Recently in climate modeling Category

This entry's title is a line from Roadhouse Blues, sung by Doors lead vocalist Jim Morrison. I think of it every time I find someone making important decisions about what to do now based on what they think is going to happen in the future. Of course, such behavior is the closest there is in Zen Buddhism to a sin. Non-buddhists, in general, don't have any idea what a horrible thing it is to sacrifice what you have today in order to secure some reward in an imagined future, so they do it, and even feel proud of it.

Eeeyyyeewww!

A case in point is the perenially stalled movement to curb carbon emissions to avoid global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 claimed: "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal ... ." It goes on to detail a raft of dire consequences if we don't heed their warning, and make drastic changes to our lifestyles and energy infrastructure.

So, let's hypothesize a future in which governments of the world gang together, and force their citizens (remember, this is just an hypothesis) to conserve energy by, for example, installing gadgets that won't let you dry your clothes before 10:00 pm, drop your thermostats to, say, 65 degrees in winter and raise them to 80 degrees in summer. They mandate use of electric vehicles that won't go over 55 mph, and can't go farther than 30 miles before recharging (thus limiting personal travel to a radius of 15 miles), and many other good ideas.

Let's say that this goes on for two generations, or about 40 years, at which time the sky is clear and blue, and it's damn cold by anyone's standards. So, roughly 5 billion people have been miserable for forty years (that's one year for each of Ali Babba's thieves) in order to avoid a climate catastrophe that nobody knows would have happened, anyway.

Then, an asteroid falls on 'em and wipes 'em all out.

Is this good planning? Is it based on good science?

The answer to both questions is "No."

I'll leave as an exercise for the reader to figure out why it's bad planning. It is, and that's why the "Green" movement has been stillborn all these years. While everyone is willing to go along with the ideas that global warming is "unequivocal," that it's bad, and that something must be done. Nobody believes it enough to take action based on it.

It's bad science because of the use of the word "unequivocal" in the report summary.

No scientist worthy of the title would use the word "unequivocal." Any sentence containing the word, without a counterbalancing negative (such as in "No scientific theory is unequivocal."), is prima facie not a scientific statement.

On July 5, 1687, Sir Isaac Newton published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, a three-volume book that was the seminal work for the science of physics. Nearly three centuries later, Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity, which, among other things, showed that Newton had, after all, gotten it wrong. He followed that up ten years later, in 1915 with his general relativity theory, which pointed out how Newton got it wrong.

It's now 95 years later, and we're still trying to figure out what's wrong with Einstein's theory. We know he got it wrong, we just don't know what's wrong with it. So far, it's the second most successful scientific theory of all time.

The honor of being the single most successful theory ever elucidated goes to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. On November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin turned the discipline of life science on its head by publishing a little tome entitled On the Origin of Species. It's now over 150 years later, and we still call it the "theory of evolution" despite its proven success. Scientists (the real scientists, not the pseudoscientists that creationists like to quote) realize that there's probably something wrong with it, but so far nobody's been able to get a whiff of what that might be.

In science, no statement is ever unequivocal. It's only the best idea we have at the time. So, if it's unequivocal, it's not science.

A flurry (pun intended) of articles in today's issue of The Wall Street Journal prompted me to drop another post about the controversy surrounding climate change research and efforts to curb global warming. Readers who have followed my posts here and in the Ask Charlie blog I wrote for Control Engineering know that I'm no fan of the IPCC report upon which most of the current nonsense is based. It's not that I think that there's anything wrong with the basic thesis that dumping loads of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will likely ratchet up global temperatures, my problem is that so much of the so-called research, and especially the conclusions drawn therefrom, are prima facie so much politically motivated dreck (or to use the proper Yiddish spelling drek).

As I see it, there are two basic problems. First, the conclusions are based on a sophmoric physical model. Second, who ever said that higher global temperatures would be a bad thing, anyway?

The theory of global warming is based on a simple physical model - the greenhouse model - which is, in turn, based on the solid physics of radiative heat transfer. Specifically, it starts with the observation that the opacity of most atmospheric gasses is wavelength dependent. That is, while most of these gasses appear transparent to visible light, they are more opaque (sometimes very opaque) to infrared wavelengths.

So, the radiative power flux of sunlight, a large fraction of which comes at visible wavelengths, gets through the atmosphere to warm the ground. The warm ground tries to radiate that power back out at lower wavelengths (basically, the color temperature of sunlight is about 6,000 K, while that of radiation from the ground is about 300 K). The infrared, however, is absorbed by the dense lower atmosphere. Ergo, the ground and lower atmosphere, which are roughly in thermal equilibrium, get warmer. Increasing the density of the more infrared-absorbtive gasses, especially carbon dioxide, (so the theory goes) will necessarily increase the infrared absorbtion, and lead to higher temperatures.

We teach this model as an example in second-semester freshman physics. It's simple, easy to understand, and illustrates the mathematics of radiative heat transfer (which is what we're trying to do in freshman physics). The only problem is that the model is dead wrong. The real world is vastly more complicated. The difference is so extreme that any conclusions drawn from the greenhouse model are unlikely to correspond to anything in the real world.

One of the biggest problems is that meteorologists have known for decades that the weather system is chaotic. Weather patterns cannot be reliably predicted for a time scale longer than about a week. Weather, of course, is critical to radiative heat transfer, so asking a climate model that uses radiative heat transfer to predict anything beyond about a week is simply stupid. Other parts of the climate system are similarly chaotic, such as solar flux variability, making the prediction of future climate via computer models an exercise in futility. It is of academic interest, but of academic interest only.

Moving on to the second problem, who says global warming is a bad thing, anyway? The medieval warm period (look it up) ushered in an age of prosperity, cultural advancement, and generally really good times. It was followed by the the Little Ice Age, which brought with it famine, plague, and death. Who th' heck wants that?

Lessons from history, and prehistory uniformly lead to the syllogism:

cooler = bad;

warmer = good.

You do the math.