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Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (1108)	11/21/1999 7:56:00 PM
From: A.J. Mullen	Respond to of 12235

Maurice, I believe you are paraphrasing Karl Marx. He labelled British Imperialism in India as "objectively Progressive." I know that it won't worry you to agree with Marx on individual issues, but I do enjoy pointing it out. I am not sure of Marx's position on the Coriolis Force, but yours is wrong. Winds and water currents are both subject to Coriolis simply because they involve motion on a rotating sphere. Without Coriolis, winds would simply blow from high to low pressure, instead of around the isobars. Remember trying to walk straight on a roundabout (carousel/merry-go-round for other cultures)? The ocean currents are largely driven by the winds, but once moving they are subject to Coriolis. Temperatures come into it by determining, along with the salinity, which water mass rides over another. I can't say with the same authority that you are wrong about the significance of C02 released to the atmosphere - significance is relative in this context. Have you seen the graph of Co2 measurements at Mauna Loa? You don't need to be a statistician to see that atmospheric Co2 has been increasing since the fifties. It is estimated that world temperatures have increased over the same period. (I know I slipped into passive there. I haven't done it myself - it requires more than simply adding a bunch of numbers and dividing by n!) A correlation does not causality make, but there is also a physical mechanism that was proposed before the measurements were available. The mechanism and the correlation together make a smoking gun. If you disturb a complex chaotic non-linear autonomous system, it is very likely that the subsequent trajectory of that system will be significantly different from that which would have been described without the disturbance. The modified trajectory might differ markedly from that observed before the disturbance. The new trajectory might be in the opposite direction of the disturbance. That is: by warming something a little, you might trigger an instability that results in it ending up colder than before. You are an engineer, you understand all this. Are you sure you are not enjoying the demogoguery? Yes, we agree we can't be sure of the effect of adding Co2. We don't know the end-effect of what we've already done. All we can do is get estimates as to what might happen and informed estimates as to what their probability given continued increase, stabilisation, and decrease. Then we could weigh the pros and cons of the various possibilities. The first part is technical (I give more weight to opinions atmospheric chemists than to my intuition, or yours Maurice). The second part shouldn't be technical at all, but I've no idea how we should decide how much risk of global change we should impose on future generations in return for present value. How do you type so much Maurice? I find it hard to keep up over a weekend, and you are holding several discussions simultaneously. Ashley