For my 30,000th post, I'd like to thank DU for inspiring me to expand my knowledge, and of course...

[NNadir]

...for giving me the right to assert my disagreement on a key element of our party's dogma.

For my 30,000th post, I'd like to talk, using the style of my posts and recalling some of them, about how and why I write my posts, the serious ones at least, and - as I am a member of the pernicious baby boomer generation to whom such things matter above all else - what's in it for me.

I have chosen DU's magnificent Science forum for my 30,000th post because, after being a husband and a father, the most important love in my life is my love of science. The majority of my original posts at DU have been about science.

First off, as is my style, a diversion about a 30,000th post, which this post is:

There is nothing particularly remarkable about that number, 30,000 in my view. It's an artifact of the evolution of human beings with ten fingers.

Other number systems might have proved more useful than base 10, ten having only two factors, 2 and 5. If one wrote "30,000" in the duodecimal system (base 12), which would be more utilitarian than base 10 because it has more factors (1,2,3,4, and 6), "30,000" would convert to 62,208 in base 10.

The advantages of the duodecimal system and derivative enumeration schemes based on it, are related to the reason why we have 360 degrees in a circle, for example, rather than 100, because we can express ?/6 radians, ?/3 radians as well as ?/2 and ?/4 radians as whole numbers. It is why we have a word for "dozen" so we can divide a dozen donuts between either 2, 3, 4 or 6 people if we don't eat all of them ourselves. (As for a "baker's dozen," let's not go there.) We can have a third of a foot (4 inches), a quarter of a foot (3 inches), half a foot six inches. These ratios are more problematic in base 10.

Trapped as I am intellectually in base 10, we'll have to live with a repeating decimal for a third of a meter in the metric system in which I live for most purposes.

In any case, I would have never gotten to "30,000" in base 12.

Anyway. Here I am, 30,000, base 10, quite sure I'll never live to have reached 40,000, base 10, posts on DU.

Recently in one of my OP's I remarked on why I have been a Democrat since I was 18 years old (much to the chagrin of my father).

To wit:

The reason I am a Democrat is basically connected with my view of human rights, in particular the rights of women, my abhorrence of racism, my concern for the impoverished (a far less fashionable focus in our party than it used to be), but most importantly my view that we owe future generations a sustainable world, a task at which my now dying generation has failed miserably and for which history will not forgive us.

I added the bold here that was not in the original which is here: Governor Gretchen Whitmer Announces Plan to Reopen the 50 Year Old Closed Palisades Nuclear Plant.

There are many things that are important to us in the Democratic Party, most recently, doing something about arresting and imprisoning the racist, abysmally stupid, incredibly uneducated orange traitorous thug who somehow left an indelible stain in the Oval office and on our nation's history as well.

Nevertheless, the fact is that in the long run, Donald Trump will be as meaningful as the "last" Western Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustus, who actually was a ten year old child rather than a 75 year old petulant son of a bitch who simply acts like a ten year old child, an overly narcissistic one at that. Nearly 1600 years later, no one gives a shit about Romulus Augustus sometimes mocked in his own time as "Augustulus" (little Augustus).

Of the things Rome left behind that does matter, one is that is somewhat obscure, but which nonetheless matters to some people in which I include myself, for instance people interested in the health of birds, is an environmental consequence of Roman "civilization."

To wit:

Significant lead production commenced c. 5,000 years ago with the discovery of smelting techniques for lead sulphide ores (galena). Its geological co-occurrence with silver (of significance for coinage) resulted in an increasing extent of lead production over the next 2,000 years, with mining and smelting in Spain representing c. 40% of worldwide lead production during Roman times (Hong et al. 1994). Roman production has been estimated at 60,000 tonnes per annum for 400 years (Hernberg 2000). The environmental emission of air-borne lead particles from these early Roman mining and smelting activities have given a record of changing deposits not only within the Greenland ice-cap (the first evidence of anthropogenic hemispheric-scale lead pollution (Hong et al. 1994)), but also in wetlands across the whole of Europe (Shotyk et al. 1998, Renberg 2001). The source has been isotopically distinguished from naturally occurring emissions sources such as sea spray and volcanic eruptions.

Proceedings of the Oxford Lead Symposium, 10 December 2014, Edward Grey Institute, Oxford University. Lead Ammunition: understanding and minimising the risks to human and environmental health (Professor Richard J. Delahay, University of Exeter, Professor Chris J. Spray, MBE, FRSA, University of Dundee, Eds.)

It would appear that the Romans mined and used about 24,000,000 tons of lead if the above figures are correct, and the effects of that industry are still with us.

(cf. also: Ingemar Renberg,* Richard Bindler and Maja-Lena Brannvall, Using the historical atmospheric lead-deposition record as a chronological marker in sediment deposits in Europe The Holocene 11,5 (2001) pp. 511–516)

Here, for comparison purposes, is the amount of lead that was vaporized as a gasoline additive in the 20th century, during the rise to dominance of the car CULTure:



Source: The Rise and Fall of Tetraethyllead. 2. Dietmar Seyferth Organometallics 2003 22 (25), 5154-5178.

At its peak, the amount of lead vaporized in gasoline alone exceeded by a factor of six, the entire annual lead output of the Roman empire.

Of course, lead is commonly used in many products, batteries, bullets, ballast and shielding, and the amount of lead mined each year dwarfs anything the Romans might have done.

Further, there were and are lots of other applications for lead than those I've just listed in modern technology and more are being proposed:

If this is in any way shocking, I note that one of the big trends in so called "renewable energy" is the development of lead iodide perovskite solar cells. Here, from a recent paper on the subject, (Peng Yu, Wenjun Zhang, Fumeng Ren, Jianan Wang, Haixin Wang, Rui Chen, Shasha Zhang, Yiqiang Zhang, Zonghao Liu and Wei Chen Strategies for highly efficient and stable cesium lead iodide perovskite photovoltaics: mechanisms and processes J. Mater. Chem. C, 2022, 10, 4999–5023) are some of the chemical reactions for methyl ammonium lead iodide perovskites decomposition in solar cells at 95°C:



The "HI" in reactions 5, 7, 9, and 10 is hydroiodic acid, an acid marginally stronger and corrosive than hydrochloric acid, which for full disclosure is an intermediate in my favorite thermal water splitting cycle, the closed sulfur iodide cycle, but (if not neutralized by ammonia or methylamine in the gas phase) could prove problematic for fire fighters fighting a fire at a bourgeois McMansion covered with "green" lead perovskite solar cells. More serious is the methyl iodide in reactions 8 and 9, which is an insecticide, now largely (but not entirely) banned because of its ozone destruction potential, that alkylates tyrosine, serine, and threonine residues in proteins, causing their essential tertiary structure to fall apart. The issue of slower decomposition is always present of course, since solar cells can rise to temperatures far above ambient temperatures much as asphalt does as one may notice walking barefoot in a parking lot.

Happily, at least in my opinion, "efficient" (is this a joke?) lead iodide based perovskite solar cells have not gone commercial, owing to their stability issues, and they are not (yet) a major source of lead pollution.

By the way, the idea of putting tetraethyl lead in gasoline was considered wonderful in its time, and the discovery of its use as an antiknock agent won all kinds of awards and praise. Maybe stable lead iodide perovskite solar cells, should they be realized will be similar, perhaps in the very same way with the very same consequences.

Be that as it may, this brings me to the point underlying a major theme of my 30,000 posts, at least beginning around 2010, I'd guess, which is a dissident view among the bulk of my fellow Democrats. I reject, totally and completely, without reservation, the notion that so called "renewable energy" is either sustainable or environmentally benign. For me the purpose of a political party should not be simply to hold power vs the "bad guys," but rather to govern well. In my view, when Democrats hype the value of so called "renewable energy" - in reality the use of the word "renewable" renders the phrase oxymoronic - we are not governing well. We need, as Lincoln wrote in another context in one of my favorite writings, his 1862 message to Congress - from which my sig line here is an excerpt - as Democrats to "think anew" about what I regard as the most serious issue before humanity in our times, climate change.

On the political left this issue is most often of critical importance; way more than 90% of us, I'm sure, think it so. The question is not whether we acknowledge the importance of the issue; the question is whether we have any idea at all as to what can or should be done about it.

Here is a statement, in various forms, that I have included in a large number of my 30,000 posts on this website:

So called "renewable energy" has not addressed climate change, is not addressing climate change, and will not address climate change.

Amiri Baraka wrote a beautiful poem, first published in The Dead Lecturer in 1964, a poem, the opening lines of which have hung in my mind since the early 1970's:

Duncan Spoke of a Process

And what I have learned
of it, to repeat, repeated
as a day will repeat
its color, the tired sounds
run off its bones...

"To repeat...the tired sounds..."

I repeat myself a lot at DU, with slight - often very slight - modifications, more about that below. I appreciate where tolerance for my practice of doing so is allowed. It's like echolalia to which Kurt Vonnegut once referred mocking one of his characters, or perhaps, even more accurately, palilalia.

Baraka's poem ends like this:

...I see what I love most and will not
leave what futile lies
I have. I am where there
is nothing, save myself. And go out to
what is most beautiful. What some noncombatant Greek
or soft Italian prince
would sing, "Noble Friends."
Noble Selves. And which one
is truly
to rule here? And
what country is this?

...go out to what is most beautiful...What country is this?"

I suppose that anyone who is familiar with my writings here and elsewhere will refer, with more than a little accuracy, to me as "pronuclear activist" - another form of my dissidence as a Democrat, although this is changing for people like Gretchen Whitmer, and indeed, more quietly, with Joe Biden - but on a deeper level, the far more profound level, what I really am is as much as I might hate to admit it, is an "anti" as in "anti-fossil fuels." I often mock the "antis," antivaxxers, anti-GMO, antinukes, but in that's what I am, an "anti," anti-fossil fuels. I note that there are many pronuclear activists - although this is also changing - who a pro fossil fuels - muttering insipidly about economics. Of course, there are antinukes who also mutter insipidly about economics, a subject about which they are clueless as they are about environmental issues.

Climate change is the most serious risk associated with dangerous fossil fuels, but it is hardly the only risk by any stretch of the imagination. I sometimes muse to myself whether the rise of insanity in the world is actually a massive case of "Mad Hatters Disease" aka "Minamata disease" which is related to the neurotoxic element mercury, but at least with respect to its symptomology, in an etiological sense, also to lead. The mechanism for the neurotoxicology for both elements is, as I recall, generally associated with effects on the metabolic proteins responsible for energy generation in the most energy demanding tissues in human beings, brain tissue. Without energy, brain cells cease to function or die.

Without sustainable and clean energy, much of humanity will cease to function and die.

Let me return to the subject of the dangerous fossil fuel waste lead:

By far, one of the largest sources of environmental exposure to lead on this planet right now is longer tetraethyl lead gasoline; it’s the combustion of coal. (Coal also releases significant mercury to the environment.)

Here are two graphics from the following publication: Muyang Li, Wei Liu, Wenqiu Liu, Mengyan Bi, Zhaojie Cui, Dynamic substance flow analysis of lead in the fossil fuel system of China from 1980 to 2018, Journal of Cleaner Production, Volume 313, 2021, 127918,



The caption:

Fig. 2. Lead flows and stocks in the coal system of China in 1980, 2000, and 2018.

The caption:

Fig. 6. Lead release from the fossil fuel system in China during 1980–2018. Note: CCPP - atmospheric emissions from coal consumption in power plants; CCIB - atmospheric emissions from coal consumption in industrial boilers; CCOS - atmospheric emissions from coal consumption in other sectors; PPC - atmospheric emissions from petroleum products consumption; UFA - unused fly ash; UG - unused gangue; UDG - unused desulfurization gypsum; UC - unused bottom ash; RWS - recycled solid waste for backfilling, road construction, and land reclamation; TL - transportation loss; CWW - coking wastewater; CCS - coke consumption for smelting; and CDW - construction demolition waste.

Note that these environmental releases are not related to technological use of lead, but rather the release of the element into the environment from the use of coal. The technological use makes things worse, far worse. As the above graphics show, the lead in raw coal used just by by China rose from around 15,000 tons in 1980 to close to 90,000 tons in 2018. In the "percent talk" used by advocates of so called "renewable energy" to obscure its uselessness, assuming the numbers in the graphic in figure 2, by 575% in just 38 years, and is releasing into the environment twice as much lead as the Roman Empire consumed on average for all purposes each year during its existence.

And if China, where much of our "stuff" is made seems far away, we shouldn't feel all that smug. In my "what's in it for me" generation, we should know that the lead released in China does get "here:" Provenance of Anthropogenic Pb and Atmospheric Dust to Northwestern North America Bess G. Koffman, Patrick Saylor, Roujia Zhong, Lily Sethares, Meg F. Yoder, Lena Hanschka, Taylor Methven, Yue Cai, Louise Bolge, Jack Longman, Steven L. Goldstein, and Erich C. Osterberg Environmental Science & Technology 2022 56 (18), 13107-13118. From the text:

Comparison of the high-elevation Denali snow pit data with the Pb isotope record from the Eclipse ice core (11) demonstrates the changing history of Pb pollution in northwestern North America (Figure 7, Eclipse error bars are shown in Figure S7). During the 1970s, the Eclipse record was largely influenced by pollution aerosols from the US (Figure 7A). Beginning in the 1980s, the increasing influence of Chinese industrialization can be seen as a shift toward higher 208Pb/207Pb values (Figure 7B), with Eclipse data overlapping the field of Chinese urban aerosols. (47) During the 1990s, the Eclipse data span the fields of U.S. and Chinese aerosols and bracket the range of Denali snow values from this study (Figure 7C). By the end of the Eclipse ice core record in 2001, the Eclipse data plot almost entirely within the Chinese source fields, with most data indistinguishable from Chinese urban aerosols (Figure 7D). The Eclipse data overlap the data from two of the highest-elevation Denali snow pits, which according to Denali ice core Pb enrichment data receive up to 80% of their Pb from pollution sources. Together these records, along with the data from Barrow and the Arctic Ocean, (22) demonstrate the pervasive trans-Pacific deposition of Chinese pollution aerosols in northwestern North America...

...The new data from Denali are among the first from northwestern North America that demonstrate potential changes in the Pb isotope compositions of long-range-transported aerosols following the 2001 phase-out of leaded gasoline in China. A comparison of our 2016 samples with the most recent samples from the Eclipse ice core (e.g., 2000–2001; Figure 7D) demonstrates similarities in their Pb isotope compositions, indicating that the isotopic signature of long-range-transported pollutants remained fairly stable over the past two decades in spite of the phase-out of leaded gasoline in China...

...While aerosols measured in China show a slight shift toward higher 206Pb/207Pb and lower 208Pb/206Pb values (i.e., from a more “ore-like” to a more “coal-like” composition) following the gasoline Pb additive ban, (53) our data indicate that the ban did not have a significant impact on long-range pollutant Pb isotope compositions. This finding, though surprising, parallels results from the Devon Ice Cap in the eastern Canadian Arctic, where ice core Pb isotope data showed no change following the leaded gasoline bans in North America (1970) and Europe (1980)

If accurate, this suggests that taking tetraethyl lead out of gasoline formulations did very little to address the distribution of lead as a single component dangerous fossil fuel waste. In fact, it appears the situation is getting worse, not better.

And yet...and yet...there are people, albeit people for whom I clearly have little intellectual or moral respect, who want to tell me about so called "nuclear waste."

Here is a follow up paper from the authors of a scientific paper - designed to evaluate the migration patterns of tuna fish by the use of radioactive tracers - discussing the media reaction to that paper, since the radioactive tracer in question, the isotope cesium-134, was released by the famous (or infamous) Fukushima reactor: Fisher, Nicholas S. , Beaugelin-Seiller, Karine , Hinton, Thomas G. , Baumann, Zofia , Madigan, Daniel J., Garnier-Laplace, Jacqueline Evaluation of radiation doses and associated risk from the Fukushima nuclear accident to marine biota and human consumers of seafood , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, 26, (2013) 10670-10675.

The paper is open sourced, and the reader is invited to look at Table 1, therein, which is about risk discussed in an important way, relative risk. I note that in Table 1, the nuclide in question, cesium-134, is observed to have one decay per kg per second (1 Bq) in a tuna fish. That single decay issue has come up in one of my favorite posts here, which I'll reference herein.

The introductory text from the paper just cited:

Recent reports describing the presence of radionuclides released from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Pacific biota (1, 2) have aroused worldwide attention and concern. For example, the discovery of 134Cs and 137Cs in Pacific bluefin tuna (Thunnus orientalis; PBFT) that migrated from Japan to California waters (2) was covered by >1,100 newspapers worldwide and numerous internet, television, and radio outlets. Such widespread coverage reflects the public’s concern and general fear of radiation. Concerns are particularly acute if the artificial radionuclides are in human food items such as seafood. Although statements were released by government authorities, and indeed by the authors of these papers, indicating that radionuclide concentrations were well below all national safety food limits, the media and public failed to respond in measure. The mismatch between actual risk and the public’s perception of risk may be in part because these studies reported radionuclide activity concentrations in tissues of marine biota but did not report dose estimates and predicted health risks for the biota or for human consumers of contaminated seafood. We have therefore calculated the radiation doses absorbed by diverse marine biota in which radioactivity was quantified (1, 2) and humans that potentially consume contaminated PBFT. The aim of this paper is to provide estimated doses, and therefore objective risk estimates, to humans and marine biota...

The authors go on to report, in language more gracious than I generally use and will use, that the concern about the radioactive atoms in the tuna fish was, simply put, stupid.

Now, let's be clear on something, OK? Above I reported on the release of tens of thousands of tons of the neurotoxic element lead in just one country, albeit a big country, much of which ends up in the ocean and in the food chain of tuna fish. This release takes place more or less continuously, without interruption on a massive scale from the normal operation of dangerous fossil fuel plants. Although I have not focused on it, another dangerous fossil fuel waste released by the very same process is the similarly neurotoxic element mercury which is well known to be bioconcentrated in the food chain of tuna fish.

This fact is not "covered by >1,100 newspapers worldwide and numerous internet, television, and radio outlets."

And yet...and yet...there are people, albeit people for whom I clearly have little intellectual or moral respect, who want to tell me about Fukushima.

Respect...

...to repeat, repeated
as a day will repeat
its color...

Recently a generous soul commenting on my personality in this space said that though he or she or they liked my posts, they felt I can be a little, um, "off putting."

Some people can be too nice. Other people have described my personality as being that of a "damned asshole," again, too nice. A few, people, mostly pro-nuke types elsewhere, have described my style, approvingly, as "take no prisoners."

This is an old "problem" with me.

Shortly before I was banned at DailyKos - I say it was for telling the truth - I commented thus on my aggressive writing style, referring then to the famous Fukushima tuna fish of that time and my sense of outrage.

Thanks for your friendly suggestion, but...

...let me explain why I write the diaries the way I do.

The process by which I write my science diaries here begins with a scan of the usual journals that I read - although I do mix it up here and there and try to include some journals that I usually don't usually read - until I find some paper relevant to the on going catastrophe that I think I might be able to use to construct a poll here.

The polls are the thing itself.

Generally this list might involve 20 or 30 papers.

I narrow the list by deciding which paper involves a subject that I would like to know more about - since I always learn something when I write the diaries.

Writing this one while collecting the references from the original paper, for instance, I learned that the death toll from the 2003 European heat wave is estimated to be 70,000 people.

I didn't know that until two days ago.

When I was a younger man, I used to be very serious about writing, and engaged in lots of rewrites. Although there are exceptions in my diaries here, what I try to do is here now (partially because of time constraints) free write: Blurt out what comes into my mind as the diary evolves.

I think this shows up in the sometimes confusing rambling that my diaries sometimes involve.

I cannot read the things I read - for instance about the 70,000 deaths - without being simultaneously angry and filled with a sense of the absurd, and usually by the end, the anger just pours out.

The writer Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that he never felt as if he had absolute control over the lives of the characters in his novel: He compared himself to a puppeteer: A puppeteer with elastic strings.

So it is with my diaries.

I don't generally have time to fix them, which is why they sometimes appear with grammatic errors and misspellings. I might go back and change something a year or so later, but that's long after they've gone down the memory hole.

And, the truth is, really I don't want them to be nice.

You read scientific papers, and you recognize that they are often about real tragedy, real human tragedy, and the authors are trapped in this polite and gracious writing style.

The last excerpt from the Nature Climate Change paper above is about as strongly emotional as one sees, but look, they can't say, scream "WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THESE INSIPID JOURNALISTS!?!" can they?

The editors wouldn't allow it.

We're supposed to be "polite."

Well there are no editors here. This place has its flaws and its frustrations, but it has no editors.

I have to think that there are a lot of scientists who want to do more than be politefeel it some of them: Jim Hansen for instance in "Storms of my Grandchildren."

I mean, 70,000 people dead from heat and we are all about the "radioactive" tuna fish?

I'm not writing here to save myself or to make myself seem neat, or professional or kind. I'm none of those things.

I'm just screaming.

I'm screaming in hopes of letting someone in the next generations know - should any of them ever read any of this - that someone cared about what we were doing to them, someone tried to stop it, that some of us weren't seeking to live in some kind of sybaritic narcotic haze where we didn't have to know anything and just did what we damn well pleased to do in the moment.

But that hope too - that someone will notice what I say and what I tried to do - is like the hope that humanity would have addressed climate change before it was too late, is nothing...

...This is a backwater website; and I'm a minor writer on it; nothing that I say is likely to accomplish anything or even survive long; but if, by some accident, something of my work is noticed and survives, I want it to seem that I least I tried to do something.

I appreciate your kind words, and kind suggestion but these diaries have been this way a long time and I'm afraid I don't really control them as much as they control me.

Peace.

Now, in the years that have passed since that long ago Kos post, we have discovered a new type of pernicious being, the MAGAT. No one here is inclined to be overly polite on the subject of MAGATS. They are awful people, overt and unapologetic hypocrites, who talk about "law and order" and then work to beat cops to death with flagpoles. They are racist and as perhaps the ultimate expression of sacrilege, if one accepts the concept of their being sacrilege, worship a dishonest and corrupt orange pig. They have killed people by spreading obnoxious idiocy about the nonexistence of Covid, or, if there is Covid, that it is cured by a cow de-wormer, or the anti-parasitic drug hydroxychloroquine or worse, have allowed the disease to spread based on an irrational fear of vaccines that they continuously hype and promote. Their ignorance literally kills people.

Frankly I think it would be morally dubious, even overtly wrong, to indulge MAGATs, to appease them with even a smidgeon of understanding. If they are not morally and intellectually wrong, nothing is wrong. Again, "to repeat, as the day repeats its colors," their ignorance kills people.

I refer to my own anger with nonsense expression on the subject environmental issues, issues that far outweigh the worst of Covid, and the people who grotesquely distort them with tiresome dogma, by analogy.

I am not inclined to worry if people regard me as an "insufferable asshole." I'm not trying to make friends or be admired. I am here to bring attention to a serious issue that will not be addressed by calling the solar installation guy and buying a Tesla car. It's no longer time for jokes. I am doing so because I feel a certain responsibility to future generations, as much as I am appalled by what my generation has done to them.

The general way I choose what to write on scientific/environmental subjects is basically the same, albeit somewhat more organized and sophisticated. I still go through certain scientific journals, to use an antique word, "religiously," but now I keep notes on the first pass through them, recording what I regard as "papers of interest" in the titles with a color code. Here are screen shots of a recent such file in MS Word, referring to the most recent, as of this writing, issue of the journal Environmental Science and Technology:





The papers and descriptions that are in green are papers that on first impression about which I'd like to write either here on DU or elsewhere. Only a very small percentage of the large number of papers so marked actually appear in my writings; there simply isn't time to cover or read everything. Nevertheless, in terms of developing ideas, the sampling is extremely valuable. Red text refers to a paper about which I have written or on which I've commented in my writings. I cited a paper on lead transport in this post, hence the red mark. The papers marked in orange are papers that involve my professional development; recently I've been thinking a great deal about cell sorting, and although my professional interest in cell sorting has nothing to do with phosphorous recovery, the general concept is of interest, and the Raman spectral application broadens perspective.

While this approach may cover well over 50% of my original technical posts, sometimes I am stimulated to write posts in response to things I see or hear in the media, in particular in those cases where a media report is spectacularly misleading, misinterpreted. Often I become aware of these misinterpretations here. An example is a recent case involving research into the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, a subject of which I'm aware as I have some professional, if indirect, interest. A rather silly interpretation of the retraction or possible retraction (for scientific fraud) of a paper in support of one hypothesis behind potential treatments was blown out of proportion by a staff writer at DailyKos, and migrated here to the superior website where it was taken up. Since I knew the statements in the DailyKos article were very overblown, and since there's often trouble when non-scientists use their ability to communicate to spread nonsense like wild fire - for example with the "Fukushima tuna fish" described above; I had a neighbor who swore he'd never eat tuna again - I felt it behooved me to offer a correction, lest people advocate cutting Alzheimer's funding for a particular hypothesis which has significant support beyond the fraudulent literature that was taken as additional evidence for the hypothesis.

That post is here:

Some remarks on purported fraud concerned with ?? oligomer hypothesis in Alzheimer's research.

I hope in these kinds of posts I clearly define the limits of my knowledge, but nonetheless suggest the types of critical thinking should apply based on what one can find out. As I have managed to maintain complete access to the full scientific literature, and basically can access writings on a large number of topics in the primary scientific literature, and have long experience in reading and interpreting them, I can be helpful in this sense.

On occasion I write posts about subjects about which I know very little, or nothing at all, but which intrigue me in such a way as to inspire me to want to find out about them. Here's an example of such a post:

Chemical Principles of Topological Semimetals (It seems the graphics links in that post have died...oh well.) I was inspired to learn more about Dr. Shoop's work after attending a lecture she gave, and thus wrote about it here. People like Dr. Shoop make me feel stupid, which is a good thing. Feeling stupid is an opportunity and a motivation to learn, to expand one's knowledge.

Some of my posts merely report the data, albeit with some bitter commentary. I have diligently followed the DATA!!! reported weekly at the Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory for many years, entering it into spreadsheets that I use for calculations of exactly how disastrously inadequate whatever we think we are doing, or should do about climate change is.

For several years, I have regularly and constantly reported the new records set, and indeed to rising rate at which we are destroying the planetary atmosphere.

...And what I have learned
of it, to repeat, repeated
as a day will repeat
its color, the tired sounds
run off its bones...

Here's one in the series of these types of posts, for which I often cut and paste the text of a previous post into the latest version:

New Weekly CO2 Concentration Record Set at the Mauna Loa Observatory 421.13 ppm.

It's tiring, and because as I understand energy technology at a very deep level, and because I understand the chemistry and physics of carbon dioxide in particular, and other greenhouse gases in general, it's depressing, because I fully understand that world wide the generally accepted proposals for doing "something" is actually making things worse, not better. The accumulation of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide is accelerating, not decelerating.

A Commentary on Failure, Delusion and Faith: Danish Data on Big Wind Turbines and Their Lifetimes.

Let's do something very, very, very crude, just as an illustration with the understanding that it is unsophisticated but may be illustrative:

As of this writing, I have been a member of DU for 19 years and 240 days, which works out in decimal years to 19.658 years. This means the second derivative, the rate of change of the rate of change is 0.04 ppm/yr^2 for my tenure here. (A disturbing fact is that the second derivative for seven years of similar data running from April of 1993 to April of 2000 showed a second derivative of 0.03 ppm/yr^2; the third derivative is also positive, but I'll ignore that for now.) If these trends continue, this suggests that “by 2050,” 28 years from now, using the language that bourgeois assholes in organizations like Greenpeace use to suggest the outbreak of a “renewable energy” nirvana, the rate of change, the first derivative, will be on the order of 3.6 ppm/year. Using very simple calculus, integrating the observed second derivative twice, using the boundary conditions – the current data - to determine the integration constants, one obtains a quadratic equation (0.04)t^2+(2.45)t+ 419.71 = c where t is the number of years after 2022 and c is the concentration at the year in question.

If one looks at the data collected at the Mauna Loa displayed graphically, one can see that the curve is not exactly linear, but has a quadratic aspect somewhat hidden by the small coefficient (0.04) of the squared term:



This admittedly crude "model" roughly suggests that the concentration of dangerous fossil fuel waste, carbon dioxide concentrations, given the trend, will be around 520 ppm “by 2050,” in 28 years, passing, by solving the resultant quadratic equation, somewhere around 500 ppm around 2046, just 24 years from now.

I’ll be dead then, but while I’m living the realization of what we are doing to future humanity fills me with existential horror.

(The bold was added here; it was not in the original.)

This brings me to the subject of the kind of "environmentalist" I am. I am a "John Muir" type environmentalist, inasmuch, unlike the modern day assholes who perverted the organization he founded, the Sierra Club, I oppose the industrialization of wilderness, in particular to produce, in a sloppy, ineffective, wasteful and very dirty way. As opposed to Muir's purposes, the modern day Sierra Club membership, perverting Muir's vision, never saw a wilderness they didn't want to trash with wind turbines, all of which will be landfill within 25 years. As I repeat often, "as the day repeats its colors" the responsibility for cleaning up the destruction and the mess of this bourgeois fantasy based affectation will fall to today's toddlers just as they are finishing college and entering their careers.

This, to my mind, defines "injustice." One thing that should define Democrats in my view is contempt for injustice.

I recently posted reference to an interview of another kind of environmentalist with whom I'm in accord, Jim Hansen, the climate scientist and activist. During the interview, it was pointed out that modern "environmental" organizations are prevented from doing anything meaningful because they are a big, big, big business, driven by donors who have drank the disastrous and deadly antinuke Kool-Aid that is killing people. No purveying of ignorance, no money. (How this differs from Exxon, if not on scale, then certainly in spirit, escapes me.)

An URGENT Chat with the Godfather of Climate Science|An Urgent Chat With the Godfather of Climate Science.

I will return to the work of Dr. Hansen below when I discuss my cut and paste approach to responding to pertinacious, interminable antinuke dogma.

Recently, as the world burns; as people drop dead in the streets, in fields, and sometimes in their homes from extreme heat; as crops fail from a lack of water; as ancient huge rivers dry up and disappear; as the glaciers that represent the water supply of billions of people melt, a new type of antinuke has appeared at DU, the "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke, a type of person who pretends not to have a visceral hatred of nuclear energy but baldly asserts, despite dragging out every idiotic objection to nuclear power ever raised by chanting oblivious fools. They are a generic bunch of overt frauds, Trumpian in the scale of dishonestly describing themselves.

Now there is no value in attempting to convince these sorts to change their ossified and rather small minds about doing anything involved with "thinking anew." They do not think. They chant. Maybe they join bourgeois oblivion squads like Greenpeace or the Sierra Club, where they get their incantations to repeat. I don't know and I don't care.

The German "Climate" Antinuke Envoy from Greenpeace says:

Germany’s decision to burn coal this winter ‘a hard pill to swallow,’ climate envoy says.

This is an asshole who applauded the closing of nuclear plants to burn coal. It's not a "bitter pill." It's a deadly pill. The German decision to embrace so called "renewable energy" was never about climate change. It was always about irrational fear of nuclear energy. They are burning coal, lots of it, and killing people by doing so.

And let's be clear, the "I'm not an anti-nuke" antinukes who write here to make excuses for the failure of so called "renewable energy" to do doodle squat about climate change, or who engage in tiresome and fallacious soothsaying about what so called "renewable energy" will do "by 2030," or "by 2040" or "by 2050," after all of the soothsaying about "by 1990" and "by 2000," "by 2010" and "by 2020" yuppie baby boomer "aspirational" "deadlines passed with things worsening by the minute, have seldom been interested in climate change, or the preservation of wilderness, or the death of seas or any serious environmental issues. What bothers them, and frankly many people, including asinine "ministers" in the German government. These people are terrified that a single radioactive atom will show up in their tiny and largely brains, killing them.

"A single atom...in a tiny brain." For a long time I kept antinukes, including "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes on my magnificent ignore list. However when I opened the DU website without bothering to log in, I noticed a few of them whining in my posts.

This year, 2022, glaciers all over the world have been collapsing, and major glaciers, including the so called "Doomsday glacier" are approaching collapse. Some of these collapses, notably in Italy, but especially in Pakistan - where the collapses have caused disastrous flooding - have involved fatalities.

Sometime ago, an "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke called up one of my old posts to report that nuclear power was "too dangerous" because a tunnel with some old railcars on which abandoned slightly radioactive chemical reactors were being stored collapsed.

Now, the "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke is in my opinion a very uninteresting person, who likes to whine along the lines of "I never said that..." when confronted with my sarcasm directed at his, her, or their stupidity and ignorance. I really don't study stupid people deeply to see what they did and did not say, I am far more interested in what highly intelligent people, Dr. Shoop referenced above, or Dr. Hansen, also referenced above say. One of the sarcastic remarks I made to this particularly stupid "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke involved the "single radioactive atom in a tiny brain" terror of antinukes.

"I never said that! I never said that!" whined the "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke, as if I give a rat's ass about what antinukes say. Hell, I know what they have to say; they've been dogging me with their selective attention and gaslighting for years. They are rather like Republicans in this respect: Whining about a collapse of an old tunnel at Hanford is exactly equivalent in my mind to Republicans whining about the teaching of "Critical Race Theory," or any of the other specious bullshit they raise.

Nevertheless, I'm actually happy that the "I'm not an antinuke" whined about my sarcasm, because it inspired me to ask a question which is this, "How many radioactive atoms from Hanford might actually migrate into the brain of an antinuke, and more importantly, what would be the physiological consequences of these atoms in the antinuke?"

This brings me to a second reason I write posts, which is to deepen my understanding.

I have long been aware that every human being on this planet, indeed every living thing on this planet has been radioactive for billions of years, owing to the natural radioactivity associated with the essential element potassium and its congener (which follows potassium into living tissue) rubidium, also naturally radioactive. I have also long been aware of the chemistry of plutonium, which I regard as the key element to save the world, as well as many aspects of its geochemistry. I am, in fact, an expert on the chemistry of used nuclear fuels and their components, which some people, absurdly in my opinion, call "nuclear waste."

My status as an expert in all things nuclear has been acknowledged by some members of DU when I was asked to write this post:

Some comments on the war situation with Chernobyl as well as the operable nuclear plants in Ukraine. (Here I explored the "Fukushima syndrome" that drove Germany to fund Putin's war in Ukraine.)

Nevertheless, the dumb "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke's whining did indeed inspire a lot of research on my part, not because the "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke is equipped emotionally, intellectually or ethically to be educated - he, she or they clearly isn't/aren't so equipped - but because the question led me to call up lots of papers that inspired calling up additional papers until I found myself learning things that I didn't know before:

I write to learn, as I noted in my DailyKos comment so many years ago.

The post I wrote on the subject of radioactive atoms migrating into the tiny brains of "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes is very arcane, long and probably uninteresting to most people, but it was a joy to write it, as it brought together several concepts from my professional life in pharmaceutics and my environmental interests, centered on the importance of advancing nuclear energy as quickly as is possible. It involved geochemistry, physical chemistry, physiological chemistry and indeed, general inorganic chemistry. So I do owe a vote of thanks to this particular dumb antinuke for inspiring the research which ultimately deepened my understanding of otherwise familiar concepts. That post is here:

828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels

Finally, there is a third reason I write posts, when current events inspire me to coalesce crude ideas that have floated around in my mind but I have not strictly evaluated on a quantitative basis. I used to live, a very long time ago, in California, and there are parts of me that still love the place. The recent drought and the extreme temperatures and fires there have broken my heart, and I have long been disturbed by the destruction of the Colorado River Delta, the death of Owens Lake, and related issues connected with water supplies in that State.

The physics and chemistry of supercritical water have long been an interest of mine, mostly connected with environmental remediation of damaged water supplies, but I have long been aware of its potential for desalination, but I never made a quantitative estimate of what would be involved. The events in California owing to climate change inspired me to write here on the subject, and thus to do some calculations and learn new details on the topic.

That post is here: The Energy Required to Supply California's Water with Zero Discharge Supercritical Desalination.

These are some of the posts for which I have learned new things in the preparation of them. In a moment, I will close with comments about why Democratic Underground is the best liberal blog on the planet, vastly superior to some more prominent and popular blogs, because Democratic Underground's operation reflects Democratic values.

First, about repetition...

...And what I have learned
of it, to repeat, repeated
as a day will repeat
its color...

There are certain things that I repeat simply by cutting and pasting text I've saved in a word file, to quickly address the rote stuff I hear about energy.

Some examples:

The death toll associated with not embracing nuclear energy:

It is here: Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249). This study is a huge undertaking and the list of authors from around the world is rather long. These studies are always open sourced; and I invite people who want to carry on about Fukushima to open it and search the word "radiation." It appears once. Radon, a side product brought to the surface by fracking while we all wait for the grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come, appears however: Household radon, from the decay of natural uranium, which has been cycling through the environment ever since oxygen appeared in the Earth's atmosphere.

Here is what it says about air pollution deaths in the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Survey, if one is too busy to open it oneself because one is too busy carrying on about Fukushima:

The top five risks for attributable deaths for females were high SBP (5·25 million [95% UI 4·49–6·00] deaths, or 20·3% [17·5–22·9] of all female deaths in 2019), dietary risks (3·48 million [2·78–4·37] deaths, or 13·5% [10·8–16·7] of all female deaths in 2019), high FPG (3·09 million [2·40–3·98] deaths, or 11·9% [9·4–15·3] of all female deaths in 2019), air pollution (2·92 million [2·53–3·33] deaths or 11·3% [10·0–12·6] of all female deaths in 2019), and high BMI (2·54 million [1·68–3·56] deaths or 9·8% [6·5–13·7] of all female deaths in 2019). For males, the top five risks differed slightly. In 2019, the leading Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths globally in males was tobacco (smoked, second-hand, and chewing), which accounted for 6·56 million (95% UI 6·02–7·10) deaths (21·4% [20·5–22·3] of all male deaths in 2019), followed by high SBP, which accounted for 5·60 million (4·90–6·29) deaths (18·2% [16·2–20·1] of all male deaths in 2019). The third largest Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths among males in 2019 was dietary risks (4·47 million [3·65–5·45] deaths, or 14·6% [12·0–17·6] of all male deaths in 2019) followed by air pollution (ambient particulate matter and ambient ozone pollution, accounting for 3·75 million [3·31–4·24] deaths (12·2% [11·0–13·4] of all male deaths in 2019), and then high FPG (3·14 million [2·70–4·34] deaths, or 11·1% [8·9–14·1] of all male deaths in 2019).

Jim Hansen's famous paper with a colleague showing that nuclear energy saves lives:

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

The vast expense for the useless so called "renewable energy will save us" fantasy.

The amount of money "invested" in so called "renewable energy" in the period between 2004 and 2018 is over 3.036 trillion dollars; dominated by solar and wind which soaked up 2.774 trillion dollars.

Source: UNEP/Bloomberg Global Investment in Renewable Energy, 2019

The trivial amounts of unreliable energy we got from this expenditure on the useless solar and wind industries compared to the energy produced by the vilified nuclear industry, also showing the scale of use of deadly and dangerous fossil fuels:

Source: IEA World Energy Outlook, 2021, page 294, Table A1A

Data with which show by calculation how many people the German antinukes, who funded Putin's war on the Ukraine with their dangerous fossil fuel purchases, are killing with their switch from nuclear to coal.

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

Here's table 2:

Duncan Spoke of a Process

And what I have learned
of it, to repeat, repeated
as a day will repeat
its color, the tired sounds
run off its bones...

For my 30,000th post, which this is, I chose to look back at what I have done here, and why I did it. "What was in it for me," the Baby Boomer quest, was that writing at DU gave me the opportunity to make myself learn, sometimes as a reaction, and sometimes in hopes of doing my little part to allow us, Democrats in general, to change for the better, for now we are the party of Lincoln, the party which must and can think anew.

Now in closing, let me remark on what makes Democratic Underground Democratic: The founders and the operators of this website have embraced Democracy. They do not and have not, in general, despite their "ownership" of the site behaved in an autocratic fashion. I'm often obnoxious. Sometimes I step over the line. However, when I am so there is no autocratic fiat by which I am banned or my posts are hidden. Rather the admins here have created the wonderful "jury system" whereby the membership can decide on these issues of disagreement with a rule of law. DU's rules are defined. When one is called to a jury here, one must first read the rule to rule.

Secondly, there is the MIRT system, whereby DUers are called upon to rule on whether new members actually belong here or whether they are trolls. Although admins serve continuously on this task, the members of this function rotate. It has been an honor and a privilege to serve on MIRT.

In short, Democratic Underground, embraces with Democratic values, in spite of no fixed requirement to do so.

This may contrast with say, DailyKos, which has an "owner" and which functions as an autocracy at worst, and oligarchy at best.

I am honored that in spite of my disagreement with certain elements of our dogma, I have been allowed to persist.

"Still, I persisted..."

Many years ago, long before I met my wife, when I was young, I spent an afternoon with a nice young woman, a refugee from a wealthy and sophisticated family, drinking wine laughing over a book of Kliban cartoons, whereupon we ended up taking a bath together and doing other fun stuff. It was nothing serious and went nowhere after that, but she liked me, she said, because she thought - even though I was something of a dummy in those days, looking back - she thought I was a pretty smart guy.

She, and I, loved this particular cartoon:



I leave it to others to decide whether I am "Judy with a tiny head" or a "callous sophisticate" or neither.

I thought I'd take the occasion of my 30,000th post, as meaningful as the number itself may or may not be, to reflect on what DU has meant to me, and equally important, what it has done for me.

And which one
is truly
to rule here? And
what country is this?

Have a pleasant Sunday afternoon.

[NewHendoLib]

1. From a fellow scientist/chemist/boomer, thanks for your contributions here.

From your superb post, I think we would have a great time chatting for hours over a beer, glass of wine, good meal. We are two peas in a pod!

[NNadir]

8. That would be fun.

I'll let you know if I'm ever around North Carolina. It happens I have family there.

Thanks for your kind words.

[SheltieLover]

2. Congrats on reaching 30k!

And ty for sharing your scientific perspectives.

[FM123]

3. Congratulations on your 30,000th post!

And thank you, for expanding our knowledge as well.....

[Blues Heron]

4. Congrats!

epic 30,000th post

[2naSalit]

5. Aw, man! Homework!

Congrats on your 30,000th!

Not a scientist here but I can make sense of a well presented scientific argument and, therefore, enjoy your posts that are researched beyond my training but make sense all the same.

[IbogaProject]

6. Thank you and your strong principles and outspokenness

I appreciate your strong opinions and even stronger defense of them. Even when and especially for when you've come for mine. This is how we learn.

[LoisB]

7. Very interesting. Congratulations on 30k.