| Friday,
May 27, 2005 A Turkish Muslim offers
his thoughts on Intelligent Design:
http://www.techcentralstation.com/052605E.html in an essay I found worth
the time investment to read it. He write in refutation of the
"Intelligent Decline" article
http://www.techcentralstation.com/051905A.html by Britannica editor
Robert McHenry.
My own view is a bit different: either the universe has a purpose, or it
does not. If it does not, debates on the "meaning of life" aren't very
interesting, and it's pretty hard to conceive of a reason to obey any kind
of moral law other than fear of getting caught. It's the Karamazov dilemma:
"If God exists, all things are possible; if He does not exist, all things
are lawful." But that is going well beyond the evidence, as does McHenry; in
my judgment Mustafa Akyol does not.
There is also a letter and my reply on this subject in mail.
Global Warming and other matters when I get back from my walk.
There is considerable mail on Bit
Torrent.
On Global Warming:
There are several issues here, all twisted together. Those whose funding
depends on the "consensus" that leads to the Kyoto conventions find it
expedient to wrap them all together into one issue -- Do You Care About
Preserving The Earth or Are You a Monster -- but that isn't a very useful
thing to do.
First issue: is Earth warming? Yes, of course it is; this is
supported by all the evidence. Moreover, it has been warming since about
1800, and we all know it: measure growing seasons everywhere (look in old
Almanacs if you like for planting dates and harvesting dates), thickness of
the ice in North America (we all know that cannon were dragged across frozen
rivers in 1776 in places where the ice no longer gets thick enough to walk
on, or never forms at all now), retreat of glaciers all across the world and
in both hemispheres. Yes. Earth is warming.
Second issue: is this due to human causes? Not very likely. The
very trends that show warming since 1800 also show that the warming has been
pretty uniform over that time, and modern industrialization didn't put
enough CO2 into the atmosphere to matter until well into the 20th Century.
Indeed, early coal burning probably put enough particulates into the upper
atmosphere to have a cooling effect. Certainly the 1815 eruption of Tambura
had a distinctly cooling effect (causing the notorious "year without a
summer" which was so gloomy that Mary Shelley wrote the gothic novel
Frankenstein because the Shelley's and Byron's weren't having any fun on
Lake Geneva due to lousy weather). But despite a glitch in the trend during
1815 the warming has been pretty well linearly constant from around 1800 to
1960, at which point the warming continued but perhaps less rapidly. This is
hard to determine because this was when we began better instrumentation, but
that itself can cause ambiguities since we can measure temperature effect
undoubtedly caused by humans -- cities for example -- which are highly
local.
Third Issue: is CO2 increasing? Yes. Is it having an effect
on Global Warming? Probably, but it's hard to see because the trend in
warming from 1800 is so strong that a small addition from CO2 isn't easily
seen (if at all; there's some controversy on whether the effect has been
observed, but no one seriously contends that it is large yet). There is
serious debate on the future effects of CO2 on global warming, and people
with good credentials take all sides of the issue.
Effects of CO2: the best paper I have seen is
http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm and I have yet to have one of
the environmentalists give me a serious refutation of what that paper says.
Fourth Issue: is Global Warming likely to continue? Surprisingly,
we don't know. If there is a serious possibility of serious global warming
we ought to be looking into ways of doing something about it. Alas, the
climate trends are such that it's as likely we are in for another period of
global cooling as warming, and I can remember when climatology predictions
at AAAS meetings were about the possibility of new Ice Ages; Stephen
Schneider who now mostly talks about Global Warming wrote The Genesis
Strategy
http://www.wilmonie.com/cgi-bin/wmb455/105317.html about preparations
for global cooling not all that long ago. I took the photograph of him and
Margaret Mead that was used for promoting the book. It's not a bad book
although like much of Stephen's work it tends to get polemical; which is to
say he feels strongly about what he concludes.
Fifth Issue: what should we do? Note that this is policy, not science. My
recommendation is that we spend as much as we must to obtain an
understanding of what's going on and what we face: should we be preparing
for Global Warming or a New Ice Age? Or nothing at all? Clearly the
different courses of action are mutually exclusive, and except for the "do
nothing" alternative are likely to be expensive.
Why Do Nothing? Doing nothing seems wrong, but in fact might be
proper: certainly we should Do Nothing until we know what it is we are Doing
Something about. As to why "Nothing" may be the right answer, recall that
the Vikings settled Greenland, and prior to about 1325 there was a long
period of warm climates, long growing seasons, and generally mild weather:
Good Weather. It may be that we are warming back up to that point. Those
concerned about CO2 are right to point out that if we have a warming trend
to an optimum the CO2 warming may take us well past that point to something
we don't like. However, there's little evidence that will happen, and
there's even less that it will happen suddenly: the Earth is big and the
oceans are large, and warming up the whole mess takes lots of time because
there are so many thermal sinks. We have no historical evidence of sudden
onset warming.
We do have considerable evidence of sudden onset cooling: England went
from deciduous trees to snow and ice in under 100 years in the last Ice Age,
and the Little Ice Age came on very quickly. If we're warming up,
preparations will be needed but there should be time -- and things will get
better for quite a while before they get worse, so there will be more money
to spend on Doing Something. If however it's ICE that's coming, things get
worse before they get awful, there will be less money, and less time.
Schneider's Genesis Strategy is a start on what we might do.
And that, it seems to me, is about where we are.
So: since this seems so reasonable (at least to me) why is there such
bitter controversy and so many really horrible charges thrown about, with
people denounced, and attempts made to get people thrown out of academic
positions and professional societies for having contrary views?
Well, there's a LOT of money at stake. The "environmentalists" generally
charge anyone who challenges their conclusions and policy recommendations
with being in the pay of the evil oil companies -- and also work very very
hard to see that every nickel of funding from other sources goes to people
with a big stake in the "consensus" position who won't disrupt the gravy
train. When we feared an Ice Age there wasn't a lot of money for some
reason; but Global Warming caught on, and there's lots and lots of money for
studies and academic positions and travel to conferences in Rio and Kyoto,
and if that dries up -- who will support the "consensus" people? I
admit that's a pretty harsh view, and it probably doesn't apply to more than
a small percentage of the "consensus" defenders: but it emphatically does
apply to many of the more vociferous, and particularly to those who go about
denouncing those who oppose them.
It may be possible to have rational debates on climatology, but my
experience has been that if the opening arguments don't convince you to join
the "consensus" then either you will be denounced, or communications will
simply cease. That happened in the discussions with NASA's Gavin
Schmidt [gschmidt@giss.nasa.gov]
here on this web site, and that was neither the first nor the last time.
But the facts remain: the warming trend was going on well before the CO2
levels began escalating. The Earth has been both warmer and cooler in
historical times. Computer models produce predictions, but none of those
models can duplicate the past (start with 1900 and run a 100 year projection
that "predicts" the realities of the Year 2000; or start with 1950 and
predict 2000 with the model; or heck, just give us a good picture of what is
going to happen next year, or this summer). Observation scientists tend to
be less enthusiastic about the "consensus" and many reject it entirely. And
there are counter-trends: We don't know if we are headed for an Ice Age or
Global Warming, but for a while at least Warming produces a more benign
world with more resources to spend. And the return of the Ice Ages would be
very bad.
And many of the environmentalist protagonists use tactics that they would
(and do) deplore if used by anyone else.
We have some additions and corrections.
Hi Jerry,
This graph:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png
only goes back to 1850 but I'm having trouble matching it to your analysis,
and this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:1000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png
goes back 1000 years and it doesn't seem to jibe too well either.
Both are well sourced although it's still hard to
judge bias; perhaps you could disclose your sources?
I doubt that you remember me, the last time we talked
it was about relative trade volumes between the US and each of the two
Chinas.
Best regards, Mark A Haney
To which I replied :
>Oerlemans Science 308 pp 675-677 "Extracting a
Climate Signal from 169
>Glacier Records"
>
>As to the linear nature of warming since 1800 almost everything we know
>including ice thickness, growing season -- look at almanacs for example...
And received the response:
Ahh, thanks, Jerry. Oerlemans' analysis was included
in the graph at the second link I sent you, although it's admittedly
difficult to see in the midst of nine other squiggly lines.
If I may take the liberty of paraphrasing you as
saying: "Almost everything shows a nearly linear warming from 1800 to 1960,
with some slowing in the trend after that point", it strikes me that that
phrasing would be about as inaccurate as "Nearly everything shows the hockey
stick."
If instead one stated: "Most analyses show a roughly
linear warming from 1800 to the present", it would be hard to quibble with
that.
Take care, Mark
And on reflection I must agree. I will defend my original formulation as
being more accurate than what has been said about the "hockey stick", but
Haney's more nuanced phrasing is more accurate: in either case the
conclusion seems obvious, and the environmentalist movement does not seem to
have answered it; and there is no hockey stick in there.
We have comments from Gavin Schmidt as well but I am still studying the
references he sent, particularly the observation data; more shortly.
And there is commentary mail.
I have copied this to the "Global Warming Debates"
page, which I am updating.
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