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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (25204)	9/9/2009 12:14:49 AM
From: Maurice Winn	3 Recommendations Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 36918

My model sits in my head. Brains are still the best thinking devices for absurdly complex things involving patterns and ideas. As I mentioned, even such a simple thing as chess has only recently been better done by chess experts telling computers how to think about the game. Until then, brains were the best way of playing chess. Gary Kasparov was finally knocked off his perch as chess champion by a gang of chess experts wielding super duper computing power. I recall in the 1970s that people thought computers could never beat people at chess and that chess was the quintessential thinking activity. I doubted that at the time. Sure enough, computers can easily beat all but the most champion of champions with one hand tied behind their backs. At some stage, climate models will do a better job than brains at coming up with what will happen. In many ways, they already do a much better job of weather forecasting because they can crunch bushels of data at megaflop rates. Long range climate forecasts are a bit different from short term analysis based on swarms of numbers be pushed into fine-tuned models. So far, we haven't had a world championship of climate modeling to find whether a climate Kasparov or Deep Greenhouse is champion. But when the climate models have only just started including clouds [apparently] they aren't even in the game. Let alone volcanic eruption predictions, and sun spot cycle levels. My question was not so much whether Hansen's model was adjusted for the consequences of Mount Pinatubo erupting, but whether the model actually predicted the eruption, which is what it needs to do. Tweaking models AFTER the event is not science. Predicting reality using a theory is what the game is. Saying "Oh, if I put the sudden and unexpected increase in snow cover in, then yes, my model now works just like reality" is cheating. The most fundamental flaw in The Greenhouse Effect doomster thinking is that earth is in balance. There's even something called Earth in the Balance. I'll ask Bing. Ah, here it is and blow me down, it's bloody Al Gore again!! en.wikipedia.org Earth is NOT in balance and never was. It's a fundamental anthropomorphist blunder to think that Gaia loves the world and that nature is a benign, happy and balanced entity but for the depredations of the Original Sin merchant, Man [and of course, helpmate Woman]. There are feedback loops which have kept the climate more or less within bounds and the dominant feedback loop is the water cycle and water is the big greenhouse gas. Not only do water molecules act as greenhouse gas, they also regularly reach dew point and freezing point and through enormous convection currents pump vast amounts of water and heat from the equator to the poles and up through the atmosphere. But there is no balance other than I described with the oscillating plant cover and hence snow cover and desert cover and cloud cover. But that's not balance, it's just a temporary boundary condition as the atmosphere continues to be strip mined by plants for carbon with the carbon being permanently removed from the ecosphere and buried in limestone and carbonaceous cemeteries such as coal, shale, oil, tars and gas. Over a billion years, Earth's atmosphere has been pillaged and the process has not stopped. Earth is dying. It's not in balance. Fortunately for us, the process is gradual. As the ice age has gained ground, with glaciation the norm, the interglacials provide brief respite. But it's a losing battle. Right now, we are fortunate to be in an interglacial and have the time to do something about return to glaciation. Perhaps CO2 emissions will even hold off reglaciation. I doubt it. But the Hansens of the world seem to think it will. If so, jolly good show. Let's have more CO2 to make sure. New Zealand could do with being 10 degrees warmer, but the 3 degrees that the climate experts claim we might get would be at least something. Russia would do nicely with added warmth. Quite a lot of places would do. On the other hand, Egypt could do with a cooling. The Sahara could bloom. Libya might become a temperate idyll. People could migrate from Sweden and Finland to Morocco. Earth is not in balance. It's in "decline" [if we are going to anthropomorphize the place] and has been for a billion years. Earth doesn't try to make things nice for "nature". Living things just find ecological niches and struggle for survival. There is no particular merit in the climate as it is right now, especially if it's about to flip into reglaciation which seems more likely than not, CO2 notwithstanding. The thinking of the Greenhousers is that but for people and their CO2, the climate would stay hunky dory, forever and ever amen. That's not so. What people might have done with their CO2 [assuming the Greenhousers are right about its effects] is avoid reglaciation. That's a very good thing. We have also certainly improved plant growth and reduced water requirements for plants. Those are good things too [other than in a few instances where flooding increases due to extra water runoff which used to be needed by plants]. But even if we have held off reglaciation [we should find out either by April next year or by 2020 - the solar minimums] it's a short term victory. If we stop producing CO2 now, the amount in the atmosphere will plunge. Within a century most of our efforts will have been removed. Of all the CO2 which has been produced so far over 100 years, about 40% has already been stripped from the air. newscientist.com There is plenty of carbon to burn, so we can keep it up, provided there is economic incentive to do so. The present incentive is to get energy for movement, heating and so on. The CO2 is a free bonus [or collateral damage depending on your point of view]. But as the human population crashes over the next century, and technology develops, there might be little incentive to keep on going to the trouble of digging up carbon and burning it. Tax incentives to keep burning coal might be needed to stop people switching to fusion sourced electricity for cars, heating, air conditioning, factories and cyberspace. Mqurice