Oil and NASA's mission statement change

If you want to remove CO2 from the atmosphere it is not that hard to do. The human activity that is being fingered by those who believe this stuff amounts to ~10E14kg/year or so. By re-establishing the forest and wetland balance that existed before it was removed from the biosphere by mankind this amount of CO2 would naturally be absorbed by plants that grew then and don't grow now. The ocean could be farmed somewhat as land now is farmed. It would only take established farms on the ocean a few years to restore the balance that may have existed(or not) before man removed much of the land from the natural production of biomass. Its really not as big a issue as models suggest. As I said before if the hysteria about greenhouse gas gets that done then good on it reguardless of the merit of the theory.

After waking up to the fragility of our climate system only a week ago, I became alarmed at the political consequences of anarchic and related tendencies, poor leadership and so on, combined with the weaknesses of humankind¡¯s modelling programs, its inadequate funding and so on. Hence that last post and this one:

There is a lot of order in Earth¡¯s climate system. There is much order in stars which are much more chaotic: convection cells, multi-layers and so on.

Unstable systems have many degrees of being chaotic, and in such marginally unstable systems as the Earth¡¯s climate system there is very much order, much predictability of important macro variables like average temperature. Demography, human population studies thus predict crime rates and so on. The flapping of a butterfly¡¯s wings can start a hurricane, but cannot change a future climate average temperature.

At Meta Research, there is much skepticism about Physics fundamentals, at both ends of the scale spectrum. But this particular skepticism is irrelevant to the problem of modelling the Earth¡¯s climate system because it is nowhere near the extremes where Physics fundamentals come into question.

Models of the Earth climate system have been poor because of its complexity, and inadequate funding, not enough physicists, insufficient computing power, over-simplification of important mechanisms, particularly their wave structures (such as my ¡°erms¡±, nodrift.com/Vol_4/4.14.pdf ), H2O structures and so on.

The reason models are so poor is not a lack of data but preconceived ideas about the result a model should generate. Its the old garbage in garbage out way of doing the job. No one cares about real climate but modelers care about funding. They design models that get the most funding and improve on that idea as funds become available. If there is no funding they make new models that can be funded. Just look at the history here and you will see a pattern of models being refined as funding becomes available with no reguard to the value or how poorly conceived the model may be. This is a problem for those who have the funds to resolve and not those who make poor models. No one learns for the past so the process continues with mixed results. Even poor models can be useful sometimes. This doesn't make any sense does it?

Those "important mechanisms" in the last paragraph of my last post should have included <font size="2"><font color="yellow">positive and negative feedback mechanisms</font id="yellow"></font id="size2">.

There's a lot of truth in Jim's last post, that "modelers care about funding. They design models that get the most funding and improve on that idea as funds become available" and so on, and this contributes to the potential catastrophe that I referred to.

Jim's 10 Sep 2006, 15:50:22 "re-establishing the forest and wetland balance that existed before it was removed from the biosphere by mankind . . .", won't happen because this land is needed to feed everyone, and his "ocean could be farmed" could soon be in trouble because of rising CO2 acidity and that ocean thermal stratification problem Silvia Kloster refers to.

Hi PN, Plants absorb CO2 and thats the reason for farming the ocean. Grow plants at a very low cost to absorb both solar energy and CO2. There is no polution in the process and in fact polution is absorbed also. Plants have in the past done exactly this and thats how all the oil, gas and coal got stored in the ground. You need to get real and stop with the scifi stuff.

Jim wrote 14 Sep 2006 : 18:36:25: "Plants absorb CO2 and thats the reason for farming the ocean . . . Plants have in the past done exactly this . . ."

The problem for approx. a century now is that this production hasn't kept up to industrial volumes of CO2 and this trend is getting worse. What we seem to agree on in this thread is intervention, doing our best to reverse the trend one way or another.

And this "one way or another" is where we and others seem to diverge. And my guess is that this divergence, failure to agree about how to deal with the problem, is probably the critical issue that may do us in, if the Earth system doesn't fix itself in a human-friendly way, which I suspect it won't, now that there are so many people pursuing dreams similar to those that we once pursued.

There is so much technophobia in the West, so much suspicion of Western intentions elsewhere . . .