of multi galaxy collisions so why not multi universe collisions.
Two particles, one in each of two of the colliding universes, could be 100’s of billions of light years apart but would both now be in the combined single black hole.
What happens next depends on the distribution of matter in the individual black holes (universes).
Question 5. How is matter distributed in a universe?
We only have (limited) knowledge of 1 universe, the one we reside in.
Questions 6. Could there be a classification scheme akin to that used with Galaxies where there are elliptical, spiral or irregular distributions? Are the universes spinning? Is there a central smaller, say 1012 or 1015 solar masses for example, central black hole? Could the Universe we live in be the Black Hole at the centre of an extremely large spiral Universe analogous with the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy?
Many simulations exist for colliding galaxies.
Question 7. Can results of these simulations be applied to colliding universes?
In these simulations as the two galaxies pass each other great arms and sheets of stars get ejected from the system. These passes will occur on a repeating pattern before the inner dense regions merge leaving a super dense region or very large black hole reminiscent to the Great Attractor. Each pass will send out consecutive groups of stars (galaxies) at different velocities. This could form redshift quantization and as the masses of the passing galaxies (universe) reduced would possibly eject stars (galaxies) at reducing velocities producing a pattern associated with an expanding universe. This is akin to the work of Halton Arp.
Another topic of Black Holes that concerns me as an engineer is the question of Singularities. In engineering singularities appear in many forms when analysing structures but do not occur in practise. For example, a sharp notch in a column would, mathematically, cause an infinite stress but, the material would change from elastic to plastic or might crack negating the singularity. This is akin to applying unknown New Physics to the Black Hole singularity concept.
Question 8. Why do we accept what is in essence a mathematical concept?
We have now reached a situation of a Universe of Universes.
Question 9. Can there be a next, and subsequent infinite number of stages.
For example, a universe with 1033 Solar Masses would have a radius of about 3 times 1020 light years and 1 amu every 1020 cubic metres. The latter equates to 1 amu in every cube nearly 5000 kilometres along each edge. It seems hard to imagine a volume of space with a radius of 3 times 1020 light years having the odd atom or so in a volume approximately the size of the Earth but is still a Black Hole.
But why stop there. The process can be progressed an infinite number of times until we reach an infinite “ultimate universe” with a zero density even though it has atoms/stars/galaxies/universes infinitely spaced. (No wonder I can’t sleep at night). This forms a Fractal Universe – Nature loves fractals.
Question 10. What are the consequences of this? We have an infinite universe with matter in it but a zero density.
Question 11. Or should I stick with engineering?
Lots of questions, not many answers. But when they all have been answered let’s turn to the much more difficult subject – the mathematical modelling of concrete. Where’s Einstein when you want him!!
Dr Alan K Welch FRAS FBIS
Ledbury
Herefordshire
References
(1) Luke A Barnes and Geraint F Lewis, The Cosmic Revolutionary’s Handbook (Or: How to Beat the Big Bang), (Cambridge), 2020
via Watts Up With That?
May 28, 2023 at 04:43AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 