So many experts who either know or predict outcomes! There are a number of dichotomies we all experience through life, where we need to make a decision, but one side is usually regarded as wrong and the opposite view is the respected one - the paradigm. But how often do we discover that the one we were taught was correct - turned out to be wrong?
I am experiencing a curious feeling of déjà vu about the continuing argument concerning global warming. I’m amazed at the overpowering, apparent, consensus of opinion. During a brief foray into google to look for global warming alternative views, I discovered a wealth of information backed up by respected science and climate experts too numerous to mention who all stress that the official demands to reduce CO2 will have absolutely no impact on the amount of CO2 in the upper atmosphere and will cost $2.4 trillion annually over the next 30 years. The presence and increase of CO2 in the upper atmosphere, it is argued, is apparently not due to human activity but rather, a natural consequence of the sun’s increasing output, and they support this argument through the fossil record and ice core sampling, among a host of other methods all of which agree.
I am experiencing a curious feeling of déjà vu about the continuing argument concerning global warming. I’m amazed at the overpowering, apparent, consensus of opinion. During a brief foray into google to look for global warming alternative views, I discovered a wealth of information backed up by respected science and climate experts too numerous to mention who all stress that the official demands to reduce CO2 will have absolutely no impact on the amount of CO2 in the upper atmosphere and will cost $2.4 trillion annually over the next 30 years. The presence and increase of CO2 in the upper atmosphere, it is argued, is apparently not due to human activity but rather, a natural consequence of the sun’s increasing output, and they support this argument through the fossil record and ice core sampling, among a host of other methods all of which agree.
Professor Lindzen, the foremost atmospheric physicist of his generation, wrote:-
“The relative stability of the earth’s climate throughout geological history, notably since life evolved, is truly remarkable. It is an extraordinary natural buffering system. While CO2 has fluctuated between about 280ppm where it was in 1940 and 5,000ppm during the Cambrian period 550 million years ago, the earth’s average temperature has been maintained by natural feed-back mechanisms within a range of about 10C. These feed-back mechanisms are extremely complex and even today are by no means fully understood."
"Many highly respected atmospheric scientists support Professor Lindzen’s views; scientists such as Fred Singer (who designed the first meteorological satellite), the late Bob Carter (the famous Australian geologist), Willie Soon ( an expert on the sun’s magnetic fluctuations), Roger Pielke (an expert on extreme weather events and sea level change) , the two Svensmarks (who have demonstrated the link between sunspot activity, cosmic rays, cloud formation and temperature, Judith
Curry, John Christy, Professor Happer, Peter Ridd ( the expert on coral
ecology in the great Barrier Reef) to name just a few." Wikipedia
Professor Lindzen concluded one lecture with the following words:-
“What we will be leaving our grandchildren is not a planet damaged by industrial progress, but a record of unfathomable silliness as well as a landscape degraded by rusting wind farms and decaying solar panel arrays. False claims about 97% agreement will not spare us, but the willingness of scientists to keep mum is likely to much reduce trust in and support for science.”
Descréjà vu
Descript
The impact of global warming seems to be self-evident. More extremes of weather; heat waves, floods, more and stronger hurricanes, earthquakes, etc. No one can dispute the weather seems to be changing. But is it really due to a build up of CO2 in the upper atmosphere? The answer seems to be that probably it is, but that may be due to the normal fluctuations in the sun's output. There are strong arguments for this alternative view.
So why are there so many experts with differing views? Surely one side or the other must be right and the other wrong! Reminds me of the Bessler wheel problem, too many experts telling us we are wrong, but there are some who believe in him.
We are all aware of the errors made in scientific predictions from before the time of Orville and Wright onward - How accurate were the predictions made around the time of the first
Earth Day in 1970? The answer: “The prophets of doom were not simply
wrong, but spectacularly wrong".
1. Harvard biologist George Wald
estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless
immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
2. “We are in an environmental crisis
which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a
suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University
biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal
Environment.
3. The day after the first Earth Day, the
New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and
conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the
race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
4. “Population will inevitably and
completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,”
Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle.
“The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per
year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
5. “Most of the people who are going to
die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been
born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe!
“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the
present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of
unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the
ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of
the 1980s.”
6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist
scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring
readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65
million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
7. “It is already too late to avoid mass
starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in
the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State
University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost
unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines
will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India,
Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or
conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine
conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world,
with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will
be in famine.”
9. In January 1970, Life
reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence
to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will
have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution
will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time
that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of
time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our
land will be usable.”
11. Barry Commoner predicted that
decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s
rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.
12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in
1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of
thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a
scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog
disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon
that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially
reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned
that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49
years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this
expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note:
According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).
14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By
the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil
at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up
to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very
sorry, there isn’t any.'”
15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American
that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally
run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver
would be gone before 1990.
16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look
that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute,
believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all
the species of living animals will be extinct.”
17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that
“since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will
be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected
that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”
18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending
Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about
twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will
be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990,
but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it
would take to put us into an ice age.”
Courtsey of Mark J. Perry. http://www.aei.org/publication/18-spectacularly-wrong-predictions-made-around-the-time-of-first-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year-2/
I am sure that when Bessler’s wheel is finished and a working model demonstrated and the full description published, there will a rush to duplicate it, improve it and find the best way of benefiting from it.
I think it will prove to be more than a seven day wonder and it won’t slip back into obscurity. Just to produce a machine that works continuously purely from the effect of gravity, requires such a paradigm shift that it may well open up a new view of science, explaining how it works and discussions about how it was missed for so long. If, as I believe, it will generate electricity in useful amounts, it will ultimately change the way we provide electricity. Given the fears about global warming, pollution and the rise and rise of those protest groups, like Extinction Rebellion, I think the wheel will be an extremely hot topic of conversation.
I'm sure that intense pressure to reduce global warming has much to do with reducing the pollution caused by fossil burning technologies through out the planet. It is related to the perception that planetary sources of energy are limited. This Eco drive is designed to save the remaining sources of oil, by replacing electricity generation with all the alternative methods so far known. The way to get progress is to find a safe, clean, cheap alternative to current methods and I believe that Bessler’s time has come. It’s almost as if his technology came too early, but now the time is right and perhaps his wheel will save the planet or rather humanity’s existence.
All the old ways of producing energy, and the new ones are obsolete. They are not ultimately green they cannot generate 24/7 365 days a year, but Bessler’s could.
JC
