Another Free Energy craft project

[erikg]

Here's another "free energy from XXX" youtube video.  This one is apparently for people who don't know that semiconductors generate a small current when exposed to light.  Semi annoying music, but otherwise good for short term amusement and face palming.



On the plus side, this does give people something to do with old CDs and lots of spare time, and frankly a rooftop covered with CD/magnet wire "flowers" would be kind of pretty (for a while, anyway).

Maybe Dave should do a video on how photovoltaics work, and demonstrate other semiconductors as solar cells?

[bd139]

Joy. You could take the magnet wire and the CD away and it'd still generate a few tens of mV.

Source impedance? HUUUUUGE.

Now you wait until I introduce my top secret project, LSD's (Light Sucking Diodes) 

[schmitt trigger]

Thanks for posting.

Some times when I'm bored and don't know exactly what to watch, I also look for outlandish YouTube videos.

Between "free energy", "flat earth" and "moon landing hoaxes", there is an almost limitless amount of entertainment.

WARNING: watching too many of these videos is hazardous for your health, permanent brain loss and erectile dysfunction may occur. Youngsters younger than 18 years old must be accompanied by an adult. Pregnant women should talk to their doctors before watching these videos. NSFW content.

[IanMacdonald]

Moat of these scams rely on the fact that the public mostly have no idea how to measure the quantities involved. Thus, the scammer takes a tiny (but real) quantity and makes impossible claims for what it can do.

I would include most of the climate change 'science' in that category. Carbon dioxide is indeed a greenhouse gas, that much is true, but when you see how little effect it actually has compared to other factors, you see that the alarmist claims are nonsense. It's not as if the equations which determine its action were in any way obscure either. They are well established and easy to apply. The alarmists rely on the fact that most people have not the slightest clue how to do so, and therefore have to take their word for it that the planet is about to explode.

The IPCC counter this by claiming that 'positive feedbacks' increase its effect, but anyone who's worked in electronics knows that it is hard to achieve stable amplification by positive feedback. That's in a circuit with a regulated PSU. Imagine doing so in the Earth's weather systems. Plausible? Nope.

The same thing applies to peripheral claims like sea level rise and ocean acidification. Sea level is indeed rising. However, the amount is something like 3mm  per year, whereas twice daily tides are up to a thousand times larger. Moreover, it's been going on for longer than human industrialization anyway.

Meanwhile the oceans are not acid but alkaliine, and the reduction in alkalinity is about 0.11 of a pH unit. pH works to a log₁₀ scale, and anyone who's tried doing a titration in a chem lab knows how incredibly small a change that is, when near to neutral.

In the land of the numerically challenged, the man with the nixie-tube calculator is king.
The rest just have to believe what they are told to believe.

[donotdespisethesnake]

In the land of the numerically challenged, the man with the nixie-tube calculator is king.

And the Irony of Year Award goes to ... climate change denier   

I think I am going to frame that one!

[bd139]

You can’t label someone a denier. That’s about as anti science as you can get! Imagine if general relativity was squashed by such claims from backers of competing theories.

I think you need to read the source papers. Most of them don’t actually even apply any analytical approach and are selected colllations of other papers’ citations which are selected to provide the conclusion that is demanded by the sponsor. Some of the papers are even quite honest about this!. These are picked up as sound bites by news publishers and that’s how opinion is built. Now if someone comes along with some new evidence or a corrected mathematical model it has to support the consensus or they are labelled a denier. Many a legitimate scientist has been silenced or been unable to speak. This leads to an opinion driven consensus rather than facts. Not to mention the ability to model a vastly complicated system with thousands of not millions of feedback paths is somewhat overstated. We can’t even model the weather on a local basis accurately with over a hundred years of data.

This is not science. Science must be open to challenge always. Every crackpot and crazy needs their theory disproven by analysis not by labelling. The moment you start calling someone names, the argument is lost. You are no better.

Fundamentally I can no longer accept or deny climate change because the above is a crap fest of monumental proportions.  I have no opinion and on that basis any action without evidence is not appropriate unless it has some logical improvement in the short term. Get rid of diesels, yes, stop cutting down trees, yes, reduce emissions, yes, but don’t do it under the name of science because it doesn’t deserve that label.

In any land, the main who applies critical thinking to anything, is the king.

[IanMacdonald]

The label 'Denier' is based on holocaust denier, in other words neo-Nazi. As such it is an extremely offensive tag.

When people resort to such tactics, is is usually because they have exhausted all forms of rational argument and have only attacks on the man instead of the message left as their last resort. 

Thing I find paradoxical is that climate change is mostly supported by hippie types who are opposed to big business, politicos and the wealthy, but they seem to overlook that the whole thing was started by one very wealthy and very political Mr Gore. With a little help from one wealthy and political Mrs Thatcher. If they hate the Koch brothers so much, how come they worship at the feet of their jet-hopping guru Al Gore? Makes no sense.

[frog]

I believe that the term 'denier' pre-dates the holocaust.  While there could be an assumption that an inference should or should not be made, it remains an assumption, unless the author would like to clarify their intention.

Meanwhile I am sure that the inhabitants of the Pacific islands that are submerging day by day will sleep a little easier with the sea sloshing round their ankles, knowing that we are deliberating the possible causes while watching ships sail unhindered across the North Pole.

[bd139]

Perhaps they should consult with Tama-nui-te-ra and ask about the modern maximum and solar cycle activity over the last 400 years or so and buy a boat.

[frog]

At the risk of digressing from the OP, here's a short history lesson:
600 to 450 million years ago the land masses were covered with forests that turned the vast majority of Earth's carbon into fossil fuels.
Then a bunch of stuff happened, the dinosaurs came and went, all that stuff.
About 150 years or so ago people started mining fossil fuel in significant quantity, and since then the amount of carbon extracted is more or less equal to the amount that was in the biosphere prior to the industrial revolution.  That is to say, the amount of organic matter knocking about has doubled, something that hasn't changed significantly for hundreds of millions of years.
The idea of 'business as usual' is unlikely to work for long; it is established that the fifth mass extinction is under way.  While arguments about the calibration of rain gauges may not be entirely without merit, we are nevertheless facing interesting times ahead.

[sv1eia]

Is the video available to view?
It shows as not available here..

[IanMacdonald]

The really large scale use of fossil fuels only started around 1950. Remember that prior to WW2 only the 'first world' nations were industrialized. Now, heavy industry is just about everywhere. Yet, the recent warming trend began in 1910. An effect cannot begin before its cause. If that seems to be the case, then the theory is faulty.

The CO2 level has increased from 270ppm to 400ppm. The amount of warming that should cause, if CO2 were the only greenhouse gas, is easily calculated from Arrhenius' equation of infrared absorbtion. There is no mystery about that, it's a relatively simple equation. Yet, how often do you see a climate propagandist going through the calculation?  NEVER! Why not? Go figure.

The actual equation output is about 1.7C. Which is significantly more than the warming which has been observed.

However, CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas. There is more than ten times the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere than CO2. As with resistors in parallel, you cannot just add the effects of greenhouse gases working in parallel. Consider a  10k and a 1k resistor in parallel. If the 10k resistor goes out of tolerance by, say, 10%, how much difference does that make to the overall value? 10%? Nope. More like 1%.

In the atmosphere, if an infrared photon leaving the surface has been deflected (absorbed then re-emitted in a different direction)  ten times by water vapour molecules, then it makes no real odds if the same happens once more with a CO2 molecule. Each time there is a 50/50 chance of it being re-emitted upwards or downwards. Increasing the number of molecules beyond a certain point where most photons are deflected a few times enroute through the atmosphere, has little effect on those odds. That point is reached with about 40ppm concentration, for CO2.

You can experiment with the variables here: http://climatemodels.uchicago.edu/modtran/

Notice how tiny a change in the absorbtion band is caused by changing CO2 from 400 to 270ppm.  (There is another CO2 absorbtion band not shown here, but it is not relevant to outgoing radiation. Also we call it absorbtion but scattering would be a better term. Absorbtion, because a dark line in a spectrum results when one wavelength in a beam of light is scattered around while the rest travel in a straight line.)

Prof. Nahle of Monterey has calculated that the mean free path of an outbound photon, between encounters with a  CO2 molecule, is a few tens of metres at 400ppm. That is a surprisingly short distance for such a low concentration of gas molecules, but the proof is well documented. It is therefore unsurprising that further increases in CO2 concentration have only a small effect on the number of photons which escape the atmosphere to space.  Its consequences match the results of Arrhenius' equation and MODTRAN, so the evidence is overwhelming that it is correct.

The IPCC claim that this tiny effect of CO2 will be increased by 'feedbacks' in the climate system to several degrees Celsius. There are two problems with this hypothesis. Firstly, creating stable gain by positive feedback is extremely hard. Secondly, since there is no known way that the presence of CO2 could itself trigger a feedback,  the input to AND the output from any such feedbacks would have to be the air temperature.  Therefore, this is like having an opamp with the + input directly connected to the output, or a better illustration might be a guitar amo on which the guitar and speaker are connected by the same pair of wires. (Don't try it, you'll blow it.) Commonsense tells us that such an arrangement cannot work. As soon as you have slightly more than unity gain, the whole thing oscillates uncontrollably.

When I challenged a climate scientist over this, he replied that the feedbacks in climate science are not the same as those in electronics. To which I said that feedback is a concept in the broader sphere of physics, not specifically in electronics. Therefore if he means something other than  the physical concept of feedback, then he is simply repurposing the word to have an undefined meaning.  In which case he might as well call it whatever he likes, phlogiston, aether, or whatever, because it means nothing.

The alarmists claim that the science regarding greenhouse gas effect is settled, and that no debate is possible. Well, they are right. It was settled over 100 years ago and has not significantly changed since.

Thing they avoid mentioning is, the settled science doesn't support their claims.

Without going into too much detail, sea level rise claims are similarly based on a true principle, but the figures are out by factors of thousands.

Ocean acidification claims are worse. They typify propaganda. They are expressed that way to make them sound scary. If it were accurately stated that the alkali in the oceans was being neutralised, leaving something nearer to pure water, would that be scary?

That's even before you consider how small the change in alkalinity is.

Science is about measurements. If there are no measurements, or no proof of where those measurements came from, then it is not science.

[HighVoltage]

Here's another "free energy from XXX" youtube video.  This one is apparently for people who don't know that semiconductors generate a small current when exposed to light.  Semi annoying music, but otherwise good for short term amusement and face palming.
On the plus side, this does give people something to do with old CDs and lots of spare time, and frankly a rooftop covered with CD/magnet wire "flowers" would be kind of pretty (for a while, anyway).

Maybe Dave should do a video on how photovoltaics work, and demonstrate other semiconductors as solar cells?

Almost 3.5 Million views and mostly positive feedback.
It really seems that our societies lag education!

[schmitt trigger]

Well, that video has a redeeming feature: it has given me fresh ideas about what to do with old CDs.

For instance, a few SMT LEDs and it would make a nice Christmas ornament.

[kalel]

Well, that video has a redeeming feature: it has given me fresh ideas about what to do with old CDs.

For instance, a few SMT LEDs and it would make a nice Christmas ornament.

Reflected from the CD, or on the CD? I'm not sure how easy soldering would be. Perhaps conductive glue onto some tape... If you explore your idea further, share it.

[schmitt trigger]

Well, that video has a redeeming feature: it has given me fresh ideas about what to do with old CDs.

For instance, a few SMT LEDs and it would make a nice Christmas ornament.

I'm not sure how easy soldering would be. Perhaps conductive glue onto some tape...

Hmmmmm....you are right. I don't think polycarbonate would have the same heat resistance  capabilities of FR4!! 

[erikg]

For instance, a few SMT LEDs and it would make a nice Christmas ornament.

Don't stop there... this thing should be interactive.  Include sensors and some ability to react to the environment.

This might be a great idea for a project contest here... winner is the person who posts the best design for a CD holiday ornament with attached circuit.  "Best" is defined by point totals for the following, with 5 points for the category winner, 3 points for runner-up:

Lowest/highest part count

Visual appeal (blinken lights, shinies)

Power use highest/lowest

Largest power storage capacity

Largest data storage capacity

Functionality - defined as what the ornament does (moisture sensor, radio receiver, free energy generator, time machine)



Winners in each category will be decided by popular vote, simple majority, all EEVBLog members can vote, tie breakers or other voting issues to be decided solely by Dave.

Other rules:  Ornament must not end up thicker than 5x the CD thickness total, must not be hazardous to human life or pets, must include exactly 1 CD or DVD disk, and should be a hanging ornament that weighs no more than 2 kg.


Any other categories people can think of?

[IanMacdonald]

Get rid of diesels, yes, stop cutting down trees, yes, reduce emissions, yes, but don’t do it under the name of science because it doesn’t deserve that label.

In any land, the main who applies critical thinking to anything, is the king.

There is also scant evidence that diesels pollute any more than other IC engines. The transport-related NOx and PM2.5 pollution figures for most countries have consistently fallen during the diesel sales boom era.  Currently asking a few Greens if they can account for this anomaly in their campaign to ban diesels.

Let us not forget that it was the Greens who promoted diesel as a 'low carbon' planet-saver. 

[bd139]

Good points there. I’m going to have to dump my diesel when they van driving into London city with them.

[paulca]

Fundamentally I can no longer accept or deny climate change because the above is a crap fest of monumental proportions.  I have no opinion and on that basis any action without evidence is not appropriate unless it has some logical improvement in the short term. Get rid of diesels, yes, stop cutting down trees, yes, reduce emissions, yes, but don’t do it under the name of science because it doesn’t deserve that label.

I like to ask environmentalists what we are actually trying to achieve.  My argument presented to them goes like this.

Man is but part of nature, not the other way around.
By this undeniable fact anything man does is natural and part of the planets normal evolution.
Many species and chemical processes through Earth's history has rapidly and aggressively changed the planet.
Consider that until organisms evolved photosynthesis Oxygen was rare and a DEADLY POISON to most life on Earth.  When plants started to photosynthesize in a largely N2/CO2 atmosphere they released massive quanities of oxygen and promptly wiped out most other of life on Earth.
How are humans different?

Then I throw the question.

Are we trying to "fix" or "change" how the world is developing with our help because we want to "save the planet" or are we making changes because we don't want to mess up the planet for ourselves, "save ourselves"?  The former is batshit and later is selfish.

Basically the planet has been here, seen it, done it, wears the T-Shirt in the form of trees and coal.  It really won't care.  It will just move on.  We might perish however.

We care because... where are the main global economic, industrial, financial and population centres of the world?  On the coast.  So there is now money behind preventing sea level rise.

On renewable energy... what we need is a device which:

* absorbs sunlight
* chemically stores that energy
* resists discharge
* stable over decades
* allows the energy to be released to produce heat and electricity
* is carbon neutral

It's funny but this was invented some like 600 million years ago.

It's called a tree.

[tszaboo]

Get rid of diesels, yes, stop cutting down trees, yes, reduce emissions, yes, but don’t do it under the name of science because it doesn’t deserve that label.

In any land, the main who applies critical thinking to anything, is the king.

There is also scant evidence that diesels pollute any more than other IC engines. The transport-related NOx and PM2.5 pollution figures for most countries have consistently fallen during the diesel sales boom era.  Currently asking a few Greens if they can account for this anomaly in their campaign to ban diesels.

Let us not forget that it was the Greens who promoted diesel as a 'low carbon' planet-saver. 

It just shows, that the Euro 2-3-4-5-6 restrictions are effective way to reduce the pollutants in the environment. You should ask this: Is it necessary to emit NOx into the environment? No? Then maybe we should stop doing it?
Besides, they smell bad. I have to place my AC into internal circulation when I'm driving behind these pathetic excuse for a cars. What I'm really surprised, they didn't start cranking up the tax on diesel. It just shows that politicians are demagogues.

[HighVoltage]

The newest "Free Energy Converter", Made in Germany!

[james_s]

People watching these videos earns money for their creators, which is almost certainly the purpose for which they were created.

[John Heath]

In all free energy yahoo videos there is supposed to be the guy in the white lab coat making mistakes in physics for entertainment. I right clicked  the video to suffer through the free energy part but the entertainment of the guy with the white lab coat was not there. I feel cheated.

[donotdespisethesnake]

Consider that until organisms evolved photosynthesis Oxygen was rare and a DEADLY POISON to most life on Earth.  When plants started to photosynthesize in a largely N2/CO2 atmosphere they released massive quanities of oxygen and promptly wiped out most other of life on Earth.
How are humans different?

It's a good point, humans will not last long anyway, so why not go out nice and hot

The way humans are different is apparently something called "intelligence", although you don't see it much in practice. Unlike microbes, we could realize we are screwing up and decide to do something about it...

Denial is really the only word for climate change deniers, they are on a par with Flat Earthers. I guess it is something to do with the internet, crazy people are now able to propagate crazy stuff at the touch of a button. A natural consequence of the democratization of information is that it will trend towards the average level of knowledge, which is woefully low. Technology works because it only needs a few smart people understand it, the dumb masses can use it without understanding anything about it.

It's not a surprise to see denial high among regular scientists and engineers - it's tough to hear that all that stuff you have been doing for the good of society turns out to be bad. No one wants to hear that. Denial is the easy option.

[ogden]

People watching these videos earns money for their creators, which is almost certainly the purpose for which they were created.

Right. Seems like "free energy" (besides funny cats) is top selling topic on Youtube. Particular video got 5mil hits during 6months, another "CD-based free energy device" during slightly more than one month got 110k already. Most popular EEVblog video took 5 years to get 1.1mil

Maybe Dave shall think about "free energy" clickbait in debunking series?

[james_s]

If I had any business sense (and less of a conscience) I'd make free energy videos, or audiophool products, or something involving "AI" or "blockchain", there's a sucker born every minute...

[Cerebus]

If I had any business sense (and less of a conscience) I'd make free energy videos, or audiophool products, or something involving "AI" or "blockchain", there's a sucker born every minute...

C'mon. Go the whole hog. Cryptocurrency mining using free energy from cats chasing each other through treadmills with AI guided fricking lasers!

Editted to add: Oh, and get AvE to do the commentary - I'd watch.

[paulca]

Make sure and destress afterwards with homeopathic sedatives. 

[Brumby]

Editted to add: Oh, and get AvE to do the commentary - I'd watch.

       

[station240]

People watching these videos earns money for their creators, which is almost certainly the purpose for which they were created.

So watch them with an Ad Blocker on, eg uBlock Origin. NO ads = no money for fake science.

[bd139]

A click or view is enough to propel bollocks. Just walk away.

[VEGETA]

After all these scams, even from companies and so on.. I came to the same conclusion that I had before: The only free energy is solar energy.

Yes, it is literally "free" energy because you get it for absolutely free, it is just that you have to get some equipment to be able to get it which is understandable since we are in worldy life not in heaven yet.

I wonder why they don't call it free energy, if they do, then these scams will just disappear.

[paulca]

Yes, it is literally "free" energy because you get it for absolutely free, it is just that you have to get some equipment to be able to get it which is understandable since we are in worldy life not in heaven yet.

You can be guaranteed governments will soon find a way to tax it.

[IanMacdonald]

   
I wonder why they don't call [solar PV] free energy, if they do, then these scams will just disappear.

The capital cost of magnet motors would be far lower than solar arrays IF they worked. Plus, they would not be dependant on weather or time of day. Just a pity they don't. 

The major cost of solar or wind is not so much that of the generating equipment but that of energy storage or backup capacity to cover outages. Any scheme which gave continuous power would be a better option. Which is why I think we should put money into thorium research.

[John Heath]

The really large scale use of fossil fuels only started around 1950. Remember that prior to WW2 only the 'first world' nations were industrialized. Now, heavy industry is just about everywhere. Yet, the recent warming trend began in 1910. An effect cannot begin before its cause. If that seems to be the case, then the theory is faulty.

The CO2 level has increased from 270ppm to 400ppm. The amount of warming that should cause, if CO2 were the only greenhouse gas, is easily calculated from Arrhenius' equation of infrared absorbtion. There is no mystery about that, it's a relatively simple equation. Yet, how often do you see a climate propagandist going through the calculation?  NEVER! Why not? Go figure.

The actual equation output is about 1.7C. Which is significantly more than the warming which has been observed.

However, CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas. There is more than ten times the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere than CO2. As with resistors in parallel, you cannot just add the effects of greenhouse gases working in parallel. Consider a  10k and a 1k resistor in parallel. If the 10k resistor goes out of tolerance by, say, 10%, how much difference does that make to the overall value? 10%? Nope. More like 1%.

In the atmosphere, if an infrared photon leaving the surface has been deflected (absorbed then re-emitted in a different direction)  ten times by water vapour molecules, then it makes no real odds if the same happens once more with a CO2 molecule. Each time there is a 50/50 chance of it being re-emitted upwards or downwards. Increasing the number of molecules beyond a certain point where most photons are deflected a few times enroute through the atmosphere, has little effect on those odds. That point is reached with about 40ppm concentration, for CO2.

You can experiment with the variables here: http://climatemodels.uchicago.edu/modtran/

Notice how tiny a change in the absorbtion band is caused by changing CO2 from 400 to 270ppm.  (There is another CO2 absorbtion band not shown here, but it is not relevant to outgoing radiation. Also we call it absorbtion but scattering would be a better term. Absorbtion, because a dark line in a spectrum results when one wavelength in a beam of light is scattered around while the rest travel in a straight line.)

Prof. Nahle of Monterey has calculated that the mean free path of an outbound photon, between encounters with a  CO2 molecule, is a few tens of metres at 400ppm. That is a surprisingly short distance for such a low concentration of gas molecules, but the proof is well documented. It is therefore unsurprising that further increases in CO2 concentration have only a small effect on the number of photons which escape the atmosphere to space.  Its consequences match the results of Arrhenius' equation and MODTRAN, so the evidence is overwhelming that it is correct.

The IPCC claim that this tiny effect of CO2 will be increased by 'feedbacks' in the climate system to several degrees Celsius. There are two problems with this hypothesis. Firstly, creating stable gain by positive feedback is extremely hard. Secondly, since there is no known way that the presence of CO2 could itself trigger a feedback,  the input to AND the output from any such feedbacks would have to be the air temperature.  Therefore, this is like having an opamp with the + input directly connected to the output, or a better illustration might be a guitar amo on which the guitar and speaker are connected by the same pair of wires. (Don't try it, you'll blow it.) Commonsense tells us that such an arrangement cannot work. As soon as you have slightly more than unity gain, the whole thing oscillates uncontrollably.

When I challenged a climate scientist over this, he replied that the feedbacks in climate science are not the same as those in electronics. To which I said that feedback is a concept in the broader sphere of physics, not specifically in electronics. Therefore if he means something other than  the physical concept of feedback, then he is simply repurposing the word to have an undefined meaning.  In which case he might as well call it whatever he likes, phlogiston, aether, or whatever, because it means nothing.

The alarmists claim that the science regarding greenhouse gas effect is settled, and that no debate is possible. Well, they are right. It was settled over 100 years ago and has not significantly changed since.

Thing they avoid mentioning is, the settled science doesn't support their claims.

Without going into too much detail, sea level rise claims are similarly based on a true principle, but the figures are out by factors of thousands.

Ocean acidification claims are worse. They typify propaganda. They are expressed that way to make them sound scary. If it were accurately stated that the alkali in the oceans was being neutralised, leaving something nearer to pure water, would that be scary?

That's even before you consider how small the change in alkalinity is.

Science is about measurements. If there are no measurements, or no proof of where those measurements came from, then it is not science.

Add on. We just finished a mini ice age only 10,000 year ago. Where I am sitting there was ice 1 mile thick only 10,000 years ago. Of course the climate is warming as we are on the tail end of the last ice age. Only 300 years ago you could walk across from Canada to the USA as lake
Ontario would freeze over in the winter. Not today as it does not freeze over. We were not burning fossil fuels 300 years ago but the planet was still warming to recover from our last mini ice age.

With CO2 at .3 percent plants are starving as they build themselves from CO2 not the dirt. If CO2 doubles plants will gobble it up fast just as they are doing now. The end result is more plants more life. We are not heading for worse times rather better times
as we continue to recover from the last mini ice age. Change is not always bad.

[GerryBags]

Talking of mini-ice ages, we are may well have one heading our way as we speak. We are entering the Eddy Minimum, which like the Dalton, Oort, Maunder minima is named for the guy who spotted it and will result in global cooling, with only a couple of places (like Alaska) which actually become slightly warmer during periods of glaciation.The data from the Greenland ice core project are fairly unequivocal; it is part of a natural climate cycle.

 Also affecting the likelihood of future cooling is the Earth's magnetic field reversal which is weakening our magnetosphere. When the sun's field also flips during the Earth's much slower process it can lead to vast incursions of galactic cosmic rays which cause the nucleation of persistent, highly reflective cloud layers. This increase in albedo cools the atmosphere and cause more precipitation. The GCRs also cause increases in vulcanism, and this can warm the oceans as well further raising the albedo, putting more moisture into the atmosphere to fall as precipitation.

This is how runaway glaciation can start.

[donotdespisethesnake]

Wow, the crazies are out in force!  Next time I need advice on electronics... I'll ask a climate scientist 

The thing I realized from the climate change "debate" is that climate change is not the biggest threat to the future of civilization, the biggest problem is that humans are just too damned stupid to survive.

[bd139]

I agree. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/

[james_s]

People watching these videos earns money for their creators, which is almost certainly the purpose for which they were created.

So watch them with an Ad Blocker on, eg uBlock Origin. NO ads = no money for fake science.

As far as I know, Adblock doesn't prevent being counted as a view. Besides, what is the benefit of watching them? Time has value, personally if I'm gonna watch a video I want it to be something educational or at least interesting.

[XYZVector]

Hey forget the CO2 what about all the waste heat these IC engines dump out there radiators? Nobody talks about this, or brakes turning kinetic motion into heat. That has to be good for a few hundredths of a degree. Co2 is a green house gas but what about methane? All those cows mcdonalds is rasing to slaughter they must fart a-lot of tons of methane into the air. No I think climate change is the sum of our entire footprint on the environment. To single out just one gas is ignorant and it is not very scientific. Yes it is getting warmer but it is also getting colder. The weather is getting more chaotic, and this is caused by greater temperature deltas.

Enjoy the Weather!!!

Oh 1 + for the free energy CD I have always been wondering what to do with my old CD collection

 

[james_s]

I have wondered about the heat output from burning fuels although I've never seen any data. I suspect it's relatively small compared to the amount of energy from the sun so it may not have much effect. Burning a candle is not going to warm you up nearly as much as putting on a coat or getting under a blanket.

Methane does get brought up, it's a popular argument from the hard core vegan crowd. The thing that bothers me most about that is all that fuel (methane) just floating uselessly up into the air.

[riyadh144]

I have been wanting to read on climate change for a long time, and try to analyze the arguments for both sides from reputable scientists.

This thread will take me through the rabbit hole now and I will be putting a few weeks into readings, and then I will come to a conclusion.

But anyway for a sustainable future we need renewable energy, and for limiting the pollution so the whole world wouldn't have the Beijing quality of air we need renewable energy.

[paulca]

On the "Global Warming" 

Is the world getting warmer?  Yes.  100% The datasets have been peer reviewed extensively, including a large study by MIT into how different datasets where normalised etc.

Is it CO2 that is causing it?  Well, it fits, but the twist is when you warm water it releases CO2, when you cool it, it absorbs CO2, so is the earth warming due to CO2 rise, or is the CO2 rising because the earth is warming?  Then again I don't think it matters as the two effects for a positive feed loop.

Is it main made CO2?  This is where it gets a little more "bleeding edge".  They have analysed the isotopic ratios of CO2 and found that a percentage of it is likely to be man made.  They have given estimates as to what portion of warming may caused by that.

The issue with climate science is while there are hard facts such as CO2 traps heat, an awful lot of the sceince is written with words like, "Suggests", "Likely", "Indicates", "Could be", "might be", "may be".

The other issue when you get to the IPCC et al, is the horrid toxic mix of science and politics.  Two things that never go well together, one is the pursuit of truth through experiment, the other is the pursuit of power through bullshit.

[Cerebus]

The issue with climate science is while there are hard facts such as CO2 traps heat, an awful lot of the sceince is written with words like, "Suggests", "Likely", "Indicates", "Could be", "might be", "may be".

A problem is that with any sufficiently complex system is that scientists tend to, quite rightly, use cautious, qualified phrases when making pronouncements about them. To the politicians, to whom certitude about cause and effect comes too easily and often with little regard for complexities, the truth, and other confounding issues, this sounds like more than just residual uncertainty. If a scientist is 90% certain, they will use cautious words, if a politician is 55% certain and there are votes or donations in it, they will talk in "black and white" terms. It's a clash of cultures.

The politicians want a sure bet; the economic consequences of taking strong action on climate change if it's not necessary are very significant, the cost of failing to act if it is necessary is disastrous. Politicians can see the value of the "precautionary principle" if it's about something that they don't like or see political risks in doing, say legalising drugs, they fail to see the value of it when it's about something they are supportive of or see political risks in doing, say banning something that makes money.

[HalFET]

Well, that video has a redeeming feature: it has given me fresh ideas about what to do with old CDs.

For instance, a few SMT LEDs and it would make a nice Christmas ornament.

I'm not sure how easy soldering would be. Perhaps conductive glue onto some tape...

Hmmmmm....you are right. I don't think polycarbonate would have the same heat resistance  capabilities of FR4!! 

Use SnBi58 solder wire, I'll send you some if you want to give it a try. I soldered on polycarbonate with it all the time.