More Lipstick on the Gas Pig: Dry Reforming Methane with "Solar" Thermal Energy.

[NNadir]

6. If one were to open a scientific journal...

Last edited Sun Sep 12, 2021, 05:06 PM - Edit history (2)

...one might have some idea what scientists are like, how they behave, and what they do.

Of course, I spend a lot of time in scientific journals, as my personal journal here reflects, and, in fact, I'd estimate that more than 50% of my posts are commentaries on scientific articles in scientific journals. I've written so many of these, I've lost count.

If one doesn't know any thing about science, clearly hates science and scientists, one could, I suppose do things like attempt to weakly insult a scientist by following one around to whine about issues of his or her personality.

I have known or met or worked with thousands of scientists in my career, maybe tens of thousands, and I can clearly say that the relationship between producing good science and having a pleasant personality is very weakly correlated, if correlated at all.

I once closely worked with an organic chemist who was excellent at organic synthesis and made many difficult compounds successfully, but was contemptuous of women in the lab to the extent that in spite of his scientific excellence, he had to be fired for being an asshole.

We are seeing this increasingly, particularly in the "me too" era, but also in areas outside of sexual harassment to include racism, fraud, and many instances in which hostile environments are created.

Scientists are also able to express contempt for ignorance without damaging their scientific credibility in any way.

I for instance, find ignorant nitpicking little whiny shits to be annoying, and sometimes openly express my contempt for them in social settings or in social media.

It happens that none of my subordinates in the lab ever experience expressions of contempt from me, but then again, they may not be as inclined to be whiny little shits when speaking with me as much as are some whiny types may be on blogs, as I'm senior management.

Here and elsewhere, I'm just another blogger. I frequently encounter people who know no science, and thus inflate non-events, like say the collapse of an old storage tunnel at a radioactively contaminated site into an event worthy of worldwide attention, this on a planet where 18,500 people die every day because we don't use nuclear energy to its full potential, for one example.

I'm inclined to treat such head up the ass rhetoric with contempt, and sometimes do.

These expressions of contempt, which I consider to be worthy of my sense of what human decency would involve, nonetheless have no bearing on my ability to read, interpret, and utilize scientific information, or my ability to engage in scientific discoveries.

If one were to read the scientific literate diligently and consistently, one would find many examples of scientists who do not "gracefully admit that they were wrong." Perhaps one of the most famous cases of this concerns the Nobel Laureate H.C. Brown, who was definitively wrong for refusing to accept the existence of non-classical carbocations, and despite much experimental evidence produced by oodles of other scientists, proving him to be wrong, never admitted as much.

The Norbornyl Cation Structure (Really) Nobel Laureate Herb Brown was clearly being a dick, loudly and often, but no one would say that he was a poor scientist.

This is hardly the only case by a long stretch. In fact, the majority of the issues of the journals I regularly read, often include at the end of the full journals "comments" on previously published paper, often asserting that the paper was wrong, and only in a low minority of cases does the author of the original paper cheerfully admit to being wrong. Some of these exchanges do border on overt hostility.

One example of a fairly hostile exchange, can be found in the comments and response to comments made by the prominent climate scientist James Hansen and his coauthor, about his famous paper demonstrating that nuclear energy saves lives, a paper I often cite:

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

The comments and the response to comments are found in this issue: Environmental Science and Technology, June 18, 2013 Volume 47, Issue 12

The fact that Kharecha and Hansen rightly dismissed the comments from the usual anti-nuke idiots did not stop one of those anti-nukes, the marginally educated but frequently published Benjamin Sovacool, from citing his objection comment in a paper he was compelled to retract, this bit of precious nonsense: RETRACTED ARTICLE: Nuclear energy and path dependence in Europe’s ‘Energy union’: coherence or continued divergence?

He's a sloppy little rube in my opinion, completely unqualified to comment on nuclear energy.

Another of the dumb shit anti-nuke commentators, Mark Z. Jacobson, did not gracefully acknowledge criticism of his paper in PNAS that the world could live on 100% so called "renewable energy," a statement that his paper was wrong - which it clearly is - by a consortium of scientists, including a scientist from his own institution publishing in the same journal. Instead, he embarrassed his institution and the larger scientific community by suing the criticizing authors.

JUDGE RULES ‘100% RENEWABLES’ RESEARCHER MUST PAY ATTORNEY FEES FOR HIS DUBIOUS LAWSUIT

Think any dumbass anti-nukes followed him around telling him about how to be a scientist? No. I know of one anti-nuke who used to write here who worshipped this ass.

This aside, scientists, good scientists, outstanding scientists, can and do make mistakes and often 'fess up spontaneously, often apologetically and sometimes cheerfully.

The Search Engine at the American Chemical Society publication site lists 12,290 cases in which the word "correction" is a title word, often the only title word.]

Sometimes scientists do not catch or own up to their mistakes and are, again, called out for them, but not all of these call outs have much meaning; some are trivializing. I made a mistake in using the simple word "methane" above instead of the phrase "industrial scale methane." It was called out, correctly, as a mistake, but it has no bearing at all on the tenor of the OP.

The existence of cow farts and swamp gas has no bearing on the industrial stupidity of reforming methane with solar heat, the point of my post, such a reforming scheme being a dumb idea if ever there was one, which I pointed out.

Whatever.

Over my lifetime, I met lots of people who claimed to respect science and scientists simply, for example, by posting a picture of Albert Einstein somewhere, sometimes in comedic pose, while actually hating science and scientists, mostly out of complete ignorance of what science is and what scientists do as well as the fact that all scientists are, in fact, human beings, with all the strengths and weaknesses that being a member of the human race implies.

As a scientist, I know of at least one case where a dumb guy follows my posts around on a blog nitpicking and whining because I called him out on stupid and irrational fears of radioactivity. I consider this type of fear and ignorance to be as toxic as anti-vax rhetoric, since given Hansen's paper cited above, and given the Lancet Global Burden of Disease Study papers detailing the number of deaths from air pollution - the most recent figure being on the order of 18,500 people per day, more than Covid killed worldwide on its worst day - since like anti-vax rhetoric, it kills people. It's been doing so for decades.

I clearly have zero respect for the guy offering up such trivial radiation paranoia.

I would advise such a person to get a life, to get past the little wound to their questionable ego, but somehow I think it's not likely.