Heat pump latest government offers

[Ferdinand]

On Green Hydrogen, JCB have signed a big long term contract to take Green Hydrogen.

 

Looks to me that that will be tanker-based or private pipe, and will bypass the current distribution network, or improve just a segment of it.

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59107805

[SteamyTea]

2 minutes ago, Ferdinand said:

Jenny Jones' speech in the Lords said nothing about water bills perhaps having to double for a generation to pay for it. When they start doing that, imo they can be taken more seriously. 

Mine are probably already double.

 

 

[SteamyTea]

22 minutes ago, Onoff said:

Like Kent?

Not much.

It vastly improved when I lived there.

[SimonD]

On 29/10/2021 at 22:05, SteamyTea said:

Can you think of a better approach?

 

For me it's a fundamental problem where areas of science continue to believe in that the mechanistic approach is sufficient and applicable to encompass all scientific enquiry, or should I say knowledge about the world. This is especially the case when it comes to our planetary environment. Whilst it has benefited us enormously since its philosophical inception about the 1600s, it has some fundamental limits. So yes, while it has its place, there does need to be a fairly significant injection of non-mechanical, dynamical, and relational approaches to science, and I'd say related areas of engineering. There is a reasonable body of climate science using complex systems, non-linear dynamics etc. but while they take a significant step in the right direction they are subject to arbitrary system boundary cut off and the models don't necessary consider, or include, relevant influence of relationships external to the system considered - relationships that may in fact be critical in the emergence of system properties and behaviours. This is an unfortunate aspect still in a lot of systems thinking and approaches.

 

So yes, there are better approaches suitable for the context, but often because they are challenging to entrenched scientific thought, they tend to get marginalised and/or dismissed.

 

On 29/10/2021 at 22:05, SteamyTea said:

But all but a handful agree where the problem is and know what to do about it.

 

Really? Or is that just another case of enhanced human optimism, something which we do know a lot about but still fail to acknowledge and do something about, especially in leadership circles?

[SimonD]

On 30/10/2021 at 11:58, epsilonGreedy said:

freedom of inquiry has been purged

 

May I add to that a dilution of both appreciative enquiry (as in fully trying to understand the position of someone who holds a different view, as well as contradictory findings) and critical enquiry (which is probably more important in that it involves a continuous critical enquiry of your own knowledge, understanding and position). I actually came across someone who had set up a website, specifically to track and critique another academic critical to some climate policies. This person had maintained the website for more than 20 years - creepy. The criticisms were highly personal, rather than academic, but one interesting thing I found was that the academic was criticised for changing his mind about aspects of climate change following empirical findings and research - to be critical of that as inconsistent is a bit weird in my view as surely that's what you're supposed to do following research no?

 

There is also that the whole debate has become so politicised even within academic and scientific communities, it's often very hard to untangle the wheat from the chaff.

 

[SteamyTea]

44 minutes ago, SimonD said:

science continue to believe in that the mechanistic approach is sufficient and applicable to encompass all scientific enquiry, or should I say knowledge about the world

So Quantum Physics and Relavalistic Effect not exist then, or been written about.

 

33 minutes ago, SimonD said:

but one interesting thing I found was that the academic was criticised for changing his mind about aspects of climate change following empirical findings and research

How it all moves forward, but I suspect the underlaying causes are the same.

There is a methodology to science proofs that has not yet been bettered.

There have been a number of academic that have tried to rewrite the science method, they all fall down in the end.

 

I think the biggest problem is that when describing nature, models are used.  At the early stages of peoples education, these are very simplistic models, the 'don't touch, it is hot' level.  These move on a bit at school to putting a few words and maybe some theory to it i.e. temperature, energy, molecular movement.

And for most people that is where it stops.

This is why people still think low temperature, or low voltage, is equal to low energy, even though, they don't have a clue what energy is.

 

Much of this confusion has come about because of the social and medial sciences.  Trouble is, their burden of proof, or what us real scientists call truth, is so pitifully low i.e. a 95% confidence level, compared to 0.0000003% or nearly 17 million times less chance that it is a fluke.

Also, when an idea is rejected, i.e. the research is on the wrong track, that does not prove any alternative is correct.  So a simple medical experiment to see if taking a daily Aspirin reduces blood clotting, does not show anything about that not taking Aspirin.  This is something that social and pseudo scientists, and especially pub bores do not adhere to at all.  They use a negative result to show a proof in any other area that that fits their believes.  This is hardly surprising as we have all been brought up a religious societies that thrive on 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence', which when you think about it, is a nonsense statement.

[joth]

1 hour ago, SimonD said:

one interesting thing I found was that the academic was criticised for changing his mind about aspects of climate change following empirical findings and research - to be critical of that as inconsistent is a bit weird in my view as surely that's what you're supposed to do following research no?

 

[jfb]

On 31/10/2021 at 09:33, Ferdinand said:

The evidence free, context free arguments made in the Sewage Overflow debate this week don't bode well. Jenny Jones' speech in the Lords said nothing about water bills perhaps having to double for a generation to pay for it. When they start doing that, imo they can be taken more seriously. 

 

Now I haven't read her speech and of course it is easy to pick holes in the argument but lets look at one fact - since privatisation about half as much money has been dished out as share dividends by water companies (over £50 billion since 1991) as spent on improving pipes and treatment plants. This has been made possible by reaching an overall debt of around £50 billion. This debt has been used to pay for dividends and not capital infrastructure as the latter has come from customers' bills.

 

So maybe there is a way for our water supply to upgrade the infrastructure without doubling the bills.

[ToughButterCup]

5 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

...

.  So a simple medical experiment to see if taking a daily Aspirin reduces blood clotting, does not show anything about that (those?) not taking Aspirin.  

...

 

Aren't those not taking Asprin the Control Group? Or have I misunderstood?

[SteamyTea]

2 minutes ago, ToughButterCup said:

 

Aren't those not taking Asprin the Control Group? Or have I misunderstood?

You have misunderstood.

A test is looking for a positive answer, but has nothing to say about a negative answer.

You can test one thing against another, but it throws no light in the other.

This is what makes it so hard designing tests, and why it is very dangerous to use already collected data.

One of the most misused tests is the Chi Squared as it compares a test against an assumption. Useful in a properly designed experiment, but misleading in a poorly designed one.

 

[oldkettle]

2 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

You have misunderstood.

A test is looking for a positive answer, but has nothing to say about a negative answer.

You can test one thing against another, but it throws no light in the other.

This is what makes it so hard designing tests, and why it is very dangerous to use already collected data.

One of the most misused tests is the Chi Squared as it compares a test against an assumption. Useful in a properly designed experiment, but misleading in a poorly designed one.

 

@ToughButterCup I think you are absolutely right, you and @SteamyTea are just talking about slightly different points.

My understanding is

1) In the experiment as described those not taking Aspirin are the control group.

2) Whatever the control group members experience cannot be used to prove any statements about not taking Aspirin. 

 

Or maybe I misunderstood as well ?

[SteamyTea]

18 minutes ago, oldkettle said:

Or maybe I misunderstood as well

Well yes and no.

It depends how the experiment was initially set up.

I think the idea of control group is not to change the null hypothesis of the experiment, it is a secondary experiment running in parallel.  It may pick up extremes, but not the bit that is important.

This is the trouble with medical and social research.  There is a prior that the control group in normal.  This has been shown to be wrong so many times.

The Facebook soap dispenser was a classic example of this.  It worked well in trials, but not in the field.

 

Edited November 1, 2021 by SteamyTea

[oldkettle]

4 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Well yes and no.

It depends how the experiment was initially set up.

I think the idea of control group is not to change the null hypothesis of the experiment, it is a secondary experiment running in parallel.  It may pick up extremes, but not the bit that is important.

This is the trouble with medical and social research.  There is a prior that the control group in normal.  This has been shown to be wrong so many times.

The Facebook soap dispenser was a classic example of this.  It worked well in trials, but not in the field.

 

 

Getting control group right (which from my limited knowledge means controlling for all possible differences to start with) is indubitably ? a proper scientific problem but without those we'd not have any medicine nowadays. Including Covid vaccine. 

 

Where as soap dispensers are likely created by designers with a bit of input from engineers (I hope so at least). Testing under different conditions wouldn't be a familiar concept to the former. 

[SteamyTea]

41 minutes ago, oldkettle said:

Getting control group right (which from my limited knowledge means controlling for all possible differences to start with)

It has been shown that in some medical trials, bias is built in.  This is often the clinician inviting the healthiest of patients to take part, not the sickest.  The control group is also usually given a placebo, so they are not 'normal' like the general population, and often have the illness that is being researched.

This is why Platform and Adaptive trials were used during the COVID-19 drug trials.

Adaptive trials work in a similar way to predictive temperature control, they use the previous results to modify the next trial.  This can reduce the number of tests that need to be completed to get to a point where the Type 1 and 2 errors are reduced.

One of the largest Platform trials was conducted to see if 10 existing drugs reduced the death rate from COVID-19, the advantage of this type of trial is that the patient base is already there, so easier to recruit. And no need for a control group.  Not so different from what Jenner did when trailing the small pox vaccines.  He noticed a group that seemed to be immune, found out what they had been exposed to, and ran with it.  Luckily for us, there was less ethics involved back in 1796, though in Asia, it was not uncommon to inhale powdered small pox scabs to build up immunity, 100 years before.

 

Any trial, of anything to be tested, has to be designed so carefully that there is such a small risk that a rogue result does not skew the numbers too much.  It is not unusual to test a test, several times, for robustness, that test may be a bit of physical equipment, several replicas of the equipment or the statistical tests i.e. do a MWW parametric test and feed the results into an X² test to see if there is a conflict.

 

And Correlation is not Causation, so often forgotten.  There needs to be a solid theoretical and proven evidence base, to explain the correlation.  Not the result used to explain the evidence, that just leads to Jackanory narratives, and we have way too much of that.

Edited November 1, 2021 by SteamyTea

[SimonD]

20 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

So Quantum Physics and Relavalistic Effect not exist then, or been written about.

You're going all journalistic on me and selectively quoting what I said ? I did actually say:

22 hours ago, SimonD said:

it's a fundamental problem where areas of science

 

I did not say science as a whole ?

 

Qauntum physics is a systemic and relational area of science, given for instance that it explicitly accepts the observer of phenomenon is embedded within the system being observed. Thus light can be particle or wave depending on your perspective. But you could hardly say it's mainstream yet, other than maybe used in lots of popular science books. I can't say I've come across the Quantum Physics approach to climate change or heat pumps yet, even if some people have used it to explain why climate change is happen..on balance of probability. Relativistic effects are hardly a science, rather a phenomena observed in science.

 

20 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

or what us real scientists call truth

 

I'm intrigued, what do you define as a real scientist and science? And truth?

 

[SimonD]

12 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

bias is built in

 

Indeed, but this is an accepted reality in all areas of science, physics included, because any observation of phenomena will go through a perception filter and scientists from either the same field, or others, will interpret the observations differently. That's actually part of the whole scientific process; both a valuable and limiting part of it. If you dig even further you'll find that there is inherent bias within the whole western approach to science given its pretty narrow philosophical basis, thus to remove the bias you'd have to untangle its very philosophical foundations. I think this is one of the biggest problems in science as a whole, because many scientist aren't even aware of these baked in, implicit biases.

 

I think what you're highlighting is more a question of method and methodology, and so it's unfair and a bit extreme to write off whole fields of science just because some studies are questionable from a methodological perspective. You have to take each study on its merits. I'd hardly call the Facebook soap dispenser an example of either social or medical research, that's down to poor product design and testing. It's a totally different thing.

Edited November 2, 2021 by SimonD

[SteamyTea]

27 minutes ago, SimonD said:

But you could hardly say it's mainstream yet, other than maybe used in lots of popular science books

And transistors.

27 minutes ago, SimonD said:

I can't say I've come across the Quantum Physics approach to climate change or heat pumps yet

Except the vibrational model of atoms.  The reason that CO₂ absorbs and releases energy is a quantum affect.  The atoms either absorb a photon, with the electrons going to  higher energy state, or they release photons, where the electrons drop to a lower state.  In some ways it is easier to understand at that level.

27 minutes ago, SimonD said:

I'm intrigued, what do you define as a real scientist and science? And truth?

A real scientist is a difficult one to describe.  Just collecting data, or just thinking up experiments, are not, in themselves science.  A Scientist is the person, or group, that can understand all the areas of their research and move the field forward, or show that a past result is robust.  There should be a minimum understanding of a field of interest, not just lucky guessing. 

The Science Method allows a systematic approach so that any experiment is repeatable and has little opportunity to give inconsistent results.  A negative result is as valid as a positive one.  Using this repeatability, anyone, with enough resources, will be able to reproduce the same results.  This is why scientists publish their work and methods.

The multiple checking of results is what leads to the truth.

Mathematics is not a science, nor is phycology or sociology, just using scientific language and techniques does not make subject a science.

Mathematics is the really odd one out as it only accepts proofs, based on axioms, that hold true to infinity, or in all cases.  There is no error margin.  This is why there are some challenges in the subject, like predicting the  location of prime numbers o the infinitely long number line.

 

Truth in science is the easy one. It is the best description of what is happening.

Edited November 2, 2021 by SteamyTea

[SteamyTea]

4 minutes ago, SimonD said:

I think what you're highlighting is more a question of method and methodology

We have good standards to work to, but they are often ignored, or the caveats (limitations) are ignored.

So getting this back to ASHPs.  If the design side is not done properly, further down the line inconsistent results will emerge.  So taking the same design methodology to different houses, without acknowledging the limits of the design process i.e. a wrong ACH figure, could easily make a system a failure or a success.  This does not change the fundamental science i.e. to get a system into thermal equilibrium, the energy input needs to match the energy output.

[Adsibob]

10 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

 

Mathematics is not a science

I disagree. It is the purest of sciences. The science of mathematics is to seek out patterns, formulate new conjectures, and establish truth by rigorous deduction from appropriately chosen axioms and definitions. Mathematicians conduct experiments all the time, whose purpose is to study and better understand quality, structure, space, and change. Sometimes these qualities, structures, spaces and changes arise in the abstract world, sometimes they arise in the real world.

There is debate over whether mathematical objects such as numbers and points exist naturally or are human creations. Benjamin Peirce called mathematics "the science that draws necessary conclusions". Albert Einstein, on the other hand, stated that "as far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."

Many areas of physics could be thought of as an areas of applied and pure mathematics. Much of computing is an application of numerical analysis, linear algebra and number theory, and yet you wouldn't tell a computer scientist that he wasn't a scientist.

[SteamyTea]

9 hours ago, Adsibob said:

I disagree

It is the language of science, but in itself, not science.

The classic question is to describe a number.

What is a 2, or a 23, show me 7, or 439?

This starts to go into philosophy, and the problems really start to show then.  We have Bertrand Russel to thank for all this.

[SimonD]

22 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

Except the vibrational model of atoms.  The reason that CO₂ absorbs and releases energy is a quantum affect.  The atoms either absorb a photon, with the electrons going to  higher energy state, or they release photons, where the electrons drop to a lower state.  In some ways it is easier to understand at that level.

 

You've done it again, I did say about Quantum Physics:

 

22 hours ago, SimonD said:

used it to explain why climate change is happen..on balance of probability.

 

22 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

A real scientist is a difficult one to describe.  Just collecting data, or just thinking up experiments, are not, in themselves science.  A Scientist is the person, or group, that can understand all the areas of their research and move the field forward, or show that a past result is robust.  There should be a minimum understanding of a field of interest, not just lucky guessing. 

The Science Method allows a systematic approach so that any experiment is repeatable and has little opportunity to give inconsistent results.  A negative result is as valid as a positive one.  Using this repeatability, anyone, with enough resources, will be able to reproduce the same results.  This is why scientists publish their work and methods.

The multiple checking of results is what leads to the truth.

Mathematics is not a science, nor is phycology or sociology, just using scientific language and techniques does not make subject a science.

Mathematics is the really odd one out as it only accepts proofs, based on axioms, that hold true to infinity, or in all cases.  There is no error margin.  This is why there are some challenges in the subject, like predicting the  location of prime numbers o the infinitely long number line.

 

Truth in science is the easy one. It is the best description of what is happening.

 

What's interesting here is that you don't actually say what a real scientist or science is. And it just goes to show how we're in completely different paradigms in our perspective. In my mind it's also emblematic of a certain snobbery and elitism that persists in certain quarters of the scientific community.

 

Science is merely about having a curiousity for the world, and using that to gain knowledge and understanding about phenomena in the world using a systematic process. Anyone can be a scientist, from a primary school child, to a retiree gardener. I'd even go as far at to say that master craftsmen are scientists in that they explore the materials they work with to understand them more fully, gaining more knowledge about them and passing that knowledge on to others - that's just applied science, but it may not be published in a highbrow journal. Science is merely about knowledge.

 

People are an interconnected part of the natural world and so the study of people, individually and collectively, is a scientific process. How you can exclude this from science as whole is rather unfathomable to me, as is the exclusion of mathematics, particularly because mathematics is fundamentally about patterns, not necessariy just numbers, and patterns are integral to knowledge and understanding about our world. I'd suggest it's also pretty methodised ?

 

2 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

This starts to go into philosophy, and the problems really start to show then.

 

This points back to my earlier comment, that a lot of scientists don't realise or understand that science grew out of philosophy, which is rather selective. Science is philosophical and the way science is pursued is driven by that philosophy - i.e. the predominant scientific world view - which includes reductionism and mechanism. This philosophy, unwares to most people is also driving the approach to climate change in that the remedies are seen to be technical, material and mechanical. I agree with you that the problems really start to show, because when you understand the underlying philosophy upon which mainstream science is based, you not only understand better its strengths, but its limitations and problems. You then also understand the bias that is contained within all mainstream science since its inception and that its 'truth' is only truth from this perspective and world view.

 

This is uncomfortable for some in the scientific community so the inevitable response becomes one of ? rather than constructive revision. ?

[ToughButterCup]

12 minutes ago, SimonD said:

 

...

Anyone can be a scientist, from a primary school child, to a retiree gardener. I'd even go as far at to say that master craftsmen are scientists in that they explore the materials they work with to understand them more fully, gaining more knowledge about them and passing that knowledge on to others - that's just applied science, but it may not be published in a highbrow journal. Science is merely about knowledge.

...

 

Exactly.

Could I just  nudge the argument a little further ? Anyone can be a scientist: I would encourage that person to apply scientific method appropriate to their age.

Sound application of scientific method, coupled with an enquiring mind makes everyone a scientist. And thats especially relevant to the building sector:  tell me - what's Thermal mass then??

[SimonD]

25 minutes ago, ToughButterCup said:

Exactly.

Could I just  nudge the argument a little further ? Anyone can be a scientist: I would encourage that person to apply scientific method appropriate to their age.

Sound application of scientific method, coupled with an enquiring mind makes everyone a scientist.

 

Yeah, totally!

 

25 minutes ago, ToughButterCup said:

And thats especially relevant to the building sector:  tell me - what's Thermal mass then??

 

Now I'm going to go and hide....

[SteamyTea]

48 minutes ago, SimonD said:

What's interesting here is that you don't actually say what a real scientist or science is

OK, then, to be blunt, anyone that has proper scientific training.  You can't say that anyone that shows curiosity 'is a scientist', that is just barmy, and you know it, would make everyone in the world a scientist.

If you want to reject the whole concept of professionalism, convince the world that we do not need any standards, for anything, an opinion is just as valid as evidence.

I have an interesting in art, I even create and sell some, does that make me an artist or a crafter?  Depends who you ask, ask a painter and they say craft, ask a sculpturer, and they say art.

Science is using the tool, that have been refined for thousands of year to get to the truth.

I am quite happy for you to trust who you think is a scientist, but one word of causing, it they tell you that gravity is an illusion, don't step off a high bridge.

29 minutes ago, ToughButterCup said:

Anyone can be a scientist: I would encourage that person to apply scientific method appropriate to their age.

Then why have we so much rejection of science, and the scientific method?

Edited November 3, 2021 by SteamyTea

[SimonD]

40 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

You can't say that anyone that shows curiosity 'is a scientist',

 

That isn't what I said though, was it? I said:

 

1 hour ago, SimonD said:

Science is merely about having a curiousity for the world, and using that to gain knowledge and understanding about phenomena in the world using a systematic process.

 

I don't think that you have to have what you call 'proper' scientific training to be a scientist, just that you use a systematic process to gain knowledge and understanding. That specific process - i.e. inquiry method and methodology - will be defined by domain and context and its suitability to the question at hand.