Make Heat Pumping The Law

Pumping Heat Can Be Seven Times More Efficient Than Creating Heat

Abstract: Heat pumping is the simplest, fastest and most effective way to heat up, or cool down, something. Deliberate heat creation by human beings, fire, is around 1.5 million years old. Heating and cooking used burning, which is quick energy releasing oxidation. Around 100,000 years ago, Neanderthals used fossil fuels (lignite) to make fire.

A completely different tech was invented in 1834: Heat Pumping . Commercially available heat pumps in 2022 can be seven times more efficient energy-wise than the maximum available when creating heat by burning. 

It is perplexing that states did not make heat pumping mandatory. It may reflect a secret political agenda to remain dependent upon fossil fuels, as the power of most of the world’s potentates is entangled with them.  

Real ecologists should be vociferous about heat pumping. Differently from electric vehicles which are of dubious proximal ecological advantage, heat pumping’s benefits are immediate, considerable, pollution free, and without ecological cost.

Heat pumping should be mandatory: it would considerably mitigate the CO2 crisis.

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Basic Physics of Heat Pump Without Mathematizing:

A heat pump is a device to transport heat, using a gas as a carrier. Heat pumps heat something by bringing energy to create heat, heat pumps trick nature by displacing heat. By displacing heat, heat pumps heat one place and cool another. An application is creating a cold place (refrigerators), another is to create a warm, or potentially extremely hot place.

Heat pumps are an excellent occasion to ponder the nature and relations between heat, temperature and motion. Basically heat is temperature writ large, and temperature is motion. Thus in a way heat is (disordered) motion and it’s not surprising that this motion can be channeled and moved somewhere else.

Heat pumps can be very advantageous: whereas one would need 600 units of energy to create  a given heat, by raising the temperature directly, it can take only 100 units of energy to get the same heat, just by transporting the heat to the same place. Intuitively, it’s a bit like needing much less energy to transport a number of people to a place, rather than creating the same people from scratch.

OK, let’s get a bit more technical:   

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PHYSICS OF HEAT PUMPS:

The definition of a gas is that it is a state which can be compressed (and is not a plasma). Heat pumps use the compressibility of gasses crucially.

Heat needs to be defined. Heat is different from temperature. At the molecular scale, temperature in a gas is defined by the average speed of motion of the molecules making the gas. That speed creates (kinetic) energy. When a molecule hits a wall, it transmits its kinetic energy to the wall: that’s heat.

Basically one can say that heat is agitation.

The closer the walls containing a gas, the more frequently the molecules will hit the walls… thus the more heat will be transmitted to said walls. So, as a gas gets compressed, more heat gets transmitted to the walls. Thus, if one pushes a gas through a nozzle, the nozzle will heat up. The effect is boosted because the compression itself raises the temperature of the gas: all the energy put into the compression gets into the gas, and that means it is converted into the form of energy the gas has, and that is kinetic energy… also known as temperature. So compression raises the temperature while transmitting more heat: a double bang.

Let’s suppose the gas can expand after the nozzle: as its momentum gets confined by the nozzle, it will move slowly after it escapes it. In other words, it will be colder than how it started before the compression… And also the compression, although bringing in energy, made it lose even more energy to the walls (if one arranges the walls and their material well). This cooling of the gas enables us to make a refrigerator. 

In a heat pump, the gas, exposed to the environment, will then warm up, back to the temperature and pressure it had before the compression. So the gas acquires heat from the environment, and then can be brought to the compressor, which releases it. Now make a closed circuit: the heat taken from the environment will then be released just past the compressor at the nozzle.

Plugging in the numbers and equations, or just experimenting with various gasses, nozzles and compressors, one gets efficiencies in commercially available units, which are seven times the maximum theoretical efficiency limit given by direct heating (given by Carnot law). 

Why have heat pumps not be made mandatory? As with High Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filters, which clean the air from all sorts of germs and pollutants, that is a mystery…

Imposing heat pumps is the simplest legislative effort which can be made at this point to mitigate the CO2 crisis.  

Patrice Ayme

Heat is motion. A heat pump moves that motion.

Hard Time Diets: Modern Genetic Archeology Throws A Light

In harder times, diet depended less on meat, and the change of diet could be brutal. Diet in the age of Pericles was grain based, with long healthy lifespans, but the plutocratic dictatorship put in place by the Macedonians 120 years later was meat-laden, with much shorter lifespans. At least so say the historical sources.

Genetical archeology is a new scientific discipline: it is enlightening up the world. For example: “Anglo-Saxon Kings Made Sure to Eat Their Vegetables, Study Shows“
Contrary to popular belief, the ruling classes gorged on meat only on rare occasions, according to an analysis of more than 2,000 skeletons buried during medieval times… The findings are based on an analysis of more than 2,000 skeletons whose remains were buried in England from the fifth to 11th centuries.

These were hard times, starting by the withdrawal in 406 CE of the three Roman legions which protected England by preventing encroachment from various Celts, Picts, Scots, etc (to try to help out the Franks to mitigate the German invasions of the 406 winter solstice)… As England was left defenseless, Anglo-Saxons invasions followed and the highly organized and productive Roman society collapsed in slow motion until the remaining Roman forces resisted in the hills or fled en masse to Armorica which came to be known as “Britanny” (late 6C). Centuries of war and resistance was ideal ground for the Vikings who invaded next, sometimes overruning all of England (begining of the Eleventh Century). Discipline and advanced civilization were re-established only through the Reconquista of the Normand Dux William and his Frankish barons, starting in 1066 CE.  

Paradoxically, during the hard times, diet was eminently correct. And also society was more equalitarian than what would happen during the middle age renaissances.

Anglo-Saxon kings have long reigned in unproven lore, as rapacious meat lovers, eagerly feasting on thick slabs of mutton and beef, washed down with copious amounts of mead and ale.

Science shows otherwise. Their diet leaned more toward vegetables, cereal and bread, according to a study in Anglo-Saxon England. This shows that, in diet as in everything else, medieval times were more subtle than menu choices at modern-day restaurants claiming to replicate medieval times have it.

“There is no sign that elite people were disproportionately eating more meat,” Tom Lambert, a historian at the University of Cambridge, one of the study’s two authors, said. “When they were not having these big public feasts,” he said, “they were eating a vegetable broth with their bread like everyone else was.”[1]

The Vikings, appearing in 800 CE, were different: they ate much protein, especially fish. Norway exported from its far north massive amounts of dry salted cod to medieval Europe. 

Heavy meat associated diets and associated gout were much in evidence in the later middle ages (and nobles knew they got gout from eating too much venison). This is when kings used to hunt every day in gigantic royal preserves, and plutocracy based inequality ruled. 

The disintegration of the Roman state and its remaining republican structures brought a demographic collapse and very hard times. The “Renovation of the Roman Empire” culminating in 800 CE was followed by civil wars and the simultaneous invasions of Vikings, Hungarians and Islamists… The wealthiest parts of Europe (north-west Francia) would recover the wealth they knew under Rome only during the Eleventh Century… but then with increasing inequality. Only then did the unbalanced diet appear, according to historical records. 

Then the nobles of the middle ages started to become taller and healthier, to the point that they looked as if they belonged to a different ethnicity. 

General and systematic studies on hundreds of thousands of individuals over 3,000 years will be enlightening. 

A archeo-genetic study published in Science in Nov 2019 showed that the population of Rome got replaced 3 times over 3,000 years: another surprise. “Many imperial Romans had roots in the Middle East, genetic history shows. At the height of Rome’s power, city residents showed little European DNA.“

That doesn’t mean Middle Easterners are imperially superior… far from it, as the fascist empire was on a ballistic trajectory of ineluctable degeneracy… In part cause by the importation of Middle Eastern-Hydraulic Dictatorship ideologies such as the deification of leaders and Abrahamism…

Patrice Ayme

Typical Anglo Saxon house: we are far from the advanced dwellings the Romans used to have, and those who would follow when civilization got re-established in full force. West Stow Anglo-Saxon Village, an archaeological site and open-air museum in Suffolk, eastern England. Anglo-Saxon kings and other elites consumed no more meat than the rest of the population

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[1] Sam Legget, the other author, said she analyzed the bones of 300 people for nitrogen isotopes, which indicate animal protein consumption, and examined published data on the bones of about 1,700 other people buried at around the same time. Dr. Leggett then determined the social class of the people she examined by cross-referencing her findings with evidence of status, such as whether jewelry and ornate weaponry had been buried in the graves.

This showed that the consumption of animal protein was no greater in the remains of people who most likely belonged to the ruling class, including men, who have been widely believed to be greater consumers of meat, according to the study. Once again only from the 5C to 11C, a time of continual wars and invasions…