[Stoves] WorldStove replies to BioFuelWatyche's latest imprecise reporting of facts.

Crispin Pemberton-Pigott crispinpigott at gmail.com
Wed Jul 20 14:59:22 CDT 2011


Dear Ron and All

 

I am not copying this to the other lists because I don’t think it will post from my address.

 

The reason I spend so much time reading papers on the broad subjects that involve climate change and stove projects is because I render advice to people who invest money in stoves. I have to be ahead of the wave, not swamped by it. That is why my posts are often cautionary with regard to depending on project pillars which may collapse. S.W.O.T. and all that.

 

>To stovers.   The original start of this thread yesterday by Nat Mulcahy was on "Biochar".  There are four "biochar" lists also managed by Tom Miles.  

>To the Yahoo biochar lists:   We have agreed that the one related to climate topics should be "biochar-policy" (URL given above). For continuity (hopefully temporary as it relates to the climate topic),  I also include "biochar".

>I think there have been no restrictions on talking climate topics on "stoves" - so I feel it necessary to comment on the several (conflicting) types of misinformation I find in Crispin's message below.  mainly from the stoves perspective.  I wrote a different kind of support response last night to the "Biochar" list, for any (non-biochar) stovers finding this interesting.



All comment are welcome as far as I am concerned. Many of these points are directly relevant to stove programme managers.

++++++++

>>When you are dealing with a funded organisation responsible one way or another to donors, you have to tout and shout the current (funded) memes. This is apparently an organisation that believes that the Earth’s climate, which changes massively and continuously all by itself, can be brought to stasis by the All-Powerful Hand of Man fiddling the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. That alone is so unscientific that it beggars belief they follow any scientific path at all, let along one that includes your observations and supporting documents.

>    [RWL1:   Crispin.  you have not read enough of the Biofuel Watch literature.  

No, I have not and do not know much about them save that they have consistently attacked, by name, Nat’s company, that is one of the very few (count them!) private companies that are actually getting into the field and manufacturing really good stoves in multiple countries. He is pioneering. 

>You have gotten the BFW message exactly backwards (hope you can prove me wrong).  

The message I refer to is the one in which they attack, by name, WorldStove. I am sure they have other messages but that is the relevant one.

>They repeatedly warn against all (especially Biochar) man-made intervention in attacking global warming.  

Good. Because it would be tilting at windmills.

>They are mysteriously silent on what they believe about anthropogenic causation of warming.  

For good reasons I am sure. There is no falsifiable claim made with respect to any ‘anthropogenic causation of warming”. This statement may still, however, be countered by those scientists who say that, “The claim of unprecedented and dangerous global warming is scientifically false” (which implies a falsifiable claim).  <http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/17/weekly-climate-and-energy-news-roundup-26/> http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/17/weekly-climate-and-energy-news-roundup-26/ 

>However, unlike you, I am pretty sure they do acknowledge that global warming exists and that it is due predominantly to fossil fuels.  You continue to amaze me with your denial of these two fundamental beliefs.  

It is important for readers to know that you state these as ‘beliefs’. They are certainly not facts. First, in case you did not read my previous public and private comments to you and because you seem to delight in repeating what you wrote there, I do believe the world is warming (long may it continue say all Canadians), and has been doing so since the end of the last Ice age (thank goodness) interrupted as we know by dramatic ups and down in global temperature. I do not know why you believe that I think the Earth is not warming up. It is warming up, and hopefully it will not do much more than cool slightly in the coming 5 decades as we go into a Dalton or Maunder-type solar minimum.

To ascribe Earthly warming to ‘fossil fuels’ is plainly unscientific. To find and prove a relationship between combustion of fossil fuels and global temperature, however imperfectly measured, is a lodestone that is not in hand, nor near to hand, nor in sight. There is a good correlation between CO2 in the atmosphere between 1975 and 1995 and the global temperature. However that is not a very good run on climate change scales and there is obviously a 60 year cycle of ups and downs. 

There are far better correlations between the global temperature are the number of pirates http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/18/climate-scientists-need-protection-from-pirates/ and the cost of US Postal stamps. I do not believe that anthropogenic CO2 or postage stamp prices or the number of pirates are anything like the leading cause of upward or downward changes in the global temperature. At the moment the temperature is not going up but the postage rates continue to do so, the CO2 continues to rise, and the number of pirates is increasing. Based on the pirates, the temperature should be going down. I think it is not following the CO2 level because the CO2 influence is overated (IPCC AR7 makes dramatic claims!) as many papers have shown, and the solar influence has been greatly underrated as many other papers have shown. Please keep an eye out for the paper soon to be released from CERN concerning the recent CLOUD experiment which shows that Svensmark was right all along – it’s the sun, and the solar influence on clouds. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/18/cern-dont-interpret-the-cloud-experiment-results/#more-43674 

>If I thought they believed as you I wouldn't be paying as much attention to their nonsense about Biochar.

I agree with you – there is a lot of nonsense about biochar circulating on the web – to some a panacea, to others, El Dorado.

>   I have asked you repeatedly to tell me one thing found at  <http://www.skepticalscience.org> www.skepticalscience.org with which you diagree.  

As you did not respond to the reply I sent on that subject here is another: Skepticalscience.org is collection of collections. One of the referenced sources is http://knowledge.allianz.com/search.cfm?126/climate-change-global-warming-what-is-greenhouse-effect <http://knowledge.allianz.com/search.cfm?126/climate-change-global-warming-what-is-greenhouse-effect&mcg=1166123302_6139625452&kwg=Broad_1166123302_greenhouse+effect> &mcg=1166123302_6139625452&kwg=Broad_1166123302_greenhouse+effect 

It states, “Minuscule changes, global impact
Slight changes in the amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are already changing the way our planetary heating system works”

And

“Most people can relate to how hot and stuffy a greenhouse can get. Now that the Earth has started to heat up, we realize that our own global greenhouse has no window that we can open to catch some fresh air.”

My goodness. A greenhouse works by preventing vertical mass transfer with glass sheets. The atmosphere is an enormous upwardly open window. That is why, when it gets slightly hotter, thunderstorms and thermals rise much higher and vent far more heat into space – within hours. Read Adrian Bejan’s quick dismissal of entire (erroneous) concept of CAGW. 

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/15/the-constructal-law-of-flow-systems/ 

The atmosphere is a very efficient heat engine venting into space, particularly in the Arctic. Heat transfer of this type is well covered in Bejan chapter 5.5 of “Convection heat Transfer” ISBN0-471-27150-0. [Bejan writes textbooks on heat transfer and AGW is all about heat capture and transfer.]

http://www.skepticalscience.org/ is not a good source of information on the climate, though it links to masses of it – paid advertising, masses of it.

Were you perhaps thinking of www.skepticalscience.com ? It is in the same league as the unremittingly warmist site Desmogblog and other low-traffic port of opinion. To be extremely brief, taking something I found within 5 minutes from John Cook, “The surface temperature record shows that the number of warm nights are increasing faster than warm days <http://www.skepticalscience.com/human-fingerprint-in-global-warming.html#stratosphere> . This is another effect of greenhouse warming.”

Good heavens, do not hire that man. Is there anything that is not another effect of greenhouse warming? 

See http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm for a list of over 600 things cause by global warming (according to papers, press and pundits) including making more women cheat when on vacation.

It was only a few years ago that the ‘consensus’ was the opposite, remember? Oh, how we forget.  Warm nights are caused by several things but especially clouds, and if the days are not warmer (which anyone can easily show) then where is the global warming which is supposed to be working especially well in the daytime. The biggest idea that held promise for a while (without evidence to support it) was that the oceans were storing the additional heat that was supposed to have been accumulating in the (not-temperature-increasing) atmosphere, that explains why the temperature has not going up meaningfully for 16 years now. This has been pretty solidly shown to be a false theory (ocean heat content). There has been no recent meaningful increase in the total ocean heat content contradicting the CO2+H2O feedback hypothesis. The OHC is still below what it was during the last interglacial when no one was burning fossil fuels (which means it was natural variation at that time).

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/18/simulation-says-doom-real-world-data-says-no-worry/ 

It is referred to as ‘Trenberth’s missing heat’ in most discussions. Lately Trenberth wants the ‘null hypothesis’ turned on its head: “If we do not know what causes the temp to go up, then it is CO2 by default.” [paraphrase] Here is his present position: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/26/trenberth-at-ams-defends-himself-against-deniers/ 

>[snip] The complaint of Nat about BFW, with which I agree totally, has nothing to do with the causation of the sequestration need for biochar..

 Thanks for agreeing. Nat is correct.

>    [RWL2:  After you start reading more of the anti-biochar literature (almost all originating with BFW), you will find that they [three non-experts (zero peer-reviewed publications) in the field] have been hugely influential in slowing down actions to promote biocchar R&D and implementation.   They are very clever in the PR department.]

Well I certainly recognize that method in the monomaniacal promotion of AG CO2 over the many, much more important influences on the climate.

>   [RWL3:  Again you need to read more closely.  There is a 97% consensus on a "CO2 argument" among climate scientists (I am sure you know where to find the data behind that statistic).  

Oh my lord! Not that 97% again! Next it will be 97% of rats prefer Kraft cheese! A 2008 master’s thesis by student Maggie Kendall Zimmerman at the University of Illinois. Everyone, please read how 75 scientists became 97% of a survey involving 10,257 Earth scientists. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/04/lawrence-solomon-on-consensus-statistics/  Ron, never again refer to that faked number. I want people to think of you as the great man of science that you are known to be. Remember what Ben Franklin said about statistics and damned lies.

>>One of the ‘difficult sells’ with biochar is not going to go away: having collected the fuel, why not burn it all. If someone wants to get more carbon in the ground, plant trees. If someone wants biochar for agriculture, set up an industry to do that. It is fundamental that having procured, processed, dried and prepared a fuel for the fire, it is unwise to throw any of it away. There must be cases where it makes sense,. But a heck of a lot where it does not.

>[RWL4:   Sorry,  this is only a difficult sell with deniers.   Start learning about Biochar's reason for rapid growth at www.biochar-international.org.  New technical papers on Biochar are coming out at a rate of about twice a week - and popular press much more often. While there, look at the IBI view of the BFW misconception at 

   http://www.biochar-international.org/sites/default/files/Biochar%20Misconceptions%20and%20the%20Science.pdf

I will have a look at that paper. I am not sure who the deniers are that you refer to. Are they the people who deny that the sun is by far the most important variable in the changing temperature of the Earth? Are they the people who deny that 25% char yield from wood with 14 mJ/kg is half the energy available in the original fuel, and that if the stove is not twice as efficient there is a net increase in the mass of fuel needed to cook? Are you referring perhaps to the people that deny there has been a collapse in the carbon trading market in the US and that the European market is about to follow suit, and that within a few years there may be no CO2 funding for stove projects at all?

>In brief,  charcoal is more valuable in the soil than being combusted - but you have heard this many times before.  Believe me,  Nat is not throwing any away.  Of course, no one would disagree that some places are better than others.

 Local circumstances dominate. I offered, twice, I think, a detailed analysis here on the decision process that can make or break an argument for retaining the char based on the energy content of the fuel, the char mass and the thermal efficiency of the stove. As always I invite responses, and there has been no counter offer. We can’t get away from the basic need for energy and if there is an absolute shortage, people should burn their char, and everything on the hardware side should be as efficient as possible. To that end there are multiple paths.

>>Everything proposed by the char producing stove seems, in my limited view, to involve work for the stove user. If that work can be very limited and the application of the small amount of char generated is concentrated on a small portion of land, or as you point, dosed onto individual plants, it is excusable. But not if there is no additional fuel readily available (because the high energy portion is being tossed). But not if there is a net increase in fuel taken from the source.  It looks strange to see the ordinary need for cooking being turned into a complex battle between agriculturalists and rent-seekers trying to bring an ever-changing climate to a halt. 

 > [RWL5:  I find it hard to believe, but everything in this paragraph is wrong.  

Let’s look at the points in the paragraph:

1.       In order to save char from a stove, the char must be remove from the stove at some point, put into a quenching vessel or (if it is already out) into a storage container. The ash should be separated from it. Later this must be transferred to either a collection point or one’s own collection point such as a fertilizer pile. That’s work.

2.       Having run out of energy prematurely (having not burned the char) one needs to get additional fuel somehow. More work.

3.       Not all, but most char producing stoves require fuel preparation (which is work, so Paul Anderson says). In particular I refer to TLUD stoves that require chopped or chipped or shredded fuel. This is not universally the case where the fuel is already in ‘pieces’ but is certainly is generally true. Buying pellets is merely paying someone else to do the fuel preparation (paid work).

4.       Nat points out that char can be more beneficial if concentrated on individual plants instead of put in the whole of the field. This is clearly more (stoop) labour. He says it because as far as he has seen, so much is required to make a meaningful difference that it is an impractical technology at the moment. He cites application rates. I have read about application rates. The Japanese researched this, big time.

5.       If there is no additional fuel readily available, where will the cook get more fuel to continue cooking? From father away? More work, obviously.

6.       If there is a net increase in the off-take of fuel to cook and create char (which is about 29 MJ/kg) on the side, that is going to create more fuel collecting work to keep the fire going, unless, as I have pointed out here several times before, the thermal efficiency of the stove more than makes up for the baseline fuel harvest. In some places the whole fuel supply including agriwaste is burned (Harare), in others, not.

7.       The cook did not ask to be given a char producing stove. The arguments organisations for and against them are a) looking for ways to produce stoves for sale that include a subsidy derived from carbon trading because, in nearly all cases, the market would not otherwise buy the product, b) they are interested in adding char to soil and the stove happened to come along (though 3-stone fires produce lots of char – perhaps this is overlooked), c) people promoting relatively expensive very clean burning gasifiers that leave char behind and they are looking for a use for it, instead of having to admit they are throwing away a great deal of energy. On this last point, I observe that people, having failed to burn whole biomass cleanly, have developed gasifiers that do burn clean but leave valuable fuel in the fire pot. Well, interesting, but only a partial solution.

8.       The critics of Nat hold, in the document that I referenced, that ‘climate change can be brought to a stop’. This is patently unscientific and reflects on their thinking. Let them first prove it by preventing galactic cosmic rays from creating Earth-chilling clouds when the solar heliosphere shrinks during periods when the Solar centre of mass is only slightly displaced from the solar system’s barycenter. Then I might believe they can control the Earth’s climate. Bring popcorn, it may take a while.

>One of the biggest advantages of the TLUDs and TLODs is an ability to start them and then leave them alaone.  Nat is finding 5-6 times more char being turned in than expected.  Reason:  people are going into business with the stoves.  

Where are they getting the additional fuel to cook with? If they are not requiring it because the stove is more efficient, that proves the correctness of my calculated benefit and economic tipping points, or rather decision points (tipping in favour, etc). If there was nothing else to burn, they would not be turning in the char, believe me. Either they have more fuel available (now being harvested sustainably I trust J) or the stove is thermally more efficient/controllable/both. What is the energy cost of sending the char to the fields compared with burning whole fuel in the home and making char in the field? (i.e. the opportunity cost from an energy audit point of view). 

>Also if you would read Nat's material you would find the words "pellets", and "residues"  and "non-trees".   Life is decidedly simpler for the Lucia stove user - one of the the reasons for rapid expansion of Nat's business.

There are a number of reasons for his success so far. That would be an interesting though separate analysis.

>>They are attacking your products because they have no idea what they are doing. That is my conclusion, on several levels. Wow.

>    [RWL6.  Now we agree.  Not sure how you got here though.]

By reading everything and assimilating the ideas, risks and opportunities. There is a reason the world most popular science site is www.wattsupwiththat.com – it allows open discussion and all sides of complex issues are aired, usually with the whole underlying papers made available even if some are behind paywalls. We agree on lots of things.

>>Your stoves work fine. If they could burn more of the carbon, so much the better. Sitting in my urban shack having found a piece of a truck pallet to cook for the night, I would rather have the heat than some black char to toss outside in the roadside where it will be crushed and blown around my already dirty, dusty township.

>   [RWL7:  On your first point,  Nat has made a conscious decision to only market pyrolyzers.  His (unique) concept could gasify - and he has chosen not to - for reasons I think you cant (as a climate denier)  understand.  

You are not making sense. It is not I who have taken on a blinkered ‘belief’ position. Has his decision helped him sell stoves by getting the assistance of organisations who want to add char to soil to promote the products? I think the answer is yes. Nothing wrong with that. Calling me names won’t affect the decision at all.

>The dust you are talking about is coal dust - which has no place in anyone's garden.  

What?!? You are still not making sense. No one puts coal dust on a field. I was referring to wooden pallet char that has no local market and which will be tossed out just like the char from 3-stove fires that is tossed out right now.

>Users of Biochar take great pains to get it safely in the ground - especially (in Nat's case) using char surrounding individual seeds. 

That is what he says in his discussion paper.

>>While there is no one, perfect answer, there is also no perfect understanding and far more than one path. One far too common element is so many people grasping at money, and failing that, straws. In their view, you, Nat, are collateral damage.

>   [RWL:  Again several agreements and disagreements.  Obviously we can all agree with your first sentence.  But  I ask anyone reading this to suggest an alternative better for either carbon sequestration or soil augmentation (Biochar comping from pyrolyszing stoves being the one Nat is following).   I think you have insulted a lot of fine people (maybe Nat?) who are in the Biochar business for the right reasons.  Unless you have some proof of the intentions of those entrepreneurs who are trying hard to make Biochar work, I think it better not to guess on motivations (which BFW does continually).  BFW shrewdly makes a big deal of Mantria - but that is/was an outlier, in my opinion.  When Nat talks about unknown money - he is referring to those very few who downplay Biochar.  

I am a supporter of biochar and investigated it long before it became popular in stove circles. As you may know I was the Director of Technical Services for a national appropriate technology parastatal corporation and we were omnivorous about development technologies. It is still not clear that the terra preta in the Amazon was deliberately created. If it worked everywhere agronomists would long ago have recommend broadening its application. They all know about it.  Biochar people may be in their business for very good reasons. I have already tried to engage you in a discussion about the math that seems to underlie their char-adding methods, pointing out on this site that it would take more than a millennium to grow on a square meter of soil enough wood to make enough char to produce the sort of results they are talking about for large scale agriculture (where the carbon sequestration argument ultimately lies).

>     Lastly,  Nat is nowhere approaching "collateral damage".  

Excuse me, he was targeted by his critics as part of a general argument they were making, and the fact that he sets up commercially sustainable fuel saving, convenient and clean burning stoves was tough buns for him. He is their target anyway.  That is what I meant by collateral damage. They are busy critiquing ‘the big picture’ and he goes down with that ship.

>His is a spectacularly successful operation, growing very rapidly - based on an outstanding business plan.  What amazes me is his ability to find the time to fight back against the likes of BFW..

We can all help with the provision of suitable and relevant background material.

>  Apologies for taking up too much space - but I couldn't let Crispin's (and BFW's) comments stand unchallenged.  I urge you to re-read both Nat's and the BFW material.

Well, you challenged them and they stand up pretty well. It would make it shorter if next time you wrote less about your opinion of me and more about the technologies, the math underlying the claims and proposals and further, that you referenced material from outside a single opinion point on the causes of climate change.

My initial comment was primarily on the scientific credibility of Nat’s critics (or not) and my conclusion remains that they are perhaps not all that well read. I further attributed that to their funding sources which are ‘earmarked’ (i.e. given for a particular purpose) and the expectation is they will continue to further their arguments no matter what science holds. This is hardly an uncommon experience in this polarized, politicized, agenda-driven modern age where the almighty (donated) Buck dominates.

Something not mentioned by you was my suggestion that planting trees stores carbon very effectively, probably far more effectively than stove char. Please read http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/18/breaking-news-trees-store-carbon/#more-43685 for an article on the huge uptake (50.5 gigatons) of carbon (185 gigatons of CO2) in additional storage in forests since 1990 because of its increased availability in the atmosphere. For 50% of that time, the global temperature increased, for the last 50% it is static. Read into that what you will. Don’t bother claiming that new Chinese power plants are the cause of the temperature stasis because NASA has already contradicted Kaufmann et al (2011). http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/18/new-nasa-paper-contradicts-kaufmann-et-al-saying-its-volcanoes-not-china-coal/#more-43660  When the CERN paper is released, even the volcano story will not hold up despite the (reasonable) correlation. Look up into the sky! It’s cloudy, for a known, proven reason.

Stovers: Did you know that if all the world’s biomass combustion were cleaned up (with reference to smoke/particles) there would be a large increase in the atmospheric forcing from biomass combustion? At present the particles from biomass burning cause net cooling. Put that in your (chimney) pipe and smoke it! Do we want to make smokier fires to cool the planet some more? Or does it make nearly no difference at all? And if there is a consensus one way or the other, was it manufactured? http://judithcurry.com/2011/07/16/manufacturing-consensus/ + 624 (!) comments.

Best regards to all you patient readers,

Crispin

 

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