Captain Obvious

“The Arctic Ocean is warming up!  Icebergs are growing scarcer, and in some places, seals are finding the water too hot according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulate at Bergen, Norway.  Reports from fishermen, seal hunters, and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and historically unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone.

Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.

Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points, well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.

Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

Within a few years, it is predicted that due to the ice melt, the sea will rise and make most coast cities uninhabitable.”

Oh, I neglected to mention that this news article was from November 2, 1922 , as reported by the AP and published in The Washington Post.  That was 96 years ago. This must have been caused by the Model T Ford’s emissions or possibly from horses 🐎 🐎and cattle 🐄 🐄 passing gas. You can check this out for yourself on SNOPES, a liberal leaning truth checker and they found it is true.

Now there is a word I have not seen lately.  And, it struck me as refreshing, but a bit odd that the wind industry would be the one to point out that Iowans are gullible if they swallow the idea that wind creates jobs.  As we have all learned, there is almost always more the to the story.  It was especially remarkable that the article uses the famous movie The Music Man to illustrate the gullibility.

Read what National Wind Watch has to say. 

The word gullible is used to describe people who are easily duped or cheated.  I couldn’t agree more, but why stop with Iowans … why not simply tell everyone in the US and around the world for that matter that the emperor is nude.

But, there is more to this than that.  The underlying reason we become gullible is more sinister.  We fall prey to this when we lose our curiosity for the rest of the story and we accept superficially appealing notions to capture the argument.

Our national lack of dialogue around energy issues rests on our gullibility.  What is worse, those in leadership positions will not “disturb sleeping dogs” when they think the gullibility is in their favor on an argument.

We live in a democracy where we need an informed electorate.  Gullibility is a formidable enemy to its success.

 

Most of us are fully aware of the concerns about methane released into our environment.  It has over 30 times the influence on trapping heat in our atmosphere.  So, it was without surprise that the cattle industry came under scrutiny and criticisms for methane release, which is called “bovine flatulence.”  Money was being spent studying this, which included research on reformulating the grasses as feedstock to see if these natural emissions could be reduced.

A much less obvious but extremely large methane release comes from mining coal.  This article is an excellent review of the size and possible remediation methods associated with coal mine methane releases:

Read the article in Climate Change News.

But almost nothing is said or done about these sources.  Unlike bovine flatulence, mine methane can be tapped and used as a fuel source.  It just isn’t sexy.  Plus, it is technically challenging to do because it requires a huge investment in projects to remediate the problem.  However, it might just make a bigger difference in the outcome while we are all trying to mitigate with our solar and wind energy advocacy.

Holistic least-cost planning seems to have fallen out of favor.  Planning itself seems to have been left to the invisible hand of the market forces.  The recent warning out of California about trusting this hand should be a wake-up call.

Read what Daily Energy Insider has to say.

“Fewer and fewer customers are getting power from the traditional large regional utilities and the central decision making that we use for keeping the grid reliable, safe, and affordable is splintering, becoming the task of dozens of decision-makers,” CPUC President Michael Picker wrote in the cover letter to the report.  “In the last deregulation, we had a plan, however flawed. Now, we are deregulating electric markets through dozens of different decisions and legislative actions, but we do not have a plan. If we are not careful, we can drift into another crisis,” Picker wrote.

Plans are good.  Better than just hoping that invisible hand does the right thing.

A recent Facebook video of Sr. Ken Robertson’s TED Talk struck a nerve.  “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”

He opened with one of my favorite stories of a 1^st grade teacher going over to a young girl and asking her what she was drawing as her idea for a picture in art class.  The girl stated she was drawing a picture of God.  The teacher blurted out a defensibly accurate statement:  “But no one knows what God looks like!”  The girl never looked up and simply stated: “They will in a minute!”

He goes on to point out how the fear of being wrong disables creativity in modern organizations.  Being wrong is punished rather than being viewed as an opportunity to learn.  Instead, we seem all too happy doing nothing creative.

IBM Bet Billions That Watson Could Improve Cancer Treatment. It Hasn’t Worked.

The Wall Street Journal(USA) August 11, 2018

Big Blue spent billions on its Watson artificial intelligence product with a focus on cancer care. Sometimes, it didn’t say more than doctors already knew. In other cases, Watson was tripped up by a lack of data in rare or recurring cancers and rapidly evolving treatments.

This comes as no surprise to me.  I have spent my entire career as an engineering mathematician looking at cause and effect and how to predict things that can go wrong ahead of them failing.  First under Admiral Rickover in the nuclear navy working on avoiding a repeat of the Thresher disaster where the submarine and 129 crew were lost during sea trials, then for the New York City Hospital Association predicting for staffing purposes who will show up in the emergency room on a hot summer evening, then for Mechanical Technologies advance equipment designers predicting bearing failure to enable predictive maintenance in offshore high-speed rotating equipment, the story is always the same.

You have to start with “training data” to drive the analysis.  It is not about some big black box, or in this case a Big Blue box that somehow works a miracle, despite what the IBM ads seem to indicate in the commercials we often see on TV.  That is marketing hype and the realities do not live up to that hype.

We at Apogee have a long history of training data from our staff’s collective careers studying first-hand energy use in homes and businesses.  I have personally field audited almost every type of large US industrial plant.  We know what is hidden in bills and meter data because we have seen it operate and then seen it show up in electrical and fuel use.

That is why our analytical engine was shown by EPA, DOE, and LBL as twice as accurate as any other in the world in their year-long testing.  The idea that someone can simply throw data into a box, stir it around and get useful results is nonsense.

Thank you IBM for finally admitting it.