My grandmother - who was the only person who ever loved my murdered grandfather - had this to say about her husband who died almost 50 years before she did: "He was a nice man until he got that silver plate in his head during the war. It made him crazy."
Whatever.
When they found my grandfather's body floating in the East River with a large number of stab wounds, the cops asked my father to come down to the morgue to identify his old man. I have no idea how the cops knew that my father was related to my grandfather, but apparently they did. My father told me that his father still had the worms and eels in his flesh that had been eating him while his body was floating. He had been in the river apparently for some time. It's not like anybody was missing him. "That's him," my father told the cops and then went home to tell my grandmother that her husband had been found dead, at last.
My grandmother apparently was really upset about all of this - especially because she was so poor that there was no way she could pay for a funeral, and like I said, for some reason that mystified everyone, she loved her husband. For a while it looked like the old drunk was going to end up in Potter's field which is probably what he deserved. Then, maybe because my Grandmother seemed so distraught, someone thought to contact the British embassy and find out if as a virtue of his war service, the British army would pay for the funeral. A surprising thing happened, my father told me. Not only did the British army pay for a funeral, but they paid for a grand funeral. Members of the Black Watch came, kilts, tam o' shanters, bagpipes and no underwear and all, and a huge slow moving assemblage marched through the streets of Brooklyn behind the horse drawn hearse carrying the Union Jack draped coffin. Anthems and hymns were sung, salutes fired, and the coffin was lowered into a plot of ground to which the soil of Scotland had been transported and mixed. It would seem that the British government thought my grandfather was a hero.
I'm not sure about this, because my father has been dead for more than a decade and I can't ask him, but I suspect that the funeral was the only time in my father's life that he felt some pride in my grandfather. The story of the funeral was one of only two positive things my father told me about my grandfather. I'll keep the other one to myself.
I don't care what you've been through, silver plate in the head or no silver plate in the head. No man who beats his wife and children in a drunken rage at the past, even if the past includes being shot and gassed, is a hero. You suck it up if you want to be a father, just like my father did, just like I have to do sometimes.
One time I took my aunt out to dinner in a nice restaurant and I worked up the courage to ask a question about my grandfather because I was curious. My aunt was in her eighties when this happened. When I asked her to tell me about her father, my grandfather, she started cursing like a sailor and that was the first and last time I ever heard her curse.
In 1914, my grandfather abandoned my grandmother and my aunt in Brooklyn and went off to Canada to enlist in the Black Watch. I may have the only extant pictures of my grandfather, including one with him sitting with a whole bunch of men in military uniforms. My father told me that he thought that all the men in the picture were my great uncles and the picture was taken in 1914. My father said that he believed that this was the last time the brothers all gathered together, just before shipping out to France and Belgium. I don't know anything more about any of these men and now there's no one to ask. Maybe some of them were killed in the war. Probably. Retrospectively we can say that the odds weren't good for a 1914 soldier to survive until 1918.
The Black Watch fought in Flanders where, in 1915, the Germans, working under the supervision of Fritz Haber, launched cylinders of chlorine gas at the opposing soldiers, killing them, blinding them, burning them, disabling them. Later everyone switched to phosgene - 85% of the chemical warfare victims died from phosgene - and then to mustard gas. In 2007 there are places in Belgium where if you dig, you are in danger of exploding a live shell of phosgene, chlorine or mustard gas. No man's land still exists.
When my grandfather came back to my grandmother - and God knows why he came back - my aunt was 15. My aunt had no idea who her father was. All that my aunt knew is that every time that guy showed up, my grandmother got pregnant and then beaten. She hated seeing her father. There were nine pregnancies and four live births, my uncle, my father, and an aunt who I never met because she died at the age of five because my grandmother, a single mother with four kids, couldn't afford medical care of any kind for her children. My aunt got married at 16 to a wonderful man, a milk truck driver, who helped her to raise her infant brothers and sisters. That was my uncle Charlie. Man, did my father love my Uncle Charlie. Uncle Charlie taught my father to be a man and a good man too. Sometimes Uncle Charlie would have to fight my grandfather to protect my father and my uncle and my grandmother and my aunts from one of his drunken rages. Uncle Charlie was tough and sweet at the same time. When I got to know my Uncle Charlie, - it was later in my life because my Uncle Charlie moved to California - I grew to love him too.
Anyway.
Until she died, my grandmother insisted it was the war that made my grandfather "crazy." Before that he was a nice man, she claimed. You know something, when I reflect on this, I feel like that war, which ended 89 years ago, is still with me, that it's in my blood and in my heart. It's a part of me that explains something about who I am.
This is the third installment in my troll ratable series examining on troll rated scientists, troll rated journalists, and troll rated Walmart/Rio Tinto/Royal Dutch Shell/Arctic Diamond mine apologists involved in the issues of peak oil, nitrogen fixation, carbon dioxide from dangerous fossil fuel waste and the bizarre concept of counting using something called numbers. The zeroth installment can be found here. The second installment, part 1, is still collecting, as I write, troll ratings from people who couldn't care less about climate change - at least in my opinion - because they can't stand to look at the real numbers involved in climate change. Later in this series, maybe I'll go take a look at the troll raters to see if they ever write serious energy and environment diaries, diaries that mention the dangerous fossil fuel waste and say something more than "Climate change is bad." Of course climate change is bad, and thus it is important to be realistic and sober and serious when one addresses it, which is why I write diaries, to try to convince people of that.
Troll rating...
Part I of this troll ratable series talked a lot about the troll rated scientist Fritz Haber. On April 22, 1915, in Flanders, where the Black Watch fought, Fritz Haber supervised the launching of 150 tons of chlorine gas at the French and British lines in the Ypres salient. I have no idea if my grandfather was on the field that day, but I still despise and troll rate my grandfather, even though I never met him, just as my contemptuous troll raters have never met me. Maybe Fritz Haber effected my family in a personal way, maybe not. I'll never know. There's no one to ask.
Here's a discussion of some behind the scenes stuff from that day.
It's worth noting that I would not exist except that my troll rated grandfather showed up and went through one of his impregnation and beating cycles, especially because the beating part proved not to be so bad as to cause my grandmother to lose the baby, my father. Similarly as I've said elsewhere, a fair portion of humanity, and indeed a fair portion of the protein now found on earth, wouldn't exist without troll rated Fritz Haber's work.
Life is ironic, no?
Haber's chemistry is still having ambiguous effects. For instance, according to a report from the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Nobel Prize winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen is about to publish a paper claiming that biofuels will make climate change worse, not better. The article that is available on line is called Biofuels could boost global warming, finds study. I'll pick up Crutzen's paper when I can, and maybe I'll write a diary about it.
Greenpeace - an organization I frequently troll rate mostly of its anti-nuke pabulum but also because of its peens to innumeracy, including "percent talk" (described in part I) - wants you to believe that biofuels are wonderful things with no drawbacks. No amount of science will change Greenpeace's opinion by the way. They couldn't care less about science over there, just like they couldn't care less about the fact that climate change is happening now and will not start in 2050.
Crutzen is apparently going to claim that the release of nitrous oxide from the fertilizers used to grow biofuels will actually be worse than any carbon dioxide absorbed by the plants that will become biofuels suitable for Mercedes, Audis, BMW's, Peugeots, and Chevrolets. Maybe he's right. I don't know. He's a smart guy. He won the Nobel Prize. The fertilizers in any case will depend on Fritz Haber's chemistry, and the ammonia that Haber's chemistry produces ends up after several biotransformations as nitrous oxide which lingers for a long time in the atmosphere. Nitrous oxide is laughing gas.
Life is ironic, no?
Crutzen has a special connection to agricultural chemistry by the way, and it's personal rather than professional. In 1944, when he was eleven years old, he almost starved to death. So he knows about starvation. His country had been overrun by the country of his fellow Nobel Laureate, Fritz Haber. As before, the Germans were being vicious in the Low Countries, but by that time, Haber had been deported from Germany for being Jewish and had been dead for ten years. Crutzen, though is unusual among chemistry Nobel Laureates inasmuch as he had no formal training either in chemistry or physics. He just sort of picked it all up while hanging around.
I would never dream of troll rating Paul Crutzen by the way. He seems like a good and honest man as well as a great scientist and a great citizen of the world. His work on ozone atmospheric chemistry may have saved the world in fact, starting the conversation that leads to the Montreal Protocol on chlorofluorocarbons.
Some refrigeration companies may have troll rated Paul Crutzen in the 1980's though. I don't know. They made a lot of noise about how CFC's could never be replaced and then they were replaced. Things might have gone differently today, of course. Rather than go through the difficult task of changing the way things are done, the refrigeration companies in the 2000's might have been able to hire the Oracle at Snowmass for $20,000/day to give them the "environmental" stamp of approval and then went on doing whatever the hell they pleased.
Just ask Walmart. Or Rio Tinto. Or Royal Dutch Shell. Twenty thousand dollars a day is almost nothing, especially if you're running a diamond mine in the arctic.
Of course, making offerings to the Oracle at Snowmass does very little to change numbers, like ppm of carbon dioxide, or ppb of nitrous oxide in the atmosphere, etc, although it does make for a nice misleading show that diverts attention from the fact that those making the offerings to the oracle couldn't actually care less about physical outcomes. I mean, it's not like Walmart is going to take steps against the car culture. That would be more suicidal than Clara Immerwahr's troll rating of her husband, Fritz Haber. Walmart isn't in the suicide business. They're in the "sell stuff from China, the Solomons and Honduras" business.
Later in this series that is all about Jimmy Kunstler and the Oracle and the way they troll rate each other, we're going to take a look at the Oracle's numbers for the Walmart advertising campaign put together by the Oracle and see what the effect of
the efficiency increase on Walmart's 6,800 trucks means to our car culture. The photograph in this link is pretty badly photoshopped in my opinion. At $20,000/day, even if its chicken feed, I would insist on better graphics for my ad campaign.
If you wonder whose side I'm going to come down in the troll rating war between the Oracle and Jimmy, I'm with Jimmy - I think that's pretty clear - although that doesn't mean I'm with Jimmy on everything he says. On the other hand I believe that 99% of what the Oracle says is pure nonsense or even antisense.
I keep talking about numbers so maybe I should take a break from troll rating the Oracle to produce some numbers.
A lot of people who troll rate me for being pro-nuclear, and when confronted with my claim that they couldn't care less about dangerous fossil fuels because the never apply the same criteria to dangerous fossil fuels that they apply to nuclear, not with respect to waste, not with respect to war, not with respect to terrorism, not with respect to loss of life from accidents, not with respect to mining, not with respect to anything, even though nuclear energy is clearly superior to dangerous fossil fuels on all of these scores, they go fly off into big rants about how they love solar energy, as if this were the equivalent of caring about dangerous fossil fuels. It's not even close.
It happens that solar electricity is effectively useless - it doesn't count really - for preventing the use of dangerous fossil fuels.
How can I say this? Troll ratable exajoule counting, that's how.
The EIA has updated its files on international energy consumption, and world energy consumption is now 488 exajoules, up 3% from the 470 exajoules of energy consumed on this planet in 2004. Four hundred and fifty exajoules, roughly come from dangerous fossil fuels. Of the 40 exajoules that do not come from dangerous fossil fuels, less than 5 of them come from non-hydro renewable energy. Of the less than 5 exajoules that come from renewable energy not one, not one, not one comes from solar electricity. NOT. ONE.
Thus if you are talking about dangerous fossil fuel waste - I've written so many diaries here on the subject of dangerous fossil fuel waste that I can't begin to count them - and some one responds by producing some regurgitated links from solar energy marketing hype web sites, that person is effectively saying is that they couldn't care less about dangerous fossil fuels, inasmuch as they can't be bothered to grasp the scale of the problem. In the context of modern times, talk about solar energy is the moral equivalent of denial.
Here, for instance, is a pretty detailed accounting of the sources of energy in the United States: Every single damn bit of energy broken down from 2000-2006.
An exajoule (the SI unit) is 1.055 exajoules and this table uses the unfortunate English unit the Quad (quadrillion BTU), but the facts are nonetheless clear. Thus the US uses about 105 exajoules of energy. Conveniently, the number of Quads of energy used by the United States is about 100 (about a fifth of the planet's energy for about a 20th of the population) and so the actual numbers in Quads correspond roughly, by coincidence, to "percent." At the risk of sounding like someone who sounds like he gets all of his or her energy information from the Greenpeace website, I will now engage in some "percent talk.
The 15% of US energy consumption that do not have dangerous fossil fuel sources are described in exhaustive detail in the link here. It's about time for the EIA to do this. For too long the Energy Information Agency has been lumping all that really, really, really, really, cool stuff (solar, wind, geothermal blah, blah, blah) under the rubric of "nonhydro renewable fuels. Now we can see in detail how much of the "non hydro renewable" energy is solar or geothermal or biomass etc. (Be careful if you're following at home to recognize that the "biomass" number and "renewable" entries are sums of the breakdowns below them in this table.) Even better, the figures are for primary energy, so no corrections need be applied to account for the fact that hydro is extremely thermodynamically efficient compared to say coal, gas, nuclear or petroleum in producing work, where I am using the word "work" in the thermodynamic sense. Effectively, the "work" is electricity in most cases, the exception being the use of things like ethanol and biodiesel in internal combustion engines. We can ignore "work" by focusing on primary energy.
I have arranged the following climate change free forms of energy in order of importance, including garbage (waste) in this climate change free category even though a portion of the garbage, (the plastic portion) is actually derived from dangerous fossil fuels and is, in fact, dangerous fossil fuel waste.
I have taken the time to do something called "calculation" using something called "math" to further analyze these figures. Let's take the percentages of the 15 percent of climate change gas free forms of energy by normalizing the renewable energy portion. The figures in parentheses are the figures for all energy (not normalized for renewables), and thus include the dangerous fossil fuels about which Oracle at Snowmass couldn't care less.
Nuclear: 54.5% (8.2%)
Conventional Hydro: 19.2% (2.9%)
Wood: 14.0% (2.1%)
Other biofuels like, and including, ethanol: 5% (0.7%)
Garbage burning (waste): 2.7% (0.4%)
Geothermal: 2.3% (0.3%)
Wind: 1.7% (0.3%)
Solar: 0.4% (0.07%)
There you have it, the eight forms of energy that do not depend on dangerous fossil fuels to operate. The last seven of them combined do not equal the first. Solar energy - a subject my troll raters talk about a lot - is trivial even in comparison to other forms of renewable energy.
These numbers should be worth a few good troll rates, no?
From my perspective, no one should oppose any of these forms of climate change gas free energy, but it is also prudent and wise to recognize the limits of each.
The Oracle at Snowmass, though, opposes the largest, by far, form of global climate change free energy there is. With this in mind, I feel completely justified in asserting that the Oracle couldn't care less about dangerous fossil fuel waste since the Oracle opposes the largest and most effective alternative to it.
Of course, the Oracle would like to talk (and what more could it be than lip service) about the three smallest forms of climate change gas free energy and then add the astounding claim that this is evidence that he gives a shit while he's busy collecting $20,000/day from Walmart.
Excuse me?
Yeah right.
As it happens, the Oracle has done everything in his power to attempt to destroy the world's largest form of climate change gas free energy, while doing nothing about the car culture other than to suggest ridiculous band-aids like the hydrogen HYPErcar SUV. Thus we have the world's largest climate change gas free energy in spite of the oracle.
I will return in subsequent installments in this series to the issue of the Oracle, and also I will ultimately spend some time about the troll rated scientist Galileo and what effect the troll rating of Galileo had on planetary motion. Of course I will also spend some time talking about Jimmy Kunstler and peak oil and of course, Jimmy's troll rating of the Oracle and the Oracle's troll rating of Jimmy.
I would also like to go through some telling passages from Daniel Charles' biography of Fritz Haber, Mastermind, Harper Collins, NY, 2005. When I do this, I would like to turn once again to the case of Haber's first wife, Clara Immerwahr, her life and death as I did in the second installment of this series, Part 1. Probably in this connection I will talk a little about my mother's funeral and my neighbor who showed up drunk as a skunk to tell me all about women he hoped to screw someday. I hear a lot of bizarre things about grief. Someone, for instance, just told me that I needed to show more grief over the death of Clara Immerwahr - whose last name could be translated as "always true" - a beautiful woman of high principle who I didn't know as well as a pile of saw dust and who would have turned 137 this past June if only she'd lived. It is well that we should discuss grief - sanctimonious and otherwise - because I am quite sure we are about to experience some grief collectively as a species.
Since funerals and grief are good things to understand, I think I'll keep on discussing them in this series - it seems appropriate. I just have to tell you about my Grandmother's funeral, and even better, my grandmother at my great-grandmother's funeral. My great-grandmother, if she had lived, would be turning 150 soon. She was, in fact, a contemporary of Clara Immerwahr. My grandmother, like Clara Immerwahr, spoke both German and English with German being the primary language. The only phrase in Geramn that my father knew was one his grandmother taught him. "Du bis veruckt in dem kopf." I hear similar expressions in English from people who tell me that I must be crazy to insist that dangerous fossil fuel waste - which kills millions of people every year - is not much of a problem while there is a big problem with so called "dangerous nuclear waste," which has killed zero people.
Yeah right. I'm crazy.
For the time being, I think I'll take a break and collect some troll rates.
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