| Wednesday,
August 11, 2010
Trying to Understand the Believers: More on climate change
I wrote most of this last night. This morning the morning papers had a
story from the Associate Press about an enormous ice island that broke off
from the Greenland ice sheets. The Petermann Glacier is four times the
size of Manhattan. Representative Ed Markey Chairman of the Energy
Committee says that the island should serve as a home for global skeptics.
This is known as rational debate. The existence of the island is said to
show the truth of global warming. "The Petermann glacier "May symbolize a
warming world like no other."
Further into the article we find that this glacier is the largest since
-- 1962.
Anyway, the following is long, for which I apologize, but the matter
seems to be important.
Query: I have been trying to chase down just
how much warming the seas receive from volcanism. Common sense would tell
you that if you want to heat water, blowing warm air over it is not a very
effective way to do it; far more efficient would be applying heat directly
to the water.. Since to heat the Earth you must heat the water, and CO2
greenhousing heats air, it does seem reasonable to see if the "extra" heat
that the AGW theory is trying to explain may be found from underseas
volcanic activity. (And of course heating the seas causes them to disgorge
dissolved CO2, raising the CO2 levels; or so I presume.)
I find a lot of estimates as to how many active underwater volcanoes
there might be. A quick suggestion is here:
http://www.volcano.si.edu/faq/index.cfm?faq=03 which suggests there
are 50-70 known eruptions each year, meaning about 200 more underwater.
One would presume that just about all the heat from the underwater
volcanoes is transferred to the oceans. I have no idea how much heat that
is; I've been unable to find out just what is the average energy of a
volcanic event. Those more familiar with the data than I should have no
trouble looking at how much energy is required to heat the earth by a
degree, and comparing that to the amount we can estimate is added to the
sea temperature by 200 "average" underwater eruptions. Given the size of
the earth and its seas, I suppose it's not likely to account for a sizable
fraction of the warming we observe (about a degree per century) but I'd
like to see the numbers anyway. I suppose I can keep digging, but does
anyone know?
I've been digging into the theory of man=made global warming, and I
keep getting steered in circles; it seems the principal argument is, the
Earth is warmer than the black-body temperature would predict given energy
received from the Sun and that radiated back out to outer space. Since the
Earth is too warm, something has to account for it. The only thing the
climatologists believe can account for it is greenhouse effect -- which
certainly seems to have heated Venus -- and therefore it must be the
explanation since we have no other. I may have put that a bit baldly, but
it does seem to be the view of the AGW "believers" ("believers" or "true
believers" as opposed to "deniers"). I have had a believer lecture to me
in what amounts to baby talk, assuming that if he talks real slow I will
understand, and that was his principle argument: the Earth is too warm,
greenhouse effect explains Venus, and it's all we have to explain the
excess heat on the Earth. The computer models all say that's what's
happening and no one has anything better. Therefore we accept AGW. That,
my boy, is science. Again I may sound as if I were parodying the argument
but in fact I am not.
At this point I thought, "I've written most of this before" and went
looking for when. The result is that I dug it out of another conference.
The discussion was a lot longer than what I am giving you here, and what
follows is pretty long. I post it because I am still interested in the
debate, and the discussion in this other conference didn't get me very
far: you'll see that if you read the next couple of screens. Apologies for
the length, but the question is one of importance, and rational debate
isn't always brief. Alas, I am not sure the debate got me very far, but I
tried. My partner in the debate is a Ph.D. physicist, reasonably well known,
and very clearly a believer in human-caused global warming.
After a number of interchanges in a conference of fairly smart people,
the physicist apologist for AGW replied to me as follows:
Once more: The greenhouse
effect is part of the laws of physics. The reason that scientists pretty
much dismiss the skeptics out of hand is that, as far as I'm aware, NONE
of them have come up with a plausible alternative explanation for why
adding carbon dioxide should *not* increase the temperature of the Earth.
(Let me remind you that the
natural greenhouse effect is about 30 degrees C: without an atmosphere,
the Earth's radiative equilibrium temperature would be below freezing.
The anthropogenic contribution is, in fact, a pretty small perturbation).
It's fine enough for amateurs
to pick through the enormous data record of climate science and say "wait,
what about this curve? How about this one?", but this, actually, is not
science. The correct way to do science would be to try to fit those
curves to a model, and see how they fit.
Is there a model in which
carbon dioxide does NOT cause greenhouse effect warming WHICH FITS THE
CURRENT DATA?
Here is the greenhouse effect
physics, in a nutshell:
1. the warm Earth emits
infrared radiation.
2. some portion of that
infrared is absorbed by (infrared-absorbing gasses in) the atmosphere.
3. the atmosphere re-emits that
absorbed energy in the from of infrared, isotropically.
4. Some of the infrared
radiation emitted from the sky is absorbed by the Earth.
These are all pretty
straightforward physical processes (that have been known for a century);
if you like you can measure the downwelling infrared with an infrared
bolometer, and even spectroanalyze it. This is not new physics. It is
covered, for example, in book-length detail in the copy of _Introduction
to Atmospheric Radiation_ (1980) on my bookshelf, not to mention dozens of
other texts.
Let's suppose that there is,
actually, some (as yet invisible) reason to be skeptical. I will suggest
that the current crop of "skeptics" have *damaged* our ability to find
it. Overall:
-they ignore
back-of-the-envelope physics calculations -they don't believe detailed
physics calculations based on integrating the absorption spectrum -they
dismiss all the detailed numberical-integration atmospheric models -they
discard the measurements when they doesn't agree with the conclusion they
started with.
Basically, once you discard
all the tools that they don't like the results of, there aren't any tools
left to do science with.
I was tempted to reply in the same tone, but what I
said was:
So: we have a serious statement by a serious
person, who wants to discard the skeptics and get on with what to do about
it since the science is settled.
My first critique is simple:
Historically, warming precedes rises in CO2. This
is in accord with normal theory. While it is certainly true that a
'greenhouse effect" influences climate, historically, CO2 levels have not
caused warming; the CO2 levels follow a temperature rise, not precede it.
Arrhenius thought:
(1) that temperatures were rising and had been
since 1800. Correct. Historical data. Not a prediction. Observed through
the 1800's.
(2) They would continue to rise as they had
been rising. This was more or less projection of an existing trend. That
would be about a degree per century. As it happened, the observed
temperature rise decelerated (and had been decelerating for a few years)
when Arrhenius made that prediction, but temperatures did rise. The NOAA
data show 1880 as -.2 below the 1940 "normal" of 0, and "normal" or 0 in
1940. That's not the 0.5 predicted in 1900 but the trend is in the right
direction.
(3) Arrhenius predicted that there would be an
"extra" rise of about 2 degrees over a century if CO2 levels doubled.
This is theory.
It is now 110 years since he made that
projection. We have had under 2 degrees rise in that time period
according to the NOAA data.
That is, from 1940 to 2003 it went up about 0.4
degrees. There is a sort of "hockey stick" sharp rise from 2000 to 2009
but these data are a bit controversial. We can agree on about 0.7 C rise
=~ to 1.7 F from Arrhenius to now. It's less than expected, but it is a
rise. Call it a full degree C (1.8 F) rise if you like.
(4) you may ascribe that 1 C rise to CO2 if you
like, in which case you have to throw out the projection of a continued
"normal" 1 C rise that would have happened without CO2. You may ascribe
that 1 C rise to the "normal trend" that has been taking place since the
end of the Little Ice Age. You don't get both, because the data show
only the 1 C rise, at least as close as I can read the NOAA charts.
[You can see the temperature graphs here
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/ The most often used graph
shows the temperature in 1880 as about 0.4 below the "normal" of 0 in 1940
and about that above the normal in the year 2000, giving a rise of about 1
degree in 120 years.]
Why? We don't have a good theory as to why; but
those are the data, and the usual practice in science is that theory has
to account for data, not data have to be forced to fit the theory.
Now about the simple back of the envelope
accounts: As Dyson points out, CO2 can have an effect only in COLD DRY
AREAS. There isn't much room for "greenhouse" warming in moist areas.
Greenhouse effects may -- indeed must -- be involved in the temperature of
the Earth, but clearly we don't have a good quantitative handle on which
ones do what: but surely we can agree that CO2 isn't what's happening.
Or: if it is CO2, then the fears of the 1970-1984
doomsters who feared a coming Ice Age are very well founded and the CO2 is
what saved us. This is sort of what Niven, Flynn, and I projected in
Fallen Angels. That was a work of fiction, and as I have often said,
novelists need only be plausible: we don't have to marshal all the
arguments for our case as do advocates, and we certainly do not have to
account for all the data. Scientists, however, do have to account for all
the data, and none of current models do that.
One theory common in the 1970's was that warming
brought out more moisture, which moved more water vapors around, which was
increasing snow falls and that was what was causing the new disastrous
coming New Ice Age and Global Cooling that had scared Schneider and
Margaret Meade and others, and dominated big science conferences during
the 70's and early 80's.
What we must conclude is that the models have not
predicted what we have observed; nor have we found the stratospheric hot
spots that CO2 driven warming predicts we will find. This is not a
confirmation of the accuracy of the theories, all of which more or less
predict the same results -- which results have not been found so far.
For decades we have had two kinds of climate
scientists: theorists and observers. The theorists are all pretty strong
Global Warming advocates. The observers are a mixed lot, but none of them
see what the models predict. The believers among them say "we have not
seen them yet."
More theory: if I want to put CO2 into the
atmosphere, I can burn coal and oil, but if I really want to run the CO2
levels up I should warm the seas. I want to bring up a lot of cold water
to the surface and warm that. Warming the oceans will really raise the
CO2 levels; how much CO2 for how much temperature
rise is calculable, but getting that circulation going is a bit more
complicated, and we don't seem to be able to predict El Nino and La Nina
events which have great effects on ocean surface temperatures. As a first
cut, if I want more cold water to come higher, I'll turn on the heat down
at the bottom -- otherwise known as volcanic events.
And if I want something to worry about, I'll
worry about how to remove a great big lot of CO2 that we could get if the
oceans warm.
That could really cause a runaway hockey stick
temperature rise. Could. It's not inevitable. I'd think some investment in
developing engineering methods to really clean out CO2 from the atmosphere
would be prudent. We may not need the techniques, but if we do, we are
going to need them bad.
So: I don't think Dyson and Baliunas and Singer
and the other skeptics are ignoring the back of the envelope calculations:
but they are pointing out that the data don't seem to be reconciled with
the theory. As to "-they dismiss all the detailed numberical-integration
atmospheric models" perhaps they should until the detailed numerical
models can take a set of initial conditions and generate a good fit to
what actually happened.
As to the greenhouse effect itself, who ever
thought there wasn't one? And perhaps that is what is saving us from
living on a ball of ice. Perhaps not. But I fail to see how investing in
better models -- they get better when questioned, and I doubt they get
better by setting up "peer review" so that anything that doesn't approve
of the -the detailed numberical-integration atmospheric models gets
ignored.
Present policy seems to be to spend billions in
ways that will have a pretty small effect on the CO2 released into the
atmosphere and even less effect on the actual warming -- this according to
the detailed numberical-integration atmospheric models which show that
Kyoto would have had the effect of preventing well under 1 C of the
projected temperature rise. The costs run to the trillions.
That's not good policy. Prudent policy would try
to understand what is going on before spending big money to change the
entire economy.
JEP
The reply I got was:
This is a war of words that the
creationists invented-- if you keep repeating that "it's just a theory"
and "it's just models," the public will say oh, it's not real. And I am
afraid that the scientists are losing this war.
It's something that
non-scientists don't quite understand: Science is all about models. When
we scientists say "model," what we mean is, this is our best understanding
of the world. The fact that models get refined, and improved, is
something that the creationists, and their ilk, attack as if it were a
flaw, but it is, in fact, a feature of the scientific method, not a flaw.
What science is very, very
good at is discriminating against competing models. When scientists ask
the so-called skeptics to come up with a viable model by which carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere does NOT cause warming, this *is* the scientific
method. Basically, by not having any good model by which the basic
physics of the greenhouse effect can be circumvented, the skeptics have
pretty much abandoned the idea of science, although they still maintain
the pretense.
Of course it's all about
data. That's what science does. That's why science credits in the
greenhouse effect, because the model fits the data. (There are about
20,000 climate scientists in the world-- do you seriously believe that
none of them ever actually look at data? What do you think they do?)
The greenhouse effect is very
simple. The Earth emits infrared radiation. Greenhouse gasses in the
atmosphere absorb this infrared radiation. They then re-emit the infrared
in all directions. Some of the re-emitted infrared returns to the
ground. This downwelling infrared radiation heats adds heat to the Earth.
Which part of this physics do
you not credit?
If you don't believe the model,
you can take the data yourself. Find a LWIR spectrometer-- a good
university should have one-- and measure the spectrum of the downwelling
infrared radiation coming from the sky. Then see if you can fit the data
to a model that in which carbon dioxide does not cause global warming.
As far as I can tell, however,
the climate-change "skeptics" have little interest in any data that does
not fit their already pre-determined conclusions. *No* amount of data
will ever change their opinions, because they will only pay attention to
data if it fits their previously formed conclusions.
At which point I gave up since I learned nothing
from the last reply, and it was getting clear that this renowned physicist
wasn't going to address my specific points. I have had similar dialogues
with other AGW believers, but quoting them would make this already too long
discussion even longer while adding no knowledge, or at least none to mine.
The part of the physics I don't credit is that the
predictions are that we should be seeing more temperature rise than we have
observed. A second part of the physics I don't credit is the accuracy of the
measurements. I do not believe we know the temperature of the Earth in the
time of Arrhenius to anything like a single degree of accuracy, and for that
matter I am not convinced that we know it now to that accuracy. I don't have
any pre-determined conclusions. As an old Operations Research guy I do like
to have some confidence in both theory and observations before I spend a lot
of money on remedies to problems that are predicted by models.
I think I have been through all this several times.
Myself
when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door where in I went.
================
I put all that above because I begin to wonder at my
own sanity: what happened to common sense? The warming that we are all
frightened of was about 1 degree in a century. That one degree increase was
predicted in 1890 simply by looking at trend lines from the 14th Century. No
one was mad enough to try estimations to a fraction of a degree.
If I wanted to take the temperature of the United
States to an accuracy of a tenth of a degree, how would I go about doing it?
What weight would I assign to, say, Lake Superior as opposed to an equal
area of Kansas? Do I give them equal weights? At that altitude do I take my
air temperature, and what weight do I give that as opposed to the
temperature of the earth beneath it? I keep searching for a simple -- or
even a complex -- discussion of those matters, but I don't find them.
And when I want to look at the heat balance of the
Earth, it would seem reasonable to say. "What do you mean by the temperature
of the Earth?" Do you mean some average of the temperature from the center
of the Earth to the top of the atmosphere? Apparently not. The interest is
on surface conditions. Excellent. But the interior is hotter than the
surface. Surely there is some transfer of heat from interior to surface.
What is that transfer? How many calories are annually added to the surface
temperature from the interior? Is it a significant amount, or is it trivial
and thus can be ignored. So far I have found no answers to that question.
We know volcanism affects surface temperature, but
the general effect is cooling. Dr. Benjamin Franklin was so far as I know
the first to observe that: as he passed Iceland on his way to take his
ambassadorial post in Europe, there was a large eruption that made for dark
skies and noticeable cooling, and he speculated that enough of those might
have a dramatic climate effect. After that came Tambora and "the year
without a summer" that caused Mary Shelley to write her Frankenstein story
and create the science fiction novel. But it there a transfer of heat from
the interior of the Earth to the surface? There must be. How large is it?
Could lava flows in the Mindanao Deep cause water circulations and have some
effect on El Nino? I look for data on this and I don't find much, which may
be a commentary on my research abilities, but still, you'd think that would
be interesting: I sure don't have a problem finding explanations of why
global warming deniers ought to be exiled to an iceberg.
Ah well. Apologies for the rant. I'll go to other
subjects. But I would appreciate enlightenment from a believer who can spare
the time to answer some simple questions.
========================
Yesterday's "stimulus" program which extended
unemployment and subsidized union worker employment was purportedly financed
by cutting the 2014 Food Stamp Program.
If you depend on Food Stamps, you might consider
planting a vegetable garden.
===================
Personal revenue for Californians is down by $40
billion this year. California continues to hire new state civil service
workers.
Federal civil service workers are now earning not
more than, but double, what private sector workers earn. Their income has
increased annually for the past nine years. Federal civil service average
paying benefit is $109,000 a year (included benefits and pensions of
course). The average bureaucrat makes about twice what those who produce
goods and service and pay taxes. There are no layoffs, and there will be
raises next year.
Where is Madame Defarge now that we need her?
============
Wednesday TOP
Current Mail
|
