Coyote Blog

The WSJ has an interesting article about why get rich quick schemes that should be so easy to demolish, particularly with Google at our fingertips, seem to attract so many people.

The article reminded me of a piece I published years ago over at my climate site.  It was about a company called "Hydroinfra" in Sweden.  I want to reprint the article as I still find the subject to be immensely entertaining.  In particular, I really really encourage you to look at the comments section of this article linked towards the bottom and see the back and forth with reader "michael".  In the face of overwhelming skepticism from pretty much every other reader, Michael desperately wants to believe -- so much so that he and a few others start heaping derision and sinister motives (interspersed with spurious appeals to authority) on those who are trying to patiently explain the science.  One can see this same desperate behavior from those who have bought into every famous pyramid scheme ever.

I got an email today from some random Gmail account asking me to write about HyrdoInfra.  OK.  The email begins: “HydroInfra Technologies (HIT) is a Stockholm based clean tech company that has developed an innovative approach to neutralizing carbon fuel emissions from power plants and other polluting industries that burn fossil fuels.”

Does it eliminate CO2?  NOx?  Particulates?  SOx?  I actually was at the bottom of my inbox for once so I went to the site.  I went to this applications page.  Apparently, it eliminates the “toxic cocktail” of pollutants that include all the ones I mentioned plus mercury and heavy metals.  Wow!  That is some stuff.

Their key product is a process for making something they call “HyrdroAtomic Nano Gas” or HNG.  It sounds like their PR guys got Michael Crichton and JJ Abrams drunk in a brainstorming session for pseudo-scientific names.

But hold on, this is the best part.  :

Splitting water (H20) is a known science. But the energy costs to perform splitting outweigh the energy created from hydrogen when the Hydrogen is split from the water molecule H2O.

This is where mainstream science usually closes the book on the subject.

We took a different approach by postulating that we could split water in an energy efficient way to extract a high yield of Hydrogen at very low cost.

A specific low energy pulse is put into water. The water molecules line up in a certain structure and are split from the Hydrogen molecules.

The result is HNG.

HNG is packed with ‘Exotic Hydrogen’

Exotic Hydrogen is a recent scientific discovery.

HNG carries an abundance of Exotic Hydrogen and Oxygen.

On a Molecular level, HNG is a specific ratio mix of Hydrogen and Oxygen.

The unique qualities of HNG show that the placement of its’ charged electrons turns HNG into an abundant source of exotic Hydrogen.

HNG displays some very different properties from normal hydrogen.

Some basic facts:

• HNG instantly neutralizes carbon fuel pollution emissions
• HNG can be pressurized up to 2 bars.
• HNG combusts at a rate of 9000 meters per second while normal Hydrogen combusts at a rate 600 meters per second.
• Oxygen values actually increase when HNG is inserted into a diesel flame.
• HNG acts like a vortex on fossil fuel emissions causing the flame to be pulled into the center thus concentrating the heat and combustion properties.
• HNG is stored in canisters, arrayed around the emission outlet channels. HNG is injected into the outlets to safely & effectively clean up the burning of fossil fuels.
• The pollution emissions are neutralized instantly & safely with no residual toxic cocktail or chemicals to manage after the HNG burning process is initiated.

Exotic Hyrdrogen!  I love it.  This is probably a component of the “red matter” in the Abrams Star Trek reboot.  Honestly, someone please tell me this a joke, a honeypot for mindless environmental activist drones.    What are the chemical reactions going on here?  If CO2 is captured, what form does it take?  How does a mixture of Hydrogen and Oxygen molecules in whatever state they are in do anything with heavy metals?  None of this is on the website.   On their “validation” page, they have big labels like “Horiba” that look like organizations thave somehow put their imprimatur on the study.  In fact, they are just names of analytical equipment makers.  It’s like putting “IBM” in big print on your climate study because you ran your model on an IBM computer.

SCAM!  Honestly, when you see an article written to attract investment that sounds sort of impressive to laymen but makes absolutely no sense to anyone who knows the smallest about of Chemistry or Physics, it is an investment scam.

But they seem to get a lot of positive press.  In my search of Google, everything in the first ten pages or so are just uncritical republication of their press releases in environmental and business blogs.   You actually have to go into the comments sections of these articles to find anyone willing to observe this is all total BS.   If you want to totally understand why the global warming debate gets nowhere, watch commenter Michael at this link desperately try to hold onto his faith in HydroInfra while people who actually know things try to explain why this makes no sense.

Years later, doing a Google search, I still seem to be the only person in the first 10 pages of Google results that wrote a skeptical article.  Seriously, I figured out this was all bullsh*t from about 60 seconds of studying their web site -- is this really what happens in tech journalism?  I got the same press release in my box that they did.  I (and many of the tech site commenters) figured this out quickly, why didn't any actual journalists?

I have always enjoyed Michael Crichton's books, but sometimes turn up my nose at his science.  I must say though that the chain of seemingly stupid errors that led to the park crashing in Jurassic Park bear an amazing resemblance to what is going on with the Japanese nuclear plans.  I don't buy his application of chaos theory to the chain of events, but its hard not to see parallels to this:

Engineers had begun using fire hoses to pump seawater into the reactor — the third reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 complex to receive the last-ditch treatment — after the plant's emergency cooling system failed. Company officials said workers were not paying sufficient attention to the process, however, and let the pump run out of fuel, allowing the fuel rods to become partially exposed to the air.

Once the pump was restarted and water flow was restored, another worker inadvertently closed a valve that was designed to vent steam from the containment vessel. As pressure built up inside the vessel, the pumps could no longer force water into it and the fuel rods were once more exposed.

The other line I am reminded of comes from the docu-drama "From the Earth to the Moon."  In the episode after the fire on Apollo 1, they have Frank Borman testifying to a hostile Congressional committee about the fire.  When asked to explain the root cause, he said "a failure of imagination."  I don't know if this is a true quote of his or purely fiction, but it resonates with me from my past troubleshooting work.  Almost every fire or major failure we looked at in the refinery resulted from a chain of events that no one had even anticipated or thought possible, generally in combination with a series of stupid human screwups.  I would describe the Japanese nuclear plant problems in the same light.

Update: Failure of Imagination from Wikipedia

From IMDB, how the line was quoted in the mini-series

Clinton Anderson: [at the senate inquiry following the Apollo 1 fire] Colonel, what caused the fire? I'm not talking about wires and oxygen. It seems that some people think that NASA pressured North American to meet unrealistic and arbitrary deadlines and that in turn North American allowed safety to be compromised.
Frank Borman: I won't deny there's been pressure to meet deadlines, but safety has never been intentionally compromised.
Clinton Anderson: Then what caused the fire?
Frank Borman: A failure of imagination. We've always known there was the possibility of fire in a spacecraft. But the fear was that it would happen in space, when you're 180 miles from terra firma and the nearest fire station. That was the worry. No one ever imagined it could happen on the ground. If anyone had thought of it, the test would've been classified as hazardous. But it wasn't. We just didn't think of it. Now who's fault is that? Well, it's North American's fault. It's NASA's fault. It's the fault of every person who ever worked on Apollo. It's my fault. I didn't think the test was hazardous. No one did. I wish to God we had.

I worry that global warming advocacy has crossed the line from science to religion, such that data counter to the basic mantra is considered heresy rather than scientific discourse. 

In my review of Michael Crichton's new book, I said I was sympathetic to his global warming skepticism but that I thought his characters and plot were over the top and he was too heavy handed with the polemic, which hurts any action novel.  Maybe I was wrong:

We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

- National Center for Atmospheric Research (NOAA) researcher and global warming action promoter, Steven Schneider

More here from Arizona Watch.  I do disagree a bit with using the Nature Conservancy as a proxy for all environmental groups.  Though they advocate things I don't agree with, the vast majority of their funds go to actual preservation rather than political advocacy (unlike Sierra Club or others).  They are actually one of the better examples of trying to use private voluntary action rather than the government to reach some environmental goals.

I have written more on Kyoto here.  A good recent article in TCS by George Taylor talking about the panic around arctic temperatures is here.

My post here and here remind me that I should review the book I just finished --Michael Crichton's State of Fear.  In this book, a group of environmental activists are trying to help mother nature along by creating some natural disasters to draw media attention for the global warming crusade.

I really wanted to like this book.  For once, the villain was not some greedy dastardly businessman trying to increase profits of his corporation at the expense of people's lives.  I have always felt that novels with a political ax to grind were tedious, particularly when they got to the preachy parts.  Clive Cussler, for example, has gotten bad about this in his later books like Shock Wave.  In this book, like in most, the crime is usually so over the top that it is just illogical that anyone would go about business that way - the same time and money spent on less villainous activities would yield far more profit.  It's like those James Bond movie villains who create a $100 million laser satellite and underground control facility only to extort $10 million.

I had thought that the reason I did not like these books was that I disagreed with most of political polemic in them.   However, "State of Fear" has taught be a valuable lesson - I hated the polemic in this novel too, even when I agreed with it.  Crichton makes the same mistake I have railed on Cussler and others for - the cost and elaborate planning that go into most of the planned terrorist attacks make no sense in proportion to benefits.  While I might agree that too many people are mindlessly marching to the global warming drummer without any real thought or consideration of the facts, I thinking blowing some of these folks up into out of control monsters does not help make that point - it just makes you look like you have an ax to grind.  Its also unfair to give the global warming point of view such a poor advocate, the sum total of whose analytical arsenal consists of saying "well, everyone believes it".

<rant>  By the way, a quick word to all you statists, socialists, liberals, and environmental freaks who seem so worked up all over the web about the above admittedly poor literary techniques:  Get over it!  First, global warming is seldom represented by its advocates as the messy, unclear, chaotic, hard to predict thing it really is.  You advocates of global warming have constantly exagerated your case, so get over it when someone does it in the other direction.  Second, I have probably read over a hundred novels where the advocates of capitalism, markets, business, and individual responsibility are just as incompetant as the advocates for global warming are in this book.  Let me see you complain about a book with polemic that you agree with, as I have done, and then I will listen to you. </rant>

So I rank the book as OK, with some pretty good scenes and plot marred by some tedious expositions and diatribes (and remember, this is coming from someone who agrees with the diatribes!)  Tom Clancy does a much better job of evenhandedly dealing with eco-terrorists in Rainbow Six, probably his last good novel. 

By the way, if I wanted to novelize a rant against global warming's bad science, I would choose about anyone except for Crichton, whose middle name is "bad science".  I enjoy his novels, but did you ever ask yourself why all the doctors had to go through all that decontamination in Andromeda Strain, when they were never going to come in contact with the objects under study anyway?  Or, in Timeline, if they are really traveling to parallel but out of sync alternate universes, then how do changes they make in the other universes (such as the dropped glasses) propagate to our universe?  And don't get me started on the science of Prey or the use of chaos theory in Jurrasic Park.

UPDATE

Well, the emails are already coming in.  Since this is getting a lot of hits already off search engines by people who do not normally read this site, and to save writing a number of individual responses, I will give the elevator version of where I am on global warming:

• The world has probably warmed over the last several decades due to man-made CO2 production, but less than is generally reported because
  • Global warming advocates, out of several available data sets, always pick the one that shows the most warming, while other data sets show less.  The data set they choose (ground temperatures) is not without issues.
  • Advocates tend to ignore other influences that might be raising temperatures in addition to man-made CO2, including natural climatic cycles, increased solar activity, and urban heat island effects.  These effects were apparently substantial in the first half of the century.  To argue that they are not part of the story in the second half of the century, you have to argue that they stopped at the same time that CO2 began having an effect.
• The world will warm further due to man-made CO2, but the models for future warming are almost certainly overstated, for at least two reasons:
  • While I can't judge the science, I sure as heck can evaluate an economic model and the models for the amount of CO2 produced in the next century are basically economic models.  And they are hugely flawed.  The models have made assumptions that grossly overstate CO2 production in the future.  As just one example, the models assume that many of the least energy efficient nations have huge growth booms over the next 50 years, so that their economies grow larger than that of the US (for example, South Africa is shown to have a larger economy in the future than the US).  These models also assume that these countries do not get much more efficient, so you end up with models showing enormous, absurdly energy efficient economies in the future -- which of course grossly overstates CO2 production
  • As I said, I don't have the science to dispute the models in depth, but one has to be concerned when the models do not match history, and in fact predict historically a much higher temperature rise than we have seen to date.  Advocates will argue that this is fixed, but it was fixed with fudge factors, not science.  People have tried doing this with financial models as well, fudging theoretical models that aren't working to match history, and have gone broke doing so.
• When and where warming occurs does matter.  Crichton was dead wrong about this - things do not warm evenly.  Models show most warming is in the coldest areas in winter at night.  Since having warming night-time winter temperatures in Siberia does not really panic anyone, this does not get much coverage.
• The Kyoto treaty is hugely flawed, leaves out the countries causing the most CO2 production increases, is ridiculously anti-American, will cost economies a ton, and will have little affect on future warming, even by advocate's models.
• I worry that the science being done on global warming is not as good as it could be, as the field has become so politicized.  Any scientist who dares to even introduce data that might soften the global warming catastrophe message is marginalized.
• Those who report on global warming, including the media and the administration of large projects like the UN climate change project distort scientific findings, substituting complexity and questions with certainty

This is just a summary, without dueling citations.  I covered the same points, but marshaling evidence and citations here.

MORE REVIEWS

More blog reviews, both positive and nevative, linked here.  Other folks who are skeptical about global warming seem to have liked the book a lot.  I still think that this is more of a reaction to finally having a novel that is skeptical of progressive causes rather than a reaction to a quality adventure book.  I continue to maintain that it is better for action books to just stick to the action.  I will be very upset if this starts an arms race among writers to get more and more heavy handed with their politics in their novels.