Helium-Pressurized Homebrew Beer at AME Featured in C&EN Article

Our own Anderson Materials Evaluation (AME) chemist Dr. Kevin Wepasnick guided a Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) investigation of the properties of a helium-pressurized beer in an article entitled Helium Beer, From Prank to Tank in its 2 November 2015 issue written by Craig Bettenhausen.  C&EN is a publication of the American Chemical Society.  Kevin brewed a 5-gallon batch of a cream stout beer for C&EN over a two-week fermentation period at Anderson Materials Evaluation, Inc. with writers from C&EN visiting our laboratory at the start and the end of the process.  He used a kegging process, but instead of pressurizing the keg with carbon dioxide, he pressurized it with helium.  The experiment was set up to test the claims that drinking a helium-pressurized beer would cause the drinker to speak with a high-pitched voice, as demonstrated in some on-line videos.

Scientifically, issues are to be expected.  Foremost is the difference between a polar molecule with excellent solvent properties such as carbon dioxide and the inert gas helium.  Carbon dioxide has a solubility in water of 1.7 g/kg, while helium has a solubility of merely 0.0015 g/kg in water!  It would be a challenge to dissolve enough helium in a beer to turn a drinker's voice squeaky!  Kevin pressurized the keg at 50 psi in a chilled keg, which is a much higher pressure than is used with carbon dioxide, and he held it at this pressure for five days.

The resulting beer had an excellent head of very fine bubbles, which it maintained as the visiting three writers from C&EN and the scientists of Anderson Materials Evaluation, Lorrie, Kevin, and Charles, sampled the beer at our laboratory.  Because the beer had little carbonic acid in it, it was a mellow beer.  The alcohol by volume was measured to be 6.2%, so it had a kick.  Yet, the beer was definitely flat and no one developed a high-pitched voice.  The Internet videos claiming such a result are fabricated!  Can you imagine that?

Well, yes, thinking as a scientist, the more than a thousand times lower solubility of inert helium in water compared to the highly polar carbon dioxide molecule, told us those videos were faked prior to doing the experiment.  Nonetheless, the experiment was fun for all, which is more the natural state of science than is the gloom and doom associated with much environmental science of our times.

The American Physical Society is Reviewing its Position on Catastrophic AGW

After many members of the American Physical Society (APS) objected that it was not clear that there is a catastrophic anthropogenic global warming crisis looming, the APS leadership has decided to review its policy on that hypothesis.  More recently, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and other professional scientific organizations sent a letter to the members of the Senate claiming that their organizations support the need for immediate action to prevent a crisis due to man's production of CO2 from fossil fuel use.  A new letter from 162 members of the APS was then sent to Senators telling them that these members did not support the catastrophic AGW hypothesis.  Some of the signers of this letter are also members and fellows of AAAS and noted that they were not polled for their opinions on the issue by AAAS.  The letter also notes that as far as they knew, the other 17 scientific organizations signing the letter with AAAS did not poll their members either.

Members of the American Chemical Society (ACS) have also complained that they have not been polled by ACS and yet ACS signed the same letter of support for immediate action on AGW with the AAAS.  Members have also been complaining that the C&EN Magazine sent to all members editorially supports catastrophic AGW.

Revolts of Scientists Against Global Warming Dogma

Many members of the American Physical Society are revolting against a statement issued by that society of professional physicists in 2007 that claimed that man-made emissions of CO2 were a serious problem. You can read a brief article about the request by 80 prominent physicists to have the earlier statement replaced with one which states that natural forces such as solar and ocean forces are the primary cause of climate change, that the 20th Century and early 21st Century temperatures are not unusual, and that objective research on the effects of both natural and man-made effects are the proper business of science.

Comments in favor of man-made global warming by the editor of the monthly magazine published for all members of the American Chemical Society resulted in a firestorm of protesting letters only a few weeks ago. Thus it is clear that the so-called consensus of scientists that anthropogenic global warming is a major factor leading to catastrophic effects has broken down.

That consensus may have seemed plausible to many a short while back because most scientists had never really looked into the issues of global climate. But as the public policy issues related to preventing a global warming catastrophe caused many scientists to realize how important climate-affecting factors were, more and more of them have done their homework. More and more of them, as I was, were embarrassed to find that much of what has been called climate science has been very poor science indeed. More and more of the scientists in the "hard" sciences have been able to evaluate the so-called science of greenhouse global warming and have dismissed it as obviously inadequate science, with many very apparent biases based upon political, rather than scientific, values.

Bring on the revolt my fellow scientists. It is late, but we must still save as much respect for science as we can.