Saturday, November 27, 2010

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Allègre

from: Claude Allègre, L’imposture climatique, Plon, 2010.

As for CO2, the idea is to capture CO2 as it leaves the factory, then to inject the CO2 underground and thus imprison it. The idea is that, in the long term, this CO2 will transform itself by reacting with rock, into sandstone. It is a way of trying to reproduce artificially the mechanism by which nature changed the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere, which was at 80 % some 4,4 billion years ago, into what it is today...

... If one were to artificially destroy all the sandstone currently present in the earth’s crust, the atmosphere would be 80% CO2, and the pressure at ground level would be that of 5 000 meters under the sea! We are currently trying to imprison CO2 in experimental sites in Canada, Norway, Algeria, Germany, Poland, Australia. To date, the major hurdle is that of capturing the CO2 as it «leaves» the factory. One needs to separate the CO2 from other gases. One knows how to do it but it is extremely expensive, some 80$ per tonne for separation (called ‘capture’) and 5$ for burial. The United States and China have immense coal reserves, which they will exploit in any event. Steve Chu, Secretary of State for Energy in he United States, made no bones about it in a recent speech. «One has to capture and bury CO2 as it leaves the factory», he said.* And announced the creation of a Chinese-American research center on the subject. Europe should also join in this scientific competition, if only because Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany have important coal reserves.

Science, November 2009.

Friday, November 19, 2010

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Trekkie forever!

So I rented it and took it home to watch: Star Trek 2009, which I had valiantly refused to see when it first came out. The reviews hadn’t been kind: young actors, not much going on. Umpf!

That was a mistake.

To me, the effect was explosive: like going back to some wonderful and long forgotten drug. This was Star Trek, babies.

I had been a fan of the original television show; waited for the weekly episode to come on. I didn’t know anyone else who liked the show at the time, it was something I enjoyed alone, mon jardin secret, as it were. There were jokes about the funny guy with the ears, and the show kept being renewed; that’s all I knew.

I loved the new actors and the re-thinking of the characters was wonderful: Spock is the passionate man while Kirk is reticent and borderline gay; McCoy drinks, and not Scotty; Checkov is a kid and Uhura is a player. And charming Mr Zulu is unsufferable. At last one touches on the truth of these characters, who are now theatrical icons different actors and directors can interpret. The mistake the second generation television series had made was to repeat the formula. It is the characters that are interesting.

And yes, Star Trek is operatic; literally so. The musical score was great and at 2 hours 59 minutes, the fim was way too short. Anyone heard of Wagner, out there in Hollywood?

The one thing that I missed, from the old show, was the feeling of confidence it gave: that the future would find solutions to the problems of the present. Maybe that can no longer be captured...

So that would be my suggestion for more Star Trek: flush out that world. I want to know more about the Vulcans and Romulans, for one. The bad guy was a tragic hero, and Kirk had to bluster his way out. More. More.

Saturday, November 6, 2010