Thanksgiving is around the corner (at the time of writing – by the time this is posted it will be a few days after) and the semester is just about over. This time of the year the students are focusing on the finals. For the climate change course that I teach, my routine for the final exam is to have the students refute the arguments made by climate change deniers. I take the arguments from extensive deniers’ literature such as the list compiled by the Heartland Institute or that compiled by Skeptical Science. The students know that it’s challenging to make an effective argument. In a previous blog (March 25, 2014), which I posted toward the end of last semester, I wrote that my main goal is to improve their ability to argue. This is a continuing challenge.
A few weeks ago, an Op-Ed in the New York Times, titled “Wobbling on Climate Change” and written by Piers Sellers, brought me back to the issue in an important way. I didn’t respond in a timely way because I was busy until recently with the series of blogs on EROI (all four November blogs). Now is the time to return to this issue. I will start by quoting directly from the Op-Ed:
GREENBELT, Md. — I’M a climate scientist and a former astronaut. Not surprisingly, I have a deep respect for well-tested theories and facts. In the climate debate, these things have a way of getting blurred in political discussions.
In September, John P. Holdren, the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, was testifying to a congressional committee about climate change. Representative Steve Stockman, a Republican from Texas, recounted a visit he had made to NASA, where he asked what had ended the ice age:
‘And the lead scientist at NASA said this — he said that what ended the ice age was global wobbling. That’s what I was told. This is a lead scientist down in Maryland; you’re welcome to go down there and ask him the same thing.
‘So, and my second question, which I thought it was an intuitive question that should be followed up — is the wobbling of the earth included in any of your modelings? And the answer was no…
‘How can you take an element which you give the credit for the collapse of global freezing and into global warming but leave it out of your models?’
That ‘lead scientist at NASA’ was me. In July, Mr. Stockman spent a couple of hours at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center listening to presentations about earth science and climate change. The subject of ice ages came up. Mr. Stockman asked, ‘How can your models predict the climate when no one can tell me what causes the ice ages?’
I responded that, actually, the science community understood very well what takes the earth into and out of ice ages. A Serbian mathematician, Milutin Milankovitch, worked out the theory during the early years of the 20th century. He calculated by hand that variations in the earth’s tilt and the shape of its orbit around the sun start and end ice ages. I said that you could think of ice ages as resulting from wobbles in the earth’s tilt and orbit.
The time scales involved are on the order of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. I explained that this science has been well tested against the fossil record and is broadly accepted. I added that we don’t normally include these factors in 100-year climate projections because the effects are too tiny to be important on such a short time-scale.
And that, I thought, was that.
So I was bit surprised to read the exchange between Dr. Holdren and Representative Stockman, which suggested that at best we couldn’t explain the science and at worst we scientists are clueless about ice ages.
We aren’t. Nor are we clueless about what is happening to the climate, thanks in part to a small fleet of satellites that fly above our heads, measuring the pulse of the earth. Without them we would have no useful weather forecasts beyond a couple of days.
The question that Representative Stockman asked John Holdren, is a legitimate question related to climate change. The issue of how Earth got into and out of the ice ages and the nature of the Milankovitch cycles that explain it are standard topics in my course and in any other course that focuses on climate change. Representative Stockman’s question appears frequently on tests in these courses. If a student had given me the answer that John Holdren gave to Representative Stockman, I would have strongly suspected that he Googled it and only had enough time to read the first line or so. If student had asked me that question during class and I had given him this answer, the student would have rightly thought that I was being completely dismissive of him and probably would have used the first opportunity to drop my class.
Representative Stockman is more powerful than my students. He can actually be instrumental in the legislative efforts to either facilitate the mitigation of climate change or to erect obstacles to doing so. He doesn’t fit into any of the stereotypes of deniers (September 3, 2012) that I have previously discussed. He also feels strongly that he needs to educate himself in order to contribute to the legislative effort to face this issue. We need more policy makers like him.
If my students feel that I am denigrating them, their reactions are limited to trying to drop the course or trying to learn the answers to their questions on their own if they are strongly motivated. If a policy maker feels that he is being disparaged by a science adviser to the president (especially one that also happens to be among the top climate scientist in the country) his reaction can be much more destructive. Instead, in this instance, according to the Op-Ed, Representative Stockman was more productive. He used the response from Dr. Holdren to ask NASA scientists if they are using the wobbling in their present modeling to predict the long term impact of climate change. It took a bit of effort on his part to go through the hoops, and he ended up discussing the issue with Dr. Sellers to learn why the wobbling is not very relevant in the modeling of the climate through the end of the century.
Most policy makers are not that persistent. They are constantly subjected to various, often conflicting, pressures and are being asked to weigh the information given to them and to try to convert it into productive policy decisions.
On a different level, all voting-age citizens are being subjected to similar such multiple, often conflicting, pressures – we are charged with voting in a government whose priorities we agree with and voting out governments with which we disagree. This puts all of us into a position to be both teachers and students at the same time. To educate informed citizens is a major effort; to educate informed, important policy makers is an urgent task – one for which we pay a very dear price if we fail.
Hydro Infra Technologies (HIT), a Swedish clean tech company based in Stockholm, has developed an innovative patent pending approach for neutralizing carbon fuel emissions by generating a novel gas called Hydro Nano Gas (HNG).
In spite of all the advancement happening in the energy sector, global economies are still dependent on fossil fuels as the interlinked chain of costs to completely replace the burning of fossil fuels with more clean and sustainable options is beyond the financial resources of even the richest nations.
This in turn effects the climate change scenario which has been continuously increasing as more pollution and green house gases are created from burning fossil fuels on a daily basis.
This dilemma requires a new approach with safe, cost effective and smart solutions; the solution in sight? Making any fossil fuel climate neutral – and this is exactly what HIT’s Hydro Nano Gas proposes to do.
Water contains 2 basic elements, Hydrogen and Oxygen. These 2 basic elements can be split, divided and utilized. Splitting water (H2O) is a known science. But the energy costs to perform splitting outweigh the energy created from hydrogen when the Hydrogen is split from the water molecule H2O. This is where mainstream science usually closes the book on the subject.
HIT took a different approach by postulating that it was not only possible but indefinitely sustainable to split water in an energy efficient way to extract a high yield of Hydrogen at very low cost.
The process of creating HNG involves pulsing an range of low energy frequencies in a very specific sequence into water. The pulsing treatment effectively manipulates the molecules to line up in a certain structure which are then put through a splitting process. The result is HNG.
Being exotic as it is, HNG displays some very different properties from normal hydrogen. For instance: HNG instantly neutralizes carbon fuel pollution emissions; HNG can be pressurized up to 2 bars; HNG combusts at a rate of 9000 meters per second while normal Hydrogen combusts at a rate 600 meters per second; oxygen values actually increase when HNG is inserted into a diesel flame; and finally, HNG acts like a vortex on fossil fuel emissions causing the flame to be pulled into the centre thus concentrating the heat and combustion properties.
Injecting HNG into a combustion chamber produces several effects that increase the burn efficiency of the fuels. HNG gasification effectively burns unburned residue/cluster while completing the burn process quicker. The long term impact of using HNG in the burning of fossil fuels can provide the balanced solution for the on going economic-climate change debate.
The new technology is also found to be effective in the treatment of polluted water; when HNG Nano bubbles are injected into polluted water, a microbe chain reaction is initiated that rapidly triggers and boosts the waters’ own organic repairing process. While further testing and validation are required, the discovery creates new potential in providing solutions to critical areas of global pollution.
HIT is also developing a Smoke Eliminator for all sorts of plants and facilities. The process reduces the need for smoke analysis as it results in a clean wet scrubber technology where CO2 becomes a clean by-product ready to be reused.
Further, a miniaturized version of the standard HNG reactor will help HIT achieve its goal of gassing 9,000 cubic meters of smoke volume per second. Using Nano technology, the reactor will see the beginning of a new technology phase for each HNG application, reports HIT.
The HIT innovation story begins in the 1980’s when a small team of dedicated technicians, researchers and engineers came together to innovate real world solutions based on the theoretical research conducted by Nobel prize winner Professor Yuan Tse Lee. The goal was clear – to ‘crack’ the Hydrogen code.
In late 2012, after years of on / off research and experimentation, they finally cracked the code and HNG was born.
HIT was formed to spread their discoveries to the world as Information Technology via joint venture partners.
HIT has also selected SGS – the worlds leading testing/validation and certification company – to be its’ permanent testing-validation protocol partner, providing certification that enables HIT to expand into global markets.
Read more about HIT: http://www.hydroinfra.com