Could wind farms and HS2 destroy the environment?

Remember when chaos theory arrived. We were bombarded with analogies to help us understand it, such as the butterfly effect, whereby a butterfly flapping its wings in a distant rain forest creates micro-turbulence that minutely affects some tiny variable in a very non-linear system, resulting in a hurricane forming somewhere later.

Imagine sticking up a wind turbine, and compare that to a butterfly. It is a fair bit bigger. A big turbine extracts up to 3MW of power from the passing wind, and a large wind farm may have hundreds of them. If weather is so chaotic in its nature that a butterfly can affect it, a massive deployment of numerous large wind farms certainly can.

Aerial wind farms are being explored a lot now too, using kites. I’ve proposed a few novel designs for wind energy extractors myself during idle time. It is very easy. In my sci-fi book Space Anchor I even described a feasible solution for harvesting energy from tornadoes and hurricanes, reducing their damage and getting lots of free energy.

But it isn’t free if the cost is such great interference with wind strength that the paths of the winds are affected, their ability to transfer water vapour from one region to another. We are already having an impact and it will increase as deployment volume grows. We don’t have the means to estimate the effects of siphoning of such energy. As has recently been shown, 99% of climate models have greatly overestimated the warming due to CO2. They simply don’t work. They don’t model the environment accurately, or even quite accurately.

In the arctic, last year the ice declined enormously, this year it grew back. Researchers found that heat added to river systems by mineral and oil exploration could have been important contributor to the excessive melt. It is human-originated but nothing to do with CO2, and it doesn’t appear in any of the climate models. If they’re right, it’s a good example of how we can interfere with local climate unintentionally, and also how we won’t usually get any warning from climate modelling community who seem obsessed with ignoring any variable that doesn’t link to CO2. The climate is certainly changing, just not at all in the ways they keep telling us it will, because the models leave out many of the important factors and the equations are wrong.

So how can we expect to be told the likely effects of wind farms? The simple answer is that we can’t. At best, we can hope to get some estimates of change in a few specific wind zones. Furthermore, due to extreme politicization of the whole field of energy production and climate change, any models that suggest harmful effects are highly likely to be blocked from reporting, or their results tweaked and airbrushed and generally sanitized beyond recognition. The Scottish wind farms have already been shown to increase CO2 emissions due to the effects they have on the peat bogs on which most of them are built but we still see push for more of the same, even knowing that on the only issue they are meant to help with, CO2 emissions, they make things worse.

The UK government seems to enjoy throwing money away just when we need it most. The HS2 rail link will waste between £50Bn and £75Bn depending who you believe. Wind farms are already adding hundreds per year to the energy bills of the poor, pushing them deeper into poverty. The Green Deal fiasco has wasted a tiny amount by comparison, but is another example of extreme government incompetence when it comes to protecting the environment. As part of EU environmental policies, blocking and delaying shale gas development across Europe has led to massive imports of coal from the USA, increasing EU CO2 emissions while USA emissions have tumbled. You just couldn’t do a worse job of protecting the environment.

So far it seems, almost all government attempts to protect the environment have made it worse. Building even more wind farms will likely add to the problems even further.

Looking at HS2, it is very hard indeed not to compare this enormously expensive project to build a fairly high speed conventional railway between two cities to the Hyperloop system in California recently proposed by Elon Musk. That would deliver a 600mph rail system at a tiny fraction of the cost of HS2. Sure, there are some engineering problems with the systems as initially proposed, but nothing that can’t be solved as far as I can see. If we have £50Bn to spend, we could build links between most of our major cities, instead of diverting even more into London. Instead of a few thousand rich people benefiting a little bit, everyone could. We could build a 21st century rail system instead of just building more of a 20th century one. A system like that would have high capacity between all the major places, diverting many cars off the roads, reducing congestion, acting as a core of a proper self-driven pod based system, reaping enormous environmental benefits as well as improvement of lives. HS2 is totally pants by comparison with what we could get with the same outlay, for the economy, the environment and for quality of life. Siphoning off 50 to 75Bn from the economy for HS2 will delay development of far better and more environmentally friendly means of mass transport. Compared to the right solution, HS2 will damage the economy and the environment enormously.

Wind farms and HS2 will become monuments to the magnitude of stupidity of people in power when they are driven to leave a personal legacy at other people’s expense without having the systems engineering skills to understand what they’re doing.

 

 

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Warning: rant, no futures insights enclosed.

Last night, we went for a very pleasant meal with friends. The restaurant was in a lovely location, the service was excellent, the food was excellent. The only irritating thing was a pesky fly. However, for some reason, the menu was written on nice paper in 6 point text with about 15mm line spacing. Each line went about 2/3 of the way across the page. I hadn’t brought my reading glasses so was forced to read small text at arm’s length where it was still blurred.

My poor vision is not the restaurant’s fault. But I do have to ask why there is such a desire across seemingly every organisation now to print everything possible with the tiniest font they can manage? Even when there is lots of space available, fonts are typically tiny. Serial numbers are the worst culprits. My desktop PC is normal tower size and has its serial number printed on a tiny label in 1mm font. Why? Even my hated dishwasher uses a 2mm font size and that stretches my vision to its limits.

Yes, I am ageing, but that isn’t a crime. When I was a school-kid, I took great pride in irritating my teachers by writing with the finest tipped ball-pen I could get (Bic extra-fine) in the smallest writing I could manage. I rarely submitted a homework without getting some comment back on my writing size. But then I grew up.

It makes me wonder whether increased printer capability is a problem rather than an asset. Yes, you can now print at 2000 dpi or more, and a character only needs a small grid  so you can print small enough that a magnifying glass is needed for anyone to be able to read the text. But being physically able to print that small doesn’t actually make it compulsory. So why does it make it irresistible to many people?

When I do conference presentations, if I use text at all, I make sure it is at least 16pt, preferably bigger. If it won’t fit, I re-do the wording until it does. Some conferences that employ ‘designers’ come up with slide designs that contain a massive conference logo, bars on the side and bottom, title half way down the page, and any actual material has to be shrunk to fit in a small region of the slide with eye-straining font sizes on any key data. I generally refuse to comply when a conference employs such an idiot, but they are breeding fast. If someone can’t easily read text from the back row, it is too small. It isn’t actually the pinnacle of cool design to make it illegible.

Mobiles have small displays and small type is sometimes unavoidable, but even so, why design a wireless access login page with a minuscule login box that takes up a tiny fraction of the page? If there is nothing else on the page of any consequence apart from that login details box, why not fill the display with it? Why make it a millimetre high, and have loads of empty space and some branding crap, so that a user has to spend ages stretching it to make it the important bit usable? What is the point?

To me, good design isn’t about making something that is pretty, that can eventually be used after a great deal of effort. It is about making something that does the job perfectly and simply and is pretty. A good designer can achieve form, simplicity of use and function. Only poor designers have to pick one and ignore the others.

The current trend to make text smaller and smaller is pointless and counter-productive. It will cause eye problems for younger people later in their lives. It certainly discriminates against a large proportion of the population that needs glasses. Worse, it does so without no clear benefit. Reading tiny text isn’t especially pleasurable compared to larger text. It reduces quality of life for many without increasing it for anyone else.

It is time to end this stupid trend and send designers back to school if they are somehow convinced that illegibility is some sort of artistic goal.

The primary purpose of text is to communicate. If people can’t easily read the text on your design, the communication is impeded, and your design is therefore crap. If you think you know better, and that tiny text is more attractive and that is what really counts, you should go back to school. Or find a better school and go to that one.