Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I had the great pleasure of being invited to give a presentation at the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (DDP) conference this weekend in Knoxville, Tennessee. It was a very interesting and professionally run conference, and I offer my thanks to Dr. Jane Orient 
for her invitation, and to her team for the doing endless logistic work that such a conference entails in a most efficient and nearly invisible manner.
The conference featured a host of fascinating speakers, and the city itself was most pleasant and interesting. I came with a stack of Powerpoint slides and a presentation on climate science. But then I thought “Wait a minute, these are doctors, not climate scientists”, and I ended up putting them aside and speaking for an hour with the main theme being the ancient medical admonition, “First do no harm”.
One of the first people I met carried around a portable CO2 meter. We were indoors at the reception dinner in a large banquet hall, and here is the CO2 concentration:
About 800 ppmv … it gave me a better understanding of why ground level CO2 is not necessarily a good measure of the background levels.
One of the best parts for me of such conferences is that I get a chance to meet my heroes. When I began studying climate science I soon identified the scientists that I thought were doing interesting and outstanding work … but I never imagined that I would meet them, much less get a chance to speak at a conference with them. Dr. Fred Singer, the dean of skeptics, was at the conference, and paid me the compliment of quoting some of my scientific results in his speech. I’ve met him several times before, he’ll be 90 this year, still sharp, still funny. I also got a chance to share a meal with Dr. Art Robinson, the originator of the Oregon Petition. He turns out to be a most interesting man, a PhD biochemist who is doing fascinating research on the diagnosis of the state of a persons health by using mass spectrometry to analyze the trace molecules in their urine. He was most complimentary, and said that my presentation was “absolutely perfect”. I felt quite honored.
It was a very eclectic collection of speakers, including a man whose work is the identification of the various types of ebola viruses, and the kinds of precautions necessary for dealing with the disease. He showed slides of him in Africa in a full moon suit, and spoke of how the hospitals often deal with the ebola patients without even gloves, because the hospitals are too poor to buy them and their stocks have run out in the current medical emergency. Given the recent and continuing ebola outbreak in Africa, it was most timely.
And unlike the ICCC9 conference where I spoke a few weeks ago and the talks were limited to twelve minutes (and unavoidably so given the number of noted speakers), we each got an hour to talk about our subject, which was a great boon.
I ended up speaking on how increases in the cost of energy for any reason are the most regressive tax imaginable. If you make very little money, for example, you pay no income tax. But the poorer you are, the larger a percentage of your expenses goes to energy costs (primarily heating, cooling, and transportation), and there is no exemption for those at the bottom of the heap. My message was, if you think CO2 is a problem, fine, but when you fight it first do no harm … and while increasing the price of energy is an inconvenience for many people, for the poorest of the poor it can mean impoverishment, sickness and death. So fight CO2 if you must, but if you increase energy prices to do it, you are actively harming the poor. I’ve requested the video of the speech, I’ll post it up on youtube when I get it. My speech stole shamelessly from my writings, and it’s nothing I haven’t said before, but it was the first time I’d put it into a one-hour speech. It was very well received.
In between sessions, I wandered around downtown Knoxville. It’s an old city, with a marvelous “Market Square”. Ironically, the huge building across the street is the offices of the TVA, the “Tennessee Valley Authority” which did so much to relieve poverty in the area by providing cheap electricity for the local people. The TVA building, fittingly, has a long lovely fountain symbolic of the renewable hydropower that the Authority provides …
There is also a display of old machinery in the foyer of the TVA building which you can see from outside. It’s all from the time when such machines were works of art. One that caught my eye was a “flyball governor”, first invented by James Watt of steam engine fame. As someone who holds that the climate is regulated not by feedback but by a governor system, it was of great interest, and is a stunning example of the genre:
When the pulley-driven wheel turns, the vertical shaft with the four steel balls (one unseen behind) suspended on flexible spring steel blades spins as well, and the balls are driven outwards by centripetal centrifugal force. This pulls the upper brass ring downwards against the adjustable tension of the spring at the upper right, and controls a valve which regulates the amount of energy entering the system … a most elegant version of an ancient design.
The Market Center is the showpiece and heart of the city. It’s a long open space, and every time I went there it was full of people and something was going on—jugglers, Shakespeare plays in an outdoor theatre …
.. a magician, people break dancing, newspaper sellers, a variety of street musicians, it went on and on. Outdoor cafes ring the Market Square, and the people of Knoxville have turned the outdoor cafe into an art form … now that’s outdoor eating in comfort.
There is only one statue in the square, and contrary to my expectation when I saw it from a distance, that it would be something honoring Civil War heroes, to my surprise it honors heroes of an entirely different kind:
One of the inscriptions on the pedestal was particularly moving …
” … the monstrous injustice of including educated women with felons and lunatics as persons denied the right of suffrage”, indeed. We forget the cost it took to purchase the rights and freedoms we take for granted.
Knowing that if you build a fountain kids will want to play in it, the Market Square also has a fountain specifically designed for kids, with benches nearby for the parents to watch the joy …
There is a museum on the corner of the square, featuring a complete reproduction of an apothecary shop, with reminders of how far medicine has advanced in the last 150 years.
The maids in the hotel who came in to clean my room were great. One was a very large black woman. When I told her I was there to give a speech, she said proudly “I just gave my very first speech myself”. I asked for the details, and she said it was at the drug rehab center where she used to live. I asked her what she’d told them. She said “I told them you can’t just sit around for the rest of your lives drawing government money and using it to buy drugs. You have to get up and stand up and make something out of your lives” … words to live by. She said the management of the rehab center wanted her to go speak to other groups, and I applauded her resolution to do so.
The next day another maid told me she’d been upset when she saw the word “Climate” on some paperwork in another guest’s room, she was all upset about the idea of a climate conference … but then she read a bit more and realized it was skeptics, not alarmists, and after that everything was fine again. So I guess the word is getting out.
One of the best parts of the conference was after it was all over. Everyone was eating dinner, when a loud buzzing went off all around the room, including on my hip. I looked at my phone … tornado alert, take shelter now. I’ve never lived in tornado country, so I followed the example of the locals in the hotel who did … well … nothing. It started pouring down rain, a torrential downpour, lots of wind. When that cleared, I went outside to look for the tornado. I walked up on the hill behind the hotel to get a good view. It’s part of a long ridge, and a sign said that during the war the Union troops (locally called “Federal troops”, I noted) erected ten forts with batteries of artillery during the siege of the town. I could see why, it overlooks the whole city. The sky was chaotic …
… but no sign of a tornado. As soon as I got back to the hotel, the rain and wind started up again, and in a half an hour it was dark, and the sky was full of lightning. I watched the storm from my 11th floor hotel window, I could see the window glass flexing in and out with the force of the gusts. And the lightning was everywhere, cloud to cloud, cloud to ground …
From the news tonight:
Tornadoes were also reported in Tennessee and West Virginia Sunday afternoon and evening. Just north of Knoxville, Tenn., near the Kentucky border, the Claiborne County emergency manager reported that 10 homes had been “completely destroyed.”
A most fitting end to a most diverse and interesting conference. Lightning and wind have picked up again as I write this, here’s the radar from my phone. Knoxville is the blue ball in the middle, the storm is moving southwards, and the lighting is getting amazing again.
Anyhow, that was my weekend. My thanks again to the DDP for putting on a good show. After three hours sleep I’ll fly out tomorrow at 4:35 AM, home for one day to see the good lady, and then off again Wednesday to Vancouver Island, where I’m signed on as first mate on a fishing boat delivery to southern Oregon.
My best to all, keep up the struggle, I’ll post when and as I can.
w.
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I’m so sad I can’t do formatting.
[Fixed. -w.]
“centripetal”?
Richard
Yes, I know and have written of this Alexandria example. I should have said a working example from the ‘modern’ age.
Mind you I could never actually find any evidence that the ancient one was actually built and worked-a bit like some of Galileo’s ahead of their time inventions. There were some very interesting Greek and Roman inventions that seem to have then disappeared for a thousand years. Did you see that programme about the ‘computer’ found on the sea bed dating from the Greeks?
Hope its not been too hot for you. Thankfully, it seems to have cooled off somewhat today.
tonyb
Hi Willis,
As Pete in Cumbria points out, a handheld CO2 meter will over-read if several people are looking at it, as they are also likely to be exhaling towards it. I use the same machine as in the picture mostly for checking indoor airflows and confined workspaces, but they can be useful outside as well, eg picking up the CO2 surge that occurs after sunset when photosynthesis shuts down. I had mine on a discussion table once when I was being dressed down by a hyperventilating warmista. I cheated a bit by setting the alarm to trigger at 1000 instead of the usual 2000, as I couldn’t place it directly in front of the person. It wasn’t long before it went off. Exhaled breath is about 4% CO2 eg 40,000 ppm.
Probably more if you are physically fit, have a high metabolic rate, or (as in this case) are steamed up.
You can buy an AZ-0001 from http://www.co2meter.com (CO2Meter Inc in Florida).
In a mid-1980s visit to Knoxville, I did business at Oak Ridge, which had a magnificent Science museum where you could buy a graphite brick souvenir from one of the early nuclear reactors. They also had a copy of the Great Scientific American Paper Airplane Book, an example of which is now with a grandchild.
The joy seems to have gone from advanced engineers toying around with paper airplanes. The importance of peaceful nuclear power is declining. Scientific fun, in general, no longer seems as fashionable as I recall from those times. I used to have a one inch metal cube containing an isotope of plutonium, for use as a paperweight and for scaring Greens, until some Government killjoy took it from me.
So, Willis, it was good to hear of your speech because I suspect that it had the ability to bring some salient points back to the limelight.
But did you visit ORNL?
Geoff
Willis said:
” … and while increasing the price of energy is an inconvenience for many people, for the poorest of the poor it can mean impoverishment, sickness and death. So fight CO2 if you must, but if you increase energy prices to do it, you are actively harming the poor.”
______________________
Many could say that you have just spotlighted the hidden agenda of the chief architects of the concept of cAGW.
Wilis wrote, ” [ … ]the hospitals often deal with the ebola patients without even gloves, because the hospitals are too poor to buy them and their stocks have run out in the current medical emergency.”
There is no shortage of gloves in the US food service/restaurant industry. Make one $5 sub sandwich and send another pair of gloves to the landfill. Mis-allocation of resources.
Willis: “Actually, you make the distinction quite neatly. A governor is not feedback. It is a system which controls the amount of feedback, which can be either positive or negative as needed … or in your words, a governor is not feedback, it is a feedback controller …”
You are now descending into semantics. When I say feedback controller, I mean it is a controller that works via a feedback mechanism not that it is a controller of feedback and there not the feedback itself.
As I understand your proposition, the emergent phenomena, tropical storms, is triggered by local hotspots and cause local cooling. The timing and number of TS are a response to local SST and provide a negative feedback to any changes in SST ” either positive or negative as needed “.
There is nothing in that descriptions which indicates whether the regional effect is linear or non-linear feedback but it is a negative feedback. I suspect that, like the Watt’s governor, it may well be a non-linear negative feedback.
That seems a reasonable proposition.
What I still don’t see is what point you are trying to make and why tropical climate should be thought of as being controlled by a governor and not a feedback.
Is it because you are ( incorrectly ) interpreting “a feedback” to mean linear feedback and you want to say that TS are stronger than a linear feedback?
PS don’t confuse the internal processes of TS which contain strong _positive_ feedbacks, bounded by negative feedbacks, with the net regional effect of TS on SST which is certainly a negative feedback.
The non-linearity of TS processes opens the possibility that they may have an overall non-linear effect but does not guarantee that is the case. I think my volcano stacks do indicate a non-linear negative feedback, perhaps better modelled as a PID controller, as I said above.
Joe Born,
“Centripetal” is correct. More correctly it would be “Centripetal Acceleration,” not centripetal force. It means “away from the center.” If you swing a rock on a string, your hand experiences this centripetal acceleration as a pull, stronger as you swing the rock faster. Acceleration is how anything moves in a circle! Gravity is also an acceleration, not a force.
A governor is a feedback controller. “Feedback” is such an imprecise word, most should research carefully before using it. Climate models assume that rising temperatures produce more atmospheric water vapor, which then produces more atmospheric heat, which would them produce even more atmospheric water vapor. In other words, a little CO2 makes water vapor increase itself! Pretty dubious reasoning, easily disproved by eons of CO2 concentration an order of magnitude above present-day, with no runaway water-vapor-driven heating.
Our tax dollars at work…
climatereason:
Tony:
Thankyou for your reply to me at July 28, 2014 at 3:12 am.
I was aware of the Antikythera device before the good TV program. Derek de Solla Price at Yale studied the device in the 1950s and I have tried to follow the matter since then.
A few years after the Antikythera ship sank, Cicero (106-43 BC, a Roman lawyer) wrote saying Poseidonus (a philosopher) who was his teacher and his friend had “recently made a globe which in its revolutions shows the movements of the Sun, the planets, and the stars as they appear in the sky by day and by night”. And Cicero noted that Archimedes had developed an earlier model that “imitated the movements of heavenly bodies”. There have been suggestions that the Antikythera device is actually that of Archimedes.
Returning to the many inventions of Hero of Alexandria. I am astonished that this great genius is known to so few. His many inventions were made in the first century AD and include
the hypodermic syringe,
the fire engine,
the coin operated slot machine
the automatic door,
the steam turbine,
the suspension of a ball in a flow of gas (steam) by using Bernoulli’s principle,
many automata including automatic theaters,
a variety of surveying instruments,
and much more.
Richard
Brad says:
July 27, 2014 at 10:51 pm
Willis,
Great report, thanks.
Was a little confused on your comment about TVA, here is a link to their 2012 fuel mix: http://www.tva.com/power/nuclear/pdf/Nuclear_White_Paper.pdf
This is a good example of the basic problem with all renewables. You have to have a power supply when your source doesn’t cooperate with you. Too much or too little wind, sun light or water to meet your current demand is a major problem. Hydropower does have one advantage over the others. You can store your power source when you don’t need it and dump it when you have too much. However, there is a limit to both of these options and it can get quit tricky and expensive either way. I worked with TVA River Scheduling for years and could sense their anguish whenever they had to spill water rather than passing it through the turbines. It’s kind of like throwing money away because you don’t have room for it in your wallet.
It’s so simple and almost everyone has heard it and knows what it means. First, do no harm.
Not only does this apply to necessarily skyrocketing energy prices but also to bird and bat chopping windmills. First do no harm.
I think I’ll start every conversation with warmists with this concept from now on.
Michael Moon says:
“Centripetal” is correct. Willis: “and the balls are driven outwards by centripetal force. It means “away from the center.”
Duh. Centrifugal ( fuge mean flight : fleeing from the centre ) centripetal means towards the centre. So Willis’ phrase saying ” driven outwards by centripetal force” is a clear contradiction in terms. That is a bit of knit-pick, which Joe quietly flagged, but you are flat out wrong.
The inertial reaction to the centripetal force of the rods constraining the balls to a circular motion is the centrifugal force. It is the cosine of the centrifugal force that pulls against the spring and which displaces the control valve.
It is the centripetal force ( resultant force of the tension in the upper and lower rods ) that constrains the balls to a circular motion, despite their heartfelt wish to carry on in a straight line in due obedience of Newton’s laws of motion.
I think centrifugal force drives the balls out and the springs on the balls provide the centripetal force.
[Thanks, fixed. -w.]
MMoon: “Pretty dubious reasoning, easily disproved by eons of CO2 concentration an order of magnitude above present-day, with no runaway water-vapor-driven heating.”
Wrong again. There is no reason why one component of the system cannot be a positive feedback, that does not mean the whole system is unstable. There is a mixture of +/ve and -/ve feedbacks, the dominant one being the Plank feedback.
The relative magnitude of the others determines just _how_ negative the overall result is and _how_ stable/unstable ie. sensitive the system is.
Large water vapour feedbacks would increase the sensitivity and reduce the stability.
That is what the debate is about. It is not a black and white / positive vs negative issue.
Equally you can have +ve f/b once a TS is triggered, that keep it going even once the initial heat that triggered it is removed. That means that it could be a non linear negative f/b on SST.
That makes tropical climate _less_ sensitive to radiative forcing and ( potentiall ) more stable than a linear neg. f/b
Greg Goodman says:
July 28, 2014 at 3:48 am
If one takes the aggregate effect of the individual T-storms around the Intertroptical Convergence Zone, the result is certainly a governing function. A lot like multiple changes in the flexible mirror telescopes which continually compensate for atmospheric fluctuations. Willis has stated repeatedly regarding emergent phenomina, they are definitely non-linear. A dust devil is just rising air, but maybe not…
Brad says:
” Was a little confused on your comment about TVA”
The TVA started out primarily hydroelectric:
http://www.tva.com/abouttva/history.htm
Watauga Lake (A TVA Reservoir) is one of the most beautiful places in the world. I’ve pulled a 6 pound smallmouth out of that lake and a friend of mine (RIP) still holds the state lake trout record that he caught there. I don’t get there near often enough but it tops the charts for best vacation destinations for me. The lake still generates electricity as it has since the late 1940’s when it brought much needed power to the area.
Richard
The Antikythera is fascinating, thanks f9or the additional insights.
It just makes you wonder where the Ancients might have ended up with their technology if;
1) They were’nt continually fighting wars, sickness etc
2) They had more time to develop the materials and parallel technologies that many inventions need.
When I was in Pakistan years ago I bought in a shop something roughly similar to the Antikythera that had been made locally and they were churning out for the tourist trade.
I had no idea of its likely provenance at the time and whilst I had it for years it seems to have got lost after a number of house moves.
tonyb
An acoustic guitar man and not even a mention of Bristol, “Birthplace of Country Music”??? Jimmy Rodgers, Uncle Charlie Osborne, the Carter Family and Tennessee Ernie Ford.
Thunder Valley, Bristol Motor Speedway night race is next month, party!!! You can always find a non scalped, sometimes even reduced ticket somewhere.
Goodman,
Touchy, touchy. Center Fly, Center Pull, what does it all mean? So you suggest that water vapor could indeed increase itself in the atmosphere? You will never be MY financial advisor…
800 ppm CO2.
Wonder what the O2 level was?
Just curious.
Greg Goodman, please take this as gentle admonition: your numerous posts are bordering on trolling. You know a lot, but it’s not necessary to nit-pick details in the comments of others. Please dial it back a little. At this point I just have to skip over you comments. I’d like to read and learn from them but it’s too much. And no need for a reply, I won’t respond.
“But the poorer you are, the larger a percentage of your expenses goes to energy costs (primarily heating, cooling, and transportation), and there is no exemption for those at the bottom of the heap.”
There is a rule of thumb that serves as a guide to social behaviour:
If the cost of energy reaches 20% of a low income family’s expenditure, they start to switch fuels. (That may apply across the board regardless of income – maybe worth investigating.)
If it reaches 40% desperation measures are implemented – anything will do if it saves money – even burning tires to keep warm or breathing vile emissions from whatever is available to cook the food they can scrounge. In highland Lesotho students are sometimes fed undercooked meals if the fuel runs out – what brush and bushes they can find the day before. That is a bit different – there is literally nothing available to burn. Otherwise the 20-40 rule seems to apply pretty consistently around the world.
Willis, when you introduced the idea of governors in climate, the image you use here was exactly what came to mind for me. Your account remains convincing.
But as to the force involved, Scott Scarborough is right, it’s actually centrifugal. It happens I was quite recently reading up on it. The word comes from “fugere” which is Latin for “flee”; hence such English words as “fugitive”.
M Courtney says:
July 28, 2014 at 3:04 am
True … but then climate alarmism has nothing to do with science …
w.