| Wednesday,
November 22, 2006 Still rebuilding. This time it's going to
be permanent. Got another thousand words of Inferno done yesterday.
An Inconvenient Truth
There's more on global warming in all the papers, and reviews of Al
Gore's pretentious movie as well. Inconvenient Truth.
The inconvenient truth is that we don't know what the hell is going on.
The Earth is probably getting warmer. Probably, but even that's not certain;
there's evidence in both directions. Still, I would guess that the
preponderance of evidence indicates a warming trend.
And it is way certain that CO2 levels have risen a lot, and much of that
is due to human activity.
And that's all we know. The rest is guesses, some of them enhanced with
computer models. We don't know whether the (probable but not certain)
warming is due to increased CO2; we can be pretty certain that not all of it
is. We don't know if the whole solar system is warming, although there's
evidence to show that it's warming up on other planets.
We don't know what the temperature of the Earth is supposed to be. By
"supposed to be" I mean what it would have been if humanity had had the good
grace to die and leave the Earth to termites and cockroaches and spotted
owls and polar bears.
We don't know if we are returning to the conditions of the Medieval Warm
period. Not long ago we were concerned that we were headed back to an Ice
Age. For a while there in the 70's it looked pretty certain that we were, so
that a number of the global warming alarmists were writing about what we
ought to do to avoid freezing in the dark. Then opinion began to tip the
other way, and grants depended on whether or not you believed in global
warming, and now you can't get a grant to study the possibility of a coming
ice age, nor even to study some of the assumptions of the global warming
hypothesis. You can publish nonsensical hockey stick analogies in peer
reviewed journals even though your algorithms are proprietary, and keep
getting grants so long as you're on the consensus side of the matter; but
it's hard to get grants to look for what's really happening. In general the
only way to get any money to look at non-consensus theories is to go to
private funding, which generally means energy companies, and once you take
energy company money we all know you are bought and paid for and we don't
have to pay any attention to your work. As opposed to those who take
consensus theory money: they're so correct they don't even have to publish
their methodology so others can try to duplicate their work.
And that's the Inconvenient Truth: that science has failed us. Science
has become so dependent on money allocated by peer review that there's not
much chance for real science not approved by the CoDominum BuScience.
I made that last one up; it's from one of my novels. Surely nothing like
that can happen?
It's easy to state the problem. It's not so easy to come up with a
solution. One possibility is political allocation of research funds: a
certain amount earmarked for contrarian research. The problem there is
which contrarians? Once you abandon the consensus view on a matter like
climatology, there will be a number of dissenters, most all with a few
truths inconvenient for the consensus and favoring their own views, and
a few way out there in the fever swamps. People like Ignatz Philipe
Semmelweis who thought that doctors were spreading the dreaded childbed
fever that killed women in childbirth; people like Alfred Wegener who
thought the continents were drifting; people like Hans Hörbiger
with his Cosmic Ice Theory. In all three cases the giggle factor among
the well learned was about the same.
I am not sure how to allocate research grant funds to ensure that only
the sound wild ideas get funded while the others are not. I am quite sure
that once a silly theory is funded the political pressure on those who made
the grant will be enormous, there will be charges of collusion and senility,
and the careers of those who argued for funding the obnoxious idea will be
hounded from public life. Look at the President of Harvard who dared
speculate that one explanation for the discrepancy between numbers of men
and women in science might be physiological differences between the sexes.
(And I expect that not one in a hundred readers knows
what was
actually said, which was rather long, rather dull, rather mild, but very
much in keeping with what we used to think of as a spirit of free inquiry.)
One MIT biologist collapsed from the vapors from the very suggestion.
Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
walked out on Summers' talk, saying later that if she hadn't left, ''I
would've either blacked out or thrown up." Five other participants
reached by the Globe, including Denice D. Denton, chancellor designate
of the University of California, Santa Cruz, also said they were deeply
offended, while four other attendees said they were not.
Note that Nancy Hopkins was not fired or disciplined or even
reprimanded for being about as unscientific as you can get; but Summers
got it good and hard. Yet, dare I say it, there's considerable evidence
that Summers was right, there is a biological factor here. It might even
be worth studying. If, as Summers assumed, we need more women in science
because we need more scientists and we have to mobilize all the human
resources we have, then it makes a lot of sense to see just why there
are more men than women in various scientific fields. Who knows, a well
planned research project might discover that it's not physiology at all,
or maybe it's a difference in teen age diets, or maybe it really is all
cultural; but we'll never know.
And that one is mild compared to the amounts of money at stake in the
global warming issue.
==============
I am told that my assumptions about the amount of power needed to get us
nearly free of imported petroleum are spot on, off by a fair amount,
ridiculous and absurd. That's quite a range. The right way to resolve this
is to do the numbers, and when I get things set up here again I'll do me a
good spread sheet. Meanwhile, if any of you have sources for the energy
input-output (source-disposition) figures for energy in the US, I'd
appreciate a pointer.
The assumption I have made is that if we wanted to, we could build 100
1000 Megawatt nuclear reactors for about $100 billion. The first one would
cost quite a lot more than the last, because the first would be subject to a
lot of design reviews; but once a safe design was adopted the rest would be
more or less identical to it, and the learning curve would apply. I also
assume that given the determination to do this, we could have most of those
on line in five years.
I confess that I haven't looked at the actual energy budget of the US
since I was science editor of Galaxy, and that's more than 25 years ago, so
I could be a fair distance off on these guesses. I have to go for a walk
now. More later.
Back: I need to collect the data to make a good spread sheet input output
chart of US power generation and consumption, and figure how much
electricity is really needed to make a significant impact on domestic oil
consumption.
As to fossil fuels, I said about 30 years ago that they are so valuable
as feed stocks for industrial processes that it's a crying shame to set fire
to them.
==============
RE: But A Lot Of Ice Is Melting, Isn't It?
Jerry,
To be the devil’s advocate for a minute: All the
popular accounts I see indicate significant ice melting. Such observations
don’t depend on any algorithm or indeed any assumptions. If there is
significant ice melting, this can be easily substantiated, can it not? And
if so, something is going on, isn’t it?
On the other hand: I did hear on NPR a few months ago
about someone researching whether fine soot resting on ice surfaces could
accelerate melting; this researcher thought it did. If this was a mechanism
(and it would seem to be very plausible) then better control of the release
of fine soot from man-made sources could make a significant difference, and
would seem to be actually possible to do without massive economic
destruction.
Mike Cheek
Tallahassee
Well, yes: pretty soon the Greenland glaciers may be back where they were
when Leif the Lucky started dairy ( Da Iry?) farms in Greenland.
And we have some evidence that the total amount of ice in Antarctica is
growing. Perhaps it would be well to establish that before we begin building
dikes?
I am all for DOING SOMETHING if something has to be done, but it helps to
have some details on just what is the problem you are trying to solve.
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