The Extraordinarily Intelligent Agree: Warmer Is Better
Just in via the SOSF grapevine from one of our extraordinarily intelligent SOSF agents:
Bomb Designer, Mars Expert Sent by Obama to Fix Oil Spill
By Jessica Resnick-Ault and Katarzyna Klimasinska, Bloomberg News, May 14, 2010 [here]
U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu signaled his lack of confidence in the industry experts trying to control BP Plc’s leaking oil well by hand-picking a team of scientists with reputations for creative problem solving.
Dispatched to Houston by President Barack Obama to deal with the crisis, Chu said Wednesday that five “extraordinarily intelligent” scientists from around the country will help BP and industry experts think of back-up plans to cut off oil from the well, leaking 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) below sea-level.
Members of the Chu team are credited with accomplishments including designing the first hydrogen bomb, inventing techniques for mining on Mars and finding a way to precisely position biomedical needles. …
Their exact activities are cloaked in secrecy. “We saw some confidential and proprietary information,” said one scientist on the team, Jonathan I. Katz, a physics professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
Katz’s early work focused on astrophysics, but now he consults on a wide variety of physics puzzles, he said. He is a member of the JASON group, a think tank dedicated to researching complex problems for the U.S. Government, including the Defense Department. … [more]
And what does Dr Katz, an “extraordinarily intelligent” scientist, think about global warming?
“Global warming is probably good for humanity. Sit back, relax, and watch it happen.”
That’s right, sports fans. It appears that the “extraordinarily intelligent” Dr. Katz agrees with Yours Truly, who in 2005 famously and publicly coined the phrase, WARMER IS BETTER - FIGHT THE ICE [here, here, and elsewhere].
More from the remarkable Dr. Katz:
Cold Thoughts on Global Warming
by Jonathan I. Katz Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis, September 11 2009 [here]
The climate has gotten warmer over the last (roughly) 300 years, since the end of the Little Ice Age c. 1300-1700. Although many of the details are controversial, and some of the data may be corrupted in a variety of ways, the preponderance of evidence strongly supports this conclusion.
There is no “Emerging Consensus”. The physics of “greenhouse gases” and their effect on climate has been understood since the work of Tyndall (1862). The conclusion that anthropogenic emissions of these gases will likely warm the climate has been generally accepted for a century. It is a consensus, but it is not emerging or new. It has been there all along. Only a panicky fear of the consequences is new.
Climate is a complicated system with many feedback loops, most of which are not understood. For example, about half of the emitted carbon is re-absorbed. No one knows where it goes, although probably into some combination of the ocean and biosphere.
It is not possible to predict the future climate. The computer codes all do an excellent job of explaining the past history of climate. This is because they are calibrated to do so. They all contain a variety of “empirical parameters” (fudge factors) that are tuned to agree with present and past climate. That doesn’t mean the codes are right, or have any predictive value (as Paul Dirac said, and “Yoga” Berra made famous, it is hard to predict, especially the future). The codes disagree with each other about the future even when the same assumptions are made, with results for the warming spread over a factor of about 2 1/2. Hence most of the codes must be wrong. Perhaps they all are.
We don’t understand climate, and there is no prospect of doing so in the forseeable future. The Earth reflects 30% of its incident sunlight. Increasing or decreasing this by one percentage point would produce a cooling or warming equal in magnitude to the warming from pre-industrial times to the present. But no one knows how to calculate this value that is measured to be 30%. Without understanding, better computers don’t help.
It is plausible that the the last 100-150 years of warming have been anthropogenic, the result of emission of greenhouse gases, chiefly carbon dioxide. The IPCC says it is “90%” confident of this. The number is meaningless, and cannot be meaningful until they make a large number of predictions in which they claim a similar degree of confidence, and find that 90% of them are correct. They haven’t done so; 90% is a spuriously quantitative way of saying “We think this is probably the case, but cannot be really sure”. If you accept the 90% as quantitatively meaningful (you shouldn’t), then there is a 10% chance the warming has some other cause. When statistical data actually exist, usually a 95% or 98% confidence is required for a conclusion to be taken seriously.
It is unlikely that the roughly 150 years of warming prior to the mid-19th Century were anthropogenic because emissions of man-made greenhouse gases were slight, and samples of air trapped in ice show that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide did not begin to rise until the later 19th Century. Some warming must have been the consequences of natural processes. The more recent warming is likely to be partly natural and partly anthropogenic. It is not possible to disentangle these two processes because we have no understanding at all of natural warming and cooling trends, beyond the fact (evident from the history of cold ice ages warm interglacials) that both occur.
If global warming is really anthropogenic, what should we do and why? Some people talk about reducing carbon (dioxide) emissions. This is a fantasy. The developed countries aren’t going to reduce their emissions much—1% per year is plausible, but 50% or 80% reductions will not happen. Emissions from developing countries will rise rapidly because so many contributors of emission (travel, electric power, infrastructure that requires carbon emission to build) are things people buy more of as they become more prosperous. People won’t freeze in the dark for the sake of a scientific theory, even a correct scientific theory.
Carbon emissions are going to continue to rise, with a little help from all those politicians and hangers-on jetting off to Kyoto, Bali and (now) Copenhagen. Get used to it.
What will be the consequences? The climate will get warmer. There is no evidence that storms or droughts will increase. In the past few decades severe storms have become somewhat less frequent, and the Sahelian drought of the 1970’s and 1980’s has ended. There is no evidence these trends are related to global warming.
Global warming does not make the tropics, or warm seasons in temperate zones, any hotter. For good physical reasons, greenhouse gas warming occurs almost entirely in arctic and sub-arctic regions and in temperate zones during winter; in other words, when the weather is cold.
The last major episode of warmer climate, the Late Medieval Climatic Maximum (which had nothing to do with anthropogenic greenhouse gases—no one knows why it began, or why it gave way to the Little Ice Age later) was good for humanity. The Vikings settled Iceland and Greenland (which was actually green, as it is becoming again today). There is no evidence of adverse effects on humanity at lower latitudes.
Who is stoking the alarm about global warming? There is Al Gore, an over-the-hill politician who wants to remain in the public eye. His house uses 20 times as much electricity as the average American house and he flies private jets. Obviously, he does not believe what he preaches; it must be an act. Conservation is for the little people. I’ll think about reducing my emissions after he reduces his by 95%. Then there is Jim Hansen, would-be dictator who wants to throw in jail anyone who disagrees with him or burns coal. He may wish himself another Mussolini (or worse), but people just laugh at him. And finally John Holdren, who in his younger days was prophesying disaster from the ice age then just beginning (so he said). Fictitious crises are a demogogue’s route to power.
Some of the more apocalyptic fears about global warming resemble a secular doomsday cult. Rather than God dooming mankind for its traditional sins (robbery, lust, murder, disbelief, etc.), Nature is said to doom mankind for the secular sin of carbon emission. Some (Greenpeace, and even more radical groups) think any human effect on nature to be sinful, and regard “Mother Earth” as a deity that is violated by any use of its resources for the sustenance, comfort or betterment of Mankind. Needless to say, this is opposite to the Biblical grant of the natural world to Man for his benefit.
Predictions of climate doom are no more rational than traditional religous predictions of a Day of Judgement or Armageddon. Divine revelation is not open to rational argument, and its truth can only be judged by further revelation.
Global warming is real and much of it is probably anthropogenic. Nothing serious will be done about it, no matter how frantic or hysterical certain people become. Fortunately, global warming is probably good for humanity. Sit back, relax, and watch it happen.
Postscript (1/1/10): November, 2009 brought the “Climategate” revelations. Leaked emails from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit showed a number of prominent advocates of drastic anti-greenhouse gas measures engaging in attempts to suppress contrary opinions by a variety of unethical means. Assertions by those embarrassed and their supporters that the leak was “illegal”, whether or not valid, amount to a confession of guilt. For professional scientists, this was familiar—scientists frequently engage in backstabbing and attempt to sabotage the careers of their rivals (see, for example, the “XYZ Affair” in my book The Biggest Bangs). Usually the stakes are prestige, jobs and research grants. In climatology the stakes are trillions of dollars of investment that might better be spent in other ways (such as food and health care for the poor).
by Francis Tucker Manns
The most plausible hypotheses of real climate change, the kind associated with the periodic (100,000-year) shift between Ice Age glaciations and interglaciations, center on two factors: varying solar insolation due to astronomic (orbital) mechanics (Milankovitch cycles) and changes in the Earth’s albedo.
Short-term climate perturbation forcing factors: solar magnetism, water vapor, cosmic ray flux, and anthropogenic burning during the Holocene, all resolve to albedo dynamics — changes in the reflectivity of the Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere. A tip from Mt. Olympus: the extraordinarily intelligent favor albedo theories, not CO2 theories.
As a geologist I am very comfortable with the multiple working hypothesis - I would like someone to start examining the other climate change ideas out there.
For instance, the Danes have been on the case for a long while, studying the sun. Who would have thought the sun would be involved in warming? The first paper to read is Friis-Christensen and Lassen (Science; 1991) If you can find the entire issue in the reference library, you will see the editor’s comment referred to this paper as hitting the ball into the anthropogenic court. The causation is under scientific review, however, and while the radiation from the sun varies only in the fourth decimal place, the magnetism is awesome. The correlation with solar activity broke down when Pinatubo erupted in 1991; my tomatoes did not ripen that summer either. Is this the exception that proves the rule?
The important correlation between warming and cooling is the sunspot peak frequency, not the actual number of spots. However, we all realize correlation is not causation. Sunspot peak frequency proxies for the rise and fall of the sun’s magnetic field, which shields earth from cosmic radiation. Cosmic radiation is currently at its highest ever measured because the sun and earth’s magnetic shields are down; climate is changing. The climate celebrities, however, are linking climate and the carbon economy. Maybe not evil; just wrong.
The third ranking gas is CO2 (0.0383%), and it does not correlate well with global warming or cooling either; in fact, CO2 in the atmosphere trails warming which is clear natural evidence for its well-studied inverse solubility in water: CO2 dissolves rapidly in cold water and bubbles rapidly out of warm water. CO2 has been rising and Earth and her oceans have been warming. However, the correlation trails.
Svensmark of the Danish National Space Center has experiments scheduled for the Hadron collider to test his basement experiment where cosmic radiation force instantaneous vapour nucleation. Elevated solar flux (~10 protons per cc) appears to cause fog in the Great Lakes and clouds too.
The hypothesis of the Danish National Space Center is as follows: quiet sun allows the geomagnetic shield to drop. Incoming galactic cosmic ray flux creates more low-level clouds, more snow, and more albedo effect as more is heat reflected resulting in a colder climate. An active sun, in contrast, has an enhanced magnetic field that induces Earth’s geomagnetic shield response. Earth has fewer low-level clouds, less rain, snow and ice, and less albedo (less heat reflected) producing a warmer climate.
That is how the bulk of climate change likely works, coupled with (modulated by) solar magnetism (sunspot peak frequency) there are cycles of global warming and cooling like waves in the ocean. When the waves are closely spaced, all the planets warm; when the waves are spaced farther apart, as they have been for this century, all the planets cool.
Many answers yield many new questions: the change in cloud cover is only a small percentage, and the ultimate cause of the solar magnetic cycle may be cyclicity in the Sun-Jupiter centre of gravity. We await more on that.
Although the post 60s warming period appears to be over, warming and attendant humidity have allowed the principal green house gas, water vapour, to kick in with more clouds, rain and snow depending on where you live to provide the negative feedback that scientists use to explain the existence of complex life on Earth for 550 million years.
We can likely kick much of the carbon economy sometime late the twenty-first century, but we must not rush to judgment for the wrong reason. The planet heats and cools naturally and our gasses are the thermostat. Nothing unusual is going on except for the Orwellian politics. In other words, it is probably not the heat; it is likely the humidity.