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Showing posts from May, 2020

Open letter to Michael Moore & Jeff Gibbs

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Mayan Coba pyramid Michael,  I share the direction of the theme of Jeff Gibb's and your recent film Planet of the Humans.  I think many criticisms of the film are because you touched some raw nerves - and rightly so, IMHO. There are others that are valid. I do wish you had not put so much emphasis on the lack of efficiency of a certain type of solar panel - it created an open goal for your critics.  It does not matter whether a panel is 8% efficient or 24% efficient. What matters is whether over the panel's lifetime, how many times it can pay back any carbon emissions generated in making the panel. The ultimate efficiency limit of photovoltaics is set by some physics first discovered by Albert Einstein.  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435117301782 They are unlikely to exceed about half the theoretical limit - 57% conversion efficiency - but, unlike fossil-fuelled generators, this does not matter.  What matters, according to this guy , and...

We thought COVID-19 was a threat?

Thankyou Michael Moore, a man who has campaigned and committed his own personal resources to fighting greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants all his life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE Oh, and the late Professor David Mackay, former adviser to the UK Department of Energy, and professor of Physics at Cambridge University. https://www.withouthotair.com/c32/page_250.shtml (This book's free online and does not explicitly come out against current wind and solar. It does urge thorough, open, verifiable examination of the arithmetic.“Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to be pro-nuclear. I’m just pro-arithmetic.” ) FWIW, the best coursework mark I got at University was for an essay written for my Nuclear professor. I used his own charts and figures - gained from a 40-year career in the nuclear industry - to argue, around the time of Chernobyl, that we should never build another nuclear power reactor. That was in the middle of the 1980s. Climate change was somet...