An interesting op-ed comparing the “Yellow journalism of Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer and the abuse of the scientific method by scientists promoting global warming.
The reality is:
over the past several decades an increasing number of scientists have shed the restraints imposed by the scientific method and begun to proclaim the truth of man-made global warming. This is a hypothesis that remains untested, makes no predictions that can be tested in the near future, and cannot offer a numerical explanation for the limited evidence to which it clings. No equations have been shown to explain the relationship between fossil-fuel emission and global temperature. The only predictions that have been made are apocalyptic, so the hypothesis has to be accepted before it can be tested.
Correct. Go on
The only evidence that can be said to support this so-called scientific consensus is the supposed correlation of historical global temperatures with historical carbon-dioxide content in the atmosphere. Even if we do not question the accuracy of our estimates of global temperatures into previous centuries, and even if we ignore the falling global temperatures over the past decade as fossil-fuel emissions have continued to increase, an honest scientist would still have to admit that the hypothesis of man-made global warming hardly rises to the level of “an assertion of what has been or would be the result of carrying out a specified observational procedure.” Global warming may or may not be “the greatest scam in history,” as it was recently called by John Coleman, a prominent meteorologist and the founder of the Weather Channel. Certainly, however, under the scientific method it does not rise to the level of an “item of physical knowledge.”
As I’ve noted before, one of the key scary aspects of the behaviour of Global Warming scientists has been the total collapse of scientific ethics in regard to reporting results.
Surely Joe Six-Pack should not be expected to monitor the findings of research physicists; if anything is to be done about this collapse of scientific standards, it must be done by the scientific community itself. Unfortunately, history has shown the inability of professional communities to police their own ranks.
And that’s the truth. One of the things that nagged me about the Republican Congress that was, was its complete inability to enforce its own laws on scientific reporting for government-paid scientists (like James Hansen) or the massive funding given to scientists who promoted global warming as a human-made global catastrophe.
Object lesson #2 in our occasional series on Wikipedia’s inability to write biographies is about American philosopher, writer and Revolutionary politician, Benjamin Franklin.
From the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, I reproduce the first few and last few paragraphs:
Franklin, Benjamin (1706–1790), natural philosopher, writer, and revolutionary politician in America, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, New England, on 6 January 1706 and baptized later that day. His parents were Josiah Franklin (1657–1745), a tallow chandler and soap maker who had emigrated from England in 1683 to practise his puritan faith, and his second wife, Abiah (1667–1752), the daughter of writeSeealsoLink(’/index/101074764/’, “Peter Folger”)Peter Folger of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. Josiah had eighteen children, seven by his first wife and eleven by his second. Benjamin was the ninth child born to Josiah and Abiah.
Early years: Boston, Philadelphia, and London, 1706–1726
Franklin had only two years of formal education. He studied at a traditional grammar school (probably in 1714–15), and at an English school during the following year. He then worked for his father, but disliked the trade. In 1718 his brother James set up a printing shop in Boston. Since Franklin loved to read and write poetry his father apprenticed him to James, and in that year the twelve-year-old Franklin signed a nine-year indenture. After reading everything in his father’s small library he borrowed books from his friends. Having purchased an odd volume of The Spectator, Franklin taught himself composition by making notes on the essays, then jumbling the notes, and later constructing them in his own words. He compared these with the originals and corrected his.
In 1721 James Franklin started his own newspaper, the New England Courant, which became America’s first witty, daring, literary, and anti-establishment journal. To Benjamin his brother’s printing shop served as a miniature republic of letters where groups of James’s friends met daily to discuss the materials they were writing for the Courant. Benjamin set the contents in type, printed and delivered the journal to the customers, and heard their comments. At sixteen he emulated his brother’s friends and wrote for the paper, in what became the first essay series in American literature, under the pseudonym Silence Dogood:
But being still a Boy, and suspecting that my Brother would object to printing any Thing of mine in his Paper if he knew it to be mine, I contriv’d to disguise my Hand and writing an anonymous Paper I put it in at Night under the Door of the Printing-House. (Autobiography, 17–18)
Between 12 June and 7 July 1722 Benjamin took charge of the Courant while his brother served a prison term for suggesting that local officials had deliberately delayed sailing out to resist pirates. After James had further offended the authorities, in January 1723, the Massachusetts general assembly narrowly agreed to prohibit him from publishing the newspaper without prior review. James defied the order, printed the Courant, and hid from the authorities between 24 January and 12 February, leaving Benjamin once more in charge. In this capacity the adolescent gave ‘our Rulers some Rubs in it’ (ibid., 19).
…………
In May 1768 Franklin, as natural philosopher, had experimented on the relationship between canal water depths and the speed of canal boats. In July of that year he devised a phonetic alphabet and corresponded in it; in the autumn he had maps of the Atlantic engraved which contained the course of the ‘river in the ocean’, the gulf stream. Franklin also supervised publication of the revised and enlarged fourth English edition of his Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1769). In August 1772 the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris elected him a foreign associate at a time when he was engaged in repeated experiments concerning the interaction of oil and water, correctly determining ‘the scale of magnitude of molecular dimensions, the first person ever to do so, but he did not recognize it’ (Tanford, 80).
And his reputation?
Reputation
During the 1730s Franklin became known as the most successful newspaperman and writer in the colonies. In the 1740s he was celebrated as Philadelphia’s most public-spirited citizen. He became the world’s best-known living scientist through his design, in 1744, of a stove more efficient than any previous one, and his proof in 1752 that lightning was electrical in nature. During the 1750s he also became the dominant Pennsylvania politician. From 1757 to 1764 and again from 1764 to 1775 he lived in England, where he was America’s spokesperson and unofficial ambassador. He was the best-known American before George Washington’s rise to prominence during the revolution. During the 1770s and 1780s he was famous as a revolutionary and then as a statesman. At his death in 1790 he was celebrated as a patriot and founding father, being the only person to sign all three fundamental documents of American statehood: the Declaration of Independence (1776), the peace treaty with Britain (1783), and the constitution of the United States (1787). His contemporaries often commented on his egalitarianism (Thomas Penn called him a ‘Tribune of the People’ in 1748; Papers, 3.186) and on his metaphysical scepticism (Condorcet thought him a Pyrrhonist). Throughout the latter part of his life he was renowned for his self-motivation. Without education he had become one of the most learned persons of his time. Without inherited money he had become wealthy. Without prospects as a young man he had become famous.
Five aspects of Franklin’s reputation endure. His standing as a public-spirited citizen has been kept alive by his Autobiography and by the institutions that he founded—among them the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society, and the University of Pennsylvania. His reputation as a scientist is confirmed by the existence of every lightning rod. The best-known period of Franklin’s life, the French years (1777–85), authenticates his position as a statesman. David Hume’s 1763 description of Franklin as a ‘Great Man of Letters’ (Papers, 10.81) and the inclusion of his writings in almost all anthologies of American literature attest to his ability as a writer. The poverty and obscurity of his family background, coupled with his later fame as a scientist, statesman, and writer, continue to make Franklin the single most famous example of a self-made man.
Posthumously three major elements have been added to his reputation: materialist, philistine, and rake. The three supposed characteristics say more about later times and the naïvety of the writers than about Franklin. The popularity of The Way to Wealth (a name later given to the preface for the Poor Richard almanac of 1758) identified Franklin with getting and saving money. This aspect of Franklin’s posthumous reputation was reinforced by Max Weber’s influential identification of him with ‘The Spirit of Capitalism’ and by Franklin’s picture on the United States $100 bill. However, instead of spending his life in the acquisition of wealth, Franklin retired aged forty-one to produce ‘something for the common Benefit of Mankind’ (Papers, 3.317). He dedicated thousands of hours to public-spirited causes without expecting or receiving any material reward. He turned down a patent for his stove design which would have made him a fortune and he offered to pay for the tea dumped into the harbour at the Boston Tea Party, though to have done so would have impoverished him. Few men of any time were as idealistic as Franklin.
Arising in great part because of Franklin’s identification with materialism, but also because he belonged to no religious sect, the idea of Franklin as philistine, without idealism or spirituality, has been presented most forcefully in D. H. Lawrence’s characterization in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). Lawrence, like some other critics, identified Franklin as the embodiment of an acquisitive American culture. But, again, such judgements are misleading. Franklin wrote more about religion and virtue than any other colonial American layman. He contributed money to every religious society of Philadelphia. He devoted his time and money to more idealistic causes throughout his life than almost any of his contemporaries. Even in his will he tried to help the young artisans of Boston and Philadelphia.
Finally comparatively frank details of his interest in sex in the Autobiography, the knowledge that he had an illegitimate son, and a number of his risqué writings, such as ‘Old mistresses’ apologue’ and ‘The Elysian Fields’ have contributed to the idea of Franklin as a womanizer, a view that became increasingly popular during the twentieth century. But after he married Deborah Read, at the age of twenty-four, there is no evidence whatever that he had any other sexual relations. His affectionate lifelong relationships with several women in America, England, and France during his mature years bespeak, in many cases, delightful flirtation and, in all cases, devoted friendship.
Franklin’s reputation during his own lifetime was well founded. Besides dozens of general biographies numerous books are devoted to various aspects of Franklin—as businessman, economist, printer, postmaster, philosopher, politician, scientist, theologian, statesman, writer, private citizen, friend—and to numerous specialized topics within these and other general subjects. Franklin’s great ability and drive were exceeded only by his interests and achievements. Every study of Franklin must be selective and none can do him justice.
Perhaps Franklin would have wished to be remembered for his concern for the ‘common Good of Mankind’ (Papers, 9.229). He wanted to become an amicus humani generis. Numerous contemporaries thought he realized that ambition (Edmund Burke called him the ‘friend to mankind’; Correspondence, 4.419) . When thanked for aiding a stranger Franklin replied, on 6 June 1753: ‘the only Thanks I should desire is, that you would always be equally ready to serve any other Person that may need your Assistance, and so let good Offices go round, for Mankind are all of a Family’ (Papers, 4.504). Near the end of his life he wrote, ‘God grant, that not only the Love of Liberty, but a thorough Knowledge of the Rights of Man, may pervade all the Nations of the Earth, so that a Philosopher may set his Foot anywhere on its Surface, and say, “This is my Country”’ (Writings, ed. Smyth, 10.72).
J. A. Leo Lemay
Now compare writing like that to Wikipedia’s version.
Or better still, try to find all of the sentences in the Wikipedia biography which have been plagiarized from the Oxford DNB
Example
Oxford DNB:
While Franklin was at sea the battles of Lexington and Concord (17 and 18 April 1775) started the War of American Independence. He arrived at Philadelphia on 5 May and on the following day the Pennsylvania assembly unanimously chose him as a delegate to the second continental congress.
Wikipedia:
By the time Franklin arrived in Philadelphia on May 5, the American Revolution had begun with fighting at Lexington and Concord. The New England militia had trapped the main British army in Boston. The Pennsylvania Assembly unanimously chose Franklin as their delegate to the Second Continental Congress.
Spooky, eh?
These articles could be subtitled “I knew I was right all along” and “since when did the Conservatives start producing recognizably useful and voter friendly policies?”
Who would have guessed that in 2008, a pledge to give British people flushing toilets would be a shock vote winner?
The Conservatives this week promised to scrap the Government’s plans for 15 “eco towns” which will potentially house 100,000 people. These have been heralded as a new era in design, but you need to take a closer look at both the theory and practice to see the full, grim picture.
But enough of me.
On with the fantastic frigid fun places that are the Labour government’s new “eco-towns”. Andrew Orlowski of “The Register” shows what fun places they will be:
“What are the responsibilities we each must share in return for the freedoms we enjoy?” asked Town and Country Planning Association chief David Lock last year when introducing a report. Lock and his quango are advising the Government on the initiative. What does he mean? He means freedoms you previously enjoyed have been clawed back.
Almost every aspect of life in the eco towns is minutely regulated. The streets are too small to drive around, and if you must drive the mandatory speed limit is 15mph. Planners are particularly excited about installing eco toilets that don’t flush. Because flushing is “the worst thing ever devised by modern man,” (according to one advocate), compost toilets may be mandatory. You won’t have a choice.
We took a look at one candidate loo, and the description gives us a whiff of this fragrant, low carbon future:
“The dry fecal matter is captured by a built-in teflon-coated bowl with a turning mechanism and is ‘flushed’ into wheeled bins in the buildings’ basements. ‘Flushing’ uses sawdust, dispensed from the back of the toilet, instead of water.”
Lovely.
I can hardly wait. We are obviously behind such Green propagandists luminaries like George Monbiot who put their names down first when eco-towns were first planned.
The Times describes more life in the eco-towns:
Motorists living in Gordon Brown’s futuristic green communities face fines for driving their cars out of town, under radical proposals being drawn up by ministers, The Times has learnt.
Residents of the largely pedestrianised eco-towns may also be expected to park their cars at the outskirts and walk or cycle to their homes, up to ten minutes away.
Oh the joy.
The proposals could include a fee for a permanent car space at the edge of town, charges for driving out at peak congestion times, or penalties for taking a car out of town above a set number of agreed journeys.
Yep. Free, democratic society in action. Better stay in the town then - or if you’re poor, you have no choice.
Town plans will differ, but most shops, schools and GP surgeries will be within walking or cycling distance. People usually reliant on cars will have a far more difficult journey — walking to the edge of towns to get their car, driving it back to pick up shopping, with few parking spaces available, unloading at home and then taking the car back to the edge.
I know. You’re thinking “where can I sign up for this green utopia?”
Other “eco-measures” include plans to install underground vacuum recycling, where residents have chutes for different types of waste, which is then automatically taken to a recyling centre on site. Solar panels and wind turbines will be used for power, as well as biomass boilers, fuelled by wood chips from the surrounding forests. Electric vehicles charged from shops and schools would also be encouraged.
Underground vacuum recycling? And you thought your town sucked…
Here is the brave new low-carbon world in bullet points:
Glimpse of future
— Penalties for cars driving out of eco-towns in peak times and exceeding journey limits
— Electronic noticeboards in homes to give bus times and locations
— Wood from local forests will be used to fuel biomass boilers
— Recycled waste will be processed underground after being sorted in household chutes
— Residents with electric cars will be able to charge their vehicles in shops and schools
It’s a Soviet planner’s wet dream only with even fewer employment opportunities. What brutalism did to city architecture, so eco-towns will do to town planning for decades to come.
It’s amazing to me that any progressive party, let alone one in power, would actually envisage such an appalling future, but then I live in interesting times, don’t I?
This is a little late as the Glastonbury festival has finished and the Wimbledon tennis tournament is still ongoing:
=================================================================================
News Release for 00.00hrs Tues 3rd June
For further information contact Piers Corbyn office above or +447958713320 / +44 7507426264
Weather Action June 2008 Forecast Media summary Statement (Available 3rd June2008 at 00:00hrs)
Piers Corbyn of WeatherAction Long range forecasters today warned that WeatherAction’s June forecast is predicting exceptional deluges, thunder and floods around the end of June and start of July and specifically that ‘Glastonbury festival & Wimbledon Tennis are likely to be hit by exceptional deluges of torrential rain’. This warning has a high (85%) confidence and is part of WeatherAction’s full forecast for this June which spells out the timing and region detail of weather through the month. Piers said “We are again experiencing stark changes and extreme weather events triggered by the high sensitivity of magnetic and particle links between the sun and the earth during this general period of transition between an odd solar cycle - 23 - and even cycle 24″.
Fuller information via www.weatheraction.com
16 June 2008
We received a petition asking:
“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Refuse any application submitted by the ‘Church’ of Scientology for recognition as a Religious Organisation.”
Details of Petition:
“Without compromise to freedom of thought or expression, the teachings and beliefs of Scientology, Dianetics and science-fiction writer L Ron Hubbard must never be legally be accepted as a religion - regardless of any recent EU decision to the contrary. We consider the ‘Church’ of Scientology is an exclusive business venture that by prohibiting access to scientifically-proven psychiatric therapy and medicine is effectively enslaving its believers.”
Well the petition is flawed, since Scientology is self-help business enterprise which hides behind a facade of religious symbolism. Or, if you like, a religious belief that has an extremely strong commercial function.
Gordon Brown replies thus:
In our approach to religious groups, the Government must seek to balance its responsibility to protect vulnerable individuals with the UK’s long held commitment to freedom of worship and belief.
The Government does not consider that it would be feasible or appropriate to introduce specific legislation or regulation of religious groups, their activities or their beliefs. There would be considerable difficulty in drawing up legislation in a way that did not interfere with the individual’s right to choose their beliefs and lifestyles so long as they do no harm to others. There is also no obvious way in which legislation could deal with cases where adults participate in activities of religious organisations entirely voluntarily.
`
I’ve no idea where the UK’s “long held commitment to freedom of worship and belief” comes from. Any serious study of British history would show the polar opposite. Many hundreds of thousands or millions of people have been killed or persecuted by the UK state down the centuries for their religious beliefs.
But the Prime Minister is right to refuse the petition because to accept it would be an imposition on other religious beliefs in the UK - for example, Christian Scientists abjure nearly all forms of modern medicine as part of their belief system - as do some fundamentalist Christian sects.
The reference to refusing “scientifically-proven psychiatric therapy and medicine is effectively enslaving its believers” is a similar poor argument. Are people who follow Scientology or similar belief systems being forced against their will to refuse modern medicine?
Nevertheless the problem of Scientology is really the problem of the extraordinary privileges given to religious beliefs in modern, secularized societies. Just imagine if religions were treated just like any other money-making enterprise, forced to actually prove that their beliefs were actually true or be sued for false advertising….
Just a note as to where I found it:
During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas–which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn’t work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked–or very little of it did.
But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFO’s, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I’ve concluded that it’s not a scientific world.
Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I’m overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it’s a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn’t realize how MUCH there was.
and on the original cargo cult:
I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas–he’s the controller–and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they’re missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school–we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty–a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid–not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked–to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Well Piers did forecast a hurricane would form between the 18th and 22nd June, and as we can see from this Hurricane and Storm Tracking site, there are no storms at all.
Nada, zip, zilch.
So my verdict on Piers’ first hurricane prediction is: FALSE
Just a note about a review of the life of Buckminster Fuller, geodesic domes and all, in the latest edition of the New Yorker.
A choice quote:
Fuller’s schemes often had the hallucinatory quality associated with science fiction (or mental hospitals). It concerned him not in the least that things had always been done a certain way in the past. In addition to flying cars, he imagined mass-produced bathrooms that could be installed like refrigerators; underwater settlements that would be restocked by submarine; and floating communities that, along with all their inhabitants, would hover among the clouds. Most famously, he dreamed up the geodesic dome. “If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top . . . that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver,” Fuller once wrote. “But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings.” Fuller may have spent his life inventing things, but he claimed that he was not particularly interested in inventions. He called himself a “comprehensive, anticipatory design scientist”—a “comprehensivist,” for short—and believed that his task was to innovate in such a way as to benefit the greatest number of people using the least amount of resources. “My objective was humanity’s comprehensive success in the universe” is how he once put it. “I could have ended up with a pair of flying slippers.”
Fuller’s career is the subject of a new exhibition, “Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe,” which opens later this month at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibition traces the long, loopy arc of his career from early doodlings to plans he drew up shortly before his death, twenty-five years ago this summer. It will feature studies for several of his geodesic domes and the only surviving Dymaxion Vehicle. By staging the retrospective, the Whitney raises—or, really, one should say, re-raises—the question of Fuller’s relevance. Was he an important cultural figure because he produced inventions of practical value or because he didn’t?
An interesting character, but more crackpot than visionary genius, I’d say.
Life’s pretty exciting these days when you’re a climate researcher, a lobbyist or an environmental activist. There’s a neverending schedule of conferences on climate change around the world to attend.
It’s a shame that very little science actually goes on at these conferences. Just lots and lots of shoulder-rubbing with politicians, scientists, writers, activists and the press. Especially press, because you can never have too much publicity.
As Bob Carter reports(pdf) on three such conferences held in Australia and New Zealand:
The three conferences shared the features of widespread pre-meeting publicity, and of sponsorship by major science organisations (CSIRO, Bureau of Meteorology, Royal Society of New Zealand), government departments (governments of Victoria, South Australia and New Zealand, foreign embassies (U.K., Holland), Greenhouse organisations and lobby groups (Australian Greenhouse Office, Greenpeace, World Wide Fund for Nature, Pew Center for Climate Change), and a wide range of companies and business organizations.
Press coverage before and during each meeting often gave the impression that the science of climate change was to be the focus, but in fact the conferences were dominantly concerned with greenhouse politics and governance, with a special emphasis on the development of presumed environmental-good “command and control” measures such as carbon taxes. As the organizer of the Wellington meeting noted, “This is a policy conference, not a science congress or a diplomatic negotiation”.
I present here an analysis of the face that was presented to the public by the Wellington conference, Climate Change and Governance, hereafter often called simply the climate conference. The conclusions that I draw are, however, applicable also to the Melbourne and Adelaide meetings and to others of like kind. I assess the intentions of the Wellington conference organizers, the degree to which the general and policy discussions were informed by an adequate understanding of the science of climate change, the role played by the media in informing the public, and assess the outcomes. Troublesome ethical issues emerge, the most important of which include the role in society of scientific organizations and universities, and the way in which government-employed and other scientists are today constrained in the public comment that they can make on controversial issues of the day. Another major concern is the way in which scientific results are now routinely deployed into the public domain with a clear greenhouse propaganda intent.
That’s problem with being a skeptic - I just don’t get out enough.
I note this article by Lawrence Solomon only because I, like most people, assumed that if we in Western countries were as nuclear-powered as France, then most of our problems with power generation would be solved (and if you think that carbon emission is a problem, that as well).
But I was wrong. Dead wrong.
“If France can produce 80% of its electricity with nuclear power, why can’t we?,” asks U.S. presidential candidate John McCain. Nuclear power is a cornerstone of Senator McCain’s plan to combat climate change, which he is unveiling this week.
McCain thinks he is asking a simple rhetorical question. As it turns out, he is not. His question is technical, with an answer that will surprise him and most Americans. Nuclear reactors cannot possibly meet 80% of America’s power needs — or those of any country whose power market dominates its region — because of limitations in nuclear technology. McCain needs to find another miracle energy solution, or abandon his vow to drastically cut back carbon dioxide emissions.
Unlike other forms of power generation, nuclear reactors are designed to run flat-out, 24/7 — they can’t crank up their output at times of high demand or ease up when demand slows. This limitation generally consigns nuclear power to meeting a power system’s minimum power needs — the amount of power needed in the dead of night, when most industry and most people are asleep, and the value of power is low. At other times of the day and night, when power demands rise and the price of power is high, society calls on the more flexible forms of generation — coal, gas, oil and hydro-electricity among them — to meet its additional higher-value needs.
If a country produces more nuclear power than it needs in the dead of night, it must export that low-value, off-peak power. This is what France does. It sells its nuclear surplus to its European Union neighbours, a market of 700 million people. That large market — more than 10 times France’s population — is able to soak up most of France’s surplus off-peak power.
The U.S. is not surrounded, as is France, by far more populous neighbours. Just the opposite: The U.S. dominates the North American market. If 80% of U.S. needs were met by nuclear reactors, as Senator McCain desires, America’s off-peak surplus would have no market, even if the power were given away. Countries highly reliant on nuclear power, in effect, are in turn reliant on having large non-nuclear-reliant countries as neighbours. If France’s neighbours had power systems dominated by nuclear power, they too would be trying to export off-peak power and France would have no one to whom it could offload its surplus power. In fact, even with the mammoth EU market to tap into, France must shut down some of its reactors some weekends because no one can use its surplus. In effect, France can’t even give the stuff away.Not only does France export vast quantities of its low-value power (it is the EU’s biggest exporter by far), France meanwhile must import high-value peak power from its neighbours. This arrangement is so financially ruinous that France in 2006 decided to resurrect its obsolete oil-fired power stations, one of which dates back to 1968.
Now read on
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