Dafydd Llewellyn

Well, in that case, how is "the same legislative motivation which worked for the automotive industry apparently painlessly" going to reduce the CO2 emissions from power stations ? The only way to reduce the CO2 from power stations is to reduce electricity consumption, which needs motivation of the consumers, not the producers. Power stations are at least twice as thermodynamically efficient as motor vehicles; your parallel does not make sense.

Hang on, there - the only way to reduce CO2 emissions from cars, is to burn less hydrocarbon fuel. Perfect combustion of any hydrocarbon fuel produces only CO2 and water. We HAVE made strides in reducing CO emissions; but CO (carbon monoxide - a deadly poison) is a result of imperfect combustion, due to an over-rich mixture. As such, it could in principle be eliminated altogether, without noticeably affecting the function of the vehicle. Don't confuse the two. I doubt very much that power station stacks emit carbon monoxide - that would be an inefficiency they would strive to correct; CO emission means wasted fuel.

We heat our swimming pool with 300 metres of 20 mm poly pipe. Now to get the filter pump to run on solar . . .

Waaal . . . the sun is (on average) around 93 million miles away. The difference between the top of Mt. Everest and the Dead Sea is around 30,000 feet, i.e. six miles. So going from the top of Everest to the Dead Sea, changes the distance from the sun by, oh, about 0.000006%. Go figure . . .

Yes, I used to fly glo-plug motors too. One had to wash them out thoroughly after each flying session to prevent them from gumming-up or corroding, tho that may have been the nitromethane / nitrobenzene. I don't want to try this on a new Rotax 582, without some pretty reliable idea of what it would do. However the greater cooling for the bearings may well be very beneficial.

I wonder how 2-stroke oil mixes with it?

Well, I doubt I'll live long enough to see fuel-cell electric, or really practical solar-cell-covered wings, so I'll settle for something less exotic. 85% ethanol sounds pretty practical, actually; at that concentration I expect it can absorb a fair bit of water and still burn, though presumably with reduced power. When will it become more generally available, I wonder.

Well, my apologies that my answer did not give you an obvious opening to decry the problems of using cooking oil or alchohol directly in engines designed for something else, though I see you were not deterred by that; I suppose it had to be said. Zero-cost fuel? Yes, the pigs are fully fuelled, and ready to fly. The fundamental problem with electric power is the energy density of the fuel; the liquid fuels we use to-day have at least an order of magnitude greater energy per unit of mass, than any electric storage device so far discovered. So there is considerable point in liquid fuels; and since we are looking for ways to reduce CO2 emissions, they must be derived from the energy of the sun - and apart from solar cells and wind power etc, which are not much practical use for everyday vehicles as yet, that leaves biofuels in all their various forms. Biofuels in their raw state have all the drawbacks you describe, and probably more. Only trans-esterified biodiesel is a likely goer, and then probably only in a jerk-pump diesel engine, in a warm climate. However the Fischer-Tropsch process allows us to take those biofuels (and in fact almost any biomass) and convert them into forms that are more suitable for whatever application we choose. The reference to coal in the Wikipaedia article, I think, refers to the use of coke in the producer-gas/water gas generation process; the FP process is a convenient way to convert coal to usable liquid fuels, but it's by no means dependent upon the use of coal; that was just a convenient means on hand at the time to get the feedstock into gaseous form. The Fischer-Tropsch process essentially takes short-chain hydrocarbons and converts them to longer chain ones, by heat, pressure, and the use of suitable catalysts - i.e. it takes gases in and gives liquids out. That solves the fuel energy density issue, so you do not need to carry a massive battery that will deplete the Earth's lithium reserves within a decade or so, and can use the existing distribution chains. You can tailor the output product by the choice of the catalyst and the operating temperature and pressure - just as is done to-day in alkylation plants that take crude oil in and give AVgas out. The various organic pathogens are just a bit more hydrocarbon to be converted. The remaining pathogens will be the same as we have to-day, in our fuels. It would be convenient, in the short term, to produce fuels in plant that in many cases probably already exists, that can be burned in internal combustion engines, since the World has such a vast investment in them; but they are fundamentally limited to a gross thermal efficiency of only around 25% to perhaps 35% and are thus very wasteful. The sooner we can go away from them, the better; and rare-earth magnet electric motors are more like 80% to 90% efficient, so they are an obvious choice - tho the supply of the magnet materials may become an issue in mass usage, just as lithium is for batteries. If you can use those liquids in, say, a fuel cell, you can jump from the 25% gross thermal efficiency of the internal combustion engine, to maybe 75% gross thermal efficiency, using rare-earth magnet motors built into the wheels - and get regenerative braking into the bargain. No doubt this will come, but in the meantime, we can reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere by this method; and therefore it merits proper research. Simply pointing investors at Jojoba without the accompanying infrastructure is irresponsible, and that's why the problem needs to be tackled holistically. No single sector of industry can do that by itself. Albert Speer was able to do it in Nazi Germany - and we don't want to have to go to that sort of political system. But we do have CSIRO to investigate the various facets of it and present a workable overall plan to Government; and Government can make it attractive to industry by backing-off the tax imposts to allow it to get up and running. This would deal with the aspect of CO2 that comes from transportation. It's not the answer for electric power generation, obviously. If we have a functional national grid, electric power can be shuffled from where the sun shines or the wind blows, to where it's needed. Decentralised power generation would remove a great deal of "power" from the commercial entities currently providing it; but they would still be needed to maintain the grid infrastructure. That's one way of doing it. The other way is the DIY thing so one can be self-sufficient. At the moment, that doesn't look economically very favourable, tho a practical solar-powered refrigerator would go a long way to make it so. But we could reduce our reliance on major power plants somewhat, and look at siting a small number of nuclear powerplants where they can do the least harm. I don't see one running any sort of substantial workshop on a domestic solar system, however, without a major initial outlay; connecting to the grid allows one to get started without such a burden. A totally self-reliant electrical power system would cripple small manufacture business start-up - and it has enough hurdles now, without adding that.

If you are talking about electric scooters or lightweight "town" cars, and small highly specialised aircraft with low utilisation, yes it's possible with current (excuse the pun, please) technology. But it's still a long jump from something that can run LED lighting in a private home, and something that will run anything like a "normal" training aircraft, or a vehicle for country use. What's the likely cost of a solar array that would power a 60 KW motor for a "normal" two-seat aircraft equivalent to, say, a Jab 120, for four hours a day - i.e. around 180 KWH per day? And what would such a battery weigh? I don't think we're there yet, by a long chalk. I looked at a lightweight low-performance (due to large wing area) single-seat glider design, a while ago, that could use a Rotax 277 for takeoff and climb, and then be self-sustaining by solar cells producing around 3 KW - but it would not be manageable until flexible solar cells get to around 40% efficiency; the cost would be too high for the market, and the aircraft would be the aeronautical equivalent of a butterfly. The government would not make money out of backyard biodiesel either. Same problem. All our non-nuclear energy comes from the sun; whether you collect it in silicon cells or in a plant crop or in an algae pond, it's ALL Solar energy. But converting it into a liquid fuel provides much higher energy per unit mass, than does any storage battery so far invented - and the gap is still an order of magnitude.

Probably the best use for them. The Germans produced about 850,000 metric tons per month of fuel in early 1944; a fair percentage of that was synthetic fuel produced by the Fischer-Tropsh process. There may be more information on that on the internet, but I can't look it up whilst I'm writing this reply. You may recall that there were permanent flames on top of refineries at Silverwater and Kurnell in the '60s. That was burning-off the methane etc that was at that time uneconomic to convert to liquid fuel. You don't see those flames any more; the alkylation plants (that produce iso-octane, amongst other things) now use them instead of wasting them. An alkylation plant is roughly half of a Fischer-Tropsch plant; the other half is pretty much a gasworks, that makes producer gas / water gas mixture. So the technology has been around for at least 70 years. It only needs the Government nous to make it happen. But we are governed by lawyers, not engineers, aren't we?

This whole biofuels business is right up CSIRO's alley; it needs proper research - and it's about B time that some of the research that we pay for actually benefitted Australia. In view of CSIRO's very definite statement on CO2 and global warming, what instructions has the Government given CSIRO re biofuel research to set up an industrial-scale operation? I said before, I don't think our politicians are worth the oxygen they consume; here's a glaring opportunity. Do they have the brains of beetles?

Correction - RAF Bomber command, of course.

Fuels that are made by the use of sunlight to capture atmospheric carbon dioxide. Usually by photosynthesis, but whatever algae do seems even more promising. There are plants such as Jojoba Curcans (if I have that right) that can use land that is unsuitable for food crops. This includes waste agricultural products. Whether one uses them to produce biodiesel or alchohol or as feedstock for something like the Fischer-Tropsh process is for the industrial chemists to work out. But for these things to happen on an industrial scale, their profitability must exceed that of fossil-base fuels - and that won't happen unless the Government tax imposts are lifted.

OK, that's a change from the media garbage. All the more reason to press for biofuels. And - dare I say it - study the French experience with nuclear. Solar will help and wind generators also - though their potential as private economic ventures is dubious, from what has been said on this thread. But to use those sources, a national grid is essential. Note that the CSIRO statement says two things (leaving volcanos aside - that simplifies things) - firstly, that burning of fossil fuels IS a major contributor to the rise in CO2 levels; and secondly that the rise in CO2 levels IS a major factor in rising world temperatures. Those are major statements. Have they released the full scientific evidence on which those statements are based? Because I'm really rather surprised that the burning of fossil fuels in WW2 did not produce a significant rise in CO2 levels - but the curves I've seen do not show one. One Lancaster took 2154 imperial gallons of fuel - and there were around 500 of them or their equivalents airborne most nights from 1942 thru 1945 - that's nearly one million gallons per day, for RAAF bomber command alone. Fuel manufacture rose substantially during those years - why does it not show on the curve? So there must be a lot more to the story than that simple announcement reveals; I'd like to know more about it. I intensely dislike being given the mushroom treatment (kept in the dark and fed on manure).

Correlation is NOT causation. The correlation, to the extent is is valid and not something that has been "massaged" for political ends, does mean we need to study the situation, and I would assume that people are doing so; but there's so much B***T floating around that I, for one, haven't heard what they have found. CSIRO is being, in my view, responsibly reticent about making any premature pronouncement. It took from 1947 to 1983 for CSIRO to determine, scientifically, the "big picture" on cloud seeding; why do you imagine it will take less time to determine the realities of fossil fuel & CO2? You sound remarkably like a religious fanatic on this subject; let's calm down and get some real science - and I don't mean the crap that has come out of NOAA. I say again, even a precautionary approach would suggest that Governments could back off their tax imposts on bio fuels. If you want to hammer anybody on this issue, I suggest you ask your MHR why the Govt still taxes biofuel?

Man, there's no doubt that the climate IS changing. All those things are a natural result of that; the polar bears went out on the ice in the first place in response to climate change in the past, after all - they're related to brown bears genetically, I understand. The part of the science that I think not yet sufficiently well proven, is that this change is primarily due to mankind's use of fossil fuel; I suspect it's hubris on the part of mankind to imagine we are sufficiently significant compared to volcanos etc that we can significantly affect climate. Regardless of that, we are being willfully stupid in the way we're using resources, and that's sufficient reason to rein it in, in my books. The progress with LED lighting makes it possible to greatly reduce the amount of electricity that is used for that purpose; but that's a very minor part of our electricity bill; what it needs is a radical development in refrigeration; try turning off your fridges, freezers and air conditioners and see what happens to your power usage.

Do you really imagine they know, at this stage? I don't. However I'm dead sure there are better ways to use coal, than burning it for electricity. A responsible Government should be pushing bio-fuel technology. When it comes to electric cars or aircraft, that is not eliminating pollution; it's merely exporting it to the power station and the battery manufacturer. You have to look at the whole chain, from the coal mine to your domestic appliance or whatever. It's loss, loss, loss all the way. Picking up fallen timber and burning it avoids all those intermediate inefficiencies. Applying that to an aircraft leads to the notion that the most concentrated energy source for transportation and distribution is an important factor.

Yes, the climate is changing. But to what extent is that due to man-made CO2?

Yes, well, I live just about on the 2000 ft AMSL contour, by choice. The term "greenhouse effect" is misleading; the basic in Vs out radiation balance that determines the Earth's temperature and the effect of various gases in the atmosphere on that can be assessed in a qualitative way, by looking at the Earth's radiation spectrum, and the absorption spectra of the various gases. Water vapour is vastly more important than CO2 in this regard. This shows what nonsense is being spouted very clearly. What comes out of that is that, at low levels in the atmosphere, there was sufficient CO2 well before the rise in the latter half of the 20th century, to absorb all the portion of the radiation spectrum that CO2 CAN absorb, in the first kilometre or so of the atmosphere; so doubling the CO2 concentration would merely halve that distance. That energy is re-radiated in all directions, and the portion of it that is headed "outwards" is re-absorbed in the next layer of the atmosphere, so one ends up with a succession of energy balance calculations, considering the atmosphere rather like the successive layers of an onion, until one gets to the point where the outermost layer finally does not have sufficient CO2 to absorb it all, and what escapes from all the relevant gases dictates the Earth's thermal balance. It's a fiendishly complex analysis, and I do not pretend to be sufficiently knowledgeable to do such calculations; but to me, this is much more relevant than what IPCC has been doing. The big question is not the direct effect of CO2, but the "amplifier" and "damping" effects of the change in CO2 on the Earth's albedo and the atmospheric water vapour, and we have only wild guesses as to those effects, except that 600,000 years of history you mention, which shows the the Earth is, in the long term, pretty stable. What IS certain, is that there are too many people on the planet.

I haven't followed the argument for the last few years; there was so much conflicting garbage that I found better things to do. Obviously (I hope) the melting of floating ice has zero direct effect on sea level - though it does alter the Earth's albedo somewhat, which may increase the sun's heat going into the sea, and thus ocean temperatures, and thereby, sea levels. Melting of ice that is on land, has a direct effect on sea level - but it also reduces the weight of the land mass, which then rises, because it is floating on the magma. So I have no idea what the net effect actually is. Even such an apparently simple matter has multiple effects, and I doubt we have sufficient data to accurately evaluate them.

Oh, dear; I hoped it would not degenerate into a debate on this. For what it's worth, I was in CSIRO when the first results on CO2 levels started to come in, from Cape Grim. And it was fascinating to sit in the lunch group and listen to people, with no more than the bare data, say "It's all those SUVs". The Cape grim station equipment was so sensitive, by the way, and the air it samples so clean, that it spotted the "blip" in the CO2 level when it arrived, from the F-27 doing a "control" low-level air sample, 600 miles upwind. The rise in CO2 levels is unarguable; but it's the only part of the climate debate that is. One of the first principles of debating is to attack the argument, NOT the man. So when the argument turns to "what is his personal interest?" I turn off. I want to see the science, not the politics; and to me, the science is unconvincing. I worked in the CSIRO Division of Cloud Physics, the climate computer modellers worked in the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric research. The computer models regularly predicted something, which we went off and measured - and nine times out of ten, the measurement showed the computer model was wrong. Climate is simply several orders of magnitude too complex to successfully model, with what we have to date. It will take several more decades to get any accurate idea. I won't go into detail here, but the most telling part of the issue of CO2, to me, is in the area of its absorption spectrum. If you want to learn more about this, look up "Fraunhofer lines" and "Gas absorption spectrum". The conclusions it leads to are incomplete, but they do NOT justify the predictions of Gore etc.; they do suggest some warming, but much less than the predictions of around 2005 or so. I think the increasing cost of fossil fuel will do more to limit any man-made contribution than anything else; and the volcanic etc contribution makes mankind's efforts look silly. If Rudd etc had been real in their expressed concern, they'd have eliminated government tax imposts on biodiesel. They did no such thing; therefore I conclude that the argument was about revenue, not climate. Climate was merely the excuse.

I hesitate to buy into this thread, because it's not my area of expertise; but I'd offer some comments from my own personal observations - not in any order of priority: China - or at least parts of it - is currently suffering from massive air pollution problems. So was Australia - or at least parts of it - in the 1960s and 1970s. I recall that the pollution in the Latrobe valley was horrendous; and also the Hunter valley, which I often traversed by air in the 1980s, was often so thick one could almost land on the smog. The Sydney basin was almost IFR due to the smog, except when a week of westerly winds exported it to New Zealand. Picking one's way down the northern lane was a matter of navigating between landmarks about five miles apart, and one could not see the next landmark until almost on top of it. The F27 that I ran for CSIRO in the 1980s (see attached) was used, amongst other things, to survey the air in the Latrobe valley, before and after the power stations installed electrostatic precipitators in their stacks, and possibly other anti-pollution devices. It was also used to prove that the acid rain in Scandinavia was due to pollution crossing the North Sea, from Britain (that was done by following a tracer chemical injected into the plume from Mt. Isa out to 600 miles offshore past Broome). China is, I suspect, currently suffering because its Government has not spent the money to do similar research - or studied the results of such research elsewhere. Cheap electricity has a hidden (or maybe not so hidden) cost. In the '70s I used to fly to work at Bankstown in my Auster, from Mittagong. One could follow the ash plume in the air from the concrete plant at the back of Picton, for 30 miles, in winter, and the countryside around the plant was white for miles. Nowadays, there's no trace of that; the plant cleaned up its act. These cleanups have been effected despite increasing reliance on coal. Solar had not come into the picture at all, at that stage. The Sydney basin was badly affected by brown smog from motor vehicle exhausts - and I spent about 40 years of my life sitting in a car for two hours a day, simply to get to & from work. The Govt. approach to that was to mandate catalyctic converters on cars - which made unleaded fuel a necessity. However I suspect the advent of work-at-home via internet may be becoming even more effective. We have become far too dependent on "big city" social organisation, and massive transportation of the necessities of life. The big cities are dreadfully dependent on an extremely complex infrastructure, and the vulnerability of that was demonstrated very clearly by the fuel strikes in the early '80s; Sydney reverted almost to the law of the jungle in only two weeks. So I got out of it and based myself a hundred miles from the nearest big city, and worked mainly by Fax, until the internet forced broadband. I drive maybe two hours a week, instead of two hours a day. I looked hard at solar, back when the subsidies made it appear attractive - but when I studied it in detail, it was clearly going to tie up my finances for 25 year or so, before it would pay off - and I did not trust the Govt. policy on subsidies. Independence is attractive, but at age 65 (at that time) the prospect of locking up one's finances for 25 years is not all that attractive. So we purchased a wood-burning stove instead, since we have an abundance of firewood, and insulated the roof. We're independent of water supply. I am inclined to the view that we can do more at less cost by reducing the inefficiencies of our way of life, than by grasping immature technology in an attempt to sustain the other inefficiencies. I'm all for technology, but not unthinking application of it. One of the really big inefficiencies is the "throw-away" society. Yes, I have a 1948 Ferguson tractor and a 1965 one, both still in daily use. It pains me to see tens of thousands of tons of coal being exported every day to sustain what I see as stupidly inefficient life styles. And our system of Government is almost totally ineffective in dealing with this; it is far too preoccupied in simply getting re-elected. it's a mob of free-loaders simply surfing on the swell. I would not feed any of them if I had the choice. I do not share the quasi religious fervour of "global warming" (which I note has now declined to "Climate change" in the media). Yes, it's changing, but it always has, and always will. But I do see that we are squandering resources recklessly, due to gross inefficiency. Inefficiency is something we can address at a personal level. [ATTACH]47452._xfImport[/ATTACH]