The Higgs Boson, Global Warming And Green Energy
Politics / Climate Change Dec 15, 2011 - 02:59 AMBy: Andrew_McKillop
Coinciding with the failed climate talks in Durban, mainly due to the European Union's bizarre and kamikaze negotiating stance, another European marvel of government spending - CERN - announced its research teams could or might have glimpsed the Higgs boson. They say it might well exist. Only might exist, note it well. Most people neither know or care what a Higgs boson might be but it should have a partner thing out there in the Universe, called the graviton. The boson would "explain" mass while the graviton would "explain" gravity, in the same way other government-paid scientists and the politicians who pay them say that CO2 "explains" climate change, which exists, but their explanation needs global warming - which might not exist.
This is already complicated. History buffs compare the CO2-climate change-global warming subject, and its add-ons like a forced stampede into green energy, with the Schleswig-Holstein question. This was so complicated that only three men in Europe ever understood it, according to Lord Palmerston, then Queen Victoria’s entertaining prime minister. He said: “One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor, who went mad. I am the third, and I have forgotten all about it.” Since bosons have plenty of mass even if they cant explain it, this brings up the Woody Allen quip on neutrinos. One character explains that physicists are trying to prove that neutrinos have mass, which provokes Allen's reply: "Neutrinos have mass? I didn't even know they were Catholic!"
STAY SANE - FORGET ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING
Even as the Durban talks broke up after a ritual last-ditch 72-hour talkathon, during which the Europeans scuppered any prospect of getting what they pretend they wanted - worldwide and uniform emissions standards and limits with financial penalties for exceeding them - big changes were taking place. The ice cliff of seamless and total support by mainstream media to the most extreme, so-called scientific stances on, or explanations of "climate catastrophe" was breaking up and floating in the dangerously warming, ever more acidic oceans of the world. The media seemed to have forgotten about global warming, after a long and insanely obsessional flirt with the subject.
Durban reporting was as they say "low key". Rearguard action included a few ritual 20-minute-specials on evening primetime news shows in Committed Nations, almost exclusively European, showing the ice cliffs, polar bears, factory chimneys, windmills and bicycles, and what have you, but it was clear this was a bow-out phenomenon. News of latest developments from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was given almost as much airtime. Explanations of What It All Means were deliberately humorous. Ringing funeral chimes for the Climate Crazies, humour is also slipping into residual and remaining media treatment of "the most massive crisis of all time".
You see the problem? The so-called God Particle is as hard to understand as why a gas making up a princely 0.04% of the atmosphere - the deadly toxic gas CO2 - could lever up average global temperatures by 6 degrees celsius, in the next 20 (30, 50, 70 or what you like) years. Why would it do that to us ? To be sure, the God Gas or Devil's Gas had done what it could in most northern hemisphere countries through the summer and autumn, with sometimes record high temperatures, and as we know the N. hemisphere is about 60% water and 40% land, while the S. hemisphere is about 80% water and 20% land, allowing an awful lot more persons to live in the north. Any change in solar insolation would rather likely heat the north more than south, especially with increasing (or recently known) massive cloud cover on most oceans, and think how many more heat-generating cities there are in the north.
PLAYING THE SCIENCE GAME
But this is already playing the Climate Crazies science game. European government owned media, as well as government friendly media was pitiless until only the past few months. The pseudo-science propaganda was Stalinesque. There was no alternative to global warming. "The planet is burning" was a favoured one-liner from the same mouths that, today in Europe, are whining "Buddy can you spare me a hundred billion euro ?".
The average physics genius who can talk about Compact Muon Solenoids may, or may not talk down and around the position of Nobel physics prizewinner Ivar Giaever. His take on global warming and climate change is No and Yes. As simple as that. Interested readers can find out what Giaever says about the first and ultra basic question: what is "global average temperature" ? One hint is that the "average" temperature of Mercury varies (up and down) by about 175 degC, if you mean surface temperatures. To be sure, we can apply Planetary Discrimination, and treat Mercury (or other Earth-type planets) as minor planets with no vote at the UN because they dont have human beings.
As in particle physics however, there is a distinct chance of near-minimal supersymmetry in future climate talks, and talks about talks - due to the Europeans. The European position - call it a "package" most intensely applied in the 2008 EU Climate/Energy package - in fact moves lightning fast from the global warming crisis which all persons of Good Faith believe, to a vast and vastly unworkable Green Energy plan, which everybody in Europe will pay for. For simple persons lacking sophistication it can be difficult to understand what a high-ranking Indian delegate to the Durban climate said about the European stance: "Naive, hypocritical and aggressive".
Child psychology rather than physics would explain it rather well, but we can use the Higgs boson, also, to explain the European climate-energy package. In 1993, the UK science minister William Waldegrave challenged physicists to produce a one-page answer to the question: “What is the Higgs boson, and why do we want to find it?”
The winning entry compared the universe to a cocktail party of political workers hosting Margaret Thatcher. Moving around the room, she has more mass than anyone else. Once she is moving, she is very hard to stop, but once she has stopped she is very hard to get moving again. That is basically the Higgs mechanism. This also worked with the "fundamental packet" of vague climate change fears, real fear of high and rising oil prices, and real fear of Gazprom cutting off gas supplies to Europe. This massed up through the period of around 2004-2007, to become a political rumour that circulated faster and faster, getting heavier and heavier. Travelling in clusters, the Climate bosons gave those carrying the rumour extra mass, political clout and spending power - exactly like PM Thatcher.
FAIRY TALES AND GREEN ENERGY
Soon after Waldegrave got his answer about the boson, Margaret Thatcher rather rapidly - almost instantly - disappeared from the UK political scene. She was occasionally glimpsed in strange company like 'Terminator' Schwarzenegger, looking over a California cliff, complete with seabirds, and regretting the passing away of 'Emperor' Ron Reagan. The great days had suddenly ended. This is most definitely a problem with bosons, and even more so with gravitons whatever they might be. It is about 99% probable that European climate-energy nonsense will also disappear the same way: abruptly.
Anyone interested in science is increasingly served with information from what were called "climate sceptics" but also include plain and simple witnesses to lying and fraud. Examples are many. One recent is the BBC’s flagship "Frozen Planet" TV series, sold overseas on a no choice ‘take-it-or-leave it’ basis on whether the buyer includes its final doom-laden climate change episode. The writer and presenter of the series, David Attenborough, has already been accused of doctoring scenes using zoo-based animals filmed in an "Arctic" studio scene, and gross sensationalism on the whole subject of climate change - that is global warming. We all know Arctic ice is melting; why is Antarctic ice expanding ? Do not ask Attenborough, he's only a film maker, but why not try the UN IPCC ?
Too late. Even the UN IPCC has started shooting itself in both feet. A report due in February will confirm what its scientists have already said: “climate change signals are (expected to be) relatively small compared to natural climate variability”. That is climate changes all on its own; it always has and except for a mega asteroid hit, is likely to go on doing so. Local and extreme human causes - and impacts of climate change can be exactly that but global or even widespread regional "anthropogenic" human-caused climate change on a long-term and enduring basis is unlikely or very unlikely. The problem is that it might need 1000 years to know for sure.
Much shorter term, we know that promised "green jobs" in the energy sector are expensive, need constant subsidies to limp along, and disappear when the subsidies are kicked away. Conversely, and treated as what it is by hard-line green energy and ecology boomers - a deadly menace - the shale gas phenomenon in the US has already generated more than 800 000 new jobs in 5 years. Europe's shale gas resources are in some cases immense: for example French potentially producible reserves are estimated by the US EIA as equivalent to about 180 years of current French natural gas demand. Talking about shale gas is not advised, if you want to keep your free ride with the crowd of Durban-bound climate jetters with their suntan lotions packed up close to their Believers Bible, featuring Al Gore video clips from the great days of Before Copenhagen. Those were the days ! Al could get $100k for a 45-minute Doom Blurb session and the fools would come back for more.
HARD WIRED AND SOFT BRAINED
Renowned Silicon Valley house mags like "Wired Magazine", with a readership of hundreds of geeks, and a few human beings still thunder out the message that Green Energy means easy cash for geeks if they pile in now: this is an old story, in fact, today. The problem is the opportunity window is closing fast, and will likely snap off the fingers trapped in it, that so nimbly raided the cash tills of good old Big Government and pigeon investors, through about 2005-2010.
Acting as an outstation of Wall Street, the Silicon Valley green energy model was a disastrous failure in mobilizing so-called talent and sucking or "mobilizing" government hand-outs and investor funds with the grand design of "reinventing energy". A fast ran scam, yes, reinvented energy, no.
Now that the green energy start-ups are shutting down, one after the other as their cash burn-up time expires with a global average of 80 percent in 18 months, dotcom-telecom style, we are left with the afterglow and the costs for cleaning up the mess. This applies in a few specialty locations around the world, including California, but is especially concentrated in Europe and the reason is Back to Top: European climate craziness went faster and further than anywhere else, so it will collapse or disappear even further and faster, boson style.
Showing that green energy craziness has achieved critical mass and speed, a new report by insurance giant Allianz warns that the “volatile” nature of wind and solar as sources of power will create grid instability, causing “catastrophic” blackouts with multi-billion dollar consequences - unless Super Grids are built really fast. This conclusion is one I could have offered Allianz at low cost, years ago, but the big green energy boson business does not work that way.
THE NEW BISMARK GOES GREEN
Allianz's warning was specially directed at Germany. French Parti Socialiste (PS) media headline grabbers like Arnaud Montebourg have railed the Merkel-Sarkozy anschluss or Directoire as the work of a New Bismark, imposing harsh budgetary discipline in return for cheap financing of wallowing deficits and debts across The New Europe. But Germany has an energy transition plan that defies any calculation of how much it might all cost. To 2030, it could or might cost 500 billion euro, maybe more but since this is a trifling fraction of present-day sovereign debt of the EU27, or even Eurozone-17, we could or might imagine it would be well worth spending - if it worked.
Angela Merkel is surely a Climate Crazy, absolutely neck-and-neck in the world class league of doomsters, with other Great Persons who told us with open-eyed sincerity that "the planet is burning". Such as Obama, Brown of the UK, Berlusconi of Italy, Sarkozy, Zapatero of Spain and others: as we can note right away, the wasteage rate is high among these Great Persons. By April 2012 if the French PS gets its head, we can also strike out Sarkozy. Happy Changey Obama, AKA Oh Bummer could also be gone. The 2009 Global Crisis team will be shrunk to only the New Bismark. And she faces national legislative elections by about August 2013.
By then however, Germany could start really changing the energy landscape in Europe. Coming power cuts in Europe, not yet catastrophic but only impressive, will testify to something we knew already: even the current extremely low 24/7 and year round electric power transport capacity of Europe is stretched - especially in Germany and France ! Yet New Bismark-Land and Sarko-Land have the most delightfully and totally different policies on nuclear power, along with exactly the same nuclear power problems. These are simple: if you want to find a new way to spend untold billions of euro, start retiring, dismantling and "safestoring" your old reactors (building sarcophages over them). The related problem is also simple: if you have ageing and increasingly unreliable reactors, you must retire them.
The Bismark solution is like a Queen of Hearts one-liner at the party where Sarkozy plays Mad Hatter: "Replace them with windmills!". Doing this needs a very fast, ultra expensive beef-up of power grids, AKA Super Grids. Not necessarily smart, but certainly tough and capable of transporting huge amounts of power. Like smart grids, they also dont exist at present. Additional spending frills could be added by High Power Storage Systems, obviously not batteries, which also dont exist. Power management also become a big problem.
Germany's energy transition plan might attain a tripling or quadrupling of Germany's present standing-room-only windfarm development, but first-off Mrs Merkel went anti-nuclear. As late as Dec 2010 she sincerely believed German nuclear reactors, all of them, deserved a 10-year life extension. By May 2011, helped a lot by Fukushima she wanted 5 of the nation's 17 reactors shut down immediately, and all the others by Jan 1st 2022. One immediate problem is coming up this winter (when it comes - global warming plays funny tricks): what will happen to French electricity consumers at peak periods, who need system-balancing imports of electricity from Germany ? To be sure the reaction in France to New Bismark Energy (with global warming trimmings) is the mixture of paranoia and incomprehension we can expect from the paranoid French race and nation which cant understand why nobody else speaks French and why the French cant understand any other language, at all.
WHAT HAPPENS AFTER GLOBAL WARMING ?
Global cooling is one real possibility. After a 10-year cycle of rising temperatures, called a "permanent trend which has lasted for 30 years", after this 10-year trend which ended around 2005 temperatures could head south - but oil prices will go on heading north, if gas prices heading south are not used to take the shock of Peak Oil.
This is the simplest read-out: obviously a lot too complicated for media bosses and the political chiefs they report to. They like things simple and who cares if its true ?
Germany could or might succeed its energy transition plans - after all if you throw enough money at a problem it sometimes goes away, and Germany likes borrowing in the same way as other European countries because. Very simply, there is No Alternative. More important however, the German energy transition could add considerable headwinds blowing on Europe's card castle public finances and ever weakening global economic weight and power. Germany's plan will phase out its dangerous and ageing nuclear reactors and replace them, perhaps, if its possible with even more expensive but less dangerous energy sources and systems - so we should not be too hard on the New Bismark.
Elsewhere in Europe the German energy transition programme will surely and certainly shakes thing up which itself is good. Kicking away the prop of cheap nuclear power in the last few years of life of reactors whose cost profile then totally inverts and climbs an exponential ladder of decommissioning costs will also kick away the idea that electricity is almost free, and just the right thing for operating the huge, totally virtual electric car fleets which Queen of Hearts Merkel and Mad Hatter Sarkozy say they also want, along with Happy Changey and the few other leaders who whined about climate crisis.
As we know, they did this for Humanity. "To fight the menace of Global Warming".
By Andrew McKillop
Contact: xtran9@gmail.com
Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights
Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.
© 2011 Copyright Andrew McKillop - All Rights Reserved Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors.
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