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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (187826)	5/31/2006 7:42:25 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Well, having to admit that I'm rather new to the global warming discussion (only having started looking at it in the past couple of years), I have to admit that in ALL OF THE UPROAR, NO ONE I'VE READ HAS PROPOSED EFFORTS TO REDUCE WATER VAPOR EMISSIONS. Water vapor is a rather important part of our weather. Think rain. There is an added problem in that increasing global temps should increase water vapor, so that is a positive feedback effect. Dr. Lindzen' problem is that the issue we face is one of an abrupt short-term perturbation we are adding to the system. There is no point in talking about the already large DC value of any other process. Imagine you are driving down a road at 65mph on a plateau at 1000 ft elevation with very gentle hills, in a vehicle with worn shock absorbers. You hit a 6" bump on the road. The 6" bump is nothing compared to the 1000 ft average elevation, or even to the gradual change from the local small hills. But the effect on your poorly damped vehicle will be dramatic, because the perturbation occurs in a very short time period. What happens to your vehicle depends on the specific dynamics, and might be hard to predict. The oscillations might damp out after awhile, and be ok, or it might cause you to lose control and crash (what we would call saturation of the system). That is a crude explanation of global warming. We know the incremental CO2 is indeed a significant short-term perturbation. The ocean could in fact deal with the total incremental carbon load over some thousands of years, but not over a few hundred. So we are hitting a speed bump, and the real remaining science question is what the intermediate term result is. That is where the models have problems, because we can't easily model very non-linear systems which are undergoing excursions significantly from the calibration points. So we can't say if the result will be short term gyrations, or a system saturation. Hence the various horror movies. But in any case, talking about the DC levels (like the 1000 ft elevation of the road above) is nonsense. Dr. Lindzen should understand this, but for some reason, does not.