Global Warming. 1. Big talk, Little walk
(let's go said he
not too far said she
what's too far said he
where you are said she)
e e cummings
It never fails to astonish me how authoritative PR-minded "climatologists" are. Quite a few of these folks make their living by delivering solemn revelations of the coming Armageddon: the dreaded global warming. They know beyond any doubt what will happen when, say, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere will increase from this value to that one. It will be bad, very bad indeed; you cannot even imagine how bad it will be. There is no room left for second guessing, for hesitation, for introspection, for suspicion of any sort. They radiate this certitude despite the fact that at close examination their models are 'garbage in, garbage out,' lacking any predictive power, that these models depend upon hundreds of poorly known parameters and scarcely understood processes, etc. For all of their big talk about global warming, the typical odds (suggested by their own models) that the period-average global temperature will increase by > 0.1 C in the next 20 years (as compared to the past 20 years) are 3:2! Few of them will be around to collect their money, though, even if this increase will actually happen. Nevertheless, these politicized climate scientists (most of which belong to computer modelling community) have few scruples when it comes to frightening the public and demanding that "something is to be done about global warming," meaning that the governments are supposed to waste billions of dollars fighting an uncertain, remote threat. I have long discovered that sensible arguments do not work on this
... holy brotherhood of twilight model experts and the crowd of diluted citizens that believe the numbers predicted by their models. I have studied their climate models and know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics and do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields, farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models. There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. The warming happens in places and times where it is cold, in the arctic more than the tropics, in the winter more than the summer, at night more than the daytime. I am not saying the warming doesn't cause problems, obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it. I am saying that the problems are being grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are much more urgent and important. Poverty, infectious diseases, public education and public health. (Freeman Dyson, 2005 address http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?DysonWinCom05)
It is hard to disagree with Freeman Dyson, who is, after all, one of the titans of the 20th century physics. However, voicing such concerns does not seem to carry the day. These guys immediately start questioning your credentials and profess deep knowledge of abstruse points and fine details that you are too stupid to get. It does not matter if those fine points have no or little bearing on the problem; the end result is that the "experts" win the day, once more reiterating their unshakeable "confidence" in the "consensus." Indeed, anyone who disagrees is not an expert, is not part of the "scientific consensus," hence their opinion does not count. That such a consensus has been shown to be wrong time and again in the past is the argument that is promptly dismissed, as heresy. In the past, yes, but now when they have computers, they know. There is, however, a trick which I found very helpful for setting the discussion onto the right path, avoiding this problem altogether. Play their own game.
What you should do is to suggest these GW enthusiasts to mean business, act on what they preach, and prevent the catastrophe by implementing the simple solution worked out by Dyson in 1979. He suggested lowering the solar flux that reaches the ground by dispersing aerosol particles in the upper atmosphere. The haze reflects the sunlight and cools down the Earth; such a solution would cost < $1B annually, whereas our socially concerned climatologists demand spending that much on their own climate modeling research alone! Of course, the economic measures they suggest to fight the GW are orders of magnitude more expensive. This simple solution works: such an aerosol induced cooling routinely occurs after major volcanic eruptions. The most pessimistic scenarios of GW suggest that the effect of doubling the CO2 concentration (when all coal is burned in the next 300 years) would be fully negated by 0.2% decrease in the flux. The typical variation of solar luminosity over one solar cycle is 0.1%. In fact, the trend on the GW observed since 1860 closely tracks the current increase in the solar flux (see Friis-Christensen, E., and K. Lassen, "Length of the solar cycle: An indicator of solar activity closely associated with climate," Science, 254, 698-700, 1991; http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/solar/lassen1.html; see also Svensmark, H. & Friis-Christensen, E. "Variation of cosmic ray flux and global cloud coverage-a missing link in solar-climate relationships" J. Atmos. Solar-Terr. Phys. 59, 1225, 1997 on the effect of solar flux variations on cloud coverage). To put this 0.2% in perspective, Life was doing very well 2 Bya, when the solar flux was 25% lower than now. The composition of the atmosphere changed drastically, the Sun flux changed drastically, biology changed drastically, and yet this planet's climate has been amazingly stable, if you do not count two glaciation episodes that followed oxygenation of the atmosphere. We'll come to that in one of the subsequent posts. Most of the GW crowd do not know such things anyway; they are surprisingly uninformed and uninterested in palaeoclimate. It is not their agenda.
Dyson's solution has been re-evaluated by none other than Edward Teller, in 1997. Here is his conclusion:
...The "geoengineering" proposed by Dyson may cost as much as $1 billion a year. More technologically advanced options along the same lines might cost $100 million. That's between 0.1 and 1.0 percent of the $100b/yr it is estimated would be required to price-ration fossil fuel usage back down to 1990 levels in the US alone. As the National Academy of Sciences commented a few years ago in a landmark report, "Perhaps one of the surprises of this analysis is the relatively low costs at which some of the geoengineering options might be implemented." Indeed, the director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program's Coordination Office has been promoting such geoengineering for three decades. But for some reason, this option isn't as fashionable as all-out war on fossil fuels and the people who use them. http://p211.ezboard.com/fchemtrailsmeteorologyissues.showMessage?topicID=37.topic
the paper is on http://lookupabove.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/Teller.txt
In 2003, National Academy of Engineering had a meeting devoted to cost analysis of Dyson’s scheme. They concluded that
...technical management of radiative forcing of Earth’s fluid envelopes, not administrative management of gaseous inputs to the atmosphere, is the path mandated by the pertinent provisions of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Moreover, this appears to be true by a very large economic margin, almost $1 trillion dollars per year worldwide, because crops could be fertilized by greater concentrations of atmospheric CO2 without climatic regrets. http://www.nap.edu/books/0309089212/html/94.html (there are more links to the research down these lines on the NAE site; there is also an excellent review on geoengineering on http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/about_us/meet_us/roger_pielke/envs5000/week11/Keith_Geoengineering_the_Climate.pdf)
In short, geoengineering is possible, it will work, it can be done without developing unspecified, nonexistent "technologies of the future," and it will be cheap. It is the exact opposite to what the GW crowd is peddling, and that's their vulnerable spot. Their agenda is to show how confident they are in their models, so they can get the ear of the powerful. Tell them that it is time to act on their confidence; we cannot afford sitting and doing nothing, right? If you are so dead certain that the GW is real, that the doom is upon us, that untold sums of money should be spent on preventing the CO2 emissions, that we should either combat GW or all die, why not go ahead and stop it? The turnaround that follows is truly remarkable. The same people immediately start fidgeting and admitting that too little is known about this and that; all of a sudden hesitation sets in; the tone is lowered and the rhetorics are humbled; things begin to look complicated; the climate is declared to be enigmatic and unpredictable; fine points come from the back to the fore. Well, if the uncertainty and predictability of the current climate models are such indeed, perhaps one should not make definitive statements and scare people off their rockers.
This warm-up usually works very well; these guys are not used to such blunt tactics -- yet. Now the discussion is set in the proper context:
GW enthusiasm is not about delivering the humankind from the imminent peril. It is about something else. Prophesizing doom that will come or not come in the next 20-50-100-300 is deplorable and cheap. Countless doomsayers have done that countless times before. Nobody will be held accountable for such a prophecy, especially if the recommendation is as toothless and self-serving as spending more money on more "climate research" (aka computer modeling of imaginary Planet Earth) and wasting loads of dollars on dubious, protracted, inefficient, and expensive measures such as cutting the industrial CO2 emissions. Taking responsibility now and providing a solution that can be implemented now is a different matter. Fear mongers, blackmailers, and phonies do not do that and avoid doing that by all means possible. Besides, quite a few of these folks know that their political future is tied to the solar cycle. Between 1930 and 1965, the global temperatures were dropping. Soon they will be dropping again, following the same cycle. We are also overdue for the next Maunder minimum that will certainly lower the global temperature quite a bit. The short-term prospects for the GW look uncertain at best. It is now or never. The racket is to grab the money before it is too late, when there are still people around who believe their computer models and confident forecasts.
What would these GW enthusiasts do when the global temperature will start going down? Will they suggest us to fight the menace of global cooling too?
PS: Recently, Guardian reported about an official $10,000 (1:1) bet between two solar physicists from Russia and a self proclaimed "mainstream climatologist" who is involved in "probabilistic climate prediction" (actually, he is a young British scientist located in Japan, of little clout) who is willing to accept such bets. In his boastful text, he suggests 5:1 to 3:1 odds on warming in the next 20 years as "fair." Somehow, the odds of the actual bet were much lower. If you read the newspapers, you would think that GW in the next 20 years is a sure thing (with odds better than, say, 10,000:1). Here you get the idea, how sure these things actually are.
Update: Scafetta, N., and B. J. West, 2006. Phenomenological solar contribution to the 1900-2000 global surface warming. GRL, doi: 1029/2005GL025539. ...We estimate that the sun contributed as much as 45-50% of the 1900-2000 global warming, and 25-35% of the 1980-2000 global warming. These results, while confirming that anthropogenic-added climate forcing might have progressively played a dominant role in climate change during the last century, also suggest that the solar impact on climate change during the same period is significantly stronger than what some theoretical models have predicted. http://www.fel.duke.edu/~scafetta/pdf/2005GL025539.pdf
Another interesting take (by Shaviv) is the effect of sun activity on modifying cosmic ray flux that changes tropospherical ionization by 5-10% per cycle; the ionization correlates pretty well with low altitude cloud coverage. You can read about it in Shaviv's JGR paper. Popular rendition of this paper can be read on http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V9/N29/EDIT.jsp
Update 6/29/06: Paul Crutzen (a Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry 1995) has announced a coming paper on aerosol geoengineering to appear in August. So far, very little detail (http://www.dispatch.co.za/2006/06/28/Features/f5.html) He estimates the annual cost of his proposal at $50b annually. Naturally, NYT adds that "there was a passionate outcry by several prominent scientists claiming that it is irresponsible." Demanding unrealistic cuts of CO2 emissions that may or may not work in the vague future and will cost us many times this amount is, of course, the responsible position.
not too far said she
what's too far said he
where you are said she)
e e cummings
It never fails to astonish me how authoritative PR-minded "climatologists" are. Quite a few of these folks make their living by delivering solemn revelations of the coming Armageddon: the dreaded global warming. They know beyond any doubt what will happen when, say, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere will increase from this value to that one. It will be bad, very bad indeed; you cannot even imagine how bad it will be. There is no room left for second guessing, for hesitation, for introspection, for suspicion of any sort. They radiate this certitude despite the fact that at close examination their models are 'garbage in, garbage out,' lacking any predictive power, that these models depend upon hundreds of poorly known parameters and scarcely understood processes, etc. For all of their big talk about global warming, the typical odds (suggested by their own models) that the period-average global temperature will increase by > 0.1 C in the next 20 years (as compared to the past 20 years) are 3:2! Few of them will be around to collect their money, though, even if this increase will actually happen. Nevertheless, these politicized climate scientists (most of which belong to computer modelling community) have few scruples when it comes to frightening the public and demanding that "something is to be done about global warming," meaning that the governments are supposed to waste billions of dollars fighting an uncertain, remote threat. I have long discovered that sensible arguments do not work on this
... holy brotherhood of twilight model experts and the crowd of diluted citizens that believe the numbers predicted by their models. I have studied their climate models and know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics and do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields, farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models. There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. The warming happens in places and times where it is cold, in the arctic more than the tropics, in the winter more than the summer, at night more than the daytime. I am not saying the warming doesn't cause problems, obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it. I am saying that the problems are being grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are much more urgent and important. Poverty, infectious diseases, public education and public health. (Freeman Dyson, 2005 address http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?DysonWinCom05)
It is hard to disagree with Freeman Dyson, who is, after all, one of the titans of the 20th century physics. However, voicing such concerns does not seem to carry the day. These guys immediately start questioning your credentials and profess deep knowledge of abstruse points and fine details that you are too stupid to get. It does not matter if those fine points have no or little bearing on the problem; the end result is that the "experts" win the day, once more reiterating their unshakeable "confidence" in the "consensus." Indeed, anyone who disagrees is not an expert, is not part of the "scientific consensus," hence their opinion does not count. That such a consensus has been shown to be wrong time and again in the past is the argument that is promptly dismissed, as heresy. In the past, yes, but now when they have computers, they know. There is, however, a trick which I found very helpful for setting the discussion onto the right path, avoiding this problem altogether. Play their own game.
What you should do is to suggest these GW enthusiasts to mean business, act on what they preach, and prevent the catastrophe by implementing the simple solution worked out by Dyson in 1979. He suggested lowering the solar flux that reaches the ground by dispersing aerosol particles in the upper atmosphere. The haze reflects the sunlight and cools down the Earth; such a solution would cost < $1B annually, whereas our socially concerned climatologists demand spending that much on their own climate modeling research alone! Of course, the economic measures they suggest to fight the GW are orders of magnitude more expensive. This simple solution works: such an aerosol induced cooling routinely occurs after major volcanic eruptions. The most pessimistic scenarios of GW suggest that the effect of doubling the CO2 concentration (when all coal is burned in the next 300 years) would be fully negated by 0.2% decrease in the flux. The typical variation of solar luminosity over one solar cycle is 0.1%. In fact, the trend on the GW observed since 1860 closely tracks the current increase in the solar flux (see Friis-Christensen, E., and K. Lassen, "Length of the solar cycle: An indicator of solar activity closely associated with climate," Science, 254, 698-700, 1991; http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/solar/lassen1.html; see also Svensmark, H. & Friis-Christensen, E. "Variation of cosmic ray flux and global cloud coverage-a missing link in solar-climate relationships" J. Atmos. Solar-Terr. Phys. 59, 1225, 1997 on the effect of solar flux variations on cloud coverage). To put this 0.2% in perspective, Life was doing very well 2 Bya, when the solar flux was 25% lower than now. The composition of the atmosphere changed drastically, the Sun flux changed drastically, biology changed drastically, and yet this planet's climate has been amazingly stable, if you do not count two glaciation episodes that followed oxygenation of the atmosphere. We'll come to that in one of the subsequent posts. Most of the GW crowd do not know such things anyway; they are surprisingly uninformed and uninterested in palaeoclimate. It is not their agenda.
Dyson's solution has been re-evaluated by none other than Edward Teller, in 1997. Here is his conclusion:
...The "geoengineering" proposed by Dyson may cost as much as $1 billion a year. More technologically advanced options along the same lines might cost $100 million. That's between 0.1 and 1.0 percent of the $100b/yr it is estimated would be required to price-ration fossil fuel usage back down to 1990 levels in the US alone. As the National Academy of Sciences commented a few years ago in a landmark report, "Perhaps one of the surprises of this analysis is the relatively low costs at which some of the geoengineering options might be implemented." Indeed, the director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program's Coordination Office has been promoting such geoengineering for three decades. But for some reason, this option isn't as fashionable as all-out war on fossil fuels and the people who use them. http://p211.ezboard.com/fchemtrailsmeteorologyissues.showMessage?topicID=37.topic
the paper is on http://lookupabove.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/Teller.txt
In 2003, National Academy of Engineering had a meeting devoted to cost analysis of Dyson’s scheme. They concluded that
...technical management of radiative forcing of Earth’s fluid envelopes, not administrative management of gaseous inputs to the atmosphere, is the path mandated by the pertinent provisions of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Moreover, this appears to be true by a very large economic margin, almost $1 trillion dollars per year worldwide, because crops could be fertilized by greater concentrations of atmospheric CO2 without climatic regrets. http://www.nap.edu/books/0309089212/html/94.html (there are more links to the research down these lines on the NAE site; there is also an excellent review on geoengineering on http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/about_us/meet_us/roger_pielke/envs5000/week11/Keith_Geoengineering_the_Climate.pdf)
In short, geoengineering is possible, it will work, it can be done without developing unspecified, nonexistent "technologies of the future," and it will be cheap. It is the exact opposite to what the GW crowd is peddling, and that's their vulnerable spot. Their agenda is to show how confident they are in their models, so they can get the ear of the powerful. Tell them that it is time to act on their confidence; we cannot afford sitting and doing nothing, right? If you are so dead certain that the GW is real, that the doom is upon us, that untold sums of money should be spent on preventing the CO2 emissions, that we should either combat GW or all die, why not go ahead and stop it? The turnaround that follows is truly remarkable. The same people immediately start fidgeting and admitting that too little is known about this and that; all of a sudden hesitation sets in; the tone is lowered and the rhetorics are humbled; things begin to look complicated; the climate is declared to be enigmatic and unpredictable; fine points come from the back to the fore. Well, if the uncertainty and predictability of the current climate models are such indeed, perhaps one should not make definitive statements and scare people off their rockers.
This warm-up usually works very well; these guys are not used to such blunt tactics -- yet. Now the discussion is set in the proper context:
GW enthusiasm is not about delivering the humankind from the imminent peril. It is about something else. Prophesizing doom that will come or not come in the next 20-50-100-300 is deplorable and cheap. Countless doomsayers have done that countless times before. Nobody will be held accountable for such a prophecy, especially if the recommendation is as toothless and self-serving as spending more money on more "climate research" (aka computer modeling of imaginary Planet Earth) and wasting loads of dollars on dubious, protracted, inefficient, and expensive measures such as cutting the industrial CO2 emissions. Taking responsibility now and providing a solution that can be implemented now is a different matter. Fear mongers, blackmailers, and phonies do not do that and avoid doing that by all means possible. Besides, quite a few of these folks know that their political future is tied to the solar cycle. Between 1930 and 1965, the global temperatures were dropping. Soon they will be dropping again, following the same cycle. We are also overdue for the next Maunder minimum that will certainly lower the global temperature quite a bit. The short-term prospects for the GW look uncertain at best. It is now or never. The racket is to grab the money before it is too late, when there are still people around who believe their computer models and confident forecasts.
What would these GW enthusiasts do when the global temperature will start going down? Will they suggest us to fight the menace of global cooling too?
PS: Recently, Guardian reported about an official $10,000 (1:1) bet between two solar physicists from Russia and a self proclaimed "mainstream climatologist" who is involved in "probabilistic climate prediction" (actually, he is a young British scientist located in Japan, of little clout) who is willing to accept such bets. In his boastful text, he suggests 5:1 to 3:1 odds on warming in the next 20 years as "fair." Somehow, the odds of the actual bet were much lower. If you read the newspapers, you would think that GW in the next 20 years is a sure thing (with odds better than, say, 10,000:1). Here you get the idea, how sure these things actually are.
Update: Scafetta, N., and B. J. West, 2006. Phenomenological solar contribution to the 1900-2000 global surface warming. GRL, doi: 1029/2005GL025539. ...We estimate that the sun contributed as much as 45-50% of the 1900-2000 global warming, and 25-35% of the 1980-2000 global warming. These results, while confirming that anthropogenic-added climate forcing might have progressively played a dominant role in climate change during the last century, also suggest that the solar impact on climate change during the same period is significantly stronger than what some theoretical models have predicted. http://www.fel.duke.edu/~scafetta/pdf/2005GL025539.pdf
Another interesting take (by Shaviv) is the effect of sun activity on modifying cosmic ray flux that changes tropospherical ionization by 5-10% per cycle; the ionization correlates pretty well with low altitude cloud coverage. You can read about it in Shaviv's JGR paper. Popular rendition of this paper can be read on http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V9/N29/EDIT.jsp
Update 6/29/06: Paul Crutzen (a Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry 1995) has announced a coming paper on aerosol geoengineering to appear in August. So far, very little detail (http://www.dispatch.co.za/2006/06/28/Features/f5.html) He estimates the annual cost of his proposal at $50b annually. Naturally, NYT adds that "there was a passionate outcry by several prominent scientists claiming that it is irresponsible." Demanding unrealistic cuts of CO2 emissions that may or may not work in the vague future and will cost us many times this amount is, of course, the responsible position.