Oil and NASA's mission statement change

Larry and Jim are pessimistic about the increasing accuracy and usefulness of climate modelling, but Larry's interventionism is agreeable.

If we are ever faced with Silvia Kloster's "enhanced ocean stratification causing a reduction in marine net primary production and a decrease in the DMS production in the ocean", hence possibly, ultimately fewer clouds and runaway global warming, then I believe humans should fix these and any other subsystem problems in various ways: Deep tubes in the ocean might enable continued upwelling, and generate electricity and so on; DMS production might be enhanced via genetic engineering and so on.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Larry Burford</i>
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In the end it doesn't matter if the climate goes off the graph because of something we did or because of something nature did. The planet will survive, but we won't care. Whomever the culprit is, we can probably fix it if we don't wait too long.
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We haven't reached the point where grapes are grown in Great Britain and farms exist in Greenland. A time when it is said that food was plentiful and life was good. Then the "Little Ice Age" began in about 1350 AD and tens of millions of people died from cold, malnutrition and disease.

What is the hysteria about? This is what happens when politics devours science. The first victims are facts and logic.

Gregg Wilson

Peter, Don't misread me about the models you favor. To me they are more like a cartoon than science. They do things that only happen in cartoons. It would be nice if some of the stuff that happens in cartoons could be done in the real world but it never happens. Ducks don't talk man in blue suits don't fly. What I think about the models is there is no real in them.

Hysteria, hype and chickens falling from the sky. Dogs shacking up with cats. These are aspects of the political side of the issue. So with a little luck (and some occasional moderator enforcement) we can avoid most of them. (For the most part the members of this board do a good job of sticking to science. My congratulations to us all.)

There is evidence from geology and anthropology and even from history that Earth has been both warmer and colder than it is now. and that life, including human life, has survived. As we look around us today we see evidence that our climate is trying to change again. (We also see evidence that some of our activities might be contributing to this.)

We have some theories, some models, that allow us to "predict" what might happen if this trend or that trend keeps going. But our theories are incomplete, so our predictions are, uh, not always accurate. Does this mean the theories "have no real in them"? Of course not. They are kind of like guns in this respect. Whether they are good or bad depends on how and why they are used.

When they are used for scientific purposes they produce results that are useful, but known to have limits. The results are applied carefully and warnigns about the limits are talked about frequently.

When they are used for political purposes they produce results that are harmful because the limits and gaps of the theory are ignored. The results are still applied carefully (very carefully indeed), but without regard to appropriateness and wihtout mentioning the limits and gaps.

But here is the real problem - there is a grey area between these two extremes. Theories are often used for mixed purposes, and as you can imagine this produces mixed results. And makes it harder to tell if a particular use is reasonable or not, because the answer ends up being "yes, and no".

A rule of thumb we could use to help tell the difference is "if a discussion doesn't mention model limits and knowledge gaps, watch out". But people (me included) are lazy and mentioning limits takes extra work, so I'm not going to hold my breath. We will just have to pay closer attention to what is actually said.

LB

An important aspect of this possibility of climate change hasn¡¯t been raised: The possibility of humankind's not being able to sufficiently deal with the challenge for all sorts of economic or political reasons, even if our Science is up to understanding the problem and is able to present options for ameliorating it to national governments, the UN and so on.

If the prestige of some or all of these institutions have been diminished by a very costly unwinnable war, or series thereof, started for dubious reasons or whatever, and for this and/or other reasons people cannot agree about which course of action should be followed, humankind might be in real trouble, because the problem might be much bigger than that Mediaeval Warm Period Gregg mentioned.

University of Bristol research suggests that ¡°the climate change ¡®tipping point¡¯ could occur in about 40 years¡±. If average global temperatures reach more than 3 degree Centigrade over the next century, carbon sinks can be expected to release their CO2 increasingly rapidly due to positive feedbacks, global warming runaway.

Any prospect of this happening would require drastic, very costly, interventionist measures that many people, unbelievers, believers in different solutions and so on, might resist violently. ¡°Unbelievers, believers in different solutions¡± might comprise nations, blocs of nations, even powerful, nuclear-armed nations and so on.

[Peter Nielson] "An important aspect of this possibility of climate change hasn¡¯t been raised: The possibility of humankind's not being able to sufficiently deal with the challenge for all sorts of economic or political reasons, even if our Science is up to understanding the problem and is able to present options for ameliorating it to national governments, the UN and so on."

This is a actually a huge problem. Not the economic reasons so much, but the political reasons. So big that it is (IMO) a prime candiate for The Answer To The Fermi Pardox.

However, this board is restricted to the science side of the issue and that makes it off-topic. If anyone knows of another board where this particular problem is on-topic and being discussed, please give us a heads up.

[Peter Nielson] " ... carbon sinks can be expected to release their CO2 increasingly rapidly due to positive feedbacks ... "

As usual the experts are in disagreement. It turns out that there are some negative feedback mechanisms as well (for example, plants are already showing a global increase in growth rates, and consumption of CO2, due to the increasing concentration of CO2). Neither the positive nor the negative feedback mechanisms are understood well enough to be able to say for sure which will win under all circumstances. This is the nature of a chaotic system like a planet's climate. Sometimes a very small change in an input can cause a large change in an output, other times a similar small input change will result in little or no response from the system. Our theories (models) are just too limited now to be much more than dangerous.

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But we do need to do something (or at least be prepared to do somehting on Very Short Notice), and it needs to be as controllable as possible because <u>we are going to have to take some stabs in the dark</u>. And some of those stabs, especially in the beginning, carry the risk of makeing something worse.

Regards,
LB