Month: May 2021

Petrified Wood and Petrified Brains

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Wood from ancient West Virginia

My wife and I talked about visiting Cincinnati later this summer. There is one thing I am not allowed to consider, though. That is a repeat visit to the Creation Museum. I will admit I did go there once, and did manage to hold it together while I saw the full-scale replica of Noah’s Ark, along with all of the animals which supposedly sought refuge on the vessel. But as soon as I escaped the building, and entered the plaza where they sold ice cream, I broke out into uncontrolled laughter. So much so that my wife was afraid one of the armed guards would take exception to my merriment and provide a bit of a 2nd amendment solution. I did calm down, and tried to reflect on what I had just seen.

I had voluntarily paid for the privilege of seeing the literal interpretation of the Bible and the Old Testament stories displayed for my own faith to grow. Or at least, that was what was supposed to happen. Instead, I was the one who saw the convoluted logic displayed, which made it seem like the management of the museum really, really tried to fit the world into their tidy world view of total consistency with the Bible. One problem is the world is not that neat and orderly. Instead, it is an accumulation of acts and conditions that can trace their origin all the way back to the initial act of creation in the Big Bang.

My own house bears testimony to the impossibility of fitting all the niceties of the physical world into the 6,000-year saga of biblical history. You see, I collect petrified wood. As it turns out, there’s a strata of ground underneath this region that trapped fallen trees, hundreds of millions of years ago. And over the eons, that wood transformed into rock, tumbling out of the eroded hillsides and falling down to the creek beds below. Our front porches have displays of large chunks of petrified wood “artfully” arranged to greet any visitors. I used to go with my sons on expeditions down into the creeks where we would search for hunks of wood. I imagine they really enjoyed the freedom of splashing around in the water even if it came with the penalty of carrying the chunks of stone up the hillside to our house.

The large chunk weighs about 40 kg

But those who view the Bible as inerrant will discount the evidence laid out before them, no matter how persuasive it may be. To those believers, it is impossible for light to take millions and billions of years to reach us, because it is incompatible with a view of the universe not being over 6,000 years old. They discount use of radioactive decay as a tool to determine the ages of things in the past, since they enable ages to be traced back beyond the 6,000-year barrier where God created the heavens and earth and declared them to be good.

This tendency to believe only what you have been told is accurate even though the evidence of the eyes contradicts it, does not function only in a religious arena. Indeed, we are seeing an entire political party willing to overlook the evidence of their eyes, and claim the events of January 6 were a mere kerfuffle, not an event worthy of further investigation, and certainly not something to cause a critical eye to be cast upon those who instigated the crowds of January 6 and their violent storming of the Capitol building.

For four years, one section of the US public heard only that Democrats were evil, and as these claims met no opposition on the networks of the right, new beliefs were proposed stating the Democrats secretly were responsible for the huge surge in child abductions (really?), followed by satanic rituals of slaying these innocents for their adrenaline. Yet there was only a wink and a nod towards these purveyors of lunacy from those in authority. As long as judges could be confirmed who would bring America back to the pre-Warren years, they were willing to play along with the crazies. One problem. They never understood their words would instigate action, and they would have large crowds who took every word as inerrant, and a direct command. Rudy Giuliani may believe he was only being hyperbolic when he suggested “trial by combat”, but an entire sector of the public was already primed to act on the literal nature of his words.

The sector of the population who is willing to delegate their logical thinking to others is the sector calling for unending audits of past elections. Maybe we’ll find Chinese watermarks, or contamination of paper with bamboo fibers in the ballots, and can thus declare all votes cast null and void. I find it more than ironic that those who were on the victorious side in 2016, castigated anyone who dared to protest against the acts of the past President as having TDS. Yet the derangement evident today, where millions cannot accept the evidence of their eyes, resulting in endless rehashing of past elections, is viewed by them as a necessary step on the way of reinstating the true monarch of this nation. Talk about snowflakes! These partisans melt down if there is any doubt cast upon their outlandish conspiracies.

Way back in 2016, Hillary Clinton made the mistake that cost her the election. She put a name to the phenomena she saw in front of her. By declaring opponents as “deplorable”, she crystallized the opposition to her. Obviously, in her opponent’s perspective, she considered herself to be the better of those who didn’t share her beliefs. Well, she should never have said that word, but it doesn’t mean the words were false. It seems an entire political party has been hijacked by those whose world view does not permit them to hold any perspective other than what is provided for them. If it doesn’t have a simple solution, then give it one regardless. Fit the round peg into that square hole. It’s all they know.

Of Thermodynamics, and Sealing Wax, and Other Fancy Stuff

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Power plant cooling towers venting waste heat

The gauntlet has been thrown down. The US needs to cut their carbon dioxide emissions by 50% by 2030, starting with a baseline of 2005. In order to accomplish this, real changes in the US economy must occur, along with some sacrifice by US citizens. And, the entrenched interests in continuing the status quo (energy companies, Republicans, utility providers) must be convinced of the necessity of this extreme action. Pretty difficult to do especially since the Republicans have made it their brand to not only dismiss the need for change, but they have proudly waved the banner of climate change hoax / no science to refute the claims of climate scientists. They have waved these banners for generations, and their influence will not go away, especially at the state and local levels.

First, it is necessary to present some simplified discussions of thermodynamics. This is the branch of physics which describes the limits nature imposes upon humanity. The first item needing description is black body radiation. Simply put, it means a body will emit radiation which puts it at equilibrium with the incoming radiation. Any disruption that affects the radiation balance will affect the equilibrium temperature. In our case, radiation from the earth is dispersed into the coldness of space. One is most aware of this phenomena on cold clear nights, but still above the freezing point of water, where frost forms on surfaces that are exposed to the vastness of space. Like, your car windshield which requires scraping when there’s no frost anywhere else.

The increase in carbon dioxide concentration (CO2) in the atmosphere affects this radiation balance. Put simply, CO2 absorbs some of the radiation that is escaping to space, and re-radiates it in all directions. The fraction that is radiated back to earth is radiation that increases the total amount of radiation earth normally receives. It increases the equilibrium temperature of earth, which is global warming. Since CO2 happens to absorb radiation in a range normal atmospheric components do not absorb, this means that CO2 exerts an outsized influence even though it is a minimal component of the atmosphere. Those who say that a small amount of this gas cannot affect the temperature of the globe are ignorant of basic physics and mathematics.

There is a second aspect of thermodynamics that comes into play with fossil fuels. That is the limitation in the amount of useful work that can be extracted from a high-energy fluid. All large-scale power plants depend upon a heat source (burning fossil fuels, nuclear fission, burning biomaterials) to heat and vaporize water to form steam. It is the steam that turns the turbines and results in the generation of electricity. Well, thermodynamics imposes a limit of about 50% peak efficiency for this type of power plant. You’ll have to trust me on this figure, since understanding and calculating the Carnot system efficiency is a staple of college engineering and science courses. There’s only so much explanation you can put into a blog post.

This says that whenever you have a concentrated source of energy being converted to another type of energy (combustion of fuel to electricity), you only get about 50% of the useful energy as an output. The rest is wasted as heat. Any time you convert one type of energy to another, there are losses involved. So why are folks so convinced that renewable energy sources are so necessary? One reason is that the conversion losses from solar and wind energy are much less than from a standard power plant. In the case of solar electricity, there is also much more potential for locating the power generation at the point of consumption. This reduces transmission losses.

The problems with renewable energy production? It’s variable. In the case of solar, it is guaranteed to not produce at least half of the time due to earth’s rotation. In the case of wind, it is at the mercy of the wind. Therefore, you need to either supplement renewables with a concentrated source of production, or you need efficient means of energy storage. While progress in energy storage is impressive, it is still expensive to use either battery storage or capacitors to bridge the gap between availability of renewable energy and consumption of that energy. The second problem with renewables is that you are depending upon a diffuse source of energy. The sun only shines so hard, and even wind turbines can’t compare to the energy density of a classical fossil fuel source.

The other problem with renewables is that they allow the consumer to bypass the utilities and the fossil fuel companies for some of the energy demand. While the prospect of going off the grid is extolled as an ideal, it is not practical for most people. We still need an energy infrastructure to cover those times when energy is required to supplement locally produced electrons. It is expensive to maintain and improve this grid, and what we’ve seen, especially with Texas, is that the grid can fail catastrophically if it is not maintained. So as much as we might want to be rid of giant monopolies governing our energy supplies, we need to construct a future system where they play a role, or else their looming obsolescence will cause them to resist any needed changes.

In my state of West Virginia, we’ve been in denial about the future of coal ever since I moved here in 1986. Coal was the exclusive source of electricity in this state for decades. Only with the increase in natural gas availability due to fracking did anyone in this state seriously doubt the moral goodness of coal, and of those who mined it. So we have suffered as local communities were shattered by the blasting needed to support mountain top removal. This form of mining only employed a small fraction of the workforce needed for an underground mine, but when it is all you know, you put up with a lot. We now have many acres of once pristine woodland and hillside covered in scrub grasses, devoid of topsoil, and unable to sustain much life. Such places would be ideal for solar farms, and slowly this state seems to be growing aware of this possibility.

West Virginia has suffered population loss for decades, ever since the coal mines first became mechanized. What better way to offer hope to the youth who now succumb to opioids than to provide jobs in solar energy? Education to enable people to learn the basics of electrical installations would raise the general education levels in this state. We must resist the siren song of reversing coal’s decline, and embrace the trend towards renewable energy that is the wave of the future. No matter what the Republicans say.

No Vaccine For Me, Please

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So now we wait for the unintended consequences. Now that the US CDC has removed the requirement for masking in most situations for those who are fully vaccinated (or vacciminatedified as my elder son says), what can we expect to see going forward? First off, those governors including our own in West Virginia will be under extreme pressure to remove any masking mandates. This has already taken place in West Virginia as of May 15. Second, we can expect non-governmental groups like my church bureaucracy to relinquish their limits on in-person services (and perhaps on singing in church as well).

But the primary consequence is that there will be a low level of severe coronavirus continuing to circulate through the population since the virus will still have plenty of unvaccinated people to attack as we go through the months and years to come. If you look at the Venn diagram of those who will not get vaccinated, and those who have resisted masking, you will see a very good overlap. So those who have not been vaccinated will not follow any guidelines from the government. As those of us who have taken the jabs celebrate our freedom from the limitations imposed by the response to the virus, we must be aware that there is no visible sign to mark the vaccinated from those who are not. Since the vaccine was supposed to be the mark of the beast, I figured there would be some visible means to distinguish those who are protected from those who are not. Alas, that is not the case.

We must all be aware that even though we in the US are fortunate enough to see falling case rates, our health system will continue to see a large number of virus patients filling our hospitals. The stressed health professionals will not be able to totally abandon pandemic status, but the reduced levels we will see will likely mean our health care system won’t be overwhelmed.

That is obviously not the case across the globe. One needs only to look at the severe effects of the virus surge in India in order to understand this is a global fight, and no one is really safe until all people have the chance for immunization. Eventually the uncontrolled spread in many countries will result in a viral mutation that will evade the existing immune response from vaccination. So we have a selfish interest in preventing the scenes of suffering we see as images from India are seen on our media.

But I fear it will be nigh unto impossible to disabuse those who insist that this vaccine is evil, and a part of the New World Order mission to depopulate the earth, and we are only waiting until the 5G signal comes that activates the self-destruct mechanism we’ve had injected into ourselves. As has been said, you can’t fix stupid. And what’s worse is that so many folks are willingly adopting these ludicrous beliefs because they’ve been persuaded by the constant drumbeat of the media of the right.

Look, the right loves to bewail the perceived intolerance of the left. Well, this partisan of the left is open, and has gone so far as to read an extensive link about gain of function research conducted at the Wuhan virology lab and sponsored by that paragon of evil, Anthony Fauci. This was a link provided by my younger son, who has been vaccinated but is also deeply suspicious of China.

I will say we do need to find the animal reservoir for this virus, else the description in the link will be more likely to describe the actual origin of the virus. Regardless of the actual source of the virus, it is apparent that the initial tendency of the Chinese government was to minimize the severity of the initial outbreak. That does not justify the ethnic sniggering conducted by US government officials who were only too willing to blame an entire ethnic group for this viral dissemination. It is the words of these government officials which emboldened so many US citizens to attack their brethren for appearing Asian. What those on the right do not want to admit is that their followers take their words literally and view actions they take in support of ill-advised words as justified both legally and morally. Cancel culture from the left can result in the loss of a job, and that loss is sometimes not justified. Cancel culture from the right can result in the loss of a limb, or a life. After all, extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And when one side defines what liberty is, extremism is often the result.

So we will emerge from the pandemic haphazardly. Some countries will see greatly decreased frequency and severity of infections. Others who may have escaped the ravages of the disease to date will find themselves overrun by later surges induced by more infectious variants. Meanwhile, the host country for the Olympics is questioning the worth of holding this event in the midst of an ongoing surge in cases. Given the expenses involved in hosting an Olympic game, it seems that there will be great reluctance for future cities to vie for the right to spend themselves into oblivion. Especially if this year’s games are canceled. Maybe that’s symbolic of how the world, which once was unified by athletic competition, is now unraveling due to the overwhelming trend towards provincialism sweeping over the nations of the earth. Much like the virus has swept over the earth, totally ignorant of the imaginary lines dividing the countries on the ground. Some realities just cannot be ignored.

The Beat Goes On (and On, and On)

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I expected the views of the Earth from the moon would have brought us closer together. The image of a fragile blue-white pebble from space shows just how small this space is we fight over. But instead of unifying us, we seem to have forgotten the lessons we could have learned from seeing Earth as a tiny ball suspended in a cosmic sea. We now insist that our version of humanity is the only one worth celebrating, and indeed, we must reach back into our past to recapture greatness rather than reaching forward towards new opportunities.

How close did we come to losing our cherished form of democracy during the 2020 Presidential election and its aftermath? A lot closer than we thought. Try these “what ifs” out for size. What if the endless stream of ludicrous lawsuits about the election found one of those Trump-appointed judges who were given incompetent ratings by the ABA? One of these judges may have viewed their fealty towards their nominator as greater than their belief in the law, and ruled in favor of the ex-President. What would that have done to the electoral aftermath?  Or, what if the roving mobs had come across one or more of their intended targets, and actually managed to hang Mike Pence, or pillory and puncture Nancy Pelosi? Would we still see Trumpistas referring to the mobs as nothing to be feared if they had taken a human toll in the form of the lives of members of Congress?

Just when you thought we had gone beyond this past presidency, along comes another Republican member of Congress who insists on stirring the festering pot of divisiveness. According to them, it is only those who want this nation to fail who insist that the previous election was fair. I’m wanting to go on to discuss real solutions to problems we have in this nation, only to be stymied by legislative representatives at the state and federal levels who care more for cultural hyperbole than the real work of legislation. But then someone like Ted Cruz comes along and informs the business elites that if they dare to express an opinion about a legislative matter, then they can just forget about having their bribes responded to by members of his party. We may have believed in the corruption of these legislators, but now we have them openly reveling in their moral turpitude in the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal.

If you think about it, this resistance is to be expected. The mantra of the Republican party since the primacy of Reagan has been that government is incompetent, and we’re all better off if we go it alone. Funny how it took over a half million deaths to disabuse many folks from continuing to believe in that mantra. Still, when you see the number of people who refuse to get vaccinated, you realize how deeply the poison of this past administration has seeped. As I’ve said, seldom do we have the chance to see evolution in action at the human level, but the differential survival rates between the vaccinated and those who disdain vaccination may eventually show up in a human preference for science at the genetic level.

But to have the beliefs of 40 years torn asunder by the reality of nature is tough for many to accept. It was tough for all of us when we learned the reality about Santa, and the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. Those myths sustained us in our innocence. Likewise, the myths fed the American people about the sanctity of Republicans as exemplified by Trump were comforting to many, causing them to abandon their ability to apply logic to what they saw in front of them. I had never believed that so many people would ignore their logical brains in favor of accepting what Fox and Newsmax and OAN whispered in their ears, night after night. Combine this with the power of social media, and you had the perfect storm for the 21st Century USA. And thus, we barely escaped this last election with our democratic republic intact.

Reasonable people can disagree with programs and priorities. That what elections are supposed to decide. But it is unacceptable to have discussions about programs usurped by those who refuse to accept reality, and insist on re-litigating the last election time after time. What will it take to make those who still follow their orange champion (#cheetojesus) to give up their folly? Will indictment and conviction on criminal charges disabuse his followers from their cult? Probably not, he will be viewed as a martyr. Will the release of the internal documents that William Barr used to proclaim Trump’s innocence convince millions that the Russia investigation was not a hoax? Probably not, since the phrase Russian Hoax was uttered so often that many will not go beyond the headline. No, it will take some event yet to come, where their champion does something so gross and crass that it breaks through the impenetrable force field protecting him in the eyes of his cult followers. And when that break comes, it won’t be pretty, since no one likes accepting they are the foolish victim of a con. It’s always those who are most invested in the scheme who insist in their belief until the end. Once that end comes, they will turn on him with the same fury that they supported him in the Capitol on January 6.