5 ms·

I suspect that we are mostly in agreement but are not reading English the same way. What I said about Joe, a generic guy, his lawnmower, a generic emitter of C

by graycat 10y ago

I suspect that we are mostly in agreement but are not reading English the same way. What I said about Joe, a generic guy, his lawnmower, a generic emitter of CO2, gasoline, a generic source of carbon to burn, and NYC, a generic city highly interested in CO2 and pushing carbon taxes, were all generic examples; looks like I should have had a prefix of "such as". But my main point was that the lecture was talking about wildly different scales than what we are seeing on Earth now or likely for, say, the rest of this century. Or, the lecture was talking about really extreme, very different, conditions -- due to a cooler sun and the earth's orbit -- over 800,000 years to many millions of years. Heavily he was discussing geology, that is, a science of really slow changes, from volcanoes, huge swings in the chemistry of the air and water of earth, etc. For your "billions of tonnes of carbon per year", I don't know what to think about that, that is, I don't know what to compare it with so don't know if that amount is, for all of the earth and sources of CO2, methane, etc. just a tiny, insignificant, nearly invisible drop in the total bucket or a major change. E.g., I have yet to see good data on how much CO2 and/or methane comes from volcanoes, on land and in the oceans, year by year. E.g., how much CO2 is dissolved in the upper, say, 2000 feet of the oceans, and if the temperature of that water is increased by, say, 1 degree C, how much of that CO2 will escape into the atmosphere? My point here is, I'm short on information to evaluate the quantities involved here, e.g., your "billions". It was an interesting talk, e.g., with lots of really cute chemistry -- I wish my chemistry courses had had that much depth. I can see how geologists, e.g., in the AGU, could get really involved. Or, the lecture should be really popular on some Web site like HN but GN for Geology News! But I see very little relevance in that lecture for the current intense discussions leading to carbon taxes, etc., which seem to be of high concern on HN. E.g., if the sun gets 30% cooler, then we might want to review the lecture, if anyone is still here! Or, if the earth has an orbit situation such as in the several cases of global cooling that show in the ice cores from 800,000 or so years ago, then maybe we should rush to add all the CO2 to the atmosphere we could and otherwise risk big ice sheets in Kansas, Texas, Panama, or some such? But these cases, along with the big asteroid hit of 65 million years ago, the huge volcanoes of the Russian traps, when India moved north, hit South Asia and pushed up the Himalayas, even when Yellowstone blew and put, IIRC, ash 1000 feet deep 1000 miles down wind, are super major biggie causes of disaster, and, of course, if a gamma ray burst popped off somewhere in our part of our galaxy, as far as I can tell, that make everything humans are doing now just an invisible, trivial nit. From all I've seen, if we want to talk about human sources of CO2 and their contributions to significant global warming for the rest of this century, then we have a lot of really hard work to do. Why? (1) A lot of work was done trying to predict what the realistic CO2 levels would do to global temperatures, and now we can see that nearly all the temperature predictions from that work were way, way too high. (2) In a sense, we know too much: E.g., we know that the fluid flows, both in the atmosphere and the oceans, satisfy the Navier-Stokes equations of fluid flow. So, first cut, we would have to solve those equations for the surface of the earth, on both land and the oceans. And we would have to include the effects of all the solar and infrared radiation involved. Then, even to get started, we would need the current initial conditions, e.g., what the volcanoes were doing, and we are a long way from knowing those. Then, we would be very short on a suitable computer. Sure, we'd like to take an approach easier than (2), but as in (1) that easier approach was nearly all wildly inaccurate. With (2), we are stuck, or stuck-o. But the lecture had some amazing geology and chemistry!

acqq 10y ago
> A lot of work was done trying to predict what the realistic CO2 levels would do to global temperatures, and now we can see that nearly all the temperature predictions from that work were way, way too high. You're wrong. The predictions are very good, and your claims are based on... some wrong sources obviously. The rest of your post is also wrong. Specifically: > I don't know what to compare it with so don't know if that amount is, for all of the earth and sources of CO2, methane, etc. just a tiny, insignificant, nearly invisible drop in the total bucket or a major change. It's irrelevant that you don't know. Your "ignorance" won't make global warming disappear. Ditto for your claiming that the scientific methods aren't to your taste. No "denier" was able to make anything scientifically relevant up to now. That's the fact.
- graycat 10y ago
  > You're wrong. The predictions are very good, and your claims are based on... some wrong sources obviously. The main reference I have in mind is just http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg that for dozens of climate models plots the predicted values of global temperature along with the observed values. Nearly all the predicted values are wildly too high. So, if we believe the graph, then in science we essentially junk nearly all the models. As I tried to outline, the model builders were on a long walk on a short pier: Nearly all their modeling efforts, with whatever approximations, short cuts, etc. they took, failed. Then, really, to return to first principles, they had to solve the Navier-Stokes equations for the surface of the earth, the oceans and the atmosphere. Doing a good job with that would be essentially minute by minute weather prediction, and as we know we can't do that accurately for more than two weeks or so. That's what the model builders ran into -- the Navier-Stokes equations. IIRC we've had some good progress with those equations for, say, some boat hulls and some aircraft wings. The whole earth? Not a chance. > It's irrelevant that you don't know. Sure it is relevant if accept a little diplomatic circumlocution: I've tried to follow some of the global warming issue for years, and so far I have not seen the data. Without the circumlocution and diplomacy, the more literal and blunt remark is that nearly all of us are short on such data either because it has not been collected very well or the people writing the main arguments don't include it. Or, the situation is like I was a customer at a fast food restaurant, got a hamburger, opened it up, and asked "I don't know where the beef is". > No "denier" was able to make anything scientifically relevant up to now. That's the fact. Well, in the graph in the link I gave above, a few of the models, maybe only one, were fairly accurate -- they predicted nearly no increase in global temperatures. So, maybe the author of that model was a "denier" in which case at least one "denier" did something "scientifically relevant". For more on "scientifically relevant" from deniers, there is the argument that at least for the past few thousand years, we know the cause of the temperature changes, and CO2 had nothing to do with the changes. Really, basically the greenhouse effect -- from CO2, methane, water vapor, etc. -- didn't either. Instead the cause of global cooling was more clouds -- they have a net cooling effect (net, not a greenhouse effect). The clouds were from some water molecules in the atmosphere collected into water droplets from the action of cosmic rays. Of course, the cosmic rays come at essentially constant rates over time but maybe with some variation with direction. So, when there was fewer cosmic rays, there were fewer clouds and some global warming. Why fewer cosmic rays? Well, when the sun has sun spots, there is more solar wind -- think really 3D all around our solar system, not just in the plane of the orbit of the earth, and reducing the rate of cosmic rays from all directions including way out and high above the plane of the earth's orbit. So, when the sun has more sun spots, there is more solar wind, more cosmic rays blocked from hitting the earth, fewer clouds, and global warming. When the sun is quieter, there is some global cooling. IIRC, over the past few thousand years or so, and maybe longer, the data on variations in sun spots do well fitting the variations in global temperatures while data on CO2 concentrations does not. So, people with the sun spot explanation are "deniers" and may have found the real cause of global warming/cooling for the last few thousand years or so at least and, thus, been "scientifically relevant". More generally, science needs to be subject to review, and a reviewer, even a "denier", who does find actual errors is also "scientifically relevant". Along the lines of reviewing, I would note that so far it appears that over the past 800,000 years, the cases of global cooling were not preceded by lower concentrations of CO2. E.g., the Little Ice Age was not preceded by lower concentrations of CO2. Neither was the cooling from 1940 to 1970. For more, yes, sure, CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Fine. We agree on that. So, CO2 can warm the earth -- we agree. But we can also agree that lighting a match will warm the earth. So, for CO2 warming the earth, the question is how much? Hate to say: (A) Just looking at the historical record from the past few thousand years, maybe the past 800,000 years, it appears that more CO2 has no detectable warming effect. (B) For some solid science, e.g., evaluating the effect of CO2 just from first principles of mathematical physics, including the Navier-Stokes equations, we can't do the calculations and, thus, for this approach, are stuck-o. Here maybe (A) is a review and "scientifically relevant". For (B), that's also "scientifically relevant" but so obvious that it is a trivial contribution. There are a lot of research problems without good solutions -- some of the details of the big bang, dark energy, dark matter, the origin of the highest energy cosmic rays, the origin of life on earth, quantum mechanics and relativity inside a black hole, a cure for cancer, how good natural intelligence works, etc. Well, one more is prediction of the temperature of earth for the next 100 years. Sorry 'bout that. While I've solved some problems in applied math and published the results, I can't apologize for not solving all outstanding problems. Sorry I don't know how to predict the temperature of earth for the next 100 years, but maybe I should say that I can't see that anyone else knows how either. In that case, my view is that carbon taxes are not justified.

by graycat 10y ago

acqq 10y ago

> A lot of work was done trying to predict what the realistic CO2 levels would do to global temperatures, and now we can see that nearly all the temperature predictions from that work were way, way too high. You're wrong. The predictions are very good, and your claims are based on... some wrong sources obviously. The rest of your post is also wrong. Specifically: > I don't know what to compare it with so don't know if that amount is, for all of the earth and sources of CO2, methane, etc. just a tiny, insignificant, nearly invisible drop in the total bucket or a major change. It's irrelevant that you don't know. Your "ignorance" won't make global warming disappear. Ditto for your claiming that the scientific methods aren't to your taste. No "denier" was able to make anything scientifically relevant up to now. That's the fact.

graycat 10y ago
> You're wrong. The predictions are very good, and your claims are based on... some wrong sources obviously. The main reference I have in mind is just http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg that for dozens of climate models plots the predicted values of global temperature along with the observed values. Nearly all the predicted values are wildly too high. So, if we believe the graph, then in science we essentially junk nearly all the models. As I tried to outline, the model builders were on a long walk on a short pier: Nearly all their modeling efforts, with whatever approximations, short cuts, etc. they took, failed. Then, really, to return to first principles, they had to solve the Navier-Stokes equations for the surface of the earth, the oceans and the atmosphere. Doing a good job with that would be essentially minute by minute weather prediction, and as we know we can't do that accurately for more than two weeks or so. That's what the model builders ran into -- the Navier-Stokes equations. IIRC we've had some good progress with those equations for, say, some boat hulls and some aircraft wings. The whole earth? Not a chance. > It's irrelevant that you don't know. Sure it is relevant if accept a little diplomatic circumlocution: I've tried to follow some of the global warming issue for years, and so far I have not seen the data. Without the circumlocution and diplomacy, the more literal and blunt remark is that nearly all of us are short on such data either because it has not been collected very well or the people writing the main arguments don't include it. Or, the situation is like I was a customer at a fast food restaurant, got a hamburger, opened it up, and asked "I don't know where the beef is". > No "denier" was able to make anything scientifically relevant up to now. That's the fact. Well, in the graph in the link I gave above, a few of the models, maybe only one, were fairly accurate -- they predicted nearly no increase in global temperatures. So, maybe the author of that model was a "denier" in which case at least one "denier" did something "scientifically relevant". For more on "scientifically relevant" from deniers, there is the argument that at least for the past few thousand years, we know the cause of the temperature changes, and CO2 had nothing to do with the changes. Really, basically the greenhouse effect -- from CO2, methane, water vapor, etc. -- didn't either. Instead the cause of global cooling was more clouds -- they have a net cooling effect (net, not a greenhouse effect). The clouds were from some water molecules in the atmosphere collected into water droplets from the action of cosmic rays. Of course, the cosmic rays come at essentially constant rates over time but maybe with some variation with direction. So, when there was fewer cosmic rays, there were fewer clouds and some global warming. Why fewer cosmic rays? Well, when the sun has sun spots, there is more solar wind -- think really 3D all around our solar system, not just in the plane of the orbit of the earth, and reducing the rate of cosmic rays from all directions including way out and high above the plane of the earth's orbit. So, when the sun has more sun spots, there is more solar wind, more cosmic rays blocked from hitting the earth, fewer clouds, and global warming. When the sun is quieter, there is some global cooling. IIRC, over the past few thousand years or so, and maybe longer, the data on variations in sun spots do well fitting the variations in global temperatures while data on CO2 concentrations does not. So, people with the sun spot explanation are "deniers" and may have found the real cause of global warming/cooling for the last few thousand years or so at least and, thus, been "scientifically relevant". More generally, science needs to be subject to review, and a reviewer, even a "denier", who does find actual errors is also "scientifically relevant". Along the lines of reviewing, I would note that so far it appears that over the past 800,000 years, the cases of global cooling were not preceded by lower concentrations of CO2. E.g., the Little Ice Age was not preceded by lower concentrations of CO2. Neither was the cooling from 1940 to 1970. For more, yes, sure, CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Fine. We agree on that. So, CO2 can warm the earth -- we agree. But we can also agree that lighting a match will warm the earth. So, for CO2 warming the earth, the question is how much? Hate to say: (A) Just looking at the historical record from the past few thousand years, maybe the past 800,000 years, it appears that more CO2 has no detectable warming effect. (B) For some solid science, e.g., evaluating the effect of CO2 just from first principles of mathematical physics, including the Navier-Stokes equations, we can't do the calculations and, thus, for this approach, are stuck-o. Here maybe (A) is a review and "scientifically relevant". For (B), that's also "scientifically relevant" but so obvious that it is a trivial contribution. There are a lot of research problems without good solutions -- some of the details of the big bang, dark energy, dark matter, the origin of the highest energy cosmic rays, the origin of life on earth, quantum mechanics and relativity inside a black hole, a cure for cancer, how good natural intelligence works, etc. Well, one more is prediction of the temperature of earth for the next 100 years. Sorry 'bout that. While I've solved some problems in applied math and published the results, I can't apologize for not solving all outstanding problems. Sorry I don't know how to predict the temperature of earth for the next 100 years, but maybe I should say that I can't see that anyone else knows how either. In that case, my view is that carbon taxes are not justified.