I have not read this book, but it has been raising some volume in Skeptic websites. What strikes me is the number of authors, it has (9 by my count).
Strangely, one of the authors, Oliver K. Manuel, is a person I’ve banned from WUWT for carpet bombing threads with his vision of the Iron Sun Theory, which I personally think is nutty. So, that right there gives me some pause. But, I haven’t read the book, so it may have nothing to do with that. OTOH, he’s one of the most well mannered commenters you’ll ever find.
The main thrust of the book seems to be discovering what they say is a flaw in understanding and accounting for 13C/12C isotopes within carbon dioxide, and this then points to a different signature related to human produced CO2.
Over at Climate Change Dispatch, they have this to say about it:
Newly released science book revelation is set to heap further misery on UN global warming researchers. Will latest setback derail Cancun Climate conference?
Authors of a new book ‘Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory’ claim they have debunked the widely established greenhouse gas theory climate change. In the first of what they say will be a series of sensational statements to promote the launch of their book, they attack a cornerstone belief of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – what is known as the “carbon isotope argument.”
Mišo Alkalaj, is one of 24 expert authors of this two-volume publication, among them are qualified climatologists, prominent skeptic scientists and a world leading math professor. It is Alkalaj’s chapter in the second of the two books that exposes the fraud concerning the isotopes 13C/12C found in carbon dioxide (CO2).
If true, the disclosure may possibly derail last-ditch attempts at a binding international treaty to ‘halt man-made global warming.’ At minimum the story will be sure to trigger a fresh scandal for the beleaguered United Nations body.
Do Human Emissions of Carbon Dioxide Exhibit a Distinct Signature?
The low-key internal study focused on the behavior of 13C/12C isotopes within carbon dioxide (CO2) molecules and examined how the isotopes decay over time. Its conclusions became the sole basis of claims that ‘newer’ airborne CO2 exhibits a different and thus distinct ‘human signature.’ The paper was employed by the IPCC to give a green light to researchers to claim they could quantify the amount of human versus natural proportions just from counting the number of isotopes within that ‘greenhouse gas.’
Alkalaj, who is head of Center for Communication Infrastructure at the “J. Stefan” Institute, Slovenia says because of the nature of organic plant decay, that emits CO2, such a mass spectrometry analysis is bogus. Therefore, it is argues, IPCC researchers are either grossly incompetent or corrupt because it is impossible to detect whether carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is of human or organic origin.
…
The 13C/12C argument being attacked by Mišo Alkalaj may be found in IPCC’s AR4 – The Physical Science Basis Working Group. The IPCC clarifies its position on Page 139 of that chapter.
According to Miso the fatal assumption made by the IPCC is that the atmospheric concentration of the 13C isotope (distinctive in prehistoric plants) are fixed. They also assume C3-type plants no longer exist so would need to be factored into the equations. Indeed, as Miso points out such plants, “make up 95% of the mass of all current plant life.”
Therefore, decay of 95% of present-day plant material is constantly emitting the 13C-deficient carbon dioxide supposedly characteristic of coal combustion—and CO2 emitted by plant decay is an order of magnitude greater than all human-generated emissions.
…
From Amazon.com:
Even before publication, Slaying the Sky Dragon was destined to be the benchmark for future generations of climate researchers. This is the world’s first and only full volume refutation of the greenhouse gas theory of man-made global warming.
Nine leading international experts methodically expose how willful fakery and outright incompetence were hidden within the politicized realm of government climatology. Applying a thoughtful and sympathetic writing style, the authors help even the untrained mind to navigate the maze of atmospheric thermodynamics. Step-by-step the reader is shown why the so-called greenhouse effect cannot possibly exist in nature.
By deft statistical analysis the cornerstones of climate equations – incorrectly calculated by an incredible factor of three – are exposed then shattered.
This volume is a scientific tour de force and the game-changer for international environmental policymakers as well as being a joy to read for hard-pressed taxpayers everywhere.
==============================================================
There is also a kindle version available on Amazon.com.
At this point I can’t recommend the book from either a pro or con perspective, I’m just making it known to WUWT readers.
C3 plants are believed to compose 95% of all green plants and 75% of terrestrial green plants. They are characterized by intolerance to heat and drought. C3 plants were the first to evolve with C4 plants believed to have evolved “recently” about 30 million years ago.
I know there were some real boners produced by IPCC but I seriously doubt one so egregious as C3 plants being extinct (or even in a minority) is one those. When you see one huge error such as this in a book it casts doubt on the rest of it.
While it’s probably not fair to judge a book by its cover the fact is that life is short and there more books worth reading than there is time to read them. So we take shortcuts in separating the wheat from the chaff. While an occasional grain of wheat might be cast aside in this way the net result is still a much improved ratio of wheat to chaff in what remains after the initial cut.
So I’m going to take a pass on this book due to too many red flags on the face of it.
That said, I never did agree that a fossil fuel signature could be sorted out of the carbon cycle. However, we’re still left with a very compelling correlation in that humans have been emitting a significant amount of CO2 into the atmosphere and the atmosphere’s CO2 content has increased by roughly half of the man-made contribution. As a working proposition that correlation is compelling enough to make it the de-facto assumption until either proven false or a better explanation is presented.
re post by: Bill Marsh says: November 30, 2010 at 8:04 am
I hope to heck that ALL Universities teaching science
offer workteach a very heavy dose of ‘Skeptical Science’ in each and every science course. They darned well ought to be. Those that aren’t, are perverting those they teach and contributing to the downfall of any continuing scientific progress.Sorry, I just HAD to say it. It’s gotten to be a bit of a pet peeve of mine, in that any scientist, rather by definition, has to be skeptical, has to be a skeptic. So, we get tangled up in what has rather grossly become the common meaning of a ‘climate science skeptic’ and a ‘skeptical scientist’ rather than being able to use the meaning of the words correctly. Then we toss the whole ‘post normal science’ abomination on top of it…. and I have no idea how many ‘scientists’ and universities or university departments actually adhere to or believe that cr*p – I hope very few, but we sure see it in some of the top ‘climate scientists’ today, and frankly that’s scary to me because it’s so antithetical to science itself. And the ‘skeptic’ label as it’s being used seems mired in or born of that quagmire somehow too…
So, every time I see something like “he’s a climate scientist, not a skeptic” I just wanna scream, if he’s not skeptical about current scientific work, if he’s not a skeptic, he’s not a scientist!!
So, Bill, I hope you’ll forgive me — its not your fault the terminology wound up being used as it is, and I know this wasn’t what you were meaning. Plus my venting about it isn’t likely to make a bit of difference. It just drives me crazy, especially when I see scientists themselves claiming to not be skeptics or that sort of thing — I guess because in part that terminology presupposes that being skeptical isn’t a crucial, integral part of using the tool of science itself, of actually being a scientist.
I can’t help but have the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that this whole thing just inadvertently teaches more and more people ideas that are dead wrong base concepts about the very nature of science itself and what it means to be a good scientist. Especially disturbing considering the large number of kids seeing and participating in this debate online in our most digital age. And yet, with the common usage as it is, how does one discuss various aspects of AGW now without falling into that very trap? It’s possible of course, but awkward and difficult all the way around, and typically far easier to just give in to the common usage. Sigh. /rant /soapbox
Speaking of compelling correlations between hard data sets the average temperature of the earth is demonstrably about 40C higher than an airless rock.
Two separate Apollo missions deployed experiments to measure the thermal conductivity of lunar regolith. Both experiments were deployed in mid-latitude locations of average lunar albedo. Both experiments, which continued to transmit data for several years, revealed that at depths of 1 meter or more all temperature variation ceased and was a constant -23C year-round. So when an airless rock with an albedo of about 15% is positioned 93 million miles from the sun its average temperature at equilibrium is about -23C. Talk about blackbodies and Stephan-Boltzman and so forth all you want but if your calculation for a 15% albedo rock 93 million miles from the sun doesn’t come out to -23C equilibrium temperature your calculation is wrong.
Now we get to the earth. The average albedo of the earth is less well known than that of the moon but it’s almost always given to be in the range of 30% to 40%. Various GCMs use this range as a fudge factor – a “constant” in the model that can be tweaked to any value between 30% and 40% to get the most agreement between model output and historic observational data.
Anyhow, the earth’s albedo is certainly close to twice as great as the moon’s and perhaps more than twice. Inarguably then the earth should have a much lower average temperature than the moon. Yet the earth’s average temperature is far higher than the moon. We can rule out internal heat (that of formation and radioisotope decay) as the culprit because the rate of escape of that heat is insignificant compared to heating from the sun. The reason it’s so insignificant is that rocks are excellent insulators – the earth’s crust insulates the heat of the core from the cold (3 degrees above absolute zero) of outer space. That leaves us with ocean and atmosphere as somehow raising the average temperature of the earth well in excess of 40C above what it would be if it were a dry airless rock with an albedo of 30%.
If someone has an explanation for that higher surface temperature of the earth other than so-called greenhouse effect I’d love to hear it because so far over the course of the last five years in which I’ve taken a keen interest in
global warmingclimate changeglobal climate disruption I’ve yet to see it.**The average surface temperature of the earth over the past few million years of ice age conditions is approximately 4C which is about 12C below the current measured average. I say this because if the ocean were well-mixed its temperature would be 4C – only a shallow surface layer is warmer than that while the vast bulk of the global ocean (90% of its volume) lies below the thermocline at a relatively constant 3C.
The big and largely the only mystery as far as I’m concerned is why the calculated effect of the increase in greenhouse gases (which is fundamental experimentally verified physics known for close to 200 years and proven 150 years ago by John Tyndall) since the beginning of the industrial revolution is a 2C rise in average temperature and the best estimate of actual rise is between 0.5C and 1.0C. There’s a whole bunch of missing heat and it’s a travesty that climate boffins on the warmist bandwagon can’t explain it. I remain pretty convinced that the explanation is largely in the water cycle which through evaporation, convection, and condensation is moving most of the extra greenhouse contribution far above the surface and also where convective currents in both air and ocean are transporting most of the excess heat away from the equator to the poles where it is more easily radiated out to space. Heat takes the path of least resistance. Convective transport of water from surface to cloud carrying massive amounts of energy in the form of latent heat of vaporization is a path of least resistance where the water cycle is very active.
If anyone wants to get a handle on the percentage of the CO2 content of the atmosphere which arises from the burning of fossil fuels then using C_13/C_12 ratios is a clueless way to go. The whole situaiton is far too complicated to lead to even half decent conclusions. It is far better to use C_14/C_12 ratios which are useable back to some 50,000 years ago. The reason why this is so is because there is NO C_14 in fossil fuels since C_14 is radioactive and has a half life of about 5,730 years. Having set up the first radiocarbkn dating laboratory in Africa I am only too well aware that the burning of fossil fules has thus diluted the percentage of C_14 in the atmosphere. However, from the figures I have seen the AGW fanatics would not be pleased with the results which point to a much smaller fossil fuel CO2 component in the atmosphere than they would like.
Rational Debate says:
November 30, 2010 at 11:52 am
re; importance of scientists being skeptics
Like most things skepticism works best in moderation. If every scientist began his work being skeptical of things like the acceleration of gravity, water expanding when it freezes, and so forth then they’d spend all their time re-confirming fundamental knowledge and no time discovering anything new. But if they were skeptical of nothing then there would also be little progress – we’d still be talking about phlogiston and epicycles!
So we’re left with a fuzzy term for what the scientist should hold to – a healthy amount of skepticism. I daresay the climate boffins on the warmist bandwagon hold and unhealthy dearth of skepticism and those persons who think the greenhouse effect is fundamentally wrong (insulators don’t insulate) have an unhealthy excess of skepticism.
The isotopes of carbon are so totally irrelevant for the question of CO2 emissions.
We can simply calculate how much carbon is being added by the industrial and related activity. It’s as simple as measuring how much water you drink every day. Whether there is C12 or C13 or C14 in it is irrelevant. They have the same chemical – and greenhouse – properties because these properties are determined by the electrons, not by the neutrons. After all, the carbon of all isotopes is being used and recycled all the time.
The “extra” CO2 in the atmosphere is not composed of the “same atoms” that were once emitted by humans. The CO2 atoms may have circulated several times. It’s still true that the CO2 concentration would be lower if we didn’t produce it.
Every year, we produce the equivalent of CO2 that would raise the concentration by 4 ppm per year. One half of it, about 1.8 ppm, is indeed added to the concentration, while the rest, 2.1 ppm, is absorbed by the oceans and biosphere. Because the concentration is higher than the 280 ppm equilibrium value, the processes consuming CO2 are strengthened, which adds to reduction of CO2. At this moment, only about 50% of our “emissions” are being abruptly absorbed. Clearly, this percentage would grow higher if the concentration were higher, or if the emissions were lower.
None of these things has any impact on the CO2 warming effects – which are small and surely independent of the isotopic composition of the carbon.
Iron Sun Theory is just nutty. At least the surface layers of the Sun clearly don’t contain any significant iron as can be seen via spectroscopy. About 0.1% of the solar mass is iron, just type a simple Wolfram Alpha query
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=amount+of+iron+in+sun
It’s pretty difficult to run nuclear reactions all the way to iron – which has the biggest binding energy per nucleus, being “most stable” in this sense. That’s why there’s not too much iron in the stars yet. It may change in future stars in a few billion years. But claiming that the surface of the Sun is mostly iron etc. is just nutty – a kind of medieval pseudoscience.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
quote
The deep oceans have a d13C level of about 0 to 1 ‰
unquote
Is that dissolved or is there a solid component? While CaCO3 dissolves below a certain depth, are there components of the solid fall-out which do not dissolve at depth? Does the calcium carbonate fall-out of plankton all get dissolved?
quote
“a release of methane which is being eaten by methanophages. Result, more light carbon CO2.”
Even despite methanophages, that would increase the methane levels, but that hardly is the case for the past decade…
unquote
http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2008/04/gloomy_emissions_data_shows_me.html has a neat graph up to 2008.
I’ve seen several ‘the sky is falling’ assertions that methane levels are rising.
At what temperature do deep sea bacteria begin to consume clathrates?
JF
Thanks for your helpful and educated posts.
(and, BTW, I notice that you make no allowance for the fact that the seasonal isotopic variations may not be consistent — C4, CAM and C4-like plants will confuse the figures.)
Dave Springer says:
“If someone has an explanation for that higher surface temperature of the earth other than so-called greenhouse effect I’d love to hear it because so far over the course of the last five years in which I’ve taken a keen interest in global warming climate change global climate disruption I’ve yet to see it. ”
Try the simple concept of heat storage by the air and (especially) water, since sunlight can penetrate these materials, unlike the case of the moon. The new book which is the topic of this post has some very thoughtful ideas on why the “greenhouse effect” may not make sense. Can you refute all these ideas?
Luboš Motl,
You’re one of the few that I have deep respect.
Please do not give ideas.
exemplo,
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/231/4737/488.abstract
Imagine,
Energy balance may need to add the term related to nuclear magnetic resonance.
I’m seeing the extra confusion.
I am sure that the system may be the most complicated.
One day I’ll ask Lubos.
About,
Ilya Prigogine
Dave Springer says:
November 30, 2010 at 11:38 am
“So I’m going to take a pass on this book due to too many red flags on the face of it. ”
Me too. Why this focus on that iron sun stuff?
As one of the co-authors of Slaying the Sky Dragon let me say, that I find a wide range of ‘settled’ science to be dubious. I was always duboius of the fusion ball of Hydrogen hypothesis for the Sun and found Dr Manuels complete series on Neutron Repulsion, Solar System Orgins and Solar Neutron Repulsion to be very compelling. My book one & book two chapters deal with a wide range of Earth science which is unconventional including Earth’s magnetism, Aboigentic Oil, Carbon Isotope anomolies, all the result of study into the undervalued Earth fission process. Some of these concepts are being introduced for debate for the first time and are offered with no claim as settled science. The delayed and denied debate over climate change has opened an entirely new line of reasoning for all future science. We should be grateful for the varying perspectives while we work to sort out their merits. All of the material in this book deserves that same consideration. I welcome informed debate over all my hypothesis presented in the Sky Dragon and posted in articles at thousands of websites. This is what ‘true’ science should be.
John F. Hultquist says:
“Margaret Ball says: “ the writing is . . . ”
Nutty ! ?”
I said clunky, not nutty, John. I’ll leave it to physicists to decide which of the many ideas being thrown around in this book have merit and which are merely mixed nuts.
It’s passages like these that annoy me:
“Consensus was a major argument in support of the claim that humans were the primary cause of global warming almost from the inception of the IPCC. It was coincident because it was the people involved with the IPCC that was the consensus.”
I don’t have any quarrel with the assertion that the oft-cited “consensus” is an artifact of the IPPC’s charter, personnel, and process. But the second sentence above is a crime against the English language, and I’m getting tired of mentally rewriting sentences like that as I read through the book.
And this one.
“Rare among compounds, is the fact that water exists in all three phases in our natural environment.”
Or how about this:
“There is largely ignored evidence that the past atmosphere was vastly different than today’s by comparing winged flight.”
By the way, the Kindle informs me that I am now 72% of the way through the book, and the subject of carbon isotopes has yet to come up. Maybe that’s what’s in the mystery PDF file.
Anthony,
I agree with both those posters who have found Oliver Manuel a polite and gentlemanly poster and those who have found him something of a distracting nuisance in scientific threads.
Could I suggest a solution? First, send Oliver a link to detailed instructions as to starting his own blog. Second, in the blog list at the right of the content here, create a new category — “Fringe” or the like — to include his blog and those promoting electrical universe and whatnot, and offer him a prominent place in this list. We skeptics differ sociologically (or perhaps psychologically) from the dogmatic Left mostly in that we are willing to listen to anything, but reserve our right to dismiss it as nonsense.
Nutty ideas deserve a hearing. They do not deserve acceptance. And I have to say that the whole CO2-driven AGW business struck me as nutty two decades ago and I am horrified to see the environmental and economic destruction it has wrought. We all here believe in freedom of thought and the general Internet philosophy of “say whatever you want, I’ll either pay attention or I won’t, depending on how convincing I find you.”
But I do find flat banning somewhat beneath the scientific dignity of WUWT, even though I have (I confess) begun to automatically skip over Mr. Manuel’s comments on other blogs.
The interesting question(s) here is whether or not there actually is a distinguishable difference in the isotope fingerprints between fossil fuel burning and volcanic CO2… and whether or not we actually know just how much CO2 is being leaked out daily from these thousands upon thousands of volcanoes both on land and at the bottom of the oceans… and whether or not oxygen depletion can actually be used as a viable process to determine the manmade signature since its still not fully understood whether or not volcanic CO2 consumes O2 in its processes and/or how much is or isn’t consumed.
Is anyone able to answer those questions with a high degree of confidence and the substantial evidence to back it up ?
Based on that thought process, it may very well turn out that the fossil fuel burning isotope signature is much much smaller than what has been assumed. On the other hand, it may turn out that it’s larger than what has been assumed.
So books like these are a welcome, as they put the spotlight back on to unanswered questions and push for further scientific research to be conducted in order to substantiate and backup the established assumptions.
jae:
Start with the book I linked to.
ScientistForTruth says:
November 30, 2010 at 9:22 am
“Molten metal is hugely lossy due to eddy current flow. Who says that an arbitrarily low initial field can be amplified? References please, not bald assertions.”
I have no interest in argument by authority. And you should note that the original amplification is happening in plasma, not metal. If the dynamo does have the form of a self-exciting system (I do not know whether that is the case) then it will be able to amplify an arbitrarily low field. Field strengths are proportional to the induced currents, and induced currents and voltages are proportional to the field strengths and velocity; thus the induced power goes as the square of the current, as do the losses; so the loss ratio is independent of field strength (assuming constant resistivity). In a metal core, since losses scale with the square of the current, the temperature will increase with field strength, and since resistivity increases with temperature, the loss ratio will also increase with temperature. Thus such a self-exciting system would actually work better the lower the magnetic field.
“One nanotesla? Well, I’d be surprised if you can do a lot with that. And what’s all this about condensation to give fields of 1000 teslas? That sounds like poppycock. Have you discovered magnetic monopoles then?”
The magnetic field is frozen into the ionised medium; if the gas cloud becomes more compact, under the influence of gravity (the mechanism by which stars and planets are formed) the magnetic field will be compressed with it. The density ratio from interstellar medium to star is ~1e24, so even if the excess heat were all radiated away during the collapse, so that the temperature did not rise, the magnetic energy density (scaling as the square of the field) would increase by the same factor. Deep within the cloud, where the temperature does rise during the condensation process, the magnetic field will be even stronger.
Margaret Ball at 2:46
Yes, I used the word nutty not you, because I wanted to subtly indicate that I supported Anthony’s use of the word regarding the theory of the iron sun.
The “Thank you” was for your comments on the book. Others seem not to have noticed that the post was about a book and not about specific scientific issues.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Luboš Motl says: 1:08
You make good sense. I suspect that you always do, even though I’m not always able to follow all you do and write about on “the reference frame.”
Mosh: I could probably even WRITE that book, but I would not believe what I wrote 🙂
I’ve been looking up some of Oliver Manuel’s work. I don’t believe it is as nutty as its strangeness might make it appear. That by no means means I believe him, but he has a huge track record of publications in real science journals (meaning not climate ‘science’ ones).
If you want to see a very surprising movie, take a look at:
http://www.thesurfaceofthesun.com/images/The%20Surface%20Of%20The%20Sun_0001.wmv
which appears to show something quite solid rotating as a single object, and would seem to be incompatible with the idea of the Sun as a ball of plasma or gas.
I’m not saying he’s right. I’m not saying he hasn’t blotted his copybook here by going on about his theory to excess, but I am saying that as far as his research goes, it has rationale and he isn’t a crackpot.
Craig said, “Nutty ideas deserve a hearing. They do not deserve acceptance.”
In my ideal world, nutty ideas are not given advertising space. At the most, they should be confined to the back pages of comic books.
That said, nutty ideas have been known to hold accepted, “consensus”, status. So, while I tire of the posts that seem oblivious to the fact they are beating a dead dog, we must accept the notion that all ideas MUST be made public and the underlying data and analysis provided to us, the consumers. And yes, we the reading public, are the consumers of scientific inquiries and discoveries. We have a right to know what you are up to in your Ivory Towers.
My only concern with all this is calling someone with an alternative theory “nutty”. We should welcome discussion on alternative scientific theories and if they are found to not be scientifically viable then we move on but if any scientist that tries to challenge “established” science gets called a “nut”, it discourages future scientists from attempting to challenge any aspect of science in general. I’ve personally never had a problem with Dr. Manuel as he simply wishes to discuss and argue his theory.
His theory was also widely reported in the media,
Sun Is Mostly Iron, Not Hydrogen, Professor Says (Science Daily, January 9, 2002)
Scientist: Sun composed mostly of iron (CNN, July 23, 2002)
“”””” Robert Wykoff says:
November 29, 2010 at 8:24 pm
Sounds interesting, will pick it up. Question, though…why is it nutty to believe the core of the sun has a significant amount of Iron? There is a significant amount of Iron in earths core. A great deal of the asteroids are made of Iron. Why wouldn’t a great deal of them have impacted the sun? It would help explain why the sun has a strong magnetic field. I’m just curious. “””””
Well if the sun did gather up iron meteoroids, they presumably would gravitate towards the solar core; although I don’t know that. But in any case; that iron would not result in any magnetic effects; well any ferromagnetic effects anyway, since the solar temperatures are way above the curie Temperature at which ferromagnetism in iron disappears completely.
Solar magnetic fields are electromagnetic fields generated by flowing electric charges; as in any plasma. You don’t need iron to get magnetic fields, in fact you can get a damn side more powerful magnetic field by getting rid of the iron; or any other ferro-magnetic material.
The University of Canberra (I think) built a proton Synchrotron that was half the diameter of the Bevatron (berserkeley); and they achieved that (Prof Marcus Oliphant) by simply getting rid of the iron core and its 15,000 or so Gauss limiting saturation magnetic field. They simply wound a copper wire core and put a lot of current through it with no iron. The coil only had two turns, but those wires were a foot in diameter; assembled from parallel strands, that were about one square inch cross-section each. To stop the wires from blowing apart due to mutual repulsion, those two wires were embedded in aluminum plates that were about 4 ft square to provide hoop strength to the wires,. Well the two wires actually overlapped like a partial eclipse sort of arrangement; and since the current went in opposite directions in the two turns there was no current in the3 overlap section at all; so they left those strands out, since they were not needed to carry zero current. That gave them a nice little hole around the magnet coils into which they placed the beam vacuum tube. So the two opposing currents provided a parallel field that was perpendicular to the plane of the two wires, to keep the protons or whatever going in a circle.
It took a little bit of power to run up that magnetic field; like eight hundred Volts at six million Amps or 4.8 gigaWatts peak power. This was generated by a faraday disc generator with two sets of counterrotating pairs of plates that were all connected in series from edge to next center and so on so they got 200 Volts per disk. Of course it takes some weird brushes to make contact with a large rotating disk that is about a foot thick, and I think some eight feet or so in diameter. So they used liquid sodium streams to make both the brush contacts and also the on-off switch.
The wound up the two disks counter-rotating with a few horse power electric motors; and then they turned on the sodium to make the electrical connection. Of course when they did that, those disks came to a screeching halt. If they hadn’t used counter-rotating disks that rapid stop would probably have turned the whole building over. Well of course the inductive kick back from that two turn coil then started to wind up the disks in the opposite direction to store the unused energy from the first jolt, and then the electric motors wound them back up to speed. While the kickback and wind up was being done, they reversed the polarity of the power to the magnetic field coils that powered the Faraday disks; so that with the reversed field, and reversed rotation they generated the same polarity output pulse next time.
So you don’t need iron to get a powerful magnetic field. This scheme was so outrageous, that Prof Olophant was able to con somebody into funding the thing; even though some of his colleagues thought it was a huge boondoggle; well they referred to the contraption as the “White Oliphant.”
When I was in College (University), they already had the Faraday disk and Sodium liquid brush system working; and they were in the process of building up the copper wires and aluminum hoop strength plates.
Well I always knew that Australians were stark raving mad anyway; and that machine just proves it; but the damn thing worked.
Gentlemen,
when you talk about C13 and say it doesn’t decay, what happens to produce C13??? Did they actually say C13 decays??
‘George E. Smith says:
November 30, 2010 at 5:56 pm
Well I always knew that Australians were stark raving mad anyway; and that machine just proves it; but the damn thing woked.’
I would have loved to have been there when they turned it on.
Ron House says:
November 30, 2010 at 5:08 pm
which appears to show something quite solid rotating as a single object, and would seem to be incompatible with the idea of the Sun as a ball of plasma or gas.
If you look at Earth from space, the clouds in the gaseous atmosphere seem to rotate as if part of Earth.
he isn’t a crackpot.
That bit comes when you realize that he believes thousands of astrophysicists are part of a worldwide conspiracy to suppress and withhold data supporting hos theory, while at the same manufacturing false data in support for the ‘standard model’. Now, I grant you that many people believe the same about AGW…
Poptech says:
November 30, 2010 at 5:38 pm
We should welcome discussion on alternative scientific theories and if they are found to not be scientifically viable then we move on
Except that Manuel does not move on.