Casey Handmer: Terraform Industries and a Carbon-Neutral Future — Manifold #57

 

Casey Handmer (PhD Caltech, general relativity) is the founder of Terraform Industries. He is one of the most capable and ambitious geo-engineers on planet Earth! 

Terraform Industries is scaling technology to produce cheap natural gas with sunlight and air. Using solar energy, they extract carbon from the air and synthesize natural gas, all at the same site. 

March 2024: "Terraform completes the end to end demo, successfully producing fossil carbon free pipeline grade natural gas from sunlight and air. We also achieved green hydrogen at <$2.50/kg-H2 and DAC CO2 at <$250/T-CO2, two incredible milestones." 

Links: 

Casey Handmer’s website: https://www.caseyhandmer.com/ 

Terraform Industries: https://terraformindustries.com/ 

Nerds on Patrol [Episode 3] - Terraform Industries: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9k3dHFJPEU 

Steve and Casey discuss: 

0:00 Introduction 

00:31 Casey's early life and background, from Australia to Caltech 

07:55 The academic path and transition to tech entrepreneurship 10:40 Terraform Industries 

15:21 Solar costs, efficiency, and global Impact 

24:25 A world powered by Terraform methane 

31:27 The entrepreneurial journey: challenges and insights 

35:01 Investor dynamics and strategic decisions for Terraform 

41:28 The hard Reality of manufacturing and innovation 

44:11 Navigating intellectual property and strategic partnerships 

45:49 The moral and technical challenges of carbon neutrality 

55:48 Looking ahead: Terraform's next milestones and the solar revolution

Transcript and Audio-only version:

https://www.manifold1.com/episodes/casey-handmer-terraform-industries-and-a-carbon-neutral-future-57

Manifold Podcast #23 Tim Searchinger: Biofuels vs Foods

Steve and Corey talk to Tim Searchinger about the unintended consequences of biofuels policies. Searchinger argues that these policies do not consider the opportunity costs of using plants for fuel rather than food. Combined with crazy carbon accounting principles, existing rules make cutting down trees in the US, shipping them to Europe and burning them in power plants count as carbon neutral under the Kyoto protocol. The three also discuss how eating less beef in the developed world along with educating women, family planning, and reducing child mortality in the developing world can decrease stress on land use and emissions.

Transcript

Creating a Sustainable Food Future: A Menu of Solutions to Feed Nearly 10 Billion People by 2050

Timothy Searchinger is a Research Scholar in the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.


man·i·fold /ˈmanəˌfōld/ many and various.

In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point.

Steve Hsu and Corey Washington have been friends for almost 30 years, and between them hold PhDs in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theoretical Physics. Join them for wide ranging and unfiltered conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.

Steve Hsu is VP for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. He is also a researcher in computational genomics and founder of several Silicon Valley startups, ranging from information security to biotech. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon before joining MSU.

Corey Washington is Director of Analytics in the Office of Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. He was educated at Amherst College and MIT before receiving a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in a Neuroscience from Columbia. He held faculty positions at the University Washington and the University of Maryland. Prior to MSU, Corey worked as a biotech consultant and is founder of a medical diagnostics startup.

Nordhaus on global warming

Yale economist William Nordhaus, who has studied cost-benefit aspects of potential policy responses to global warming, responds to this recent editorial.

I don't find Nordhaus completely convincing (in fact his discussion of the performance of climate models, point 2, alarmingly misses the point), but the article is worth reading.

NYBooks: ... Then, I saw an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal of January 27, 2012, by a group of sixteen scientists, entitled “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” This is useful because it contains many of the standard criticisms in a succinct statement. The basic message of the article is that the globe is not warming, that dissident voices are being suppressed, and that delaying policies to slow climate change for fifty years will have no serious economic or environment consequences.

My response is primarily designed to correct their misleading description of my own research; but it also is directed more broadly at their attempt to discredit scientists and scientific research on climate change.1 I have identified six key issues that are raised in the article, and I provide commentary about their substance and accuracy. They are:

• Is the planet in fact warming?
• Are human influences an important contributor to warming?
• Is carbon dioxide a pollutant?
• Are we seeing a regime of fear for skeptical climate scientists?
• Are the views of mainstream climate scientists driven primarily by the desire for financial gain?
• Is it true that more carbon dioxide and additional warming will be beneficial?

As I will indicate below, on each of these questions, the sixteen scientists provide incorrect or misleading answers. ...

Climategate and the American Physical Society

I got this email message today. Again, I haven't done my homework on this issue, so I don't have a strong opinion. But the signatories to this email and (I suspect) a fair number of APS members do.

Dear fellow member of the American Physical Society:

This is a matter of great importance to the integrity of the Society. It is being sent to a random fraction of the membership, so we hope you will pass it on.

By now everyone has heard of what has come to be known as ClimateGate, which was and is an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen in our cumulative 223 years of APS membership. For those who have missed the news we recommend the excellent summary article by Richard Lindzen in the November 30 edition of the Wall Street journal, entitled "The Climate Science isn't Settled," for a balanced account of the situation. It was written by a scientist of unquestioned authority and integrity. A copy can be found among the items at http://tinyurl.com/lg266u, and a visit to http://www.ClimateDepot.com can fill in the details of the scandal, while adding spice.

What has this to do with APS? In 2007 the APS Council adopted a Statement on global warming (also reproduced at the tinyurl site mentioned above) that was based largely on the scientific work that is now revealed to have been corrupted. (The principals in this escapade have not denied what they did, but have sought to dismiss it by saying that it is normal practice among scientists. You know and we know that that is simply untrue. Physicists are not expected to cheat.)

We have asked the APS management to put the 2007 Statement on ice until the extent to which it is tainted can be determined, but that has not been done. We have also asked that the membership be consulted on this point, but that too has not been done.

None of us would use corrupted science in our own work, nor would we sign off on a thesis by a student who did so. This is not only a matter of science, it is a matter of integrity, and the integrity of the APS is now at stake. That is why we are taking the unusual step of communicating directly with at least a fraction of the membership.

If you believe that the APS should withdraw a Policy Statement that is based on admittedly corrupted science, and should then undertake to clarify the real state of the art in the best tradition of a learned society, please send a note to the incoming President of the APS ccallan@pr****ton.edu, with the single word YES in the subject line. That will make it easier for him to count.

Bob Austin, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Hal Lewis, emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara
Will Happer, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Larry Gould, Professor of Physics, Hartford
Roger Cohen, former Manager, Strategic Planning, ExxonMobil

Climategate at Tierneylab

Be sure to look at the hundreds of comments!

Tierneylab: ... I’m not trying to suggest that climate change isn’t a real threat, or that scientists are deliberately hyping it. But when they look at evidence of the threat, they may be subject to the confirmation bias — seeing trends that accord with their preconceptions and desires. Given the huge stakes in this debate — the trillions of dollars that might be spent to reduce greenhouse emissions — it’s important to keep taking skeptical looks at the data. How open do you think climate scientists are to skeptical views, and to letting outsiders double-check their data and calculations?

People keep asking me about climate change, and I tell them I just don't have enough time to do the homework necessary to justify my having a strong opinion on the issue. Note, by simply making that statement I am being politically incorrect -- I think I am supposed to accept that the "experts" know what they are doing. (Just as the bond rating agencies and financiers knew what they were doing a few years ago :-)

Very few of the people with strong opinions on climate change have done the homework I refer to -- read the literature (including arguments on both sides), look at the data, etc. In the case of the housing and credit bubble I did do the homework and as a result I thought we were in a bubble back in 2004, that credit derivatives were dangerous, and that it might end badly.

I can say something with very high confidence: scientists are not immune to groupthink!


[A reader asks: what if you don't have the technical background to actually "do your homework" -- i.e., read the scientific literature? (Perhaps because your liberal arts education left you unable to use important tools necessary for understanding how the world works ;-) In that case, you are limited to an examination of the process by which the science is done -- are the incentives right? Could researchers be victims of groupthink? Can critics be heard, and do they have access to resources (such as the original data)? This is a sociological question -- is science working properly in this particular subfield? A final factor that should influence your confidence level is that the track record of experts studying complex systems is quite poor. ]

Help! -- climate change

Some of the readers of this blog know much more about climate change than I do. Could someone please comment on this web page of Eric Baum's, in which he claims the evidence for human causation is weak and that state of the art climate models are shoddy? (Excerpts below.) Baum is a brilliant guy -- former theoretical physicist and AI researcher. I've recommended his book on AI here before.

Greenhouse Gas global warming (as opposed to other sources) should be measured in the tropical troposphere, because the models say that is the signature of greenhouse gas warming: the tropical troposphere should warm at roughly twice the surface rate. To verify this, see for example Figure 9.1, p675, Vol 1 IPCC Report. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter9.pdf (The whole report can be found at http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg1.htm .)
This was always an embarrassment for global warmists, because the troposphere has never warmed much, but in the last few years its cooled. The tropical troposphere has now not warmed at all. See http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3048 for the graph of temperature according to three satellite series since 1978.

The Radiosonde (weather balloon) data series is an independent measurement of the tropical troposphere temperature. It goes back to 1958 and is presumably extremely reliable, because all they are doing is sending thermometers up in balloons. You can see the time series at: http://www.climateaudit.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/hadat42.gif The graph is flat, and the most recent data point is the coldest.

...This shows that the IPCC's GCM's (Global Circulation Models) are wrong. Not that it can be too surprising that the GCM's are worthless since p 596 of the IPCC 4th report cautiously admitted they didn't know whether their GCM's had more data points or free parameters! Yet the GCM's are absolutely central to any argument for expecting warming by more than a few tenths of a degree by 2100, and to the amazingly porous argument the IPCC report gives to demonstrate man caused the alleged observed warming.

...The IPCC 4th report says "attribution of anthropogenic climate change is understood to mean demonstration that a detected change... is not consistent with alternative, physically plausible explanations."[p668] But the report contains several alternative possibilities that are said to be "not understood" or whose magnitude is said to be "largely unknown". For example, two are mentioned just in the last paragraph of 1.4.3. (p108): unknown large feedbacks from changes in solar irradiance, and the effects of galactic cosmic rays. Actually, as I point out in the above few paragraphs, cosmic rays seem to explain climate fluctuations extremely well. The IPCC devotes considerable space to the strawman that solar activity could directly affect the earth's temperature, but ignores the actual indirect means by which solar variation seems to affect temperature. Global Warmists routinely attack the strawman of direct solar effect any time the subject is raised.

Also, Mars, Jupiter, Triton, Neptune, and Pluto have recently been observed warming, suggesting some cause external to the earth, but none of them are mentioned anywhere in the 987 pages of the 4th Report. Another physically plausible explanation for recent warming (if indeed warming has actually occurred) as remarked by Lindzen would be thermal transfer from the deep oceans. The oceans and atmosphere are turbulent fluids prone to exchange heat in unpredictable ways over a wide range of time scales simply because chaotic systems do that kind of thing, which the computer models of the IPCC are completely inadequate to simulate.

Its also worth noting that intuitive physics (and pencil and paper calculation) says that greenhouse gas warming scales logarithmically. The theoretical reason for the effect is that CO2 molecules (for example) absorb and reflect certain wavelengths. But they only do it in certain wavelengths. Once you've got some molecules of CO2 in the air, the effect of each next molecule is less than the one before, because those wavelengths are already getting scattered, and mostly heat is already only getting out in other wavelengths. So even if you believed everything else, one's expectation would be that we've already seen the substantial majority of all the warming we will ever see, if we quintuple the CO2 from here. To believe otherwise, you have to rely in detail on the GCM's prediction of positive feedbacks, that they are not competent to calculate, to predict warming in the future that is several times greater than anything we've seen before.