All readers of Access to Energy are entirely truthful - right? Well, at least we all try to be where impersonal scientific facts are concerned. Science requires not only the truth, but also the whole truth. It is forbidden to omit consideration of any data, especially data that might reflect upon the accuracy of a particular hypothesis or theory.

Human affairs, however, are much more complicated, particularly where the whole truth - with no omissions - is concerned. I still recall a dinner at a Chinese restaurant with a young lady whom I dated during graduate school. There was some difficulty which the idealistic student was certain could be resolved if all relevant facts, thoughts, and feelings were entirely and openly expressed and discussed. I busied myself during the dinner in putting this theory into practice. I do not remember the specifics of the issues or discussion, but I have never forgotten the fortune cookie that I opened at the end of that dinner. It said, "Young man who is open book is soon on shelf.'' A good rule of truthfulness in human affairs is to try to never knowingly leave another individual with an impression that is fundamentally different than he would have if he knew all of the facts, particularly regarding a subject that you know is important to him. This avoids the common practice of literally correct lying by double-en-tendre and by deliberate falsehoods of omission.

A better rule is absolute candor in all matters - if you are able to take the heat. I have a friend who is greatly admired for his many fine attributes of character of which one is total candor. In a draft of a book, he wrote that his wife is the second smartest woman he has ever met. She reacted with good humor, but the risks are clear.

On the other hand, overt lying and secrecy are generally accepted as permissible when in combat with an enemy. I once caused the capture of a burglar and the loot from several robberies in San Diego by lying to the burglar in a back alley at 2:00 am. I convinced the fellow that I, too was being chased by the police. In fact, the police and I were both chasing him. Jeff Cooper would have done this more honorably, but then I did not have his skills or equipment available.

War between nations usually involves a great amount of secrecy and disinformation. Nuclear weapons development during World War II and during the Cold War included much deliberate dishonesty and secrecy. This stimulated a substantial debate. Edward Teller has, for decades, consistently argued against this secrecy.

Nuclear secrecy deprived most American scientists of the information needed to contribute their own talents to the defense of their country. It also left most Americans uninformed of the facts needed to prudently evaluate their country's policies toward nuclear weapons, civil defense, and even nuclear power development. It has been convincingly argued that these effects of secrecy did far more harm than good to the United States - especially since our totalitarian opponents managed to learn our secrets anyway. Secrecy was really only effective against honest, patriotic Americans.

Incomplete knowledge of matters of crucial public importance is inherently dangerous to a free society even regarding issues less spectacular than nuclear weapons. At present, for example, suspicion and distrust concerning numerous semi-secret events is completely shredding the remaining credibility of the current American President. If the truth is so bad that it must be hidden, then we need another Presi dent. If it is not, then we need the truth, so that the President can do his job in an atmosphere of trust and confidence.

In fact, experienced people usually watch for signs of secretive ness as a negative measure of veracity and also as a measure of mind set. If a person or group is secretive, it is reasonably probable that they view those to whom they are secretive as enemies or potential enemies. Privacy is, of course, an entirely different matter. Privacy a valuable and enjoyable benefit of freedom. Secrecy is manipulative Sensible application of secrecy (and even overt dishonesty) in combat with an enemy requires the wisdom to determine whether or not the secrecy is actually beneficial - whether it does more harm to one's enemy than it does to one's allies. In retrospect, regarding the international contests in nuclear weapons development, it is highly probable that Edward Teller was right. Secrecy about nuclear tech nology has been counterproductive.

As nuclear, chemical, and biological technology has advanced and knowledge has become more widespread, however, all decent people face an increasing danger from an old enemy - terrorism. With cur rent technology, terrorists can threaten or destroy the lives of very large numbers of people. Moreover, successful terrorist attacks of large magnitude could damage all of our lives by means of the dimi nution of our freedom that might take place in reaction to such acts.

Terrorists are always our enemies. Press spinmeisters use words such as "freedom fighters'' and "insurgents'' for the leftists and re serve "terrorists'' or "right wing extremists'' for the rightists. We wonder what euphemisms would have emerged if the suspects in Oklahoma City had called themselves "environmentalists.'' Every person, given special circumstances and potential mental instability, is a potential terrorist, but the risk that any single individ ual will commit a terrorist act is very, very small. How far can we go, therefore, in describing the details or even the general potentialities of terrorist acts without raising the risk of those acts? Conversely, in free society, how will we ever raise awareness of this risk high enough to stimulate reasonable protective measures if we do not dis cuss the potential acts? Wisdom dictates that we balance the chance that each discussion will lead to protective measures vs. the chance that it will enhance the daydreams of a twisted mind. After all, five decades of open discussion of the risk of nuclear war have failed to stimulate realistic American civil defense.

As a countermeasure to terrorism, we might try national publicity and well-publicized conferences concerning terrible weapons for ter rorism - mythical weapons that will not work. This would, however, probably just fool our friends and not the terrorists.

We do not claim to know whether or how much public discussion of potential terrorist weapons and actions should be restricted. Se crecy and dishonesty are justified when in mortal combat with an en emy. Sometimes they are counterproductive. Terrorists - dangerous and difficult to deter enemies of us all - may constitute a case in which wise use of secrecy is the best course.

As we watch the the global warming gurus - presently impaled upon their thermometers and writhing unhappily in an atmosphere where the temperature just refuses to go up (see, for examples, Access to Energy Vol. 22, No. 9, p 3, for temperatures and "Climate response to increasing levels of greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosols'' by Mitchell, et al in Nature 376 p 501 (1995), for an effort to blame their troubles on cooling from sulfate aerosols) - it is useful to review briefly the definition and simpler properties of atmospheric temperature. The earth's atmosphere is primarily a diatomic gas. Of each 10,000 atmospheric molecules at sea level, about 7,708 are nitrogen

(N 2), 2,075 are oxygen (O2), 120 are water (H2O), 93 are argon (Ar), and 3 to 4 are carbon dioxide (CO2). This assumes certain standard and typical conditions (see International Critical Tables 1, p 393, 1926). There are also traces of neon, helium, krypton, hydrogen, xenon, ozone, radon, and other gases (see CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics). These values change with altitude primarily by decreases in H2O, O2, and Ar and increases in hydrogen (H2) and N2.

Most atmospheric molecules (N2, O2, and H2) are diatomic, meaning that each contains two atoms joined by a chemical bond. O2 molecules are about 4 angstroms or 4x10^-8 centimeters long. Lined up end to end, there would be about 60 million O2 molecules per inch.

The "temperature'' of a gas such as the atmosphere is defined as the mean (average) kinetic energy of the molecules in that gas.

The kinetic energy of an object (whether of an airplane full of envi-ros winging their way to another meeting about the immorality of energy use or of a single molecule innocently bouncing around in your breath) is one-half its mass times its velocity squared ( E = 1/2mv² ).

For a monatomic gas with only only one atom in each unit, the kinetic energy arises only from translational motion - movement of the atom from place to place in three dimensions. For a diatomic molecule, additional motions are possible. These are rotational motion - the two atoms in the molecule spin about their mutual center of mass - and vibrational motion - the two atoms vibrate back and forth by stretching and compressing the chemical bond that holds them together. (Imagine the molecule as a tiny barbell suspended by a string from the bar between the two weights. Now, if you hit one of the weights, the barbell rotates. If, however, the weights were connected by a spring instead of a rod, you could also pull them apart and let go with the result that the two weights would vibrate in and out with respect to one another.) As heat is added to a gas, that energy must be stored in the gas. The storage that takes place in the motion of the molecules of a diatomic gas is in the translational, rotational, and vibrational motions of the molecules of that gas. Some molecules can store more heat than others with the same velocities of motion because they have more or heavier atoms or atoms that are more free to move under certain conditions.

Looking at this another way, each diatomic molecule has two atoms that can move and therefore more degrees of freedom to engage in motions with kinetic energy. The two atoms, however, are bound together and are, therefore, not entirely free. Therefore, it is useful to categorize the new potential motions as rotations and vibrations of the molecule. The more energy that is added to the gas and stored in the gas, the faster its molecules move and therefore the higher its temperature.

For historical reasons, we use temperature scales of degrees Fahren-heit (°F), Centigrade (°C), or Kelvin (°K) and varying definitions of temperature. These can all be related to average molecular kinetic energy by appropriate constants and conversion procedures.

The theory of the behavior of gases was conceptualized in the early 1700s and elegantly worked out by several great theoreticians, culminating with James Clerk Maxwell's classic paper in 1859. These scientists did such careful work that their calculations were mathematically perfect. So, they should have obtained perfect agreement with experiments on simple gases. Maxwell, however, realized that there was something wrong with their molecular model because his calculations of the energy that could be stored in a gas were not in agreement with actual experimental measurements. Feynman quotes Maxwell as saying ten years later, "I have now put before you what I consider to be the greatest difficulty yet encountered by the molecular theory.'' (See Feynman Lectures on Physics by R. P. Feynman, R. B. Leighton, and M. Sands, Volume 1, p 40-9 (1963), published by Addison-Wesley.

To Maxwell and his contemporaries, it appeared that certain motions of molecules, allowed at high temperatures, became impossible at lower temperatures. They had no explanation for this effect. The effect is shown in Figure 1 which is adapted from General Chemistry third edition by L. Pauling, p 364 (1970), published by W. H. Freeman.

The experimental heat capacities in Figure 1 show perfect agreement with the theoretical value of 2.5 for the monatomic gases, He, Ne, Ar, Kr, and Xe. Only, however, at very high temperatures do the experimental values for the heat capacity of the diatomic gases reach the value of 4.5 equivalently calculated by Maxwell. (The heat capacity arises here as 1.0 units from thermal expansion; 1.5 from translational energy; 1.0 from rotational energy; and 1.0 from vibrational energy.) The problem was that Maxwell and his colleagues did not have access to quantum mechanics because it had not yet been discovered. Figures 2 and 3 show the quantum mechanical explanation that now allows theoretical calculations to agree with experiment. These figures are from Spectra of Diatomic Molecules by G. Herzberg, p 99 and p 107 (1950), published by D. Van Nostrand Company.

Figure 2 shows the distances between the H2 atoms in a hydrogen molecule as they vibrate back and forth (horizontal axis) vs. the energy contained in that vibration (vertical axis). Quantum mechanics shows that these vibrations can only take place at discrete energies and are not allowed for energies in between these discrete levels. These levels for H2 are labeled 0, 1, 2, 3, and so on in the figure. At high levels, vibration tears the molecule apart as indicated by the gray area at the top.

Until the temperature is sufficiently high to cause some of the hydrogen molecules to vibrate vigorously enough to be in level 1, they all must stay in level 0. They cannot, therefore, store additional energy in vibration when at low temperature.

As shown in Figure 3, molecular rotation is also quantized. The first five vibrational levels (0, 1, 2, 3 and 4 labeled 'v') are those in Figure 2. Superimposed on each of these, we see the sets of rotational levels allowed in each vibrational level. No energy can be stored in rotation until the temperature is high enough to provide energy for the molecules to move to the next higher quantized 'J' rotational state above 0.

Returning to Figure 1, we see that H2 is unable to store energy in either vibration or rotation at temperatures between its boiling point (about 20 °K) and 50 °K. Above 50 °K, H2 gradually accumulates rotational energy storage which is mostly complete above 400 °K, but is still unable to store energy in vibration. Above 700 °K, vibrational energy storage begins to become possible for the more energetic H2 molecules. The other diatomic molecules shown in Figure 1 have different curves because their atoms have different masses and chemical bonding ability, so their quantum levels have different spacings.

Different individual molecules in the same gas can have differing energy contents at different times. The actual detailed theory calculates distribution functions for the different energy configurations. These functions give the indicated overall results.

The O2 and N2 (and, at high altitude, H2) which comprise most atmospheric molecules have quantum levels such that, at ordinary temperatures of 0 °C to 100 °C (32 °F to 212 °F or 273 °K to 373 °K), additional rotational energy can be stored but vibrational energy cannot. Too few molecules are able to reach energies high enough to occupy the first vibrational level above the 0 state.

As our atmosphere warms and cools, therefore, the diatomic molecules of nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen and the atoms of argon store and release heat energy by increasing or decreasing their average translational velocities. In addition, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen are able to store energy by increasing their rates of rotation. At ordinary temperatures, however, increases in molecular vibration do not take place.

Energy transfer to atmospheric molecules occurs primarily by collisions between those molecules and the molecules of warmer bodies and by absorption of energy from electromagnetic radiation.

As you read, you cannot see the tiny diatomic benefactors in the air between your eyes and this page. If they were not there, however, tirelessly bumping into your body and storing and releasing energy by increasing or decreasing their rates of translational and rotational motion, you would be immediately uncomfortable and soon dead.

In these few words, we can communicate only a little about the subject of energy storage in atmospheric gases and the measure of that storage - which is called 'temperature.' This is, however, a very beautiful and exact part of physical science. If you know a student 16 years of age or older to whom you wish to give a lasting gift, get copies of the three books listed above (as sources for Figures 1 to 3) from your library or from interlibrary loan and suggest that he study these books until he understands this subject and all of its associated mathematics.

Notice three things. First, as complicated as this simplified explanation may sound, it is child's play in comparison with understanding the atmosphere of the whole earth - an ability the global warming industry falsely claims to have acquired. Second, Maxwell insisted that theory agree with experiment if theory were to be considered correct. Global warming calculations have a common characteristic - they do not agree with experiment because they fail to agree with measured atmospheric temperatures. These calculations are fundamentally flawed and cannot be corrected with fudge factors designed to give a politically desirable answer. Third, we are very fortunate to live at a time when the world that surrounds us has been enhanced by science. In previous times, people lived out their entire lives without ever having an opportunity to know about and enjoy the truth about the air around them.

 

 

During the years before his death in August 1995, Nobel prize-winning astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar worked through the mathematical propositions in Isaac Newton's Principia and formulated them into a book entitled Newton's Principia for the Common Reader by S. Chandrasekhar (1995), Oxford University Press. This is reviewed by D. Hughes in "On the shoulders of giants,'' Nature 376, p 395 (1995). The Principia is entirely unchallenged as the greatest scientific achievement in history.

Even science's greatest theoretician, however, required his theories to conform to experiment. Newton is quoted in Science 255, p 693 (1991) as saying, about his work on pendulums and inertial and gravitational mass, "I tried the thing in gold, silver, lead, glass, sand, common salt, wood, water, and wheat. I provided two equal wooden boxes. I filled the one with wood, and suspended an equal weight of gold (exactly as I could) in the center of oscillation of the other. The boxes, hung by equal threads of 11 feet, made a couple of pendulums perfectly equal in weight and figure, and equally exposed to the resistance of air: and, placing the one by the other, I observed them to play together forwards and backwards for a long while, with equal vibrations. And therefore the quantity of matter [inertial mass] in the gold was to the quantity of matter in the wood as the action of the motive force [gravitational mass] upon all the gold to the action of the same upon all the wood; that is, as the weight of the one to the weight of the other.'' When Newton invented the reflecting telescope, he first built a brick oven. In that oven he carried out metallurgical experiments to formulate the composition of the mirror. Then he made the mirror with which he constructed the telescope. Technology has changed, but this is still the sort of activity that characterizes real scientists in 1995.

Compare this with the nitwitted, tax-funded apparitions, hands unsullied by honest work, who appear at press conferences today to howl that the sky's ozone is falling and its temperature is rising - when the experimental data shows that both are only fluctuating in a normal way and neither has changed significantly.

"Electromagnetic Fields from Utility Power Lines and Salem Witchcraft'' by H. E. Payne has been published in several places and is available from Payne Engineering, Rt. 29 Rocky Step Road, Scott Depot, WV 25560. The magnetic field in milligauss of a straight electric wire is equal to 6.6 times the electric current in the wire in amperes divided by the distance from the wire in feet. For reference, Payne gives the usual human exposure to the earth's magnetic field as about 500 milligauss. This exposure is continuous, 24 hours each day.

The magnetic field depends upon the amount of current flowing through the wire regardless of whether the voltage is high or low. High voltage is used in power lines in order to pass more energy through a wire of minimum diameter, but it is the current that determines the magnetic field strength. As an example, Payne uses a high voltage power line 300 feet from a home and transmitting 300 amperes of current. This would result in a field in the home of about 7 milligauss.

Conversely, the low voltage wiring in the house itself, assuming 30 amperes on average 24 hours per day and wires averaging 10 feet from the occupants, exposes them to about 20 milligauss. During high exposure periods, such as working 5 feet from the wiring of a 40 ampere electric range, this rises to about 50 milligauss. All of these magnetic fields are small with respect to the earth's field. Also, even in a house near a high voltage transmission line, most of the exposure comes from the wiring of the house itself and it appliances.

Little is known about the biological effects of magnetic fields. Since these fields are weak in comparison with molecular forces, it is believed that the biological effects are small. If they are affected, however, biological systems must function in the usual environmental magnetic field. This field comes from the earth and, except in unusual locations, is not increased appreciably by human activities.

Access to Energy keeps reviewing the facts about the enviro scams that falsely allege global warming, ozone destruction, forest depletion, and whatever else is politically correct. Our back issues and good reading recommendations already contain more than enough information to discredit these claims. Why, however, do mediocre scientists keep repeating these myths? Why, also, are most good scientists silent about them? Moreover, what is the scientific community going to do as further research accumulates to show that these myths which it promoted - or at least tolerated - are deliberate falsehoods?

Three recent articles help to answer these questions.

"No: Doomsayers are just trying to scare money out of the government'' by S. Fred Singer, Insight, September 4 (1995) pp 19-21 reviews some of the dishonesty in the global warming industry and correctly links this behavior with the current $2.1 billion annual U. S. tax-financed expenditure for "global-change'' research. There is big money in global lies, and a surplus of people willing to tell whatever lies are necessary to continue receiving that money - money that is taken by force or threat of force from the men and women who earned it. Also, there is a surplus of government bureaucrats and politicians who are are happy to do the taking as long as they receive a portion of the loot (and the prestige and lifestyle that it buys) as it goes past.

"Peer Review After the Big Crunch'' by David Goodstein, Ameri-can Scientist 83, September-October (1995) pp 401-402 discusses some of the pressures that have caused an increase in dishonesty in science with special reference to breakdown of the peer review system. David Goodstein is vice provost and professor of physics at Caltech and one author of the two physics texts we have been recommending for self-teaching home schools (see "Verbalize'' in Access to Energy

22, No. 10, June 1995 p 1). He points out that the exponential increase in resources for scientific research, which was fed by enormous increases in tax money during its latter decades, ended about 1970. Since then, too many people who are in the business of "science'' (we cannot call the majority of these people real scientists) have been scrambling for shares of the static to slightly decreasing amount of money available. Increasing numbers of these people are willing to discard scientific integrity in order to preserve their place at the trough.

"A Fickle Sun Could Be Altering Earth's Climate After All'' by Richard A. Kerr, Science 269 (1995) p 633 is illustrative of the sort of articles that are starting to appear with respect to everything from AIDS to ozone. Correctly reviewing a research paper that shows a strong correlation between solar flux and atmospheric pressure (remember those tiny barbells discussed on pages 2 and 3 which exert more pressure as they get warmer and therefore hit the objects around them with greater frequency and velocity), Kerr manages to open this article, however, with the politically correct and very dishonest statement, "No, there's still little evidence that a brightening sun drove the last century's global warming, as some greenhouse skeptics argue.'' Remember, the small increase in global temperatures during the past century occurred before the release of most of the dreaded CO2, and no increase at all has been observed in satellite temperature data for the past 15 years. (See Access to Energy 22-9 p 3. 22-1 pp 1-3, and

21-8 p 4.) There is no evidence whatever that increases in greenhouse gases have caused significant or even measurable increases in global temperatures during the past century. Such warming probably does exist, but is apparently of minor importance and not yet measurable, whereas there is evidence that fluctuations in the sun are important. The procedure here is, when the truth becomes inescapable, to slip it into the literature gradually along with repetitions of the original lies. The taxpayers are supposed to be so busy earning more money for the tax collectors that they do not notice the shifting argument.

It is important to realize that many honest scientists are institutionally trapped into silence on these issues. As soon as a research institution, even one with a large endowment of private money, has a significant number of tax-financed people, all of its scientists feel peer pressure to avoid endangering the money of the tax-supported group.

• The Wall Street Journal, August 23, (1995) p A10 reports that a new calendar put out by the 241,000 member tax-financed California Teacher's Association, the largest affiliate of the National Education Association, includes the following holidays: Women's Equality Day, Hispanic Heritage Month, International Day of Peace in Education, American Indian Day, National Coming Out Day, United Nations Day, Kwanza (an African-American harvest celebration), International Human Rights Day, Bill of Rights Day, the anniversary of Wounded Knee, Nirvana Day, Asian/Pacific Heritage Month, and the anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion (when New York homosexuals rose against police in 1969). Not included on the calendar are Christmas, Independence Day, and Labor Day.
  
  Tens of thousands of refugees from California have been pouring over the Oregon border each year. Unfortunately, those hoping for better from socialism in education in Oregon are going to be disappointed.
  
  
• E. B. Dunckel sends four infamous ravings worth repeating: "Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover the source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.'' -Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute.
  
  "We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects . . . We must reclaim the roads and the plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions and tens of millions of acres of presently settled land.'' - David Foreman, Earth First!
  
  "People are the cause of all the problems; we have too many of them; we need to get rid of some of them, and this (ban of DDT) is as good a way as any.'' - Charles Wurster, Environmental Defense Fund.
  
  "Giving society cheap, abundant energy . . . would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.'' Paul Ehrlich, Stanford.

• "Rising CO2, A Breath of Life for the Biosphere'' by Keith E. Idso,World Climate Review 3, No. 3, pp 8-15 available from Department of Environmental Sciences, Clark Hall, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903. Access to Energy has reported many times about the excellent research of the Idsos and their colleagues. This is a good overview of that work. If CO2 were not already rising in the atmosphere, its many environmental benefits would strongly suggest that it should be intentionally increased.
  
  
• "Why I'm Running for President'' by Harry Browne available from 4094 Majestic Lane, Suite 240, Fairfax, VA 22033. Access to Energy is not going to start endorsing candidates, but this libertarian monograph is worth reading regardless of your presidential preference.
  
  
• "For Sale: U.S. Enrichment Corporation'' in Nuclear Energy Insight, August (1995) pp 1-2 available from 1776 I Street, NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20006-3708. The government is selling its nuclear fuel business that supplies 90% of the U.S. and 40% of the world markets. They want to privatize it, but will they also deregulate it?
  
  
• "China's Nukes'' in The Wall Street Journal of August 24 (1995) p A16. While a large nuclear weapons capability is rising in Asia, our government has dismantled our tactical nuclear weapons and left us defended only by the suicidal threat of strategic retaliation. Meanwhile, the administration continues its efforts to gut strategic defense. It is refusing its obligation to provide for our common defense.