New cartoon series on climate

Great work as always Josh !!!

If I am ever investigated I want only defense witnesses at my “investigation”!
I also want someone I have worked with for 18 years on the jury.

“De Plan, de Plan!” as opposed to “De plane De Plane!”

I know that pub. I once met a mann there about a hockey stick.

What J.”Trains” Hansen used to sing to Mr.Jones:
Me and Mr. Jones, we got a thing going on,
We both know that it’s wrong
But it’s much too strong to let it cool down now.
We meet ev’ry day at the same cafe,
Six-thirty I know she’ll be there,
Holding hands, making all kinds of plans
While the jukebox plays our favorite song.
Me and Mr., Mr. Jones, Mr. Jones, Mr. Jones,
Mr. Jones got a thing going on,
We both know that it’s wrong,
But it’s much too strong to let it cool down now.
We gotta be extra careful that we don’t build our hopes too high
And now he sings:
They say that breaking up is hard to do
Now I know, I know that it’s true
Don’t say that this is the end
Instead of breaking up I wish that we were making up again

Josh,
I dedicate this to the 3 musketeers of CAGW:
http://www.absolutelyrics.com/lyrics/view/bee_gees/i_started_a_joke/
NOTE: or is it n musketeers, where n is a very large number? I forget : )
John

Go Josh! And as a follower of his Comic Curmudgeon, I can’t say how happy I am to not only learn that he’s in the sceptic camp, but that he’s on this very site.
Hey, Josh. Maybe you could have a new line of products. Instead of “What would Margo do?” you could have “What would Mann do?”

Myron Mesecke says:
July 22, 2010 at 11:57 am
Real life is becoming a cartoon
How is it the topological distribution of this life change on earth?

Vuk etc. says:
July 22, 2010 at 11:35 am
You are being unkind. If they got their science right, I wouldn’t have bothered with the climate topic, but now I got something to do in my spare time.
My thanks and gratitude go to Jones, Mann and ‘AGW brotherhood’.
But now THEY KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE !!”
Do you remember “someone is knocking my door…..”?

http://www.cbsnews.com/2300-500202_162-10004208.html?tag=contentMain%3bcontentBody
Yacht owners file insurance claim when their yacht was crushed under a jumping whale.
Cause: Global Warming. (Ocean’s are just to hot for the poor creatures)

Barry Woods says:
July 22, 2010 at 12:56 pm
Now that forecast will be fulfilled. Enjoy it!
The Sun in the emergency room:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/PF.gif

Re: Nuclear power causing global warming.
The writer is a fool, but his argument is qualitatively correct—to a point. The waste heat from exothermic power generation is expelled to the environment and becomes part of the overall thermal “economy.” (Actually, it is probably fair to say that most of the power generated goes into the environment, because a large part of the power utilized is also dissipated by friction, turbulence, etc.) This is also a “problem” for coal, oil, and gas-fired powerplants, even though he pushes them off the stage. The crux of this contention, however, is the fact that the total amount of power production is peanuts compared to natural insolation and is therefore “in the noise,” a fact he does not evaluate by calculation. In any case, the slight increase in outbound radiation needed to keep the planet in thermal balance may be a trifle for natural systems to accommodate.
This is not to say that it can never become a problem. Krafft Ehrike, the late colleague of the late Wernher Von Braun, proposed in his book “The Extraterrestrial Imperative,” that the growing heat release of a continually advancing world economy may require us to put our powerplants in orbit so the heat can be radiated into space (not into the biosphere) and the power beamed down to the surface. That is quite a ways away, but it illustrates that interesting things can result from massive economic growth.
As to the friction from the wind turbine? It was only power that was previously in the wind, but now the wind has less power due to the extraction from the turbine. No net increase in temperature, but in fact a reduction, due to the conversion of wind kinetic power into electrical power.

Vuk etc. says:
July 22, 2010 at 1:08 pm
I was not thinking about the Beatles’ song but the poem:
“THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.”

I don’t mean to put a wet blanket on the effort, but I don’t get the cartoon.

Tom T : July 22, 2010 at 11:01 am
Real life is becoming a cartoon we now have nuclear power causing global warming http://bellaciao.org/en/spip.php?article20030
DirkH’s comment there was perfect — “Who are you trying to fool, biologists?”

Michael J. Dunn says:
July 22, 2010 at 1:16 pm
As to the friction from the wind turbine? It was only power that was previously in the wind, but now the wind has less power due to the extraction from the turbine. No net increase in temperature, but in fact a reduction, due to the conversion of wind kinetic power into electrical power.
_____________________________________________________________
Maybe this is too pedantic, but how do you get to “a reduction”? It should be a wash – no net change – unless you’re assuming that some of the electricical energy is stored in products like electrolytic aluminium and not returned to the environment. There’s also a very small (and quite insignficant) effect whereby the air flowing past the turbine is at a slightly different pressure – and thus adiabatically a slightly different temperature – than it otherwise would have been. Since the purpose of a wind turbine is to slow the air, then by Bernoulli’s principle the pressure (and temperature) should be higher. However, if the pressure and temperature are higher, itwill radiate slightly more to space, which makes for stronger cooling (possibly stronger than it would have been where the heat would otherwise have radiated from … or not!). It’s not clear what the net effect would be, but it’s surely not going to be precisely zero.

This whole thing stunk to high heaven and those media whores involved shunning face to face confrontation with people like Steve McIntyre spoke volumes even the deaf managed to hear. The OJ trial was less racially biased than these enquiries were politically and that will come to light as Mr Simpson found out sooner than later.

Michael J. Dunn says:
July 23, 2010 at 12:49 pm
“… Hope this clarifies …”
No, sorry, you’ve given a long lecture which as a physicist myself I don’t need, yet failed to supply a direct answer to my query.
You said, “In order for power (work per unit time) to be extracted from wind, the total temperature of the airflow must drop (the difference in thermal energy being the work extraction, where kinetic energy and heat content are interchangeable).” This is incorrect. KE and heat are not interchangeable (hint, compare entropies). The wind turbine is not extracting heat, it is extracting KE. The temperature in the airflow does not drop. On average it must rise, because its speed is reduced. It does not rise as much as it would if it were brought to rest by purely dissipative processes in which all the energy ends up as heat in the same body of air, but it does rise.
Apart from subtleties like variations in the timing and pattern of radiation into space (as I mentioned), the only way capturing windpower could produce a net reduction in temperature is if some of the captured energy thyat otherwise would have been dissipated to the environment is not so dissipated but held as, eg, the chemical energy of refined aluminium. I ask you plainly: is that what you meant? If so, fine. Temporary energy storage doesn’t count – it’s still dissipated.

Michael J. Dunn says:
July 24, 2010 at 10:38 am
“It seems we are an eddy conversation, so I will try to keep this succinct.”
Pity you failed. Please stop trying to lecture. I understand the physics far better than you do. Just answer my question.
“Flowing gas conserves enthalpy, which is the totality of thermal and kinetic energy of the gas.”
This isn’t what you said. You said that KE and heat are interchangeable, which they’re not. You slipped up in your lecturing. Even this replacement statement isn’t quite true – there are other components of the enthalpy in a flow, such as PE and chemical energy, the latter strongly reducing hypersonic stagnation temperatures for example. It is also somewhat ambiguous; the enthalpy is not conserved within the flow, but over the whole system, which in this case, since we are radiating to space, comprises the entire universe.
“Kinetic energy converts to a high stagnation temperature when the gas is brought to rest (diffusers), or heat energy converts to kinetic energy when gas is allowed to expand (nozzles). It is a fact that these are isentropic processes; we have a century of engineering practice designing diffusers and nozzles in accordance with this fact. Let’s not argue about fact.”
Except that it’s not a fact. They can be nearly isentropic, but there is always some loss. There is frictional drag at the boundary layers, turbulence from vortices and thermal transfers to and from the flow.
“Eventually, all wind dissipates its kinetic energy by viscous processes into heat, so the airflow will come to its total temperature…”
This isn’t true either. First, even in the natural environment, some of the wind energy does other things, such as blowing sand up a slope, or powering lightning which induces chemical changes in the air and ground. Not quite all of it is simply dissipated as heat. Second, even with purely dissipative processes, the air would not heat up to its stagnation temperature (“total temperature” is an inaccurate and misleading term strongly to be deprecated, since it is not an actual temperature at all, merely a hypothetical equivalent for the total enthalpy), not only because it is radiating and cooling as it goes, but also because much of the dissipated heat (typically around half) is transfered, by the same frictional process, to whatever it is that the airflow is flowing past (eg, the ground). Third, the airflow is interacting with the environment is numerous ways, some of which reduce its temperature (eg, evaporation), some increase it (eg, passage over warmed ground). In particular, the airflow is being warmed by the heat lost to the environment by the consumption of the power extracted by wind turbines. Unless the extracted energy is locked up in a semipermanent form (eg, refined aluminium), the net effect of the wind turbine on the temperature of the environment is (very nearly) nil. It’s a wash. There is no net reduction in temperature.
Originally you seemed to be claiming either that the use of wind energy does actually reduce the temperature of the environment (not merely fails to increase it like burning fossil or nuclear fuels does), or that a wind turbine reduces the actual temperature of the wind passing it (even though slowing and friction both tend to raise it). However, it would now appear that in saying “the wind generation process reduces the air temperature” you are referring to a purely hypothetical situation in which the energy extracted from the wind is never returned to it, not the real situation in which it (mostly) is. Again, I ask you plainly: is this all you mean? If so, fine.

Dear Paul (re all the above),
I’m sorry you perceive my explanations as “lecturing,” but unless I explain, there is no way to answer your objections.
Let me get a mea culpa out of the way. In my original post, I remarked that wind power generation results in a lowered air temperature. Subsequently, I clarified that to be the total (or stagnation) temperature of the air. The static temperature would not change. My apologies for jumping ahead to concepts familiar to me, but not to the general public. In any case, it does not matter. The effect on environmental temperature is the extent to which the dissipated energy of the wind degrades to thermal energy; if there is less wind energy, there will be less thermal energy, and air temperature at rest is a direct measure of thermal energy.
Now I stated that flowing gas conserves enthalpy, which is the sum of thermal and kinetic energy of a gas, and that because of this conservation law, thermal and kinetic energy can be converted back and forth. The context for this comment was terrestrial surface air at low Mach number, which is all we experience normally. Potential and chemical energy are not involved (unless the wind is blowing up or down a mountainside, or you are riding outside of a Space Shuttle on re-entry). And, yes, the entropy is conserved within the flow (per unit mass) because it is a physical property. I refer to devices that convert kinetic to thermal energy (diffusers) and vice versa (nozzled), whose existence contradicts in practice your assertion that these conversions are not possible. And they are isentropic to a degree that justifies neglecting boundary layers for most analyses. They are non-isentropic only to the degree that they have boundary layers; the main flow is isentropic. (Since there is no heat transfer experienced through a wind turbine, the process is adiabatic.) What we come to at the end is that you do not argue against any of these facts, but quibble over minor deviations from inviscid aerodynamics. These quibbles make for entertaining repartee between experts who like to argue for the sake of argument, but they do not edify the general audience, which is who I was speaking to.
Next, you object to the idea that winds dissipate their kinetic energy into heat. There is no way around this one. The winds are set in motion by the terrestrial heat engine; unless they dissipate, they will have to continually increase in velocity (rather like the J. G. Ballard novel, “The Wind from Nowhere”). The terrestrial boundary layer is as much as 2 kilometers deep, so all the wind we see is in the midst of a dissipative process. It is not involved in lighning generation. If you want to allege that all the wind energy is dissipated in building sand hills, well, you are grasping at straws. It is all dissipated as heat because that is what viscous fluids do. They remain in motion only because there is a driving force.
Total (stagnation) temperature is well-established terminology in aerodynamics, which is why I conclude you are not really familiar with this field. It is a physically definable temperature and is regularly reached in diffusers. In boundary layers, there is a viscous analogy to the diffusion process (not isentropic) and what is reached is the “recovery temperature.” This attains about 80-90% of the temperature rise as for an isentropic diffusion process. It is the reason that high-speed aircraft (e.g., SR-71) are subjected to high temperature over their skins.
You give a list of reasons why the airflow through a wind turbine would “not” reach a total or recovery temperature condition. These are not relevant arguments, because these same processes would occur had there been no wind turbine. What we are talking about here is the difference the wind turbine makes to the airflow, and any consequence this may have.
Finally, we come to the issue of “net effect.” My original comments were strictly in regard to the power generation process itself, not to the overall energy economy of which the process might be a part. Insofar as the process goes, it will reduce the heat energy being dissipated by the wind, and thus result in a lower air temperature than had the wind turbine not been there. That is the point of contention, not whether the subsequent uses of electrical power result in heat dissipation.
Don’t take my word for this; read the text by Liepman and Roshko for a good introduction to gas flow thermodynamics. The moderator has my permission to forward you my home e-mail address if you would prefer to continue this offline (since we are probably talking over most everyone’s heads at this point).
Best wishes,
–MJD