Kyoto and Spin 35

[zdas04]

Recently I was talking to a group of engineers in Indonesia and someone said "we can't do that because, unlike the U.S., we have obligations to protect the environment".

That rocked me, and I asked what the heck he was talking about (we were in Jakarta and the air is so nasty that you can't see the next sky scraper). His response was that since the U.S. didn't sign the Kyoto protocols we must just be raping and pillaging the environment.

A Canadian collegue pointed out that the U.S. has been a leader in controlling air emissions for decades and that our air-quality restrictions are far more stringent than the Indonesian restrictions. This shocked the Indonesians.

What I'm wondering is how the international media has gotten to the point where its agenda is just taken on faith with no regard to facts?

David

 

[SnTMan]

http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/

Perhaps the ultimate global warming sceptic, possibly Sceptic In Chief.

Regards,

Mike

 

[SnTMan]

Not to keep beating this horse, but this just plain scares me. Do these guys really think they've got a good enough handle on things to do this?

http://www.tulsaworld.com/NewsStory.asp?ID=061117_Ne_A11_Layer24404

Regards,

Mike

 

[LCruiser]

Just shows you how wacked out some of these people are. They don't even have a good understanding of what real clouds do, let alone doing something like that.

 

[jmw]

The idea of adding a pollutant back has been aired before but as I've commented elsewhere, we just spent the last dozen years taking the sulphur out of fuel simply because its a health hazard.

At the start of this excercise 33% of atmospheric sulphur was from fossil fuel burning and note that some power stations emitted sufficient sulphur oxides as to be be global warming neutral.

We are now down to just the remaining 3% from marine fuel having taken it out of land fuels.
That is a big change so if we have done anything, it is make the situation worse.

But hey, sulphur was an easy target, CO2 is not.

Incidentally, Al Gore had this to say about the computer models:

To be sure, not all of the finest workings of the climate system are yet fully understood to the finest grain.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/11/19/nclim19.xml&page=3

Now just how good does he want us to believe the computer models are and do we believe him?

This was his rebutal to the Christopher Monkton article and is pretty much along the same lines as some other rebutals and if these are the best that can be managed, then I'm seriously worried that the AGW case is beginning to take in water, or at tleast, the attribution of all our worries about climate change. (In none of these have I found any real comment refuting the solar activity scenario....)

Even the arch AGW proponents, the dreaded BBC2 ran a program on climate change (OK so it was at 2 am) where the scientists were far more reticent about what they claimed for the models and, for the BBC, this program was far less gung ho than previous efforts.... does one detect a glimmer of doubt creeping in to their campaign?

Far more ironic is this comment of his:

To begin with, there is a reason why new scientific research is peer-reviewed and then published in journals such as Science, Nature, and the Geophysical Research Letters, rather than the broadsheets. The process is designed to ensure that trained scientists review the framing of the questions that are asked, the research and methodologies used to pursue the answers offered and even, in some cases, to monitor the funding of the laboratories — all in order to ensure that errors and biases are detected and corrected before reaching the public.

So was his filmic enterprise peer reviewed?
Besides, part of this debate has been that peer reviewing by the legitimate scientific journals has been sadly vulnerable to political correctness..... and not at all as AL would have us believe it is.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[LCruiser]

Political correctness as well as fiscal "prudence". If there's no problem there's no funding...

 

[rb1957]

but the problem is if someone creates an issue, and politicises it; then funding gets diverted to it, and away from more sensible (but less politically sensitive) spending.

to my mind climatology is the new religion, it relies on belief and faith and politics. no-one can prove anything (other than yesterday was fine/sunny/rainy/whatever it was). many have tied themselves emotionally, financially, socially to the cause. quite naturally they can't abide others not complying with what they see to be rational.

i ask how much of the climate change is being driven by factors beyond our control, the sun for starters. i believe the human factors are small in comparison; ie our actions may (that that's a big may) affect between 1% to 5% of the global warming and the ensuing environmental changes, but this means that 95% is continuing unabated. the way we're going, storms will increase, the tides will probably rise, people will get flooded out (or develop ways to deal with the problem, like the Dutch), and we'll be able to say in good conscience "we tried".

i contend a more pragmatic approach is to accept that the climate is changing, as it always has been, and the best we can do is to try to anticipate the effects (increased storm activity, higher tides) and develop counters to them (perhaps more accurately defenses that allow us to co-exist with our climate).

but then that's only my own humble opinion.

 

[jmw]

I rather think that ateroid strikes are something we should really worry about but since there is nothing to tax, politicians probably don't give this the credence it deserves.

Of course, with ELE (Extinction Level Events) we know they can happen, they've happened before, and there is still enough junk out there that it will happen again... but though we could apply the term "Abrupt Climate Change" the problem is we can't work up any models that will pursudae the public that our doom is at hand unless we do something about it now.

Of course, we should be doing something about it now... map everything we can and make damn sure we understand the physics enough to predict when something might happen. The trouble is the big event could be in the next year or two (fine, from the politicians point of view) or in a thousand years or longer (not so fine). Oh yes, and of course, we can't be blamed for bringing it on ourselves through some act or other.

Any other things we should really worry about?

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[jmw]

For those who were concerned about the politicisation of climate change, an appropriate article to read is this one:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6115644.stm

This is by Mike Hulme, Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, and Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

from the same source (Tyndall Centre for climate change research;

http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/media/news/latest_news.shtml):

We cannot predict with any great accuracy how, when or to what extent rapid, catastrophic, or runaway climate change will occur.

And, re the Al Gore quote in my previous post, this quote is apposite:

It is apparent that the vast uncertainties associated with climate modelling necessitate a wide range of possibilities, the extremities of which produce fertile
ground for sensational reporting.

Where does Al Gore get off criticising others for being disingenuous when this comment (from Tom Lowe) does not match with Al's "finest grain" interpretation?

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[0707]

This is our ship all of us are the crew. It is our responsibility to keep it spinning.

Luis Marques

 

[GregLocock]

Oh well, we're doing something. 25 nukes, to keep the greenies happy.

Oh, they're not happy. Oh dear.

Cheers

Greg Locock

Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.

 

[zdas04]

There was a guy whose heart didn't beat for a brief period of time 70 times a minute. A neighbor with very good intentions decided that this was a problem and cut the guy's chest open with a chain saw. The neighbor never did figure out why the heart was pausing so often, but it wasn't pausing any more, problem fixed.

Sometimes doing nothing is a lot better than doing something stupid. The problem is that in the heat of the moment it can be hard to tell what is stupid.

David

 

[Tomfh]

Err, ok.

 

[moltenmetal]

zdas04: you're presuming that reducing global emissions of carbon dioxide and methane are bad things in and of themselves. How do you know that conserving fossil fuels will be equivalent to doing surgery on the economy with a chainsaw? I predict the exact opposite. I think weaning the planet off its fossil fuel addition will be the best thing we ever did for ourselves. I think it will be a great boon to engineers in particular. Any idiot can solve a problem by throwing materials and energy at it- but it takes an engineer to optimize materials and energy use.

Just like some can be accused of swallowing the human causes of global warming uncritically, the exact same thing can be said of those who predict that reduction in our fossil fuel dependence will result in economic catastrophe.

We're not over-reacting to weak stimuli in my opinion on this issue: we're standing frozen like a deer in the headlights.

 

[zdas04]

Conservative behavior is rarely a bad thing. I find it awsome that engineering advances have reduced the amount of energy required to move a given mass of vehicle a given distance. It means less energy consumed and less garbage in the air. Both are really good things. Reducing energy consumption is good because it requires less of a given entity's resources to pay for the energy. Putting less garbage in the air means that the problems associated with garbage in the air are reduced.

Now look at "greenhouse gases". The single largest mass of greenhouse gases is water vapor. Most of that comes from evaporation of ocean water, it can't be reduced, managed, or legislated so there is no outcry. The next biggest mass is non-anthropogenic gas (methane and CO2 from "natual" sources like termite mounds, ocean alge, and geologic seeps and volcanoes). Can't legislate or villify that so we ignore it. Finally there is the truly insignificant amount of anthropogneic gases. Here we can find a villan so we have conferences, pHD's line up to write papers, people introduce legislation, and economies are stalled.

Meeting the Kyoto goals will have zero impact on climate, rate of change in glaciers (either positive or negative), or sea level. This is all a horible hoax based on seriously flawed science that only includes the data which support its stupid conclusions.

Call doing nothing "deer in the headlights" if you will, I think we'll just have to disagree and our great great grandchildren can look back at objective data to see exactly how silly this whole discussion is.

I started this thread in September to try to get a new discussion on media "spin". As I knew it would, it has started yet another polarized discusion on global warming. The first long thread on this subject had a different cast of characters on the anti-Kyoto side, but the arguments were very similar. My intention in starting this thread was to get a feeling about exactly how polarized we as an engineering community were. It looks to me like the worldwide propaganda has proven to be amazingly successful and technical people have become very emotional about something with minimal and conflicting data. None of us would build a bridge or a cog or a pipeline or a computer based on the quality of data that exists on this subject, but we are quite willing to wreck economies. I think the propaganda and "spin" have been frighteningly successful.

David

 

[LCruiser]

Here's something on spin:

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/p..._honest_broker/000994walter_lippmann_195.html

"the more rational is overcome by the less rational, and the opinions that will prevail will be those which are held most ardently by those with the most passionate will"

 

[electricpete]

I think we'll just have to disagree and our great great grandchildren can look back at objective data to see exactly how silly this whole discussion is.

I agree.



=====================================
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[Tomfh]

zdas04,

You keep referring to water vapor as though it is an independent entity. The level of water vapor is affected by the level of other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and humans are dramatically increasing the levels of those other gases.

 

[zdas04]

How could it not be an independent entity. At any temperature above freezing, some amount of water will evaporate from every coherent air/water interface on earth where the air is less than 100%RH. The difference in evaporation rates for a 0.7C temperature rise (which is the biggest rise I've ever seen proposed) is essentially zero. There are billions of tons of water in the atmosphere, some of it is in clouds and the rest is humidity. All other contaminants are tiny by comparison.

Can you find three credible, peer-reviewed references to back your contention that "humans are dramatically increasing the levels of those other gases"? I've looked, and I don't find Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The BBC, or CNN to be credible. The peer-reviewed journals tend to be much milder in their predictions.

This whole discussion is a perfect example of the utter tripe that passes for "science" in the popular media. I'm just disappointed that so many engineers buy into it as whole cloth.

David

 

[moltenmetal]

zdas04: You say that nobody would ever design a bridge or a cog or a pipeline or anything else on the basis of data as poor as what exists on the topic of global warming, but in fact we DO that every day. To quote Dr. A.R. Dykes of the British Institution of Structural Engineers:

"Engineering is the art of modelling materials we do not wholly understand, into shapes we cannot precisely analyze, so as to withstand forces we cannot properly assess, in such a way that the public has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance."

Any contingencies which may cause catastrophic harm and cannot be eliminated as extremely improbable by the design team, we need to design mitigation measures to deal with. Merely ignoring or disputing the contingencies in order to save cost is not an option.

Again, you reiterate your ASSUMPTION that conserving fossil fuels and investing in renewable energy and other fossil fuel alternatives will wreck our economy. You have no more causality to depend upon in that assertion than do those whose opinions you dismiss in relation to the causal relationship between human-induced greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. Again, in my opinion, there are enough known harms arising from fossil fuel production, refining, distribution and consumption that we should be guarding this valuable and FINITE resource and doing all we can to minimize its consumption. The mere probability of irreversible climate change being one of those harms is significant added motivation. We should be conserving this resource for the benefit of future generations and for the benefit of our own as well- and yet we continue to do essentially nothing other than warm the atmosphere further with useless TALK. Deer in the headlights- afraid to act!

I too am dismayed at how the engineering community has reacted on this issue. What dismays me most is the willingness of a great many engineers to totally discredit the science behind this issue with at best a partial knowledge of the field. This is hubris in the extreme, which does not befit our role as defenders of the public safety. Review my posts and you'll see that I have never offered an opinion in regard to whether or not human-caused emissions lead to global warming because I KNOW I am not qualified to do so. And I need not have demonstrated proof in my hands of a causal relationship between these two factors to know what action should be taken.

 

[GregLocock]

Aye, well some of us aren't interested in faith-based solutions.

Cheers

Greg Locock

Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.