This is almost hypnotic. One of the leaders at a Tea Party event with the Citizens of Liberty holds forth on the science of global warming. [Note: there will be no academic credit awarded for this Internet learning exercise].
The site for this organization makes clear that this is about a world socialist agenda:
No, nothing will ever be enough for these extremists. Because it really isn’t about saving the planet in the first place. It’s about pushing a socialist agenda to cripple the capitalist nations of the west. It’s about wealth redistribution and socialist schemes under the guise of environmentalism.
While nothing will ever be enough to straighten out the socialists and other Koolaid drinkers, we have more than enough for the American people to force our government to stop treating us worse than foreign dictators and stop this cap and trade global warming tax nonsense in the Senate.
I had to add this to our library of hard-right science, here.
IS,
The bathtub analogy was to illustrate to Gary T that energy (i.e. water) could be added to the system even if the input remains constant. Greenhouse gasses are clogging the drain by reducing the radiation of energy. One of my friends did an undergraduate thesis on modeling traffic flow – I’ve often suspected that traffic congestion could be improved by some modeling of how traffic jams occur.
Slarti:
thank you for the response.
“Consider this thought experiment: you have a bathtub half full of water which is being filled and drained at the same rate. Slow the drain down and what happens?”
I believe we would call this a first semester fluid mechanics problem that has nothing to do with thermodynamics, other than you are trying to make an analogy to an increase in energy with little or no means of dissipation. Which cannot happen except in a highly insulated system which the earth is not.
I am still reading about Prigogine, from my first fluid mechanics class and being stuck in traffic and watching traffic patterns it was remarkable how similar they were especially if you considered each car to be a point in the stream.
The behaviour is almost identical in fact.
I should have figured that someone would have studied and come up with equations modeling traffic flow.
that is one of the great things about this site, you go from global warming to traffic flow and it is amazing how connected all ideas seem to be.
bdaman,
2012 is the Mayan Y2K – their calendar rolls over and it’s going to wreak havoc with all of the Mayan computer systems because they didn’t plan ahead. I don’t know where you’re going with your plate analogy, but just about any fool notions about astronomy can be debunked at badastronomy.com.
IS,
Is it possible that my profession has caused some prejudice? I suppose it is possible, but I don’t think that it has (other than my tending to take a scientific viewpoint in most matters) and I stand by what I said about complex systems. My work is not theoretical, my colleagues are bench scientists and I work to help them understand the biological systems we are studying. I don’t see changes in my models in response to minuscule adjustments to parameters – in fact, we want models which show consistent behavior across wide ranges of parameters. While it is true that natural systems (I study cellular biology) tend to have a lot of redundancy and stability, it is also true that small events can have large consequences: A single photon can hit your DNA and cause a lesion on a gene involved in the cell’s defense mechanism that detects and repairs DNA damage. As a result the cell’s ability to reproduce without errors can be degraded resulting in accumulating DNA damage which leads to cancer. I’m not saying that the environment has cancer – I’m saying that we want to carefully consider things as the evidence comes in because, like cancer, the problems that we (probably) face are much easier to deal with sooner rather than later and there may be a point at which if the problems haven’t been addressed, they can’t be solved at all.
Gary T,
I don’t care about mission creep or climate change vs. global warming or what someone said was a problem 10 years ago or what Al Gore said or any kind of sales job. To me the issue is man’s impact on the planet and I believe that the evidence shows that man has had a significant impact on the planet (there’s a island of discarded plastic the size of Texas in the middle of the Pacific) and I believe that the only way to prevent our species from drowning in its own wastes is through advancement in scientific understanding. I’m not trying to win debating points about the correctness of a 10-year old theory, I’m trying to discuss the best way (in my opinion) to solve what I see as potentially species threatening problems that are facing us. It’s not about which theories were right and which were wrong, it’s about making sure that the best theories are the ones we’re currently using and it should be science’s definition of ‘best’ that we use here (the theory that best explains the relevant data). When we inject politics into this part of the discussion bad things happen. Politics has a role in deciding how to act on the results of the science – what the costs and benefits of any course of action are, not in shaping scientific results.
I’m sorry but I’m going to have to get a little pedantic on you here as ‘chaotic dynamical systems’ (or more properly ‘non-linear dynamical systems’) is a field I’ve studied for many years. A ‘chaotic’ system does not form from linear systems – as my alternate name suggests, ‘chaotic’ behavior arises from non-linear systems. (I don’t like using the word ‘chaotic’ because it has a very pervasive and nebulous popular meaning and its technical definition is, well, very technical…) Also, I don’t think that the global climate is made up of constituent elements depending on one another in a serial fashion. I’m not sure what your getting at about the Hamiltonian – the amount of energy in the system cannot exceed the total amount of energy in the system? There is an enormous amount of energy in the system already – what we don’t want is greater concentrations of energy like bigger hurricanes which don’t violate any conservation of energy laws but could do a lot of damage. I have never in any way indicated that I am opposed to reasonably assessing the risk of potential catastrophes and the cost and effectiveness of programs to avert them (and I think that politics are an appropriate part of this discussion), I just think that the evidence that man impacts the planet is undeniable and that it’s likely that as our understanding of the ecosystem improves we will discover that the impact is even greater than we think now. You said, “I do deny overall (anthropic) global warming, as such warming is fundamentally limited by the energy receivable from the sun.” Consider this thought experiment: you have a bathtub half full of water which is being filled and drained at the same rate. Slow the drain down and what happens? I wont continue the discussion about thermodynamics as it would take us off-topic at a significant fraction of the speed of light, other than to say that if you’re interested you should look at the work of Ilya Prigogine who won a nobel prize for his work on thermodynamic systems far from equilibrium and to point out that life has a tendency to become more organized, violating the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Slarti:
“As to what I am or am not neglecting: I’m not an expert on atmospheric carbon dioxide so I can’t say for certain what the magnitude of these effects are relative to each other nor what effect trees have on the process, but I stand by my statements about the behavior of complex systems. I find the idea that changes in the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide could have significant detrimental effects very plausible.”
————————————————–
is it possible that your mathematical work has caused some inherent prejudice? When you are doing your theoretical work you probably do see changes to the system by minuscule adjustments to your original parameters. These fluctuations don’t necessarily convey to a naturally regulated system. And some systems are more susceptible to small amounts of input variation than others, it also depends on the type of compound.
For example a human can ingest a fairly large dose of arsenic and not be effected but given a very small dose of ricin leads to death.
Even if you don’t dig evangelicals? This isn’t so bad and it isn’t out of line about how I feel about space. I suggest it to the other science minded here.
Buddah, I was going thru my video list and I came upon one of my favorites of all time and I immediately thought of you. I don’t know where you are in your faith but even if you are a non believer watch this 45 minute video. The shots from hubble if you haven’t seen these are incredible.
Also in one of your post above you touched on a bit about the earths axis and tilt. Would you honor me with your opinion on what will happen in 2012 and the end to the Myan Calendar. Will the poles shift? Is it true that if you were to put all of the planets on a plate and were looking at the plate from the edge that come 2012 the earth moves to the bottom of the plate, which has never happened.
Buddah regardless of tit for tats I just wanted to say I love you man.
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=17849695
Slartibartfast:
Firstly I must say that I have been tolerant about the mission creep on this issue, so far, but I really have to address this point and bring it back down to its original terms, insofar I am far more a skeptic of anthropic global warming theory than I am of global warming neat, or of “climate change”.
The thing about Climate Change is that it is a shmoo, it can mean anything to anybody, the Earth has always had Climate Change throughout its 4 billion year history, and the weather is inherently chaotic.
So it means nothing and everything at the same time.
As far as I understood it, the very hype and hysteria surrounding anthropic global warming theory was successfully sold to the public on the very explicit fear of ACTUAL global warming and its direct proffered catastrophes – continents of ice melting, ocean levels rising, species extincting due to excessive environmental heat, and the bogeyman of runaway greenhouse atmospheric heating, ala Venus.
The AGW theory was not sold on the far less sexy premise of climate change.
So, I address the question AGW in its traditional inception, not some new definition or alternate concern.
You have asked me:
Could you please define what a “serially interdependent fractal process system” is?
Well forgive me if I use my own terminology, but I considered it more descriptive of what I was talking about.
In short I am talking about chaotic dynamical systems.
I was referring to how a chaotic system forms from a linear one, and described the way the constituent elements depend upon one another in a serial fashion as opposed to a global one.
But my ‘clarification’ may be more obtuse than just rearticulating it.
And yes, traditionally the Hamiltonian requires a conserved system, but I was referring to the instantaneous Hamiltonian in the context I was describing. My point being that although the local variations of energy and chaos may exist, none of them on the average could exceed the instantaneous Hamiltonian.
You replied:
“but the principles of conservation of energy and thermodynamics in general don’t preclude devastating effects from climate destabilization.”
This is strictly correct, as undetailed, unrestrained destabilization can produce almost any kind of localized weather pattern. But to say they don’t preclude them is telling, because you are effectively playing the Pascal’s wager – the fact that it COULD be SO bad, that the probablistic insignificance of the possibility is subsumed in the risk analysis.
However here is where the thrust of my mission creep criticism is apros pro, I don’t deny the possibility of climate instability, but I do deny overall (anthropic) global warming, as such warming is fundamentally limited by the energy receivable from the sun.
You then sed:
“As an aside, the laws of thermodynamics apply to closed systems near equilibrium, and thus are probably not the best rules to use for an open system far from equilibrium.”
To this I respectfully disagree. The laws of thermodynamics apply universally; they are not so constrained as you pose.
I agree you may have proffered a facially falsifiable scenario, but use your imagination and debating skills, even the scenario you hypothesized could be scientifically put into doubt, it would not be a slam dunk QED, an alternate and viable scientific argument could be put forth to claim it supports the opposite, or something else entirely.
These posts are getting a little tedious, and desultory.
Not well defined, as the engineer in me would prefer.
Slarti,
No apology needed.
Slartibartfast
“you have to be open to the possibility that there is a man-made effect on the planet’s climate”
Look I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about me. There is no question about man’s effect on climate. We, some more so than others, are destroying this planet each and every day. It is EXTREMELY worse in third world countries. I have personally seen this and if anyone has not watch the video posted by Pardon Me, you should and take heed. By the way thanks Pardon Me for the video. My educational backround is no match for 99% of the people who post here and I’m sure it’s evident. I spend a great deal of time outdoors enjoying my hobbies. I’ve been a Bluewater fisherman all my life, a surfer, a diver(all three this past weekend) and going to paddle out this morning soon as I press submit. The whole problem with global warming has been in marketing and sales (this is my area of expertise) As I said before most people, including myself associate global warming with warming. You may not think it but I do understand that it’s really about climate change. Now, had global warming been coined climate change from the beginning it would be much more open to acceptance. Thats the marketing departments fault. The sales manager has also done a terrible job. His salesman have been caught fudging the numbers on numerous occasions and either hiding or eliminating reports that go against thier theory. This is why people don’t trust the salesman(men) Then the sales manager(Al Gore) has made a presentation of his product called an Inconvenient Truth in which many of the claims he made have turned out false. Alot of the claims went 180 degrees in the other direction. Again bad marketing and sales. Most people say, inconvenient truth turned out to be an Inconvenient Lie. Then you have a watch dog group that follows the sales manager where ever he goes just to see if he practices what he preaches. Low and behold they find out that he buys more of the same product that he’s trying to get you not to buy. On earth day when everyone turned their lights out for an hour and just lit candles, I myself included, he had his mansion lit up like a Christmas tree on Sunday morning, the third year in a row. The manager at the local power company is gladly keeping the public informed about how much of the product he actually buys and you would be AMAZED. It’s a bad sales and marketing job all the way around and the majority of people just don’t buy what they are selling anymore. Just look at the poles( North and South) sorry, Polls.
Buddha,
Thanks. My personal history with differential equations is long and tawdry and far from over… I’m actually a bit stunned at “conservation trumps chaos theory” and I’m trying to regroup before I answer. There’s quite a bit of ignorance proudly displayed there. I actually met Hofstadter once – he was the speaker at the awards banquet for a math competition that I was in (I got a copy of “Metamagical Themas” as a prize, which he autographed). I am a fan of “Godel, Escher, Bach” and a living example of Hofstadter’s law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law”. I may get distracted by something shiny and wander off from time to time, but I’ll continue coming back. I’ve got my towel, so it’s all good.
IS,
As to what I am or am not neglecting: I’m not an expert on atmospheric carbon dioxide so I can’t say for certain what the magnitude of these effects are relative to each other nor what effect trees have on the process, but I stand by my statements about the behavior of complex systems. I find the idea that changes in the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide could have significant detrimental effects very plausible.
Gary T,
First off, I’m a mathematical biologist, not a mathematical physicist (not a big deal, but it’s important to me). When I said Buddha is correct, I was referring to his comments about complexity and that the issue is more properly described as ‘climate destabilization’ than ‘global warming’. It was not meant to be a blanket endorsement of everything that Buddha has said on this board or even this thread (sorry Buddha). Now about “conservation trumps chaos theory”. What does this statement mean to you? Because what it means to me is that that you probably don’t understand ‘chaos theory’ (which is a popular term that is general and not very well-defined) or how the idea of complexity relates to the climate problem. Let’s continue on, you said:
although chaos theory certainly suggests (but by all means does not demand) that a serially interdependent fractal process system can go chaotic if even a little more energy is introduced into the system, those chaotic activities can only go so far as to the magnitude of their unpredictibility – the system as a whole will be limited by the Hamiltonian descriptor, i.e. chaos activity cannot trump the limitations that the total energy available will provide that is driving it in the first place.
Could you please define what a “serially interdependent fractal process system” is? This whole paragraph seems to refer to things you’ve heard of, but not fully understood. To answer the question I think you are trying to ask – there is an enormous amount of energy contained in the Earth’s atmosphere which means that the result of destabilizing the system could be very destructive (bigger hurricanes, creating deserts, etc.). I’m not sure what you’re trying to take the Hamiltonian of since you don’t really have a conservative system (energy absorbed from the sun and radiated to space), but the principles of conservation of energy and thermodynamics in general don’t preclude devastating effects from climate destabilization. As an aside, the laws of thermodynamics apply to closed systems near equilibrium, and thus are probably not the best rules to use for an open system far from equilibrium.
As for your answer to my question, I didn’t find it entirely satisfying, but I doubt you found my answer to the same question satisfying either, so I’ll just thank you for having the honesty to answer. I don’t depend on “the opinion of a committee” as you put it – when I want to know what scientists say about something I look at peer-reviewed journals and positions of professional organizations. And you aren’t being asked to disprove a negative – I’m sure if the global mean temperature increased 10 degrees (C) in the next 10 years, you’d admit that global warming was occurring. And if global temperature showed no correlation with carbon dioxide levels over the next 100 years, that would surely be strong evidence to falsify a connection between greenhouse gasses and temperatures. This is a complex issue and you have to be open to the possibility that there is a man-made effect on the planet’s climate (just like I must be open to the possibility that there isn’t – sadly, I think the evidence makes it more likely that I’m correct) otherwise you’re taking a position for political reasons not scientific ones.
Slarti,
I think I like you even more now. You’ll keep me accurate and honest on math – not that I’m stupid enough to lie about math, but I’ll stipulate while my knowledge of the subject is good, it is not close to perfect and pales to your expertise. If I were to say something as silly as “conservation trumps chaos theory”, I know you’d set me straight. Other than physics, symbolic logic and game theory, to my shame I’ve always been a bit of a lazy learner in that area. There was that brief fling with differential equations but what young man in college doesn’t experiment a little? No, much math I’ve learned from necessity to understand other areas of interest rather than desire to learn math for its’ own sake. To be honest, I blame my teachers. Reading Sagan and Hofstadter got me to at least pay attention to their usually horridly boring presentations of what can be an exciting subject. Had I been more inclined in that direction, I’d have probably a different career path, become an astronomer or an astrophysicist. Maybe something in theoretical physics.
Space is the just the coolest thing ever. Although life was largely thought to be a bad idea at its inception, even the Guide says space is cool as long as you carry your towel and don’t panic. As an amateur scientist, I appreciate the input of a professional. I’m glad you keep coming back. You are an asset to this blog.
Slartibartfast:
Your resume is indeed impressive, and that you have an underpinning of physics in your studies makes it all the more germane to the discussion (of course mathematics alone, e.g., knowledge of chaos theory, would not be enough).
That would make you the best educated person here on these topics, I believe.
This makes it all the more puzzling as to why you would give Buddha’s answers to my question an unqualified thumbs up.
Buddha averred several times to the idea that chemicals can take in quiescent heat energy and store them up:
“Worrying about the sun when looking at global warming is about as productive as worrying about termite mound in North Africa when looking at mosquitoes in Canada.
THE PROBLEM ISN’T HOW MUCH HEAT WE GET FROM THE SUN, BUT HOW MUCH OUR ATMOSPHERIC CHEMISTRY ABSORBS INSTEAD OF ALLOWING TO RE-RADIATE BACK INTO SPACE.”
Slartibartfast, being a mathematical physicist, you must know that all the energy that a body absorbs in radiant energy, must be re-radiated back out, do you not? There is not going to be a static net retention of that heat over any period of time.
Furthermore, did you not understand my comment about conservation of energy trumping chaos theory?
Apparently not, so I will elucidate somewhat more: although chaos theory certainly suggests (but by all means does not demand) that a serially interdependent fractal process system can go chaotic if even a little more energy is introduced into the system, those chaotic activities can only go so far as to the magnitude of their unpredictibility – the system as a whole will be limited by the Hamiltonian descriptor, i.e. chaos activity cannot trump the limitations that the total energy available will provide that is driving it in the first place.
So, notwithstanding the mission creep I see occuring here in this thread – that global warming does not mean global warming, rather it means chaotic weather – I do not deny that excessive heat introduced into a system may make it go chaotic, I do question however whether an incipient stability in our atmospheric shell, due to the StefanBoltzmann equilibrium with the Sun, would prevent it from ever accumulating such additional energy levels.
As to what would convince me that AGW is a real phenomena and a contemporary effect?
Well, if the Al Gore movie’s assertion that temperature follow-tracked CO2 levels were actually true, if the percentage of greenhouse gases produced by man was a significant percentage of all greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, if we would see higher temperatures today than ever before in the past, perhaps if God came down and publically proclamated that it was true.
One thing I would not depend on exclusively, is the opinion of a committee, particularly if that opinion is diametrically opposed by another committee.
You know it is really hard to disprove a negative. There simply is no correlative evidence that shows this to be true, so what you are asking me to do is make up things in my imagination that would be definitive proof. I have a sneaky suspicion that this “science” of global warming is not even falsifiable.
Slartibarfest:
Arent you neglecting cooling mechanisms such as rain and evaporation? As temperatures increase wont there be additional water in the atmoshere that will react with the CO2. Also additional CO2 can be and is absorbed and stored by trees.
“There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models.”
Published: Tuesday, July 14, 2009 – 11:45 in Earth & Climate
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/14/there-appears-to-be-something-fundamentally-wrong-with-the-way-temperature-and-carbon-are-linked-in-climate-models/
James Hansen of the Goddard Institute For Space Studies (GISS) has been implicated in the recalculation of existing data to make the planet appear warmer than in previous decades. For instance, in one infamous incident, he threw all balloon data regarding temperature out of his historical analysis because it revealed cooler atmospheric temperatures than his theory of Global Warming was comfortable with. You see Hanson needs the world to get continually warmer as CO2 increases if his theories of anthropomorphic global warming are correct. The easiest way to do that is to rewrite past records.
Gyges I needed only to see this at the top of the article to see where it comes from. Contributed by James Hansen, July 31, 2006
All of Bda’s sound and fury, And yet…
http://www.pnas.org/content/103/39/14288.full)
To quote the abstract.
“Global surface temperature has increased ≈0.2°C per decade in the past 30 years, similar to the warming rate predicted in the 1980s in initial global climate model simulations with transient greenhouse gas changes…Comparison of measured sea surface temperatures in the Western Pacific with paleoclimate data suggests that this critical ocean region, and probably the planet as a whole, is approximately as warm now as at the Holocene maximum and within ≈1°C of the maximum temperature of the past million years…”
http://atlasbear.com/2009/06/20/the-scariest-counter-in-the-world/
Slartibartfast I’m saying that the best evidence currently available says that there is a problem and we are contributing to it.
CO2, Soot, Modeling and Climate Sensitivity
Warming Caused by Soot, Not CO2
From the Resilient Earth
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/15/9373/
Bdaman,
I am not and never claimed to be an expert on climate change, I am, however, an expert on complex systems and as such I am claiming that it is entirely reasonable to think that small changes in the total energy of the planet mediated by an increase in man-made CO2 levels could have a significant effect on the complex system that is the climate as a whole. I’m not saying that we should stop doing research or that we understand the cause and effect here completely, I’m saying that the best evidence currently available says that there is a problem and we are contributing to it. In light of this, waiting until we’re sure that we understand everything before trying to ameliorate this problem (at which point we will be unable to fix it in any case) seems to me to be not much more than sticking your head in the sand.