Chaos Manor View, Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Thursday, October 01, 2015
The week has been enjoyably consumed by family matters, with three of our four boys in town. Wednesday I had a good story conference with Niven and Barnes and Jack Cohen by Skype from England, and lunch after that. All’s well, but as usual I have been falling behind.
Nice walk this morning with Frank, my number two son, after dinner with Alex (1), Frank (2), and Richard (4), lacking Phillip (3) who is still a career Navy officer. Now Frank and Richard have gone home, and we’ll try to get back to what passes for routine at Chaos Manor. It was all complicated by a dead rat who expired Monday behind the walls in the downstairs office, rendering the place unusable with the smell. The exterminators are due in hours, but the smell was so awful that I cajoled Frank into clearing access to an access door, where, Lo! he found and extracted the corpse, so I am able to write this; it’s hot outside, but we have all the windows open, and I prefer hot with a fan to the alternative as normal chaos returns…
And it’s lunch time.
The big news is Climate Models: they have left out an important factor in cloud formation. The expensive climate models we depend on for climate predictions cannot predict the present from the past, and cannot explain the past fifteen years of virtually no warming at all: they predicted a monotonic temperature rise that failed to happen.
MASSIVE GLOBAL COOLING process discovered as Paris climate deal looms • The Register
Thought y’all might be interested in this. Credit belongs to Jim W., but he doesn’t have your emails on his smartphone, which is all he has access to right now.
Stephanie Osborn“The Interstellar Woman of Mystery”
http://www.Stephanie-Osborn.com“Sometimes you gotta say what’s in your heart… And you have to stand for what you believe. No matter what.”
~’Dr. Michael C. Anders,’ Burnout: The mystery of Space Shuttle STS-281Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2015 12:09:36 -0500
Subject: MASSIVE GLOBAL COOLING process discovered as Paris climate deal looms • The Register
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/30/massive_global_cooling_factor_discovered_ahead_of_paris_climate_talks/
A team of top-level atmospheric chemistry boffins from France and Germany say they have identified a new process by which vast amounts of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are emitted into the atmosphere from the sea – a process which was unknown until now, meaning that existing climate models do not take account of it.
The effect of VOCs in the air is to cool the climate down, and thus climate models used today predict more warming than can actually be expected. Indeed, global temperatures have actually been stable for more than fifteen years, a circumstance which was not predicted by climate models and which climate science is still struggling to assimilate.
In essence, the new research shows that a key VOC, isoprene, is not only produced by living organisms (for instance plants and trees on land and plankton in the sea) as had previously been assumed. It is also produced in the “microlayer” at the top of the ocean by the action of sunlight on floating chemicals – no life being necessary. And it is produced in this way in very large amounts.
The standard climate models have never been very good on clouds and cloud formation; this is known, and many of the ad hoc corrections usually applied to the models’ predictions have involved clouds, their formation, and their effects. This new discovery will be an important correction to the models. Obviously, C02 increases facilitate more growth of plants on land, which may increase VOC production – a negative feedback.
It is also reasonable to assume that increased ocean temperatures will increase formation of VOC’s, and cloud reflectivity over the ocean may have some effect on el Nino events, which we do not understand. None of this affects the influence of C02 on warming, of course, but the negative feedback mechanisms may explain why the models have been so unsuccessful in explaining the actual climate behavior.
The situation in Syria is serious, and we have an incompetent Secretary of State and a President not educated in foreign policy, and not gifted with natural talent in that subject.
Meanwhile ISIS, The Caliphate, thrives having declared war on the United States while openly calling for terrorist attacks on the West in general and the US in particular. It suffers little punishment for these acts, and the President’s responses to the televised brutality of the ISIS regime have not been effective.
The United States, by pronouncement of the President and the Secretary of State, has a policy demanding regime change in Syria without specifying what regime it should change to. President Obama has also designated ISIS as “the junior varsity” and also demanded its end, but ISIS has continued to grow; it presumably is not the President’s designated successor to the Baathist regime of Western educated Syrian President Assad. Now that the US has cooperated in the regime change in Libya, ISIS has colonies there as well. So long as ISIS has territories to rule by its version of Islamic Law, it will continue to attract recruits as it claims to be the legitimate Caliphate: if effect The Return of the King.
Baathists put Arab unity as a primary goal; this means toleration of both Sunni and Shiite Arabs, and also toleration of other Arabs including Christian and Druze. When the American Press speaks of “moderate Arabs” it generally means Baathists although it does not seem to realize this. The Baathist Party has generally thrived in Arab nations with Sunni majorities, although Baathist party members are often Shiite. Baathist regimes tend to be one-party despotates ruling by force.
The President does not seem to understand that majority rule democracy in the Middle East equates to legalizing persecution of minorities; and this is generally inevitable. Lebanon had a multi-party multi-religion multi-ethnic regime at one time, but the US support was slowly withdrawn, and the tolerant regime has pretty well vanished. Lebanon was not a majoritarian democracy, but it was constitutional with offices reserved for Marionites, Shiites, Sunni, and Druze. It worked at one time, but generally the only tolerant regimes have not been democracies. We will except Israel, but it is very much an exception.
Now Putin has offered cooperation and has been rebuffed. I foresee interesting times as Russian warplanes attack the Caliphate and Obama worries that they will also strike “moderate Muslims” whom Obama approves of – if he can find any. Interesting times.
Perhaps it is time to leave Syria to the Russians and Assad, and concentrate on shoring up the Kurds, who are the only real friends we have in the region?
Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.
