Harold Squared

Hey, thanks. As it turns out, I personally have been living in ex rice fields most of my life, just turned out that way. Hurricane zones too. So I know a little bit about them since it is in my interest, despite being a layman. I will be discussing my conclusions on a more appropriate thread. I have been considering your remarks and since the space based option basically amounts to a carbon abatement plan in that every watt transmitted to the surface can in principle replace a coal generated watt suggest that there is no time like the present for the Chinese to implement space based power. Yes, another awkward run-on sentence, my fault. The past was horrible, as a matter of historical record, and immutable, though records of the past can be falsified, as Karl et al have recently demonstrated. The future, according to you, is grim as well. Ergo, the Chinese will never have more resources to devote to such a project than they do right now. With the Three Gorges Dam project over, they might be looking for another challenge. Maybe they have some leftover Cold War ICBMS hanging around that they could beat into metaphorical plowshares? Anyway, did you get to look over the Rice University study? It is so much better than anything I could dream up. The only quibble I have right now is vulnerability to tsunamis. Pleasant dreams and thanks for your interest. Is it really fair to characterize fusion as "not demonstrated yet"? Explosives employing the principle have been around for 5 decades now. But pending the outcome at ITER, and per your request, and since it is technically off topic, I shall say no more of it on this thread. Au contraire, from the standpoint of capacity factor space power wins walking away, particularly at high latitudes. No snow removal, no washing, no interruption by clouds or seasonal variations or that rare and unpredictable interruption called NIGHT which curiously coincides with increased illumination demand. No bother of tracking the sun all over the flaming sky, which would be even tougher on a damned raft. No complaints from the stinking neighbors. And you say we will only need a 10x10 km patch of ocean to do it? Great news! Forget Antarctica, we could use a little bit of the Gulf off Padre Island. The link you added was very courteous, sir, thank you for the effort and your continued feedback. Best regards to all, yawn...goodnight.

It was a feasibility study about a rectenna financed by NASA and published in 1980. There were cost complaints and NIMBY problems they were trying to solve. I wish I could provide a link and am going to get a machine with that capability ASAP. Please accept my apology for the inconvenience and proceed to the website and look it up with the number provided. If that doesn't work I will see what I did wrong. I hope you find it worth the effort, good night to all.

Your misfortunes may be clouding your thinking. Perhaps devoting your time to simpler and more practical matters will help organize your thoughts. Clearly stating the premise of your experiment, its design, and the materials you plan to employ will help people to understand much better and offer relevant advice.

What, no cartoons? You must be slipping. Anyway, let us look at the evidence, just for fun, shall we? Regarding the Lindzen/Gore comparison, just for kicks, let's see if any indicative awards have been garnered by either one and what people in a position to know have to say about them. LINDZEN: received Regents' and National Merit Scholarships before attending Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Harvard University. From Harvard ultimately obtained Ph.D. in applied mathematics, 1964, and held faculty position there from 1972-1983, as well as positions at University of Oslo, University of Chicago, University of Washington, UCLA and a little place called MIT. Member, National Academy of Sciences, Norwegian Academy of Arts and Letters, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, American Geophysical Union, and the American Meteorological Society. ISI highly cited researcher and author of numerous publications, awarded by both foreign and domestic scientific organizations on at least four occasions. Described by personal acquaintances as "fiercely intelligent, with a deep contrarian streak." (Wikipedia) GORE:Prep school jock, not good enough for any scholarship, attended Harvard where is known to have smoked pot but graduated A.B. cum laude 1969. Army boot camp, april 1970 Soldier of the Month, honorable service in Vietnam as journalist. Civilian journalist and dropout of both Vanderbilt Law and Divinity Schools. U.S. Congressman from Tennessee, serving on Energy and Commerce and Science and Technology committees among others. Vegan. Maybe. Whatever. Received Nobel Peace Prize, Primetime Emmy Award, Webby Award, Prince of Asturias Award and Grammy Award.(Wikipedia) Recurring character on "Futurama" animated series.(Futurama) Described by "Grist" publication as "...transforming into fiery climate evangelist" (June 10, 2005) I guess that time at Vanderbilt Divinity wasn't wasted after all. Returning to the topic, how long and how severe would such periods have to be? What other effects were present?

If the experiment is correctly designed and disagrees with the theory the theory must be amended. So make each of them as good as humanly possible, and be receptive to errors others can see and which you may have overlooked. They are helping you and the greater good.

Commendable. I look forward with great interest to your findings. It would bolster your credibility with all of us if you could provide your sources. Swanson is a straight shooter and does not have any interest in leading you astray, if you make any errors he will advise you and you would be better off knowing. All the mods on the board are volunteers and it is no benefit to any of us to waste their time, voice of experience here. If you feel singled out unfairly take your lumps and amend your behavior, you can do nothing about what is literally none of your business. Do not post unless you are in a thoughtful and calm frame of mind, and be willing to accept criticism, iron sharpens iron.

Posts are supposed to be civil, according to the moderators. Both Gore and Lindzen have derived considerable notoriety from the recent issue of climate change but one has twice as many children as the other. Is this significant and if so, why? And which has the bigger brain and/or cognitive capacity? In any case, the original post concerned rapid climate change of purely natural origin, early in the prehistory of our species, specifically in the Rift Valley of Africa. It is a terrific show, you should see it.

So those who profit from climate change have large families? According to public record, Al Gore has four children while Richard Lindzen has only two. Now we need to figure out who has more brains. Of course this would be anecdotal evidence, but judging from the membership here there are quite a few who care about such. And please identify your source when making such assertions.

With all due respect, propaganda, as such, is not necessarily true or false. It is information intended to influence public opinion, whether accurate or not. Despite the ludicrous claims Fox has made to be "fair and balanced" media Baron Rupert Murdoch has been pretty up front about his personal views being influential on the various outlets he controls unless I am mistaken. Perhaps you will direct me to your source regarding the catastrophe in China to which you referred above and explain why it is NOT propaganda, or if you concede that it is such, how accurate it is. Essentially we are all like fish swimming in a sea of propaganda, advertising, education, etc. If you have evidence that rainfall in the Sahel has NOT increased over recent years, or that this has any relation whatsoever to do with CO2 levels, I would appreciate the notification. If we may return to the topic, I was pleased to find an old study by my hometown team of Rice University and BARDI(with Arthur D. Little of Cambridge) involving offshore rectenna designs at ntrs.NASA.gov, document ID number 19810004047 Why reinvent the wheel? And given such a detailed report, greatly superior to my own poor efforts to date, why not inspect it for feasibility? Inflation has changed the monetary figures we could expect to deal with but these could be at least partially offset by advances in materials science. Looks like that array was expected to cost around $5.7 billion as a one time project and each similar unit thereafter expected to run about 2/3 of that figure. Why not start offshore and work up to the Antarctic option as demand increases, building experience and technology as time progresses? Offshore sites have the advantage of being closer to both workers and consumers, plus potential mariculture and wave power applications, all of it carbon emissions free. Methane synthesis would probably still be the preferred option for Antarctica, and tanker vessel delivery of same to the ports of choice. The harsh weather conditions and lack of infrastructure there also make it a poor initial choice but the vast area available for reception of space energy remains to be explored and one day perhaps employed. As time goes by my regard for your responses has grown, thank you all for your most illuminating thoughts. Oh? Please elaborate.

Of course, sir. Thank you for the figures and the time expended bringing them to my attention, but I think I understand the general principles. The power derived from the solar collector and the radiation dissipated are derived primarily from the area devoted to each, and in space this is only determined by the volume of material available. In any case the rectenna problem is formidable enough for the moment, given the time and resources available to yours truly. Again, your interest and comments are very much appreciated and I look forward to more of the same.

I hope my response referencing the International Space Station helped explain my thinking on microgravity, I am assuming we will mainly be dealing with charged particles in a vacuum. But I must concede that antimatter and further discussion of same are best pursued on another thread, tough I remain keenly interested in the subject. The area of Antarctica is some 14 million square kilometers in a remote and harsh region. I am making very slow progress on selecting a suitable site and design for a rectenna but will post all thinking here for inspection. Thank you all for your time and thoughtful remarks.

Good morning gentlemen! Overtone', I am particularly pleased to see you, thank you for your inquiry and the opportunity to elaborate. I really have no preferred news source per se and notice things in a variety of places. Much like the reference regarding several related proposals in another publication cited above which is considerably more relevant to the topic. If you recall, the Fox article regarding the greening of the Sahel and its possible relation to AGW is anecdotal only, and like all such reports establishes no definite link by its very nature. I have some lingering suspicion regarding both Fox and the Weekly Standard publications for their jingoistic warmongering history but they remain a part of the media landscape for better or worse and last night was mostly reading SpiegelOnline. Further discussion of this nature would be worthy of another thread elsewhere, agreed? But it is good to see you and your participation is always welcome. Construction in space is admittedly still in its infancy and no doubt many techniques of fabrication and assembly remain to be discovered, but at least the ISS demonstrates we can potentially construct arbitrarily large structures impossible to launch from the planetary surface. Cooling electronics by means of convection or conduction is of course not much of an answer in vacuum but radiation to the void of space has kept sattelites operating since the Sputnik days and Walter Cronkite. Yeah, I'm old.

Yes, but as Forward points out, no purposely built device has yet been constructed. There are formidable problems of storage and transportation as well, which have no doubt been aware of from the beginning. It was the only physical commodity I could think of at the time which could be manufactured in that environment. Quite obviously the microgravity and near vacuum conditions present in that setting would be an asset. With regard to the Antarctic rectenna field, the interior of the continent is barren and for good reason. On the pro side a large field should keep the atmospheric ionization problem you raised in check, or do you disagree? Unfortunately construction and maintenance will be challenging to say the least, in terms of logistics and everything else. Way off topic, but I might as well mention that if everyone demanded a cost analysis before plunging precipitously into wars our history would be less tragic. Thank you all for your comments.

IMHO, the quality of the candidate trumps the reputation of the school. One need not have a good teacher to be a good student. In the practice of learning you will find talents, interests, and opportunities which will guide you better than any preconceived plan, since you will become better informed by the day. Unfortunately, cost will also enter into the decisions, though I hate to be the one to bring it up. Best wishes for your success in any case.

It is true, and related to the topic, the record of continental drift is more durable and less open to variance of interpretation than that of atmospheric phenomena. I was making a simple, and true, comparison which I stand by. Threats will not change it and it has been obvious my views are unpopular here. You will notice perhaps the complete absence of cartoons in my posts, what the hell relevance do they have on a science forum devoted to any topic if I may ask? Yet there they are, and NOT my doing, look for yourself.

"There is no place in science for 'toeing the line' with some 'doctrine' or 'consensus'. The best science is always the one that breaks the consensus. This is why we celebrate Einstein and Boltzmann today, for example. In their day, both stood up against the prevailing 'consensus'. Yet, today we know there is no 'ether'- Einstein was right, Kelvin was wrong. And, yes, thermodynamics is derivable from the kinetic theory of matter and...atoms do exist- Boltzmann was right too." -Zdzislaw Meglicki

Turns out this sunshade idea is nothing new. For details see "Could Space Mirrors Stop Global Warming" by Rachel Kaufman, 08/08/2012, live science.com As far as expense goes the major factor is cheap access to orbit, 3blake7 speculates a StarTram system could be built for $60 billion US. Me, I am hesitant to hazard a guess because inflationary factors can make them wildly inaccurate, think of Weimar Germany. Space Elevator, Space Fountain, whatever, something durable and reliable to bridge the gap between planetary surface and orbit will be the real breakthrough. One thing for sure, it will not be chemical rockets.

Yesterday watching "Hacking the Universe:Why We Left Earth", I noticed the guy comparing different skulls and relating periods of rapid climate change were coinciding to increases in cranial capacity. I confess it seems superficially plausible and would like to get your responses. Thanks in advance!

Agreed. Volcanic soil is notoriously fertile, maybe there is some sort of race memory phenomena involved. But yeah, geophysicists have a pretty good idea of where the plates have been and where they are going, since the geological record is literally written in stone. Atmospheric matters, not so much. It is hard just to find anyone who will acknowledge that the past 15 plus years have shown no significant warming trend.

Oh no, it is definitely Amateur Science material. You will understand when the time comes. It is RESEARCH, you see.

Of course I will do my best to answer your objections in the spirit they were raised. As to bird frying specifically, I have conceded that no matter what course we pursue, a certain amount is unavoidable. Your observation that communications microwave transmission involves much lower power levels than those involved in my proposal is spot on, and I confess that I have no specific knowledge of any harm caused by such microwave transmissions. The manufacture of antimatter is well understood and indeed proceeds at particle accelerators around the world as we speak, but it is hideously expensive per gram. In fact to date I am not aware that a gram quantity has been made, although in space where we can build as large as we like given the materials it would be a real possibility. So we will table that scheme in favor of more pedestrian fuels, perhaps methane. Do you think microwave transmission to a designated area, restricted in access and possibly remote, would be a viable option? If we switch from North to South polar statites, it might be clever to ues a suitable location on the Antarctic coast as a base for methane manufacture via the Sabatier reaction, killing two metaphorical birds with one stone, abating CO2 in the atmosphere while producing fuel simultaneously. Whew, run on sentence that! But much more familiar than the antimatter option, and the added bonus of concentrating heavy water as well as the CO2 abatement angle. Maybe ammonia too via the Haber-Bosch process. There is already a fairly robust infrastructure for distribution of methane and currently it seems to be the fuel of choice as far as generation of electricity, since it can run gas-turbine driven generators whose exhaust can in turn drive steam turbines. Waste heat from the enterprise can be used by local residents, researchers, etc. Very handy this time of year, from what I understand. And ambient cold conditions should facilitate isolation of the CO2, or am I mistaken? I think that commercial quantities of carbon dioxide are not extracted from the atmosphere but synthesized from carbonate rocks. Anyway, since I am thinking about it and posting to the thread, let me assure you guys that I understand Overtone's "alligators" are only metaphorical, and that I was only making a little joke. Very likely I am the only one amused, but c'est la vie...

No matter what the cause, I am afraid a certain level of avian mortality is a consequence of industrial civilization. Commensal birds such as pigeons will in all probability be unaffected. Unfortunately. Will Ducks Unlimited boycott space based electricity? Frankly, my dear colleagues...

Thank you for your comments. Right now my opinion of this particular thread is that the topic is too general and that it has become unwieldy and contains too many digressions and too little civility. I am planning a project specifically on Gore and a manifesto of sorts describing in detail my objections to the AGW hypothesis, the former on Amateur Science and the latter in this section. May you all enjoy good health and spirits until tomorrow.

Thank you kindly sir. Of course shipping antimatter to Earth would not kill birds, and microwave transmission of communication signals is common practice today. Beyond routing power signals to avoid major migratory flyways I confess I do not know any particular means to avoid harm to our feathered friends at the moment. I also have no real idea how many birds are killed by aircraft operations but I don't expect people to quit flying altogether. Depending on the design of a solar installation it could present a bird hazard as well, I refer to those which focus light from a field of heliostats upon a central target located in a tower, e.g., Solar One, the now defunct model in California.

Not at all, sir, not at all. I hardly think you can point to Fox saying as much. But we digress. The facts indisputable are that the most destructive storms on record are unrelated to CO2 levels and that the general trend has been one of decline since 1900. No link between rising levels of greenhouse gases and storm activity has been even tenuosly established. What relevance your ice melt observations have to the topic are obscure to me, would you care to elaborate?