Computer generated climate models are like computer generated Hollywood movies = fun to watch but they have only a loose relationship with reality.
We don't go to a movie and think "Omigosh, alien monsters from another planet are going to land in Woking and take over Earth". They are just movies.
Weta Workshops uses computer models to generate all sorts of imaginary output which makes excellent stories.
Anything at all can be specified as the output.
It's the same with computer generated climate outputs. The output depends on what the model's workings are designed to do.
The big mistake people are making about Earth's climate is the anthropomorphic idea that it was in some kind of balance which was optimum for life in general. Their conclusion is that anything humans do is ipso facto a bad thing.
A casual glance at climate records shows that the climate varies enormously and even in short times measured in decades and maybe even years.
There are also long term trends which are not cyclic but are one way trends such as the appearance of free oxygen, the stripping of carbon from the ecosphere and burying of it as coal, shale, oil, gas, bitumens, limestone, peat and the elimination of CO2.
Life is a mechanism for removing carbon from the ecosphere. Gaia is a suicidal maniac.
Without life, CO2 sat happily in the atmosphere. But then the carboniferous jungles stripped the carbon out and produced oxygen. That was convenient for us because after hundreds of millions of years of battle with umpty mega peta-trillion beings dying for the cause, DNA got around to producing me and you.
That was a desirable process because here I am and it's quite pleasant to be here compared with not being here, which is how things were until 60 years ago when nothing at all was happening. But unfortunately, once the living things have had their day, they die and their carcasses, trunks, roots fall to the ground or sink to the ocean floor and become sedimentary.
Limestone is the husks of squillions of quadrillions of little and large shelly and bony fauna. Coal is the repository of eons of Amazonian forests long gone never to return. Oil is the subducted, cooked and stored in traps organic leftovers from oceanic crust sediments. Gas is the same but processed differently. Shale is geosynclinal sediment set in stone along with marine life of the area.
All people are doing is bringing a little bit of the coal, oil and gas back to life. It's a new lease on life, but all too short. We can do it for a few hundred years using tars and coal as well as the oil and gas, but plants are busily stripping the CO2 nearly as fast as we can produce it.
Something like half the CO2 produced has already been stripped from the atmosphere. So it's not as though we are going to be able to fill it up. Nobody is being paid to produce CO2 so they are always looking for ways to do things at less cost. People find it cheaper to buy insulation than more electricity. They invent little cars which get 100 kilometres per litre. They invent cyberspace so they don't have to travel at all - not even to post a letter [this message traveling at the speed of light without even a stamp or envelope, no jet fuel needed].
With Peak People in 2037 and increasing efficiency, peak CO2 output and Peak Oil should be at about the same time.
It would be interesting to see what Hansen's model has for human population, their car types, transport designs, living styles, cyberspace usage.
Rumour has it that climate models are so amateurish that they don't even include cloud cover, dew points etc.
Deserts grow and shrink as does ice cover and chlorophyll cover, all of which needs to be in the model.
Life isn't a movie and climate isn't a model, though Al Gore combined the two in An Inconvenient Truth. Oddly, people left the movie thinking a movie about a model made by a politician was something real and truthful. That's simply hilarious. How do you know when a politician is lying? When his mouth is moving in the movies.
Mqurice |
