An experiment of nature

Back in day genetic diseases were called experiments of nature, which I thought rather cruel, as it implied a conscious intent to set them up (to me at least).  Well, we’re in the middle of one presently, and it may tell us something about climate change.  The New York Times today has a pious article “What the Pandemic Means for Climate Change” full of treacle.

However, it is possible that the drop in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions (25% in China in February) if it goes on long enough might tell us something about the effect of CO2 on climate.

Suppose global CO2 drops and the temperature along with it.  This should convince the hardiest climate skeptic (not denier) that CO2 and global temperature are related.

I’m far from knowing enough to even guess, if a mild decline in emissions would change global CO2 levels and with it global temperatures, but both are being continuously measured so we’ll soon have the data.

Probably nothing will happen to either as there is so much CO2 in the atmosphere, that a blip of a 25% decline (even worldwide) won’t do anything.

I’m posting this, because the article said nothing about the possibility.

Any thoughts, particularly from people more knowledgeable than me

A modest proposal — take 2

The current dustup in France brought on by elites raising the price of gas  to demonstrate their climatological virtue at little cost to themselves warrants the republication of an earlier post in which I endeavor to show how they can put some of their own skin in the game and actually do something other than posture.

A modest proposal (with apologies to Jonathan Swift)

The New York Times magazine of 5 August 2018 was entirely devoted to global warming and our lack of response to it.  Doubtless it was read with great approval by the denizens of the upper West and East Sides of Manhattan as they sat in their million dollar apartments, vowing to fight until the last coal miner and oli field roughneck was out of work.  This will cost them nothing.

Virtue signaling notwithstanding, it’s time they had some skin of their own in the game. Having practiced medicine in the People’s Republic of New York, I know the love of New York state government for regulations and mandates, and the approval with which they have been met by the above denizens.

So here is a modest proposal for fighting global warming.  Mandate that governors be placed on air conditioners so that room temperatures can be no lower than 80 in the summer.  Similar governors should  be placed on heating, allowing room temperatures no warmer than 60 in the winter.  Start in the upper East and West sides of Manhattan, and if met with general approval extend it further.

I think it will be accepted as well they accepted the wind farms proposed off Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket near their summer homes.

A modest proposal (with apologies to Jonathan Swift)

Sunday’s New York Times magazine was entirely devoted to global warming and our lack of response to it.  Doubtless it was read with great approval by the denizens of the upper East and West Sides as they sat in their million dollar apartments, vowing to fight until the last coal miner and oil field roughneck was out of work.  This will cost them nothing.

Virtue signaling notwithstanding, it’s time they had some skin of their own in the game. Having practiced medicine in the People’s Republic of New York, I know the love of New York state government for regulations and mandates, and the approval with which they have been met by the above denizens.

So here is a modest proposal for fighting global warming.  Mandate that governors be placed on air conditioners so that room temperatures can be no lower than 80 in the summer.  Similar governors should  be placed on heating, allowing room temperatures no warmer than 60 in the winter.  Start in the upper East and West sides of Manhattan, and if met with general approval extend it further.

I think it will be accepted as well they accepted the wind farms proposed off Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket near their summer homes.

An unhappy anniversary

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the xxxx’s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.

Pretty serious stuff.  Written 50 years ago, “The Population Bomb” by Paul Ehrlich had enormous impact.  However the xxxx elision concerned the 1970s.

4 years later The Club of Rome released the following broadside, “The Limits to Growth”Here is a direct quote from the jacket flap.

“Will this be the world that your grandchildren with thank you for? A world where industrial production has sunk to zero. Where population has suffered a catastrophic decline. Where the air, sea and land are polluted beyond redemption. Where civilization is a distant memory. This is the world that the computer forecasts. What is even more alarming, the collapse will not come gradually, but with awsome suddenness, with no way of stopping it”

This sort of stuff is why the elderly (such as myself who will turn 80 this month) gradually become more and more cynical.   Unfortunately, over half the people alive today have no memories of these two debacles.  If you want to read more on this buy a book by a Yale Professor, Paul Sabin called “The Bet” concerning the intellectual conflict between Paul Ehrlich — he of the population bomb and Julian Simon. Ehrlich said we’d run out of just about everything shortly (presumably because of too many people), so economist Simon bet him that we wouldn’t. The intellectual war began in earnest in the 80’s and dragged on for a decade or so. I recommend the book and I think it really does capture the flavor of the times and the debate.  In it you will find John Holdren, Obama’s science advisor, also a devout malthusian, although with a degree in physics.

The current barrage over global warming seems to be diminishing.  Particularly damning is the failure of the models to predict the absence of any change in global temperature for 17 years.  I tried not to be turned off by the similarly apocalyptic and Old Testament Prophetic tone of the proponents.  But any scientific theory to  be any good (aside from Evolution, and String theory) must make testable predictions, and those about climate have consistently failed for 20 years.

The volcanos did it

Why did the glaciers below the equator retreat 17,700 years ago (17.7 ka)?  A series of volcanic eruptions spanning 192 years down there did it according to Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 114 pp. 10035 – 10040 ’17.  No one was driving SUVs then and mankind had barely invented farming in the old world.   Have we had an usual amount of volcanic activity in the past 100 to 1,000 years? Here’s the summary.

“Glacial-state greenhouse gas concentrations and Southern Hemisphere climate conditions persisted until ∼17.7 ka, when a nearly synchronous acceleration in deglaciation was recorded in paleoclimate proxies in large parts of the Southern Hemisphere, with many changes ascribed to a sudden poleward shift in the Southern Hemisphere westerlies and subsequent climate impacts.

We used high-resolution chemical measurements in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide, Byrd, and other ice cores to document a unique, ∼192-y series of halogen-rich volcanic eruptions exactly at the start of accelerated deglaciation, with tephra identifying the nearby Mount Takahe volcano as the source. Extensive fallout from these massive eruptions has been found >2,800 km from Mount Takahe. Sulfur isotope anomalies and marked decreases in ice core bromine consistent with increased surface UV radiation indicate that the eruptions led to stratospheric ozone depletion. Rather than a highly improbable coincidence, circulation and climate changes extending from the Antarctic Peninsula to the subtropics—similar to those associated with modern stratospheric ozone depletion over Antarctica—plausibly link the Mount Takahe eruptions to the onset of accelerated Southern Hemisphere deglaciation ∼17.7 ka.”

Correctly taken to task by two readers and some breaking news

I should have amended the previous post to say I mistrust unverified models.  Here are two comments

#1 Andyextance

• “Leaving aside the questions of the reliability of models in different subjects, and whether all of your six reasons truly relate to models, I have one core question: Without models, how can we have any idea about what the future might hold? Models may not always be right – but as long as they have some level of predictive skill they can often at least be a guide.”

  Absolutely correct — it’s all about prediction, not plausibility.

#2 Former Bell Labs denizen

“And yet you board a commercial airliner without hesitation, freely trusting your life to the models of aerodynamics, materials science, control system theory, electronics, etc. that were used in designing the aircraft. Similar comments apply to entering a modern skyscraper, or even pushing the brake pedal on your automobile.

Perhaps what you are really saying is that you don’t trust models until their correctness is demonstrated by experience; after that, you trust them. Hey, nothing to disagree with there.”

Correct again

Breaking news

This just in — too late for yesterday’s post — the climate models have overestimated the amount of warming to be expected this century — the source  is an article  in

Nature Geoscience (2017) doi:10.1038/ngeo2973 — behind a paywall — but here’s the abstract

In the early twenty-first century, satellite-derived tropospheric warming trends were generally smaller than trends estimated from a large multi-model ensemble. Because observations and coupled model simulations do not have the same phasing of natural internal variability, such decadal differences in simulated and observed warming rates invariably occur. Here we analyse global-mean tropospheric temperatures from satellites and climate model simulations to examine whether warming rate differences over the satellite era can be explained by internal climate variability alone. We find that in the last two decades of the twentieth century, differences between modelled and observed tropospheric temperature trends are broadly consistent with internal variability. Over most of the early twenty-first century, however, model tropospheric warming is substantially larger than observed; warming rate differences are generally outside the range of trends arising from internal variability. The probability that multi-decadal internal variability fully explains the asymmetry between the late twentieth and early twenty-first century results is low (between zero and about 9%). It is also unlikely that this asymmetry is due to the combined effects of internal variability and a model error in climate sensitivity. We conclude that model overestimation of tropospheric warming in the early twenty-first century is partly due to systematic deficiencies in some of the post-2000 external forcings used in the model simulations.

 

Unfortunately the abstract doesn’t quantify generally smaller.

 

Models whose predictions are falsified by data are not to be trusted.

 

Yet another reason Trump was correct to get the US out of the Paris accords— in addition to the reasons he used — no method of verification, no penalties for failure to reduce CO2 etc. etc.  The US would tie itself in economic knots trying to live up to it, while other countries would emit pious goals for reduction and do very little. 

In addition, \ I find it rather intriguing that the article was not published in Nature Climate Change   –,http://www.nature.com/nclimate/index.html — which would seem to be the appropriate place.  Perhaps it’s just too painful for them.

A bit of history

I’ve been reading Nature since I’ve been able to afford a subscription, e.g. since about 1972. To put their undoubted coming hysteria about Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement into perspective, consider the fact that they bought the arguments of the Club of Rome, hook line and sinker. The Wikipedia article is quite sanitized, but here’s a direct quote from the jacket flap of the club’s book “The Limits to Growth” which came out in 1972.

“Will this be the world that your grandchildren with thank you for? A world where industrial production has sunk to zero. Where population has suffered a catastrophic decline. Where the air, sea and land are polluted beyond redemption. Where civilization is a distant memory. This is the world that the computer forecasts. What is even more alarming, the collapse will not come gradually, but with awsome suddenness, with no way of stopping it”

Well, it’s 45 years later and their grandchildren have seen no such thing. Nature’s online available archives go back to 1975, but I’ve been unable to find a link to one of their articles. If anyone out there has found one, post a comment.

When we were down in New Haven, I picked up a book by a Yale Prof, Paul Sabin called “The Bet” concerning the intellectual conflict between Paul Ehrlich — he of the population bomb and Julian Simon. Ehrlich said we’d run out of just about everything shortly (presumably because of too many people), so economist Simon bet him that we wouldn’t. The intellectual war began in earnest in the 80’s and dragged on for a decade or so.

I recommend the book. In it you will find John Holdren, Obama’s ‘science’ advisor, also a devout malthusian, although with a degree in physics.

Perhaps Nature has it right this time, and that the models of warming which failed to predict the climate stasis of 17 years duration (the term pause gives away the game implying that temperature will continue to increase) are a reliable guide to the future.

Even if Nature is right, the Paris Agreement was terrible, no verification, no penalties for missing targets etc. etc. A massive expansion of governmental control and clamps on economic expansion, for minimal benefit.

So relax. Protest if you wish, it’s a cheap display of virtue which costs you nothing, even though you’re quite willing to fight global warming down to the last coal miner.

Yes it’s hot, but

A few years ago, before things calmed down, hurricanes were predicted to become more frequent and more severe. So although global warming fans predicted higher temperatures, they also predicted this. Here’s an example

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/study-projects-more-frequent-and-stronger-hurricanes-worldwide-1620
and another — http://time.com/3706888/hurricane-warning-study/

So far this year (and the major part of the hurricane season is about to begin) the Atlantic hurricane season is the quietest it’s ever been. There have only been 4 tropical storms this year and no hurricanes at all not even one. One of the 4 storms occurred in January, which is rather bizarre.

Scientific theories when faced with a falsified prediction are usually modified or abandoned.  Not so with global warming.  It’s just been rebranded as climate change.

There is a rather imperfect measure of the amount of power produced by the storms of the season, called Accumulated Cyclonic Energy (ACE). The average per year is an ACE of 110. This year (so far) it’s only 6.

ACE is calculated as the square of the wind speed every 6 hours, and is then scaled by a factor of 10,000 for usability. The ACE of a season is the sum of the ACE for each storm and takes into account the number, strength, and duration of all the tropical storms in the season. The caveat to using ACE as a measure of the activity of a season is that it does not take the physical size of the hurricane or tropical storm into account which is why it’s imperfect.

If you know any physics, ACE is velocity squared * time — which is not the dimension of energy (it’s acceleration). I wonder if satellite radar is good enough to give us ground windspeed over small areas, which could be summed over the hurricane area if the division was fine enough. This would allow us to tell big storms from smaller ones. Unfortunately, there would be no way to compare this new measure to ones in the past such as ACE.

The climate gods have a sardonic sense of humor

Things haven’t been going too well for Global Warming. First, there has been essentially no change in global mean temperature for 14 – 17 years (depending on which of 4 measures you use). So Global Warming was rebranded as Climate Change. Then, we’ve been told that climate change would lead to more and more ‘extreme weather events’ (translation hurricanes, tornadoes etc. etc.) So in one of the coolest New England summers within memory and with nearly half of the 6 month hurricane season gone, we have a very quiet, not to say comatose, hurricane season.

At the onset of the 2014 season NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) predicted a 70% chance of a below average season. The numbers they expected were

8 – 13 Named storms (top winds over 39 mph — not very impressive)

3 – 6 Hurricanes (top winds over 74 mph)

1 – 2 Category 3 storms (sustained winds over 110 mph)

This was updated 7 August to a 70% probability of an even less exciting season

7 – 12 Named storms (top winds over 39 mph — not very impressive)

3 – 6 Hurricanes (top winds over 74 mph)

0 – 2 Category 3 storms (sustained winds over 110 mph)

So instead of extreme weather events, we have extremely boring (but pleasant) weather and just 2 named storms which turned into hurricanes. No category 3 events, and as of this writing, the Atlantic is extremely quiet. This has been blamed on dry air from Africa and (amazingly enough) unusually cool water temperatures in the Atlantic. Recall that it has been argued that the stability of global temperature over the past decade is due to heat going into the deep ocean where we can’t see it.

To be noted if you look at the graph in http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/atlantic-tropical-threat-possible-gulf-coast/32555368, which is of hurricane frequency vs. date, and try to mentally integrate the area under the curve in your head, that only about 20% of the hurricanes have occurred by this time. Peak frequency is 2 weeks from now (11 September) and the frequency of 20 August is half maximal.

Would anyone like to guess when (not if) this will be blamed on Global Warming/Climate Change? I’d be very surprised if it weren’t, and if it is, remember that a theory which can explain anything explains nothing.

The Empire Blinks

Physicists 100+ years ago were perturbed that the precession of the perihelion of Mercury as predicted by Newtonian mechanics was off by 38 arc seconds (roughly one part in 1/100,000). It took relativity to straighten things out.

None of the climate models mentioned in Science in 2009 [ Science vol. 326 pp. 28 – 29 ’09 (2 Oct ’09 ) ] predicted a pause in warming as long as we are currently experiencing (17 years and counting), even when they were run for a total of 700 years. The longest pause found was 15. They should be run again for many more years with the faster computers of today, to see if they produce the present pause. If not, the models, and their recommendations should be abandoned.

It is a perversion of language to call the absence of continued warming a pause, because this implies (without actually saying so) that the warming will continue after a bit, something for which there is no evidence. Global warming in fact has stopped for 17 years. What it does when there is some sort of change from the stasis, is anyone’s guess. Models which didn’t predict the stasis are of no help.

The mainstream scientific press is finally sitting up and taking notice. This week’s Nature (16 Jan ’14) has an editorial (pp. 261 – 262) and a news item (pp. 276 – 278) concerning the pause. It is claimed that the Pacific is taking up the heat, without heating up much. The heat capacity of water is USED to define the calorie — it is 1 calorie per gram of water — in contrast the heat capacity of methane with the same molecular mass is 1/116th of water. So there’s plenty of heat capacity in the ocean.

Adding a new parameter to explain unexpected results is good science when the system being explained is complex. Consider the additions to the central dogma of molecular biology — introns, exons, microRNAs, ceRNAs, reverse transcription etc. etc. Certainly global climate is equally complex. However, more than a little humility is in order.

This begs the point about whether the ocean as a heat sink was included in the model cited in 2009. If it was, the model had better predict the pause. If it wasn’t and if the latest explanation given for the pause is correct, the model should be thrown out along with its recommendations.

There Is Nothing So Tragic As A Beautiful Theory Destroyed By An Ugly Fact. — Sherlock Holmes

The fact that Nature came to deal with the pause is significant. They were quite defensive when ClimateGate came out — see https://luysii.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/the-empire-strikes-back-nature-on-climategate/