Where is your Green God now?

Well, May is here, and with it the promise of… snow?

It wouldn’t be the first time. Scotland has had snow in May before and will again. It’s no coincidence that ‘Ne’er cast a clout till May is out’ is a common phrase in Scotland. It means, to put it into Mrs. Queen’s English, don’t be in a hurry to put your winter clothes in storage before the end of May.

In the last few years we have had a surprise frost in the middle of August. Usually just one night, maybe two, but it does happen. It makes a bit of a mess.

I’ve been called a ‘climate change denier’ because I agree with David Bellamy. ‘Man made climate change’ and all this ‘carbon’ stuff, well it’s all bollocks, innit?

Changing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by adding a few parts per million has only one effect. Plants grow faster. Every greenhouse operator, every biologist who hasn’t been suckered in to the scam, knows this. Carbon dioxide really doesn’t do anything else. It is not a ‘greenhouse gas’ beyond its use in actual greenhouses to make plants grow faster. Yes, greenhouse farmers really do this. You can achieve a temporary boost in your own small greenhouse by dropping a couple of fizzy headache pills in water and closing the vents and doors. It won’t be much of an increase and won’t last long but we are talking parts per million here so it’ll have an effect.

This makes me a ‘climate change denier’ even though I fully understand that the climate changes all the time. Sometimes dramatically, as it’s about to. It has nothing to do with human activity, nothing to do with carbon dioxide, it’s not getting warmer and we can’t do a damn thing to stop it. Adapt or die.

Of course, most people are adapting in the wrong direction so they’ll all be dead soon. China and India are building more coal fired power stations because they see what’s really coming. I think I’d choose moving to India over China. It’s further south, less totalitarian and I really like curries.

When I say rapid change is ‘coming’, I really mean ‘it’s here’. While Corbyn jumps on the global warming bandwagon, the last wheel is about to come off.

The North Wind doth blow, and we shall have snow. Another old saying. Here it comes.

I doubt there’ll be very much snow in most places but considering that snow was declared ‘a rare event that future children will never see’ by the year 2000, and considering that we are now in May and should be entering summer, if you are still being suckered in by ‘man-made global warming’ then good luck to you. Prepare to die.

We are about to see a big push for windmills and solar power and a shutdown of every reliable power source. Houses built with no chimneys have no alternative heating arrangements. Gas boilers are being banned, oil prices will be way out of reach for most of us and electricity will be available occasionally. If you don’t have a chimney, you’d better have a really high metabolism.

You see, this is a ‘climate emergency’ so you all have to die to keep the ideology pure. You have to love socialism, right? Well you have to or they shoot you in the back of the head but this time they have hit upon a much more efficient way to kill millions. They’ll let the cold finish them off. Icicles are cheaper than bullets.

Didn’t anyone question the likes of David Attenborough’s huge support for ‘climate action’? We must do all these silly things and shut down everything to save ourselves, coming from the man who has declared he wants somehting like 90% of the human population removed from the planet. He will achieve the latter because of those who believe the former.

Africa is being cleared. People are being sent north to die in the coming cold, a cold they will never have experienced before. Some of us northern people are used to it, some of us remember waking to ice on the inside of the windows and a house that had no need of a refrigerator. Some of us remember how to store lake and river ice through the summer with no machinery at all. Technically that’s even before my time but I do know how it’s done.

Until someone got out of bed and lit the fire in the living room there was no warm place to be. That was inside the house. You had to rotate yourself because the part facing the fire was warm while the part facing away from the fire was cold. Think I’m joking, young people? You’ll find out. If you live where you can have a fire. If not, well, basically, you’re fucked.

I have no sympathy for the young. They have been blocking roads and lying on the floor in Waitrose (they wouldn’t be seen even genuinely dead in Poundstretcher of course) to make the world cooler and it’s been cooling for the last two decades. This is about to accelerate.

Why? Why am I so confident that winter is coming to stay awhile?

Astrophysics is not like climate science. The cycles of the sun are entirely predictable and have been prediced way in advance of this moment. The problem was that those predicting those solar cycles – if they wanted to keep their careers – had to add the caveats that ‘warming will be slowed’ or something like that to their papers. Read the papers without the caveats and what they tell you is that we have just entered the start of a Grand Solar Minimum.

Sunspot activity is dropping very fast. The sun is going quiet. There will be less solar wind keeping cosmic rays off us. Cosmic rays will cause a lot of low cloud. A lot of low cloud will shield us from the already dimming sun. It’s going to get very cold indeed. This is just the beginning.

Middle America is seeing cold and wet weather. Crops are suffering and will be limited this year. I’m hearing that South Africa is getting something similar. Farms in the UK have been busy with planting through a warm April and are about to be hit with definite frosts and possibly snow. Sheep are lambing into the cold.

The climate is changing. Fast. And not for the better. We are going to be taxed as if we are causing warming to the point where we cannot afford to survive the coming cold. Reliable energy sources will be shut down to prevent warming that isn’t going to happen.

Adapt or die. It seems most have chosen to die. But then that was the idea from the outset. Agenda 21 is not a conspiracy theory. It’s serious.

However, as with all these things, the ones the so-called ‘elite’ will kill off are the ones they wanted to keep. The gullible drones. They will be left with those like me, who accept nothing, believe nothing, and who make arrangements for their own survival with no regard to the wishes of those who think themselves superior.

It’s such a monumental ballsup I could almost believe Theresa May is the festermind behind it all.

That’s if I could be convinced she actually has a mind.

The Decline and Fall of… pretty much everything

I have received a polling card for the EU elections. You know, the EU we were supposed to have left a month ago. I’m going to vote, and I’ll vote for the most awkward bastard on the ballot paper. I will not vote Tory or Labour or Lib Dem or SNP and definitely not Green. If that’s all there is, I will draw a primitive anatomical diagram on the paper and write ‘Every candidate is one of these’ and put it in the box.

Voting doesn’t matter anyway. Might as well regard it as a game. The current government have proven that they can happily ignore any voting we might do. At least Stalin had the decency to rig the votes so people could pretend he had won legitimately. Our lot let us vote any way we want and then ignore it and do what they want anyway. That’s worse, in my book.

England and Wales are about to have council elections. Scotland isn’t having those yet but I bet the Scottish clowncillors are paying close attention. Those councillors have no say in government but the Tories among them are pretty much screwed. The Labour ones shouldn’t be getting too complacent either.

Beery Nigel’s new Brexit party are head to head with Labour on the latest EU voting polls and rising. Between them and UKIP (oh how I wish they could just get along instead of sniping at each other) they could fill the EU Parliament with troublemakers. I hope they do.

They could also, combined, take power at the next General Election. Can’t happen? Tell that to the Whigs. The upstart Labour party sent them to the back benches not that long ago.

A guy called Adonis, who looks like an anti-Adonis if I’m being brutally honest, is standing as a Labour MEP on a ticket of ‘if you want Brexit, don’t vote for me’. Like there was any chance of that anyway. Meanwhile, Jerry Cordite has been out saying that he fully supports Brexit, thus utterly fucking up Adonis’s remote chances. Good on you, Jerry. Even the Brown Gorgon got one thing right (refusing to join the Euro) which is one more thing than Theresa May.

Labour won’t deliver Brexit any more than the Tories. We all know it. It’s a stitch up and the final proof that voting counts for nothing in what used to be called the ‘Mother’ of democracies but which has now become its coffin.

We might as well elect Kim Jong Jinglyjangly and be done with it.

The only honest ones among them are the Lib Dems. They have been against Brexit throughout. It’s a vote loser but at least they are consistent. What a pity they are so bloody useless. We had a taste of them in the Cleggeron Coagulation and that was enough to send them straight back to obscurity.

The next EU elections could be the ones I actually stay up to watch. I don’t usually bother but for this one, it could well be popcorn time.

It seems Donnie Trumpton is going to visit the UK in the summer. Very sensible. It’s really horrible here in winter. Mrs Queen is having a banquet in his honour and apparenty that is a terrible thing. She’s had banquets for world leaders who have massacred their own people and still does. Donnie hasn’t done that. He does look like he enjoys a good meal though.

Jerry Cordite, Vinnie the Wire, Tyrion Bercow, and several others whose names escape me because I don’t care who they are, have refused to attend the banquet. Can I have their tickets? Free food is free food and I don’t care who I have to sit next to. It’ll be posh food too, none of that Iceland microwaved stovies stuff. I bet Mrs Queen only shops at Marks and Spencer or Waitrose. Damn, free posh food? I’ll sit next to Jason Voorhees for that, as long as he only has a spoon.

Also, Tyrion Bercow has refused to allow Donnie to give a speech in Parliament. Who cares? Nobody with any sense listens to anything said in there any more anyway. It’s the House of Utter Bollocks. Perhaps if Donnie were to self-identify as a sixteen year old Swedish autistic girl who has been evilly manipulated to the level of actual child abuse by the Church of Climatology… perhaps then he’d be heard.

He has a terrible speaking voice anyway, it’s all squeaky and whiny. Come on, even if you are an ardent supporter, he doesn’t have a deep, resonant, commanding tone, does he? Reagan, a trained and experienced actor, was good at that. Trump has not learned modulation and has never studied hypnosis techniques… but then, that could be a good thing. Someone who knows how to do those things could convince antismokers of things like feeling their own neck nymph lodes as cancers. Or so I am told…

It’s all become very silly. Caroline Lucas (I remember fondly her line in spare parts for car electrical systems) says that anyone she doesn’t agree with is a racist-Nazi-bigot which is what we have heard from the Leftie playbook for over a decade now. Re-edit that book. It’s long overdue. Come up with something new because nobody cares about being called those things any more.

The latest is ‘white supremacist’. Oh they exist, there are probably at least ten of them worldwide. Most of us white folk are not interested in any kind of supremacy, we have shit to do to pay bills and we don’t want to rule over anyone. We cannot afford to keep slaves, we can barely afford to feed ourselves. You want to look at modern slavery, look at Islam. They still do it.

The people who shout about (white – they don’t say it) people queueing up at food banks are the same ones who crow about white privilege and white supremacy. The really funny part is – most of them are white and very privileged. The rest of us honky trailer trash are of no consequence to them. What do they think will happen when the backlash against ‘white privilege’ they demand actually comes to pass? Will the non-whites raid the meagre belongings of the trailer trash, or will they go for rich pickings?

We whiteys aren’t really doing much about any of it and you know why? We don’t need to. We’ll just let it all fall apart and rebuild it later. We’ll let the white self-haters fall to the wolves. We’ll let the entitled try to live on leaves and untreated water. Sure, take all we made for you and rip it up. We can do it again.

And now I’m going to be called a ‘white supremacist’. Call me whatever you want. I do not care. You don’t want my cure for gut diseases because it’s ‘too white’? No problem, I have a pot of it in my fridge here that’s worth £2000 and could wipe out Clostridium difficile from several large hospitals. It’s been tested, the doctors loved it, admin didn’t, it got shut down. Too white, and more important,. too damaging to their Pharma perks because it’s too natural to patent. Well I put a drop in my coffee every day. I’m fine. You don’t want to know, no problem.

Incidentally, if you have read this far without going off on a lefty rant and you are, or have a relative with C. difficile, I’ll be happy to send a free sample. And no, I don’t care what colour your skin might be, what religion you follow, anything. I also have this stuff in powder form so it’s a bit easier to post and I’ll tell you exactly what to combine it with (nothing hard to find).

If I cure a black family’s elderly relative, I am exercising white privilege. If I cure a white family’s elderly relative, I am a white supremacist. If you have an elderly relative in hospital with C. difficile and I have something that will cure it, without having to take them off the doctors’ prescriptions at all, and you refuse it because I am white, well just sit back and think about yourself. I have the cure, I am offering it for free, you refuse because I am white and that makes me the racist?

For many out there, it does.

The human race is going to collapse. That massive population reduction will happen. The ones who die will not be the ones the elite think will die.

In Denmark, an immigrant from Africa called police one morning because someone had coated his car in white stuff overnight. It had snowed. This is not a joke, this really happened. These immigrants will not do well in the grand solar minimum that is under way. Most Green God acolytes will die too. There will be mass deaths in the coming cold but the ones who are left alive will be those who rejected the globalist message and prepared properly. The ones who do not listen and who do not take orders from cash-filled suits.

Rather like the upcoming EU elections. The winners won’t be the ones the elite want to win.

They’ll be left with the likes of me.

The Nicotine Worms

There has been a video circulating that looks like something Kenny Everett would have made as a parody of antismoking – or rather Antivaping, which is actually Antismoking, The Next Degeneration. It’s really, really bad. It’s like those old SF/horror B movies that were so bad they gained cult followings for being hilariously bad.

I have saved this still from the video because it has so much comic potential

They claim that vape pods are littering the whole planet, leaching out heavy metals (plus nicotiiiiiiine!) and getting worms addicted to both. So we can expect to see worms on street corners passing round illicit tobacco while bopping to Iron Maiden. I can see story potential in that image. I’ll consider an antismoking/antivaping parody short story collection if there are enough ideas out there and really, how can you be short of ideas now? There are more ideas than there are clowns in a car.

Do people randomly discard vape pods? I’ve never seen one on the ground and yes, I do enter civilisation (reluctantly) on occasion. I see cigarette butts but those biodegrade, despite the lunatic idea that they are immortal. You see them every day because there are new ones every day and that’s because smokers are forced outside. If they were immortal we’d be wading through them by now.

But vape pods? I bought one of those Juul things to try out. It’s okay but the EU have limited the nicotine in them to Consulate or More levels. So it won’t work. The best alternative I have tried is still the HNB IQOS device but you can’t use that when driving and it can be a bit of a pain when it runs out of charge. Oh I still use it, mainly when I run out and can’t be bothered tubing up some more ciggies, and it’s still pretty good, but it hasn’t taken me off the real thing so far.

Most vapers, certainly in the UK, use refillable tanks. They will only be discarding little plastic bottles and those will mostly be discarded at home, into the recycling (I do love to put empty Viking and Skjold packs, Danish cigarettes, into recycling in the hope it’ll scare the shit out of a dumb drone in the recycling plant).

No, I don’t care if they think they will get The Lumps from seeing the packs and subsequently shit themselves in a panic attack. Anyone stupid enough to believe the antismoking/antivaping nonsense deserves all they get. I am sick of trying to tell them the truth. No more. Die if you want to. Live in terror of a mythical monster if you want to. I don’t care any more.

Like the old saying goes, ‘First they came for the smokers, and I’m a smoker, and nobody (not even pubs) spoke out for me so don’t expect me to give a shit when they come for you.’

The same is true of the Church of Climatology. You want to believe that rubbish? Go ahead, believe it. Don’t make any preparations for the Grand Solar Minimum that has already started and boy, you think you have ten years? You don’t have five. You’re demanding action in the wrong direction and it’s already too late for you to change. Tough titties. I’m getting ready for the right thing and I am no longer interested in saving the world.

Truth be told, I never was. I was only ever interested in saving friends and family and me of course. I did try to warn the rest of them but they came back with sneers and insults until I thought ‘Why am I trying to help these morons?’ Oh I’ll still drop them a hint now and then but there’s no point getting too close to them. They’ll all be dead soon.

Nicotine is not addictive. Nicotine causes no harm at all. Nicotine, or rather the oxidised form, enhances brain function. These things are real. Science, what’s left of real science, has already proven them. Nicotine from burning or heated tobacco, or heated on a coil in a vapouriser, works this way. Nicotine absorbed through the skin does not. Patches and gum miss the point – if they were loaded with oxidised nicotine they might work but nobody is listening.

And I’m no longer telling them.

Nicotine delays or maybe even prevents dementia and Alzheimer’s. Antismokers seem to be largely already suffering these things.

Nicotine is not a bad thing. I will accept that smoking real burning leaf can lead to bad things but nicotine is not the cause of those bad things. Nicotine only became a ‘bad thing’ when vaping fired up. If nicotine kills, every doctor who has prescribed patches and gum is guilty of attempted murder. Take a moment to savour the idea of those trials. Imagine antismoking/antivaping trying to wheedle their way out of it now. I wish I could afford a lawyer for this.

Oh that oxidised form? It’s called niacin. Look up the history of pellagra to find out why it’s added to so many foods, and where it came from. Or search for comments by Rose in the history of this and other smoker blogs. Or, if you prefer, avoid all foods containing niacin (nicotinic acid) and die happy and in horrible agony. The game is yours. Make your choice. I really don’t care any more.

I have retired from science and from researching it. I still do rare consultancies when they show up but I do not work for tobacco companies because my specialisation means they have never asked me to. I will not work for antismoking research, and they are unlikely to ask.

As for vapers, most of them are good guys. Still they have a vocal born-again-nonsmoker group that means I will not support them. You support the fight against antismokers as well as antivapers or you will lose.They are the same enemy and they have been very clever in splitting us. You rail against antivapers and also against smokers? Half of your effort is directed at your own side.

If you will not see that, then…

First they came for the smokers. I was a smoker and they came for me first and nobody spoke out for me.

Then they came for the vapers. They added to the hate that was already on my shoulders so I will not speak out for them.

The game is on. Your move, vapers.

Nearly…

Well, we nearly had Brexit. And the Tory party nearly had a future. They will be spoken of in future as we now speak of the Whigs, once their opposing number in the two-main-party system we have, but now relegated to a bunch of irrelevancies. It took me a long time to work out who the Whigs were. It’ll take the next generation just as long to work out who the Tories were.

Now we have a new party. Change UK, which is going to be abbreviated to CUK because they really didn’t think it through. Naturally, they don’t plan to change anything at all including the modern politicians’ disregard for anything the public has to say. They certainly don’t plan to change their cushy jobs and their Marie Antoinette attitudes. But then, none of them do.

Well I won’t vote for CUK. I won’t vote for Conservatives ever again. I won’t vote Labour because they aren’t Labour any more. They are Catweasel’s Commies now. As for the Lib Dems and the SNP… no. Just no. The Church of the Militant Elvis makes more sense.

I’m going to vote though. If there is no realistic choice I will not vote ‘for’ anyone but ‘against’ whichever one is currently incumbent. As a last resort I will write ‘No thank you’ on the paper. There is nobody in favour of delivering the referendum result or of even slightly relaxing the smoking ban so my options are going to be limited to a ‘fuck you’ vote of some kind. Even Jake the Greasy Moggie turned tail and voted for the now thrice-thrashed Surrender Deal. Who is there left to trust?

It has all become very silly indeed but it did inspire a story – ‘Pandora’s Lost Luggage’ – which is in the next Underdog Anthology and which I will post here for entertainment purposes when the book is done. As I’ve said all along, those anthologies aren’t out there to make a profit – none of them have yet broken even – they are advertising. For me, for Leg Iron Books and of course for the starting-out authors in them. So yes, I’ll post that story here.

That book has occupied an awful lot of my time recently because it turned out to be a very big one. Details elsewhere – and Leg Iron Books authors should keep an eye on that site because that’s where the book details are now.

I have also not forgotten the Freddo contest. Just need this book out of the way first… I have a Fistful of Freddos ready to set it up.

What I need is an island where I can declare myself an independent country. But not off Scotland. The Grand Solar Minimum and the SNP’s insanity is going to cover this place in glaciers in a decade or so.

If only Australia was sane. But then, we did send them there…

Extermoonate!

Around 1990, I worked alongside some scientists who studied methane emissions from ruminants, particularly (but not exclusively) cows. I wasn’t directly involved, I was working on probiotics for pigs, but we are talking the same scientific group.

Their aim was to reduce methane emissions from cows, in the name of global warming, because otherwise we’d all be dead by 2000. Must have worked then, eh?

Nope. Not at all. The meddling kept getting funded but the cows farted and belched unhindered. My suggestion of adding a spark plug at either end to burn off emissions and simultaneously create double-ended dragons or self-cooking steaks was scoffed at. No imagination, those scientists.

Besides, the methane and CO2 belched and farted out of cows is as nothing compared to what comes out of mud flats, wetland, bogs, marshes, swamps… and when a subsea methane clathrate collapses, the cows become utterly irrelevant for that whole year. Sometimes you even get to see swamp methane as will-o-the-wisps when a bit of naturally-produced phosphine sets it off. Worrying about cow farts was, and still is, pointless but if you throw money at scientists they will find a way to use it.

To be fair, these days they have to accept funding. Their jobs depend on it. The days of pure research are gone and I count myself lucky to have been part of them. Now, you have to have a commercially viable aim for a project. Research for pure interest, and the inventions that came as byproducts of that, are gone for good.

Well, after a few decades of failing to stop cows farting (plugging the holes just makes them inflate and float away) the only solution left is the one that was obvious all along. In the name of conservation, in the name of ending animal cruelty, the plan is… kill all the cows.

The Amazing Occasional Cortex’s ‘Green New Deal’ is neither green nor new. There have been decades of research into stopping cows farting and belching methane and nothing has worked. Even if it did, all those wild ruminants would fill the void very quickly. So we’d have to kill all of them too.

If we do, their niche will be filled by other species and since most animals produce methane to some extent, and all of them produce CO2, the only way to save life on the planet is to exterminate all life on the planet.

Including insects and microbes. They represent an enormous biomass and they all produce CO2. They all have to go if we are to truly reduce CO2 emissions because shutting a few power plants is going to make no difference at all overall.

Makes sense? Has any of the ‘progressive’ claptrap ever made any sense?

No, it makes no sense. In the 70s we were heading into a global ice age due to rising CO2, then we were heading into a planet with a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus because of rising CO2, now we have ‘climate change’ because of rising CO2 so they can claim a win either way.

And they have an army of acolytes hanging on every word. Believe! Listen to our High Preists with their white coats and hockey sticks! Live as we direct or the Green God will smite thee! The End is Nigh!

I have tried to point out to these people that this is the basis of every major religion on the planet and that they are members of the Church of Climatology. Do they listen? Of course not. Who would willingly deny their own religion?

Now, the Occasional Cortex says we have twelve years to kill all the cows and abandon all technology. All those advances, all those innovations, must be discarded. Yes, she tweets this from an iPhone while drinking Starbucks and checking the time on a posh watch. And to think, people say Americans don’t understand irony.

Is that what happened to those who built the ancient structures we don’t know how to build now? Did they fall for the same scam? Did they abandon their technology because of farting cows and destroy all records of their inventions to make the world a safer place to bang rocks together and collect berries?

There are so many ruins under the Amazon forest that it is becoming clear that it’s not an ancient forest at all. It’s a runaway weed patch. The ‘lungs of the planet’ are not a discrete organ all in one place. It includes that lawn outside your window, the weeds growing in hte cracks in the pavement, the algae around your windows after a wet season. All of it is absorbing CO2 because all of it needs CO2 to live.

We are all to become vegetarian to save the planet by eating its lungs. Isn’t that a fun image? Well it can’t work. Those grasslands the cattle graze on are not used for crops because those areas are only good enough to grow grass. You can’t plough a field when the bedrock is six inches down but grass will grow there and cows will turn that into something you can eat. Vegetarianism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

There will be climate change, there always has been and always will be, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Not a thing. You adapt to it or you die. Nature doesn’t give a damn either way. If the human race is eradicated, another species will take our place. Just like the cows.

If you want to worry about humanity getting wiped out, you’d do better to worry about what’s currently happening between India and Pakistan than worry about half a degree of temperature change or a millimetre rise in sea levels. But hey, if that’s what floats your boat…

This planet has gone through changes that have put cities under the sea and the sea bed at the tops of mountains and humans have never, and will never, have any control over any of it. If the planet decides to have an earthquake or a tsunami or a volcano, the best you can hope for is getting enough warning to get out of the way. You cannot control this.

That is the part that the control freaks really cannot stand. We have absolutely no control over nature. None at all. So they have to pretend we do. They pretend we are ‘causing an ice age’ or ‘causing global warming’ or ‘causing climate change’ because they cannot stand not being in control. I’m surprised they haven’t blamed dinosaur farts for deflecting an asteroid so it crashed into Earth and killed them all.

We really don’t have hat much effect on the planet. Sure, we had cities with smog and some places still do but that’s a local effect. Not a global one. Cleaning up our cities to get rid of the smog is a Good Thing but really, only for ourselves. The planet does not care.

If we managed to get this planet to a state where we cannot live on it any more, nature will not care. It will replace us with species that can live on it in its new state and carry on going around the sun as usual.

Taxation will not affect that one jot. What does the rock we stand on care about our money? What does any other species on the planet care about it? Hell, there are whole populations of humans who don’t care about it.

Going back to living in huts made of dung and working dawn to dusk on subsistence farming is not going to make the slightest difference to climate change. It will only affect our ability to cope with it.

We really are not Gods. We do not control the weather and we have absolutely no control whatsoever over the planet. We are hairless monkeys with fancy toys and smugness and that is it.

The planet doesn’t care if we wipe out our species with our own self-importance. The loss of a species is nothing to Nature.

It can simply make another one.

Wind Power

No, no, no, I have not made another baked bean Madras. Once was enough for anyone’s lifetime. I have never felt so deflated, nor so totally empty.

This is about the Green God’s Gadgets. Again, no need to worry. I have not grown a straggly beard and had all my arm muscles replaced with lentils and string beans. I am still of the firm opinion that the entire man-made global warming rubbish is a control freak scam and believe me, smokers are currently best placed to spot those. Especially smoking scientists – which is what I am.

However. I am and always have been attracted by the notion of free energy. Okay, yes, it’s never really free. You have to buy the thing that turns sun or wind into electricity and it only works when there is actual sun or wind around. I get that. It’s not just about electricity bills though.

Living way out here, internet is best described as dire. Sometimes teeth-grindingly slow and sometimes it will die out for short random intervals. I have been looking into a 4G connection. That will work if I place the receiver at a certain point at the kitchen window (yes, it’s that bad) but it can work.

It still won’t work if there is no electricity. It doesn’t matter how many phones or tablets or laptops you have fully charged, when the power goes of and the router stops, it all stops. Unless you stand in exactly the right place with your phone. A little restrictive, I think you’ll agree.

Two issues here. Recently, someone drove a truck or tractor into the phone line pole at the end of the drive. Phone and internet were off for a day until it was patched up, and off for another few hours another day while they fixed it properly. A small issue? Yes, but it can happen again.

The phone line passes through trees and trimming back those trees would be a job for a tree surgeon. Get it wrong and you’d bring the line down right now. Ignore it and one day, one of those branches will fall on the line and bring it down. It will happen.

The other issue is the electricity supply. This is prone to random outages. The local distribution transformers are at the top of a hill – safe from flooding but not from lightning. It’s not too frequent but sometimes there is no electricity.

This is a bigger issue for us than for most. Cooking is not a problem, we have a hob powered by gas bottles outside. Heating is a small problem, we have a wood burning stove in the living room and an entire elm tree cut into small bits in the barn, so could huddle up and survive an extended blackout.

The big problem is water. Our supply comes from a well via a pump. The well head supplies the pump tank by gravity but the pump supplies the rest of the house through filtration systems. That has to have power. No power, no water.

I have considered buying a generator. There is an old huge rusty one here which could probably be put in working order but the amount of fuel and oil those things can go through in regular use is horrible. I am still considering one as an emergency backup. It would really only need to run the water pump as the most vital component of the system, so a small one would suffice.

But… could I sustain the pump with a Green God Gadget using 12V batteries and an inverter? It does of course depend on how long I’d have to do it for but it’s possible, at least for a short outage.

I looked into it. Solar is a bit of an issue this far north. When the problems are most likely to arise – winter – the sun peeks over the horizon, says ‘ screw this shit’ and ducks back down again. You can’t charge a little garden solar light in winter here.

How about wind? We get quite a bit of that, being on top of a hill. Well, okay, but it’s not really reliable. On a still cold day after a storm there’s nothing to charge the batteries to run the pump.

Both options are very expensive to install. The Green God might be here to save mankind but he ain’t doing it for free. No sir, he’s an expensive consultant indeed.

Maybe these things will pay for themselves eventually. Maybe not. There’s only one way to find out and it’s risky. What I need is a Scotland-oriented reliable power generator.

Rain. Rivers. Streams. I have never seen a hosepipe ban in Scotland. Water is not short of supply here, it drops out of the sky most days. So, if I get a windmill, put cups on the ends of the blades and dip it in the stream next to the house…. I have something far more reliable than wind power.

What if I install little waterwheels all along every downpipe from the roof? Each one only generates a little bit but if there are 20 or more per downpipe it would add up.

Sun power is sod all use in north Scotland in winter. Scratch that one. Wind power is a bit better but windless days happen – and often when it’s really cold. Water though… there’s a lot of it and it’s always moving. Best of all, you get no energy from the water itself.

Water power is actually gravity power. 20 waterwheels in a downpipe or drain – how much energy does the water lose from one waterwheel to the next?

None. The energy is not coming from the water. The water is a vector. The energy is coming from the gravity pulling the water down, and that is inexhaustible. It does not matter whether you have 10, 20, 100 waterwheels in that downpipe. The last one gets the same driving force as the first one.

The same is true in rivers and streams and our ancestors knew this. They could build one or forty watermills along a river. It made no difference at all. If you were in watermill 40, you saw no difference in river speed from watermill 1. No energy is extracted from the flow of the water because that’s not where the energy is. It’s gravity. Water flowing downhill. It would work the same if it was dry sand flowing downhill. Gravity is the energy that cannot run out.

Nobody seems to care about this. It’s all ‘buy solar panels, buy little windmills’ and they will work some of the time. As I said, here in north Scotland, solar panels work when you don’t need them and wind can be capricious. But the river always flows.

I have a map of this place dated 1768. Both the main river and the stream are on the map and both are still here. Neither have any record of ever drying up. They flow and they flow and a watermill will not slow the energy in that flow by a single joule because it is not the water that is the energy in the flow. It’s gravity. That is the real free energy but the Green God’s Followers don’t want to exploit it. There’s no money in free stuff  😉

So I am wondering. I have candles for lighting, I have all sorts of backup batteries for computers (enough to keep the little ones going at least), I have alternative heating and cooking arrangements, so really I need to power the water pump and possibly a 4G router in a total outage. I don’t really need a big generator.

You know, if it came right down to it, I could bypass that pump and use the gravity-fed water from the well. Unfiltered and risky but better than nothing and boiled, it would be mostly okay.

So. If I get an old car dynamo or alternator from the scrapyard, fit it to a waterwheel with sufficient diameter to ignore the seasonal rise and fall of water level, and dip it in the river, I could have a more reliable bank of backup batteries than anything the Green God’s Gadgets have on offer.

That river is not going to stop flowing tomorrow. The wind might.

The pointing finger points

The book is done. Print and eBook versions formatted, links in the eBooks, covers, all of it. I just need to write a short description for the sales page. I’ll leave it overnight in case someone finds another correction but if everything is okay it’ll get loaded up tomorrow.

So I have time to blog properly for a change. Let’s see if I can remember how.

I have seen, on Twitter, references to the ‘six rivers’ that produce 90% of the world’s floating sea trash (figures may vary). This is held up to prove that we in the West aren’t the ones polluting the sea, it’s all coming from China and Africa.

Well I don’t know about Africa, but there’s a good reason for a lot of that waste to come from China. It’s because we Westerners send it there. Then we blame China for producing it and the Chinese have had enough.

As of January 1st, China has new rules for the ‘recyclables’ they will accept and they don’t want all the added crap. The plastic bags, the bits of mouldy food residue etc. That stuff that ends up dumped in China instead of over here and then washes into their rivers, then into the sea.

In addition to all the waste China produces itself, and has to deal with, they’ve been dealing with a big chunk of ours too. Then we blame them for being polluters. Oh, and we send the stuff over on those massive container ships, six of which can equal the polluting output of the total of all the cars on Earth. That’s really green.

There’s also the matter of rare earths – we use a lot of those over here but we produce little to none. We use a hell of a lot in those massive wind powered ornaments we set up everywhere to wave hello to the Green God. We plan to use much more in those electric cars we’re all going to drive to reduce pollution and save the planet. Yet we don’t mine those rare elements ourselves. Most of the supply comes from China.

Those ‘rare earths’ aren’t really rare. It’s more that they are thinly spread and don’t occur in convenient seams or deposits where you can mine the ore and get them out fairly easily. So you have to process tonnes of rock to get much of anything as an end product.

That processing produces vast amounts of waste, and that waste is very toxic indeed. So, to fuel our lust to claim we are reducing our pollutant output and saving the planet, we have created a market that causes Hell on Earth. That’s really green.

Now that China isn’t taking our waste any more, not unless we clean it first, the recycling game is suddenly far less profitable than it was. If China has enough of turning its country into a pit of sulphur, where will we get all our vital electronic components from?

Or if China gets pissed off at us and decides to stop emptying our bins, stop supplying us with stuff we dare not mine ourselves and dump its vast dollar reserves back into the market…

They can wipe us out without firing a shot.

We won’t have any petrol cars left by then. All our information is already on computers we can’t fix without new parts. Our power stations will be gone, replaced by lawn ornaments and fields of solar panels that depend on materials whose extraction produces far more pollution than the power stations ever did. Our Green God is pleased because that pollution only happens in a country that does not worship him. Well okay, it leaks into the sea but we can point the finger at China for that. That’s really green.

China does not need to invade. They just need to wait. Once we are utterly dependent on their rare earth supply with no backup technology left, once we are wading knee deep through plastic bags and McDonald’s wrappers, China will take over the world with nothing more than one little word.

‘No’.