Endless energy
Mark Buchanan’s article on the limits of wind power raised some interesting aspects of renewable energy (2 April, p 8), but there were some intriguing omissions. First, is Buchanan unaware that wind speeds, and therefore wave energy, increase with global warming. This has already been documented and should be factored into the free-energy balance.
Secondly, in claiming solar electricity is too expensive and dependant on rare metals, he neglected concentrated solar thermal electricity generation, in which mirrors are used to focus the sun’s energy. This energy is converted to heat, which is used to drive a generator. This is a rapidly expanding renewable source.
Finally, no one is planning to “suck” 70 terawatts from wind. Wind would at most contribute 40 per cent of the 17 TW required to replace the energy we derive from fossil fuels.
From Eric Kvaalen
The amount of solar energy that reaches the Earth is vastly greater than the amount of energy (of whatever kind) we use. So if we use solar panels that convert a few per cent of the sunlight into electricity, then even if they also spill a few more per cent into the environment as heat we can still get enough electricity without significantly heating the planet.
What I object to is this sentence: “Photosynthesis also generates free energy, but without producing waste heat.” Photosynthesis certainly does produce waste heat.
La Courneuve, France
From Iain Murdoch
In his calculations of the energy available from the wind, has Axel Kleidon taken into account the fact that wind energy is converted into heat in forests and other natural features, indeed wherever the wind meets resistance?
When we cut down forests we reduce the surface friction of the Earth. Wind farms may simply be replacing this friction. If the depletion of atmospheric energy affects the climate, then models need to take account of all changes to the Earth’s surface friction.
Marton, Warwickshire, UK
From Michael Bailey
After reading in your article that my solar panels were contributing to global warming, I was about to remove them, when I thought, “What happens then to the incident solar radiation hitting my roof? Doesn’t all of it become heat?” Suppose we cover a whole desert with solar panels. If your contributor’s argument is correct, this will presumably add to global warming. How?
Uki, New South Wales, Australia
The editor writes:
鈥� The desert is fairly reflective so not all the light hitting the ground gets turned into heat. Covering the desert with dark solar panels would result in a lot more heat being absorbed, some of which would leak into the atmosphere.
Bonus bonanza
Cheating bankers always prosper, says Mark Buchanan (19 March, p 30). One reason for this is that they control their own bonuses 鈥� a privilege most employees don’t have. A solution might be to give every employee the right to decide their own salary and bonus.
Inevitably, everyone would want to award themselves top dollar, but before long they would realise this was impossible. Then they would all get together and determine what they could spend on salaries without hurting the company, and how this should be divided among the various jobs.
Toyota negotiates with its suppliers this way, and it seems to work.
From Bryn Glover
I applaud Buchanan’s attempt to find new ways of controlling our greedy bankers, but I suspect his ideas will merely present them with new challenges to circumvent. I prefer a more radical solution, but one for which there is already a long-established and successful precedent in the UK’s National Health Service.
More than 60 years ago, in the teeth of virulent opposition from the medical profession and at a time when our national debt was in real terms about three times what it is now (we had just fought a war), Clement Attlee’s government overrode all opposition and established the NHS based on principles of access which have never been seriously challenged. I propose an equivalent National Banking Service, in which all the banks are taken fully into public ownership.
Bankers would be placed on civil service pay scales, and bonuses would be completely abolished. The encouragement to perform well would be the same as that in the NHS: the sense of satisfaction of a job well done, coupled with the threat of disciplinary action or dismissal hanging over those who performed badly.
The main argument against the idea is exactly the same as the one that was levelled at Attlee’s minister of health, Nye Bevan: if you impose such a monstrous regime, all the best people will leave and practise elsewhere. Bevan’s response was simple. He called their bluff by stating that if the top-level practitioners left there were many others equally competent who would be willing to step up to take their place.
His high-risk tactic worked. Within a few weeks, the British Medical Association recognised the fallibility of its resistance.
Cracoe, North Yorkshire, UK
From John Gledhill
Performance-related bonuses only really work for jobs such as sales or income-generation with quantifiable outcomes (9 April, p 40). For general management the concept is perverse.
Until it was abolished, the performance-related bonus system where I worked was totally counterproductive. Targets were set a year in advance, with points attached to each. This meant that by about the mid-point of the year, I and others ended up doing tasks that were no longer relevant or even desirable, just to ensure that we wouldn’t miss out on the available points and therefore get a lower bonus. Any new tasks, however urgent and necessary, that had arisen since the target list was agreed were relegated to low priority, as they conveyed no financial benefits.
This created tensions for everyone. It was a stupid system, but not at all unusual. Needless to say it was devised by management experts.
Wellesbourne, Warwickshire, UK
Nuclear question
Fail-safe technology is an essential goal in all nuclear power generation, and yet it continues to be ignored by an arrogant industry (26 March, p 8).
The question that should be asked is why zirconium is still used in cladding for nuclear fuel rods after being implicated in the Three Mile Island disaster. Zirconium readily generates explosive hydrogen gas if reactor coolant stops circulating. I believe safer substitutes are available but not used because they impair efficiency.
Nuclear power is only as safe as its design, and earthquakes should hardly come as a surprise. A properly designed plant must be self-regulating and not rely on back-up.
The Santa delusion
Jonathan Lanman refers to the supposed “universality of religious beliefs”, as many have done before (26 March, p 38). In the society I grew up in, one might also have referred to a universality of belief in Santa Claus, but only if the subjects in the study were restricted to children under 8.
As Richard Dawkins has written, most of us grow out of our early belief in Santa Claus. I trust that religious universality will one day be looked on as a similar kind of sampling error.
God and evolution
I was intrigued by Michael Marshall’s interview with Martin Nowak (19 March, p 34), but one statement puzzled me deeply. Nowak states that “a purely scientific interpretation of evolution does not generate an argument in favour of atheism… Evolution is not an argument against God, any more than gravity is.”
I have yet to see anyone claim the opposite. What evolutionary theory has done, remarkably effectively, is to prove there is no requirement to invoke any kind of deity to explain the wonderful diversity of life on Earth. Prior to 1859, the diversity and intricacy of life were often cited as “evidence” for the existence of God.
Nowak goes on to say that the Christian God is “that without which there would be no evolution”. This is a fine sound-bite, but meaningless: it could equally well refer to the entire universe, or to only the chemical and biochemical processes that govern genetic mutation.
Belief abridged
Being an atheist and easily led, I tried to enter “Scientific Realist” in the religion box in the recent UK census, as suggested by Martin Hunt (26 March, p 36). Only 17 characters were allowed. I had to make do with “ScientificRealist”. Seventeen characters does seem a bit miserly to describe what I “do believe in, deeply and objectively”.
Genteel steal
When listing the means of escape of plant species (19 March, p 18), Andy Coghlan apparently overlooked one of the most obvious: the steady flow of keen gardeners pinching a bit off, with the delicious challenge of trying to root it at home. I know that I am not alone in having memories of seeing respectable people surreptitiously stuffing broken-off bits of greenery or seeds into their bags.
Mars conspiracy
David Shiga told of the Russian mock-up of a mission to Mars, which is intended to help with planning a real mission (5 February, p 10). Is it too late to try to convince conspiracy theorists that this is in fact an elaborate front for an actual mission to Mars? If the belief takes hold that we have already been there, the resources that would be wasted in sending people there for real could be spent more usefully elsewhere.
The wrong register
Alan Chattaway’s call to name the phenomenon where something is known more widely by an erroneous name than by its correct one (29 January, p 25) immediately brought to mind another common misuse. Many people in the UK refer to their local office for the registration of births, marriages and deaths as the “registry office”. The correct name is, of course, the “register office”. I therefore propose all these names should be consigned to “The Smart Register”.
For the record
The photograph in the box in “The secret life of plants” (26 March, p 48) was wrongly accredited. It was taken by Justin Runyon (courtesy of the De Moraes and Mescher labs).