Don, over a now lengthy life, I have always found that the so-called experts are not sacrosanct Gods who we must worship as infallible. To the contrary, I have found their feats to be clay all too often. <when Steven Chu and the very great majority of scientists, world wide, who have studied this very serious planet problem are up against Monckton, Morano, Singer and other extremist right wingers, particularly, in our country, you lose. >
For example, in regard to lead in petrol [aka gasoline], the scientists and experts said it wasn't affecting intelligence and the cost of not including lead in petrol would be huge. I suspected that lead wasn't a problem and that it blew away, being diluted so much as to be inconsequential.
But then BP Oil gave me a job which included looking after the environmental aspects of burning petrol in cars. I got a stack of scientific literature and waded through it all, which included studies by Needleman en.wikipedia.org After reading all that was available and thinking about it, I decided that in fact lead in petrol was an environmental catastrophe and that BP and everyone else ought to stop putting lead in petrol.
As it happened, I was promoted to BP Oil International despite expressing my opinions about lead in petrol and was able to bring some persuasive powers to bear to fix that [and other problems]. Contrary to popular mythology, people who work in big Oil do not like walking to work inhaling carcinogenic particulates and having acidic sulphur oxides dissolving their ancient buildings and the inside of their engines. Neither do they like their children's brains to be poisoned. But as the people in Beijing are finding, it's not a simple matter to eliminate pollution. It costs big bucks to force the changes on those doing the polluting and poor people are not necessarily all that keen to incur those costs.
BP had been opposing capital investment [as did other companies] to fix environmental problems but was contributing to CONCAWE to study the problems so that decisions could be rational. By the 1990s, my argument to BP was being accepted that investing in pollution control is as valuable as investing in engine performance if that's what the public and politicians want and will pay the increased bills. I quit BP in 1989. My very last conversation with Hans den Ouden, my boss's boss, was that he told me BP was coming around to my way of thinking. I laughed as the process seemed glacial. But indeed they did change and so did industry in general as the political pressure for environmental protection grew during the 1990s.
CO2 is not like lead which is poisonous at any level. CO2 is good stuff. What is at issue is whether we have too much of a good thing yet, or will have over the next 100 years.
Steven Chu seems to me to be like the promoters of lead. He has a vested interest. The promoters and governments and all sorts couldn't see that lead in petrol was doing damage to the tune of about 0.3 IQ points nor could they understand the huge value of IQ points. They think "People have about 100 of them, so 0.3 of an IQ point is neither here nor there. Tests of IQ vary way more than that just on a daily basis".
His false premise is that Earth is in Balance. The false first principle of the Global Alarmists is that there is a natural balance on Earth and we had better not disturb it. There are cycles and feedback loops which do balancing, but they are not really balancing mechanisms. They are just pressure reducing mechanisms. Whether it's deer over-eating and ruining their own habitat, or wolves eating the last deer, killing off their food supply, or hurricanes moving air from high pressure to low pressure, or wind taking water from the equator to drop as snow in Antarctica, it's pressure reduction. It's not balancing.
The process is more like a share market price. A share price is sort of instantaneously in "balance" with buyers and sellers matched evenly. But at any time share prices can go zooming away as perceptions and reality change and forcings change minds. Yes, a small "forcing" such as more CO2 can move the needle a bit, but there are vastly bigger other forces acting to determine the actual climate share price. But have a look at the long term Dow index and you won't find any natural balance. Climate is like the Dow. Billions of things are constantly pushing on it. Normally, over a few days, "Dow in the Balance" is a valid idea. But over 20 years, a bit of CO2 is irrelevant.
The absorption of particular light frequencies by CO2 has been shown to be false as a climate warmer. 15 years and no warming. The light was still absorbed, the CO2 didn't stop doing what it does. The theory was bung. In fact, so little extra light is absorbed that it was irrelevant. Claiming that the heat jumped deep into the ocean is silly as it can't just sneak from the troposphere to the deep ocean without being noticed on its way. It would have to have a mechanism to get there too.
What we actual Greenies are more curious about is with all the extra CO2, plants are loving it, and need less irrigation, so are likely to be increasing their coverage of dry climate areas, thereby warming the planet. Chlorophyll, clouds, snow and insects are the biggies of climate. CO2's main effect is as food for plants. The absorption of particular wavelengths by CO2 is trivial. Insects and other beasties put out CO2 in large amounts.
Steven Chu has got things wrong. When it's a debate between his computer climate models and reality, and reality disagrees with him, Steven loses. Not me. It doesn't matter how many PhDs he has, or how much knowledge, if his opinion doesn't match reality, he loses, not me. I won.
But wait, CO2 could become a problem if Peak People, technology changes and cultural shifts don't solve the CO2 emissions problem first. Peak People is due 2037 [or sooner with calamitous catastrophe such as Malthusian solutions to over-crowding in Egypt and other places, or H5N1 diseases, or a bolide in the Pacific Ocean], technology developments are accelerating towards the Kurzweil singularity, cultural shifts are seeing car culture abandoned.
Since CO2 is only at 400 ppm and 500 ppm should be no problem, we can wait to see what happens over the next 40 years. You probably won't have to worry about it as your CO2 production will cease some time sooner than that. Meanwhile, the corn is growing well, with less irrigation, with all the extra CO2 so that's a good thing. Let's see whether my October 2008 2020 foresight was correct and we in fact get global cooling in 2020.
Mqurice |
