Is it hot in here?
Posted on 02/28/2007 8:25:29 AM PST by Tolik
A mathematician, a physicist, and a chemist were examining the proposition that odd numbers are prime. The mathematician said 1 is prime, 3 is prime, by induction all odd numbers are prime. The physicist said 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, and he ws satisfied. The chemist did the same thing: ...5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is not prime, 11 is prime, 13 is prime. I throw out the one bad observation, 9, and indeed all odd numbers are prime.
An excellent article. I think any reader of Hayek would understand that human beings are not good at really complicated things such as planning an economy. It's funny the same people who think they can plan economies think they can plan climates.
Exactly what I said. This is a nice article, written at the right level.
Then repeat one of the previous observations to replace the "bad" data point. This is known as "Data Enrichment". I suspect there is one hell of a lot of data enrichment going on in the global warming world.
Cheers!
We do know that if you have a south facing window and an otherwise sealed room, that increasing the insulation value of the room's walls will result in a warmer room. All other things being equal.
Since water vapor is the primary greenhouse gas and water vapor in the earth's atmosphere increases with temperature, any increase in temperature will be multiplied by water vapor.
So if the sun is in a part of its cycle where it is getting hotter, and C02 is increasing, one would expect water vapor to increase also, multiplying the effect.
Considering the politics of China and India, I would say our best bet is to plan for warmer temperatures. I rather doubt that anything we can realistically do will stop whatever is going to happen.
Well, if their rivalry continues, and they have a limited nuclear exchange...we could see if Carl Sagan was right about nuclear winter...
I've been ranting about India and China lately, see my vanities (links to prior articles are in the above link)
I wasn't thinking of war. Just the fact that any reduction in C02 production depends on cutbacks by China and India. Not likely.
I hear that NYC has a study underway to build dikes and levees, modeled after Holland.
While it's good they are starting to think of technology solutions they might consider cheaper alternatives. Man-made fog can be generated for about $1 per square mile covered. Fog can be used to reflect sunlight out to space then burn off and let the ocean radiate its heat out at night. It can also be used as a blanket at night to retain heat. If you run the numbers it is much cheaper to make fog to regulate the climate than it would cost to build and maintain a multi-billion dollar dike around one American city. We only need to cool the temperature at the latitude where it is 32 degrees to keep the water from melting.
Water vapor is a greenhouse gas. The net effect is warming.
What NYC is planning for is tidal surges like the one that leveled the Mississippi coast.
...
I'm at my day job. Looks close to a simple linear relationship. I'll get back to you.
This researcher is convinced that global warming will cause lower altitude cloud thinning over land but also says on his current bio "We don't understand these internal feedback processes very well, largely because we don't understand the details of how different meteorological phenomena conspire to change the amount, phase, and spatial distribution of water in the atmosphere."
70% of the Earth is ocean, not land. Thinner clouds dissipate faster when the sun goes down so there is less blanketing effect at night. Thinner might be better. There is currently more water vapor over the oceans but also less cloud density because of the unavailability of nucleotides. There are more clouds near the coast because of wave action which kicks saltwater into the air providing salt nucleotides. We could very likely increase low clouds over the oceans by spraying saltwater, and it would be great if the clouds were thin enough to not blanket the water at night.
The left is seriously worried that cloud management will shut down the whole global warming scare. We should study what every researcher has discovered but take every government workers palm readings about the future with a grain of nucleotide.
Thunderous applause!
To my mind, the hardest thing is to develop the (wincing, but no better word handy) intuition of when your program is not working, or is just "having a bad day" ;-)
I appreciate your intellectual honesty in admitting that, akin to stock guru Jim Cramer's writing in "Confessions of A Street Addict."
Back to the subject of DC...
I also enjoyed reading RWP's discussion of the rotational bands (CO2 IIRC) and how they complicate the modeling of the atmospheric physics necessary to predict global warming.
Brought back memories, it did. :-)
Cheers!
An excellent and a great comment by grey whiskers.
"To my mind, the hardest thing is to develop the (wincing, but no better word handy) intuition of when your program is not working, or is just "having a bad day""
But maybe think of this the other way around? That our models are often more perfect than the systems they attempt to replicate, and the question becomes why aren't the systems behaving like they should?
This is where an understanding of thermodynamics and kinetics comes into play. The first describes in the perfect world where everything should get to. The second takes account to how long it takes to get there. The answer to the latter can be never in any practical terms, for a system that is always in flux.
One site that toys at the differences:
http://www.tock.com/chem32/kinT/ )
Each part of the earth is in heat flux on a daily heat cycle, and as well a seasonal basis. Longer term the changing earth orbit and the sun itself are in flux. It never "catches up", it never comes to equilibrium. It starts cooling before it finishes heating up, and vice versus at the other end.
On a slighly more micro-scale, the whole water cycle and what gets evaporated, where it wants to condense into fine droplets, and when and where the droplets fallout as rain, is all about thermodynamic equilibrium being ruled (or overruled) by its kinetics.
It's hugely dynamic and hugely complex from the start. And to combine in cosmic rays, sea salt sprays, desert dusts, smoke flume particulates, SO2/SO3 etc. etc., all the more fun.
UN IPCC WG1 Technical Summary (TS) and expert review draft TAR, Chapter 14:"The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future exact climate states is not possible. Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions..."
"In sum, a strategy must recognize what is possible. In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the prediction of a specific future climate state is not possible. The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the probability distribution of the system's future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. This reduces climate change to the discernment of significant differences in the statistics of such ensembles. The generation of such model ensembles will require the dedication of greatly increased computer resources and the application of new methods of model diagnosis."
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