Trump Administration Set to Eliminate NASA’s Climate Researc

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There is plenty of scientific support for the idea that man's activities are contributing to Global Warming.

There isn't much actual scientific support for the notion that it is a disaster. It is true that there have been plenty of people trying to reinterpret evidence so as to blame many things on Global Warming, but those attempts are far from credible.

Want to know what is bad about Global Warming? It will raise sea levels a bit. Maybe a foot or so per century. That's hardly a disaster.

Desertification? Not really. Some places will get less rain and others will get more. There have been reports, for example, that the Sahara Desert is turning green in places that hadn't been green for centuries. Look at what it was like during the Holocene Climatic Optimum when it was warmer than now -- the Sahara Desert was green, the Gobi Desert was a forest, and Northern Mexico was considerably wetter.

If you look back at the Anasazi People of the American Southwest who abandoned their civilization, you'll see that they likely did so because it had become too dry to stay there. What was the climate doing at that time? It was cooling off as we begin to enter the cool period known as The Little Ice Age.

That was just a bit cooler and some people were having to grind up tree bark to make a meager flour to avoid starvation. The idea of going back to that should scare the hell out of us.

There is even more support to the hypothesis that natural drivers account for most of the temperature increase since the end of the Little Ice Age circa 1850. The temperature of the earth has risen on average 1.2 C since then and there are some findings indicating that human CO2 effluence has produced about 0.3C of that 1.2C.

CO2 is necessary to feed the plants and keep the temperature of the earth above freezing. Without the greenhouse gases (so-called) the average temperature would be about 33 C less than it is. The earth would be so cold that plant life could not flourish on land.

Energy is constant (First Law of thermodynamics) The only new energy that can be "made" is by nuclear fission and nuclear fusion which converts mass to energy. The amount of entropy in the universe is increasing. That means energy one used to produce mechanical work will produce less work. Gibbs free energy is constantly decreasing. or put another way, the universe is winding down. We cannot beat the second law of thermodynamics which says the amount of entropy in the cosmos is increasing. In a reversible thermodynamic process entropy stays constant. Otherwise it increases.

A comical translation of the laws of thermodynamics might read.

1. You have to play
2. You can't win.
3. You can't even break even.

As to "renewable energy" or "green energy": Generating electric power from solar conversion or from wind turbine generators has the following flaw: They are intermittent. A solar conversion plant produces nothing at night and far below plant capacity during heavy cloudy weather. The wind does not always blow. For this reason solar and wind generation are not sufficient to support industrial economies which require baseline power 365/24/7. Solar and Wind generation could be used to supplement other power sources and would be good for home lighting and light duty loads. They are not sufficient for industry or transportation.

Hydro power is good provided the water head is high and the water sources do not suffer drought conditions and insufficiency of flow. Tidal power is good. Gravity always works. Problem is tidal generators can only be built where the coastal geology lends itself to tidal generation. Hydro is steady and clean but only where there is drought free high head water sources. The U.S. gets a lot of electricity from Quebec Hydro, a good source. Niagara Falls delivers a lot of electricity to Ontario Province, Northern New York and Northern Pennsylvania. It is a good source.

In lucky Iceland which is situated on a crack in the earth they can get sub terrannian heat from magma which is accessible because of gaps in the tectonic plates. Good for Iceland. Earth has literally given them a break and they make use of it. In general geothermal heat is not readily accessable. The Earth's crust is about 30 km thick on average but our grilling technology cannot get down much past 10 km. If we could get down to the magma our energy problems would vanish. There is enough internal heat in the Eath to last a billion years and the human race will not be around anywhere that long.

What is the answer? Right now the answer is generating heat by nuclear fission and using the heat to produce steam to turn turbine electric generators. About 20 percent of the electricity in Europe is produced by fission and a little of ten percent in the United States. Nuclear fission does not produce CO2, SO2 or NOx. The problem of disposal of water is grossly exaggerated, especially by the eco-extremists. The problem of disposal is largely political, not technical.

The two major nuclear generation mishaps Chernobyl and Dai Ichi Fukishima were the result of mismanagement. In the case of Chernobyl the reactor did not have a proper containment structure (unlike western reactors which do) and the reactor was mishandle by a Communist Party appointed manager who was incompetent, but could quote Lennin and Marx like a pro. In Japan they did not make the sea walls high enough so that a Tsunami swamped their emergency back up generators and the reactors started to melt down because the back up generator were flooded out and could not deliver cooling water. Modern reactors have gravity activated control rods so they do not need electrical or batter back up to shut down. A modern reactor can be scramed (emergency shutdown) by cutting the power to the holders of the cadmium rods, thus dropping the rods into the core and shutting down the reactor. If the Japanese had used the latest design, the Tsunami would not have led to the meltdown of the Dai Ichi cores. Modern design sub critical reactors are now as safe or safer as any other kind of power generation scheme.