Listening to Paraducers

Another thing we must do as Producers is listen to Paraducers, and to some extent Consumers. This is quite dull, but can illuminate some trends.

For example, in the 2004 Presidential election, the trial lawyers supported the Democrat candidates. They do this on a routine basis. Whether you are a Democrat or Republican, you have to recognize the trial lawyers as a rabid Paraducer group, extracting millions of dollars a year from the pockets of Producers like you, and driving up costs for us all. But you could also find evidence that the insurance industry supported both parties.

We cannot hope to redirect the political contributions of the trial lawyers, but this type of information is very helpful in our daily discussions with Producers and Paraducers. Revealing a shameless Paraducer like the trial lawyers is not difficult, and that can have an effect on another person’s vote.

Listening to these parties is easy, just turn on the television. The Paraducers pour forth their meaningless drivel continuously on hundreds of channels. Or stop by the checkout stand at your local supermarket. People, Time and Newsweek are loaded with Consumer oriented idiocy targeted at them by Paraducers, to manipulate their buying habits.

The point is that we have to keep a finger on the pulse of Paraducerism, to know which way they are moving, in order to counter those moves at the interpersonal level with our families and friends.

Now that I reread that last paragraph, perhaps counter is too strong a word. It’s like tubing in a river. Occasionally you see something floating in the river, a log or dead animal. In either case, it’s wise to take note and get out of the way. That’s how we need to view the trash that the Paraducers throw overboard into the river of life. Keep both eyes open and a paddle in the current, and shout warnings to your friends behind you.

Hydrogen Fuel

Occasionally, the Paraducers provide quite the comedy club routine. One of my favorite gags is the hydrogen vehicle. Hydrogen is a great fuel because when it burns (gets combined with oxygen from the air) it produces water. Remember that water is two atoms of hydrogen (represented by the letter H) and one atom of oxygen (represented by the letter O), so we have H₂O. When hydrogen burns, we get a lot of heat and some pure water, which is no danger to the environment.

Before we all go out and buy hydrogen cars, we have to ask the question, “Where do I fill my hydrogen tank?” There are no hydrogen stations, and no hydrogen distribution networks, and no hydrogen plants equivalent to gasoline refineries. A quick scan of the literature shows that we really do not even know how to economically make hydrogen. Why?

The problem is that most hydrogen on Earth is bound up in water, H₂O or other chemicals. What we need to do is separate the hydrogen from the oxygen so we can burn it in our cars. But think about this: When we combine hydrogen and oxygen, we get water and heat. To bust apart the hydrogen and oxygen, we have to put heat into the process. See what that means? We need energy to break apart water molecules.

Where does that energy come from? We could burn coal, oil, or natural gas, but then we have the same pollution as we do burning it in our autos. We could use energy from solar power, but then we would have to cover a huge area with solar cells or solar collectors, plus an electric or hydrogen distribution network. (Why not just use that energy directly, instead of fiddling with the hydrogen?)

Understand? No matter how we break up the water molecules, we have to get the energy from the sun (possibly including bacteria or plant sources), or use stored solar energy from something we dig up out of the ground, like coal or oil.

Important also is the fact that it takes more energy to break up the water molecules and deliver the hydrogen to your vehicle than we get from burning the hydrogen, because no system is 100% efficient. There is energy lost with each processing step, such as piping or trucking hydrogen to your local gas station.

The US Department of Energy’s web site discusses the technology options for generating usable hydrogen. Here’s a sample:

“Photoelectrochemical hydrogen production systems integrate a semiconducting material and a water electrolyzer into a single monolithic device, to produce hydrogen directly from water, using light as the only energy input. Simple in concept, the challenge is to find a material that can drive this one-step process.” ^[29]

Only a properly trained and conditioned government Paraducer can write copy like that! What they are saying is that they have discovered a simple one-step process that will change the world, but the only sticking point is finding the material that makes the simple one-step process work. I bet they are also working on anti-gravity, which would work except they don’t have an anti-gravity generator. Darn it, those difficult details. Where’s a Producer when you need one?

The Department lists several other options, such as, “Concentrated solar energy can be used to generate temperatures of several hundred to over 2,000 degrees Celsius at which thermochemical reaction cycles can be used to produce hydrogen from water.” Yep, we can heat millions of pounds of water per day to 2,000 degrees nationwide to run our vehicles. That’s one big magnifying glass!

When you listen to the Paraducers in government and academia blather on about hydrogen fuel, not one of them mentions where we get the hydrogen. That’s not important, the solution to the problem. No, what’s important is that they have a system that funds research, those funds coming out of the pockets of Producers like you and me.

I would love to live in our world populated by clean, hydrogen burning vehicles, but it is not going to happen while there is one barrel of oil, one cubic foot of natural gas, or one ton of coal left in the ground. But there is still a lot of room for the Producers to create cleaner burning engines so that we don’t destroy our planet in the meantime, like we did with the catalytic converter.

Global Warming

They say it’s getting hotter outside. (They say there’s also an ozone hole over Antarctica, but no one lives there so it’s really no big deal.) I had not noticed the heat, but I am not calibrated for such measurements. I am calibrated to detect government Paraducers, and I smell a few of those.

I remember in the 1970’s hearing about global cooling. Were we headed into another ice age? Television reports scared us into tuning in for the next episode or issue or whatever. It was no big deal to my family or friends, just another television sensationalism.

Then came the 1980’s, and the situation changed. No longer was the problem cooling, it was global warming. We were just so silly to believe in that cooling nonsense. Must have been the disco music of the 1970’s.

Scientists were testifying before Congress that we were entering a period of warming due to man’s release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Congress swallowed the bait whole and started appropriating money at a good clip for global warming research. That caused the scientists to (surprise!) determine from their computer models that warming was a real threat, and also that they needed more money to write better computer models. The environmental Paraducers in Congress were more than happy to oblige.

In 1991, Richard S. Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at MIT, wrote

“The growth of environmental advocacy since the 1970s has been phenomenal. In Europe the movement centered on the formation of Green parties; in the United States the movement centered on the development of large public interest advocacy groups. Those lobbying groups have budgets of several hundred million dollars and employ about 50,000 people; their support is highly valued by many political figures. As with any large groups, self-perpetuation becomes a crucial concern. "Global warming" has become one of the major battle cries in their fundraising efforts. At the same time, the media unquestioningly accept the pronouncements of those groups as objective truth.” ^[30]

He identifies the Paraducer proclivity for self-perpetuation in the environmental community. Global warming, fact or fiction in reality is today an industry, with a payroll and fund raising numbers to meet.

I am an amateur radio operator, meaning that I am licensed to operate shortwave transmitters and receivers, and to use them for hobby communications worldwide. It’s a lot of fun talking to other radio amateurs on the other side of the country or the planet. One of the things radio amateurs know is that radio communication waxes and wanes in cycles that are eleven years long, corresponding to fluctuations in the number of spots on the sun. The number of sunspots is related to the charged particle solar wind that interacts with the Earth’s ionosphere, creating conditions for radio waves to bounce around the globe. So we amateurs track the sunspot cycles religiously.

Below is a graph of sunspot activity from 1750 to 2005, from a NASA web site. ^[31] Galileo saw sunspots when he built the first telescope, and since then mankind has been counting these spots.

The amazing thing is that this giant hot ball of gas that could hold a million Earths is fluctuating on a regular basis, every eleven years. Observe the longer term variations, such as the lessening of spots around 1810, and the huge peak near 1960. Could it be that the temperature of the Earth is controlled, at least partially, by the sun?

Apologies if you spewed another beverage on your spouse. That was a truly shocking question. But, yes, it may be possible that the sun’s normal output variations are causing global warming. Possible.

You see, most of the accurate temperature data we have has been taken only in the past few decades. Talking about 2.4 degree changes in the average temperature of the Earth is not possible using data taken a hundred years ago because they had no universally calibrated instruments as we do today. And today, we are looking at temperatures over a very short period compared with the age of the Earth. Ice cores pulled out of glaciers simply are not calibrated to 0.1 degrees Celsius.

Fact is, most of the hysteria revolves around computer modeled predictions of the Earth’s temperature at some point in the future, not real data. Now I have a degree in mathematics and I have written computer models for several applications, and I can tell you that I must be extremely careful how I write them and what assumptions I make, else the output of the model is totally misleading and worthless, or worse, dangerous. A computer model can be written and adjusted until it provides whatever output the author desires. Want a model that ‘proves’ global cooling, or global warming, or the global Macarena? I can write one for a small fee.

I want to state for the record that I do not know whether global warming is real or not, or caused by man or not. I suspect scientists do not either. Perhaps we should do something. But this issue is so Paraducer driven that it is an excellent illustration of appearance over substance, and how that appearance is used to shore up Paraducer power. Heaven forbid that some PhD government scientist should have to do some original research for his paycheck. H.G. Wells said, “… nothing destroys the powers of general observation quite so much as a life of experimental science.” ^[32] Apologies to Mr. Wells for updating his thought: “Nothing destroys the powers of general observation quite so much as a life of experimental science supported by government grants.”