For a few weeks now, I've been imagining a room with 10 people in it and trying to figure out how many of them are likely to be alive because of one of the most troll rated scientists of all time, Fritz Haber. Would six or seven or three or nine of the next people you meet not exist without Fritz Haber's work? It's hard to say, but I'll try to make a stab at it.
That's the kind of thing I do. I count. I'm into numbers. I count so much that it annoys my wife, but she's more or less accepted after all these years that it's my way. Maybe my wife will never get it, but for me though, numbers have deep meaning.
Here at Kos, in a world in which my wife is little involved, I count exajoules. That's my way. Some people at Kos get really annoyed when I count exajoules. There is some evidence that these people get even more annoyed than my wife gets when I count other things, since my wife never troll rates me but I get troll rated at DailyKos, usually by the same people.
Fritz Haber's wife, unlike my wife, troll rated her husband...
...even though it seems like many people, probably to most people, living today owe their lives to her husband's work. And it's not like Fritz Haber's wife was a bad person. On the contrary, she may have been one of the most moral European women of her time and one of the smartest too, with the exception of Lise Meitner and Marie Curie.
Anyway, the calculation of how many people are alive today because of Fritz Haber's work is not as straight forward as I'd hoped it would be.
We can say this:
It's pretty clear, as I will discuss in some detail in the following series, that the world population would not be almost 7 billion without Fritz Haber's most famous discovery. At the time of Haber's discovery, the world population was about 1.75 billion and it was growing but getting there had taken millions of years. Fritz Haber's most important discovery is almost 100 years old. The world population is now estimated at 6.6 billion, and thus has increased by roughly 5 billion, give or take a few hundred million, since Fritz Haber's invention.
According the US Census Bureau Prediction the world population in 2050 - the same year that Greenpeace says that 70% of our energy could be from so called "renewable energy" - will be 9.4 billion.
Did I ever tell you that I think Greenpeace is full of shit?
I didn't?
Um... Well...
If you have some time, poke around here. I'm positively sure I said something about that somewhere.
Greenpeace misleads people with futuristic fantasies although many similar rosy scenarios have proved in the past to be so ridiculous as to more or less border on outright lies - yes I will discuss the Oracle as Snowmass, highly paid shill, in this diary series - by engaging in what I call "percent talk." This is numerical illiteracy, sometimes called innumeracy.
Let's talk about "percent talk." Suppose per capita energy stays constant. It's not doing any such thing - as of 2004 per capita energy consumption was at the highest point ever, mostly because the Indians and Chinese stopped agreeing to be impoverished so westerners could live like gods - but suppose per capita energy consumption remains constant.
If the census bureau is right and per capita consumption stays the same, it follows from direct calculation that world energy consumption that world energy consumption in 2050 will be 700 exajoules as compared to 470 exajoules as of 2004. Now - and this is very, very, very, very, very improbable - Greenpeace is not purely full of shit, 70% of the world's energy will come from so called renewable energy, including the usual magic formulas, biofuels, solar, wind, etc.
This means, according to Greenpeace - and let's be clear that most of what Greenpeace does is to hate the world's largest source of climate change gas free energy, by far, nuclear energy - that 210 exajoules of energy will still come from dangerous fossil fuels.
Yeah. Well. We will talk more below and in this series about the concept of "couldn't care less. How much energy is 210 exajoules? Well, if you must know, the world in its entirety was using about 300 exajoules of primary energy from all forms - at that time almost all fossil fuels - in 1980. Thus, if Greenpeace is right - and there's almost zero chance of that - the world will have labored mightily for 70 years to "only" be 80% as bad as it was in 1980.
Of course, Greenpeace couldn't care less where exactly this 210 exajoules of fossil fuels is going to come from, remaining oblivious apparently to the issues of peak oil, peak gas, peak coal, and where it's going to go, since the dangerous fossil fuel waste that would be generated by 210 exajoules of dangerous fossil fuel burning is considerable, no more trivial than it was in 1980 or 1970 or 1960 for that matter.
But that's if everybody agrees to use 74 gigajoules of energy a year (70.1 million BTU), which is about the per capita energy consumption of nations like Paraguay, Latvia, Romania and Argentina, a power level that is about 2300 watts, or in units familiar in our car culture, about 3 horsepower. There are big screen TVs that consume more power than that, and lots and lots and lots and lots of lawnmowers that use more than that. It's better than the lifestyle lived by a citizen of Chad, where the average citizen is entitled to 77 watts of average power for all purposes including flushing the toilet (if you have a toilet or water) but nowhere near the 11,500 watt lifestyle of the average American.
Suppose everybody decided that they wanted to have a lifestyle equivalent to that of Denmark, where they consume about 5300 watts of power on average, or 168 billion joules per person.
Under these conditions, 30% of the energy coming from dangerous fossil fuels would amount for 9.5 billion citizens of the planet to about 480 exajoules, more energy from dangerous fossil fuels than is produced by all forms of energy, including nuclear, hydro and all of the really, really, really, really, really really cool non hydro renewables that we all love to talk about.
Non hydro renewables in the meantime would be required to produce 1,120 exajoules or roughly 4300% as much energy as they produce today to get the other 70% that Greenpeace talks so confidently about.
Suppose everybody decided to live like an American? Then with only 30% of the energy coming from dangerous fossil fuels would amount to 1030 exajoules - more than twice modern worldwide energy consumption, again from all forms including nuclear and hydro, and other renewables would be required to produce an astonishing 2,404 exajoules or an even more astounding 120,200% of what they produce today (about 2 exajoules).
And let's be clear here, most people on earth would consider themselves fabulously wealthy if they lived like an American and what's worse, most people want to live like Americans.
Gee, don't you hate counting? It's so pessimistic. You can't get into Greenpeace, I think, if you do too much counting. Percent indeed!
Maybe they think we’re stupid over at Greenpeace.
Oh, did I mention that this series will be my discussion of the famous "peak oil" issue that is exposited by the famous journalist Jimmy Kunstler who has troll rated the famous Walmart/Royal Dutch Shell/Rio Tinto/Arctic Diamond Mining shill Amory Lovins? I didn't? I must have overlooked it. (But in case there is any doubt about shilling here, I do intend to discuss Mr. Lovins daily fees for visiting, say, the Rio Tinto boardroom to give Rio Tinto the "environmentalist" stamp of approval. Just so we're clear, the nuclear industry gave me a golf shirt - and I don't play golf.)
Anyway. That's what this series is about, dangerous fossil fuel supply peaks, the troll rated journalist Jimmy Kunstler, the troll rated Walmart executive, Amory Lovins, the troll rated scientist Fritz Haber, the troll rated scientist, Galileo (and other troll rated scientists) and the troll rating of something called "data."
I get troll rated too, so I'm in great company.
My wife doesn't troll rate me, or if she does, it's relatively rare.
Fritz Haber got troll rated too. Let's count some things that Fritz Haber got troll rated for: One. Causing most of the deaths in World War I. Two. Being a German nationalist. Three. Not ever, not once, apologizing for number one and number 2. Four. Being a Jew. Five. Making it possible for a vast subset of people in any room today to have something to eat. Six. Every body of water on this planet that is choking to death from algae. Seven. The dangerous fossil fuel based weapons industry...
Well to be honest, on a little reflection, sometimes my wife makes noises that are sort of like troll rating. My wife would say, "What does it matter how many times we did this or did that? I am here now. Now is now. I don't count things."
A good marriage still has some friction, but a good marriage is also about compromise. I should stop counting things in my married life because my wife doesn't like it. On the other hand, I didn't marry any Daily Kos readers, so I feel perfectly free to count things here. That's mostly what my diaries are about, counting. I am not here to compromise. I'm here to count.
This diary will be first in a series - this is the second time I've said this - about Jimmy Kunstler, who says things about how many barrels of oil we may count in the future. Jimmy Kunstler has troll rated the Oracle at Snowmass, Amory Lovins, who just got a great job at Walmart paying $20,000 per day - and the Oracle at Snowmass in turn, has troll rated Jimmy Kunstler right back. I troll rate the Oracle at Snowmass often - he certainly deserves it with all the damage he's done to the environment - but I'm not famous and I don't count.
I'm not sure if Jimmy Kunstler counts. Maybe he does. Maybe he doesn't.
The only other thing I will say about Jimmy Kunstler in this first of a series of diaries about Jimmy Kunstler is that he often writes about the stuff for which the much troll rated scientist Fritz Haber became famous. That would be nitrogen fixation. What is nitrogen fixation? It’s the process for making ammonia out of hydrogen and air. For many millions of years, billions of years really, that process has been notoriously difficult, limiting the amount of biomass the planet could accommodate.
Many people who troll rate me don't know shit from shinola in my opinion. I couldn't care less about being troll rated, actually, except to the extent that it illustrates an important point. They couldn't care more about things that don't matter and they couldn't care less about things that don't matter. I contend that they troll rate because they either can't or won't think and they're desperate and weak and embarrassed by their weakness.
Now, as it happens, one of the people who didn't troll rate Fritz Haber, a person who considered himself a close personal friend of Fritz Haber, was in fact the pacificist/philosopher/scientist Albert Einstein. As a scientist Albert Einstein was famous for something called "thought experiments." For instance, Albert Einstein once considered the state of affairs of a person who is in an elevator standing on a scale. According to Einstein, a person standing on such a scale would not know if his measured weight derived from the mass of the planet on which the elevator sat or from the acceleration, if any, of the elevator. Since Albert Einstein is not known to have brought scales into elevators and to have quizzed the people standing on them about the source of their downward force (weight), this is a "thought of experiment." There was no measurement because the nature of the situation elucidated reality by merely imagining it. Another thought experiment that Einstein did involved a person standing on a beam of light. Obviously this is an imaginary situation as well, but Einstein got a lot of mileage for just thinking about what would happen.
One of my theses involves the fact that the anti-nuclear industry - a subset of the members of which come to my diaries to troll rate me regularly - couldn't care less about the damage caused by dangerous fossil fuels. In fact, one of my troll raters specifically said in one of my more troll rated diaries - and I paraphrase - "I am troll rating all of your diaries that say that I couldn't care less about dangerous fossil fuels." The person made this statement in lieu of demonstrating that he, she or it actually cared at all about dangerous fossil fuels. We were, I suppose, to take this meaningless declaration to be true on faith.
Um. Well...
I'll come back to this in a latter entry in this series when we get to a discussion of the troll rating of Galileo, but for now, I'd like to make like the man who overturned Galilean relativity (more or less) and do a thought experiment. After the thought experiment is complete, we can then refer to actual data available at DKos to see if the thought experiment has helped make things clearer and more precise.
First let’s contemplate an existing reality.
Mexico has a nuclear power plant. It's the Laguna Verde Nuclear Power Plant, and it has two 683 MWe reactors. (These plants are not imaginary, by the way, they are real.) Here's a report about the shit-for-brains whining and complaining that Greenpeace has to offer about this plant. Rather than shut the plant because there are actually a few Greenpeacers who pay attention to Mexican affairs - not that Greenpeace could possibly care less about poor people - the Mexicans plan to uprate their nuclear plant with new bigger turbines in 2010. Right now the plant produces about 5% of Mexico's electricity. Last year was a record year for nuclear power production in Mexico. Even after uprating it will probably still produce 5% because Mexican power consumption is likely to grow, although probably not to Denmarkian proportions.
Now for the thought experiment. Suppose there had been an act of terrorism at this nuclear plant involving (gasp) uranium. There wasn't such an event, but suppose there had been one. What would have been the reaction of the anti-nuke contingent at DailyKos? Maybe it would have been something like the bizarre show that took place when an earthquake struck Japan in the vicinity of a large nuclear complex:
Situation Grave at World's Largest Nuclear Plant.
(Frankly, I think the word "grave" should be reserved for use by serious people, but that's just my opinion. Here is the number of lives lost from the "grave" accident, not counting the people who are killed by the dangerous fossil fuel waste that is generated while the plant is being repaired: Zero.)
Wanna bet?
It would not matter if the (imaginary) terrorist attack on Mexico's nuclear plant had been thwarted either. The anti-nukes would still offer the attack, or even the thought of an attack as "proof" that nuclear power is "dangerous." Probably millions of anti-nuke web pages would appear in short order all over the internet, each referring to the other in a great circle jerk, talking about the "nuclear terrorism."
Well, there you have it. That's the thought experiment. Does anyone deny that the thought experiment seems valid?
Now for real world data.
In fact, as luck would have it, a short while ago, there was an act of energy terrorism on Mexican facilities, just 10 days ago. I was going to publish a diary on it called "Fossil Fuel Terrorists Strike Mexico" but I demurred to see if any of the people who feel compelled to troll rate me for pointing out that anti-nukes couldn't care less about dangerous fossil fuels wrote a diary about this dangerous fossil fuel terrorism in Mexico.
Let's count all of the people who claim to be offended when I say they couldn't care less about dangerous fossil fuels who wrote diaries on the dangerous fossil fuel terrorist attacks in Mexico:
Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero...
There you have it. The count is zero.
Of course, it doesn't follow that if someone doesn't write diaries on a subject that they couldn't care less about it. For instance, I never write diaries on abortion rights, but that hardly means that I don't care about abortion rights. I never write diaries about voting rights denial based on race, but that doesn't mean that I don't care about racism. On the other hand, it's not like I follow people with whom I may disagree on abortion rights around like a rabid puppy dog, troll rating their diaries either.
Even if I wasn't writing a diary on fossil fuel terrorism in Mexico myself, I was interested enough to spend time watching to see if anyone wrote a diary on the dangerous fossil fuel terrorism in Mexico. Let's count all of the diaries written about dangerous fossil fuel terrorism in Mexico on September 10, 2007.
One.
Let's count the troll rating anti-nukes who showed up in this diary to complain about how "terrorism" proves that dangerous fossil fuel energy must be banned.
Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero...
Again the count seems to be zero.
Anyway. About Fritz Haber:
The people who troll rate me in general know nothing more about me than the fact that I can see right through them. On the other hand, some of the people who troll rated Fritz Haber knew him very well.
One of the people who troll rated Fritz Haber was intimately familiar with how to measure Fritz Haber's work. She also understood how to measure Fritz Haber, probably better than any other person who knew him. She was his wife. Fritz Haber's wife, with the interesting name (in German) Clara Immerwahr - thank goodness for her it wasn't Immerkrieg - troll rated Fritz Haber by committing suicide. Dr. Immerwahr - she was the first woman to earn a PhD in chemistry from the University of Breslau - was not the sort of troll rater of the type that was clueless about things that count. This much should be said.
On the contrary Dr. Immerwahr was hyper-aware of what her husband was doing both personally and professionally. She had, in fact, translated all of his scientific work into English, and it is almost certain that she participated as a scientific collaborator in his work before the "War to End All Wars" started. Being a woman scientist in Germany in her times and in her country, Germany, was extremely unjust, a point I made when I discussed the great scientist Lise Meitner in an earlier diary, The Deformed Nucleus, Neptunium and the Rain. . When Dr. Immerwahr troll rated her husband Fritz Haber in 1915 she took his military pistol, pointed it at her own chest and pulled the trigger. The next morning her husband packed his military pistol and went off to the Russian front to supervise the first poison gas attack on human beings in history.
He apparently couldn't care less that his wife troll rated him. It didn't break his stride at all.
Creepy.
That fact that he did this creepy thing by the way did not change the chemistry of nitrogen in any significant way. It did not make iron catalysts – or the first catalyst Haber used, interestingly enough, uranium mixed with osmium - a useless for converting a mixture of hydrogen and nitrogen into ammonia. Hydrogen and nitrogen continued to be converted into ammonia by these catalysts before Dr. Immerwahr troll rated Dr. Haber and it continued to be converted into ammonia after Dr. Immerwahr troll rated Dr. Haber. Iron catalysts still convert mixtures of nitrogen and hydrogen into ammonia until this day.
The catalysts couldn’t care less if Dr. Immerwahr troll rated Fritz Haber.
The fact that troll rating Dr. Haber did not change the facts that he discovered about nitrogen, hydrogen and ammonia accounts for many people in the world having something to eat today, assuming they did have something to eat today. Troll rating Dr. Haber does not change the fact that Dr. Haber's invention accounts for the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, a dead zone as large as the state of New Jersey.
I live in New Jersey, by the way, so I have a sense of how big a dead zone that is.
In 1918, Fritz Haber - it was the same year that his country was roundly defeated in spite of the invention of poison gas war by him - was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Some people weren't thrilled about this award. They felt that Fritz Haber should be standing trial for war crimes, or, if not that, at least troll rated. Instead he received one of the important prizes a human can be awarded.
One of the further outgrowths of Fritz Haber's Nobel award work was discovered at the post war (post First World War) institute that would bear his name until 1933. This was the invention of an industrial process to make Prussic acid, also known as "hydrogen cyanide." In 1934 Fritz Haber, then 65 years old, was deported from Germany on the grounds his family was Jewish, even if he had himself converted to a religion that is not Jewish. It's time to evoke Godwin's law - I don't go there enough - and note that Fritz Haber was also troll rated by Joeseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler, neither of whom knew anything at all about Haber's work and its importance to Germany. Almost all of Haber's family, excepting his second wife and children, would later be killed by Prussic acid, the industrial chemistry of which was developed at the "Fritz Haber Institute, and which was sold in Germany under the trade name "Zyklon B" and was used as the active ingredient in the gas chambers at Auschwitz and similar places.
One of Haber's sons emigrated to the United States after escaping from Germany in the 1930's. In 1946 he shot himself, just like his mother had in 1915.
Maybe it was a protest. Maybe he was troll rating his father, much as his mother had troll rated his father. I don't know.
Troll rating...
Some people think I'm a liar. Maybe so. I say that this series of diaries is about Jimmy Kunstler, but so far I haven’t talked much about him. I'll say try to say something about Jimmy Kunstler in this first installment on Jimmy Kunstler diaries: Jimmy Kunstler thinks we're all going to die without oil.
This is part 1 of this series. Part Zero of this series is here. In part zero - and if there can be a zeroth law of thermodynamics why can't there be a zeroth part of an insufferable NNadir series on famous troll rated scientists - I said I would poke around the primary scientific literature to see what I could find out about how much of the earth's protein and nucleic acids could be attributed to industrial processes invented by the likes of Fritz Haber. I don't know that I have a great answer, but I found out some fun things that I'll share in parts, 1, 2, 3...x, however many parts we can count.
Later in this series, besides Jimmy Kunstler and the swell, great, fantastic, superdelicious Oracle at Snowmass and his great job giving companies like Rio Tinto the "environmentalist" seal of approval at the discount price of $20,000/day, I will discuss the great French chemist Grignard, who developed an industrial process for making phosgene to kill Germans who lived in trenches, and the great Chemist Sir Humphrey Davy, who discovered chlorine gas. I will also discuss the troll rating of Galileo, and do so in a particularly self serving way, as usual.
As for Grignard, for those who don’t know anything about him was also the inventor of one of the most important carbon-carbon bond forming reactions ever discovered, even to this day, reactions which probably account for most of the medicines on the market today.
All that aside, I’m not sure if Grignard ever got troll rated for his phosgene process. France, after all, won the war.
I’ll see you all later.