Home/BlogA YouTube video making the rounds on social media (with over 27 million views!) describes a system of small wind turbines placed in the median between two lanes of traffic. The wind generated by the traffic spins the turbine blades and generates (a very small amount of) electricity:
https://www.facebook.com/InTheKnowWanderlustByAOL/videos/463043554144777/
The question is, does such a system recapture energy that would have been lost anyway?
The answer is NO.
When the blades turn to generate electricity, they are slowing the wind generated by the moving traffic. That creates additional wind resistance, which increases aerodynamic drag on the cars, and reduces their gas mileage. In effect, the turbines are stealing energy from the cars and converting it to electricity.
No, it’s not like regenerative breaking in hybrid cars, nor is it like turbochargers. It’s forcing the car to do more work than it would have otherwise done… and inefficiently converting that extra work into another form of energy. Wouldn’t the cars have lost energy through aerodynamic drag anyway? Yes! But this system INCREASES the drag on the cars. It would be like putting a little wind turbine on the roof of the car and generating electricity that way. The electrical energy created would not be worth the gas you wasted to do it (unless you really needed the electricity…but that’s what car alternators are for, and they don’t run all the time anyway).
I’m pretty sure the system would waste energy, not save energy. That’s why I’m calling it a “scam”.
Here’s a short discussion by some engineers who come to the same conclusion.
Sorry.
Hurricane Lane will soon hit Hawaii.
https://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/west/hi/h5-loop-wv.html
Dr. Spencer: I would like to draw your attention to this post:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2018/08/green-energy-scam-167-traffic-driven-wind-turbines/#comment-318304
This seems to be yet another attempt to “capture the breeze” on freeways. Seem to recall an prior idea, a few years ago, which entailed putting turbines inside the lower portion of the concrete dividers (which CA calls K-rails) to collect the air currents. CalTrans never gave it a moment’s thought and the notion dissipated as quick as it came.
Hi Dr. Spencer,
it’s clearly just another perpetual motion machine.
Many years ago, here in Italy some guys started a trail around the world using a “green ship”, they had a sailboat with an electric motor for the no windy days. To charge the on board batteries they had 2 submerged mills which in their point of view charged the batteries for free.
On my opinion many of those green guys miss the very basic of physics.
But even your friends at NASA did it once a long ago puzzled by some Italian scientist 🙁
https://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/wtether.html
Nice to see that finally they realized that it was a very bad performing generator, those days I remember how the Italian news papers were proud to announce that fantastic experiment that “extract energy from the Earth magnetic field for free”… Yes, and if my mother had the wheels, she was a bicycle of course 🙂
Have a great day.
Massimo
Failures were due to tether breaks. The science on space tethers is, however, solid. The purpose is not generally for power generation – power generation needs can be met in space much more easily with solar panels, without degrading the orbit.
The purpose is more to use the power from the solar panels to drive a current through the tether. The circuit is closed through the plasma surrounding the vehicle (this is only viable for low Earth orbit). Normally, one can only get torque from closed circuit flow, because one side of the loop gets force one way, and the other gets force the other way. So, net force is zero, but the torque can be used to maintain vehicle attitude.
However, with a tether, the circuit is closed through the plasma, so the part of the current loop attached to the vehicle gets a net force. This net force can be used for maintaining the orbit in the face of decay caused by the rarefied atmosphere that exists up to maybe 600 km altitude.
In a more conventional design, the vehicle has to use propellant to maintain altitude and, when the propellant runs out, the orbit’s days are numbered. A tethered vehicle can theoretically stay aloft forever.
Hi Bart,
yes, I know that now this is the purpose for the tethered satellites, but those time at least here in Italy the mantra was “we can get energy for free passing through the Earth magnetic field”, which was ridiculous, but sufficient to spill funds from our government.
It had been a scam for us in Italy, there were many university researchers complaining for having their funds diverted to the “magic” satellite project and remained without any fund.
Have a great day.
Massimo
I read a detailed modeling study done in China that estimated the power that can be generated by one of these turbines, they came up with 12 Watts from a passing car, over 100 Watts from a passing bus. That study said there was a negligible effect on the forces affecting the car. But I found elsewhere that a Honda Civic going 75 mph uses about 16,000 W of power just overcoming wind resistance. So if all of the energy driving the turbine actually was extracted from the Civic, that would be less than 1 part in 1,000 (negligible) yet the wind energy is still generated by extra gasoline consumption by the car: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318812449_Numerical_study_of_energy_recovery_from_the_wakes_of_moving_vehicles_on_highways_by_using_a_vertical_axis_wind_turbine?_sg=xBC_y_0yXRBPn3TUChNbwtl2YEwYrPZ_2NYXLLVkGSRR0_y64vnGbELmSYUiQxIF5WYlSrkVEQ
But the main parameter to be checked here would be the delta associated with the ADDITIONAL wind resistance versus the ADDITIONAL energy produced by the turbine; not the overall energy already required for a car to overcome wind resistance. In other words, the Honda is ALREADY using 16,000 W; the question here is whether the additional energy produced is still superior to the additional wind resistance incurred.
I meant: “…is still superior to the additional energy required from the car to overcome the added wind resistance.”
Thanks for saving me the trouble of asking that question. What you have written is the correct way to look at this. Roy Spencer seemed so sure there was no benefit, but he never quoted or linked to any calculation that shows the benefit is zero, based on your logic.
Yes, it’s exactly in that the joke!
I think that all arises from the common misconception of the name “generator” which doesn’t indeed “generate” anything, it just “converts” different kinds of energies.
Many scientifically illiterate don’t realize that.
BTW the most aerodynamic cars should be the less performing, while very bad aerodynamic vehicles such those buses should be the better performing.
Anyways I wouldn’t talk about power per car per turbine, but energy per cars per turbine, and it should be a function of square of the car speed.
Massimo…”the name generator which doesnt indeed generate anything, it just converts different kinds of energies”.
I get your point and I am not disagreeing with you. However, in the electrical field, a generator is generally a direct current device whereas an alternator is an alternating current device. The names get confused when someone attaches a gas motor to an alternator and calls the entire device a generator. Ideally, a gas-powered generator should produce a D.C output.
Although a generator is a converter of energy as you claim, it actually does generate electricity. It converts mechanical energy to electrical energy for sure, but internally, it is the coils of the armature being driven through a magnetic field that produces (generate) electricity.
When I was studying this stuff, the tendency was to confuse generators with motors. A generator is driven by mechanical energy and outputs electrical energy whereas a motor is driven by electrical energy and outputs mechanical energy.
On an exam, if you don’t get the drawing straight in your mind, you could end up doing calculations for a motor whereas the question was about a generator.
I swear that a good part of getting through university is learning to read the questions on an exam. Even at that, some profs had a tendency to confuse students unintentionally by failing to grasp that certain questions could be taken in more than one way.
Hi Gordon.
Yes, I wasn’t arguing about people who had a scientific background, I was writing about the “scientifically illiterate” (most of politicians indeed).
And yes, it “generates” electricity, but not energy which is converted from one form to one other (with exception for the intrinsic losses of course).
Have a great day in the country of the maple leaf.
Massimo
You can’t make this stuff up!
Robin Hood syndrone …..
I think you meant “Inverse Robin Hood” that robs the poor to feed the rich.
While we are dealing with scams:
CLEAN COAL PROJECTS HAVE FAILED AND HAVE WASTED HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF TAXPAYER DOLLARS.
Two examples: FutureGen in Illinois and the Kemper Power Plant in Mississippi.
In the case that the Kemper project is ever operational, about a quarter of the overall electricity generated by the power plant [will be] needed just to run the equipment that will capture the carbon emissions. And thats true of any clean coal power plant with carbon capture: between 20 and 30 percent of the electricity is used to capture carbon emissions, though its unclear if these estimates include the electricity required for pollution-scrubbing. Thats like filling your car up with 20 gallons of gasoline, and it takes five just to start the engine totally crazy.”
M,
What possible advantage is there to humanity, in reducing the amount of tha most essential plant food (CO2) available to those plants without which would perish?
Keep your death wish to yourself, please. Maybe you are even stupid and ignorant enough to call for the removal of the other supposed “pollutant”, water (H2O), from the atmosphere as well!
Your desire to wipe out humanity is insane. Who do you suggest should be starved to death first? I’m guessing you won’t be volunteering.
And of course, reducing the amount of plant food, in the face of increasing numbers of humans, must result in starvation for some. I appreciate you don’t care, being stupid and ignorant and gullible enough to follow your cult leaders unswervingly! Maybe you could contemplate doing without food, that others may live. This would no doubt convince other cultists of your sincerity. Do you really think that climatological pseudoscientific cultists like Schmidt, Mann, and all the rest, actually think about the nonsense they expound – or give any thought to the logical conclusions of their demands?
Keep it up. I don’t blame for using a pseudonym. You never know who the crowd with the pitchforks and torches might be looking for next! The advocates of starvation, perhaps?
Cheers.
Please pardon the typos. Laughter, faux righteous indignation, or fat fingers – take your pick.
Cheers.
“Your desire to wipe out humanity is insane.”
Not really.
I would prefer a controlled cull.
Starting with climate denialists and people who people who make too many typos in their posts.
Oops! I made a typo!
M,
You don’t agree that your desire to wipe out humanity is insane? Maybe you’re insane to think so.
Oh well. I’m glad that you have no power whatever to influence the course of human events. Carry on fantasising.
Cheers.
Myki: What exactly is a ‘climate denialist’?
To deny is to declare untrue or non-existent, disavow or repudiate.
I’ve never met anyone who declares climate to be non-existent.
C,
Myki’s stated desire is to exterminate, at the very least, all those who are not gullible, stupid, or ignorant enough to blindly accept his climatological pseudoscientific nonsense.
“Climate denial” is just his stupid and ignorant definition of anyone who questions his deluded fantasies.
Myki and his ilk are not bright enough to realise how stupid and ignorant they are. Fanatics can be dangerous – particularly in combination with stupidity, ignorance, and delusional thinking.
Until he can describe this GHE upon which his delusion is apparently based, Myki remains your common or garden variety cultist nutter.
Do you think I may have over-used stupid and ignorant? Nah. Seems about right to me.
Cheers.
How about we start with you, Myki?
Revolutionaries always think they’ll be part of the ruling class that emerges after the battle. Generally, instead, they’re the first up against the wall.
myki…”In the case that the Kemper project is ever operational, about a quarter of the overall electricity generated by the power plant [will be] needed just to run the equipment that will capture the carbon emissions”.
If you alarmist twits had not started this pseudo-science about CO2 warming the planet, that money would not have been wasted installing and running useless carbon capture schemes.
It’s your fault.
Im pretty sure the system would waste energy, not save energy. Thats why Im calling it a scam.
“Stupid” would be a better word.
If somebody said to you, that they had a type of graph, which showed clearly how much global warming had occurred in the past, and how much global warming was occurring now, would you dismiss it as rubbish, without even looking at it?
Global warming is a very emotional subject. Many people “know” that it is a serious problem, and they will not even look at evidence which they think might suggest otherwise. I don’t think that this is a very “scientific” attitude.
Global warming contour maps clearly show that global warming is happening. But how fast is global warming happening, and is it getting worse?
Perhaps I should have called my global warming contour map, a “rate of change” graph. A “rate of change” graph can be made from the data of any time series. If temperature is used, then the graph shows how fast the temperature is changing, for every possible date range.
A global warming contour map is made from a temperature series, like GISTEMP or UAH or weather balloon data. I don’t create the temperature series myself, scientists do. I perform a mathematical procedure on the temperature series, which is based on linear regressions (lots of linear regressions, normally between 150,000 and 350,000 linear regressions). The results are colour coded, and plotted on a graph.
I am a computer programmer. The procedure has to be automated, because it would take several lifetimes to do it manually.
If you are willing to “risk” learning something new, then you should check out my introduction to contour maps. The introduction uses Robot-Train train trips, and makes contour maps based on Robot-Train’s speeds (the “rate of change” of distance).
https://agree-to-disagree.com/robot-train-contour-maps
Robot-Train contour maps are easier to understand, than global warming contour maps. But they are based on exactly the same mathematical principles. Speed is the “rate of change” of distance, and the warming rate is the “rate of change” of temperature.
One of the first steps in investigating any scientific issue, is to accurately measure what is happening. The data then needs to be organised accurately and logically, so that it can be understood. This is especially important when there is a large volume of data. A global warming contour map does these tasks efficiently, and effectively. The human eye is designed to detect colour and shape. A global warming contour map turns warming rate changes, into colours and shapes.
A global warming contour map is not biased towards alarmism, or denial. It is as unbiased as a line graph (actually, you can bias a line graph much more easily than a contour map).
There are many more advanced global warming contour maps on my website.
https://agree-to-disagree.com
I am happy to answer any questions that you have.
Regards,
Sheldon Walker
Sheldon…”Global warming contour maps clearly show that global warming is happening. But how fast is global warming happening, and is it getting worse?”
What the maps or the time series fail to show is what is causing the warming. It is only an allegation, backed by agreement, that CO2 is the cause.
No one has ever demonstrated, using the scientific method, that CO2 in our atmosphere has caused any significant warming.
The reasoning goes that CO2 can absorb infrared energy and infrared energy can cause gas molecules to warm, therefore all warming since the Industrial Era must have been caused by CO2. The logic has conveniently omitted laws related to thermodynamics and perpetual motion while completely ignoring the fact that we are still recovering from the Little Ice Age in the short term, and other ice ages in the long term.
If we’re just recovering from the LIA, why are temperatures now higher than they were initially?
Such a “recovery” violates energy conservation (1LOT).
As predictable as the sun sets i the west, Roy Spencer spirals ever deeper into cranky old man syndrome
B,
And as predictably as the Sun rises in the East, another stupid and ignorant exponent of the irrelevant and pointless, makes another information free statement of worthless personal opinion, supported by precisely no facts at all.
I surmise, from this, that another follower of climatological pseudoscience has proclaimed his desire to enter the competition for The Most Witless Troll Award.
None of the bumbling buffoons can even specify what the wondrous GHE is, let alone how it performs its wonders!
In any case, the GHE is vastly inferior to the UFE (Unicorn Fart Effect), as is evident from the fact that the surface cools at night, during winter, and when it’s cloudy, rainy, foggy, cold, or even when there is a total solar eclipse! The UFE is responsible for four and a half billion years of surface cooling. So much for the vain GHE cultists’ attempt to usurp the obviously superior UFE!
UFE deniers should go back to playing computer games, talking to trees, and searching for the missing heat that wasn’t there! What a joke!
Cheers.
Mike, I think you need to calm down. Not everyone who disagrees with you or Roy is witless and ignorant.
I suspect that one of the reasons for this blog is that Roy doesn’t mind hearing different opinions.
You’re regarding those with differing ideas as the enemy. That’s neither entertaining nor instructive.
Don’t worry SC, we will give him his sedatives tonight.
I am afraid we have not yet found a cure for cranky old man syndrome.
Other than waiting for time to take its toll.
I fail to see how calling out stupid ideas that waste taxpayers’ money and funnel it to snake oil salesmen, rather than helping those taxpayers, makes me a cranky old man. To then suggest such calling out needs to die with me earns you the coveted cranky old man ban, professorP.
Cranky old men are those with brains and experience.
Cranky old women are those with brains and experience.
There is no known cure.
We haven’t found a cure for paranoid delusional warmists, either. What’s your point?
Well Roy, in your own words you characterize this as a “scam” while the video you provide says it is nothing more than an experimental prototype that provides no evidence of fraud or other financial malfeasance. Maybe they are just glorified wind chimes but a scam?
Question for you: Are you up to determining what is or is not “a scam” in a domain beyond your own qualifications or might that itself also be a scam?
Surely you can think of some other green energy scams a bit juicier than that. Climate Gate perhaps or Solyndira. Maybe that great global scale research grant swindle. You do have a blog and celebrity status. Don’t waste it on small potato like this little thing.
Unless in fact, thats all you got
Speaking of Solyndra:
“U.S. Expects $5 Billion From Program That Funded Solyndra,” Bloomberg News, 11/12/14
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-12/u-s-expects-5-billion-from-program-that-funded-solyndra
B,
You haven’t explained what you meant by Dr Spencer spiralling ever deeper into cranky old man syndrome (whatever that might mean).
Have you considered starting your own blog? You could post matters of your own choosing.
What do you intend to do if Dr Spencer fails to comply with your advice? Run to your mummy? Have a tantrum?
Good luck with that.
I notice that Dr Spencer explained why he used the word “scam”. Maybe you could substitute another in your own mind, if you find Dr Spencer’s useage unacceptable.
Or just try another pointless ad hominem attack, followed by a pretty poor attempt to weasel your way out of it.
Cheers.
Roy,
You are not a cranky old man.
You are our beloved guru, truth seeker and distributor of wisdom. Thankfully there are few swine here to trample your pearls.
That said I reserve the right to respectfully disagree with you from time to time.
Bruce sez:
“Well Roy, in your own words you characterize this as a scam while the video you provide says it is nothing more than an experimental prototype that provides no evidence of fraud or other financial malfeasance.”
On the contrary, perpetual motion schemes are, by their very nature, fraudulent. One does not need further evidence. If it purports to generate energy from nothing, it is ipso facto a scam.
If you can provide any evidence that the engineers of these turbines actually “purport to produce energy from nothing” I will first eat my hat then give you a thousand dollars.
If there is any “scam ” going on here it is that this army of cranky old diaper fillers actually claims an ounce of skill between the lot of them!
“If you can provide any evidence that the engineers of these turbines actually purport to produce energy from nothing I will first eat my hat then give you a thousand dollars.”
They are claiming they can extract net energy by impeding air flow. Done.
I will require a cashier’s check, youngling. Hope your beanie is made of non-toxic materials.
Not so fast old gummer, you might trip over your cane.
What you “purport” has never earned you much i suspect. You go off one one last vision quest for what they purport. Maybe just email them and ask. I’m sure they’d find your question amusing at least.
“Not so fast old gummer, you might trip over your cane.”
Funny, I said the same thing to your mom.
s,
What you think is of no moment to me, unless you can provide some reasonable basis for your opinion. Your attempt at imputing a particular state of mind to me (which happens to be erroneous, in any case), is just stupid (it achieves nothing, except to possibly make yourself appear thick), and ignorant (you have precisely no way of knowing my state of mind).
I’ll ignore your unsolicited and baseless advice.
Your suspicions are likewise completely worthless.
As to what you say I give regard to, once again you demonstrate a tenuous grip on reality. Your fantasies are not soundly based – your misrepresentations are not facts, are they?
I don’t give a tinker’s curse whether you find my comments entertaining or instructive. Why should I?
Carry on blathering.
Cheers.
I guess I have to spell it out to you Mike.
My hypothesis that Roy Spencer is a “cranky old man” is well founded on the following:
1) He is cranky. If all it takes to raise his bile is this silly little Youtube video the objective of which is his own hypothesis that it is “a scam” (meritless to the point of laziness, as I have demonstrated) then I am confident that one reasonable explanation, considering it has a historical pattern of predictability, is that he is cranky. I won’t speculate why but maybe its his underwear or he lost his dentures.
2) He is old. He is.
To which Earnest Hemingway had the best explanation of all, not just for Roy but 98% of all predominantly male and typically old denizens of blogs and comments sections:
“No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”
B,
You still haven’t managed to explain what you meant by spiralling ever deeper . . .
Uttering nonsense about “spelling it out” is the usual feeble attempt to weasel out of a generally indefensible position. The refuge of the stupid and ignorant.
Are you claiming to read Dr Spencer’s mind, or just casting unsupported aspersions?
Your confidence that one possible reasonable explanation is correct is about as stupid as foolish Warmists being confident that additional CO2 plant food in the atmosphere has adverse effects!
Keep trying with pointless remarks about underwear and dentures. Others are fixated on overcoats, lakes, bank accounts, and the endless reanalysis of weather observations. At least underwear and dentures are a bit of light relief.
If leaping to conclusions becomes an Olympic sport, do you think you would be good enough to get gold?
Have you managed to find a useful description of the GHE, or are you just trying to deny, divert, and confuse generally? Only joking, the GHE doesn’t actually exist, does it?
Cheers.
Mike…. or should I start calling you Roy’s pet Pit Bull?
You can skip the “cheers” as clearly you don’t mean it. I’d rather converse with someone honest
. Why don’t you just go sit in your corner and let Roy, – who has indicated already that he can when inclined speak for himself – come back in and explain how and why he choses to characterize this small scale experimental effort at wind power, a project the extent of which he knows no more than whatever a dinky little youtube video reveals, as a “scam”.
He being a professional, no doubt appreciates the correct definitions.
Scam is considered a fraud, deliberate deception, a swindle, a racket, a dupe, double cross, racket etc.
Does Roy consider any experiment a “scam”? Or just this one?
B,
You may converse with whomever you wish.
You need to brush up your mind reading skills. You have not the faintest idea of what I think, have you?
If you don’t agree with me, just provide some facts supporting your view. Others can then make up their own minds, based on the information presented.
You and your ilk resort to pointless and patronising ad hom statements, couched in vague terms, rather than providing facts relevant to the discussion. This seems to me to a stupid and ignorant attempt to deny, divert, and confuse.
If you do not agree with Dr Spencer’s use of the word “scam”, why not just provide a dictionary definition, and leave it at that?
Summing up with the usual pointless and puerile gotcha once again makes you appear stupid and ignorant to me, and possibly to others. Carry on.
What point are you actually trying to make?
Cheers.
Dear Roy Spencer Pit Bull,
I’m glad to hear you don’t care but you said as much already. I would actually believe you if you proved it by shutting up and giving Roy an opportunity to reply to my admittedly not terribly respectful challenge to the validity of his claims.
To further my case (in the continued absence of Roy’s) please refer to his previous post entitled
MAGA – USA Soy bean and Corn production 2018 yada yada
where he states, gloatingly, that:
“Clearly, the widely expected decline in U.S. agricultural production due to global warming has yet to materialize,”
Similar to his bullshit spin on the wind chimes, there was no ” widely expected decline in U.S. agricultural production due to global warming” anticipated for any time in this decade by anyone other than the FOX News fever swamps or some flake bible thumping evangelist yet somehow this is Roy’s take home conclusion about this years bean yields.
Now to be fair I’m only guessing but that does sound to me a lot like any run of the mill cranky old man scratching his balls while listening to Rush Limbaugh. One or two bizarre and hopelessly logically fallacious leaps of the imagination is one thing but a consistent pattern?
I think my hypothesis could well be considered theory but I doubt I’ll find many peers here to objectively consider it, if Roy Spencer’s Pit Bull is any indication
B,
You give me precisely no reason to dance to your tune, do you?
Whether you choose to believe me or not is your affair, obviously. Nothing to do with me.
I am flattered that you think I can influence Dr Spencer’s actions, but I have no reason whatsoever to believe this is so. Have you any facts to support your apparent belief?
You wrote –
“Now to be fair Im only guessing but that does sound to me a lot like any run of the mill cranky old man scratching his balls while listening to Rush Limbaugh.”
Who cares? Does anybody pay attention to what you think? Or to what I think, for that matter.
It is a characteristic of climatological pseudoscientific types to confuse hypothesis and theory with opinion and assertion. Your opinion of what something sounds like (with or without testicles – I’m unsure of the relevance), is not a hypothesis. You appear confused, and possibly deluded.
Carry on. Maybe you could describe the GHE in such a way that someone, somewhere, could have a stab at proposing a testable GHE hypothesis. How hard could it be?
If you can’t, and you still claim belief in the GHE, you are obviously stupid and ignorant.
Time for you to whine and complain some more, I suppose. You could pose a pointless gotcha, or try more deny, divert, and confuse tactics. How about issuing a witless challenge? I could challenge you to a duel of wits, but I was brought up to realise that duelling with an unarmed opponent is not good form.
Press on. If you are attempting to be gratuitously offensive, I have to point out that I generally decline to take offense, and you provide no reason why I should alter my normal practice,
Cheers.
It is no mere coincidence that the term “Gotcha!” first made famous by the bumbling attempts at damage control by Sarah Palin, is now repeated twice by you.
Roy would tell you, after his long painful slog thought the mosh pit of scientific completion that what you and Sarah fear is nothing but an honest transparent question, unambiguous and unaccommodating to the clever deception of logical fallacies. He would also tell you to get over the painful injury of perceived insults and just answer the damn questions, to the best of your ability.
Because Roy, unlike you, is a professional
b,
Regardless of who might tell me what to do, I do as I choose, Don’t you?
You wrote –
“He would also tell you to get over the painful injury of perceived insults and just answer the damn questions, to the best of your ability.”
More mind reading? What perceived insults? Do you imagine I choose to feel insulted?
Why I should I believe that Dr Spencer dances to your tune? Would I care?
Ah, questions, questions. If I can’t be bothered responding to your gotchas, that is my affair. If you choose to feel upset or slighted, good for you. Keep demanding answers, I’ll keep refusing – as and when I desire.
How are you going with your GHE hypothesis? Not well, until you can describe a GHE – which of course you can’t! Keep trying.
Cheers.
bruce…”As predictable as the sun sets i the west, Roy Spencer spirals ever deeper into cranky old man syndrome”
You are wrong on to counts. One, the Sun does not set in the west, that is an illusion created by the rotation of the planet. Two, in your deluded state you fail to see that Roy is talking good sense and doing readers a service by having the guts to tell the truth.
At the North Pole, it sets in the south. Be careful with your local bias.
-A cranky ‘old’ ‘man’
Cranky old men just tell it how it is and 97percent of the time they spot on
Regards
Harry
The engineers cited do not agree amongst each other.
With close 2-way traffic, turbines may reduce the drag effect produced by cars going in one direction on cars going in the other.
Not so clear.
And it’d be nice if Roy or the engineers put some numbers to this.
nate…”The engineers cited do not agree amongst each other. ”
It’s fairly simple, you don’t get something for nothing. If you dam a river to generate electricity you affect the environment from the dam all the way down the river to its end.
In this case, if you interfere with the wind blown off cars by forcing it to drive turbines, you have to interfere with aerodynamics of the car itself.
I recall driving across the Canadian prairies in a little Honda, and on certain days when the air was heavy with moisture, whenever you passed a large truck going the other way, the wind collisions from both vehicles would nearly blow the Honda off the road.
I had to start watching out for trucks and drive on the side of the road to avoid the wind from them.
“whenever you passed a large truck going the other way, the wind collisions from both vehicles would nearly blow the Honda off the road.”
Making my case. That oncoming traffic’s effect can be strong, and the turbine in between may reduce this.
It does not matter, Nate. Losses may not be evenly distributed, but there is no possibility whatsoever that the balance sheet ends up positive overall.
Not obvious.
If a ship’s wake causes a buoy to bob up and down, and in doing so generate power, is the ship, long since passed, slowed as a result?
Nate dear,
‘obvious’ is that you don’t get a positive cash or even energy flow with these devices. And I’m not going to debunk, since one fool asks more questions than a thousand wise men can answer.
If you can’t debunk, then posting serves no purpose. Its still not obvious.
Nate dear, my love,
posting here serves no purpose, you are right on that. But you are wrong on anybody’s need to debunk all garbage people come up with.
No amount tantruming will make this shit worth the virtual ink.
“If a ships wake causes a buoy to bob up and down, and in doing so generate power, is the ship, long since passed, slowed as a result?”
Yes, it is. It disrupts the wake, creating a pressure change the propagates forward, slowing the ship.
A negligible amount relative to the ship’s power usage perhaps, but the power generated would be similarly negligible on that scale. If you create a network of densely deployed buoys, and you reach the point where you are drawing significant power, you will be significantly slowing the ship.
There is no free lunch.
There is no free lunch, but that is not applicable here. The energy of the ship’s wake will be dissipated anyway, whether it is gathered or not.
See example here:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2018/08/green-energy-scam-167-traffic-driven-wind-turbines/#comment-318227
“The energy of the ships wake will be dissipated anyway, whether it is gathered or not.”
There will be additional energy dissipated due to the change in pressure. This is always the case, Nate. Just because you can visualize a decoupling in your mind does not mean it exists in the real world.
It is very difficult to exploit “waste energy”. To the degree it is truly “waste”, it cannot be exploited. As you get closer to the ultimate limit, it becomes increasingly hard to gain anything else, because you always lose something in the conversion as well.
Bart,
“there is no possibility whatsoever that the balance sheet ends up positive overall.”
You have a hard time acknowledging that someone else has made a good point.
You are over generalizing. I gave you a solid counter example, where the coupling back to the source is negligible.
Even the wake problem, the coupling back to the ship is likely weak. Wave energy 1/r^2.
Your counterexample is garbage.
Whatever the coupling is, that is what you are drawing your power from. So, if it is weak, so is your power draw.
Nate, you really don’t want to be defending perpetual motion schemes. This scam is as old as the hills. It never works out because the laws of physics are against it.
“Your counterexample is garbage.”
Your rebuttal of it is garbage. Just argument by assertion.
No perpetual motion involved.
I expected that not even David Appell would be dumb enough to defend this insanity but he showed up to defend the indefensible.
David is a member of a cult of crazed fanatics.
Instead of insulting me multiple times, you should be trying to find your missing 150 W/m2.
Any progress on that yet?
It is pointless to debate with fanatics. Fanaticism drives out reason and logic.
That said you are doing wonders for this blog by helping these folks hone their arguments.
Traffic-powered windmills should be installed on all solar roads, as well as on all piezo-electric roads. That’s a marriage made in bearish heaven.
OMG, yes. Piezo-electric roads. I thought that was the dumbest thing I ever heard until this one.
I know. Don’t put them along the highway. Install mini-windmills on top of the cars. That way they can charge their batteries while driving, and run their electric cars forever.
Crazy, right?
Apparently the geniuses at Gizmodo thought it was a great idea. This fellow tries to edumacate them.
https://transportevolved.com/2014/01/09/were-sorry-gizmodo-but-mini-wind-turbines-wont-power-your-electric-car-for-free/
Do you think he’ll succeed in getting them to understand energy conservation? I mean, it is Gizmodo after all, so no, probably not.
Yonason…”Install mini-windmills on top of the cars. That way they can charge their batteries while driving, and run their electric cars forever.
Crazy, right?”
That’s what I’ve been trying to tell alarmists around here about the AGW theory. One version claims that IR radiated from the surface can be collected by CO2 and radiated back to heat the surface to a higher temperature than it is heated by solar energy.
I can see you’re being derailed again.
Backradiation doesn’t ‘heat’, it ‘slows down the natural cooling’ after the Sun has heated the surface. The Sun does the heating business. AGW is about slower cooling and milder nights, milder winters, and as a consequence, more quickly warming mornings and springs.
This is like ocean ‘acidification’, which is all just about reducing alkalinity.
Wert: Ah yes, the ‘ocean acidification’ scam.
The IPCC stated in 2007 in ‘Climate Change: The Physical Science Basis’ that ‘the uptake of anthropogenic carbon since 1750 has led to the ocean becoming more acidic, with an average decrease in surface pH of 0.1 units.’
They also said that ‘the overall pH change is computed from estimates of anthropogenic carbon uptake and simple ocean models.’ Yeah, right…….
On page 405, they (mercifully) get in touch with reality, and note that that ‘the mean pH of surface waters ranges between 7.9 and 8.3 in the open ocean.’
The ‘ocean acidification’ scare is total BS. It is in my view nothing more than a deliberate twisting and misuse of terminology, which is intended to mislead – and, putting my cynic’s hat on, extract more grant money for second rate so-called science projects.
Every solution has a property called “acidity,” and the ocean’s is increasing — up 30% since the pre-industrial era.
It’s a measured number. See
“Ocean acidification” (review)
Phillip Williamsona, Carol Turleyb and Clare Ostlec
MARINE CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS PARTNERSHIP: SCIENCE REVIEW
2017
doi:10.14465/2017.arc10.001-oac
http://www.mccip.org.uk/media/1760/2017arc_sciencereview_001_oac.pdf
See especially figure 2.
DA: thanks for the ocean acidity reference. I haven’t had time to sit down and read it it properly yet, but it looks interesting at first glance, and read it I certainly will.
DA: The term ‘ocean acidification’ is misleading, as I’ve stated many times before. The subject always being discussed is that of claimed minor changes in alkaline oceanic pH values.
In my earlier post, I commented that the IPCC stated in 2007 in Climate Change: The Physical Science Basis that the uptake of anthropogenic carbon since 1750 has led to the ocean becoming more acidic, with an average decrease in surface pH of 0.1 units.’
This leads me to your claim that ‘acidity has increased by 30%’ – an oft repeated and incorrect statement. Allowing for the misuse of the term acidification, look at a pH reduction from 8.2 to 8.1. Do your sums and you’ll find that, for example, a pH of 8.2 corresponds to 6.3096 x10^9 mol/L of hydrogen ion, H+.
A pH of 8.1 represents 7.9433 x 10^9 mol/L of H+. That’s a decrease of 0.1 pH units, and the difference between 7.9433 and 6.3095 is 25.89%, not 30%. Similarly, the difference between a pH of 7.8 and 7.7 is 25.86%, and so forth for other values.
You claim that ‘every solution has a property called acidity.’ Where have you got this from? Is some new mutation of what used to be science being taught in schools these days?
Now to the paper you referred me to.
As expected, plenty of reference to ‘anthropogenic CO2’ , ‘ocean acidification’, and lots of scary speculation (impacts) from the IPCC.
Nowhere is there a reference to exactly how much of the increase in atmospheric CO2 is of anthropogenic origin. Pre-industrially, we’re told it was 280ppm, and now it’s 410. So how much is currently due to mankind? I’ve seen figures of 3% – but is it? I don’t know, but the authors of this paper in my view certainly should.
You refer me to figure 2. The observed pH values are plotted in grey, and the right hand axis gives the values, all of which are firmly alkaline. The anomalies clusters lie above the pH values – i.e., they’re more alkaline than the pH values! I’m not a statistician, but given the variability shown by these anomalies, can a trend line really be drawn through these values? Figure 6 clearly shows the variability inherent in ocean pH readings.
I see that the authors refer to a new technique called free-ocean CO2 enrichment (FOCE) which is being developed. According to Wikipedia, current FOCE systems lower pH using metered addition of CO2-enriched seawater into the experimental chambers – yet it’s still not using CO2 enriched air above the water, and so is not a true mimic of real-world conditions.
Here, then are my questions.
How much of the increase in CO2 from 280 to 410ppm is due to human activity?
Where is the experiment which proves, reproducibly, how much of a pH change this induces, and indeed whether this change is irreversible?
Perhaps the ‘ocean acidification’ scaremongers should have addressed this first – only now are we seeing the necessary controlled experimental techniques needed being developed, it seems.
I need to clarify something. Where I’ve posted 10^9, this of course means 10 to the power of minus nine. My apologies!
I still find it strange that Roy is blogging on picayune topics, while noticeably silent on the heat records being broken in the northern Hemisphere, and all the fires in the west. There is smoke all over the place out here.
“Portland air quality still considered ‘unhealthy,’ advisory extended to Thursday,” Oregonian 8/22/18
https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2018/08/portland_air_quality_still_con.html
Interesting that you are always happy to flag cold instances/records as accidental weather events (whenever people like ren mention them) while immediately screaming about Northern Summer heat events (which often arent records) as incontrovertible proof of AGW climate change.
Make up your mind, David. And another thing: even if such fiction were true, what exactly would you expect as human actions to reduce warming? Kill all the cows and stop all industries so we can get a 0.2 degree heat respite? Trust me, warmer is better than colder – mankind doesnt like artificial heating or heavy coats. Just see where life thrives the most: in the rainforest.
“Red hot planet: This summer’s punishing and historic heat in 7 maps and charts,” Washington Post 8/17/18
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2018/08/17/red-hot-planet-this-summers-punishing-and-historic-heat-in-7-maps-and-charts/
Too risky for Roy to touch.
DA,
Climate is the average of historical weather records.
Over the longest period there is, (back to the Earth’s creation – about four and a half billion years), the surface has cooled. Long term climate shows a cooling trend.
Don’t panic. Come back when Antarctica is ice free again.
Cheers.
I believe in ice ages.
C,
Antarctica definitely seems to be in the grip of an Ice Age.
The Libyan Desert, not so much.
GHE enthusiasts can no doubt explain that both the hottest and coldest places on Earth are characterised by the lowest levels of supposed GHGs in the overlaying atmosphere.
If anybody could actually come up with a scientific GHE description, of course. Nobody has, to date.
Cheers.
“Antarctica definitely seems to be in the grip of an Ice Age.”
Brilliant Mike has never explained how Antarctica can be so cold–
when there is all that heat coming out of the Earth that he keeps yammering about..
N,
You wrote –
“Brilliant Mike has never explained how Antarctica can be so cold
when there is all that heat coming out of the Earth that he keeps yammering about..”
Thank you for recognising my effulgence intellect.
I have explained previously. You must have missed the explanation. If you wish me to explain it again, let me know. I would be grateful if you demonstrate some evidence of your efforts to find my previous explanation, and acknowledge that your knowledge of physics is insufficient to understand why Antarctica is colder than the Libyan desert.
Thanks again for the compliment. I appreciate your support.
Cheers.
“I have explained previously.”
You previously strung words together..
Meanwhile I have explained to you several times why the heat emanating from the Earth is negligible. Yet you act as if it has never been explained.
I would be grateful if you demonstrate some evidence of your efforts to find my previous explanation, and acknowledge that you have not in any way rebutted this.
“my effulgence intellect”
Did you mean to say my intelligence intellect? Either way it makes no sense.
N,
No. I meant “effulgent”, I apologise for the typo.
Obviously, you are finely honing your ability to leap to incorrect conclusions.
By the way, imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery.
The imitation you evidenced in a previous comment is more the style of the monkey in the zoo imitating the human observers. Sometimes, it appears that the monkey is actually exhibiting human intelligence! I’m not sure how flattered I should feel by your imitation, but I accept flattery from any source – even the stupid and ignorant.
Go ahead Nate – deny that the Earth has a molten interior. Deny that the Antarctic ice caps exist, kilometres thick in places. Don’t be surprised if others might assess you as being stupid and ignorant, as I do.
Learn some physics. There is no GHE.
Cheers.
Description of the GHE:
“Less GHGs less impediment to radiation reaching the surface from the Sun, or being emitted by the surface to outer space.”
– Mike Flynn, May 5, 2017 at 9:22 PM
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2017/05/uah-global-temperature-update-for-april-2017-0-27-deg-c/#comment-245860
We are picking cherries here! May is a Spring Month so why is it being included in an article on the heat this summer??? May-July is not summer!!! May is a Spring month and was the warmest on record in the lower 48 so by including May in the period that should be meteorological summer it skews the temperature numbers way up. This map should be June-July!!!!!!!!! Picking Cherries!!! We will see the numbers and how they add up at the end of August for June-August! I bet it is not even close to !934 or 1936 for the lower 48!!!
rusty…”May is a Spring month and was the warmest on record in the lower 48…”
Propaganda from NOAA, the political arm of the Democratic Party. The hottest year ever in the lower 48 was 1934, until NOAA erased it retroactively to better serve the zealots perpetrating anthropogenic warming.
The record only reflect the degree to which NOAA has fudged the temperature record.
Gordon: How would you prefer to remove the biases that adjustments are attempting to correct for?
Don’t attempt to correct the history. Any “correction” of the history is a lie.
Otherwise known as “summer”. We broke many cold records in the past winter, and are on a track to break a lot more in the coming one.
As I’ve showed you before, hot records are outpacing cold records, and have been for a long time.
The world is warming.
And, they will until they don’t. But, this is not an issue. Everyone agrees there has been some slight warming. The question is, what is the source of it? A warming climate is not proof that CO2 is warming the climate.
David Appell says:
August 25, 2018 at 1:56 PM
As Ive showed you before, hot records are outpacing cold records, and have been for a long time. The world is warming.
……
David, then you would have to show the error of his ways to Tony Heller, with this demnstration of the rate of breaking weather records. Geoff.
https://realclimatescience.com/2018/08/algorithm-for-counting-records/
http://www.geoffstuff.com/record_numbers.jpg
DA. are you whining again?
Why aren’t you out on the fire line, doing something? If you’re too lazy to offer anything constructive, at least learn some physics.
DA,
Apparently you don’t find the fact that nobody can actually describe the mysterious GHE, at all strange.
Strange.
Cheers.
“The atmosphere is an insulator. CO2 is around 90 to 750 times as opaque to some wavelengths of light as N2 or O2.”
– Mike Flynn, June 18, 2017 at 3:34 AM
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2017/06/a-global-warming-red-team-warning-do-not-strive-for-consensus-with-the-blue-team/#comment-251624
Mike Flynn says:
May 23, 2017 at 5:16 PM
“I hate to bore you the real science, but the transmittance of the atmosphere increases as the amount of GHGs in it drops.”
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2017/05/uah-global-temperature-update-for-april-2017-0-27-deg-c/#comment-247988
“Less GHGs less impediment to radiation reaching the surface from the Sun, or being emitted by the surface to outer space.”
– Mike Flynn, May 5, 2017 at 9:22 PM
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2017/05/uah-global-temperature-update-for-april-2017-0-27-deg-c/#comment-245860
DA,
Thanks for quoting me – again. Repetition of factual information is a pleasant change to your usual nonsense.
Are you disagreeing with anything I said, or just totally stumped for words?
How are you getting along with a description of the GHE? Not so well?
That’s because the GHE is a mythical climatological pseudoscientific construct! CO2 heats nothing.
Anyone who thinks that putting more CO2 between the Sun and a thermometer makes the thermometer hotter, is just delusional. Or maybe just stupid and ignorant – which do you prefer?
Cheers.
DA…”I still find it strange that Roy is blogging on picayune topics, while noticeably silent on the heat records being broken in the northern Hemisphere, and all the fires in the west”.
The only heat records I am seeing is in the fudged data from NOAA and GISS. To get the records, they needed to cut the confidence level in half.
Fires are due to dry weather. We’ve had a high pressure zone stalled over the NW since mid-June, a not so uncommon occurrence during summer.
Gordon: What’s the evidence that any data are “fudged?”
Are the Japanese fudging too?
Their data show the 30-yr GMST trend is +0.15 C/dec.
Their data show total warming since 1891 is +0.9 C.
Source:
http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/gwp/temp/list/mon_wld.html
Roy,
Not an aerodynamics engineer but knee-jerk reaction is wind turbines will produce negligible extra drag or no drag at all.
Calculating it (CFD) would be virtually impossible as input parameters (shape, distance to turbine, speed, frequency etc) greatly vary.
With that, idea is still stupid and unlikely to ever recover energy went into its production.
Keep up the good work bringing science back to climate science (which began to sound like an oxymoron with advance of AGW)
Daniel,
Yours would be the most important point – at least to me.
How much would it cost, totally, to install such a system and then, forgetting the drag on the cars (that seems to be only another hidden tax on the consumer) what would be the ROI?
My guess is no lending institution would touch it which makes it perfect for the government to use as another way to waste our tax dollars.
To calculate ROI you’d need to include the damage costs of fossil fuels — to health, ecosystems, and climate for the next 10,000 years.
Check that — 100,000 years.
“The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate,” David Archer (University of Chicago), 2008.
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10727.html
It’s really not hard at all. The only way you get power out of it from the passing traffic is via drag. So, if the drag is negligible, so is the power. And, you will always lose more than you gain, because of the laws of thermodynamics.
Numbers?
Completely unnecessary. Perpetual motion is not possible.
“And, you will always lose more than you gain, because of the laws of thermodynamics.”
The loss of energy is happening anyway, some of that lost energy can be captured and used.
Consider a pitching machine pitching high velocity baseballs. Say it uses 50 W of electricity.
Suppose I capture the kinetic energy of the baseballs and generate 10 W of power with it.
Does the pitching machine now have to generate 60 W?
Nope.
It does not care a whit about what you do with the energy in the balls after they leave the machine.
This is specious reasoning. The purpose of the pitching machine is to provide high velocity baseballs. If you extract energy from them before they reach the batter, they will no longer be at high velocity, i.e., will not be performing the function.
If you gather the energy after the ball has passed the batter, you are still losing energy overall, from losses within the pitching machine, and drag from the air. You can recover some, but not nearly all.
The situation with the freeways is like the first example. You are taking away energy that is being employed for the purpose. To get something like the second example, you would have to do something like regenerative braking, where the energy extraction is not impeding the primary purpose.
The ball with its kinetic energy is analogous to the air with its kinetic energy (wind). The ball machine is analogous to the car.
For the case of the ball, the coupling back to the machine is nil.
For the case of the air the coupling back to the car is likely very small.
For example suppose 10 % of car’s dissipated power makes it to the turbine. Pt = 0.1 x eff Pcar. Suppose eff is .25. Pt ~ 2.5% Pcar
A reasonable guess is that the coupling is symmetric, 0.1 back to the car as well. Car also has eff ~ .25 of absorbing wind energy.
So net power loss to car is Pt x 0.1 x eff ~ .025 Pt ~ 0.062 % Pcar
“For the case of the air the coupling back to the car is likely very small.”
There is your mistake. If the coupling is small, so is your power draw.
There is no chance of coming out with a net positive gain here, and throwing out made up numbers isn’t going to change that.
” If the coupling is small, so is your power draw.”
I already noted it was small. So what?
The additional losses to the car are smaller.
“There is no chance of coming out with a net positive gain here”
How do you define positive gain?
What I claim is that the car is already dissipating power. The turbine will capture some of this. Additional losses to the car will be smaller.
What is the fundamental reason it can’t? Be specific.
Got nothing? No fundamental reasons?
“The additional losses to the car are smaller.”
Only in your made-up numbers. The additional losses are necessarily larger. I’m going to post something near the present end of comments explaining so it doesn’t get lost up here, then I’ll come back and post a link. Give me a little time…
See http://www.drroyspencer.com/2018/08/green-energy-scam-167-traffic-driven-wind-turbines/#comment-318304
“they will no longer be at high velocity, i.e., will not be performing the function.”
Function is irrelevant.
Their is no function intended for the movement of the air by the car.
Au contraire. The air has to get out of the way for the car to move.
Pffft!
The video states that “The turbine is solar powered” and apparently “Measures CO2 in the air”.
I suppose there maybe some reason for using a solar cell to spin a turbine to drive a generator to produce electricity, but it is not apparent to me.
Similarly, measuring CO2 in the air, on a median strip, every few meters, doesn’t seem particularly useful. Internal combustion engines generate large amounts of CO2, due to combustion.
It might be the next big thing, or it might be a pointless waste of time, effort and money. Time will tell.
Cheers.
I was interested to read Roy’s comments where he says ‘..that creates additional wind resistance, which increases aerodynamic drag on the cars..’ and also..’this system INCREASES the drag on the cars.’
I’m no engineer of any kind, but I think that the issue of wind resistance and aerodynamic drag would have to be investigated and assessed properly for the following reasons.
In Formula 1 racing, commentators often refer to the turbulence behind a car making it difficult for following cars trying to overtake – yet at the slower speeds encountered in bicycle racing, sheltering close behind another rider is a huge energy saving manoeuvre, of which much use is made.
The aerodynamics of what’s going on around a dual carriageway might well be more complex than we imagine.
In F1, the turbulence does not cause a drag problem for following cars – quite the opposite. But it does disrupt the flow over all the carefully tuned aerofoils so dramatically reduces downforce and hence grip.
So closely following another car in F1 does reduce drag, a lot, but overtaking is dangerous due to reduced grip, esp in corners.
Thanks for you insight, Steve T. Clearly explained, and yes – I understand.
Steve T: after reading your post, and further to my earlier reply, I checked up on motor paced cycling records.
Behind a dragster car, a record of 167mph has been achieved on a pedal cycle.
I imagine that turbulence behind the car wasn’t a problem!
Here’s a link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Rompelberg
carbon…”Behind a dragster car, a record of 167mph has been achieved on a pedal cycle”.
The cyclist is lucky the dragster did not blow a rod and scatter shrapnel and oil on the track.
It was no ordinary bike either, Gordon. Have a look at the video of the actual event:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5wmkXu_v2k
carbon…”It was no ordinary bike either, Gordon. Have a look at the video of the actual event:”
The guy is crazier than I thought. Did you see him squeezing the brake pedal with his left hand?
Gordon: Yes, Fred Rompelberg is crazy – and thank goodness there are people like him in the world, willing to take huge risks in pursuit of their goals.
Also, isn’t it great that people can have a speed blast on the salt flats in Utah without interference from the safety nannies?
The energy always comes from somewhere. This is no free lunch.
There’s no free lunch, but there can be recovery of energy that would otherwise go to waste.
There is a limit, and this scheme does not reduce the losses beyond that limit. It adds additional losses.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wind-turbines-affect-temperature/
I dont see how you remove energy from a system and dont change the system. Like butterfly flaps its wings and it creates a hurricane. There are thresholds and chaos in the climate and weather systems… so I dont buy the models at face value. Of course cutting down all the trees hundreds of years ago was likely more significant
Aaron S says:
Like butterfly flaps its wings and it creates a hurricane.
Are there butterflies who flap their wings and prevent hurricanes?
Somebody at another website, said this to me,
“I think that the problem is that most of us can’t understand what you are on about.”
Here is my reply.
=================
I understand what you mean, when you say, “I think that the problem is that most of us can’t understand what you are on about.”.
There is something about global warming contour maps, that many people find confusing. The format of the graph is unusual. It is displaying 4 dimensions, using 2 axes (the X-axis and the Y-axis) for 2 dimensions, colour for 1 dimension (warming rate), and the other dimension is hidden (you can calculate it from the X-axis and Y-axis).
So there are a number of things about contour maps which are counter-intuitive.
I have spent about 2 and a half years developing global warming contour maps. And even I have to be careful when I interpret them.
All temperature series are probably not perfect. That is why you should look at all of them.
Global warming contour maps give you the most comprehensive view of the temperature data, that it is possible to get. Not only does it show you how the warming rate varies over time, but it also shows you how the warming rate varies for different trend lengths.
That lets you see if warming rates are consistent, or changing over time and/or trend length.
Global warming contour maps show the chaotic nature of climate. Every contour map shows the short-term warming and cooling events along the bottom. The El Nino’s and La Nina’s. You can actually SEE the 1998 El Nino, in colour (actually 2 colours, red for the warming phase, and blue for the cooling phase).
I have worked hard to try and make global warming contour maps more understandable. I invented Robot-Train contour maps to try and help people understand contour maps. I don’t know what else I can do, to make it easier. People have to be prepared to make a little effort, to understand them. I am always happy to answer questions, and help people in any way that I can.
I get a lot of hostility from Alarmists and Warmists. I am not joking, when I say that I have been called a Denier, and verbally abused, for over 9 years. I also get verbally abused by Skeptics, who don’t understand what contour maps are saying. I am frequently accused of being an Alarmist or Warmist.
I don’t really expect to win. But I am still here fighting after 2 and a half years. If I can’t win with mathematics and logic, I will just keep going until people surrender, because they can’t stand me any longer.
Have a closer look at global warming contour maps. You might even enjoy it. I do.
https://agree-to-disagree.com
Roy’s argument is too simplistic. He simply assumes that the cars see an increase in aerodynamic drag based on some vague conservation of energy argument.
As mentioned above, race cars break this sort of conservation of energy argument when drafting. If a following car drives closely behind a lead car, it needs less power to maintain the same speed as if the lead car was not there. The lead car does not need to use more power because of the drafting car, but actually LESS! Both cars use less power for the same work. Where does that “extra energy” come from?
I’m not saying this is a brilliant idea, or even a good one, but Spencer’s dismissal is not scientifically sound.
S,
Dr Spencer wrote –
“The question is, does such a system recapture energy that would have been lost anyway?
The answer is NO.”
I also disagree, in general. If the turbine is attempting to capture some of the energy from the air turbulence induced by the passing vehicle before it is eventually dissipated as radiated heat, then the answer is yes, rather than no.
I’d characterise most “renewable energy” schemes as delusions, rather than intentional scams, but it makes no difference in the long run.
As to roadside energy harvesting, promoters generally obtain Government funding to “improve efficiency”, or similar. As far as I know, none of these (there have been many similar ideas), have managed to show any overall benefits. Most then incorporate pollution filters, or similar ideas, to justify funding of their scheme, after discovering they are reinventing the wheel, so to speak.
Most of the delusional schemes seem to be aimed at “Reducing Climate Change”.
What happens when Climate Change is Reduced? Nobody can give a useful answer! Delusion.
Cheers.
Agree that the dismissal is premature.
Since there is two-way traffic involved, it seems possible that introducing these ‘turbines’ may improve laminar flow on each side of the road, and so actually reduce drag, while harvesting the trivial amount of power at the same time.
Hi Steve T,
no, the two-way traffic works as the one-way because those turbine are symmetric respect the two lanes. In this case, if the cars produced on the turbine blade the very same effect on both the sides, one could probably argue about a tiny (very tiny) better performance because the bushings or bearings work better than getting the energy on one side only.
Have a great day.
Massimo
If the cars DIDN’T have the same effect, the turbine would not spin.
But clearly it’s spinning.
HI David,
I probably have not explained well my point, with “the very same effect on both sides” I was meaning that they were transfer the very same energy on both sides.
In that case the turbine bushings or bearings are uniformly loaded on their rotational axis, while if the cars were run on one side only then they were subject to a little radial force too that should increase the frictions of the system a very little (it’s just a philosophical statement, maybe it is well under our capability of measure that).
Have a great day.
Massimo
Hi Steve O.
“The lead car does not need to use more power because of the drafting car, but actually LESS! Both cars use less power for the same work. Where does that extra energy come from?”
This is because the following car experience less aerodynamic friction with the air, while the leading car reduces the effect of suction on its behind produced by the depression there when the car is alone. Both the effects depends on the aerodynamic efficiency of the single vehicle and the better they are alone the less is the advantage in that drafting configuration.
In this turbine case, you don’t have this effect because to extract energy from the system, the turbine need the higher differential speed respect the running cars (which must be very bad in aerodynamics, as those buses of the movie), while the drafting needs the cars to be at mostly at the same speed.
The laws of thermodynamics always applies: you can’t get energy out from a system without reducing the energy that it was in the system by the same amount.
Have a great day.
Massimo
“Where does that extra energy come from?”
One can use energy more or less efficiently, but one never gains any. There is no “extra”. Energy is still being expended by both parties.
But in this situation some energy is clearly wasted. Can some of it be recovered and put to use?
No David,
In the drafting configuration is not wasted the way you argue, it can’t be recovered except by making the single cars more performing in aerodynamic by themselves. In that case (the hypothetically border case where the cars are exceptionally optimized and have no friction by themselves) the drafting configuration didn’t work at all.
It’s just a different system of two bodies moving AT THE SAME SPEED, VERY CLOSE, ONE BEHIND THE OTHER and for that the influence of the air friction is less.
For doing that easier to understand, imagine that the two bodies are not cars but cylinders.
Thus imagine a system composed of two cylinders moving one behind the other, very closed, at the very same speed because their kinetic energies are E1 and E2. Then compare it with one other system where there is one cylinder only which length is equal to the sum of the lengths of the two cylinders of the other system, if the cylinder is moving because its kinetic energy E3=E1+E2 then the speed will be the same, demonstrating that there is no energy recovered, but just a particular configuration of the moving bodies. It’s the shape of the bodies which faces the air in front of them that waste the energy while they are moving and the only way to “gain-back” that energy is to change that shape. You can’t recover that energy with third party bodies added to the system except making them running at the same speed behind the leading body.
I hope that I helped you.
I apologize, because I’ve lot of problems to explain my thoughts in English.
Have a great day.
Massimo
That is correct. Here, we are not reducing losses due to aerodynamic drag. Instead, we would be adding to them.
Some of you may be interested in the latest joke here in oz commonly known as federal Parliament.
To recap, the liberal party (read Republican) was lead by a conservative (Abott) who was knifed in the back by a left leaning Goldman Sachs banker (Turnbull).
He turned a 30 seat majority to one at the last election. After two years of leftist policy and his latest attempts to implement the Paris agreement and this confirming oz as having the highest power prices in the world was too much for the party.
A conservative has challenged for the leadership so today is the big showdown in Canberra, I can hear the circus music from Adelaide.
Coincidentally the AEMO are sitting down with the Victorian government today to discuss how they can avoid rolling blackouts this summer, if Hazelwood was not forced to shutdown they would have an additional 1600Mw to play with.
You want to know what a scam looks like just look at power generation in Australia
Sorry.
Tomorrow Hurricane Lane will be over Honolulu in the form of a tropical storm. It will bring very heavy rainfall.
Correct me if I am wrong, but the pressure wave/wake caused by the movement of the car through the air spreads out from the car outwards.
As the pressure wave(s)/wake (a pulse of air) travels further away, it reduces in amplitude/power. ie dissipates.
The air is pushed, spreading out, decreasing in power.
A parcel of air near the car is pushed away, dissipates, pushes more distance air, dissipates, etc etc.
If we were to ‘block’ or impede part of the air that the car is trying to push out of the way, it follows that the car will have to use more power to push the same amount of air to match conditions that existed prior to the insertion of the partial blockage.
It matters little if the partial blockage is a flat plate or a vertical turbine. They both interfere with the free movement of the pressure wave(s)/wake.
As Dr Roys states – a scam…..
Add one more engineer to the list (me): It is a scam.
Do you think Chinese scientists are part of the scam too?
DA,
Do you think they are?
Why?
Cheers.
Dan Pangburn…”Add one more engineer to the list (me): It is a scam”.
********
Here’s a good lecture by a chemical engineer on why AGW cannot and does not exist. Starts a bit slow but hang in because it gets interesting.
I might add that a chemical engineering degree is one of the most difficult degrees to obtain. This guy is an expert in control systems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ55koi7vaA
What has this engineer published on climate science (peer reviewed)? Anyone can make a video — the standard is to put one’s claims into the scientific, peer reviewed literature.
Gordon, did you actually WATCH this video.
His first claim is that “Atheists are probably wrong.” He offers not a shred of evidence.
He claims the GHE violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics. This is a standard talking amount deniers, and it’s completely wrong, as I’ve explained to you several times.
This guy is clearly full of crap. Naturally (and easily), he fooled a low-knowledge person like yourself.
Gor,, Thanks for the link. Apparently that is where you got the false perception that there is no so-called greenhouse effect. He also predicted a temperature decline with CO2 increase while the temperature since 2014 has increased about 0.05 K (UAH trend). Just about everything else the fellow licensed P.E. presented appears to be correct. Particularly interesting was his referral to effective emissivity of the planet. I introduced that to Wikipedia in 2007. You can verify that by searching for emissivity here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Climate_model
A fact that most folks appear to have overlooked is that, except for the radiation that goes through the atmospheric window, and at a few meters above the surface, less than a third of the net energy flux got there from radiation. Click my name to see my recently updated blog/analysis. It explains all this and much more including a calculation of Climate Sensitivity using MODTRAN6.
Have you submitted your claims to a peer reviewed journal?
DA,, Better, it is available on line, with source links, for anyone to review.
In case you forgot,there is this quote, available in Wikipedia, by Richard Horten, editor of the Lancet But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.
The situation wrt climate is particularly egregious. Peer review of climate related papers has substantially morphed into an academic cult approving each others papers which elicit government grants. Biased peer review is de facto censoring.
Apparently this pathetic situation has started to improve: http://notrickszone.com/2018/02/26/a-teetering-consensus-97-new-papers-amassed-in-2018-support-a-skeptical-position-on-climate-alarm/#sthash.SAcMoy89.CIbi2gqg.dpbs
Dan Pangburn says:
The situation wrt climate is particularly egregious. Peer review of climate related papers has substantially morphed into an academic cult approving each others papers which elicit government grants.
Yes, it’s all just a huge conspiracy meant specifically to keep down exactly the likes of you and Pierre Gosselin, isn’t it?
Get real. You don’t submit your work to journals because you’re afraid it will be soundly rejected. And then your little fantasies go up in a puff of smoke.
Dan Pangburn says:
DA,, Better, it is available on line, with source links, for anyone to review.
No, that’s not better. Scientists & experts don’t read blogs, they read the professional literature. There are very good reason for that.
If you won’t submit your work to a good peer reviewed scientific journal, there’s no reason to pay them the slightest bit of attention.
Main problem is it interferes with making freeway wider so have less traffic. Or even without this added problem, government can’t manage to reduce traffic congestion.
So wind mills will kill people, but increase congestion caused by adding wind mills will kill the larger amount of people.
Of course they will generate any useful amount of energy and they will ugly and dumb.
gbaikie….”So wind mills will kill people, but increase congestion caused by adding wind mills will kill the larger amount of people”.
Hate to say it, but alarmists don’t seem to give a hoot. People will suffer from climate alarm, especially those who cannot afford the high price of fossil fuels proposed by alarmists to stem the emission of CO2.
What’s the evidence that windmills are killing people?
David – you seem to be responding randomly on unrelated topics. People are making points with regard to Dr. Spencer’s post on the proposal for putting windmills on the freeways to extract “free” energy from the wind produced by the cars.
You should not be setting yourself up as a defender of this ridiculous proposal.
Bart says:
“You should not be setting yourself up as a defender of this ridiculous proposal.”
Where are the numbers proving this is “ridiculous?” No one here has yet posted any facts about this situation.
And come on, these type windmills are hardly widespread. It’s just Roy posting a distraction from all the fires in the US and the record highs being posted around the world. He’s been doing this most of the summer.
DA: Read my comment again. I didn’t say that windmills kill people.
C5 – Oops, you’re right, that was gbalkie. My apologies.
” Its just Roy posting a distraction from all the fires in the US and the record highs being posted around the world.”
This is a bait and switch. The AGW hypothesis projects higher lows, not higher highs.
It is the same as the canard alleging greater climate variability. In fact, by smoothing out temperature differences across the globe, AGW would lead to less variable weather as a matter of course.
These ad metum appeals are completely a sales gimmick. If they were subject to FTC regulation, they would be labeled false advertising and banned.
DA: I have no idea as to whether a ‘windmill’ has actually killed anyone, but I wouldn’t want to live near one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfzgIxMEo8g
I wouldn’t live near a wind mill either. Nor would I want to live near a coal mine, a coal powered power plant, an oil refinery, or anywhere close to a fracking site.
But you said “So wind mills will kill people…,” but can’t back that up with evidence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En8i0i8zkM0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jmj2Z7XB-w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLfOQcmD868
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo5VHYoAAKQ
etc.
“Nor would I want to live near a coal mine, a coal powered power plant, an oil refinery, or anywhere close to a fracking site.”
You stand a much greater chance of avoiding those, as they require far less surface area to produce overwhelmingly greater power output.
DA,, 0.15 deaths per TWH. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
And many, many more from coal, oil and natural gas!
Conclusion: More wind power would save lives. Lots of them.
DA,, Apparently you lack the engineering/science skill to adequately understand what is wrong with depending on solar and wind for energy.
The fallacy of renewables is revealed with simple arithmetic.
5 mW wind turbine, avg output 1/3 nameplate, 20 yr life, electricity @ wholesale 3 cents per kwh produces $8.8E6.
Installed cost @ $1.7E6/mW = $8.5E6.
Add the cost of energy storage facility and energy loss during storage/retrieval, or standby CCGT for low wind periods. Add the cost of land lease, maintenance, administration.
Solar voltaic and solar thermal are even worse with special concern for disposal and/or recycling at end-of-life (about 15 yr for PV).
The dollar relation is a proxy for energy relation. Bottom line, the energy consumed to design, manufacture, install, maintain and administer renewables exceeds the energy they produce in their lifetime.
Without the energy provided by other sources renewables could not exist.
Oh please. If you think I’m going to swallow whatever numbers you throw up as a comment, you don’t know me at all.
Engineers, I guess, are different though.
Dan Pangburn
You are correct with your understanding of Wind Power. It is not profitable and would not be pursued by industry without support from external sources (mainly government).
You did it with killowatt hours. The average price for Megawatts/hr in MISO is between 20 and 25 dollars. Every hour of run you get $20.
http://www.windustry.org/how_much_do_wind_turbines_cost
A 2 MW wind turbine costs between $3-4 million to put up.
At $25/MW-hr you would make $50 an hour while it runs.
It it ran at 100% for a whole year you would make $438,000. Wind averages about 30% of maximum over a year (better in some places worse in others). You would make $131,400 per year of one windmill.
It has a estimated 20 year life. Over the life you would return $2,628,000 which is less than the initial price tag to put it up. An electric company would lose money on every windmill it put up.
Also windmills do have maintenance costs (oil changes, replace generator brushes, gearboxes etc).
I am against windmills as a future source of energy for humans. We have used wind in the past and it took people so far but it has always been unreliable. Like a friend who comes to help when you don’t need them (spring and fall when electric need is low) but never shows up when really needed (hot windless summer days which can last for weeks or really cold windless winter weeks).
A much better choice would be to work on fusion energy. The Bussard polywell device has potential to fuse hydrogen and boron to produce zero neutrons and helium as the reaction by product. Both these elements are very abundant on Earth and you could have steady reliable power to build Civilization upon that does not pollute. There are far better ideas than wind.
Gordon,
Traveling in China for business atm, no access to FB but from what Ive seen earlier, this was a feel good trial in Turkey.
I think we are giving it too much weight by discussing merits as oppose to laughing at it.
Off topic, but Cliff Mass has a great write up regarding forest fires in the Pacific Northwest:
https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2018/08/northwest-wildfires-are-we-seeing-new.html?m=1
Consider the source.
Cliff Mass makes a lot of spurious claims. At your link he writes:
“The number of acres burned early in the 20th century absolutely dwarfs when are experiencing recently.”
That’s not surprising in the least. There was little firefighting in the early 20th century, and little human property at stake, for many reasons. I’m sure you can figure out the reasons.
Since 1960, fires/yr has decreased at a rate of -1500/yr, while acreage burned has INCREASED at a rate of 65,000 acres/yr. Suppression costs are increasing by $50 million_2017_dollars/yr.
All of these are (easily) statistically significant trends.
Source:
http://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_statistics.html
http://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/nfn.htm
annual data:
http://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_totalFires.html
suppression costs:
http://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_documents/SuppCosts.pdf
Those numbers say that the increase since 1960 in acres burned is 5,800 sq miles — an area larger than Connecticut.
snape…”Off topic, but Cliff Mass has a great write up regarding forest fires in the Pacific Northwest:”
It’s summer, it’s weather. This summer in the PNW has been inordinately hot and dry from mid-June onward. There is no reason to associate that with AGW.
One of the comments also addressed wildfires in California:
“We don’t know how bad the air quality was a century or two or three ago, but the evidence is pretty strong that fires were more numerous down south (California) than they are now. Rich’s (a professor at UC RIverside) conclusion was that a mosaic of numerous fires, started by lightning or deliberately, causes subsequent fires to remain small as they run out of fuel. The fire ecology of chaparral is different than our forests here, but the effect of fire suppression is similar.”
Do you mean there were no attempts at fire suppression a few centuries ago in SoCal??
I’m shocked by that, shocked I am.
This device has 3 sources of power; solar, natural wind and the wind generated from passing vehicles (from their video/website). Of the comments I read from the engineers two stuck out to me, 1) this may have application in areas where there is no electric grid access (for lights etc.) and 2) is the cost justified given where they are located, these will be hit often (just look at a medians with a concrete barriers and you often see collision evidence). So what is the lifetime cost to the benefit achieved?
It is this second point that makes experimenting to see if there is a positive benefit/cost ratio desirable. However, for point 1, areas with no grid access typically do not have a lot of traffic either. So why not just use solar/wind tech we have and put it out of the danger zone.
So, this really does not seem like a cost effective application. In areas of high traffic, the extra drag created would increase emissions. Again, bad idea as these areas typically have air quality issues and we would like are vehicles to be more efficient.
As far as ideas go, I don’t think this is a good one. As far as a scam, it would depend if investors are being sold a lie. Or if government funding is being used, and if their are promises being made not inline with reality just to get the government funding. So scam may be too harsh Dr. Spencer, but it can’t be ruled out without knowing the funding. I would add the claim of it being a renewable energy resource is a stretch. I guess fossil fuels are renewable over long periods of time.
It could be an unwitting scam those making the proposal may be idiots who actually believe in it. But, it is a scam nevertheless.
No one has yet put any numbers to this situation, or your claim.
DA,
How do you know? Are you sure? Are you sillier today than yesterday? Can you prove it?
Do you still believe that Gavin Schmidt is a scientist? What about Steven Mosher?
Questions, questions.
You can’t even describe the mythical GHE – no question about that.
Cheers.
It does not matter. Perpetual motion is peremptorily a scam.
Sort of my point is if this is unwitting on the part of these investors and they actually believe it has viable application, then it is just bad judgement and not a scam. And some people have more money than they know what to do with. Perhaps there is some spinoff value for applications elsewhere?
It becomes a scam when they falsely present this to gain funding from others. I did not see if this were true or not.
Maybe the investors have seen studies that you have not(?)
DA,
Which investors are these? Can you name one?
Of course not – just posing the usual inane and information free gotchas.
Keep it up,
Cheers.
Now Mike, David is absolutely correct here. If I had additional studies that would raise the value of my idea or its marketability the first thing I would do is not share with others and just let others speculate on the products usefulness. /sarc
b,
Dang me!
You’re right of course! Standard pseudoscientific climatological thinking. Transparency through secrecy. Heating by cooling. Fact by consensus. Of course!
I’ll give myself a severe whipping with a boiled lettuce leaf for failing to appreciate the Appellesque logic.
Thanks for setting me straight.
Cheers.
Michael Mann
“As Kerala experiences the worst flooding in a century, let’s reflect on what climate models predict: increases in Indian monsoon rainfall EVEN as the monsoon itself weakens. It’s called the “windprecipitation paradox”.
myki…”Michael Mann
As Kerala experiences the worst flooding in a century, lets reflect on what climate models predict: increases in Indian monsoon rainfall EVEN as the monsoon itself weakens. Its called the windprecipitation paradox.”
Mann is a geologist who made a complete ass of himself trying to prove the 1990s were uncommonly warm compared to the average of the past 1000 years. Not being satisfied with being the clown prince of climate science he went on to claim Antarctica has warmed the past 50 years.
Along the way, he managed to insult Dr. Judith Curry, with a sexist remark, because she changed her mind on AGW and took a more skeptical view.
When the proxy data upon which he relied for the 1000 year claim began showing cooling, while the planet was beginning to warm, he cut off the offending data and spliced in real data.
And you are quoting such a pseudo-scientist??? He’s a geologist for cripes sake, what would he know about climate science?
I do not think it would affect the shape of the wake and therefore not affect the drag coefficient. I also do not think any system will capture much energy from a moving car.
Not from a car, but from traffic. The video says it captures 1 kW.
DA,
Do you blindly accept anything you see in a video?
Stupid, ignorant – and gullible into the bargain!
Cheers.
M,
You point out that Kerala has experienced worse flooding over a century ago, according to a geologist who inadvertently claimed to be a Nobel Laureate, at one time.
Is their a point to your comment, or are younaspiring to new levels of thickness?
Cheers.
“Is THEIR a point to your comment, or are younaspiring to new levels of thickness?
I think the ability to spell is a sign of thickness.
M,
I apologise. Sloppiness on my part. Laughter while typing is no excuse.
What you think (or more likely don’t think) is irrelevant, I think. Do you think anybody is going to give much thought to what you think?
I’ll recast my question.
Are you aspiring to new levels of thickness, or are you satisfied to remain at your present level?
Cheers.
Roy wrote:
When the blades turn to generate electricity, they are slowing the wind generated by the moving traffic. That creates additional wind resistance, which increases aerodynamic drag on the cars, and reduces their gas mileage. In effect, the turbines are stealing energy from the cars and converting it to electricity.
One problem with the video is it says that turbine generates 1 kW “every hour.”
That doesn’t make sense — power is already energy per unit time. What they probably mean is just “one kilowatt.”
DA complains: “That doesn’t make sense — power is already energy per unit time. What they probably mean is just ‘one kilowatt.'”
No DA, they had it correct. It is “1 kW every hour”, or 1 kWh.
Learn some physics.
Wrong, Ger*an. It’s 1 kW, ALL THE TIME.
Obviously that can be converted to an energy. But the power derived is a constant.
If you were not confused, there would have been to need for your attempted correction. At least you leaned a little physics.
Much more to go.
Ger*an doesn’t understand the difference between power and energy.
You can always tell when DA gets caught. He goes to his backup tactics–false accusations.
(DA, did you ever find your mythical “150 Watts/m^2”?)
At an average temperature of 288 K, the Earth’s surface radiates an average of 390 W/m2.
240 W/m2 leaves out the top of the atmosphere.
Where is the other 150 W/m2?
JDH,
David can’t find his missing 150 W. It’s obviously a travesty of Trenberthian proportions!
Maybe it’s hidden with the “new physics” that Gavin Schmidt keeps discovering, (the ones that stop him writing a manual for his computer game), or Michael Mann’s Nobel Prize.
Cheers.
Yes Mike Flynn, DA still clings to his pseudoscience, refusing to learn physics. He desperately believes that radiative fluxes, from two different surfaces/temperatures, can be added/subtracted with only simple arithmetic.
That’s why he can’t find his mythical “150 Watts/m^2”.
DA needs to learn some physics, and embrace reality.
JD…”DA needs to learn some physics, and embrace reality”.
Not necessarily in that order.
DA…”At an average temperature of 288 K, the Earths surface radiates an average of 390 W/m2″.
Since CO2 only absorbs about 28 watts of that radiation, where does the other 93% of the radiation go?
I guess it must go to the same place the radiation goes that comes from a cooler object and interacts with a warmer object. That’s is, it seems to disappear somewhere because it is not absorbed.
If there was no net energy to be recovered, the turbines would stand still.
But clearly they’re not.
OK, it’s not really this simple. We have to consider the effect on the vehicles.
DA,
Who is “we”, David? You and God, as in the Royal “we”?
You have probably realised you are confused. How is my mind reading?
You might need to define “net energy”, as this concept is giving you cause for thought. That is a problem when you try to sound sciency without having a clue what you are talking about.
If the turbines spin in the absence of traffic, due to the wind, would they be using net energy, or some other form of energy? All very confusing to a climatological pseudoscientific cultist.
That’s probably why their output has never achieved anything of benefit to humanity, I suppose.
Keep at it. Learning physics might help.
Cheers.
David Appell
80 plus years of fire suppression and logging have caused forests to be crowded with relativity short trees and the ground piled with debris. When conditions are right, a more intense fire erupts than what might have occurred otherwise.
Climate change seems to be getting all the blame, whereas it might be a minor player.
*******
“Do you mean there were no attempts at fire suppression a few centuries ago in SoCal??”
Exactly, and as a result, fires were likely less intense then than what we’ve seen recently.
Forests are supposed to be crowded with dead trees and underbrush. It’s their natural state, that allows future trees to thrive there, and other species who have adapted to that ecosystem.
DA…”Forests are supposed to be crowded with dead trees and underbrush. Its their natural state, that allows future trees to thrive there, and other species who have adapted to that ecosystem”.
It’s a product of gravity. There is no such thing as an ecosystem, just another eco-freak word like sustainable.
A comment made about Global Warming Contour Maps
================================================
Sheldon,
So have you constructed a true combined “Global” temp map for the past 100 yrs to date ?
Also the main issue i personally have is that graphical presentation of data is intended to make understanding the data much easier.
Your “Global temp Contour” maps do not do that.
They are much more conplex and difficult to understand than the simple line graph , but are still trying to highlight the same basic points.
================================================
Reply made by Sheldon Walker
.
there is a well known saying, “Everything Should Be Made as Simple as Possible, But Not Simpler”.
I have made global warming contour maps as Simple as Possible. Any simpler, and they start losing information.
A global warming contour map, makes warming rates OBJECTIVE. e.g. It is red, therefore the warming rate is…
A line graph does NOT do this. You may look at a line graph, and say, “there is a definite slowdown/pause”.
But Tamino looks at the same line graph, and says, “You are an idiot. There is NO slowdown/pause”.
The warming rates on a line graph, are SUBJECTIVE.
So you produce a linear regression from 2000 to 2012, and say, “Look Tamino, scientific proof of the slowdown/pause”.
And Tamino looks at you, and smiles, and says, “You cherry-picked that date range. That doesn’t prove that there was a slowdown/pause”.
With a global warming contour map, there is NO cherry-picking. It shows you EVERY possible warming rate (between 150,000 and 350,000 of them).
NOBODY can accuse you of cherry-picking. That is why I developed global warming contour maps.
Global warming contour maps, can be interpreted on a number of levels. Some simple, some complex.
Colour is a simple level. The colour is red on contour map 1, and orange on contour map 2. Therefore the warming rate was greater on contour map 1.
Even a 5 year old can understand that.
Perhaps you need to put a little more effort into learning how to understand global warming contour maps. It is well worth the effort.
The main problem is NOT that global warming contour maps are too complex, it is that people are too simple.
Learn about global warming contour maps, by studying Robot-Train contour maps.
https://agree-to-disagree.com/robot-train-contour-maps
sheldon…”A global warming contour map, makes warming rates OBJECTIVE. e.g. It is red, therefore the warming rate is…”
How about these global warming contour maps?
https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/climate/
Very easy to understand, no explanation required.
Gordon,
those are NOT global warming contour maps.
They are temperature anomaly graphs.
You can estimate the warming rate from them, but it is SUBJECTIVE.
You can see the OBJECTIVE warming rate, on a real global warming contour map.
David, you need to do a little reading:
“When a ponderosa pine is young, it is susceptible to fire, but by the time the tree reaches 4 or 5 years, it has begun to develop a thick bark that protects it from low-intensity fires that may sweep through every few years. The same fires remove competition from shrubs and less fire-resistant trees, such as true firs like grand fir, and create the open sunny spaces that allow the ponderosa to grow strong and tall.
******
*Fire-Suppressed Forest*
“With the exclusion of fire, trees that would normally be cleared out by wildfire can grow dense. The density and layering of trees provide a path for flames to reach the high foliage of the ponderosa and potentially move from one crown of a tree to another. Smaller trees, shrubs, and brush can fuel even hotter flames, and send the blaze upward into the ponderosa pines crown. These crown fires are the most devastating kind of fire for pine trees.”
“This forest stand is thick and contains large and small trees in close proximity. Vegetation and other debris are crowded on the forest floor. This forest stand has been untouched by fire for almost 80 years.”
“The overabundance of vegetation and debris on the forest floor becomes fuel for wildfires to completely burn through a forest stand. As the fire moves from the ground into the trees foliage, it burns the crowns of tall trees, causing historically resilient trees to die, too.”
https://blog.nature.org/science/2017/11/08/trees-tell-us-much-about-fire-what-will-we-do-about-it/amp/
My problem is that I’m dubious a logging company can go into a forest and selectively log a few old & dead trees without tearing up the forest floor with their truck and big machines?
Can you tell me if this has ever been done? If so, where and when?
DA,
You say you are dubious – ie “not to be relied upon; suspect”.
Very apposite. I agree.
Cheers.
If I was a State, I’d implement rotational logging and controlled burns. It’s a better option than free for all or moratorium, and it combines elements of both ideas.
“Historically, fires operated in a way that tended to be less severe in valley bottoms and lower slopes,” Taylor added. “Now, because of fire suppression, they tend to burn at a higher severity and you lose that habitat.” The practice of not allowing any fires means that more leaf litter and branchesthe components of forest fuelcan accumulate on the floor, while small trees that would have burned in the past can grow large enough to carry fires into the crowns of the taller trees that had escaped the impact of less severe fires in the past, putting the landscape in jeopardy.
https://news.psu.edu/story/270206/2013/03/26/research/suppression-naturally-occurring-blazes-may-increase-wildfire-risk
Leaves are supposed to accumulate on the forest floor. They provide a habitat for many animals there, and eventually decay into more soil.
Are you saying forests should be prevented from rejuvenating themselves?
DA,
Are you saying mankind should not be allowed to take advantage of the bounty provided by Nature?
Are you the arbiter of what is acceptable or not? How do you cope with such awesome power and responsibility?
Are you aware that CO2 is necessary for plants to survive, and that reducing CO2 levels will result in starvation for many if the human population increases naturally? How many people do you think need to be exterminated in pursuit of your lunatic cultist belief that CO2 is evil?
Questions, questions. I’m sure you can no more answer them than you can describe the GHE!
Off you go now. Time for some more gotcha exercises, no doubt.
Cheers.
“For most of the last century, naturally occurring fires in Yosemite, usually caused by lightning, were put out whenever they started.
The result was an incredible build-up of deadwood and undergrowth, which fuelled catastrophic infernos.
Now national park firefighters play catch-up. They manage and allow naturally occurring fires to burn or set controlled fires like this.”
https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/yosemite-sequoias-fire
Forests are supposed to build up with “deadwood and undergrowth.”
They’ve been doing this for millions of years.
Why can’t we respect that, and respect their ecosystems and how they want to live?
DA,
You tell us – why can’t we? Or are you just trying for another gotcha?
Cheers.
David: Are you saying fire is not a natural part of the ecology?
Really? I expect since they didn’t teach that subject in physics, you are not expert and so we, the readers, should understand that, as usual, you don’t have a clue.
snape…”The result was an incredible build-up of deadwood and undergrowth, which fuelled catastrophic infernos”.
More snape reasoning. That means all forests untouched by lightning and not subject to forest fires are infernos waiting to happen.
For Roy:
“Crop production losses associated with anthropogenic climate change for 19812010 compared with preindustrial levels,”
Toshichika Iizumi Hideo Shiogama Yukiko Imada Naota Hanasaki Hiroki Takikawa Motoki Nishimori
International Journal of Climatology
First published: 20 August 2018
https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.5818
Abstract:
“The accumulated evidence indicates that agricultural production is being affected by climate change. However, most of the available evidence at a global scale is based on statistical regressions. Corroboration using independent methods, specifically process‐based modelling, is important for improving our confidence in the evidence. Here, we estimate the impacts of climate change on the global average yields of maize, rice, wheat and soybeans for 19812010, relative to the preindustrial climate. We use the results of factual and non‐warming counterfactual climate simulations performed with an atmospheric general circulation model that do and do not include anthropogenic forcings to climate systems, respectively, as inputs into a global gridded crop model. The results of a 100‐member ensemble climate and crop simulation suggest that climate change has decreased the global mean yields of maize, wheat and soybeans by 4.1, 1.8 and 4.5%, respectively, relative to the counterfactual simulation (preindustrial climate), even when carbon dioxide (CO2) fertilization and agronomic adjustments are considered. For rice, no significant impacts (−1.8%) are detected. The uncertainties in estimated yield impacts represented by the 90% probability interval that are derived from the ensemble members are −8.5 to +0.5% for maize, −8.4 to −0.5% for soybeans, −9.6 to +12.4% for rice and − 7.5 to +4.3% for wheat. Based on the yield impacts, the estimates of average annual production losses throughout the world for the most recent years of the study (20052009) account for 22.3 billion USD (B)formaize,6.5B for soybeans, 0.8 Bforriceand13.6B for wheat. Our assessment confirms that climate change has modulated recent yields and led to production losses, and our adaptations to date have not been sufficient to offset the negative impacts of climate change, particularly at lower latitudes.”
DA,
“Corroboration using independent methods, specifically process‐based modelling, is important for improving our confidence in the evidence.”
Gee. “Specifically process-based modellling”. Combined with the “estimates”, “climate simulations”,
and “assessment” based on “uncertainties”, a “global gridded crop model”, and “ensemble members”, who could doubt the worth of such an pointless piece of puffery, published in the “International Journal of Climatology”.
Climate is the average of weather. Climatology is presumably the study of this average. If you claim this is science, good for you! Keep averaging – if you keep getting different averages from the same figures, you might need more intense climatological pseudoscientific training.
Cheers.
David studied physics. By extension, he knows nothing of weather or climate.
lewis…”David studied physics”.
That’s hearsay. I have found little evidence in my debates with him that he has anything more than high school physics, and he’s not even clear on that.
The wag who runs skepticalscience claimed at one time that he was a solar physicist. Turns out he does not even have an undergraduate degree in physics and he works as a cartoonist to make a living.
DA…”International Journal of Climatology”
That’s the journal that had Andrew Weaver as its editor and Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann were assistants.
Weaver is an uber alarmist as are Schmidt and Mann. The article you reference is typical of the junk science one would expect reviewed at the JOC and you can bet no skeptical POV would be accepted.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DVdspKuU0AAe934.jpg
Just how much would these windmills cost? And maintaining them. Unicorns would be cheaper
Touche’
Global Warming: How Long Do We Have Left?
Using the latest statistical techniques, we can now predict, to the minute, when global warming will kill you (accurate to +/- 17 minutes).
Recently, Mr Tamino wrote an article, called “Global Warming: How Long Do We Have Left?”.
As you all know, Mr Tamino is an overly optimistic, sort of person.
I can assure you, that he took no delight, in telling everybody that they would all be dead by the year 2045. This is when we will exceed the 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature limit.
He even tried to soften the blow, by saying that you might get a couple of years more.
The only way to avoid total disaster, apparently, is to do exactly what Mr Tamino tells you to do.
I don’t want to rain on Mr Tamino’s parade, but I noticed that he made a small mistake, in his calculations for the end of the world.
He forgot to take into account, the fact that different regions of the world, have different warming rates.
That is ok for some regions, but we have bad news for Region 1 (from 90N to 48N).
https://agree-to-disagree.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Map-Date-of-Death-Region-1.png
With Mr Tamino’s help, I have created a colour coded map of the world, which shows the outlook for the different regions of the world.
Region 1 (90N to 48N) – Red – Already dead
Region 2 (48N to 30N) – Orange- Not feeling very well
Region 3 (30N to 14N) – Yellow – Don’t take out a long term contract for Sky TV
Region 4 (14N to Equator) – Light green – Slightly under the weather
Region 5 (Equator to 14S) – Dark green – Have been better
Region 6 (14S to 30S) – Aqua – Not feeling too bad
Region 7 (30S to 48S) – Blue – Never been better
Region 8 (48S to 90S) – Purple – Feeling great, but it is very cold, and I can’t feel my feet
People who don’t want to know when they are going to die, should not read this article. You have been warned.
https://agree-to-disagree.com/global-warming-how-long-do-we-have-left
Sheldon…”As you all know, Mr Tamino is an overly optimistic, sort of person….”
Is that a kind way of saying he is an idiot?
That is hilarious…
DA
“My problem is that Im dubious a logging company can go into a forest and selectively log a few old & dead trees without tearing up the forest floor….”
You’re digressing. My argument, and Cliff Mass’s, is that decades of fire suppression has a lot to do with the trend towards larger, more intense fires. The Nature Conservancy concurs.
The media, and poorly informed alarmists, would have you believe it’s all climate change.
DA
“Leaves are supposed to accumulate on the forest floor. They provide a habitat for many animals there, and eventually decay into more soil.
Are you saying forests should be prevented from rejuvenating themselves?”
That’s not what the article is saying, and that’s not what I’m saying.
********
“Forests are supposed to build up with deadwood and undergrowth.
Theyve been doing this for millions of years.
Why cant we respect that, and respect their ecosystems and how they want to live?”
*******
Naive. Yes, deadwood and undergrowth are part of a healthy forest. The problem is when there’s TOO MUCH of a good thing, and flames are able to reach the upper crown of the large trees. Then the whole forest goes, old growth and all.
Frequent fires (natural and inevitable in a region with hot, dry summers) tend to keep that from happening.
Controlled burns are an attempt to simulate what nature was prevented from doing herself.
It should noted that tropical forests don’t require or naturally burn, and they are the forests which can millions of year old.
They also don’t have build up of dead wood- it’s basically eaten.
Forest in temperate or sub polar zones are not millions of years old- and trees don’t grow well on glaciers.
But drier regions in tropics burn- so trees and grassland regions.
And generally temperate Zone are drier, and one could have massive forest fires.
Basically trees win vs grass unless you add in the effect of fires- and the vast grasslands of North America, indicates that forest fires allowed these grassland to exist.
Sorry.
In the Eastern Pacific a new hurricane is forming, which will come closer to Hawaii in a few days.
The Nino 3 index is negative.
https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/analysis/ocean/nino3.png
Gbaikie, interesting observations. Thanks.
Regarding grasslands vs. forest, I once tried backpacking through an area recovering from a large fire. Nothing but dense shrubbery. In fact, miles and miles of a single variety: Snowbrush Ceanothus,
https://i2.wp.com/karl-helser.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/DSC02631.jpg
I would have much preferred open grasslands!
Is Tamino somehow related to DA? It definitely looks like this is the case.
Tamino is Grant Foster’s nickname.
Foster gets repeatedly discredited and denigrated by people who do not have even 1 % of his intelligence and experience.
He has, that is true, an increasing tendence to see things very dramatic.
Bindidon,
My experience with Tamino is that he has nothing of an “Open Mind” he reminds me of Joseph Postma in character.
He may be an expert at statistics, that does not mean he has this brilliant intelligence in other areas or experience.
I was not impressed at all with him or his blog.
Roy Spencer’s blog is far more open minded than Tamino’s.
Just another echo chamber like Skeptical Science.
I like Skeptical Science because it has links to science.
You can never stop at a blog of course, you must always check the sources.
Norman,
Was it the discussion forum you didn’t like, or his articles?
Tamino says:
I have no background information about Tamino, but I’m impressed by his analysis.
He is going the James Hansen way because reason does not seem to work.
binny…”Tamino is Grant Fosters nickname.
Foster gets repeatedly discredited and denigrated by people who do not have even 1 % of his intelligence and experience”.
*********
When one idiot appraises the intelligence of another idiot, what is actually being appraised?
Tamino, aka Grant Foster, is a musician who seems to have a background in astronomy. He appeared on an old blog he used to frequent to promote his band.
https://motls.blogspot.com/2008/09/who-is-tamino-grant-foster-identity.html
On his blog, Tamino blatantly praises Al Gore and James Hansen, and every other alarmist. Same as David Appell. He screams at skeptics or anyone presenting a valid scientific argument.
Only an idiot would do that. He appears to be a lot like David Appell, an alarmist short on scientific fact and long on rhetoric, red-herring arguments, and general pseudo-science.
In the following article one cannot miss similarities between Tamino, Appell, and our current twit, Bindidon.
https://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2015/07/21/tamino-grant-foster-is-back-at-his-old-tricksthat-everyone-but-his-followers-can-see-through/
Tamino is nothing more than an alarmist apologist who bends science to suit his warped views of the planet.
How many people are dying due to Venezuela’s socialism.
A once rich country, that recently, is having millions of people who have fled the country.
It known that they aren’t leaving due to wanting to go on a vacation, but rather due to the fear of losing their life.
I don’t know the answer. There is not a free press in Venezuela and there not a lot of American press which is covering it.
Some have said it’s a larger exodus, then people who fled Syria’s war. It seems the Syrian had a good reasons to leave Syria, and it seems the Venezuelans also have good reasons.
And it seems to me that none of reasons were due to global warming- though Syria’s problems has been claimed to be caused by global warming. I tend think it has to do with a ruthless regime and Venezuela having a similar problem. Main different being Syria was an older ruthless regime, and Syria has always been poor with the extreme poverty as compared to despotic nature of Venezuela being a more recent development. Or old ineffective socialism vs much newer a more effective socialism.
Though there is no doubt that crime and terrorism are related to both.
Anyhow, I was prompted by socialist claiming that Americans were dying from global warming.
And I wondered how many American are suppose to be dying from global warming?
“The Venezuela refugee situation is “building towards a crisis moment”, the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) has warned, with the organisation’s spokesperson likening it to the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean.
Many Venezuelans are choosing to leave their country as a result of the recession which has gone on for almost five years now. According to the UN, 1.6 million Venezuelans have fled the country since 2015, 90 percent of whom went to countries within South America.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/08/likens-venezuelan-refugee-crisis-situation-mediterranean-180825064123119.html
Linked from:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/08/venezuela-migrant-crisis-peru-imposes-entry-restrictions-180826064211393.html
which said:
“Peru has imposed new entry restrictions in an effort to limit the flow of migrants from Venezuela.
The Peruvian government says asylum seekers must now carry passports.
Previously they could enter the country using just a Venezuelan national identity (ID) card.”
I would note that I am assuming that only special people could manage to get a passport.
It would not be like the free Venezuelan medical care, though it would similar trying to get medicine from free Venezuelan medical care.
The amazing thing about that is that Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world. In. The. World.
Talk about killing the goose that laid the golden egg!
Bart…”Talk about killing the goose that laid the golden egg!”
For whatever, reason, South Americans have a history of violence and corruption.
gbaikie…”I tend think it has to do with a ruthless regime and Venezuela having a similar problem”.
I’d agree, and I wish you would not brand the Venezualan form of government a socialism. If you want to see a true socialism look to Canada, the UK, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia, etc. A socialism is a form of government in which the government runs vital services common to all people in the country.
Unfortunately, the Russian Bolsheviks, who ran an extremely oppressive regime that incarcerated true socialists and communists, used the name socialist in their name for the USSR, to give a legitimacy to their brutal regime. They tried to pass it off as a workers’ movement whereas it was an extreme fascism run by a small group.
Russian communism was supposedly based on the work of Marx, although none of it resembled anything Marx dreamed up. In fact, Marx was totally opposed to socialism since in the early days, socialism was a brand of patronization practiced in Germany where the rich offered handouts to the poor.
Democratic socialism as we know it today has it’s roots in the working class. They became fed up with the excesses of the wealthy, ruling class and withdrew their services in protest. For their efforts, many were shot, beaten, and/or jailed. However, they persevered and won major concessions like shorter hours, better conditions at work, Medicare, workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance and even womens’ rights.
All of that was accomplished under a democratic government with elections in place.
For anyone appealing to authority in the form peer reviewed research published in prestigious journals –
“The project, which aimed to repeat 21 experiments that had been published in Science or Nature sciences two preeminent journals found that only 13 of the original findings could be reproduced.
The research, which follows similar efforts in psychology and biomedical science, raises fresh concerns over the reliability of the scientific literature.”
If you aren’t convinced, the number of forced retractions – due to instances of stupidity, ignorance, or just plain fraud, is rising, as scientists and journals are faced with facts proving superior to the fantasies of scientific authors.
The climatological pseudoscientific cult centrepiece, the GHE, is a fable. Cannot even be described in any useful way.
All good fun.
Cheers.
Solving Global Warming is easy
==============================
I have written a fictional story, which explains how we can solve the problem of global warming.
The story is meant to be funny, and a bit silly (like Monty Python).
Although it is written in a light-hearted way, there is a serious message hidden in the story. Is global warming really going to be as bad as the merchants of doom, claim?
https://agree-to-disagree.com/solving-global-warming-is-easy
Please tell me what you think.
Funny. A few editorial marks:
“…which already have a temperature that is greater that your
citiescity’s global warming“But what was I to do?” (question mark)
“Remember all those postal workers who dont have enough work to keep them busy?” (question mark)
LOL lines:
“To me, they seem to be too smug.”
“I was feeling a bit woozy, which is strange, because I dont even know what the word woozy means.”
Bart,
thank you for you help.
I will fix up those mistakes as soon as I can.
Regards,
Sheldon
The reason windmills on the highway, to the degree they are relying on the wind from passing vehicles to power them (if relying on regular wind, there are better places to site them), would be parasitic to the vehicles, representing a net loss, is as follows.
Suppose the vehicles are hybrids, and that we have a means of transmitting the power produced back to the vehicles without losses, where it could be stored and used to drive the electric motors driving the wheels. Then, we would increase the efficiency of the vehicles – they could drive farther on a given quantity of fuel.
We have done nothing to change the aerodynamics of the vehicles for the better – they are still pushing the same amount of air out of the way. In fact, we have impeded the flow of air. Yet, somehow, magically, we have gained greater efficiency.
And, this is assuming lossless transmission and application of the added power.
Clearly, this is impossible. In the lossless scenario, the best we can do is break even. The added resistance from the obstacles to free flow of the air precisely cancels the additional power produced. When we add in the losses in production and transmission from the windmills, we end up with a net reduction in energy efficiency.
Thats a good point.
However, the buses in that video are very blunt and non-aerodynamic. They are throwing off a lot of extra kinetic energy into the air. Some of that extra kinetic energy could be captured. If it were recycled back to the bus, fine, a bit of the loss of being non-aerodynamic could be recaptured. But you be better off just making the bus very aerodynamic.
To show this is not crazy, take a very aerodynamic bus and put a turbine on top, so that it has a net drag coefficient matching the original poorly shaped bus. Send the turbines output back to the batteries of the bus. You could recover some of the loss that way, but again, not as much as leaving the turbine off.
I think if you had ideal aerodynamic vehicles, little could be captured by road turbines, and not with net gain.
“To show this is not crazy, take a very aerodynamic bus and put a turbine on top, so that it has a net drag coefficient matching the original poorly shaped bus.”
The drag coefficient only scales the force, it is not the force. By adding the turbine’s frontal area to the flow, you are going to increase the drag. You will never recover as much from the turbine as you lost with the added drag.
“You will never recover as much from the turbine as you lost with the added drag.”
Sounds familiar. Oh yeah, cuz I said this:
“Send the turbines output back to the batteries of the bus. You could recover some of the loss that way, but again, not as much as leaving the turbine off.”
“The drag coefficient only scales the force, it is not the force. By adding the turbines frontal area to the flow, you are going to increase the drag.”
Alright then, add the turbine within the grill of the aerodynamic bus, so that area and drag coef. is the same as the original bus.
Or…make the bus very aerodynamic. But add magnets to the side. On the road are large copper rings. The magnets will generate eddy currents in the rings which will dissipate energy as heat and will create drag. Add enough magnets to make the drag force equal to the drag on the original bus.
Now…cut a gap in the copper rings, connect wires on either side of the gap, and connect the wires to a grid or capacitors to be charged. Thus the energy that would have been dissipated in the copper rings can now be stored and used. Adjust so the same drag on the bus is obtained. But now we have captured energy.
The current in the rings is a form of kinetic energy that is dissipated and turned into heat, or alternatively can be captured and used.
Similarly, the wind generated by the car pushing it aside has kinetic energy that is dissipated and turned into heat, or alternatively can be captured and used.
“Alright then, add the turbine within the grill of the aerodynamic bus, so that area and drag coef. is the same as the original bus.”
If this worked, don’t you think Toyota would have turbines installed on the front grill of every Prius?
Missing the point. Reread my post.
N,
Off you go, then. Try it.
You will quickly discover why I call you (and others with similar witless “thoughts”), ignorant and stupid.
Ignorant and stupid enough to believe the GHE fantasy? Probably.
Have fun. Do let me know how you cope with reality.
Cheers.
You will never recover as much from the turbine as you lost with the added drag.
Precisely. The added drag of a turbine attached to the bus,, does work ON THE BUS, and thereby costs energy.
But the added drag on a turbine on the road side does no work on the bus. It is not on the bus.
It still influences the drag, to the same extent that the drag influences it to produce power.
I know these things are tricky and non-intuitive. That is why perpetual motion scams exist to this day. We don’t always clearly see why they are impossible, but we nevertheless know they are.
If you can’t intuit why it fundamentally can’t work, then perhaps that is a clue that it does.
This is not equivalent to perpetual motion. In this instance we can conserve energy.
Just as in the magnet/copper rings example (you have a problem with it?), kinetic energy that would be dissipated and turned into heat, instead is captured, and turned into electrical energy. As a result the surroundings are cooler.
No perpetual motion involved. No 2LOT violation.
The drag force experienced by the turbine is clearly not experienced by the vehicle, as it 100% would be if the turbine were attached to the vehicle. That should be considered.
Actually, it is all about 2LOT violation. Entropy has expanded, and you are proposing to shrink it after the fact.
The drag force induced by the turbine is integrated over the entire approach and recession, with pressure gradients spreading at the speed of sound. So, it’s a little bit here, a little bit there, and it adds up.
The thought experiment above argues that it will not gain more energy than the sum total of what it put in.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2018/08/green-energy-scam-167-traffic-driven-wind-turbines/#comment-318304
“The thought experiment above argues that it will not gain more energy than the sum total of what it put in.”
No not at all. You are crying wolf about perpetual motion here.
Energy is conserved.
The wind passing through a turbine has less energy content afterwards. The difference being the amount taken away by the generator.
If you want to say that the car lost this energy also, you are a again double counting the loss.
The car did lose that energy. It lost above and beyond what it would otherwise have lost due to the added obstruction to the free flow of the induced wind.
I realize it is difficult, and a little mind-bending. I will try to come up with a better example for you. But, for now, I will have to go do other things.
It is true you are not violating 1LOT. But, you are running afoul of 2LOT, as I described above.
Actually, it is all about 2LOT violation. Entropy has expanded, and you are proposing to shrink it after the fact.
I dont think so.
The vehicle simply a machine for pushing air like a fan (and of course driving). To the extent that you can cause a turbine to spin and generate energy, that means you have some organized energy available in the air, wind.
It is clearly there.
Now you are converting some of that moving air energy into electrical energy. NO 2LOT problem there. The rest gets dissipated, entropy increases.
I dont see a 2LOT problem.
Bart…”Actually, it is all about 2LOT violation. Entropy has expanded, and you are proposing to shrink it after the fact”.
You have to be a bit careful when you associate the 2nd law with an increase in entropy. One reason is that entropy does not increase in a reversible process, it’s zero. Another reason is that entropy is associated with heat, not other processes as many people seem to think.
The definition of entropy as defined by Clausius is the sum of infinitesimal changes in heat over a process at the temperature T at which they occur. If you can keep T constant using a heat bath, then entropy becomes the sum of infinitesimal changes in heat over a process.
Clausius made it clear that entropy can only be positive or zero.
In other words, entropy is the total heat released during a process. When heat is released, bonds have to break, therefore the atoms concerned break up in such a manner that they are highly unlikely to come back together to form the same bonds. If they can, then the process is reversible and the entropy is zero.
Clausius developed the theory of entropy after he had stated the 2nd law. He claimed heat can never by its own means be transferred from a cooler to a warmer body. After having made that statement, and based on his treatment of heat engine cycles, he declared the math, which is stated as entropy. S = integral dQ/T.
Many people have read way too much into the definition of entropy. Its popular interpretation today is that the universe is disintegrating. Clausius noted that in his day but it’s because heat is generally released during irreversible processes.
I read an article recently by a mathematician/philosopher in which he argued the original meaning of entropy is wrong. Duh!!! His idea of entropy was an abstraction whereas the definition of Clausius was based on the observation of the pressure, temperature, and volume changes during the cycle of a heat engine.
I feel it’s much safer to stick to the original definition of the 2nd law given by Clausius related to the direction of heat transfer. Increasing entropy is tough to prove unless you measure the heat involved, although it can often be presumed.
I think there are way to many variables here to come to any conclusion.
When a northbound vehicle passes a southbound vehicle…..doesn’t that add resistance to both? Now put a turbine in between. Who knows?
Agree, I said something like that above.
Also, after a vehicle passes, air will rush in to fill the space it had occupied. The inward rushing air would collide. Wouldn’t that result in a secondary wave in the opposite direction of the collision (outflow)?
If so, the turbine would benefit from the secondary blast of air, with no added resistance to the vehicle (it would already have passed).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RLn1ErhxOPo
As far as I can tell, the drop pushes water aside and creates a crater (like a vehicle pushing air aside?). The inward rushing water then collides and creates a ripple in the opposite direction.
A thought experiment for all you engineers (although you should do it for real):
Stand next to a freeway as a truck passes.
The claim being made here is that your body will create resistance to the truck equal to the force of the blast of air you feel. I’m skeptical. Where is the front of the truck when you feel that blast?
It if course depends on how far back you are, but from what I can remember, the wind doesn’t hit you until the truck has already passed.
snape…”A thought experiment for all you engineers (although you should do it for real):
Stand next to a freeway as a truck passes.”
No engineer would do anything that dumb, unless he had drunk the proverbial 40 beers from the famous engineering song:
“We are, we are, we are, we are, we are the Engineers,
We can, we can, we can, we can, demolish forty beers,
Drink rum, drink rum, drink rum, drink rum, drink rum and follow us,
‘Cause we don’t give a damn for any old man who don’t give a damn for us!”
I have already mentioned my experience driving across the Canadian prairies in a Honda, in cooler, damp air. When a semi-trailer went past in the opposite direction it pushed the lighter vehicle to the side. There is a heck of a blast of air from the passing semi.
You can even feel it from smaller vehicles. That’s why I tended to make sure I was well over on the road, away from the passing traffic.
Here is an aerial view of a wake:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fjordn_surface_wave_boat.jpg
It creates a V shape. Looks to me like the boat could pass very close to an object in the water, and the wake would not hit the object (causing resistance) until the boat had already passed.
That V shaped shock wave is itself a product of the interaction of the boat with its surroundings. It will only influence the object to the extent the object has already influenced it.
Yes, the influence is tiny. But, so is the power produced.
No, Bart.
The wake once emitted has its own independent existence and energy, no longer reliant on its mother ship.
If the wave hits an object, and transfers energy to it, then the wave’s energy is reduced afterward.
The ship need not supply MORE energy since it is already accounted for in the loss of energy to the wave.
No, that’s not how it works. The shock wave is stored energy, but energy transfer starts the moment the pressure gradient from the oncoming ship starts influencing the buoy, which in turn starts influencing it, and the energy is integrating over the entire time.
Please review the thought experiment at
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2018/08/green-energy-scam-167-traffic-driven-wind-turbines/#comment-318304
I know it is non-intuitive, but reality works out such that all conservation laws are satisfied.
“No, that’s not how it works. The shock wave is stored energy, but energy transfer starts the moment the pressure gradient from the oncoming ship starts influencing the buoy, which in turn starts influencing it, and the energy is integrating over the entire time.”
This is a dissipative system. Waves travel out and dissipate energy.
The drag on the ship is localized phenomena, doesnt care about events removed in time and space from it (causality).
If the energy in the wave is transferred to the buoy (it is) then the wave has less energy. If you now say the ship ALSO loses the energy, then you are double counting the loss.
It’s only going to give back up to as much as it takes out.
“The drag on the ship is localized phenomena, doesnt care about events removed in time and space from it (causality).”
This is a decoupling claim that leads to a logical contradiction as discussed in the thought experiment.
It is accurate physics.
What of the double counting?
It is partially accurate physics.
This is a boundary value problem. The wave is produced by pressure differences, and the pressure distribution is determined by the boundary conditions, including the discontinuity at the buoy.
The fact that the buoy is so small is, I think, coloring your perception. So, imagine it as a solid wall with a small passage way for the boat to go through. As the boat gets closer to the wall, the pressure builds, and the boat has to push harder to move at the same velocity, and so is experiencing losses.
The wall is floating, so it will bob a bit in the wake, and power can theoretically be generated from its bobbing. If that power could be transmitted back to the boat, it would at most replace the energy loss from pushing past the wall.
“It will only influence the object to the extent the object has already influenced it.”
Causality says No. The wave V is like the light cone.
No, it’s not like that. Pressure gradients travel at the speed of sound. The V is just a place where energy is concentrated on the surface.
“No engineer would do anything that dumb”.
Highway patrol officers, and people with car trouble, have been known to stand on the shoulder of freeways completely sober. Apparently much braver than engineers. But if the idea frightens you, Gordon, just pull to the side of a highway, stay in your car and roll the window down.
Better yet, find a street with fast moving traffic that has a sidewalk.
” When a semi-trailer went past in the opposite direction it pushed the lighter vehicle to the side. There is a heck of a blast of air from the passing semi.”
Of course. My question is not whether there’s a blast of air or not. I’m wondering where the truck is at moment you feel the blast. Has the front of the truck already passed you?
Here’s a video where it looks like the water first collides, and then spreads outward:
https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-4831373-stock-footage-boat-engine-wake-in-slow-motion.html
Does air do the same thing?
I think what you are seeing there are two Kelvin waves produced by two motors colliding with one another.
Bart
“That V shaped shock wave is itself a product of the interaction of the boat with its surroundings.”
Agreed. But again, I’m wondering when a would a nearby object come into contact with the shock wave? Has the boat already passed?
Until the object feels water rushing towards it, there is nothing to resist.
The shock wave is stored energy, but the pressure gradient extends as far as the speed of sound in water.
No. Now you are just making stuff up. The energy in the wave travels at the speed of surface waves.
I am using the wrong terminology. It’s not a shock wave. It’s a Kelvin wave. But, pressure changes propagate out at the speed of sound, which is about a mile a second in water.
Does the buoy move before the surface wave hits it? No.
Well, in a real world situation, it is bobbing around all the time. But, in an idealized situation in which the waters are perfectly still, yes, it starts moving as soon as the pressure differentials propagate to it from the boat.
Think of a finite expanse of water. A toy boat in a tub. As soon as the boat starts pushing forward, it is stacking up pressure behind it, and that sets the waters in front of it in motion, as they seek to equalize the pressure.
Maybe this graphic will help:
http://oi66.tinypic.com/qsv3o3.jpg
Only seeing ads.
The pressure wave (sound) will carry a negligible portion of the energy compared to the wake.
Thats why people build wave energy driven generators.
“The pressure wave (sound) will carry a negligible portion of the energy compared to the wake.”
Proof?
Look for the picture of the boat and the buoy. If you are on a Windows machine, you can right click on it and choose “view image” to see the graphic without all the ads.
The question is not whether we can draw energy from wave action. It is whether we can recover additional energy above what was lost.
What we call “sound” is the result of rapid pressure oscillations. But, the pressure gradient has a full spectrum, including very low frequency. The buoy will be pulled in toward the boat long before the Kelvin wave hits it (that is what the graphic depicts), and the recoverable energy in the Kelvin wave will cancel the energy of prior motion.
There are many types of waves, they carry different amounts of energy. Eg Earthquakes.
In my experience with smooth lakes, floating objects begin moving when they are hit by the wake of a boat, not before.
A small boat has a 20 hp motor, 15 kW.
If sound waves from passing boats were carrying 10s of kilowatts, I think swimmers and animals ears would be regularly damaged.
That is not my experience. I have been sucked in toward boats approaching me.
Again, we’re not talking sound waves. We are talking pressure gradients, of which sound waves form a high frequency subset.
The gradients are probably not carrying 10’s of kW-hr, but you’re not extracting 10’s of kW-hr for from a given wake anyway.
Note my addition of a time unit to your kW – a watt is a rate of energy transmission, not energy.
kW is what I meant, power.
“In their most recent paper (Jordan, et al., 2010) the authors note that the induced winds caused by a high speed train have three distinct components: (1) flow around the nose of the train, (2) flow along the train, and (3) flow in the wake of the train. Exact analytical solutions for these flow fields are not possible. This is especially true of the flow in the wake of the train. However, it is known that the average magnitude of the induced wind does diminish as the distance from the train increases. For the analysis in their most recent paper the authors represent the induced velocity in the wake of the train as the product of an exponential and parabolic function of the distance with each function having a separate decay constant.”
I’m wondering if a roadside turbine mostly encounters the WAKE from a passing vehicle. How far out does air “slipping” along the side extend?
S,
Part of your quoted comment –
“Exact analytical solutions for these flow fields are not possible.”
As far as I know, this is true. You question is unanswerable – you might as well ask “how long is a piece of string”. If you could define your question properly, you would probably have the knowledge to answer it yourself!
There also seems to be an implicit assumption that the “winds” are somehow regular, or laminar, when, in fact, they are not. The air in question moves chaotically. Extracting useful power is possible, but unlikely to be competetive.
The Atmos clock, for example, uses “free” energy from the changes of atmospheric temperature and pressure. However, the total cost of ownership will ensure that any promoter claiming that the principle could be scaled up to compete with, say, fossil fuelled power generation, might rightfully be considered to be a scammer – or alternatively , stupid and ignorant.
Almost invariably, the promoters of “something for nothing” schemes need a few million or so for “research”, to iron out the remaining “minor problems”. Ha! Anyone who would believe that, is silly enough to believe in the GHE.
Cheers.
I’ve done a little reading on the subject. If I understand correctly, as a truck passes you, the pressure from air moving along side the truck will push you sideways away from the truck. In a small way, you would therefore push the truck sideways In the opposite direction. How does a perpendicular force impede the trucks forward motion?
As the truck moves past you, you will be pulled laterally towards the road as a result of air being sucked in behind the truck. Any resistance to this force would (in a small way) pull the truck sideways toward you. Again, I don’t see how this would impede the trucks forward motion.
“1973, Edwin J. Saltzman, Dryden aerospace engineer and bicyclist, noticed the push and pull of large trucks at highway speeds while riding to work. As a tractor trailer overtook him, he first felt the bow wave of air pushing him slightly away from the road and toward the sagebrush; as the truck swept past, its wake had the opposite effect, drawing him toward the road and even causing both rider and bicycle to lean toward the lane.”
https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/t_3.html
*******
(Notice the push and pull he talks about is not backward and forward, but lateral)
I can confirm this from personal experience. While trying to pass a tractor trailer in near hydroplaning conditions, the front of the car was pushed away from the truck and the rear was sucked toward it, resulting in a quite thrilling skid.
Cool. There is supposed be a slight vacuum behind a truck. A bike rider could get pulled into it. As in this video:https://youtu.be/A5wmkXu_v2k
Hi Nate,
yes there is, but that reduction in pressure is equivalent to pushing the truck backwards, that because it is the differential pressure front-back that mostly establish the aerodynamic loss (the most important is the front pressure then the back pressure and then all the other lateral air flows produced).
Just to be concise, I fully agree with Bart which is more trained than me in this field.
Have a great day.
Massimo
S,
Couple of minor points.
The lateral force is only a component or vector of the entire force. What you “feel” is not necessarily what is factual – reality is processed by your brain, often with different perceptions depending on circumstances.
Air does not get “sucked”. Once again a “feeling” which is not reality.
There has been a lot of research into the aerodynamics of road vehicles. One book is even called “The Aerodynamics of Road Vehicles: . . . ”
Cheers.
Mike: “Air does not get sucked. Once again a feeling which is not reality.”
Ok, my wording was imprecise.
*******
Meanwhile, I think I answered my own question, “How does a perpendicular force impede the trucks forward motion?”
By increasing the friction drag between the vehicle’s body and the air moving past it.
It’s more that the perpendicular “force” is a result of the friction drag. When the molecules of air hit the side of the truck, they bounce off in a pattern which depends upon surface roughness, but they acquire a mean sideways component of velocity.
Thanks, Bart
I was wondering how that works.
How about a “jack-in-the-box” turbine on a car’s roof?
Pops up when you step on the brake, retracts when you release.
Sure, that would work, if a bit cumbersome, and probably not much of a boost, with all the losses. Regenerative braking is less obtrusive and offers more substantial reward.
Does that mean I shouldn’t apply for a patent?
We can indeed scavenge or recover some of the energy “wasted” by an object moving through a fluid, so long as that energy has not degraded to the point of random thermal motion. (At that point, we would need Maxwell’s Daemon, but, alas, he is nonexistent.)
Consider the following thought experiment: A supersonic airplane passes overhead. It produces a shock wave which expands behind the plane, forming a cone-shape in space. Near the ground, we set up a loudspeaker, but we don’t use it as a loudspeaker. Instead, we use it as a receiver, and we connect its wires to an oscilloscope and to a suitable load or charging circuit for a battery. When the shock wave hits the speaker cone, the cone moves, driving the speaker coil through the magnetic field of the speaker’s permanent magnet, producing a pulse of electricity which we observe on the oscilloscope and which we can use to do a little work in the load, such as dumping a little charge into a battery for later use. The recovery of energy by our apparatus can have no effect on the energy used by the passing plane, because any of the sonic boom reflected from our apparatus will travel at or below the speed of sound and will not catch up to the supersonic plane. Is this demonstrable? Yes. Practical? No, unless we are merely trying to build a sonic boom detector.
The same can be true in subsonic cases. It is true, as has been pointed out, in the case of the wake of a moving boat, where we scavenge some energy from the waves of the wake off to the side, and behind the boat. If the boat is travelling faster than the waves are propagating in the water, there is no way the reflected waves from our apparatus will catch the boat. Of course, the sound produced by our apparatus will catch up to the boat, but this returned energy is insignificant when compared to the energy in the waves. We can indeed recover some of the energy in the wake without causing any additional burden on the boat.
Consider geese. The lead goose takes off. A second goose falls in at a point behind and to the side of the lead, where the second finds that less energy needs to be expended to travel the same distance at the same speed. If the lead goose felt the additional burden that has been lifted from the second goose, the lead would break off the formation, saying in effect, “No way!”. Instead, the lead carries on, not suffering any noticeable burden, and knowing that he or she can eventually trade places with the other, thereby sharing in the energy savings. Additional geese join in, building a V-formation, not burdening each other, but yielding a further advantage, as the fraction of time any one goose must stay in the lead goes down.
I think the last time I passed through the Atlanta airport, there were “whirligigs” attached to the walls housing the people mover tram. The purpose of those is to add additional turbulence, reducing the power requirement of the mover by allowing the air to slip by and fill in behind the mover, reducing the partial vacuum behind the mover and lowering the overall air friction. (This is a similar effect to that of adding dimples to a golf ball to cause turbulence to enable the ball to travel farther than would occur with the more laminar flow around a smooth golf ball. It only works in a particular range of Reynolds number, beyond the scope of our discussion here.) The whirligigs clearly use a little energy themselves, through air friction and friction on the pivots. We could attach small electrical generators to the whirligigs and recover some of the wasted energy. This might or might not increase the load on the mover as compared to the case with free-turning whirligigs, but we can certainly recover some energy without requiring the input of more energy by the mover than that of the case with no whirligigs.
The referenced video of the Savonius rotors contains so many confusing and erroneous statements that I won’t try to address these. I don’t know if the configuration shown materially adds to or subtracts from the burden of the passing vehicles, but I doubt that it adds as much energy burden to the vehicles as it recovers in energy. However, the small amount of energy recovered is very unlikely to begin to pay for the costs of procurement and maintenance of the system. The company probably perceives the benefit to be positive advertising and good will, given that very few of the general public will ever look into the numbers, and may merely buy into the idea that this is a wonderful new “green” innovation.
“The recovery of energy by our apparatus can have no effect on the energy used by the passing plane, because any of the sonic boom reflected from our apparatus will travel at or below the speed of sound and will not catch up to the supersonic plane.”
That’s a nice thought experiment. But, is it true? The speed of sound is relative to air speed. So, we can have a reaction disturbance travel right back up the shock wave to the vehicle.
‘If the lead goose felt the additional burden that has been lifted from the second goose, the lead would break off the formation, saying in effect, “No way!”‘
This also is a very clever thought experiment. But, is it applicable? In effect, it is creating a composite vehicle with a better aerodynamic drag profile. We can definitely do that. The question is whether any of the wake energy can be exploited to provide energy greater after the fact than that put in cumulatively by all the geese flapping their wings.
Fun additional thought experiment: If the vehicle were traveling faster than the speed of light, then any reaction to the light shock wave would never catch up, in accordance with your scenario, because the speed of light is absolute. That might be another argument against the possibility of superluminal travel, as it would allow what I believe is a proscribed recovery of waste energy to be effected.
Its a perfectly good thought experiment, and comparable to the boat.
” So, we can have a reaction disturbance travel right back up the shock wave to the vehicle.”
C’mon Bart. When someone makes a good point, its ok to just let it be that.
My comment is correct. Perhaps you need to think it over.
Got any examples of this super-sonic wave?
It’s not super-sonic. The speed of sound is relative to the movement of the medium. If you are in the cabin of a supersonic plane, you can still talk to the people in front of you.
Oh not supersonic? Then your ‘reaction disturbance’ will not make it back to the plane, will it?
Nonsense!
You’re not thinking. “Supersonic” does not refer to an absolute speed.
No need to lecture me on basics, Bart. I know all of that.
You suggested “reaction disturbance” travelling all the way back to the plane.
Explain that. Give an example of that happening.
I wish to withdraw my comments about the people mover in the Atlanta airport. It has been too many years since I was through there. The only references I can find are to the Denver airport, and there the “propellers” are said to be only for decorative or artistic purposes.
“regenerative breaking”? With this sort of perpetual motion nonsense I sort of like the literal meaning of that vs the intended “regenerative braking.”
As previous owner of a hybrid and current owner of an EV I am continuously amazed when people latch on to “regenerative braking” as if it is The One Thing that makes an EV work.
It is the main thing that makes it more efficient than a regular vehicle. I’ve driven a Prius. Acceleration is pitiful. A comparably powered and weighted ICE vehicle also would have very high fuel efficiency. It is why hybrids do great in the cities, not so great on long, open stretches of road.
Not really the main thing. It is having a small gas engine and an electric motor combo.
The small gas engine doesnt guzzle gas and is helped by the electric motor for acceleration.
No, that really doesn’t help. In fact, having the combo means there will be losses in conversion of mechanical to electrical energy.
As I said, a comparably powered ICE will get very high gas mileage, too. The Prius advertises 50 mph in highway driving. The Honda Civic gets 42. The Prius goes from 0 to 60 mph in 10 seconds. The Civic in 6.3 seconds. If you brought the Civic down a bit, you could make 50 mpg.
The ways you save with the hybrid are primarily 1) regenerative braking, 2) shutting down instead of idling in heavy traffic.
“No, that really doesnt help.”
Facts are of no importance, you will still argue regardless, and not be able to back up your BS assertions.
This is a topic I happen to know a lot about.
2018 Honda Civic/MPG
Up to 32 city / 42 highway
Up to 58 city / 53 highway
2018 Toyota Prius, MPG
Substantially different.
Zero to 60 in almost 4 seconds less is very substantial, too. If you had a comparably weak ICE engine, you could match the Prius highway mileage.
In the city, the Prius gains the advantage from idling shutdown and regenerative braking. On the highway, advantages must be drawn from aerodynamics and weight.
These are the facts, Nate. None of your wishful, magical thinking will change them.
Bart says:
In the city, the Prius gains the advantage from idling shutdown and regenerative braking. On the highway, advantages must be drawn from aerodynamics and weight.
So the Prius has the advantage.
DA,
That’s what he said. Why are you pretending to disagree? Trolling, or just stupid and ignorant?
Cheers.
“wishful, magical thinking ”
No magical thinking at all, just physics and engineering, asswipe.
You don’t think anybody else can ever know about things that you don’t.
Reducing the size of the engine saves gas by making it operate most efficiently at high-way speed. You only need 25 hp to go down the hiway, and engines are most efficient at middle of power range. So a 50 hp engine is ideal for hiway. You need some more for battery charging and other needs ~ 90 hp.
You need more hp for acceleration, hence an electric motor assists, which has better torque also.
With a gas only 150-200 hp engine (civic) operating at 25 hp on hiway is inefficient.
Regen braking helps a bit. Idling off helps.
Low speed electric only helps.
Idling or low speed with a 200 hp engine is very wasteful.
DMK
I like your “regenerative breaking” joke.
I wonder how much energy we could generate from a power lunch?
Jim,
really interesting comment.
I think in this case Dr. Spencer (and others) have misapplied Newton’s third law:
“…..for every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction. In other words, if object A exerts a force on object B, then object B also exerts an equal and opposite force on object A.”
https://wright.nasa.gov/airplane/newton3.html
*******
Object A is perceived to be, for example, a passing truck which exerts a force on object B, the wind turbine. From this, it stands to reason that the turbine should exert an equal and opposite force on the truck.
I think that’s too broad. Should be A is air, which exerts a force on B, the turbine’s blades. The blades would then exert an equal and opposite force upon the air.
The passing truck is not part of the “pair” of forces.
Amplifying what you said, the moving vehicle imparts energy to the fluid. This energy is stored for a while in the fluid. The fluid, in turn, imparts energy to the energy-scavenging apparatus. Depending on the system design, the scavenging apparatus may or may not return energy or force to the vehicle. If anything is returned, it may either “help” or “hinder” the vehicle in its forward motion. If it “helps”, there is still no perpetual motion. We are just leaving a bit less energy in the fluid as “waste”, and requiring a bit less energy from the mover in the first place.
Jim b…”Amplifying what you said, the moving vehicle imparts energy to the fluid. This energy is stored for a while in the fluid”.
There’s that energy word again, the same word alarmists use to convolute basic physics and defend the pseudo-science of AGW.
This problem is simpler than that. The truck is a force and when it contacts air, it compresses the air. Under normal conditions, the compressed air will be pushed back and to the sides then move around the truck in swirls (vortices).
If part of the air pushed off to one side contacts the windmill device, the device will resist the air, creating a higher compression between truck and turbine. That compressed column of air is what you feel when you try to inflate a car tire using a bicycle pump. The air in the pump column resists the handle as you push it down.
This is not the case of a compressed fluid going off on its own with a force of its own. The force is only there while the truck is pushing it.
Of course, a parcel of air can gain momentum, but that momentum caused by the truck is very short lived. Air pockets moving randomly will not affect the turbines as they drift off around the truck, only the direct impact of the initial air compression will affect the turbine, and for a fleeting moment as the truck passes.
However, if you place a series of those turbines down the road, the truck is pushing air into each of them, and Newton III tells us there is a continuous resistance to the air pushed by the truck. Since the truck is pushing that air, it encounters resistance due to increased air pressure.
Gordon Robertson says:
“Since the truck is pushing that air, it encounters resistance due to increased air pressure.”
This happens whether the wind turbine is present or not.
DA,
So?
Just stating an irrelevant factoid won’t make you appear any less the stupid and ignorant troll that you seem.
Maybe you could ape your betters by quoting me a few more times. At least stupid and ignorant GHE fanatics might learn something. Off you go, David, save me some effort.
Cheers.
Good points.
The vehicle and turbine are not in a monogamous relationship when it comes to force and energy. They are interacting with the medium and all other surroundings.
The return force (pressure) from the turbine can spread out in 3D, much of it not affecting the car at all.
It seems reasonable at first glance, but then one must reckon that any energy removed by the fluid came from the vehicle in the first place, and the energy-scavenging apparatus leaches additional energy above and beyond what otherwise would be the case.
“energy removed by the fluid came from the vehicle in the first place”
And no one is denying that.
snape…”The passing truck is not part of the pair of forces”.
Without the truck there is no force. The truck IS the force that creates the rest of the forces to which you refer.
Not if there is some wind already present.
Gordon,
I suspect Sir Isaac would side with me, and agree theres a big difference between air moving through a turbine and a truck moving through a turbine.
S,
The video states that the turbine is solar powered. What is the relevance of Newton’s Laws of Motion?
Is it a scam after all, misleading people into believing the turbines are powered by passing traffic?
Or is the video’s poster merely deluded?
What do you think?
Cheers.
Bart
Water waves are not the same as sound, shock or pressure waves. They move much slower:
https://www.quora.com/How-fast-do-ocean-waves-travel
What you are talking about is an echo. Depending on the surface angle a sound wave hits, there may be no echo returned at all. If there is one, it will likely be much weaker than the original wave.
https://www.physicsclassroom.com/mmedia/waves/er.cfm
I already acknowledged that here:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2018/08/green-energy-scam-167-traffic-driven-wind-turbines/#comment-318385
But, in the supersonic thought experiment, there is most definitely a shock wave.
My thoughts here are a little inchoate, and I need to formulate them more precisely.
I cannot deny that there is a small portion of energy in the wake of the cars that should be recoverable by some means and to some extent to do work.
What I believe is that the means and apparatus suggested cannot do that. I am virtually certain it cannot when considering all the losses, and I am reasonably confident it cannot under any circumstances. I am completely sure that any additional efficiency, should it exist, would be utterly negligible.
The reason is that the apparatus produces additional drag losses above and beyond what there would be were the wake allowed to flow freely. As a result, any power generated is parasitic.
Gaining efficiency is generally a result of very focused efforts to mash down the “tall poles” in the tent that draw excess energy from application to the goal. This scheme is not focused at all. In fact, it would be much easier to gain additional wind energy simply by citing the windmills properly, and raising them in height to capture the sustained winds that exist at higher altitude.
When and if I collect my thoughts (before this message board goes stale, hopefully), I will notify you all.
…siting…
Mike Flynn
That is a simple 3-blade Savonius wind turbine. Small, cheap and not particularly efficient.
I notice that each unit has a red warning light on top. I would imagine there are also some electronics to allow the power from the windmill to be transmitted, and some monitoring gear. There would need to be a battery to power the electronics when there’s no traffic.
A small solar panel to keep the battery charged on quiet days would be a cheap backup.
E,
It is interesting to note –
“Enlil was the name of the Mesopotamian god of wind and storms. Now, fittingly, it’s what Turkish inventor Gelecegin Yenilenebilir Sehirleri is calling his vertical wind turbine.”
Robinson used the principle in the cup anemometer in 1846. Savonius extended the idea in 1922. I can’t see anything novel about the Enlil.
I call it a scam (using the standard climatological redefinition of words to mean anything I want eg. cooling is warming).
Others may invest as much as they desire. I wish them luck.
Cheers.
Bart
The waves you see here are ordinary, run of the mill water waves, created by and propogated by the force of gravity (as opposed to pressure). As mentioned in my last link, they tend to be quite slow……although a surfer might disagree. And as Nate pointed out, they are constantly dissipating.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fjordn_surface_wave_boat.jpg
https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-4831373-stock-footage-boat-engine-wake-in-slow-motion.html
Not sure of your point…
The bottom line is that, extracting energy from that wake means you will change its characteristics, and in changing its characteristics, you will require more power from the boat.
Yes, it’s a tiny amount, but you’re only generating a tiny amount of power, so you can’t neglect it.
You might be right about the twin engine wake (bottom) having something to do with a Kelvin wave:
“A Kelvin wave (fluid dynamics) is also a long scale perturbation mode of a vortex in superfluid dynamics”
https://www.math.ubc.ca/~cass/courses/m309-01a/carmen/Mainpage.htm
Bart,
Big wake of a ship. https://youtu.be/uFzQxmrZsSg.
Energy transfer to other boat when wake hits.
Energy transfer occurs both before and after the crest has hit, and it is not one-way.
Only just before.
“The transfer is not one-way”
Sure, but if any energy makes it back to the ship at all from the boat-wave interaction, it will mostly be dispersed into the ocean.
Again, the idea that once the energy has transferred to the medium from the ship, the medium then transfers energy to the small boat, an event removed in space and time from the ship-medium interaction-
This is the essence of wave phenomena.
“Not sure of your point”
The speed of the waves make a difference, as noted by Nate and Jim,
“If the boat is travelling faster than the waves are propagating in the water, there is no way the reflected waves from our apparatus will catch the boat. Of course, the sound produced by our apparatus will catch
up to the boat, but this returned energy is insignificant when compared to the energy in the waves.”
********
Right or wrong, I’m ready to let it go.
The speed of the wave propagation is not the speed of pressure propagation.
Look at this power function. What is the net energy? (hint: zero)
http://oi64.tinypic.com/2urtm6a.jpg
In general, in a classical gas
speed of sound = sqrt{(Pp/Prho)s}, where P = partial derivative symbol, p=pressure and rho=density, and s=entropy.
No context for image, not meaningful.
Oh…and thanks for the link to Kelvin waves. Hard to find anything other than el nino related.
One last link:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NDYglRkjDls
One of my favorite tunes!
It is good that people brain storm about alternative energy generation. But it takes a great deal of both naivety and ego to think that no one has ever thought of doing this before. It took me about five minutes to figure out the proposal is just an inefficient wind farm.
Inefficient how?
The witless gotcha troll shambles from his cave!
Tell us, David, why you think the scheme would be efficient? Can’t or won’t say?
Back to your noisome subterranean lair, troll! Interfere not with the affairs of men!
Cheers.
I’m pretty sure Davie lives under a bridge, not in a cave.
Made many a trip freighting fuel etc up the Big Susitna river in Ak for creel survey at its various tributaries and although drove the slowest jet boat of three could get my bow over the wake coming off the much faster boat and gain on them. I don’t think it affected the efficiency of the lead boat but it sure annoyed the crap out of them.
D,
Interesting. I agree that the efficiency of the lead boat is unaffected. It has expended energy pushing water above its rest level. If you manage to extract useful work from the vertically displaced water, it is really no different from extracting energy from a hydro electric system.
When the wake subsides naturally, the energy which went into its creation is radiated away as heat.
Another way of utilising energy which would otherwise be wasted as heat, is the technique of “bump drafting”. This results in faster lap times for both cars, particularly where track construction allowed continuous use, even through corners.
Carried to the extreme, the technique almost creates an eight wheeled vehicle of twice the power, with the same frontal area as a normal four wheeler.
As an aside, the v formation of geese and others results from the trailing birds using the vortex lift energy, which would otherwise be wasted as heat. At least some migrating species continuously swap the lead bird every minute or so, to spread the load.
For the curious, a look at how Nature has engineered the humpback whale’s flippers to achieve lower stall speeds while flying through the water is fascinating. Increased manoeuvrability, underwater somersaults – and high propulsive efficiency to boot!
All part of the rich tapestry of life, I suppose.
Cheers.
Jim b…”Amplifying what you said, the moving vehicle imparts energy to the fluid. This energy is stored for a while in the fluid”.
There’s that energy word again, the same word alarmists use to convolute basic physics and defend the pseudo-science of AGW.
This problem is simpler than that. The truck is a force and when it contacts air, it compresses the air. Under normal conditions, the compressed air will be pushed back and to the sides then move around the truck in swirls.
If part of the air pushed off to one side contacts the turbine device, the device will resist the air, creating a higher compression between truck and turbine. That compressed column of air is what you feel when you try to inflate a car tire using a bicycle pump. The air in the pump column resists the handle as you push it down.
This is not the case of a compressed fluid going off on its own with a force of its own. The force is only there while the truck is pushing it.
Of course, a parcel of air can gain momentum, but that momentum caused by the truck is very short lived. Air pockets moving randomly will not affect the turbines as they drift off around the truck, only the direct impact of the initial air compression will affect the turbine, and for a fleeting moment as the truck passes.
However, if you place a series of those turbines down the road, the truck is pushing air into each of them, and Newton III tells us there is a continuous resistance to the air pushed by the truck. Since the truck is pushing that air, it encounters resistance due to increased air pressure.
Our cars already charge themselves via pistons. Punch the gas and electricity from the pistons is already sent to the car battery, keeping it charged. Our autos are designed for aerodynamic superiority, to ensure they “catch” as little “wind” as possible, as to improve fuel economy at higher speeds. Turbines are designed to “catch” the movement of a substance-something you do NOT WANT ON A VEHICLE. The turbine would greatly decrease fuel economy and create a “catch” hazard in high wind conditions, leading to significant decrease in road safety.
So fortunately, our cars already recycle their own energy as much as possible, in a safe manner.