The falcon that did not fly

The US cable news networks were covering a story about a kid named Falcon Heene who floated from his backyard in a helium balloon that his dad made. Planes and helicopters were sent up and no kid could be seen attached to the balloon. The balloon started to deflate and after four hours it landed hundreds of miles away and the kid could not be found. A massive hunt was started to find out where the kid landed and possibly perished. It turns out the kid was hiding in his home and the whole thing was a non event except that now the parents are being questioned if this was a publicity stunt. The parents appeared on Wife Swap last year a reality TV show and I guess they needed more coverage so to speak. The kid and his parents were interviewed on the Morning Show the next day and the kid started puking on live TV. Here is the headline from the San Francisco Examiner on October 15 the day this happened: "Helium balloon floats away with boy,6, inside: After landing, child is missing from balloon"

All this helium balloon stuff got me thinking of the Hindenburg and dirigibles. With the help of Bill an extra smart engineer who studied at Caltech, we have decided that hydrogen not helium should be used in lighter than aircraft and that diesel should be the fuel of choice for the engines. Hydrogen got a bum wrap for causing the Hindenburg fire. Aluminum oxide, static electricity and shellac ignited the fire and hydrogen then burned. I am pretty sure I would not travel in a new Hindenburg that I may design but I would use it to deliver heavy equipment to remote areas like the North Slope of Alaska. The pilot would get double pay for hazardous duty or perhaps the dirigible could be remote controlled just like the drones the Air Force uses.

The National Hydrogen Association had a piece on a remote controlled drone that was powered by hydrogen fuel using a half horsepower fuel cell that stayed aloft to almost a day. The puny little drone might be able to carry a pea sized camera but my green machine could lift a tank. The National Hydrogen Association should go back to physics 101 and realize they have a massively buoyant chemical and a puny fuel. As for Falcon he may become forgotten like a Ford Falcon the car that certainly could never fly.

The stock market is up but will fear overtake greed?

Greed is back. The stock markets in China, Japan, the US and Europe are up. Folks are losing the fear factor they had last October and traders continue to increase the price of oil, copper, and other commodities. So what has changed since governments have pumped almost half a trillion dollars into stimulus and five trillion dollars into the banking system? Really nothing has changed except that greed has replaced fear and there is an expectation that consumption as a driver of economic growth will return.

The Chinese now produce close to 500 million tons a year of steel. This is flat with production over the past couple of years but four times as much as their production in 2000. Does China need to produce this much steel going forward? I think they may not need to produce this much steel and that half of the worlds steel production comes from China is not sustainable in the future. Perhaps the Chinese government will shut down old inefficient and highly polluting steel mills and the world will be minutely better for this. The WSJ reported that some steel workers in China beat up and killed the mill manager when it was announced the government owned mill will be sold and the mill may be shut.

Finally we have a report form the agency that reviews commodities trading that speculators drove up the price of oil to $150 a barrel last year. Come on! Is this news we did not know? Of course greed drove up the price and fear drove down the price. Greed will certainly drive it up again but perhaps this time it will peak below a $100 a barrel, because at that price alternates exist and consumers start economizing. The government can quell speculation in the oil markets by enacting laws that tax commodities trading profits at 90% and only allow a 10% tax deduction on trading losses. Long term the governments must enact energy laws that favor conservation.

The government appropriated one billion dollars of funds for the “cash for clunkers” program to spur the trading of old inefficient vehicles for new ones. Within one week the entire billion was used up and now another two billion dollars is being proposed by the government to keep the program going. We will get news in a few weeks that some greedy folks came up with a scheme to defraud the government by trading in stolen or non existent cars. The Chinese government should come up with a program to give cash to the workers in old inefficient steel mills that need to be shut. This program could be called cash for junk smelters. Western Europe, Canada and US have all gone through the cycle of shutting down steel mills that no longer make economic and correspondingly environmental sense. The US peaked at 150 million tons a year of steel production in 1973 and now we produce under 100 million tons. http://www.naspd.com/pdf/national05_busse.ppt#6

In 1875 Britain accounted for 40% of world steel production and by 1889 the US superseded Britain as the world’s largest steel producer. China took over the global leadership in steel production from the US just before the end of the 20th century. My fervent hope is that India does not overtake China in the steel production race as this is kind of the most stupid race mankind has ever undertaken. I am all for the production of steel. I even live in a steel framed house and drive a vehicle that is made primarily from steel. However it makes no environmental sense for a country like China to produce half of the world’s steel when they do not have enough iron ore nor metallurgical coke. Australia is becoming one big quarry for China. Steel should first be made by recycling old cars, cans, and appliances and secondly in a non coke process that uses natural gas as a substitute. I estimate that Nucor in the USA that produces steel from recycling as well as natural gas has a carbon footprint per ton of steel that is half that of the average Chinese mill. I was disgusted to learn that the contractor building a power plant for Duke Power in the same state that is home to Nucor has a policy to buy Chinese steel for the project. Are we dumb or is it plain greed that drives these decisions?

Can kids running around a house power a TV?

I have come across the most out of the box idea for electric power generation. It all started when Lawrence an avid reader of my blog asked me if it was feasible to generate electric power by laying down miles of copper wire on the floor and having kids run around the room with magnets tied to their bodies. On the surface this sounds like a not so bad idea. I estimated each kid could put out about 10 watts of power and could run around for at least two hours so if one had ten kids in the house one could generate enough power for one and half hours of watching a 40 inch LCD TV.

This got me thinking about manpower hours. We have horsepower hours. Eldon another reader of my blog once emailed me that a barrel of oil has the amount of energy that eight men working at full pace eight hours a day would generate in a year. I actually did the calculation and it is estimated that a man working at full tilt is about 8% of a horsepower. Therefore 12 men working in unison is one horsepower. 12 men working for an hour is a horsepower hour. 12 men working 2000 hours a year is 2,000 horsepower hours or 1,500 kilowatt hours. A gallon of oil has about 35 kilowatt hours of stored chemical energy and there are 42 gallons in a barrel, therefore a barrel of oil has approximately 1,477 kilowatt hours of chemical energy. Now that we know 12 men working flat out for a year is a barrel of oil, lets all become couch potatoes because human work, kids running, or hamsters tread-milling will not replace our oil imports.

So what is the most out of the box idea for electric power generation? Well it comes from Chinookville (Canada). These blokes in Quebec believe that one should place windmills aloft in the sky up to one thousand feet above the land. The rationale being that the wind is more constant at this altitude and the dispatchability of electric power would increase from 20% of the time to 50% of the time. Their device is a rotating airship that is tethered to the ground by wires. They have named their airship MARS for the Magenn Air Rotator Systems http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/12/magenn_air_roto.php http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2005/12/mobile-air-rotors-use-wind-to-generate-electricity-40993 I have heard of one of the founders of the company as he was previously in the hydrogen fuel cell business. He of course lost his shirt and other investors’ money in the fuel cell effort and is now trying to find the answer blowing in the wind. MARS has raised over ten million dollars so far to commercialize this idea.

My take on the MARS system is that it will never take off so to speak. It is clever but not cost effective. It could be used by ships and the power that is generated could be transmitted via the guide wire back to a ship, but I estimate more energy could be generated if the ship simply had a sail assisting in its propulsion. I have to rename the MARS system to the VENUS system. VENUS = Very Expensive Not Ubiquitous System. I should not knock their idea as at least they are thinking out of the box and there is some chance that the system can find an application here and there but it simply will not do much more to save the planet than having the younger generation run around with magnets tied to them in the hope of capturing some of that seemingly inexhaustible energy.

Are Raser and Capstone thermodynamic busts?

I should be a financial planner. Over the past couple of weeks I blogged about Raser the Eraser and Capstone the Gallstone being thermodynamic busts. Well the folks on Wall Street must be reading the green machine. Raser traded today at a paltry $3.60 and Capstone is now trading at a measly eighty cents a share. These two companies are in a race to the bottom. Capstone has more financial resources than Raser so it will last a few quarters longer before its life is over or new equity has to be found to finance their ongoing losses. The companies will soon be ghosts.

Raser is now positioning itself as a big geothermal power plant developer. They have put the “100 mpg” Hummer on the back burner so to speak. Well Raser brings a contract with United Technologies as their entre into geothermal energy. UT may have some good technology but Raser will have to pay full price to buy this technology so unless Raser can raise cheap capital to finance their build own operate geothermal power plants they have no cost advantage over other more well funded project developers. Of course Raser has their hand out for Uncle Sam’s stimulus money and stranger thing have happened so they may pull this off but maybe the Feds can read a balance sheet and even the US might understand that Raser has negative net worth as well as negative working capital.

As for Gallstone they have yet to claim their microturbine can run on geothermal steam but they are asking investors to pony up more cash to keep going. They announced their quarterly results a few days ago. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Capstone-Turbines-4Q-loss-apf-2100563017.html?x=0&.v=2 They lost over eleven million dollars this quarter. This means they spent two dollars for each dollar of sales revenue. Kind of like the State of California.

Enough about losers and losses, I have great news regarding the state of carbon emissions in the USA. We are emitting only 94% of the emissions we had in 2008 and about 92% of the emissions we had in 2007. All fossil fuel based electric generation has declined since last year. Oil usage has declined to 18.6 million barrels a day (this is more than 1.2 million barrels a day less than last year). I doubt that when the economy recovers we will ever go back to the absolute level of energy wastage we had in 2007. The US is no longer the largest polluter on the planet. China will hold this position now and well into the future. GM had good news to report today. Their Chinese joint venture has just sold their 2 millionth Buick. Maybe Raser should move to China now that a Chinese company will own Hummer. I wonder what the Mandarin word for an Eraser is? Perhaps the word is also a Chinese synonym for Ghost.

Can a turbine replace an internal combustion engine?

Today the blog is about Gallstones and Capstones. I know keystones are critical to the support of an arch but what is a capstone. Well in the world of thermodynamics, Capstone is the manufacturer of a microturbine that can produce 30 kilowatts or about 40 horsepower of power. A turbine is a jet engine rather than a piston engine and Capstone has miniaturized the jet engine to be small enough to fit in the hood of a car. They have been at this for about twelve years and blown through almost a billion dollars of investors’ money. The inventor is the brother of the founder of Compaq computers and Paul Allen of Microsoft fame has been a backer.

While the technology is elegant and sweet, the cost of fabricating a microturbine is very high. The 40 horsepower engine from Capstone that has one third the power of a Toyota Corolla, costs them more than $20,000 to manufacture. By comparison the 60 horsepower engine in a Smart Car costs Mercedes less than $2,500 to manufacture. Is the microturbine much more efficient than a piston engine? Over the full driving range that a motorist typically runs their vehicle the, microturbine will approach 30% efficiency while the piston engine will be about 15% efficient. However, when one employs a diesel engine to do the same driving, the diesel engine yields approximately the same efficiency as the Capstone turbine. The diesel engine would only cost about $3,000 to manufacture.

For the past couple of weeks I have been blogging about Raser the Eraser and today it is about Capstone the Gallstone. Capstone also wanted to lift their stock price by getting in on the plug in hybrid bandwagon. CPST is Capstone’s stock symbol and it is a small cap stock on the NASDAQ. It was once a large cap stock during the dot com boom years but it saw a low of 39 cents a share a few months back. Last week some thermodynamic wankers in the UK, fitted a plug in van with a Capstone turbine and are claiming 80 mpg for the van. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Photo-Release-Capstone-C30-pz-15498531.html?.v=1 . On this news the CPST stock rose to close at one dollar sixteen cents yesterday.

Again the claim of the first forty miles being energy free due to the plug in lithium ion batteries propelling the vehicle without the need for engaging the engine is being made. If Raser is an Eraser then the Capstone plug in is a Gallstone. In Capstone’s case one has to add the extra cost of the turbine versus the standard piston engine and this is amounts to another $20,000 on top of the lithium ion batteries that already added more than $30,000 to the base cost of the vehicle. Therefore the Capstone Gallstone will cost you $50,000 more than the base diesel van and get no better fuel economy. I hear gallstones are very painful, the extra fifty thousand dollars per vehicle is also painful to your wallet.

Gall is a synonym for nerve or chutzpah. I really get my hairs up on my back when these gangrene gallists who have jumped on the band wagon to save the world by lowering energy consumption make ridiculous claims about their technologies that are Betamaxs and some fool then buys the stock on the hope this is the next Apple Computer. I suggest that folks rather buy shares in my new engine company Gallstone Turbine Corporation that uses rubber bands to propel a lead acid plug in. I will list Gallstone Turbine Corporation on the NYSE with the symbol GTC which also stands for Get Their Cash.

On Wednesday June 17, Lindsay Leveen will be on blog talk radio at noon California time to discuss Eraser and Gallstone. 12pm PT (3pm ET) at http://BlogTalkRadio.com/AlternativeEnergyRadio The call in number for the radio show is (347) 838-8999.

Should we paint our roofs white?

We used to have a white flag of surrender, now the US government is proposing a far bigger white surface option. Our secretary of energy Dr Chu has proposed that we paint our roofs white. No kidding yes he did. Is the Nobel Prize winning physicist buckling under the pressure of the job? Or has he realized the Martians are invading? No he has done a calculation that shows if roofs were painted white less heat would be lost in the winter from our homes and more heat would be reflected away from our homes in the summer. This simple act of painting roofs white will save a couple percent of the energy consumed in heating and air conditioning our homes. See the London Telegraph article http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/5389278/Obamas-green-guru-calls-for-white-roofs.html

Chu also suggested that the paving of roads should be done with lighter color material than asphalt. This got me thinking we should have pastel color roofs and pastel color concrete roads and sidewalks. We should allow kids to decide the color of the roof of the home we live in as well as the color of the roads and sidewalks. Living in such a neighborhood would like being on an acid trip without any LSD and it would be a declaration of victory for the Hippies of yesteryear. I am all for brightening up the neighborhood and getting rid of dark color shingles on the roofs of our homes. Why did the roofing materials companies come up with dark colors in the first place? It might have been that historically tar and gravel was a simple, abundant, and inexpensive choice in the material selection process. I am sure that folks could come up with pastel colored alternatives for roofing material but they will be more expensive. In many European and Asian countries roofing of dwellings is accomplished with red terracotta tiles. This is because of the global abundance of the red clay that can be baked into tiles, pots, and other objects. In old soviet style housing drab gray concrete tiles were used. Perhaps we could resurrect concrete roofs but add some pastel tints and colorants to the concrete before it cures.

Road paving with pastel colored concrete is a much simpler task. However the production of cement is a carbon intensive undertaking. I have performed some simple arithmetic that does show over the complete lifecycle of a road that will span 20 years a pastel colored road does significantly reduce global warming compared with an asphalt road. Perhaps the government should set aside several billion dollars of the stimulus to replace the pothole filled roads in America with Dorothy’s light yellow brick road. I also have a suggestion for the government that we should install a few hundred thousand air compressor stations along our roads that would conveniently offer free compressed air for the tires in our vehicles. Most folks are driving with underinflated tires and the simple act of properly inflating tires will increase fuel economy by as much as three percent. Why not use a few of these billions of dollars of stimulus to have the news cars from Congressional Motors (the renamed General Motors) drive nicely on smooth and cool roads with properly inflated tires?

Can a Hummer really get 100 mpg?

Today I have a very interesting blog for the readers. This company called Raser Technologies is hereby awarded this quarter's Gangrene Award for their pretence to be green. These guys claim to have developed a Hummer that gets 100 mpg. Ordinarily one would laugh at them but they got the Governator excited and he loved their Hummer by exclaiming at the Society of Automotive Engineers Forum on April 20 that the "solution is not changing the size of the cars we drive but in changing the technology that drives the car." What a dumb statement from a bankrupt governor who got a F in thermodynamics. Raser Technology then took their monstrosity to Wall Street and rang the opening bell for the NYSE on May 1. Their chairman appeared on Squawk On The Street and tried to convince Erin Burnett that this oversized piece of junk gets 100 mpg.

Their audacity does not end there, on May 19th these gangrene green folks paraded their contraption on Capitol Hill and had Senator Hatch drive the thing around the Capitol.

100 mpg my elbow!! The piece of junk at best gets 33mpg and cost $40,000 more than a standard bummer. Together with Tad Patzek the Chairman of the Department of Petroleum Engineering at University Texas I helped alternativeenergy dot com www.alternativeenergy.com bust these green imposters. David Kates writing for alternative energy dot com broke the story that the 100 mpg was a slight of hand. You must read his article by going to http://alternativeenergy.com/profiles/blogs/a-100-mpg-hummer-really

Doug Schiller of alternative energy dot com also was interviewed on MSNBC who broke the news that the 100 mpg was a myth. Go to http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30845961/ for the MSNBC article on 100 mpg more or less

Why is Raser hyping thing this. Well Raser Technologies (RZ NYSE) is a small cap stock and they are for all intents and purposes insolvent. They reported their first quarter earning recently and their balance sheet makes Chrysler look triple A. Their working capital is negative to the tune of $60 million and their net equity is negative by over $20 million. The 100 mpg Hummer is being used as a last ditch effort to inflate their stock. I had blogged in March 2008 that Raser was a hype stock when they were trading at $13.82 http://www.greenenergyexplained.com/2008/01/geothermal-stocks.html

Raser is now trading around $4.00 even with the hype of the 100 mpg Hummer. I was correct in renaming Raser to Eraser as they are a wipe out. Remember my motto that is a misquote of Warren Buffet "be green when all are fearful and be fearful when all are green". No doubt you must be very fearful when folks are gangrene.

Why do grannies get better MPGs?

I hope there is nobody out there who does not love their granny. I have selected this group of people as the G word of the week because they have the lowest carbon footprint of any age group. Due to their extremely slow driving they achieve far better gas mileage than teenagers. Also I have not seen a Granny driving a Hummer or and Escalade. Grannies in Tiburon tend to drive a baby Mercedes or a compact Lexus. Grannies do not accelerate rapidly nor do they brake suddenly close to the traffic light or the stop sign. In fact it almost takes an expert to identify if a granny is accelerating or braking and that is why cars are equipped with brake lights. Some grannies actually use two feet while driving an automatic vehicle. This is why their brake lights are on even when they pull off from a stop or are driving up a grade. These two footed drivers are ruining the average fuel economy for their age group and should be told that braking while accelerating and accelerating while braking is contrary to Newton’s second law of motion but congruent with his third law of equal and opposite actions and reactions.

Midas Brake Repair should offer an early bird special to Grannies who use both feet as they must need brake pads as often as they need an oil change. Enough of my picking on an age group that is not much more than a decade older than me. The news for Chrysler this past week was that the company would enter Chapter 11 and hopefully be in Chapter 12 within two months. Let’s hope they are not speed readers and turn the pages too quickly to chapter 13. It is a good thing though they missed chapter 7. I wonder what all the other chapters of the bankruptcy code are all about. Maybe we have a copy of the code in the Tiburon library and we could find out if chapter s 3 and 5 are more interesting than chapters 7, 11, and 13 that we always hear about.

I have a suggestion for the Chrysler Fiat combination company that hopefully emerges out of bankruptcy proceedings, why not target Grannies as your primary market segment? You do not need powerful engines to satisfy grannies. Fiat is famous for underpowered vehicles. Fiat is also well known for their style. Grannies are into style and color and I can only wait for the first purple Fiat 500 to drive down Tiburon Boulevard. Grannies can also loan these underpowered vehicles to their teenage grandchildren without fear that the young and the restless will break the land speed record. Jokes aside Fiat will provide Chrysler with small car technology that will offer improved fuel efficiency and that is what the Green Machine is all about. Many years ago when I was a child my Dad owned an auto junk yard in Johannesburg and he had a massive watch dog named Chrysler that roamed the yard. Both my Dad and Chrysler must be looking down from heaven in disbelief that future smaller stature guard dogs in junk yards may get named Fiat.

Is being green being good?

Good News Good News Read All About It! This was the call newspaper vendors used to shout in order to promote sales of their paper to passersby. These days we don’t have too many vendors and in fact we don’t have too many newspapers. In the past month several newspapers in large cities have entered bankruptcy reorganization. I am truly fortunate to write Green Machine for the Tiburon Ark and not the Chicago Sun Times nor the Chicago Tribune as both of these papers are in bankruptcy reorganization.

So what good news do I have for my readers? Today is income tax day and that is good news for the government. The good news for those paying income taxes is that at least they had income. The Chicago newspapers did not have any. The State of California is crying crocodile tears over the reduced tax collection from motor fuels. Gasoline demand in the Golden state declined in 2008 by 4.1% compared with 2007. Diesel demand declined even faster with a corresponding drop of 8.3%. Betty Yee the Chairwoman of the State Board of Equalization put on a happy face as California will meet the Kyoto Protocol due to the reduction in hydrocarbon liquid sales. The reduction in diesel is primarily due to the massive drop in economic activity so let us not celebrate to quickly about our collective greenness. The total taxable gallons of gasoline sold in California in 2008 equaled 15.032 billion gallons. This is the lowest volume of taxable gallons of gasoline since 2001. The data for the taxable gallons of gasoline sold in California for each of the past ten years are available on the following web page http://www.boe.ca.gov/sptaxprog/reports/MVF_10_Year_Report.pdf The taxable gallons of diesel sold in California in 2008 equaled 2.827 billion gallons, the lowest value since 2003. The data for the taxable gallons of gasoline sold in California for each of the past ten years are available on the following web page http://www.boe.ca.gov/sptaxprog/reports/Diesel_10_Year_Report.pdf
Unfortunately the number of employees working for the State of California increased by 4.8 % between 2003 and 2008. I have a suggestion for the Governator that we limit the growth in government employees to growth in gallons of motor fuel that are sold in the state each year. This proposal would make Proposition 11 look like Chapter 11 for the State Government. We know for sure the volume of motor fuel sold will decrease in the next few years as SUVs become Such Ugly Vehicles. Since Arne is the Jolly Green Giant and a fiscal conservative he should approve of my suggestion on how to limit the size of government. The reduction of 640 million gallons of gasoline consumption in our state in 2008 equals a reduction of over 6 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Let’s not get too excited about how we are saving the planet, we still had carbon dioxide emissions that exceeded 150 million tons from all the gasoline we burned last year. I have a suggestion for saving even more gasoline in the future. Let’s all buy newspapers and stay at home and read instead of driving in our cars. I know some of you may think the printing and distribution of newspapers is energy intensive. I will discuss this in an upcoming article and demonstrate that driving a car each day is many fold more carbon intensive than reading a newspaper each day. We also need a vibrant free press if we wish to keep the goodness going in our country.

Does Bernie Madoff have a low carbon footprint?

I bet you think the Green Machine cannot spell goal but I was not thinking of scoring today. The British word for Jail is Gaol and that is where Bye Bye Bernie will spend the rest of his life. The carbon footprint of inmates is far below the population at large. Inmates live in small cells with less heat and for sure fewer windows. They also do not have expansive lawns and hot tubs, so they are actually doing their part in the effort to meet the Kyoto Protocol goals. In fact if all of us were to live in a mere eight foot by eight foot space and not driving cars the US would be totally self sufficient in energy. It is therefore surprising that Rush to Judgment Limbaugh has not suggested this on his radio show.

Inmates do get three square meals and a two thousand calorie a day diet. The per person carbon dioxide footprint for the metabolism of this amount of food produced via exhalation is approximately one pound per day. Cooking their food, lighting the jail, heating the cell and other incidentals most probably amounts to another ten pounds a day of carbon dioxide emissions. This is a mere ten percent of the carbon dioxide footprint of the average free and brave citizen. In fact the prisoner’s carbon footprint is about half that of the average person in China. I do not know how Chinese prisoners are fed and housed but I would suspect these suspects are not exactly living in a Federal Country Club and in turn a prisoner in a Chinese jail has an extremely low carbon footprint.

This jail house rock talk is a Macabre subject, so let’s rather talk about goals than gaols. The word goal means that there is an end point and a purpose toward which an endeavor is directed. Therefore what is a realistic goal for us to set for the reduction of our collective environmental footprint. I believe that within a decade it will be pretty easy to reduce the per capita carbon footprint in the USA by fifteen percent. Less carbon emissions does not necessarily mean lower living standards. Much of the reduction will come about be the elimination of gross wastage. My own carbon footprint is down by thirty percent from four years ago. I now van pool to work, keep the daytime heating of our home down to sixty seven degrees and turn the heat completely off at night, and I have also shut down the hot tub as I never use it in the winter. I will restart the hot tub after the spring equinox as I do really enjoy soaking in the tub. I will however set the spa temperature to ninety nine degrees as I do not want to become a wilted green machine. Even though I have accomplished this level of energy savings, I still estimate my personal carbon footprint to be approximately seventy pounds a day of carbon dioxide emissions, or about a ton a month or twelve tons a year. At standard conditions of atmospheric pressure and room temperature twelve tons of carbon dioxide occupies a volume of approximately three thousand cubic feet, a space that is about six times the volume of Bernie’s new home.

Should we all drive golf carts and save the planet?

Spring is here and all the golf enthusiasts are excited that a new season of clobbering a small white ball with an oversize driver named Big Bertha is soon to begin. What in the world does golf have to do with being green? Actually quite a lot as we will soon have numerous small super sub compacts that resemble golf carts. First we had the GEM electric car, now the Smart car and soon we will have a host of small cars that are propelled by electric motors, small gasoline engines, or a combination of motors and engines.

The Golf car I really like is the VW Golf. This model has sold over twenty five million cars since its inception and is one of Europe’s most fuel efficient models. The 2009 Golf Euro Star turbo-diesel with a 1.6 liter engine actually achieves better fuel efficiency than a Toyota Prius hybrid. It is a great little car and certainly is like putting a Tiger Woods in your tank. Does anyone remember the Exxon advertisement starting in 1959 for putting a tiger in your tank? Wow this was a dumb advertising campaign that started in Chicago and went worldwide. If you like, check out the Exxon Mobil website under corporate history and the whole story of the Tiger is there, including Exxon Mobile’s good corporate citizenship of donating one million dollars to “save the tiger fund”. Perhaps if Exxon Mobile would not have put fifty million tigers in tanks we would not need the save the tiger fund.

Golf is actually a great way to explain to students studying physics how the laws of conservation of momentum and energy work. The momentum of the Big Bertha is transferred into momentum of the ball. Momentum is the product of mass multiplied by velocity. Hence the more mass and the more velocity the club has the more momentum that can be transferred into the golf ball. The manufacturers of drivers, the club that is used to hit the ball the greatest distance, have increased the mass of drivers to the level of the 1959 Cadillac including the large tail fins. Perhaps it would be a brilliant advertising campaign if Callaway, Taylor Made, or Ping come up with an ad that says “put a tiger in your driver”. I doubt the young advertising executive back in Chicago in 15 ever dreamed that golf would be dominated fifty years later by a person named Tiger.

Golf is a sport that of course does have a large water footprint. I am not talking of the water holes but rather about the quantity of water that is used to irrigate a golf course. It is pretty wasteful of water to build a championship golf course in Phoenix, Tucson and now Dubai. The web site www.dubaigolf.com lists three championship courses in this arid country. One of the courses is called the Dubai Creek Club. I have to assume the creek is manmade just like the indoor ski run in the country. My advice to golfers everywhere is to walk the course so you can huff, puff, and duff and also hopefully avoid the ruff.

Can footballers be really green on the gridiron?

Super Bowl Forty Three was simply amazing and possibly the most exciting Super Bowl ever. I dedicate this episode of Green machine to Gridiron Football. Originally US Football fields were much like checker boards and not lined in the modern fashion with hashes and lines. The gridiron name was given to the game and field because of the checkerboard squares that were originally marked on the field of play. The ball was snapped in the grid in which it was downed in the previous play. Both Canadian and American Football were played on gridiron fields that were 110 yards long and 160 feet wide. Modern Canadian Football fields are still 110 yards long while American Football fields have shrunk to 100 yards.

Many of the fields that are home to NFL teams are now covered in Astroturf rather than natural grass. The losing team in Super Bowl 43, the Arizona Cardinals, play on grass while the winners, the Pittsburgh Steelers, play on Astroturf. The championship was played in Tampa Bay on grass, therefore the type of turf had nothing to do with the outcome of the game. I have previously opined that Astroturf is significantly greener than grass when carbon and water footprints are compared. Maybe the greener team won the Super Bowl. Actually the greenest team in the NFL is the Philadelphia Eagles the cross state rivals of the Steelers. Besides the fact that the Eagles uniforms are green, their owner Christina Lurie has instituted a massive recycling program at their stadium. The Eagles are the first professional sports organization to purchase renewable wind energy for the operation of their stadium. Also they produce bio-diesel from the waste cooking oils and fats that are used in the team’s and stadium kitchens. Of course the Eagles stadium in South Philly is Astroturf.

The least green thing about Super Bowl is the number of fans who arrived in their private jets to witness the game in Tampa Bay. It was estimated that over 400 private jets were used to ferry the rich and the famous to the championship game. These "turbofans" undid the entire efforts of being green that the Eagles accomplished in the entire season. One of the announcers, John Madden, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area has a fear of flying and he and his entourage made the trip to Tampa Bay in his Madden Bus. Two years after Madden graduated from Cal Poly the school suffered a terrible incident in which 16 players were killed in plane crash. This accident as well as Madden’s admitted claustrophobia are the reasons why this hall of fame player, coach and now TV announcer travels from game to game in his bus. Madden should also be admitted to the Green Machine hall of fame as bus travel leaves a far smaller carbon footprint than air travel.

The Super Bowl was watched on TV by some 98.7 million people. That all these fans remained off the roads and freeways for three or four hours also had a positive effect on our collective carbon footprints for that short period of time. If only each Sunday was Super Bowl Sunday the USA could meet the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol by simply being couch potatoes. The Vince Lombardy Trophy was presented to the Steelers by the ultimate Green Machine – Joe Namath. Joe wore the green NY Jets jersey with number 12 in his Super Bowl III victory some forty years ago.

How did Gandhi’s charka save the world?

The G word of the week is in honor of a most remarkable person - Mahatma Gandhi. We all know of his non-violent resistance to British colonialism and his efforts for independence in India. What is not known is that Gandhi was the father of the green movement long before modern opportunist politicians joined this band wagon. A Google search of Gandhi plus Sustainability yields over 250,000 links. Ghandi had proposed that fifty million rural Indian households have Charkas or spinning wheels to produce yarn that in turn would lift these households out of poverty. The Charka is a device that is powered by a foot pedal and Gandhi spent quite a bit of time operating his own charka and was often photographed at his charka.

Ghandi used the symbol of the charka as that of Indian self reliance and the Congress Party of India still uses the charka on their political party flag. Almost sixty years have passed since India gained independence yet the charka is still being used in millions of rural homes. The charka is now being retrofitted with a small electric generator so that the device can not only spin yarn but also generate electricity for lighting the homes of poor villagers. The e-charka as it is now known is connected to a battery while the villager spins yarn and the stored energy is in turn used to power LED lights in the home. Two hours of pedalling an e-charka provides sufficient energy to light the home for 8 hours. The LEDs are replacing kerosene lamps that were traditionally used in rural homes in India. I had jokingly suggested that US provide its prison population that now totals some two million inmates with stationary bikes that have a generator attached. Prisoners need exercise and turning their exercise into green energy may be more useful than most of the present prison practices.

A human with a 2,000 calorie diet is consuming approximately 100 watts of power on a 24 by 7 basis. When we exercise and burn calories, part of the energy consumed is emitted as heat from our bodies but a fraction can actually be harnessed as useful energy. On a stationery bike we could generate approximately 50 watts of energy if the pedals were connected to a generator. The Indian villager that is powering the e-charka is likely not breaking a massive sweat and is engaging in more moderate exercise. I estimate that they are generating something like 15 watts of pedal powered electricity. If the yarn spinning activity is for two hours a day the villager will generate a total 30 watt hours each day. As the LED is ten times more efficient in emitting light than an incandescent light bulb the villager will have generated sufficient electricity to light the home with the radiance equal to one 40 watt incandescent light bulb. A lot of work for a little amount of light but the e-charka has the benefit of producing yarn as well as keeping the villager fit.

Perhaps one of the major US political parties could trade in their symbol of the elephant or the donkey for an e-charka and we too may enjoy energy independence. Better still old Alfalfa and the Governator should try powering their private jets with charkas. I wonder how Arne would pronounce the word Charka.

Is hell exothermic or endothermic?

This episode of Green Machine is the final one for 2008. What a year it has been! Thank G it’s over. Gasoline prices peaked in the summer and are now down to the price they were five years ago. General Motors and Chrysler are on life support and President Bush had to step in where congress refused by offering a bridge loan to these two once mighty companies. The bridge loans will only provide sufficient liquidity until President Obama take office and more money will be needed in February. Time Magazine does a person of the year. Green Machine follows suit by nominating the G Person of The Year, and without a doubt the G Person for 2008 is President George W. Bush. George’s Dad was also President of the USA and had the full name George Herbert Walker Bush (GHWB). His son will be remembered as George Herbert Hoover Bush (GHHB).

Green Machine believes that young GHHB went off the rails by his nomination of two totally incompetent Energy Secretaries. His first Energy Secretary was Spencer Tracy Abraham who lasted the entire first term with zero accomplishment. Spencer had lost his senate seat in Michigan in 2000 so he was out of work when he was chosen by GHHB for Energy Secretary. Spencer was chosen Energy Secretary for the single reason of being of Lebanese decent and GHHB believed that Spencer would have great working relationships with the Movers and Shakers (I would spell this Sheikers) of the oil rich Middle East. Spencer had zero knowledge of thermodynamics and was of no consequence except for helping the US disregard the Kyoto Protocol on global warming gases. The Bush first term was almost entirely focused on the post 9-11 response and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the global war on terrorism. Spencer left office in February 2005 to become a consultant. I can only imagine how well his clients have done. Had we opted into Kyoto in 2001, GM and Chrysler would already have fuel efficient vehicles and would not need a bailout.

GHHB’s second energy secretary, Sam The Sham Bodman, has already won the Green Machine’s Gangrene Prize. What make me particularly mad about Bodman is he has a PhD in Chemical Engineering and unlike Spencer the Dispenser he had a full comprehension of the laws of thermodynamics and simply chose to ignore them for political gain. Now that I have lambasted the Energy Secretaries of the past eight years I will point to Harvard MBAs next. The three most incompetent MBAs from this prestigious school are GHHB, Hank Paulsen, and Rick Wagoner. All three of these HBS alumni have in large measure contributed to the current economic malaise. If I have to pick the least impressive one of these three, it is Rick Off The Wagon Wagoner. He is the magician of the year by making GM disappear.

There is great debate whether hell is exothermic or endothermic because we have the sayings “hotter than hell” and “when hell freezes over”. I will have to opine on this in a future episode of Green Machine now that our economy and environment is going to hell in a hand basket. I anticipate that 2009 will be a better year and there is no way possible that the next President, next Energy Secretary, and next Chief Executive Officer of GM will ignore science and the melting Arctic Ice Cap and believe the marketing of Hummers are good for the economy and environment. I wish all Green Machine enthusiasts a happy, healthy, prosperous, and low carbon footprint new year.

Is Arnie a Jolly Green Giant?

Today we thank the Jolly Green Giant for our episode of Green Machine. Is this the Giant on the small screen that ate pees became green and grew into a giant? Actually I was thinking of our Governator who is the new Jolly Green Giant. Just in time for Christmas, Arnie and his Air Resources Board have proposed the Scoping Plan to cut California's greenhouse gas emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020. Developing this Scoping Plan was part of the law that Arnie signed into law in September 2006. The problem is that back in September 2006 housing prices were high and GM still was a company with a stock price of thirty three dollars a share.

The same fools at the Air Resources Board who brought us MTBE are now scoping the future and planning for us to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by thirty seven percent between now and 2020. This will primarily be accomplished by the wished for low carbon fuel the Air Resources Board is yet to invent. Also proposed is a "Feebate" for a Cap-and-Trade program to lower greenhouse gas emissions. I read this as a Tax and an increase in the cost of fuel, automobiles, doing business in the Golden State, or simply living here. Instead of coining marketing terms like Feebates these guys should concentrate on improving the quality of life for all in California.

These imbeciles coined the term "Reformulated Gasoline" for the MTBE laden poisonous gasoline that was mandated twenty years ago to clean the air. This was stupidity of the greatest measure as all gasoline vehicles started to deploy catalytic converters and the MTBE served no purpose other than to line the oil companies' pockets with additional profits. Some elite group will make money out of Cap-and-Trade while our greenhouse gas emissions will not decline by 37% by 2020. The only hope for reduction of greenhouse gases in any large measure is to improve vehicle efficiency and provide incentives for folks to carpool and take public transportation. Instead of Feebates (Taxes) we should have rebates (incentives) to those who adjust the driving habits, turn down their home thermostats, get rid of their lawns and SUVs, and live a greener life.

Thank goodness Obama did not take the Kennedy family's advice and appoint the Jolly Green Giant as the Secretary of Energy. Instead he will appoint a Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Chu as Energy Secretary. Chu won his Nobel Prize in 1997 for understanding the behaviour of gases at very low temperatures. Chu and his co-winner Claude Cohen-Tanoudji, developed a method to use multiple lasers focused on gas atoms that slowed down their velocity of motion to less than one kilometre per hour thereby reducing their temperature to almost absolute zero. Chu was quoted in 1997 when he won the Nobel Prize that he and Cohen had slowed down the velocity of gases to a rate that an ant might walk. I kind of like it that an ant tamer was chosen over Jolly Green Giant for Energy Secretary. Remember that the suddenly green Governor was the celebrity that popularized Hummers and owned a bunch of them at the time Chu and Cohen were trying to think small and slow things down. I think Dr Chu will be a good Energy Secretary, I only wish that the California Air Resources Board had a collective IQ close to his. As tomorrow is Christmas I will use the words of the original Jolly Green Giant and sign off by saying Ho Ho Ho.

Will GM become a white dwarf?

Today we thank the once biggest general of them all, General Motors, for our episode of Green Machine. Yes GM is the biggest of the once big three. This motor company has managed to loose more than seventy billion dollars since 2004. Not bad, they sold about thirty five million vehicles during this period and only lost two thousand dollars on each vehicle in their effort for us to “see the USA in our Chevrolet”. While GM lost the seventy big boys the global economic crisis has wiped out more than twenty trillion in the collective global wealth. I was thinking about twenty trillion and realized this is a very large number. The second nearest star other than our sun is less than twenty trillion miles away from earth.

The big question for the big three is whether they will become the little two. Stars also go through expansion and contraction and may end up as black holes. The good news about all of this is that it will be billions of years before our sun gives out its last rays. Solar energy is still our major hope for using renewable energy to power the planet. The solar stocks have also been hit by the plunge on Wall Street but their collective future is still brighter than auto stocks, but not by much unlessl the cost of solar cells is reduced by eighty percent. Solar cells now cost approximately $8,000 per kilowatt of installed capacity and only generate energy a quarter of the time when the sun is shining. When and if the installed cost of solar cells drops to around $1,500 per kilowatt this method for abundant electric power generation will really take hold.
There are rumors that the CEO of GM, Rick Wagoner, wants to meet with Toyota in Tokyo. Maybe he read my recent Green Machine article where I postulated the “Toyota Inside” model for affordable, efficient, and high performing future vehicles. Bob Lutz the Vice Chairman of General Motors who often appears on CNBC is still betting on his Chev Volt, the plug in hybrid that will rely on Lithium batteries and is scheduled for commercial launch in 2010. The problem for Lutz is whether GM can survive until then. The US government may well become the largest shareholder in each and every of the three US auto companies long before the Volt draws any juice from the power grid. Perhaps GM with Washington calling the shots will then have a CEO named Klutz and a car named the Revolt.

On an upbeat note, we have a new President with yesterday’s election. As I write the Green Machine articles a week in advance I cannot answer who the new president is, but there is no doubt the new president will have to deal with energy as one of the primary policy issues facing our country in the future. Housing and transportation account for over half of our energy use and both of these sectors require significant funds and attention. I did a quick back of the envelope calculation that transportation including the cost of owning and operating vehicles, maintaining roads and bridges, policing the roads, etc. accounts for approximately twenty per cent of our gross domestic product. I have not performed the calculation on housing but it must be more than thirty percent of GDP.

Maybe I should offer my services to the next administration and show them and the US public, how by being Green Machines we can move the economy forward based on conservation and saving rather than by massive and unsustainable consumption. While it will be painful for the former Big Three stars of the US economy to shrink, they can still have a bright future producing efficient smaller vehicles that could be branded as “white dwarfs” rather than “Super Novas”.

Are goblins green?

Today’s episode is in honor of Halloween and should be called orange machine rather than green machine. I was thinking how much energy goes into the production and distribution of bite size candy bars. If the candy is simply sugar based such as a life saver it actually has less energy per unit mass than a candy such as a Snickers or milk chocolate of equivalent mass. This is due to the fact that carbohydrates (sugar) have less energy content per unit mass than cocoa butter (lipid or fat). The chemical structure of a carbohydrate already is partially oxidized and hence it has less available chemical energy when it is digested. A lipid has no oxygen atoms in its chemical structure and therefore has more chemical energy available for digestion.

If one looks at the nutrition information on the package of foods one would see that fats yield 9 kilocalories per gram while sugar only yields 4 kilocalories per gram. Therefore we would be doing our kids a favor if we gave them individually wrapped Lifesaver Candies rather than individually wrapped Snickers Bars on Halloween night. There are approximately four thousand children on the Tiburon Peninsular that will be trick or treating on Halloween Night. If we assume each child is lucky enough to haul in half a pound of candy and that the candy is evenly split between sugar and chocolate one can perform the requisite math to calculate that the collective energy in all the treats given to the children here on the Peninsular on Halloween Night totals some 5,900,000 kilocalories. This amount of energy equals the fuel content of 203 gallons of gasoline.

If we assume that on Halloween Night each household on the Peninsular hands out a pound of candy, the 2,000 head of households also had the drive to the grocery store to purchase the candy. Assuming the trip to the grocery store required a quarter of a gallon of gasoline another 500 gallons of gasoline was expended to procure these treats. I am all for being green but believe that on a special night like Halloween one should not worry about carbon footprints but one should rather enjoy the festival. I do however have advice for the method of lighting the Jack-o’-lanterns and the kids’ flashlights. These should all be lit by light emitting diodes (LEDs) as LEDs require far less energy than older incandescent lights to emit the same amount of lumens.

There are some among us who believe handing out candy is not good for the children and prefer to give the kids stickers. I have a sweet tooth and feel that on this special night candy treats are in order. In some communities a large bonfire is lit for the celebration of Halloween. Of course lighting a large bonfire would significantly add to the carbon footprint of the event. Perhaps a wealthy community could buy carbon credits to offset the carbon emissions from the bonfire, but now we are really commercializing the celebration of Halloween even though old Alfalfa would recommend the purchase of such carbon credits. I always enjoy Halloween as it has many G words associated with the festival. These include ghosts, ghouls, gremlins, gourds, and of course goblins. Happy Halloween!

Will vehicles get lighter?

What does one of the Marx Brothers have to do with green? Back in the 50s Groucho had the TV show called “You Bet Your Life”. These past weeks on Wall Street could also be called you bet your life. I have received several emails about the outcome of investing $1,000 in various shares or simply buying beer with the $1,000. The emails claim that had you bought $1,000 of beers and drank the beers you would still have $214 in left over aluminum in the empty cans. Had you bought Bear Sterns or Lehman Brothers you would have boopkas.

I did a quick calculation of the mass of left over aluminum had you bought beers with your $1,000. Let’s assume one can buy the least expensive beer for $6 per case of 12 cans. The CRV per can is 5 cents hence the 12 cans would have a CRV of 60 cents or 10% of the cost of the beer. Excluding sales tax one can therefore expect to receive $100 for the recycling of $1,000 expended on beer. A minus 90% return these days is actually preferred to a minus 100% return.

Last week I bet my own life by having major surgery to remove my prostate. Thankfully the outcome was successful and the prognosis is excellent. I am reminded on Charles Dickens and his book “A Tale Of Two Cities” in which Dickens writes his famous lines that “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. While recovering from the surgery and bearing the pain under medication I watched the TV in my hospital room and seeing how the financial world was falling apart, I was thinking about these words. For me the past week was the best of times, but for most it was the worst of times. But for all of us we still have the hope that there will be better times ahead. From a sustainability perspective the global economic slowdown will lower the rate of combustion of fossil fuels and hence will lessen the emissions of carbon dioxide. Conversely there may be much less capital available to retool the power generation sector and the vehicle fleet. I still believe we are on the path to using less fuel no matter what the level of the Dow Jones Index.

Remembering that mid grade gasoline prices peaked here at the 76 station on Tiburon Blvd. on June 19 at $4.79, I was pleased to see the price of the same gasoline was $3.63 yesterday. No doubt thanks to economic slowdown and us all being greener we will “enjoy” gasoline for less than $3 per gallon soon. I am an optimist and believe the future will be better than the present and the past. The US government will need to adopt energy efficiency policies. Both candidates in the final presidential debate agreed we will be weaned off oil imported from unfriendly countries within ten years. Hopefully we will not simply buy more oil from friendly countries. My prognostication is that we will be using 20% less oil in 2018 as by then many of the SUVs will have been recycled and the fleet of vehicles will be 1,000 pounds lighter on average. I guess one could use the beer investment analogy and calculate the residual value of the steel in a Hummer. Maybe the Governator will ask for legislation to set a CRV for his fleet of Hummers. In this case I would gladly support legislation to give SUV owners $1,000 to take their monsters to the junk yard. We could even have the duck come down with the $1,000 when the owner says the magic green word.

Should we be green or greedy?

Today’s episode is brought to you courtesy of one of the prime motivators of behavior. With all the news of the housing, banking, and economic crisis there has to be a connection between greed and green. The oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffet, has a saying “be fearful when all are greedy and be greedy when all are fearful”. Warren Hard-Thing Buffet has stepped in to buy a part of GE and also holds several other recent investments in hurting companies.

The connection between greed and green is just a substitution of one letter - the d for the n. Does it make sense to say “be fearful when all are green and be green when all are fearful”? Yes it does! When all the politicians claim to have alternative energy policies one should be fearful. We have the recent cases of hydrogen and ethanol to point to where there was this mass stampede by those who set policy to waste time, money, and precious food on thermodynamic dead ends. Should we be green when all are fearful? Yes there is a real opportunity to save ourselves and our planet by being green!

One silver lining from this economic mess is that Smart Cars are in and SUVs are out. The US consumed 4.4% less liquid hydrocarbons in the first eight months of this year versus last year. There is no doubt the trend will continue. We did however consume 3.5% more natural gas and 0.7% coal in the first eight months compared with last year. As liquid hydrocarbons account for about the same total energy use in our economy as natural gas and coal combined, we did manage to lower our total energy use so far this year. Also as natural gas is less carbon intensive than either liquid hydrocarbons and coal, our collective carbon footprint is also lower in 2008.

The real solution to our economic crisis lies in ending the decline in housing prices and putting people to work in new jobs. A good fraction of new jobs could well be in manufacturing more efficient vehicles, manufacturing and installing wind turbines or solar electric power generation systems. Several years back I gave a talk at a meeting in DC that pointed to the need in the USA for a new car company. My hypothesis was that we should “standardize” around an engine and drive train platform from a company like Toyota and mass customize the body, interior and paintjob of the car to suit motorist’s individual needs. VW bugs and Model T Fords were kind of like this business model but my idea is to go even further, where one engine/drivetrain company provides all the “inside” equipment for a vehicle and others assemble and customize vehicles for the consumers. This was the “Intel Inside” model for PCs when there was an opportunity to drive costs down and increase performance. If only I could get the ear of old Warren, I could then convince that I could produce the Berkshire Hat-Away roaster, a car that goes as fast as a Carrera yet costs as little as a Corolla. No doubt a few of us on the Tiburon Peninsular would don our British racing green driving caps, speed down the boulevard in the Berkshire with rag top down and salute the electromotive forces of fear and greed.

How much energy is there in a hurricane?

Thank Gustav It’s Saturday

Yes Gustav is the G word of the day. Why would we thank Gustav for being green when in fact he was the hurricane that hit Louisiana on Labor Day? Well first Gustav is a Swedish name for the “staff of the gods” and maybe the gods were trying to tell us that increasing the ocean temperature helps hurricanes form and intensify. The scale or category of hurricanes is measured from 1 to 5 with 5 being the most powerful. The scale named the Saffir Simpson scale was developed in 1971 by a Structural Engineer named Herbert Saffir and a meteorologist named Bob Simpson. Bob Simpson was the director of the National Hurricane Center and Herb Saffir was interested in designing inexpensive hurricane resistant housing. They could of called their hurricane scale the Herb and Bob scale but then who would have taken them seriously?

The amount of power contained and hence released by a hurricane is proportional to the cube of the velocity of the winds ge nerated by the hurricane. Therefore a category 5 storm with winds of greater than 156 miles per hour has 430 percent of the power of a category 2 storm with winds greater than 96 miles per hour. The residents of the Gulf Coast were indeed fortunate that Hurricane Gustav had lessened in intensity to a Category 2 by the time it hit land. 96 mile per hour winds are still not something to sneeze at. I actually have never tried to sneeze into a powerful wind, perhaps Newton’s laws of motion would cause one to sneeze inward rather than outward.
There are sceptics who believe that the increase in global warming gases in our atmosphere have nothing to do with hurricanes and that all hurricanes just come and go in cycles. There is likely a cycle between periods of fewer hurricanes and periods of increased hurricane activity but the warming of the ocean by a degree or two will have a significant influence on the intensity and severity of each hurricane. The hurricane gains strength when it is over warm water and dissipates its strength by traversing land or cooler waters. All the added carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will indeed increase earth's temperature by a degree or more in the next fifty years and folks living in Florida and the gulf coast will have to live with more severe hurricanes. In fact the Saffir Simpson scale may need to expand to a category 6 hurricane but this is purely academic as a category 5 hurricane will damage just about every building in its path.We are fortunate that Gustuv moved across the gulf in pretty rapid fashion with a forward motion of the eye that was between 15 and 18 miles per hour. This more rapid movement prevented Gustav from exceeding a category 2 when it made landfall on the Louisiana coast. Other factors that influence the intensity of the hurricane besides ocean temperature and the speed the eye is traveling is the amount of shear the hurricane experiences in the upper atmosphere by other weather systems. In the case of Gustav there was another weather system that did moderate the hurricane by the presence of counter flowing winds above Gustav. We are indeed fortunate that Gustav only caused $10 billion in damages and there was little loss of life. As Gustav did not reach a category 5 storm his name was not retired and Gustav will live to frighten us again in a future hurricane season. Perhaps the folks who name hurricanes will also use the names herb and Bob in the future.