December 31, 2022

A visit the temple of liberalism, the FDR/ER National Historic Sites, Museum & Library.

Recently I reported in this space that I was going to do something I had wanted to do for a very long time:

Off my bucket list this Christmas Break: A day at the FDR Museum, Library, and National Historic...

Well, I went yesterday. I expected to be moved; I expected to learn something I didn't know; but I did not expect I would be so moved, and learn so much about Franklin and Eleanor.

We did the tour of Springwood, FDR's boyhood and adult home, first. The ranger guide could not have been more excellent. He had lived in China, he told us at the outset, and actually was teaching Chinese and Chinese history in an academic setting. He revealed, as we stood outside the house, the Roosevelt families close connections with China beginning with a business relationship in silks and other products (including at one point, opium, although it was legal then - the guide claimed that the importation helped wounded American soldiers in the Civil War).

I didn't know any of this. I was able to answer a question that he said no one had ever answered correctly in any of his previous tours. The question was, "Does anyone know who Soong Mei-ling was?" I responded, "Madam Chiang Kai-shek," and he graciously acknowledged that the streak was over. (I did not know her Chinese name, but assumed this answer based on context.) He went on to detail her relationship with the American Government, and how Roosevelt made sure she was prominently promoted in order to encourage American sympathy (before Pearl Harbor) for China with respect to the war against the Japanese. He then offered that Roosevelt's support of China, and his insistence on treating it as a major power, which both Stalin (with eyes on Manchuria) and Churchill (holder of the Hong Kong "lease" ) opposed, but Roosevelt won out and China is representing the UN as a "great power" largely from his efforts.

Roosevelt also invited the King and Queen of England, again, before Pearl Harbor, to Springwood. He had a collection of Revolutionary War cartoons displayed on the wall of the foyer, and his mother told him to take them down as they made fun of the British; Roosevelt promised he would do so, but didn't, but the King (George VI) and Queen were suitably amused, and also learned what a hot dog was and how to eat it.

The rest of the tour was equally moving, standing before the room where Roosevelt was born, and of course, Eleanor's room.

After the wonderful and moving tour of Springwood, we headed back to the museum and library. The Ranger who greeted us was very warm and welcoming, and he told us with a big smile, that if we thought we'd be there for an hour, we wouldn't do so, we'd be there for at least three hours. He was right on; we weren't done, but we wanted to be sure to make time to go to Eleanor's Valkill.

The museum was featuring a display on the 1944 campaign, Roosevelt's last. There was a huge focus on the decision to run again while his health deteriorated. Displays included his (disturbing) medical records, and portions private diaries of people who knew how bad his health was, including his daughter Anna. I came away with the impression that he thought he could make it through to the end of the war, but planned to resign after and retire. I was hoping for more insight to the brilliant choice of Harry Truman for VP, but it remained inscrutable, apparently a compromise between the liberal wing of the party, who wanted Henry Wallace but could not endorse James Byrne because of his segregationist views, and the conservatives, who wanted nothing to do with Henry Wallace. Truman seems to have been a compromise, but one made between people who were aware of who Truman was. Regrettably, Roosevelt did not communicate all that much with Truman.

There was a moving display that recorded Eleanor's remarks to Truman on assuming the office. When Truman asked if there was anything he could do for her, she replied, “Is there anything we can do for you? You are the one in trouble now.”

She did her share, serving with great distinction as the first US ambassador to the United Nations, pushing through the oft (regrettably) ignored "Declaration of Human Rights" in 1948.

Valkill was the most moving, as I expected it to be. I did not know that it was planned and built as a factory to help train and employ future skilled crafts people, and was only converted to a home. The modesty of the home was exactly what I expected of the greatest Democrat of the 20th century (in my opinion). The guest list he went over was most impressive, including Nehru, Prime Minister of India, as well as many other luminaries of the 20th century, including Winston Churchill, Danny Kaye, Katherine Hepburn, Harry Belafonte...and of course...as a correspondent in my previous post noted, John F. Kennedy, who came begging her support.

I know I've seen the correspondence between Eleanor and JFK, which bordered on hostility, but I did not remember that she responded to his supplications by addressing her return letters as "My dear boy..." The guide told the story of how, after nominating Adlai Stevenson at the 1960 Democratic Convention, believing "the third time is a charm," and expecting Lyndon Johnson to prevail because "he knew everyone" she accepted Kennedy as the nominee. We were standing in the living small living room, and the guide pointed out the small table at which Eleanor and Kennedy sat for two hours, behind closed doors, where she lectured him on Civil Rights and other issues for which he had little or no passion (but she did), and related how the photographs of him leaving Valkill showed him looking like a schoolboy after being lectured by the Principal on his behavior.

The guide and I swapped Joe Kennedy stories; I related the story of Eleanor being asked by Franklin to throw Joe Kennedy out - to disinvite him from a weekend stay at Springwood, and the guide told a story about how the bad blood between them may have been related to Franklin, when he was under Secretary of the Navy in 1915, having tricked Joe Kennedy, an investor in Bethlehem Steel, into delivering destroyers to Argentina, something Kennedy didn't want to do before being paid.

One thing I didn't know was that Valkill was almost demolished. Franklin and Eleanor's son, John Roosevelt, who inherited, sold off the home's contents and rented the home to tenants, and upon retirement, sold the place to a Long Island dentist, who in turn, sold it to developers who planned to tear the place down until the local Hyde Park Community responded with outrage, whereupon the US Government, during the Carter administration, acquired the property as a historical park. The National Park Service has been working to recover the original furnishings that John Roosevelt sold; they claim to have recovered about 80% of them, including the table at which JFK sat while Eleanor lectured him.

I would say the museum, by the way, showed incredible respect to Eleanor as an equal partner in the greatest Presidency of the 20th century. I knew many of the details of her life, but the feel of her presence was incomparable to me. I did not know that she had a brother who, like her father, drank himself to death, and who also had some episodes of destructive violence at Springwood that helped to break up a friendship between Eleanor and two of her best friends. Marion Dickerman, and Nancy Cook, who motivated the construction of Valkill. (Valkill is not a quaint cottage; it looks like the factory it was designed to be.)

(I did disagree with the Valkill guide's description of her as ever having fully embraced the role of the dutiful wife of a politician. I believe that was never the case with such a magnificent soul, although I am aware of how much she doubted herself in the early years of her marriage. My feel is that she was always a force, albeit one not always cognizant of her own power, after having been educated by Marie Souvestre at the Allenwood academy.)

What the full museum showed was how very bad, how disastrous, the continuing wet dream of the Republican Party, laissez-faire capitalism was, and how Roosevelt, possessed of enormous optimism, set the country on the course of recovery from the Great Depression, and how we all still live in the glow of his legacy.

My wife and I plan to go back. We're not done. If you are in the New York area, and if you believe that the role of Government should be to better the lives of all the citizens of a nation, you should go there. You will be moved.

December 31, 2022

Happy New Year. 2022 in Carbon Dioxide Concentrations at the Mauna Loa/Kea Observatory.

As I noted earlier, the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory, possessing the longest record of controlled direct analytical readings of carbon dioxide concentrations in the planetary atmosphere (since 1959), closed owing to the eruption of the Mauna Loa volcano, but the measurements resumed at the University of Hawaii Mauna Kea, nearby.

The "Mauna Loa" CO2 observatory about to become the Maunakea observatory.

I have monitored the data from this observatory for many years, entering the weekly, monthly, and annual data from the Observatory's data page into spreadsheets for many years, so that I can utilized them to do calculations.

The data posted this week will be the last of the year. It is as follows:

I should note that 2022 was a relatively mild year - at least in terms of the 21st century, it would be considered disastrous in the 20th century - the average of all weekly readings in comparison to the same week of 2021 was 2.12 ppm higher than the previous year.

The average weekly year to year comparator changes for the 21st century is 2.17 ppm. In the 20th century (from 1959 to 2000) it was 1.54 ppm.

The worst year ever recorded for these types of weekly readings was 2016, when the average was 3.40 ppm.

There's a lot of bullshit flying around about an "energy transition" away from fossil fuels, basically based on the quasi-religious belief that lip service to so called "renewable energy" is effective and workable. There is no data whatsoever to suggest that this is true.

Things are getting worse, faster: Using the data in my spreadsheet, I keep a 12 month running average of comparisons between readings at Mauna Loa compared to the same week ten years previous. As of this week, that reading of averages of comparators between 2012 and 2022 is 24.51 ppm/10 years. In 2017, five years ago this week, it was 22.70 ppm/10 years. Ten years ago, it was 20.60 ppm/10 years. In 2002, 20 years ago, it was 16.86 ppm/10 years.

There is no "energy transition" and the reason that there isn't one is that the overwhelming of the money invested in a putative "solution" - one that doesn't work - has been on solar and wind energy. We are now half a century into hearing this anti-nuke fantasy; it's been as effective as saying the "Hail Mary" to cure cancer in a loved one.

Prayer may make you feel better, but it doesn't work.

2002 is around the time that the Chancellor, Gerhardt Schroeder, of a major industrial nation, Germany, announced a "nuclear phase out." After leaving the Chancellery, Schroeder went to work for Vladimir Putin's company, Gazprom, where he helped Putin fund the war now taking place in Ukraine. More people in Ukraine have been killed by German money used to finance Putin than were killed by Chernobyl, vastly more people. Germany is now relying on coal to run its power plants. As I noted here recently, Germany in its switch to nuclear to coal can be estimated to have killed about 5,300 people this year whose lives would have been saved had Germany not shut its nuclear plants:

12 Month German Carbon Intensity, 501 g CO2/kWh; An Estimate of the Associated Death Toll.

It's time for all of us to wake up, and be realistic. It's time to "go nuclear" against climate change. It is, I'm afraid, our last best hope.

Happy New Year.

December 31, 2022

Zero Winners of the ACS Early Career Morgan Award for Environmental Scientists are Americans.

The American Chemical Society, which publishes the internationally respected journal Environmental Science and Technology, which I read regularly, has announced the winners of the James J. Morgan Award Early Career Award 2023 for scientists working in the Environmental field.

The Announcement can be found here: Winners of the James J. Morgan Award Early Career Award 2023, Julie Beth Zimmerman, Bryan Brooks, and Margaret Mills, Environmental Science & Technology 2022 56 (23), 16541-16543.

The winners are:

Dr. Xiaoguang Duan

School of Chemical Engineering and Advanced Materials, University of Adelaide, Australia

“Probleme kann man niemals mit derselben Denkweise lösen, durch die sie entstanden sind” or “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them” is often attributed to Albert Einstein. Given the significant and urgent environmental problems we are facing around the world, it is ever clearer that we need new ideas, new perspectives, new tools, new metrics, and new innovations to create solutions for a more sustainable future. While the challenges we face are daunting and dire, our community can be hopeful on the basis of the creativity and urgency that the next generation of environmental scientists and engineers is bringing to bare in designing, developing, and implementing novel solutions and forging new pathways through interdisciplinary collaborations. While there are so many early career researchers of whom to be proud in their commitment to addressing society’s great environmental challenges, today we have the opportunity to recognize those in the Asia Pacific region who have demonstrated their ability to think differently, having already made important contributions to tomorrow’s solutions to today’s problems. Please join us in warmly congratulating the winners of the 2023 James J. Morgan Environmental Science & Technology Early Career Award. The winners and honorable mentions for this year’s award are as follows.

Winners

Dr. Xiaoguang Duan

School of Chemical Engineering and Advanced Materials, University of Adelaide, Australia


Dr. Zimeng Wang

Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Fudan University, China


Professor Jiang Xu

College of Environmental and Resource Sciences, Zhejiang University, China

Professor Tong Zhang

Environmental Science and Engineering, Nankai University, China

Of the seven honorable mentions, five have Chinese names, one is Korean, and one is Indian. One of the scientists with a Chinese name works in Australia.

The success of scientists is related to the priorities of funding agencies in these times, and the value placed on scientific research and education.

Just saying...

December 29, 2022

12 Month German Carbon Intensity, 501 g CO2/kWh; An Estimate of the Associated Death Toll.

I was inspired to write this post based on an article in the ANS News, which answered the question for which I never actually took the time to answer, this question: "What was German nuclear capacity before its government decided to kill people by switching to coal?"

The article is here: Germany’s winter to wonder “What if . . . ?”

Before going into the data provided by the article, and excerpting it, and conducting "back of the envelope" calculations of the death toll associated with this decision, I'll post a bit I keep handy for discussions of this type that I have posted before in other contexts:

Anil Markandya, Paul Wilkinson, Electricity generation and health, The Lancet, Volume 370, Issue 9591, 2007, Pages 979-990.

Here's table 2:

This publication comes from 2007, five years before the much discussed natural disaster that killed oodles of people, nearly 20,000 humans, with seawater building collapses, but is only of interest to the public because 3 nuclear reactors failed at Fukushima. (Nobody gives a rat's ass about seawater deaths, although from a climate perspective we're all working as hard as is possible to make sure that the seawater death toll rises.)

One might think that the 2007 data would be invalidated by radiation deaths from Fukushima, at least if one is a badly educated antinuke - there are no other kinds of antinukes - but one would be wrong.

As of 2022, radiation deaths among the most exposed people, plant workers, have yet to materialize: Comparison of mortality patterns after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant radiation disaster and during the COVID-19 pandemic, Motohiro Tsuboi et al 2022 J. Radiol. Prot. 42 031502

The article is open sourced, anyone can read it, but here's an excerpt pertinent to the point:

I added the bold. There may have been some radiological deaths, but they if there were, they were not so prevalent as to vary from statistical noise, in other words, they are vanishingly small. Thus I will rely on the 2007 Lancet publication for calculations, suspecting as I do that the power generation associated with powerplants used to power computers for people to obsess all over the internet over Fukushima actually killed more people than radiation in the event did. In my experience, few things generate more stupidity with respect to this climate disaster than the word "Fukushima."

Now let me excerpt the ANS "Nuclear News" article indicating how much nuclear capacity was mindlessly destroyed in service to German fear and ignorance.



Here is a graphic from the article showing when and why German reactors of Western design were shut:



The following graphic comes from the Electricity Map for Germany, set to 12 month history, running from October 2021 to October 2022.



It shows that Germany's average continuous power from coal in this period was 21.2 GW, which translates as there are 24*365.25 = 8766 hours in a year to 185,839 GWh, or, carrying one insignificant figure, 185.8 TWh. Now we are almost ready to calculate the death toll associated with the German decision to switch from nuclear to coal based on fear and ignorance. But first we have to decide whether the Germans are burning lignite or hard coal.

German domestic coal is largely lignite, the most dangerous type of coal to burn, but in their decision, in effect, to fund Putin's war on Ukraine by buying dangerous natural gas and dangerous coal, they tended to buy hard coal from Russia. Presumably they have found other sources of coal to burn to kill people, but for the purposes of this back of the envelope calculation, I'll use the average death toll per TWh of lignite (32.6 deaths per TWh) and hard coal (24.5 deaths per TWh) which works out to 28.6 deaths per TWh.

This means that Germany's coal burning, estimated at 50% lignite, led to around 5,305 deaths this year.

If Germany had not chosen, as a result of fear and ignorance to shut its nuclear plants, which tend to operate at close to 100% capacity utilization, but let's assume 90% capacity utilization, it would have supplied 20.6 GW of average continuous power, translating to 181.3 TWh, again carrying one insignificant figure.

Using the Lancet figures, this would have resulted in less than 10 deaths.

To two significant figures, this means the German decision to shut its nuclear plants killed around 5300 people this year.

These figures do not include the deaths associated with climate change that Germany is working hard to make worse.

For comparison, French carbon intensity for the same period was 111 g CO2/kWh. This was despite the disastrous French decision to not maintain its once magnificent nuclear infrastructure so it could fund the dangerous and deadly "renewable energy is 'green'" fad, an internationally held nonsensical belief. Even so, using its operable nuclear infrastructure, in "percent talk" France's carbon intensity was 22% as bad as Germany's or put another way, again in "percent talk" 451% better than France.

The implications should be clear, even to someone as badly educated as, say, Bill McKibben, but somehow they aren't.

Have a happy New Year.

December 29, 2022

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm Vacates the 1954 AEC Decision in the Matter of Oppenheimer.

I was directed to this by Science's "News at a Glance"

The 1954 decision to strip Robert Oppenheimer of his security clearance, effectively treating him as if he were a Soviet sympathizer, after he had successfully overseen the Manhattan Project was the handiwork of Lewis Strauss, a right wing cold warrior with no scientific training. (Anti-nukes love to quote his idiotic "Too Cheap to Meter" remark about fusion energy; anti-nukes are unashamed of embracing idiots. It's their modus operandi.)

It was a grotesque injustice to a great scientist, who contributed, among other things, the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, and some of the earliest insights to black holes. Oppenheimer died in 1967, shortly after President Lyndon Johnson invited him to the White House to try to make amends for his country's ingratitude.

Secretary Granholm has formally vacated the 1954 decision:

Secretary Granholm Statement on DOE Order Vacating 1954 Atomic Energy Commission Decision In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer

The Full Decision: VACATING 1954 ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION DECISION: IN THE MATTER OF J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER

It's long overdue, if not for Oppenheimer's sake, for the sake of history.

December 27, 2022

Sigh...getting a new car tomorrow...

The thing finally came in.

Every time I buy a car, I feel those lines in Allen Ginsberg's Howl:

Howl

December 26, 2022

As Long As You Know You're Living Yours

December 26, 2022

Off my bucket list this Christmas Break: A day at the FDR Museum, Library, and National Historic...

...site.

My magnificent wife has organized the whole thing. We're heading up the night before, staying in a hotel after a nice local dinner and show, getting tickets for the tours the moment the site opens.

The museum is featuring an exhibition on the 1944 Presidential campaign, where Franklin Roosevelt decided to try to see the war through, even though everyone, including himself, understood he was dying. Choosing Harry Truman for VP proved to be a stroke of genius, and I have always wondered how Roosevelt came to that decision. The exhibit closes New Year's Eve.

Of special importance to me will be to visit Valkill, where Eleanor Roosevelt lived. To me, she, as opposed her husband, was the greatest Democrat of the 20th century. My entire view of politics is completely defined by her, how she translated her own very exigent struggles into compassion for all humanity.

I have been obsessed with the idea of doing this for about 20 years, but never managed to put together the time.

December 24, 2022

TerraPower Nuclear Reactor in Wyoming to Be Delayed for Lack of Russian Fuel.

I'm not necessarily crazy about this design, especially after my son, after his first semester of his nuclear engineering Ph.D. enlightened me to certain material issues. It's not that the materials are bad; it's just that they relied on materials developed in the 1970's while far superior materials exist.

This said, the worst nuclear plant is better than the best dangerous fossil fuel plant, or for that matter, the best so called "renewable energy" plant.

One of the technical flaws of the TerraPower design to my mind is that it is designed to integrate with wind energy, that is to address wind energy's awful lack of reliability. We don't need wind energy; it's expensive, environmentally destructive, unreliable, and far too mass and land intensive to even come close to sustainability. The only reason to have it is popular opinion, opinions fed by an illiterate mass media.

Another problem is that the reactor is sodium cooled, albeit with a hybrid molten salt design designed to store thermal energy.

Here's the story with respect to the fuel; the Biden administration is working to correct the problem by bringing fuel manufacturing facilities to the US, but for the time being, the fuels around which the TerraPower reactor has been designed are sourced industrially from Russia, where the manufacturing infrastructure exists.

The article:

TerraPower announces delay due to lack of fuel availability.

We have destroyed nuclear manufacturing infrastructure in this county at the behest of "solar and wind will save us" types. The failure of this mythology to address climate change leaves humanity in a hard place.

There are a lot of better reactors than the TerraPower reactors under development, but they will all need infrastructure.

December 24, 2022

While it certainly didn't happen with Lindsay Graham, but a video on growing a human spine from...

...artificial embryos. From my Nature Briefing news feed.

Artificial embryos: the hidden steps in forming a spine

Subtitle:

It's a shame that Lindsay can't pull his head out of Donald Trump's ass to watch the video. He might learn something.