Politics, faith, and the engineer

Our esteemed competitor EETimes has an editorial about intelligent design and global warming. Kenton Williston points out that Darwin and the theory of evolution is settled science and so is global warming theory. By this he must mean anthropogenic global warming (AGW) because he says we have to do something and do it good and hard or disaster awaits. He points out that some engineers have the temerity to doubt AGW and he condescendingly feels sorry for them, since they are obviously being as unscientific as the people that peddle creationism and intelligent design.

Before I add my two cents, I would like to point out a little foible in his strawman. Now, I am a Darwin guy 100%, but lets’ face it, if you push and push and push on science you go to physics and then past relativity and quantum mechanics to get to— superstring theory. Nice theory, actually it is hypothesis. A lot of nice math. A lot of idea people. But there can be no possible testing of the hypothesis and therefore no science. Sorry, it bothers me too, but since we can’t test superstring theory it is indistinguishable from the religions that say God snapped her fingers 10,000 years ago and everything came into being just as it is today.

Funny thing is that, faced with the same facts as Kenton Williston, I draw the exact opposite conclusion. In fact AGW is far more a religious movement that a scientific one. Now please, before you greenies start foaming at the mouth and bite out chunks of the carpet, I am not saying climate theory is religious, or disputing the fact that the world certainly seems to be warming. There are tons of good science going on that examines the relationships of CO2, water vapor, cosmic rays, volcanic activity, asteroid impact and sunspot activity on global climate. But there are two religious wings. One is the global warming skeptics that think that absolutely nothing is going on and that we should not even care about these issues. The other religious wing is the global warming alarmists, who make a very tortured leaps of faith to come to the conclusion that not only should we do something, we should do just what they want us to do and do it right away.

I do agree with Mr. Williston that engineers should add their voice to the discussion. This is especially true because if the world adopts all the proposals of the AGW alarmists, then you can expect to spend at least twice as much for gasoline and natural gas and you can also expect to spend twice as much for electricity. In addition, the cost of every single manufactured good should go up about 25% due to the higher cost of energy. So what do we know for certain about anthropogenic global warming? Not very much for sure.

Lets go over the basis for AGW.

1)      CO2 concentrations have gone from 300ppm to 400ppm in the last century.

2)      That increase is due to human consumption of fossil fuels and burning forests.

3)      The increases in CO2 from 0.03% to 0.04% is triggering much larger increases in water vapor.

4)      The increase of CO2 and water vapor in the atmosphere that block infrared radiation out to space means that the equilibrium temperature that can radiate heat out to space is at a higher altitude.

5)      The higher altitude of the equilibrium sphere means that surface temperatures have to be hotter.

6)      The world’s climate is demonstrably getting hotter, by about a degree in the last century, so all the above is true.

7)      There are one or more tipping points, positive feedback mechanisms, that once passed will cause massive climate change and that may well destroy the human race.

8)      Hence it is a simple fact that mankind is causing all the earth to warm and if we don’t do something right away we are all going to kill our grandchildren.

Nice, but first off, it is not a theory. It is a hypothesis. See a theory is built up from a whole series of hypotheses that have been proven experimentally. There are a lot of things wrong with AGW, but the most glaring is that it is not science, no more than intelligent design is. They are both broad sweeping hypotheses that have not only failed experimental testing; real-world results often contradict the stated hypothesis.

When looking at the individual steps in AGW (and I include the doomsday scenario since it is such and inherent part of the AWG proponent’s claims) they all seem pretty reasonable, and even a bit scientific. Some I would consider indisputable facts. Certainly number 1 and 2 are pretty pat. But the fascinating thing is that even those very obvious statements are subject to observable contradictions. For instance, looking at the CO2 increase superimposed on the temperature increase in the last 100 years you can see that the temperature increase seems to precede the CO2 increase. One hypothesis is that the higher temperatures of the earth are forcing CO2 out of the ocean. Well, I am an analog guy and even if CO2 sequestration is a very little understood part of the whole AWG hypothesis, we have to assume that if we burn billions of tons of CO2 into the air, it will surely push the equilibrium point to where there is more CO2 in the air. After all, we just pumped it out of the ground and burned it, so one would expect there to be more CO2 in the air.

There are other seemingly pat observable facts that are not really so pat. Take my #6. Yes, the climate has gotten warmer, but it seems to have stopped after 1998. From really good satellite data, the trend line levels off. This contradicts global warming hypothesis but supports the people that say that sunspot and solar activity is the dominant effect on climate. The global warms alarmists have cobbled up another kludge, they say that it is the particulates, yeah, that is the ticket, the particulates have caused the temperatures to level out, but once we clean up our diesel cars and coal power plants than bam, turn it up another notch—we will veer back to a certain catastrophe.

Now I am an analog guy, I can deal with shades of gray, so I am pretty certain the climate will not stay the same and I am pretty sure the climate skeptics and climate alarmists are both wrong. First off, the fact that the earth is getting warmer is no big surprise, after all we are coming out of an ice age. Did you know about Milankovitch cycles? Check them out, the precession of the earth causes a lot more climate change than CO2 apparently. And don’t forget to watch the lecture from Art Robinson where he shows that sunspot activity and warming trends have a correlation coefficient of 0.92.

When I look at my list above I am pretty much in agreement with the first 6 points. Oh, and do be sure to understand greenhouse theory—it is not like a flower greenhouse, it is much more fascinating and Mr. Williston is right, Fourier discovered it in the 1800s, but that is one small crumb of science in the religious madness that is AGW. As a recent commenter to the EETimes article, Kyle The Zombie Killer, noted:

As an engineer, you should understand that stable systems are generally dominated by negative feedback. This contradicts the basic assumptions of the alarmist viewpoints espoused by James "tipping point" Hansen and others. Please refrain from using wikipedia links as references. Arrhenius’ musings of 1896 predate all of modern physics. Planck’s work on blackbody radiation took place several years later and he won the Nobel Prize for this work in 1918. Spectral lines were not fully developed until 1913 by Niels Bohr, who won the 1922 Nobel Prize for it. Longwave infrared does not escape to space from Earth’s surface, but instead radiates away from high in the troposphere. That’s the foundation of modern GHG models. There’s little water vapour up there because it’s so cold, so CO2 is presumed to be the main far-IR radiator at that altitude. The assumption of GHG models is that IR will need to be radiated from ever colder regions of the troposphere as CO2 levels rise. Therefore, less energy will actually be emitted, since the temperature is lower. To find the equilibrium in this model, you have to increase the temperature of the Earth’s surface such that assuming a constant "lapse rate" (this is the rate at which air gets colder with altitude) you get the same IR-out as you did with other values of CO2 concentration. Other energy transport mechanisms, notably convection and cloud interactions are neglected. Herein lies the trouble.

See, where I have to say thing are getting wacky is the when people start spouting off the latest code words for greenies trying to prove they care more about the world than I do. The tipping point. Now I worked in the amplifier group at National Semiconductor and have designed several servo systems. Positive feedback is a very rare thing. What’s more, if the positive feedback in our climate system was as delicate as the alarmists say they are, we would have all died off millions of years ago. The earth is at a pretty stable place in its development, as you would expect from an extremely complex system. Complex systems just don’t go twang and veer of into catastrophe, that is religious millennial thinking, something that must appeal to the human mind since it has been used by religious figures for millennia in order to get people to obey the leadership. In 1000 years, stopping our use of fossil fuels at this time will be looked at as being as savage and stupid as the Aztecs cutting out people’s hearts to insure the sun comes up the next day.

OK, what else bothers me about AGW? Well, the big deal is that they substitute computer simulations for experimental confirmations. We analog engineers have been dealing with SPICE and if a 100 billion dollar industry cannot come up with a three pin transistor simulation that always works, well don’t expect anything as complex as climate to ever be modeled with a computer. After all, as has been noted, if you are going to simulate climate you have to simulate weather and to do that you have to simulate the turbulent fluid flow equations of both the atmosphere and the oceans. No model even attempts to do that, so don’t expect too much from computer models, just like you should not expect too much from SPICE.

Other things that make me wary of AGW are that they have been consistently wrong. The same crowd was predicting global cooling 20 years ago. Their temperature-rise predictions have uniformly been off by octaves if not decades. And the tipping point catastrophe scenarios are obviously being voiced by people that have no concept and no formal training in control theory or feedback mechanisms. The AWG crowd came up with the famous “hockey stick” graph that showed we are at the warmest in history. It was based on a terrible analysis of data. The medieval warm period was far warmer. Here is Al Gore’s response. And a rejoinder. Indeed, please don’t quote me anything that comes from the IPCC. That is like asking the Pope what religion is best. Similarly I am not too interested in what skeptic MIT professor Richard Lindzen says either. But there are a lot more James Hansens then the are Lindzens, and they all need to be tuned out.

But one thing is certain; the alarmists sure are predicting doom. And the only thing worse than their science is their solutions. Al Gore wants to eliminate fossil fuels use by 2050. Look at this. Now, if you are an engineer, tell me that Al’s suggestion does not sound like any other marketing BS you have heard by the management elite. At best Gore is an attention whore and at worst he is clinically insane. We know he is a hypocrite because he is not doing webcasts, he is jetting around the world and burning a couple hundred kilowatts per month at the mansion. His movie is docuganda and you can find a point-by-point refutation here.

And that is the real trouble, these AGW proponents are so strident and so earnest they think is it OK to lie and tell falsehoods because they are so sure mankind is destroying itself. They have to lie because they know, they just know, we are so stupid and only they have received the Truth. They have received carbon into their lives. Everything is the end of the earth, but they have cried wolf so many times reasonable people are getting tired. Remember when the AWG crowd said the North Pole was going to melt and flood the earth? Well guess what, the North Pole is floating ice so when it melts nothing happens to the ocean’s level. Except that is not quite true, see, the ice is fresh water so it will raise the level a tiny bit, but not the gross amout claimed by the AWG crowd. We remember the prediction of doom but never the refutation. And we never remember any analog subtleties in the argument where both sides are a little right. If you want to know how the holocaust could happen in Germany just look at the hysteria about AWG and you can see how things get really crazy really fast.

Mr. Williston over at EETimes says that people that don’t believe in global warming are just like the people that don’t believe in evolution. Well science is not a democracy, and just because a bunch of journalists and politicians believe the world is coming to an end and we need, surprise, more taxes, that does not mean there is not some decent science on both sides of the issue. In addition to the petition by 31,000 scientists challenging AGW, there is this batch of physicists that thinks maybe we should calm down and be a bit more scientific.

Now the greenies I like to have fun with green-baiting are really good decent people and you have to salute them for caring about the planet. I too care about the planet. But accessing the risks to our civilization, here is the real list we need to worry about:

1)      The bankrupting of our economy by Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and prescription drug entitlements.

2)      The horrible lack of rational water policy in the US. We give water to big corporations to grow food in deserts. We need to charge people for what water costs and get a bunch of it from Canada and at least reload the Ogallala aquifer.

3)      We have to stop eating bait and go back to eating fish. This means an international agreement to protect and conserve our oceans as well as a lot of domestic preservation policy.

4)      Local governments have to be subject to strict water pollution laws, the sewage plants are still poisoning our rivers.

5)      We have to charge people for what electricity really costs. I don’t think CO2 is a pollutant but we sure should be talking the methyl mercury and acid rain out of coal plants before we worry about CO2.

Then after we spend money to fix all these problems, maybe 50 or 100 years from now, we can look at climate change from a more rational perspective. One thing that may really irk people on both sides of the issue is that the effects of humans on climate change may be unknowable, just like the superstring hypothesis may never be proven. Some things do approach god and some things may be too complex to understand. You know how the climate alarmists have conjured up particulates into their precious models to prove that they were right all along, so don’t be surprised if they never do accept that they perhaps overstated things a tiny bit.

As I said, I am neither a climate skeptic nor alarmist. I am a climate realist and an analog one at that. I do think most every hypothesis proposed by the global warming crowd is somewhat correct. Humans are making CO2, the CO2 is leveraging water vapor. That is increasing the average temperature. But where we diverge is in the analog nature—they are digital—if anything changes a little then it is doomsday. I think a degree or two of temperature increase by 2100 will not do too much damage and may have quite a few benefits, since CO2 promotes plant growth and warm is better than cold for human beings. Do not let the former Marxists that dominate the political component of global warming activism use a hypothetical scare in order to shut down global capitalism. Of that I am sure, we are better off with capitalism and a little warming than communism and equality of outcome, with the whole planet living in squalor since we can only add as much CO2 to the air as we breathe.

BTW—here is a little fact. The average American generates 22 tons of CO2 per year. Each human has about 792,000 tons of atmosphere. But if the IPCC has their way you will only be able to generate in a month what you used to generate in a day. You won’t be able to have central heat, a car, and the CO2 you breathe out will be a large portion of your CO2 allowance (after Seitz, Carbon-based Prohibition, not yet on the web).

Is there any hope? Will there be any science that helps us to figure out if we are going to cause a catastrophe? Well, sure, that is the great thing about science. I will be looking to climate paleontologists, ice-core samples and planetary exploration. Did you know about the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum? It used to be way way hotter—the thing we should be studying is global cooling. That is the real disaster scenario, not a couple degrees temperature rise in a century. By listening to scientists that have a million-year view on climate, we may better be able to put in perspective what is happening in the next 100 years, and just what, if anything, we should do about it. Now get back to work.