1936 SHOWBOAT ON TCM TONIGHT

If you read my recent posting about SHOWBOAT, the version I liked most, the 1936 version, is on at 8:15 tonight in Honolulu on TCM, Channel 602 or 1602, if you subscribe to Oceanic.

A SIMPLE SOLUTION FOR OUR ENERGY PROBLEM: Part 2

I received a range of responses to my posting yesterday, so thought I'd share with you some input from colleagues.  All of them came via e-mail, but one might have explained why I get essentially no comments to this blogsite:  

BTW, your blog site's bot detector is too finicky. Tried maybe twenty times, but couldn't pass the type the following two illegible words filter. 

I'll definitely need to look into this.  (IN FACT, CAN SOME OF YOU READING THIS TRY TO COMMENT AND LET ME KNOW BY E-MAIL--patkentak@hotmail.com--IF THIS IS A MAJOR PROBLEM?)

The person who reported the above is PhD physicist Ray Kamada from the state of Washington, who manages his science and design company.  I don't think he'll mind my mentioning his name.  He also sent me information about potential enhancements to the lithium battery, as Lithium-air batteries have 5 to 15 times the potential of lithium ion.  He indicated that IBM might have found a material that overcomes the problematic degradation issue.

I have a personal interest in metal-air batteries, for my recent discussions with THE expert on campus, Bor Yan Liaw, suggest that these might ultimately replace lithium.  It was nearly forty years ago that I spent some time at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory working on the aluminum-air battery for one important reason.  It rarely gets mentioned, but Hawaii actually has "interesting" deposits of bauxite (perhaps 500 million tons of aluminum oxide).  I then felt that geothermal electricity could be utilized to build a new industry.  Of course, it would today be impossible to mine for bauxite in Hawaii.

More from Ray, suggesting that the Martin Experiment showed potential for controlling global warming.  From the Huffington Post:  Ocean Fertilization Study Finds That Dumping Iron Might Help Remove Atmospheric Carbon Through Algae.  I've regularly followed this potential solution, for researchers at the University of Hawaii, led by David Karl, have been at the forefront.  As that article indicated, though, you need to be particularly pioneering to get anything done, for there are watchful environmental eyes against doing anything these days.

There were several other comments, and a couple expressed some concern that I was, maybe, giving up.  Well, not really, for I attach here the response to another e-mail not even remotely related to this matter, but appropriate to the notion of my continuing the effort:

While we must face the reality that there is no such thing as ample, cheap and clean energy, we can't continue to sit around awaiting a miracle.

Thus, while I haven't totally abandoned hope, and one of the responses (from Ray Kamada--who subsequently sent a second) provided a few rays of light, I'm more and more getting disenchanted about:

  -  the timely development of the hydrogen economy (I don't see this becoming commercial in my lifetime--I was a lot more optimistic when I first drafted the bill in 1980), 

  -  fusion (perhaps a century away--spent two assignments on the laser version of fusion with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), 

  -  biofuels from algae (will be too expensive for some time to come--this was my first project with EPRI in 1974), and 

  -  next generation aviation (neither the hydrogen aircraft nor biosubstitutes for jet fuel will be available when our state economy tanks soon after oil jumps to $200/barrel--but I tried, as I wrote the legislation for the National Aerospace Plane a third of a century ago, and the Department of Defense subsequently spent a couple of billion on it, but for a decade and more now has been a black, or secret, program).

Having largely failed (well, let's put a positive spin on this and give me some credit for helping lay the groundwork for future success) with the above options, I continue to try with the Blue Revolution.

My final passion is the Pacific International Ocean Station.

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Typhoon Tembin, now at 85 MPH, is doing strange things.  As best as I can determine, the storm rolled over southern Taiwan, strengthened in the Taiwan Strait, and will now make a circular u-turn, subsequently marching across the east side of the country:

Category 4 Typhoon Bolaven, at 145 MPH, is heading straight for Naha, and could yet meet up with Tembin:

The Republican National Convention remains anxious about Tropical Storm Isaac, but current models show him cruising to the west in the Gulf and only bringing some wind and rain to Tampa:

All the relevant computer models project that Tampa should hardly be affected.

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A SIMPLE SOLUTION FOR OUR ENERGY PROBLEM

Singapore attained eminence because their benevolent dictatorship system worked.  The Germany of Adolf Hitler nearly dominated the world because Fascism almost succeeded.  The USA and much of the rest of the world are precluded from utilizing any form of authoritarianism to solve our energy/environment woes, where we have already proven that democracy has failed, for given an infinite number of options from an infinite number of competing interests, any governing body goes into a state of perpetual paralysis...until a two-by-four incident squarely convinces it that the crisis is real and serious.  But wouldn't it be a lot more sensible to wisely prevent the worst?

We've seen this in World War II, when America joined the fray after the attack on Pearl Harbor, then initiated the Manhattan Project, for fear that Hitler was close to such a weapon, and "succeeded" with Little Boy and Fat Man only four years later.  The Soviet Union's Sputnik in 1957 stunned the U.S. into then prevailing with the Apollo Project in a dozen years, ultimately leading to Cold War victory in a little more than a third of a century.

Unfortunately, Peak Oil and Global Warming do not sound as fearsome as the horror of Hitler nor the threat of a nuclear winter.  While this double-hammer menace could well be more serious to survival, it is lacking in imminence and purposefully obfuscated by disinformation interests with short term profit priorities and developing countries like China and India with an argument that they have not had a chance yet to use their share of fossil fuels.

There is now growing a more insidious threat.  The reality of economics.  For example, in the Honolulu Star Advertiser today is a letter to the editor from the Mayor of the Big Island, Billy Kenoi:

We're not interested in more renewable energy.  We're interested in cheaper renewable energy.  Unless it has lower rates, we will not support it.

Is this the kind of attitude we want from our leaders?  Actually, I kind of agree with him.  My posting of 8August2012 essentially expressed a similar opinion.  

Here is the problem. Yes, of course, there are sound arguments underscored by green energy advocates, such as life cycle analysis, externalities, leveling the playing field, security/benefits of locally produced sustainable energy and the like.  The private sector, though, is driven by short-term profits, and all these goodies worshipped by renewable interests are just not in the decision-making equation of industry.  SO, THE SIMPLE SOLUTION WOULD BE TO CHANGE THE LAWS SO THAT COMPANIES WILLFULLY INCLUDE THESE ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS INTO THEIR CORPORATE PRIORITIES.  As you can imagine, one of the problems with a simple solution is that it can be difficult, and many times impossible, to implement.

Returning to Mayor Kenoi, the price of renewable energy will remain high for a long time to come.  A few clean electricity technologies, such as wind power, are getting close.  However, more than half of all energy use goes to ground and air transport.  We are many, many decades away, as best described in a Renewable Energy News article of this week entitled, Flying on Woody Biomass and Camelina:  Consortium Seeks Biofuel Answers.

This paper promisingly overviews attempts at using trees and camelina (above left) to produce jetfuel.  Lignin is cited as a problem for conversion of woody biomass to a biofuel, while camelina (a shrub with oil seeds) will depend on reducing costs and taking advantage of co-products.  However, at least 70% of the volume remains.  (My note:  As jet fuel will ultimately need to be produced in enormous quantities, any high value by-product will very quickly flood the market.  This the basic problem of bio-products, for they have tiny marketing volumes.  Cheaper options such as animal feed might work.)

Worse, are comments from Cliff Claven:

The U.S. military is on the cutting edge of biofuel use and the lowest price they have paid for straight algae-based fuel is $61.33 a gallon from Solazyme last August. The fuel used for the Great Green Fleet was mostly Tyson chicken fat-based with just a hint of Solazyme algae oil. The purchase was 450,000 gallons for just over $12M which equaled $26.75 a gallon (don't be deceived by many who try to blend down the price--one gallon of biofuel displaces exactly one gallon of conventional fuel, no matter what the mixing ratio is). The stark choice facing the military today is whether to spend $2.30 a gallon on conventional fuel (current bulk contract price), $26.75 a gallon for chicken-fat, $59.00 a gallon for camelina or $61.33 a gallon for algae. Contrary to the implication of this article, Gevo (and Amyris) abandoned drop-in biofuel to focus on biobutanol, an industrial chemical 2X the price of ethanol they hope to get added to the RFS.

From the article: "Cavalieri says Gevo, Inc. in Englewood, Colorado has a proprietary line of microbes that will ferment sugar and produce isobutanol (an alcohol) that's readily converted into biojet and other products."  The conversion of isobutanol into "drop-in" hydrocarbon biojet fuel is about a 28-step process that takes months to accomplish in a batch process. 

The Department of Transportation paid UOP $11,000 a gallon last year to make 100 gallons for delivery this year. The Navy paid Albemarle $4,454.55 a gallon in February to deliver 55 gallons sometime this year. Neither of those prices include the cost of making the biobutanol via wood chip pyrolysis in the first place.  

In other words, if we want to willy-nilly proceed to commercialize biofuels, how much government aid can be justified?  Oil today costs $2.28/gallon ($96/barrel).  Gasoline is around $4/gallon and jet fuel  $3.20/gallon.  Given the above current costs of bio jet fuel, it seems optimistic to think that this price could drop to $10/gallon anytime soon.  Even with significant breakthroughs, $5/gallon would be a stretch.  Should taxpayers subsidize ground and air bio fuels so that, one, we are domestically producing these fuels, and two, lowering the potential for global warming?  The general public is open to spending a bit more.  But the key question is how much.  Mayor Kenoi brings up a fundamental point.  Consumers are just not willing to double or triple their energy bill for the sake of Planet Earth or to gain any energy security insurance.  While we must face the reality that there is no such thing as ample, cheap and clean energy, we can't continue to sit around awaiting a miracle.

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Tropical Storm Isaac remains at 40 MPH, and it mostly depends on Cuba to safeguard the Republican National Convention.  As shown below, the projection is for Isaac to attain hurricane strength after leaving that country, but now moving further into the Gulf of Mexico:

Tropical Storm Joyce follows right behind, but is expected to turn north into the mid-Atlantic.

In the West Pacific, the eye of Typhoon Tembin, at 120 MPH, will very shortly slam into the East Coast of Taiwan, and appears to be going through some strange moves.  The rainfall could be catastrophic if the storm just circles the country:

Meanwhile, soon to become Super Typhoon Bolaven, now at 120 MPH, will dangerously threaten Naha, Okinawa as a Category 4, then move towards  Cheju Island, Korea:

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WHERE ARE THE MONSTER HURRICANES?

Republicans seem to be running into some bad luck.  First, Congressman Todd Akin and his inflammatory remarks further riling the female gender (hear him explain his "legitimate rape" remarks), and now, Isaac, barging in on their National Convention.  However, the last Category 3 hurricane to make landfall in the USA was nearly seven years ago.  2005 is the most active season on record, with 7 hurricanes, 3,913 deaths and damages of $159.2 billion.  That was the year of Katrina over New Orleans.

Some blamed global warming for the anomaly, as there is general acknowledgement that warmer oceans result in more and stronger hurricanes.  But others argue that we don't know enough.  Yet, Kerry Emanuel found a close correlation between hurricane intensity and surface ocean temperature:

But the past seven years have been among the warmest ever, so why aren't we being buffeted by killer cyclonic storms?

First, though, what is a hurricane?  Let me not get too technical with something like the Coriolis force, but these storms are cyclonic, turning counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern half.  To be called a hurricane, a wind speed of 74 miles per hour must be attained.  A hurricane is the same as a typhoon and a cyclone, although the Western Pacific uses typhoon and cyclone is applied in the vicinity of the Indian Ocean.  The severity of these ocean storms is ranked by category.

Katrina was a Category 5 storm and maxed at 175 MPH, but veered east of New Orleans only as a Category 3.  Rita and Wilma in 2005 were actually stronger Category 5 hurricanes.  

1992 was also another terrible year, but while there were only four hurricanes, Category 4 Iniki at 145 MPH devastated the island of Kauai, while Andrew (right) a few weeks earlier, struck Florida as a Category 5 at 175 MPH.  Iniki was suspected to have formed, of all the places, off the coast of West Africa, went west, crossed over Central America, and found her way to Hawaii.  The strongest cyclone in the Central Pacific, Hurricane Ioke in 2006, on the other hand, actually was created south of Hawaii, never got close to land, strengthened into a Category 5 at 155 MPH and took 19 days to reach Alaska.

One interesting fact is that a hurricane has never crossed the equator.  Again, this has to do with that natural phenomenon expressed by French scientist Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis.  Someday I see the equator serving as the line from which a wide variety of ocean products will be produced, for first, no one owns this space (except the United Nations and their Law of Sea will do what they can to subvert that current freedom), and second, ocean thermal energy conversion plantships (left from Lockheed Martin) will not have to worry about serious storms.

So, to answer the original question, yes, the Atlantic has been relatively calm, but the West Pacific is another matter.  Already this year, there have been nine typhoons:

Here is the sequence:

Typhoon Tembin is soon to strike Taiwan: 

and then, who knows what.  Typhoon Bolaven is aiming for Okinawa, then, anywhere from Shanghai to Cheju Island:

About Tropical Storm Isaac:

Yes, he seems to be headed at this time in the general direction of Tampa, with the Republican delegates and Isaac possibly running into each other on the first day of the Convention, August 27.  But, at worst, it will only be a Category 1, and, most probably, not even that.

Which circles back to Congressman Todd Akin and many of the views he truly believes which are in the mainstream of current Republican thinking, as reported by Maureen Dowd of the New York Times:

But, for all the Republican cant about how they want to keep government out of the lives of others, the ultraconservatives are panting to meddle into the lives of others.  Contrary to President Barack Obama's refreshing assertion Monday that a bunch of male politicians shouldn't be making health care decisions for women, this troglodyte tribe of men and Bachmann-esque women crave that responsibility.

best summarized by Paul Blumenthal:

What is very disturbing to me is that people like Mr. Akin who have postulated this secret mechanism for avoiding pregnancy have developed their own make believe world of science based on entirely self-serving beliefs of convenience or just ignorance, he said.  I don't think we want these people to be responsible for the lives of others.

Oh, it gets worse.  Just click on this blog by Jo Piazza.  Yet, Akin actually serves on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, and also renders judgement on crucial issues such as global warming, nuclear power and the wisdom of using coal for electricity.  

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WORLD DROUGHT CONDITIONS EVIDENCE OF GLOBAL WARMING

The weather today at the South Pole was minus 74 F.  Historically, the Lut Desert in Iran is the hottest spot on the planet, with a record 159 F in 2005.  The record low is 129 below zero on the Fahrenheit scale at Vostok Station, Antarctica in 1983.  So hot and cold are relative, and so are hot and hot.

True, 61% of the 48 none Alaska/Hawaii states are experiencing some form of drought condition.  It was up to nearly 62% in 2007.  More specifically, 88% of the nation's corn crop is being impacted by drought.  But the Dust Bowl days were worse, as an 80% condition was reached in 1934.  

Strange, but Ohio is the only state which is doing fine.  But that is a strange state.  All reports indicate the world is also suffering.  Korea is being impacted by a drought of a century.  And, by the way, we likely will have more fires this year than ever before.  An area larger than Maryland--7 million acres--has been charred so far, with more than four months left.  I might add, though, that most recent years saw destruction higher than 6.5 million acres by today.

The whole point to this discussion is:  ARE THESE DROUGHT CONDITIONS CAUSED BY CLIMATE CHANGE?  James Hansen, the Godfather of Global Warming, says yes:

"This is not some scientific theory," Hansen told The Associated Press in an interview. "We are now experiencing scientific fact."

 Bjorn Lomborg says no, or, at least, let us not mislead the public.  But he is The Skeptical Environmentalist,  campaigned against the Kyoto Protocol and calls the Greenhouse Effect a myth.  He has a PhD in POLITICAL SCIENCE from the University of Copenhagen and is associated with the Copenhagen Business School.  Hansen has a PhD in physics and is with Columbia University, in addition to heading the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.  Okay, who has more credibility, Hansen or Lomborg?  An amazing number of people actually side with Lomborg.  This is a good part of our problem.

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Well, there is tropical storm at 40 MPH in the Atlantic that will soon become Hurricane Isaac and traipse west through the Caribbean islands towards Florida:

However, in the west Pacific are two significant events.  Typhoon Tembin, now at 105 MPH, will strengthen into a Category 4 storm, but somewhat weaken before striking Taiwan on Thursday:

However, right behind, to move north of Taiwan, is Typhoon Bolaven, already at 90 MPH, predicted to strengthen into a Category 3 storm, threaten Okinawa and make landfall in Zhejiang Province, China:

Interesting, but Tembin (left) and Bolaven (right), under certain conditions, could meet and combine:

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MY 40 YEARS WITH THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII

This is opening day of classes for the University of Hawaii at Manoa.  It was to the day exactly 40 years ago that I started teaching here:

The first college course I taught was FORTRAN, a computer language. I was given the text the day before my first class, had not ever taken it and I barely knew anything about the subject. Let’s see, should I confess to  my students that I would be learning with them, or wing it. As I walked up to the podium I chose the latter. Questions came up that I did not understand, but I deftly side-stepped them with the response, “we will take up that subject later in the semester. I don’t want to confuse the group.”

There were a hundred or so in that first class, from freshmen to graduate students. After the course was over, streams of students, including those in graduate school, came by to tell me how much they enjoyed the semester. This never happened again in such numbers in my 28 years in academia, although I only taught for a few years. The lesson learned was that if you don’t know what you are teaching, but must, you actually make the course easier to understand. This state of semi-panic evokes humility. From then, in all my courses, my problem was not to visibly laugh at the elementary nature of student questions. This kind of arrogance hurts teaching. I became an administrator not long after that first experience, but now realize that I really should go back and teach teachers to teach. There is an important educational clue here I should be developing. However, as this is about all I’ll ever do, I hope some educational professor or influential higher education administrator is reading this.

This is not quite my "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" moment (and, by the way, Robert Donat won an Oscar for his 1939 performance, opposite Greer Garson--his first day of teaching and the goodbye), but as I fondly reminisce, gazing at my walls in my campus office this morning, to the right (above) I re-live various photos and awards of my career, while to the left (below) my "stuff," including a poster of the Old Course at St. Andrews (it was not all work, you know).  Yes, those are wine/scotch/sake glasses, for that brown box is a refrigerator.  They are all just decorative, of course, because there are rules on campus about these things.

About my life, though, maybe it is time for me to move on.  Perhaps I can accomplish one more thing for Planet Earth and Humanity.

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There are now seven ocean storms:

Typhoon Tembin, presently at 120 MPH, will soon attain Category 4 status, and is now predicted to head straight for Taiwan, with landfall on Thursday:

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WHALE SHARKS, ANTS, PANDAS, WHITE BUFFALO AND THE STANFORD TREE

For reasons I don't really understand, all my postings on whale sharks attract readers.  So, to begin, from Indonesia, here is a clip.

Something you've always wanted to know, I'm sure, but there are 10,000 trillion ants, meaning there are a million ants for each person on Planet Earth.  They weigh more than all of us humans.  The largest is the Camponotus gigas (left).  For the record, there are 7 billion of us and 24 billion chickens.  On the extinction end:  200 California condors and 2,000 giant pandas, of which 300 are in zoos, including, above, Mei Xiang and Tian Tian at the National Zoo in D.C.

A white buffalo (for our purposes, same as bison) was born in Connecticut a few weeks ago.  The timing was ideal, as a group of tribes is lobbying Congress to place the bison alongside the eagle as our national symbols.  Why countries, high schools, states and other entities seem to mostly select an animal approaching extinction for this distinction is also something I don't understand.  I predict some new university bestowing this selection to their students end up with something like quack grass or E. Coli.  Stanford University gave up on Indians in 1972, so students picked Robber Barons, no doubt in reference to founder Leland Stanford.  The University declined, and now, the color Cardinal is used, with an unofficial mascot, a member of their marching band, a redwood tree:

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Wow, Typhoon Tembin, now at 85 MPH, is scheduled to crash into the middle of Taiwan as a Category 4 storm by Friday.

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