Given that we know that AGW is real, and has a well understood physical basis, I think we need to react accordingly.”
Well, since the temperature is falling, there is no GW, much less AGW.
The amount of human-contributed CO2 in the atmosphere is one part in ten thousand.
This is the same ratio as one penny out of one hundred dollars. AGW is the magic penny theory. The idea that one-one-hundredth of one-one-hundredth of the atmosphere is controlling the temperature of the planet is fantasy, not science.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
The latest global warming denier
“Oh yeah one last thing… on BraveNewClimate I asked how long the current “flat” temp would need to continue before it was statistically significant, and I can;t remember the answer I got and can;t find it on the blog, but it was a straightforward answer as in “X years” so it seems to me that when an honest question is asked of climate scientists an honest answer cometh.”
Why, when CO2 levels are going higher and higher, is the temperature back down to where it was in 1980 (based on the only accurate global measurement, by satellite)?
“El Nino”! El Nino doesn’t last ten years of course, and in any case the notion is nonsense.
If you take ice out of your refrigerator and put it in a glass on your kitchen table, you have not changed the total thermal energy of your house one erg (except for the heat energy developed in your muscles from moving them to perform the action).
El Nino causes more cloud cover in some places, and less in others. It’s been operating for thousands, perhaps millions, of years. Why is it suddenly the climate “decider” now?
No, no, wait. I meant it’s the Tooth Fairy. The Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny are conspiring to mask the otherwise overwhelming effects of man-made CO2 increases. They will probably get tired soon, and then watch out Venice and New Orleans!
The question is not why the global warming “deniers” persist in their delusions, but why anyone takes the “asserters” of man made global warming theory seriously. Their theory does not withstand basic scientific scrutiny, and their predictions do not match the data.
I once took a car of mine to the same mechanic over and over again to fix a series of small problems. He was sincere, energetic, intelligent, engaging, and enthusiastic. He would explain what was wrong and tell me how he was going to fix it. Each time I got the car back, the problem would be worse. Reluctantly, I finally had to stop going to that mechanic when my car woldn’t run any more. I needed to be able to get to work, you see.
In this time of global economic uncertanty, we need to get the whole world back to work.
There was talk some time past of sanctioning global warming “deniers”.
When even the thermometer becomes a global warming “denier” it is time to take a look at our critical thinking process with respect to climate change.
Why, when CO2 levels are going higher and higher, is the temperature back down to where it was in 1980 (based on the only accurate global measurement, by satellite)?
“El Nino”! El Nino doesn’t last ten years of course, and in any case the notion is nonsense.
If you take ice out of your refrigerator and put it in a glass on your kitchen table, you have not changed the total thermal energy of your house one erg (except for the heat energy developed in your muscles from moving them to perform the action).
El Nino causes more cloud cover in some places, and less in others. It’s been operating for thousands, perhaps millions, of years. Why is it suddenly the climate “decider” now?
No, no, wait. I meant it’s the Tooth Fairy. The Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny are conspiring to mask the otherwise overwhelming effects of man-made CO2 increases. They will probably get tired soon, and then watch out Venice and New Orleans!
The question is not why the global warming “deniers” persist in their delusions, but why anyone takes the “asserters” of man made global warming theory seriously. Their theory does not withstand basic scientific scrutiny, and their predictions do not match the data.
I once took a car of mine to the same mechanic over and over again to fix a series of small problems. He was sincere, energetic, intelligent, engaging, and enthusiastic. He would explain what was wrong and tell me how he was going to fix it. Each time I got the car back, the problem would be worse. Reluctantly, I finally had to stop going to that mechanic when my car woldn’t run any more. I needed to be able to get to work, you see.
In this time of global economic uncertanty, we need to get the whole world back to work.
There was talk some time past of sanctioning global warming “deniers”.
When even the thermometer becomes a global warming “denier” it is time to take a look at our critical thinking process with respect to climate change.
The Science Behind Global Warming
This is a post I wrote on AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) on the Jnonva site.
Right now the major justification of AGW as a scientific theory has been the reliance on a computer model that has never correctly predicted temperature changes.
A scientific theory of global warming has to conform to what we already know about chemistry and physics. AGW doesn’t.
One part in ten thousand of the atmosphere is just not enough to affect the overall atmosphere in the significant way that AGW says it must. CO2 would have to be magic fairy dust to have the effect they want it to have.
The correlation of CO2 levels with annual global temperature is weak. Even if it were much stronger, correlation is not causation.
Basically what we are being asked to do is to bet the world’s future on a simulation with the technical sophistication of Donkey Kong. It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic. Already political and economic decisions are being made on the basis of this superstitious fad, that reduce the economic prospects for the world’s poor.
Historians of the future will perhaps consider this period one of mass hysteria, where people driven to distraction by the apparently intractable collision of Islamic terrorism with liberal dogma, reacted by creating a fantasy threat that seems measureable and controllable.
AGW is real only in the sense that those who promote this piffle into government policies are causing real harm to the world’s poor, increasing the likelihood of more hunger, more disease, more isolation, and less education for those who suffer from these wants the most. The “benefits” of CO2 reduction schemes are hypothetical and entirely unproven, but the harm from them is foreseeable and as certain as tomorrow’s sunrise.
We might as well collect pine cones as trade carbon credits, for all the difference it will make to the world’s climate. And it would be better to starve a few squirrels than the poor children of the world, which is what CO2 restrictions will tend to do.
Man made global warming doesn’t need to be disproven, because it has never been proven. It has only been asserted.
“Deniers” indeed. It is the “Asserters” who need to prove their case.
The bullies behind the AGW movement need to be called on their tactics and their crummy science.
Or at least they need to have enough respect for the rest of us, or enough shame, to stop pretending that AGW is science. So far all I have seen is a faith-based political movement, a Children’s Crusade with a bevy of simpering sycophants in politics and the press.
The only degrees that count in global warming theory are Fahrenheit and Celsius. Show me a mechanism for man-made global warming that conforms to scientific principles, and calculations that explain at least the present set of observations, and I will modify my opinion of this theory. Right now, AGW seems to be a lot of hot air stirred up by 60 scientists, most of them lab partners, who hijacked the IPCC process and are now hijacking the political process.
AGW is the Technorati Tulip Frenzy. What a sad, sad footnote this will be in the history of science.
What scientists should be giving us is cheaper energy, cleaner water, better education, improved crops, and everything that will help lead to longer, healthier, more satisfying lives. Instead what we get is billions of dollars spent on a digitally-derived Armageddon fantasy and the prospect of laws that will tie our hands in taming the problems of the future.
It’s time to bring the AGW bandwagon to a screeching halt.
Brad Jensen
Right now the major justification of AGW as a scientific theory has been the reliance on a computer model that has never correctly predicted temperature changes.
A scientific theory of global warming has to conform to what we already know about chemistry and physics. AGW doesn’t.
One part in ten thousand of the atmosphere is just not enough to affect the overall atmosphere in the significant way that AGW says it must. CO2 would have to be magic fairy dust to have the effect they want it to have.
The correlation of CO2 levels with annual global temperature is weak. Even if it were much stronger, correlation is not causation.
Basically what we are being asked to do is to bet the world’s future on a simulation with the technical sophistication of Donkey Kong. It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic. Already political and economic decisions are being made on the basis of this superstitious fad, that reduce the economic prospects for the world’s poor.
Historians of the future will perhaps consider this period one of mass hysteria, where people driven to distraction by the apparently intractable collision of Islamic terrorism with liberal dogma, reacted by creating a fantasy threat that seems measureable and controllable.
AGW is real only in the sense that those who promote this piffle into government policies are causing real harm to the world’s poor, increasing the likelihood of more hunger, more disease, more isolation, and less education for those who suffer from these wants the most. The “benefits” of CO2 reduction schemes are hypothetical and entirely unproven, but the harm from them is foreseeable and as certain as tomorrow’s sunrise.
We might as well collect pine cones as trade carbon credits, for all the difference it will make to the world’s climate. And it would be better to starve a few squirrels than the poor children of the world, which is what CO2 restrictions will tend to do.
Man made global warming doesn’t need to be disproven, because it has never been proven. It has only been asserted.
“Deniers” indeed. It is the “Asserters” who need to prove their case.
The bullies behind the AGW movement need to be called on their tactics and their crummy science.
Or at least they need to have enough respect for the rest of us, or enough shame, to stop pretending that AGW is science. So far all I have seen is a faith-based political movement, a Children’s Crusade with a bevy of simpering sycophants in politics and the press.
The only degrees that count in global warming theory are Fahrenheit and Celsius. Show me a mechanism for man-made global warming that conforms to scientific principles, and calculations that explain at least the present set of observations, and I will modify my opinion of this theory. Right now, AGW seems to be a lot of hot air stirred up by 60 scientists, most of them lab partners, who hijacked the IPCC process and are now hijacking the political process.
AGW is the Technorati Tulip Frenzy. What a sad, sad footnote this will be in the history of science.
What scientists should be giving us is cheaper energy, cleaner water, better education, improved crops, and everything that will help lead to longer, healthier, more satisfying lives. Instead what we get is billions of dollars spent on a digitally-derived Armageddon fantasy and the prospect of laws that will tie our hands in taming the problems of the future.
It’s time to bring the AGW bandwagon to a screeching halt.
Brad Jensen
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Recent news supports dinosaur death theory
In previous posts on this blog and in postings to newsgroups, I have described my theory on how the dinosaurs died. Recent news articles have continued to support my ideas, and have suggested a mechanism for the great change that resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs.
My "Last Gasp Theory" states that dinosaurs evolved to exploit a metabolic mutation that gave them an advantage in a thicker atmosphere with a higher concentration of oxygen. During roughly the same period, mammals evolved in high altitude locations (mountains) that had cold temperatures and thinnner atmosphere.
Suddenly, 65 million years ago, the atmosphere changed, reducing the amount of oxygen. The dinosaurs' metabolic advantage became a liability, and the mammals' adaptation to lower oxygen levels suited them to world-wide conditions rather than a limited environmental niche.
We now know that oxygen levels were higher at the time the dinosaurs were present. One of the questions created by my theory, is where did that oxygen go? Recent news articles have stated that ocean levels were far lower before the dinosaur extinction. Water is H2O, and of course the greatest mass of water is the oxygen. In order for large amounts of oxygen to become bound up as water, you have to burn hydrogen or compounds containing hydrogen, such as hydrocarbons.
If the major source of hydrocarbons is abiotic (from processes within the Earth, rather than 'fossil fuels') then there may be large amounts of hydrocarbons trapped under the crust of the Earth. This abiotic theory has been gaining ground since it was first proposed in Russian in the 1950s.
Assuming that there was a meteor or asteroid strke 65 million years ago, it may have 'cracked the crust' and released large amounts of hydrocarbons or hydrogen gas, which then burned, taking large amounts of oxygen from the atmosphere, creating water which raised the sea level. At the same time, the suddenly oxygen-poor air (by the standards of the dinosaurs) would become inhospitable to dinosaurs that lived both on land and in the water.
Another recent article states that mammals were more developed in their uniqueness earlier than was previously thought. The mammalian traits of hair, live birth, and suckling of the young all suggest adaptations to a colder climate, and if the atmostphere was thicker, that climate would have likely been at higher altitudes (or perhaps a combination of high lattitudes and higher altitudes).
My "Last Gasp Theory" states that dinosaurs evolved to exploit a metabolic mutation that gave them an advantage in a thicker atmosphere with a higher concentration of oxygen. During roughly the same period, mammals evolved in high altitude locations (mountains) that had cold temperatures and thinnner atmosphere.
Suddenly, 65 million years ago, the atmosphere changed, reducing the amount of oxygen. The dinosaurs' metabolic advantage became a liability, and the mammals' adaptation to lower oxygen levels suited them to world-wide conditions rather than a limited environmental niche.
We now know that oxygen levels were higher at the time the dinosaurs were present. One of the questions created by my theory, is where did that oxygen go? Recent news articles have stated that ocean levels were far lower before the dinosaur extinction. Water is H2O, and of course the greatest mass of water is the oxygen. In order for large amounts of oxygen to become bound up as water, you have to burn hydrogen or compounds containing hydrogen, such as hydrocarbons.
If the major source of hydrocarbons is abiotic (from processes within the Earth, rather than 'fossil fuels') then there may be large amounts of hydrocarbons trapped under the crust of the Earth. This abiotic theory has been gaining ground since it was first proposed in Russian in the 1950s.
Assuming that there was a meteor or asteroid strke 65 million years ago, it may have 'cracked the crust' and released large amounts of hydrocarbons or hydrogen gas, which then burned, taking large amounts of oxygen from the atmosphere, creating water which raised the sea level. At the same time, the suddenly oxygen-poor air (by the standards of the dinosaurs) would become inhospitable to dinosaurs that lived both on land and in the water.
Another recent article states that mammals were more developed in their uniqueness earlier than was previously thought. The mammalian traits of hair, live birth, and suckling of the young all suggest adaptations to a colder climate, and if the atmostphere was thicker, that climate would have likely been at higher altitudes (or perhaps a combination of high lattitudes and higher altitudes).
Saturday, January 22, 2005
The real challenge Social Security faces
After writing about Social Security reform this afternoon, I was visiting http://www.lucianne.com before bedtime, and happened across this shot across the bows of Social Security.Scientists identify a single 'master' gene that seems to turn on cancer-causing action of other errant genes
BY DELTHIA RICKSSTAFF WRITER Newsday
January 20, 2005An international team of scientists believes it has found cancer's master switch with the discovery of a gene they dubbed "Pokemon." Like the electronic game figures - tiny monsters with bad tempers - the cancer-triggering gene apparently instigates the misbehavior of other cancer-causing genes, leading to tumor formation.
Imagine if some significant percentage of cancers were routinely curable. You get cancer, they give you a shot or a pill, and it goes away. No chemotherapy, no radiation.
This good news may be a false alarm, it has certainly happened before. But it is now a matter of time before the mystery becomes history, and the vast majority of cancers are easily curable. Knowing the DNA is like having the source code to the firmware of the organism, and every cancer is like a computer virus, in that it hijacks the normal operation of the cell.
What does this mean for Social Security Reform? It means we don't have 40 years before we have a problem. The normal time from a discovery like this to effective drugs is generally under a decade. In this case, it might be much faster. You can throw all the actuarial tables (how many people die at each age) right out the window.
It means higher tax rates won't solve the problem. If grandma lives to be great great great grandma, Social Security will run out of money. It isn't just how many people are around to pay for each retiree, it's also how long they have to pay. If you work for 45 years, and then you are retired for 50, 60 or 70 years, the pay as you go system we have today is just untenable.
It means that increasing the age of retirement won't work either, unless you want to increase the retirement age to say, 87 or 95. Curing cancer and lowering the death rate is just part of the equation. This same gene that is killing us, if tamed, could lead to an end to aging. Or if not this gene, some other one or combination of genes. We have the map, and are only beginning to explore the territory.
To heck with Viagra, I want to be young again.
The only solution to Social Security's challenges is an asset-based solution. It's the only thing that can continue to pay as seniors continue to live longer and longer lives.
A little thought experiment is in order. What would the Social Security system be like today, if we had implemented the President's suggested reforms in say, 1953? (That's the year I was born, and I'm 51 as I write this.)
I'll leave that to the economists. I'll guess that seniors would own a lot of stock, US companies would have a lot of low cost capital, growth rates would be another percentage point or two higher each year, payroll tax rates would be 50% or less of their current levels, and seniors would be receiving higher benefits than they are today.
Most of the current accepted 'problem' of Social Security is fictional and can be fixed with a stroke of the pen. Future benefits are tied to average lifetime earnings, and the original designers of the system failed to predict the continual increases in productivity that raise real wages year by year. Adjusting the system for that oversight doesn't cost anyone anything, and will have to happen in any case, no matter how dearly the politicians want to buy your vote today with your grandchildrens' wages tomorrow. All we have to do is stop promising ourselves and unnecessary and unaffordable windfall. We might as well, because our grandchildren are not going to stand for it.
Social Security is supposed to be a safety net, not a vacation hammock. Change the payout to be indexed for inflation, the actual cost of living, and seniors of the future will live as well as the seniors of today, without bankrupting the system.
It's only because Social Security has pretended to be a pension that the problem exists at all. It isn't a pension, and it doesn't own any assets. An IOU to yourself is not an asset, no matter what the politicians say.
But the real problem of Social Security will bankrupt the system unless it converts to an asset-based system. That problem is the revolution in medicine that has barely begun, but is as certain as tomorrow's sunrise. The result is certain to be longer, healthier lifetimes - and beneficiaries collecting benefits for many more years than anyone is now expecting.
The Social Security system we have today is sort of like a slow-motion version of the Internet stock bubble of a few years back. Unreasonable promises and unsustainable spending lasted as long as new dollars were flooding the market. The original setup was sort of a brass ring for people who lived beyond the age of 65. Now we need to convert it to something more like a real pension system, and we have the means and a plan to do so.
If those who are fighting the reform of the system have their way, it will be concrete dormitories and beans and rice for tomorrow's seniors, your children and grandchildren - and maybe even you! If you buy them in 50-pound lots, you can live on beans and rice for about $15 a month. That's what Fidel Castro feeds his peons on his tropical Animal Farm - all 11 million of them. It's cheap, healthy food, but a little monotonous.
Now is the time to convert to a real, sustainable system for the future. I have a couple of suggestions to improve the President's plan. More about this soon....
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