Haiti - no more concrete?

Awful tragedy in Haiti, from an earthquake. The folk there have everyone's deepest sympathy and need all the help we can muster. But the job after that is to see that tragedy on this scale does not happen there again.

You cannot, pray or curse as much as you like, stop earthquakes. But it was not basically the earthquake that killed and injured so many folk in Haiti. It was falling concrete.

Barack Obama, who has responded very well, (10/10 for that)and is sending all the help he can, said "this is cruel and incomprehensible."

It is unfortunately neither cruel nor incomprehensible and it is perhaps worth getting this straight. If he wants to blame his pet sky god, fine, but he does not have to. No conscious agency was involved in setting off the earthquake. You can look at the world map of the shape of the sea beds, and see immediately that around Haiti is a nightmare. Port Au Prince, the capital, is a tectonic nightmare's nightmare. Two massive tectonic plates are in collision, and Haiti is the crumpling fender. To the south is the massive South American plate, and to the north is the equally vast North American plate. With Haiti not merely on the boundary, but on a twisted and stressed part of that boundary. The two American plates are moving westwards, but at different rates. Haiti is on the tear line. Tear as in both senses of the word.

Have a look first at this map, of the planet's plate tectonics


Click on the map for a bigger image.

Haiti is half of the oval island due north of the most northerly tip of South America. It's location does not look particularly alarming, at that scale. But have a look at the following Google Earth image. It shows the capital, Port Au Prince, but it also shows the shape of the seabed around the island.


Click on the map for a bigger image.

The two dark blue lines in the sea, the curved one to the east of the island and the straight one stretching west to the Yucatan Peninsula, are massive ocean trenches, on the boundary between the two big tectonic plates. And, to make a bad situation worse, the line of the southern edge of the western trench runs right through Port Au Prince.

What follows is that there will be earthquakes there for the next fifty million years, minimum.

What is cruel and does involve conscious thought is the utterly absurd habit of putting up concrete buildings in such places as Haiti. Such places are Japan, southern Italy, Crete, Turkey, Greece, San Francisco, Northern China, the Solomon islands, etc. where the plate tectonics get savage and will always be so.

Construction with concrete should be made illegal in every one of those.

Here is a vast opportunity to be useful, for the steel industry. Promote the replacement of concrete buildings with safer steel ones. Clad them with corrugated iron, or foam sandwiches, or whatever. But not with concrete. The stuff is too heavy. Even if the building stands in a quake, the concrete will fall off and hurt people. If you bolt steel sheeting on properly, it will not fall off. Very simple.

And there is a bonus for the folk who still hang onto the quaint old notion that CO2 is changing the climate, and not deep-seated geological processes. Concrete manufacturing produces vast quantities of greenhouse gases. OK, so does the manufacture of steel, but hey, the greenhouse gassers are bloody damn good at looking the other way, or they would have by now noticed their hockey stick has snapped in the middle. So, just don't talk about that, because a lot of peoples' lives are at stake here. For real, this time.

As high as kites on greenhouse gas

We're as high as kites
on greenhouse gas
but not as high as satellites
which say they see that CO2
comes from the seas,
not me and you.

And from deep
under desert land
where, in the gaps
in the buried sand,
life lives and waits,
till we understand.

That does not make
the world get hot.
When the compass flips
them to the melting pot.
then the icecaps melt
'cause that's their lot.

The Legend of the First Cognitist

How small evil things escaping from hot boxes are mugging the air
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First posted ABC Pool Climate Group here 23.11.09

The image above or below or wherever, is of a tasteless, odourless, colourless invisible gas. Enjoy. Well-orchestrated men in dark suits, who care for their violins in proper cases, will shortly be phoning from Copenhagen and offering to bury lots of it for you. Sequester now and avoid all unpleasantness.

Another incisive Closeburn Signal Station Report

The tale of how small evil things escaping from hot boxes are beating up the atmosphere

or,

The Legend of the First Cognitist

Once upon a time there was a very old man. In his youth he had wanted to become famous by finding out useful things and telling the world, but his granddad forget to tell him there was a catch. It is no good just having fine ideas. You had to get someone to lend you a large beagle, someone else to agree to pretend to be your bulldog and you have to own at least two suits and and a lot of railway shares. The old man had never heard of Aristotle or Patrick Matthew or the 33 other people who Charlie Darwin, in the second edition, politely admitted had thought up evolution, with and without natural selection, before him.

Eventually the old man did find some sort-of useful things out, or thought perhaps he had, but by then he had developed a personality problem. There was no-one to explain it to him, apart from the marginal issue of being grumpy, which his wife explained to him in detail, most days. He mostly talked to his friends, who were donkeys and a three-lefggd (that is what the laptop says) dingo. They found his theories fascinating, and quite good for a monkey and they tried to explain his basic problem. But he could not really ubderstand beven basic donkey or dingo, so after a few yaers, they gave up. He got confised, at tmes.

So when youngsters, eager for the definitive truth, asked him for pronouncements of clarity and authority about the small evil escaping things, that we will get to if remembered, he would launch into long rambling explanations of complex things. Their coffee would get cold, and he would forget to offer more. He was a disaster. They all called him Mr Dunno, B.Sc. (Basically Seriously confused).

Well, he beavered away regardless for many years, putting lots of words to paper and out into hyperspace. He carefully watched and reported on the small things escaping from underground and then from the hot boxes they hid in for a while. And, like with the cane toads, in time he came to think, they must have their uses. He had seen the cane toads eating mosquitoes while sitting for hours on his driveway, were there was not much else to eat, or he thought he had, though he wasn't sure. He wasn't sure because he rather liked the toads on the driveway, the rounder ones, and could not get himself to cut one up to see what was inside. He should of course have got one that already didn't care, and was wearing one of those bracelets that say the rellies don't mind what you do with the wreckage after a semi-trailer has interviewed it. But he could never find a flat one with a bracelet, so that project was stuck, for the moment.

He concentrated on the small escaping things instead. He watched them under an old microscope he had found on the tip. He
watched them from herds of satellites that people had forgotten all
about as soon as they were launched and that no-one was using. No-one seemed to mind.

Anyway, one day, taking a short stroll at smoko, he noticed that the small hot-box escapees visited the trees and that the trees seemed to like them. Later he went out with a torch. Most of them left again at night, but some stayed on. The trees were very kind folk and some of them fed him every day, so he thought, he would like the little devils himself, from then on. He thought although he felt he was getting a bit technical, they were perhaps more like little angels. Every morning, when he did not forget, he cheerily called out, "Good morning, carbon dioxide molecules. Have a Nice Day!" He knew the last bit of that greeting was very fashionable, because he had once been to one of those fancy new Supermarkets, and that is what a very pretty young lady had said to him, when they let him out. He never forgot it.

One day, when the busy little escaping people were being very nice to his favourite bunya tree, so it was just glowing with new leaves, he decided he would try and help them, because he was alarmed on their behalf. A possum told him she had heard a rumour that there was an awful plan afoot to bury them all. He could speak possum alright, and had no problems with the reversing verbs.

He decided he would walk to Gumboro, the most important village in the shire, and there explain what he had found, to St Kevin-the-Infinitely-Patient-Except-when-Ordering. The village was called "Gumboro" because all the folk there always had a lot on their gums. They mostly pushed words out that they had borrowed from other folk. They pushed out so many, that at times their lips nearly melted. The shire, just in case you want to look it up on Google Earth, has a very grand name. It is Terra Australis Incognito. It is always written in bold letters, like that, and comes, if you have audio, with drum rolls. That, in Latin, (which is the language the Pope uses when he did not wish to be too clearly understood, but feels he should speak up anyway, since so many have come so far), means "The Southern Land Where We Know Nothing." It really is a very grand name and everyone here models their lives on it. But as happens, in time it got shortened a bit, so now it is just "Trailya." Any new fashion, be it socks that glow in the dark or another war in Afghanistan - you can rely on us. We Trailya. So long as you come from the land of the landing-fee.

Anyway, old Mr Dunno found it easy to live in Gumboro, as the bins out the back were full of fine food, since far more came out of those hard-working folks' gums than ever went in. After only a few years, he got to see an assistant to the second secretary of an acting assistant to St Kevin himself.

After he was frisked and they took away his pies and sausage rolls, he said, he had come to say, that he had a new model. The man was very kind, but said they already had a new one, that Mike Someone, from the important village of Addledad in the deep south, had found wandering about in the kitchen, and who was very good at office work. He had sent her on. Old Dunno said, he was very pleased to hear that and that from the pictures he had seen, he had known she was herself very fetching and would not have to be fetched, but he was actually there about another sort of model. The great man looked puzzled, and his visitor saw he was clearly wondering if there was any other sort of model.

Old Dunno said he had come to talk about the small escaping things from downunder. The great man promptly said, he could go home with his mind at rest. All the people in Gumborough had their minds at rest, on everything actually, but on that in particular. It was a law-and-order problem. Compounded with border protection. Small evil things without a proper grounding in climate science and peer review reading, were escaping and then getting on boats, with no respect for national sovereignty or navy leave-roster schedules. They were then getting into an array of hot boxes, and then rushing out and beating up the full-fee-paying foreign trainee-suits in the hot-air camps that Gumboro was running. Out of pure kindness and the most sustainable of motives. They had to be detained, it was for their own good. They were getting out of black rocks and they had to go back there. It was not in anyway a racial thing, they could be put under white rocks. Some of those rocks were dry, and some were gummy, it was all very complex, but they had all the graphs. When he had said that, the great man smiled, looked up, and then said "Next." The lady who was so good at office work came in. Old Dunno recognised her from the magazine pictures and was very impressed.

As he told the donkeys and his three-legged dingo friend, when he got home, he had meant to explain that the small escaping things were actually angels who danced on pins, how he had carefully counted them all, and about his experiments in the icebox of the fridge with the magnet, and how it had perhaps melted all the ice. Though the big power blackout may have influenced the data slightly. But she had smiled at him so sweetly, he hd to admit, he quite forgot. And by then, the great man was already taking off his tie, so he knew it was time to go. The trees said never mind and gave him an extra two dozen really good macadamias, as they too had had welcome visitors.

The old Latin word "scio" means "I know." The old Latin word "cogito" means "I think" Or, if you prefer, "I dunno."

He was the first cognitist. Scientists, now as rare as alchemists, still don't like them much.

Hooroo all, and have fun.

Signalman Second Class Jones

Closeburn Signal Station, November 2009, just a few days before the Copenhagen Climate Conference.

The Seafridge System. Clean power for some lucky places. And massive water savings.

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The two maps here show sea surface temperatures, from ship and satellite readings, for July and January. Where the colours show yellow, green or blue against the coastline, both summer and winter, those are the lucky folk. That is where the solar electricity generation system outlined here will work best. The sun does the warming, the sea does the cooling. Boiling and then condensing liquid drives turbines. Very, very simple. No extra radioactivity needed, just that of the sun.





This is about some lucky coastal places, with no new technology,

1) Getting an inexhaustible supply of energy

2) Saving huge amounts of fresh water

3) Getting huge quantities of fertiliser from waste,

in one complex but integrated clean green system.

Ocean-cooled solar power. The Seafridge System.

Places like Cape Town, and in fact the entire west coast of southern Africa, as far up as southern Angola. Like the coast of Chile. Like California. Spain. Melbourne, Adelaide and the entire south coast of Australia. Like coastal China and New Zealand.

What do they have in common? Cold ocean water, at the surface and close to the coast. Where most places have warm sea water on surface, those regions have unusually cold water on their coastlines. A real limitless treasure, if used as below.

The west coasts of southern Africa and South America both have Antarctic Bottom Water surfacing right on their coastlines. Having grown up in a Cape Town beach suburb, I can vouch for the first, as I used to swim, dive, and occasionally poach abalone and turn blue with a numb brain, in the 10 degree C Antarctic Bottom Water that surfaces right on Camps Bay beach. Twenty miles out to sea, the water is a balmy 20 degrees C. The SE trade wind drives the warm surface water off the coast, and the bottom water from the deep south, after a very long slow journey, comes up right on the coastline. That lot is nirvana for fish and the fishing industry there, being laden with nutrients, mostly the wreckage of dead krill. which they have just found live to great depths, and not just near the surface, and so are probably our most important relatives on this planet, bar none. Next time you meet one, doff your hat.

And that lot is also nirvana for a power system that will never run out. You use it as a very efficient and convenient coolant for some fluid with a low boiling point, like ammonia, that you just used solar power to boil and that then drove a turbine making electricity.

And then you use that warmed seawater to flush your toilets, before one more trick before sending it back to the sea. You filter out the solid shit, as that is too valuable to waste, and you grow algae on it, in big ponds, if you have the space, maybe under the same space you just used to catch your solar power. And the algae then goes to the farms as fertiliser. You use the waste heat in the cooling water to warm the algae ponds, before the water goes for domestic use and then comes back laden with whiffy nutrients. The ponds take kitchen waste as extra nutrient feedstock.

The seawater is pumped to houses, via an entirely independent reticulated water system, that uses salt -corrosion-resistant poly pipes and fittings, all the way. You can now buy those off the shelf. So, no more wasting scarce fresh water where salt waster is perfectly adequate. When you've grown your algae, you pump the water, still with some dissolved nutrients, far out to sea, where the biosphere will thank you kindly for the nutrients and come back as fish for anglers and abalone for abalone poachers and similar low life.

For the power system, you pump cold seawater onto the shore. There it cools some liquid of low boiling point, like ammonia, that you just used the sun to boil and used to drive a turbine making electricity. Or, maybe you save energy by pumping the ammonia or whatever into the sea and out again, since that requires the movng of a lot less liquid. The downside is, you may lose your ammonia or other boiling liquid to the sea, in storms or from corrosion or just bad luck and that may be a serious ecological problem. If you can simply pump seawater, leaks mean nothing except maintanence and cost. And, of course, if you pump ammonia and not seawater, you don't get the salt water toilet flushing and the fertiliser.

Less fortunate places than those listed at the top of this essay have warm sea water on the surface, and cold water deep below, so you need to put huge pipes deep into the sea to get the cooling effect. India has been trying some experiments, but some of the pipes went awol in deep water, when being lowered. Storms are ever the problem, with sea-based power systems, and have for decades reduced most wave-power projects to rubble. Here, you just have a couple of securely-buried big pipelines running under the shoreline and into the sea. there is plenty of engineering experience for that.

Desert coasts with up-welling are ideal for these power systems, in that they do not lack sunlight, the real energy-source here. If the evaporating pipes are set in lines parallel to the shore, and with access bridges and tunnels for the wildlife that migrates along shorelines, and over-zealous admin types can resist the temptation to put fences everywhere, on say the Namibian coast, the jackals will be grateful. They can rest in the shade and burrow under the pipes. I saw one family using rather scarce whalebones for a shady home, near Swakopmund, once.

Cape Town has stretches of very steep coastline, that no-one can see except from boats, or access without being a serious rock climber. Those would be ideal spots for the onshore pipelines, and the turbine housings. As between the suburbs of Three Anchor Bay and First Beach, Clifton. And just north of Llundudno. If done well, the access tracks can become fine walks. That happened in the 1890's when the Pipe Track was put in above Camps Bay, a village then. Opposition from mountaineers to the new dams on top of the back of Table Mountain rapidly diminished, as the Pipe Track and the old construction cable route became very popular routes onto the mountain. Or, the whole show could go alongside the nuclear power station, which is already pumping seawater for cooling. What would probably be ideal for the evaporator is simply ordinary black rural poly pipe, maybe of 40mm diameter, laid out in the sun, on a black sand bed, perhaps. Straight of the shelf. That pipe lasts at least 20 years in the sun. I have couple of kilometres of it here, most buried but some not, and its only problems have come from the donkeys or the horses standing on it. It looks good for another 20 years.

What is here set out for coastlines, can also be applied to farm dams, if they are deep and large. Such dams show very marked temperature stratification, which can be made even stronger if you simply stir on some clay every few days. That traps the sun's heat right on the surface, so you can just about scald your hand on a hot day, in the top few centimetres. you park the poly pipe on the dam wall, where it gets maximum sunlight, run your cooling pipe.
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this dual system should be a boon for places like Adelaide (desperately short of fresh water and a bit far from the coal mines) Melbourne, Beijing, and many other cities alongside cold water. This will probably work just fine of all of Portugal and southern France.

Many cities like Vancouver have cold water along the shore - there the problem is more the solar heat. And in the end, every coastline everywhere can have these systems. Where there is warm water on top, there is always colder water deep down, and then the system as outlined in the New Scientist of with the warm water boiling the ammonia, and the deeper water cooling it at depth, can be used.

All for now.

Peter

Kickoff of the Cognitist Movement

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This is an attempt to develop a new model of open "scientific' communication - to replace the presently failing science peer-review-copyright-journal system of reporting research and ideas. See the current climate change debate for a classic example of that failure. That started this.

This aims to be a forum for half-baked ideas about the real world. All the best and most popular ideas started somewhere, half-baked. So, we may as well get systematic about it. With luck, here the baking can go the rest of the way. Then said bit of inspiration can be tasted and either go towards immortality or into the rubbish bin.


This lot also aims to try to set a general human philosophic head-shift going, from the silly certainties implicit in "science" which claims "I know" to "cognience," which in contrast is a bit more modest, and merely says "I think."

If interested, this is your invitation to join. You start as a guest. If you get into being insulting and impolite with no redeeming wit attached, you do not get further. And you soon stop being a guest. Also if, in the utterly undemocratic view of me, you are not contributing anything useful, that's it also.

When people claim that what they are saying is scientific, or based on science, or is science, what they are claiming is that what they are saying is true. When you are guessing about reality in some new way, you cannot know that what you are saying is "true". You can in fact never know, as something may come up, long after you kick the bucket, that clearly shows you were wrong. Others may find what you claim to be useful or interesting, but that is it.

So the oft-repeated recent claim, (coming far more often from journalists and politician than from scientists) that, on the matter of climate change "the science is settled" is an amusing contradiction in terms. The science is never settled. It would not be science if it was. It may be that "the religious dogma on climate change is settled" but even that claim is dubious. Religious dogma settles in the mud every now and then, as eels do, but like them, the slightest disturbance will sets it flailing off in some unpredictable new direction.

All posts here about real world issues are and will remain in the public domain. If you want to maintain some sort of medieval licence to sue, otherwise known as copyright, in any of it weird shades, we thank you, and you best be on your bicycle. Start your own forum.

Conversely, whoever you are, you are free and very welcome to use anything you find here for whatever purpose you like, private, commercial, political, just plain daft, whatever. If you want to say that something says the exact opposite of what it actually said here, go for it, but you may have your leg pulled if you do.

Enough for now. More to follow. We expect and hope for very slow start to this movement. We are stalking the eel called reality. It is very skittish, as well as very slippery.

Have fun all,

Peter.