OK, baby stuff is over.

I don’t care who this offends. And I don’t care if nobody reads it. At least I will know I have put it out there.

SO FAR SO GOOD

For several thousand years, humans have been extracting energy from the environment directly. They have done this through three methods:

• Sailing Ships
• Windmills
• Buildings.

 So let’s look at each one.

SAILING SHIPS

The first thing to notice about ships: they move. That’s kind of the point of the thing.

And that means that any effects they have on the environment are transient.

A sailing ship uses the wind to push her hull forward, making a hole in the water shoved aside.

To do this, she uses the wind, slowing and cooling it, just a little bit.

After she passes, the water slams shut behind her, releasing the energy she used making the hole. Not forgetting the friction of her hull on the water.

This all ends up as a tiny rise in the temperature of the water in her wake, fleeting, soon dissipated.

As I have said, this is transient, the ship has moved on.

Since the ship stays at the same level, hopefully, on the surface, no overall work is done in raising or lowering the vessel.

She will not have any lasting effect on her environment.

WINDMILLS

Windmills have been in use for about fifteen hundred years. They are static, but local. By that I mean that they have been used primarily to pump water and to grind corn. There have been other uses, but these are the main two.

In both cases, the use and the output is more or less at the site of the mill. Corn is brought to it, ground and then taken away. Water is usually pumped out of a nearby source into a nearby system.

The mill extracts energy from the airstream, slowing down and cooling the air.

The energy is used changing corn to flour and “sump” water to “delivery” at a higher position.

Now, these are old, inefficient designs, a lot of the extracted energy was lost as friction in the mill and therefore released back into the local airstream as heat. The flour will also carry away the heat of grinding, but that will be lost in transit, again, locally.

With water pumping, the energy path, apart from friction, is different. But most will end up in the nearby surroundings as heat.

In short, there will be no greatly noticeable change to the overall energy, velocity and temperature of the airstream.

We need not trouble them further.

BUILDINGS

Buildings do two things, they absorb heat from the sun and the air, they also block and deflect the airstream around them.

The heat absorbed during the daytime is released at night, so they do slightly modify the distribution of heat in the airstream.

Blocking and deflecting the wind is usually only a local effect, although towns and conurbations are known to create their own microclimates, but this is probably mostly due to the energy used to run them.

Their effect has probably been minor until the late twentieth century development of the skyscraper, high-rise development and the general trend for vertical development, leading to an accentuation of the building effects in relatively small locations.

We’ll leave it there because the direct effects of buildings are probably vastly outweighed by the effect of their attendant energy usage. This is purely surmise and I have no evidence to support it.

AND NOW

So, lets have  a look at what TDATS have been up to recently.

WIND FARMS

These are a wonderful invention, almost purpose built for screwing up the environment.

As with the windmill, they extract energy from the airstream by slowing and cooling it. By  the  way, that’s just simple thermodynamics, there ain’t no way round that.

With the developments of engineering, aerodynamics and structural materials, they can to this on a scale and with an efficiency which is way above any conventional windmill.

They have another and far more damaging consequence. The extracted energy is not released back to the airstream at site after driving a process. It is transported tens, maybe hundreds of kilometres away before it finally leaks back into the atmosphere as waste heat.

And finally, and most importantly, they stick up in the air a long way. Much higher than any windmill.

SOLAR FARMS

These are another way of moving energy about.

Spread over a nice large area, they serve to cool the soil beneath them, screwing up drainage and water exchange with the atmosphere, suppressing vegetation that would capture carbon. They extract energy from the sun. This means that solar radiation will not be dissipated as heat going into the earth or the airstream, affecting both.

And then, as with wind farms, that energy is released as waste heat at a great distance from the site.

At present, because they occupy valuable real estate and are in everyone’s face, they are still on a smaller scale than wind farms

CLIMATE ENGINE

Now we have to really get grown-up.

We need to look at the climate engine.

This is a truly global system. No, not in that way. I said “grown-up”.

It is made up of:

• The atmosphere
• The oceans
• The land surface, its disposition and configuration
• The inner Earth, mantle and core.
• The Sun.
• The planetary motion.
• The Moon

In fact, if it’s on, in, under or near our planet, it has an effect and is part of the climate engine.

We know from the geological record that volcanic events in one part of our planet can affect the climate everywhere. They do that by messing up the atmosphere and it can last for centuries, millennia and all other geological time definitions.

So, it looks like the sun and the planet’s internals are the main drivers for the engine and the main transmission components are the oceans and the atmosphere.

(Not doing oceans now. Do that later.)

The atmosphere is made up of a load of layers, none static, moving and jostling against each other, swapping energy and altering their configurations constantly.

There is a lowest layer, I’m going to call it Tree-height. This is always going to be in turmoil. Trees and plants are all over the place, taking up carbon oxide, absorbing and releasing heat, exchanging water between the soil and the air layer passing over them. It’s a mess.

Wind turbines stick up well beyond the Tree-height.

Humans have not messed around in this layer and been part of it. Until now.

Now, I am going to assume that layer is pretty well constant.( Except when there are very large wildfires and things like that which will send a heat and gas plume into other layers.)

We have no idea how these layers interact.

We model them on supercomputers, which frankly are like a smartwatch compared to the complexity of the climate engine. And that means no disrespect to those using them.

Take a wind turbine and poke it into a layer of the atmosphere we have never used, experienced or even been aware of before. We have no idea what it does.

Take a hundred or so and stick them in the middle of the ocean. Where they slow and cool the airstream. Being cooler and slower, it picks up less moisture and so the lee shore will be drier and cooler. Not much, just a little bit. A tiny bit. Who cares?

Well it’s like sticking your finger up a sleeping tiger’s bum. The problem is, when she wakes up, she may not like it.

We have no idea how this layer reacts with those above and around it.

We have no idea what happens when this extracted energy is released as waste heat over some distant city.

Everyone knows Big Ben. It’s a great big clock tower with a great big clock inside it.

This clock was regulated by placing pennies on the weights that powered it. Pennies, changing the timing of tons of machinery.

The climate engine is truly enormous and the opposing forces that clash within it to make it work are inconceivably large.

But the balance between those forces? Maybe a penny, a wind farm here or there can affect this balance.

If we were really clever, we might find a way of using the configuration of wind farms to affect and trim the climate engine and help regulate the weather. But, we’re a long way from that.

High above us we know about the Jet Stream. It really is a major influence on our climate and weather. It wobbles about a bit. And we get weather systems being pushed around, blocked or moved by the Jet Stream.

The Jet Stream does not behave randomly. It is a part of the engine, as rigidly controlled as a gearbox. It is responding to inputs from other components.

And now we have added windfarms to that list of parts. And we have no idea what our shiny new part does.

Energy is the fuel of the climate engine. That’s pretty universal and obvious.

The ocean currents (not the subject here) and the atmosphere are the fuel distribution system. The fuel lines.

If you start coupling fuel lines to different cylinders at random, your motor will not run very well.

THE STORY SO FAR

Phase 1

In the 1960s and ‘70s, there was concern that we were on the verge of the next ice age. According to the geological record as understood then, there was a rhythm and pattern to global glaciations and it seemed that we were overdue for a new glaciation.

The last ice age lasted about 100,000 years and ended about 12,000 years ago.

There had been what is known as the Little Ice Age, affecting the Northern parts of America and Europe, lasting from 1300 – 1850. Not enough to worry you, just enough that the river Thames froze so fairs could  be held on it at times, complete with stalls and so on.

There was concern that the polar ice caps were beginning to recede.

This would release melt water from the cap, particularly into the North Atlantic, disrupting the current that carried warm water up the East coast of America  and across to Europe, This flow was though to ensure that the climate of Europe remained relatively mild and ice-free. (look, we’re talking ice sheets  a mile thick here, not frozen ponds and burst water pipes.)

There was an idea that it would need as little as two consecutive really cold N European winters to  stop the annual retreat of the ice cap. Once that happened, the cap would become self-sustaining, its reflectivity preventing seasonal thawing and it would then advance South. And Ice Age here we come.

It was held that the climate engine was a chaotic system and that once it “tipped” into glaciation, it would stay in that part of the cycle for a very, very long time.

There were mumblings about “Snowball Earth” and “Runaway Freezing” going on for ever.

There are three problems with that:

In order for the ice cap to advance, it needs to have more snow dumped on it. That has to come from precipitation which has to come from evaporation, mostly from open water. As the ice cap advanced, the belt of open water would shrink, limiting the replenishment that enable expansion. This would only be overcome if the entire planet dropped below freezing.

The core of the earth is pretty hot and while the very core itself may be a plastic state held by pressure, the outer core and mantle are molten. Lots of reasons for that. The planet is a magnet spinning in an electromagnetic field, a dynamo generating heat. It is slowing down( everything does) and can only dissipate rotational energy as heat. It holds radioactive material which is decaying. And someone left that oven on. That heat has to go somewhere, even if it takes a long time to get to the surface.

There ain’t no such thing as a “runaway” as envisaged. Ask any wrecker driver who has had to clear up the mess. A runaway comes to a  halt eventually. Could take a few billion years, but let’s be specific here. In either extreme scenario, heating or cooling, the system becomes a runaway at the point where its own corrective mechanisms ( brakes, steering) can no longer input or take out enough energy to limit the divergence. Then only a cataclysmic event (brick wall, super-volcanic eruption, meteor strike) can provide enough energy. Failing that the system will disrupt permanently. Endof.

Phase 2

I think around 1980, someone got bored with this and thought they could get a PhD or two by promoting the idea of Global Warming. It was realised that carbon dioxide retains heat in the atmosphere. “Greenhouse Gas” was invented, an ad-man’s dream of a slogan. The whole thing suited the zeitgeist and the bandwagon has been rolling ever since.

In at least one scientific publication of this time it was noted that Global Warming had become such an accepted mantra that it was impossible to get funding for any research project that did not aim to reinforce this climate model. Uh-oh, here come the witchfinders: “you must be wrong ‘cos you disagree with us and we’re right ‘cos we say so.”

The Global Warming religion didn’t have many believers at first, but some really persistent missionary work fixed that.

I use the term “believers” because of course there can be no proof. There is no control experiment. There can be none. Unless you build an identical planet to test the hypothesis. You’ll need some mice for that. Frankie and Benjie might be available.

Phase 3

Global warming gets wheels. The bandwagon is rolling.

Big Business gets on board, realising there’s a fortune to be made out of expensive toys, like electric cars, wind turbines, solar panels. And all without the haunting spectre of the nuclear industry.

Politicians of all parties swear allegiance to the green flag. And as in other cases, once they’ve taken the oath, there’s no way back, no matter how wrong it may be.

More projects are being pushed and brought onstream. And still we are unable to test the original hypothesis or see the long term effects.

In the past few years, we have had catastrophic wildfires in the United States and elsewhere. I do not know how much carbon dioxide they have released into the atmosphere, but I feel it must be making a not insignificant contribution to the overall level

Not to mention the greenhouse effects of smoke and other pollutants released in these events.

This year, we have had a further development. A very hot situation in northern Africa has sent hot air North and East into Southern and Eastern Europe. Large areas are being ravaged by wildfires.

Phase 4

What happens next?

With the destruction in southeastern Europe, there will be very little vegetation cover this winter. It will not have time to regrow.

Vegetation helps to moderate the effects of cold weather. This could be a very bad winter in Europe.

I have a feeling that because of the “shape” of North America and the presence of the Pacific Ocean, it is more resilient to this type of disaster.

I’m not going further with this because it is real finger-in-the-wind stuff, irresponsible.

But there remains the possibility that this could bring the type of ultra-hard winter that was feared in the 1960s.

With the promotion of wind farms and solar farms, we are betting the planet on an untested hypothesis.

We need to keep fossil fuel reserves ready, with a spectrum of short, medium and long term availability, maintaining the viability of these sources.

We need to upgrade the development of small and medium modularised nuclear plants. These have been available as marine propulsion units since the 1950s, but their development has been held back by the panic over three or four well publicised failures.

There are two factors to this reluctance: the spectre of radiation fallout and the cost.

With regard to the disposal of nuclear waste, there has been very little real development other than the policy of diluting it in ever larger containers and hiding it from sight.

The cost of these units has been prohibitive. It could only be supported at government level.

But, government spending is so profligate and badly administered that it is highly probably that once the strategic imperative for direct government control is discounted, nukes are expensive because they are built with taxpayers’ money. And who gives a damn about the taxpayer?

Nuclear power stations have always been built on the grand scale. That takes decades and that leads to sclerosis of the development, cushioned by the mobility scooter of public funding.

Whether it is possible to strip away the overburden of the present system and leave an efficient regulatory system that would allow modular nukes to roll off a production line, powering small towns and villages wherever needed, I don’t know. Such attempts seem to have failed everywhere else from railways to traffic-calming schemes.

But we may not have very long to get it right.

In the distance is the beckoning glow of nuclear fusion. Or is that a mirage I see? We better find out sharpish.

CONCLUSION

As I said at the beginning, I don’t care who this offends, who reads it, if anybody.

Other conclusions? So far evolution has demonstrated that mankind has two outstanding abilities:

• Screwing up
• Surviving our screw-ups

If not: time for the cockroaches to have a run in the fast lane.

As I have warned elsewhere, the Butterfly Mind gets to the end of the problem, or as far as it is interesting to go and then does other stuff.