I've deleted a few out of date posts. I'll stick to energy policy, software and analysis tips from now on; my specialties. Let the specialists in other fields be as self-reflective of their own profession as I am of mine. We outsiders will always remain skeptical of everyone, all the time in our quest for the unspun truth.
One comment I noticed on a recent telegraph story on green energy. I won't link to it because it's full of vitriol, bad conclusions and misinformation. However there is one interesting comment for me from person called rastech below. Interesting because i am looking for a new boiler and I want to be green and save money too - don't we all!
:
"Just found another blatant 'alternative energy' scam - expensive heatpumps.
Landlord at the local is doing up a house. Been offered a 11.9kw heatpump at 'quite a saving' of £1,199.99. Plus fitting.
This was going to be his main heat source for the house!
Was told it would work to -15 deg C!
Wasn't told about the progressive loss of heat output as the temperature fell, to the point he'd be burning more energy to get less heat out, and when he 'really needed it' wasn't aware that he wouldn't be getting any heat out of it at all!
So he's binned that idea, I've found him a 12kw multifuel stove for £299 (the same one dads got), and a 12,000 btu air conditioning unit that gives him a 4.5kw heatpump (should be enough to keep the place warm enough to the point losses really start), as well as cooling in the Summer (the heatpump didn't), a dehumidifier function (the heatpump didn't), and an outstanding air filtration system (the heatpump didn't), for £299 also (plus fitting he can do himself), all for a consumption of 1.25kw.
I told him how to do a cheap air mixing system to build in, using cheap rainwater downpipes and cheap computer fans too. How many suckers are being sold a lemon with these heatpumps, like this poor bloke nearly ended up with? I bet it's more than a few. What is this Country now? Scammers 'R Us?"
He then adds:
"Why the licenced housing efficiency and certification inspector imposed on us by the retard politicians in GOVERNMENT, of course! eta: this house is more than half way up a ruddy mountain too, and it's bleedin parky there for 10 months of the year pretty much. Whoever recommended that heat pump 'solution' should be done for deliberate and life threatening cruelty as well as dereliction of duty!"
Last things first. The pusher of these air source heat pumps is/was Dr. David McKay, the Oxford don who was put in charge of UK energy policy and who has written the book "...without the hot air". I won't link to that either because it's not as useful as it pretends. His main thesis however is that gas shouldn't be burnt in the home, we should make electricity from it, then use that electricity to extract heat from the air. There are flaws in that argument which I shouldn't even need to point out. Suffice to say, he seems to be letting a beautiful theory over-ride the reality. But it comes down to costs. If you believe the numbers from the manufacturer then - as it turns out by my calculations - the actual cost of the fuel to the consumer is around the same, so it's really only the installation cost that makes the difference. I''ll admit that there are a few people who appeared on TV in France who seemed to say they made a big cost saving - except they had installed geothermal pumps and the capital outlay was quite enormous. Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul..
Well I'm not sure that 1200k is really that expensive - seems relatively cheap to me - but I had these salesmen in my house too and i showed them the door. I'm sure the geothermal heat pumps are a great idea but they are pretty difficult to install on old properties with small gardens. Reckon on 20k at least. For these cheaper air pumps, well we need proper trials rather than sales brochure spin, and McKay does point out that newer designs are better than older. However like rastech I remain extremely dubious that they are of any use whatsoever in a normally cold Winter. Of course if you had believed the Met office then cold Winters were supposed to be a thing of the past. Ha, ha indeed...the perils of prediction based on hubris. Of course last Winter was a one-off....except for the 2007 one-off.
I was stupidly tacitly subsuming that "milder winter then usual" Met office prediction when I drove to Disneyland in Winter on a sunny day in a car totally unsuited for snow. On the return trip a blizzard surprised us and I spun at an uncleared service station exit into a lorry that was inconveniently parked there: Otherwise the spin would have ended with entropy rather than collision. Happily the family was alright and even Bert the car has now recovered; his partly-repaired big rear end bash notwithstanding. Ok i could have stayed at the service station - if only it wasn't in the middle of bleeding nowhere, the exits from the motorway were even more dangerous than staying on it, and my wife hadn't been urging me not to think so negatively about the possibility of crashing. In any event my tolerance for unbridled hubris is even thinner nowadays. I resolve to continue to try to totally ignore all advice that sets off my BS detector.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Heat pumps and spin
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
Green angst
Thanks to spam I'm reposting this and deleting the older one. Not because I want to write about climate issues any more - it's an issue full of single issue fanatics and poisonous pens on both sides. I'll stick to wanting green technology for it's own sake not because I think you can extrapolate a 0.6K rise from one century into 6K the next based on models with no real validation.
The best discussion of the current green angst that has yet been produced is here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ethicalman/2010/01/the_problem_with_hidden_agendas.html
Everyone is remarkably honest and candid and huge praise to them for that. Finally greens are acknowledging that climate change is a hook to hang on their other societal concerns. And I have a great deal of sympathy for some of them. However we need to separate them out from carbon dioxide production if we are to judge them sensibly. I don't believe that greens are anti-humanist or anti-industrialist or statist in the least. Some of them clearly are but it's a tiny minority.
Is this rampant consumerism they worry about sensible? I don't believe it is but then you can't deny that it's worked out ok so far. Or has it?
Is the never-ending growth model of economics sensible? Well famed economist, Joe Stiglitz recently asked the same question and concluded it wasn't - but then he's a lefty :)
What are the aims of greens?
a) Let's avoid fouling our own nests.
b) Don't screw with nature. Nature usually knows best.
c) Recycle stuff.
d) Renewable energy.
e) Cradle to cradle technology.
f) Poverty reduction.
Now what's wrong with that? Let's not criticize them for the lying done by others and let's not paint our own prejudices over their faces please.
Saturday, March 06, 2010
Buyers's perceptions of FEA Software:
This was lifted from the forums of eng-tips. Seems people are looking for inexpensive FEA but there is only expensive or free. Their suspicion of any inexpensive software will largely be similar to these 3 points, most of which apply to free software, rather than inexpensive software. However it's all about perception in this game. I like to imagine a budget FEA market similar to the desktop publishers or CAD market. Might be possible!
///
"The main cost of a modern FEA package is split into three factors:
1) robustness of the algorithms. Everybody is able to self-program a valid FE code for solving 1-D elements in the linear domain. It's probably one of the easiest "things" to program in engineering. But when you begin to deal with non-linears, contact interactions, composite materials, multi-layer elements, birth-and-death, adaptive meshes, etc etc etc, and in addition all this "thing" must be optimized in order not to take millenia to solve, you can imagine the effort of the development people.
2) support. Have a problem with Ansys you can't get out of? No problem: apart from the fact that being one of the most known programs you can find a very huge users' comunity to help you, in "extreme" cases you have two levels of support: your reseller, and the main Company itself. You pay for it, but that makes a lot of difference wrt a "free" software (most of which is univ-born, so would you write e-mails directly to the teachers, researchers and students? Sometimes it may work, but usually...)
3) user interface. OK, this may not be a problem any more nowadays 'cause there are several pre- and post- already programmed and compiled by the "free comunity" which do a good (or at least acceptable) job.
Anyway, just because of the first two points you can not simply take a good free solver and claim that it would save the world instead of commercial packages such as Abaqus, Ansys and some others... It would save YOUR world and money UNTIL you run into one of their weaknesses (every program has some bug). Should this happen, good luck: it would be you and the program..." (plagiarised from cbrn on Eng-tips)
///
I disagree with some of that but it is the public perception that counts. Someone else on the same thread said you always get what you pay for. That's utter bilge of course. You get what you set out to get, or are persuaded to get, or what your neighbour has, and much of the time you end up with an expensive pig while if you look around you can manage to find a cheap jewel*. It's the 80/20 rule again though. Only 20% of the buying public know how to buy effectively. Meantime we sellers have to deal with the other 80% by using psychology,much as i described in a previous thread, and bearing in mind the 3 points above.
*On re-reading this I find it ironic that in our world a pig, which is useful, is worth less than a jewel, which isn't. Illogical! as Spock would say. Does our monetary system revolve around the adornments we hang on our body rather than what feeds us, clothes us or heats us? Well it used to. Nowadays it revolves around oil, which does do all of that! Food for thought.
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Watts up
Help I want to name my electric car but the Tesla, the Faraday, the Ohm, the Amp and the Volt have all been taken. Watt is the only SI unit left. The Edison maybe? He never did get a unit named after him did he?
Maybe it's time to go funky and call it the Juice!
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Mist stack CO2 scrubber designed already!
Further to my description of a stack CO2 capture device I discovered a mist trap for smoke stacks has actually been patented. Being in 1972 the patent is no longer active and it was mainly meant for other types of pollution - particularly particulates. However it would catch CO2 as well. I find it highly ironic that we care most about controlling the most benign item coming out of a smoke stack but never mind.
Anyway, it's pretty much the design I had in mind. I suppose none were ever actually built. Instead of simple mist it creates high density fog, presumably because of the temperature of the flue gas. You are helped of course by the fact that the flue gas contains a lot of water vapour too. All you have to do is supersaturate and drain the liquid. Shouldn't cost very much should it? It might even cost less than a traditional tall stack. All this fuss about a simple engineering problem!
Friday, February 26, 2010
Selling a new product
This is a short distillation of stuff I'm trying to ensure I do as I launch a new product.
How to Sell (adapted):
1. Know your customer. Understand his personal (secondary) buying motive. ie what he really seeks from the product or service. Ask questions and listen to the answers.
2. Sell the features, advantages and benefits that relate to what the customer wants.
3. Be aware of the psychological steps that buyers go through and how to deal with them.
4. You need a) Empathy, so that you can understand customer needs. b) Confidence, so that your can bring customers to the point of buying, and c) Resilience, so that you can use rejection and temporary setbacks as spurs that constantly move you forward
5. Be honest and available. Sales are about relationships and relationships are about trust.
6. Plan for the possible objections.
7. Make it easy to buy.
Some of this doesn't relate to me but perhaps more to the website or the product. I am a stickler for simplicity. When it's simple it's usable and has less trouble. For usability it needs to be lightweight, with few options all of which are labelled clearly. To some extent this is a carry over from designing tools offshore. I listened to the complaints about existing tools, agreed they were indeed correct, noticed where they could be designed a lot better and made sure my own products did not have the same defects. It's most gratifying when the users of the tools say something like "this tool is a heck of a lot better than the last one we had".
I'm aware of course that others like complications but I'm thinking they are the kind of people who will buy the big name products, where you might know what you want but you can't a) find it in the interface, b) use it after you found it because you didn't do 3 or 4 previous steps correctly. If you don't know what I'm talking about then you clearly haven't used Ansys Workbench!
Now the reason some buyers/users value complexity is presumably the assumption that they are getting more bang for their buck. So if the buck is less maybe that would overcome that difficulty.
Then of course you get into the canard of "you get what you pay for". Well there is no way around that other than to target your audience. People may criticize Alibre for price reductions, just like they criticize Ryanair for cheap flights but if the sales are there then clearly it's just snobs or vested interests who are worried about buying something cheaper. Most of us here in France just love Ryanair because they provide a service that is convenient, unique, quick and fair. Their separations of the charges are a pain but clearly they are used to bring customers in the door. I think that's what I'm aiming for. The pricing issue is a problem that will sort itself out only by testing, in the way that Alibre just did. Having added 10,000 users at 100 dollars a piece it was an interesting million dollar gain as well as an experiment.
Update - fixed it: Confucius he says "Use too many threads and deadlock is your downfall".
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
CO2 capture device
Now I was just musing about the SO2 scrubbers that were used to prevent acid rain. We retrofitted them to power station stacks and now the problem is no more. Actually whether it was a problem in the first place is debatable - according to Bjorn Lomberg's book "the skeptical environmentalist" it wasn't - but let's gloss over that. Are we presuming that a similar thing can't be done with CO2? Because if we are then it doesn't make much sense to me. When air capture is mentioned at all then they always assume it should be in the form of artificial trees. See here for the most promising one of these:
http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/articles/view/2523
Now Lackner got his idea first from a fishtank scrubber and then from a leaf. However he forgot the most efficient natural scrubber of the lot - rainwater. Yes CO2 indeed easily dissolves in rainwater to form carbonic acid. In fact though Lackners idea uses this mechanism to collect the CO2 from the ion-exchange mechanism. Why did he use an ion-exchange mechanism? - because he is simulating a tree. Why is he simulating a tree? - because he is capturing CO2 from the air. Why is he capturing CO2 from the air rather than from chimney stacks? - lord alone knows, it seems dumb to me!
So in summary - and if anyone wants to fund me in this planet saving mission my email is jg@femdesigner.com
a) skip the dumb tree idea and go straight to the power station stacks exactly as with the SO2 scrubbers,
b) put in a 90 degree bend and add a fine mist spray in the corner, like the type that sprays mist on lettuces in my local supermarket,
c) drain off the carbonic acid and the wet soot from the bend corner,
d) pipe the liquid to an algae farm or a greenhouse. Be sure to use gravity rather than a pump.
Now how much would that cost? Peanuts? A working prototype is worth 25 million from Richard Branson. Alas the idea is now officially out in the public domain (ie here) so you can't patent it! Ha ha!
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
unequivocal warming, but not unequivocally human
Interesting quote from Andy Revkin buried deep in his comments section at dotearth:
////quote
There's utter logic in concluding that if there is, as the IPCC concluded, 90-percent confidence that more than half of recent warming is greenhouse-driven, that implies a substantially higher level of confidence (well up toward, if not precisely 100 percent) exists that some greenhouse warming is under way.
But the IPCC -- outside of the questionable line in this chapter -- never stated there was no doubt about human-driven warming. Again, that doesn't mean there's no doubt, given the breadth of evidence. It just means they never formally said it.
I actually had prolonged discussions with both Susan Solomon and Michael Oppenheimer of the IPCC about this after some IPCC authors expressed concern over that very phrase in an update we ran on the latest climate science just before Copenhagen. http://j.mp/noCO2doubt
Using that logic, I wrote that the panel “...concluded that no doubt remained that human-caused warming was under way and that, if unabated, it would pose rising risks.”
They both disagreed:
Dr. Oppenheimer: "The 'no doubt' or 'unequivocal' refers only to the warming part, not the human-caused part."
Dr. Solomon: "This could be true but it's not something that we said."
////endquote
Time they reminded some of their colleagues and disciples who regularly use that phrase cavalierly. The trouble is, the fact of warming does not suggest the cause of it. The warming of the last century though has been a linear trend with fluctuations. We think we know the fluctuations are down to ocean cycles but the trend is not so easy. It could be just another long term fluctuation - as suggested by Avery and Singer in their book "Unstoppable warming every 1500 years". Certainly if 50% of it was natural last century and the trend in the 2nd part is the same as in the first part then the rest of it has a good chance of being natural too, in the form of a natural recovery from the little ice age. The idea that it was manmade was based on a false assumption that we could tease out the natural component from 1985 to 2000 so what was left must be man-made warming. It was a ridiculously optimistic or misleading idea - no doubt entirely to influence policy. The significant pause in recent warming put paid to the idea that natural fluctuations were predictable on these shorter timescales. So to really answer the question of what caused the warming, we really need to first ask the questions a)- what caused the little ice age, and b) what caused the medieval warm period before it, because these were 100% natural and seem to have been global. When we know that long-term natural component then we can tease out the manmade contribution and not before.
Of course several solar theorists have said the long term trend seems to match solar activity. One that springs to mind was Scaffeta and West who compared solar reconstructions with Moberg's proxy reconstruction. A bit iffy mind you but interesting. The exchange between Scaffeta and Rasmus on realclimate.org was quite entertaining. To me Scaffetta won on points and Rasmus gave up. It didn't help that he got the Stefan-Boltzmann equation wrong; somewhat of a howler for a man in his position. Neither did it help that he was pretending that the now utterly discredited and even disowned hockey-stick reconstructions were better than Mobergs effort. Nor that his main defense for that was the utterly illogical canard that if natural variation proved large then that is even more reason to worry about CO2 rises.
Saturday, February 06, 2010
Science as a blunt instrument
No doubt anyone who's followed the debates on global warming that occur on the blogosphere have noticed the reference to tobacco industry scientific studies and in particular that S. Fred Singer and perhaps a few others were involved in downcrying the science that second hand smoke causes cancer. What I'm wondering though is why anyone needed a scientific report to call on any ban for smoking? As I just read a lawyer repeating, "my right to swing my fist ends just before it touches your nose". Well substitute blowing smoke for swinging fists and you have all the justification you need. For all the blather that selfish smokers make about society impinging on their liberties they don't ever consider for one second that us non-smokers find smoke offensive and that our right to not breath their pollution far outweighs their rights to do it. The case is this simple; you can smoke as much as you like as long as you don't blow any over anyone else. It doesn't even matter whether it causes cancer or not, the mere fact that it is disgusting is sufficient reason to send the buggers outside.
A similar report was recently released on the health effects of Diesel. Apparently long distance lorry drivers are showing certain signs of something or other. This is no doubt another effort to undermine fossil fuel use in some way. That I saw it on the green car congress blog confirms the audience for this stuff. But again it wasn't necessary because everyone agrees that diesel smoke and soot is particularly disgusting and I'd have thought pedestrians are more at risk than anyone. So who needs a report? Answer - absolutely nobody. People get bogged down arguing on scientific reports that show spurious correlations and talk about statistical significance (a phrase that should be outlawed in my opinion) in order to invoke some health law. Yet they don't need that - they can turn to civil liberties laws instead.
And of course the upshot is that even smokers prefer to be in a smoke free environment. This is why they blow it out so far in the first place. Now that discos have become smoke free zones, my smoking friends remark that it's much more pleasant and they are quite happy to go outside to prevent the inside getting smoky.
I guess I'm particularly cranky about smoke because one of these 2000 poisons gives me a migraine from time to time. It took me a while to narrow it down to smoke but then I narrowed it down even further to US cigarettes. Ah the US free market economy - allows you to consume all the junk you like and a lot more you didn't know about! Have some growth hormones with that steak won't you? By the way, did anybody ever tell you you're beginning to resemble a bullock? What happened to the science that investigated that anyway? Maybe the entire grant went towards investigating truckers lungs. Or maybe the fossil fuel industry is fair game but the food industry gets a free ride for some reason.
Monday, February 01, 2010
Insourcing; think about it!
There was an interesting segment on French TV last night. Apparently some companies who had outsourced their labour to foreign countries were scuttling back after it all went wrong. Both companies featured complained about the lower quality costing them customers and the first explained that the cheap labour cost in Roumania wasn't all it seemed: ie Although the cost in France was 30 euros per hour versus 6, there were hidden costs, such as low productivity, transport, more management staff, etc that put the full Roumanian cost at 36 euros per worker. These were all things they just hadn't thought of. Meantime the manufacturer who'd gone to China complained about only having two colour options - both gray - and the hand-finishing causing fit-up problems. As Jeremy Clarkson would say, "hand-built is just another way of saying the door won't shut right", which is fair comment on metal objects at least. A 3rd businessman made an all-out effort to have a made in France label as a matter of pride. Let's face it a prestige manufacturer with a made in China label is just not possible. But in order to do that he needed to squeeze his suppliers. Well there's no better time than a crisis to try that. We need to take risks and make strong partnerships to survive. The Japanese though used to pay extra to ensure good suppliers but it's changed days now. I'll bet they are feeling the Chinese bite too.
Contrast this with the Ross Perot/Al Gore encounter about NAFTA where Perot correctly predicted all jobs would go South and Al disagreed. Well besides the jobs argument, just how much of the collapse of the US car industry is down to poor quality? Customers are difficult to get and even more difficult to get back when they've been let down. Short-termist thinking needs to be rooted out of managers heads. The best way to do that is probably to put engineers in charge :) like they do in France, Germany, Japan and China. France wavered a bit with US hire-em-fire-em ideas but the law stopped them and Germany had a short-lived experiment with US management but this crash has ended all that. Now they know they were right all this time.
The car industry is my benchmark for business generally and it seems that they survive due to protectionism, national pride in engineering, good management and single-union, no-strike deals. If Japanese manufacturers can manage to build and sell quality cars in the US and UK then clearly the idea that unions or workers were to blame for a car industry closure is a total red herring: It is perforce the management at fault. And that is from making decisions on a short-term quarterly return basis rather than thinking about long-term customer satisfaction. Blindly outsourcing your product is a perfect example that will come back to haunt many. Sadly on their return, one of the French manufacturers discovered that the workforce they'd abandoned had moved on and there was a shortage of skills necessary to run the machinery.
Finally I read a lot of whining from US and UK fund managers about European work hours and regulations that stop you firing people on a whim. But when it's easy to fire people, what kind of workers do you get? Answer: ones who won't tell you when you are wrong. And if it's easy to get people to work long hours routinely then are you getting the best work done in the best way - or are you getting a horses arse of a job produced by an overtired, overstressed worker? If you've ever worked in the oil industry you'll know the latter is the case.
There should be a compromise position and I for a while thought that the UK employment laws were best in that respect; reasonable protections, no impediments to startup. However for some reason it doesn't work as well as you'd think. Why? Well I've found that the worst problem in the UK is late payment. I'm pretty sure that's what kills most businesses and I'm also sure that's the intention of the accountants who keep this practice up. It goes like this; get the job done from small supplier on credit, refuse to pay, supplier goes out of business, ergo no need to pay. Even government departments practice this. My own uncle was forced out of business when after he'd done a lot of work for the local council, the Labour party decided to abolish county councils and replace them with regional councils instead. The old council couldn't pay and the new one said it was not their bill. Many, many businesses were lost in the same way because the only redress was via expensive court proceedings. Don't tell me that the Labour party is about workers. A whole bunch of accountants should be in jail for that scam. Of course any excuse works for late payment and if you've done the job already then you are shafted.
So if you are starting a small business in the UK the lesson is clear: NO CREDIT EVER. Personally I'm quite insulted when a company sends a purchase order. It's so second nature to them that they don't seem to even realize they are actually rudely assuming that I'll give them credit rather than politely asking for it. If someone ever tries that one on then send a pro-forma invoice and explain in clear terms that you don't ever give credit, because of bad experiences with late payers. That way they might actually realize that they've been begging for credit like a street urchin while pretending to be a world class company. They'll whine about their systems not being set up for that but it's all just toss. Be firm and you'll discover they can pay up front very easily when they feel like it!
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Good news: The planet can cope!
"By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster."
And for all you people who say well it can't hurt making sure we stop deforestation then you clearly haven't seen this PBS documentary: I urge you to do so!
http://www.pbs.org.news-channel.org/frontlineworld/stories/carbonwatch/moneytree/
That comment from anonymous below the film clip was from me. Ignored completely of course by the self-righteous - in complete line with the Stiglitz think tank who I'd alerted about reality not being quite the same as the models, before they went and made an arse of themselves at Copenhagen. Seems like they've dropped off the radar anyway - still using up public cash though and producing flawed reports that nobody seems to read. Oddly though they'd asked for comments on their reports and supplied an email to do so which is why I bothered. I'd even harboured a notion that they might at least acknowledge me (they didn't) though I'd known beforehand that they wouldn't say "thanks we'll think about this". And of course when the Sunday Times gets around to investigating the deforestation fiasco then they'll say that nobody informed them. Frankly it's not up to me either - it's up to Dr Steve Running who did the fine satellite work. Funny that he hasn't received funding for it since 2003 when he reported the good news isn't it? Almost like they didn't really want to know that deforestation wasn't a problem!
Stiglitz of course is one of the few economists who predicted the current financial fiasco - a Keynesian, he was predisposed to be skeptical of the Washington Consensus version of free-market strategies, and has written fine words in condemnation of the world Bank and IMF policies in Latin America. He really should know what it's like to be against the crowd but correct and he should realize the vital value of using real data to validate hypotheses because he was that man; resigning his position at the World Bank when they failed to listen to him.
So we have the tyranny of good intentions, the herdlike nature of humans to believe exactly what they want to believe, the failure to appreciate unintended consequences and plain old follow-the-money. Sure the planet can obviously take it but it's the poorest humans that suffer. Can't we at least learn to listen to them this time around?
Friday, January 22, 2010
"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."
I've discussed the first part of Einstein's famous phrase above in "Simple is Efficient" but the second part is just as important. If the recent meltdown of the financial markets is a guide to anything it's about how we search for ways to over-simplify something we truly don't understand, in order to make predictions that have no solid foundation. I'll use the dismal science as an example. I could have used engineering but that's too obvious: When a bridge falls down you are forced to do things better next time, but with economics they can just swap out one failed or untested theory with another.
The current economic dogmata owes much to the opposing Chicago School and Keynesian schools of thought. The Chicago school, of whom Milton Friedman is the most famous were a bunch of revisionists who reverted to a free market concept which they ascribed to the "invisible hand" metaphor of Adam Smith. Likely they hadn't even read Smith or they'd have known better. In truth Smith wasn't lecturing anyone, he was trying to understand the market and in several places he honestly admitted when he just didn't get it. The simplification made was that people are rational, markets work perfectly by themselves via the "invisible hand" and government regulation is therefore automatically bad. Of course the absurdity of the assumptions ridicule the conclusion - but only to a rational thinker. There's the rub; they thought they were rational people (rather than ivory-towered, hubristic chumps who couldn't run even a toffee shop) so their assumptions must perforce be correct.
Well the simple theory-confounding reality is that a truly free market is also free for the criminals. The only real test of the Chicago School theory was in Yeltsin's Russia, where all the economists straight from college suddenly became government advisors. Yeltsin naively assumed that what was being taught in US Universities was how America became rich. In truth America became rich thanks to staying out of the World War for long enough to sell vast amounts of arms and materiel to the combatants. No real secret there; but crucially the huge booms felt in the fifties in the West owed abolutely nothing to free market ideas either. It was Keynesianism apparently. But Keynes pretty much changed his mind all the time, so you might say it wasn't really his doctrine - it was his own savvy. Keynes of course knew how to run a business that made money and that is done by learning from mistakes, ie being adaptable, rather than sticking to ideas that have manifestly failed. Russia paid a heavy price for believing US academics by having a huge slump and being dominated by criminals. They only recovered when statism returned under Putin.
In the 70's Keynesianism, or rather the simplistic version of it invented by Samuelson, was blamed for the lack of growth and Friedman became the new guru. Thatcher then experimented with these Friedmanite free market ideas - basically changing taxation from income to consumption and removing state subsidies and regulations. Initially this lead to a massive recession in the UK but eventually - thanks to deregulation of the markets (and North Sea oil) the UK began to look lean and fit. It had certainly been shorn of much of it's manufacturing capability. But while the poorer 60% became poorer, the richer 40% became richer so it was all deemed a big success by the right-dominated newspapers. Everyone was in fact happy that the overly-powerful unions had been quietened, it was just a shame it took massive unemployment engendered* by a ruthless, bloody-minded, destructive and immoral harridan to achieve that end.
Reaganomics didn't really come from Reagan as he he didn't really bother himself much with government at all - or indeed with anything that required any thinking, or even with turning up for work. His puppeteers copied Thacherism, which in truth wasn't really like anything Friedman had advised (Thatcher had already abandoned monetarism as a proven failure) and renamed it the Washington Consensus. This doctrine was applied by the World Bank and IMF in a one-size-fits-all manner: Privatise everything, cut government spending, remove subsidies. The result - as reported by the economist Joseph Stiglitz and others - was a complete disaster for any country who asked for IMF or World Bank help. In effect these organisations who were supposed to be helping poor nations become less dependent on aid, had turned into tyrannical loan sharks, destroying economies for the profit of their friends on Wall street and various other corporate criminals based offshore.
Now Samuelson's Keynesianism is back but not in the manner Keynes would have liked. Keynes decried the idea of casino capitalism and that's almost exactly what is being tried now. There is no actual plan behind the massive spending except the vague idea that it worked before. But previously there had been the realization that to make money you have to add value to raw materials and sell the finished product at a profit. Somehow now, we have a strange mix of massive spending from that psuedo-Keynesianism combined with the sunny Chicago School optimism that markets, if left alone, will absorb this cash injection and magically produce economic growth. A double-whammy of stupidity! Only in the 3rd strand of economics; the Austrian school of Von Mises and Hayek, is there the realization that if too much debt caused the problem then more debt will make it worse. Of course the Austrian School followers have somewhat oversimplified beliefs too (stemming from Ayn Rand) but at least they were the ones who predicted this depression coming. Strangely this wasn't enough qualification to allow them to be employed by governments to fix the mess. Likely their fix - let the banks fail - was a bit too much for the revolving door mentality of politicos. After all that's their next job they'd be making disappear. Even Nouriel Roubini's softer ideas of mark-to-market mortgage reassessments were rejected. At any cost the huge mistakes made by the bankers seemingly had to be rewarded by the taxpayer. What are the chances then of this lot fixing anything? After all they are the same ones who broke it.
The point is that all strands of the original economic thought, have been over-simplified by others, removing all the important caveats and uncertainties of the originators, to the point where they do more harm than good. This is only one illustration of the process. One could mention the oversimplification of CO2 as the major climate driver, or of psychotherapists eager to blame parents for every misdeed done by their children, or indeed of any number of other social sciences that ignore the wondrously unpredictably chaotic nature of life on Earth. Good grief they've even over-simplified natural chaos into a chaos theory. Isn't that an oxymoron? If you ever need an illustration of the real, natural chaos that confounds us then you'll see it the next time you pick up a cable that seems to have tied itself in knots all by itself after you had neatly stacked it away. Now that's an allegory worth remembering!
*It was the late Paul Foot's theory that Sir Keith Joseph and Maggie had deliberately conspired to increase unemployment so as to reduce inflation. The swingometer of high unemployment=low inflation was a trendy concept at that time so it's possible. Conservatives truthfully didn't give a rats arse about anyone who had to dirty his hands to work so it's plausible too. After all how can you not realize that if Asia and Europe subsidize their industries and you remove your subsidies then you will lose your industries. It's not a difficult concept! So it's either gross stupidity, which is also plausible, or downright evil or the blinding dogma of the free-marketeers (which to be fair also goes in the stupidity box).
Sunday, January 17, 2010
The science is worse than we thought!
There was a link from a recent article in the Independent (about the met offices abysmal prediction record) that showed some of the arithmetic trickiness employed by the IPCC to present the case that climate change is worse than we thought.
http://sites.google.com/site/globalwarmingquestions/ipcc
Now i'd noticed before the inability of the IPCC to properly add up error bounds, ie it is impossible for individual components to a total to have a larger error bound than the total. And I'd noticed the IPCC got the 20% deforestation number totally ass-backwards because the planet has actually been officially greening according to the peer-reviewed NASA satellite data http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalGarden/. It might very well be 20% REforestation. If that was included int he carbon sink summation then there is less missing sink to search for. The missing sink argument is that we stick roughly 7 Gt (Gigatonnes)) in the air, 1.5 Gt is added by deforestation, 3 Gt stays in the atmosphere and 2 Gt is removed by land and sea.The remainder is unaccounted for. Of course the error bars on these numbers are quite high. The numbers also vary according to who does the calculation.
Ref: IPCC + http://www.greencollar.org/employer/the-missing-carbon-sink-ads-7868.html
Values in gigatonnes:
Existing idea: 7 (fossil fuels) + 1.5 (deforestation) - 3 (remains in atmosphere) - 2 (oceans) = 3.5 Gt missing sink.
More plausible idea?: 7 (fossil fuels) - 3 (remains in atmosphere) - 2 (oceans) = 2 (reforestation).
Of course the whole sink/source argument is inexact science to say the least, as this report shows:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070621140805.htm
They really don't in fact have a clue as to what is a sink and what is a source in nature. In fact the sea should be a net source too by Henry's law, since it is warming up. The reason it is treated as a sink is because then either the sea contributes to the total that we observe in the atmosphere which is politically incorrect (in my opinion) or there is an even greater missing sink, meaning our scientists are even more clueless about the carbon cycle. There isn't really a scientific justification for a warming sea being a net sink - there are some hand-waving arguments and iffy models but no real evidential numbers so it's mostly a politically convenient decision.
And I'd of course noticed that the 90% certainty figures in the summary was presented as scientific, ie based on evidence when in fact it was no more than a show of hands, ie 100% unscientific and misleading.
But it's even worse than I thought. Things are added after the reviews are complete. This is brought to light becuase the review comments were eventually - after much pressure - released in this "open process". And they reveal that Kevin Trenberth and Phil Jones clearly thought the case wasn't strong enough so they just made things up and added them later - unreviewed.
The IPCC is always used as the yardstick to judge alarmism, eg by the UK judge who lorded it over the courtcase that identified 9 serious innaccuracies in "An inconvenient truth" and ordered schools to mention these when the film is shown. However, we no longer have that yardstick because the IPCC report was shaped by these two lead authors after everyone else had gone home. I'm reminded that several of the authors; Paul Reiter (malaria), Richard Lindzen (feedbacks), Chris Landsea (hurricanes), Roger Pielke Snr (land-changes) had of course resigned because of this post-review chicanery and had been summarily ignored by the press. In addition just about everyone has criticised the millenial reconstructions of temperature including Briffa the actual lead author of the report, who according to the "climategate" emails firmly believes that there was a medieval warm period as warm or warmer than today. Crazy! Science will recover because people have short memories but we really have to redefine peer-review procedures now that we have the chance.
Now some might think that it's all for the greater good. Wrong! Being honest is for the greater good! If you are dishonest in your summary of the science then you are more than likely dishonest in all of your science and you dishonour your profession. In engineering this type of chicanery would quite literally cost lives.
An alternative bathtub model:
http://www.john-daly.com/carbon.htm
