A bunch of whoi

[jsage]

Joking aside here is what I think is worth considering. But I'll lead in with an old joke.

An Electrical engineer, chemist, mechanical engineer and a Microsoft Programmer were traveling together when their car stalled.

The EE was certain it was a problem with the distributor, The chemist was certain that the problem was due to bad gas, the mechanical engineer said it must be a problem with the timing chain. The microsoft engineer said why don't we all just open the door and get out then get back in and see if it starts.

There is a danger of having to narrow a scope. In reality it was an EMF disturbance created by a government jet flying overhead ; )

I think this is worthwhile to know there are a number of the resources here with slightly different perspectives and basis for concern.


The hook. Generally played down though. News for the masses.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2...mar_arctic.htm

"If the Great Conveyor Belt suddenly stops, the cause might not matter. Europeans will have other things on their minds--like how to grow crops in snow. Now is the time to find out, while it's merely a chilling possibility."

Oceanic Climate Change Institute


http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/occi/...?o=read&id=501



Selected topics

Ice and the atlantic and greater oceanic conveyer.

http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/occi/...cle.do?id=9206

Common misperceptions about abrupt climate change

http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/occi/...le.do?id=10149

Separating fact from fiction

The day after tommorow

http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/occi/...cle.do?id=9948


Abrupt Climate Change: Should We Be Worried?

Are we ignoring the oceans' role in climate change?

http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/occi/...cle.do?id=9986

An Ocean Warmer Than a Hot Tub


http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/occi/...le.do?id=10366

[fizzissist]

Citing Woods Hole looks good on the surface, and they've got some very competent scientists working there.

Before taking everything you see on their site at face value, you might dig a little deeper into some background.....like for instance, "...As the American Geophysical Union recently concluded: "It is scientifically inconceivable that - after changing forest into cities, putting dust and soot into the atmosphere, putting millions of acres of desert into irrigated agriculture, and putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere - humans have not altered the natural course of the climate system."

Does that represent the ENTIRE body of the AGU??? No, it does not. Neither is it taken in context. How many respected readers here actually KNOW an AGU member, much less have experienced discussing climate issues and specifics with an AGU member with expertise in the subject????

The chair of AGU's focus group on global environmental change is Dr. Roni Avissar, and he has some problems with GCMs(which the IPCC uses to base it's alarms on)...He said back in '98 that current GCMs only paramterize the effects of one important process, that is, the effects of turbulent heat fluxes close to the surface, which are dominant there. They fail however, to include the mesoscale heat fluxes that are dominant in the middle and upper parts of the boundry layer. Apparently it's still a problem, as evidenced in his PowePoint presentation in May of '05.

http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/cgc/gro...05-amazon.html


Thought it might be of interest to note some of his recent work, since it's been suggested here that trees are the answer.....

Durham, N.C. -- Growing tree plantations to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to mitigate global warming -- so called "carbon sequestration" -- could trigger environmental changes that outweigh some of the benefits, a multi-institutional team led by Duke University suggested in a new report. Those effects include water and nutrient depletion and increased soil salinity and acidity, said the researchers.

"We believe that decreased stream flow and changes in soil and water quality are likely as plantations are increasingly grown for biological carbon sequestration," the 10 authors wrote in a paper published in the Friday, Dec. 23, 2005, issue of the journal Science.

http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2005/12/carbontrade.html

[jsage]

I believe we are focusing on different time scales. I'm looking more micro and geographic possibilities.

I'm not disagreeing with anything that has some correlation and validity. I am saying that the conveyor is a known physical process based on salinity and temperature differences. Temperature gradients effect weather severity. Is something outrageously new occuring here. No. I just expect there is a significant enough indication that we will see effects which revolve around this process.

[jsage]

fizzissist,

Had some difficulty with the first topic. Checked out the power point. Without having to time to hear the presentation I probably didn't much more than deforestation is accelerating and secondary growth doesn't do as well. Fires are a problem and roads accelerate deforestation.

On the planting of trees in deforested areas. The finding made sense. You lose the canopy/biomass and effect on ecosystem, jump starting it is not easy as just not destroying in the first place. The investment and period of time invested to restore a self sustaining, self replicating chlorophyl based carbon dioxide sequestering system requires more than just a weekends friend of the trees "planting" activity ; ).

I don't have the whole story. At the same time considering all the controversies I'm focusing on what I see as a core, albiet secondary mechanism of climate perturbation. Similary, I'd rather share something that was synthesis of ongoing work, though cognizant of the potential for bias. The hope is that more than just saying lets get all the carbon dioxide in hopes that it will reverse years of anthropogenic effects. What is a likely outcome that validates that we may need more than sunscreen and business as usual.

I really hate this topic but what bothers me more is seeing the way things are spun and the proliferation of the concrete jungle. The subtle progress of degradation that takes some of the magic of nature out of life.

The statement by whatever his name is not a quantified statement. It is an epistemic quandary at best. At what point does the number of pieces of straw equal a hay bale.

[fizzissist]

Ok, I admit to throwing in the deforestation stuff knowing it was off-track... but WHOIS quoted AGU, and that opens up the discussion to all the various avenues. After all, you put up the links...

I intentionally brought up the GCM problems, and they ARE central to the issue.

The ocean current that you talked about is one of Richard Alley's major interests, and look at what the Committee on Abrupt Climate Change, chaired by him, has to say about them:

"At present, the models used to assess
climate and its impacts cannot simulate the size,
speed, and extent of past abrupt changes, let alone
predict future abrupt changes. Efforts are needed to
improve how the mechanisms driving abrupt climate
change are represented in these models and to more
rigorously test models against the climate record."

Again, I have to question, just what triggered these other abrupt changes, if it wasn't us???? The thermohaline stops, it starts.....and stops, and starts...
Sorry sports fans, but that puts us well into the realm of normal variability.

"......tree rings show the frequency of
droughts, sediments reveal the number and type of
organisms present, and gas bubbles trapped in ice cores
indicate past atmospheric conditions. With such
techniques, researchers have discovered repeated
instances of large and abrupt climate changes over the
last 100,000 years during the slide into and climb out of
the most recent ice age—local warmings as great as 28°F
(16°C) occurred repeatedly, sometimes in the mere span
of a decade."

http://dels.nas.edu/dels/rpt_briefs/...ange_final.pdf

[jsage]

So I get this right, you are saying that we can't prove we are causing global warming. If that is what your saying, ok I can accept that.

I hate using this because it is a bit silly but the old saying for lack of nail a shoe was lost, for lack of shoe a horse was lost, for lack of horse a soldier was lost, for lack of a soldier a war was lost.

Taking another angle we are assuming that only the same inputs can create a given outcome.

Example we have a hard time proving exactly what killed the dinosaurs we want the single smoking gun, meteor hit. However it has also been strongly that supported that this event in itself did not wipe out the dinosaurs nor did the previous impact wipe out there predecessors in the Permian.

Generalizing the meteor hit was a major climatic input to the system the propagation of this input created some chain of events that likely killed the dinosaurs.

Stepping along lets say that chain of events deforested a significant portion of the land mass at that time. It didn't happen all at once it was a breakdown of the existing trophic web. I think if I remember correctly what they found was a lot of ferns which are more tolerant to acidity than most flora. Large vegetarian dinosaurs couldn't live off ferns, carnivores were left with smaller prey combined with other stresses (acid rain). Game over.

Stepping away from that a little, instead of one time deforestation event, we have continuous deforestation, widescale depletion of species, varied and increasing sources of pollution. The horse is missing more than a shoe.

Sure this could have been the result of meteor strike or the 20 thousand year cycle of the sun coupled with other factors.

However we have become one of the major inputs to the system. So I agree with what's his name. We have taken some of the disorganized localized inputs that wax and wane with environmental changes and replaced it with ourselves, highly adaptive but our success is also detrimental.

How bout those frogs. We didn't give em extra legs, did we (:. Life here is carbon based. What's the saying matter is never created or destroyed it just changes form. Tongue in cheek all that carbon dioxide is somehow related to all the life forms we wiped out,disrupted, fished out, dug up, burned. Carbon lost from evironmental degradation. We inserted ourselves into the global process.

So while I stretched my logic very thin, just because it has happened before industrialization doesn't mean we are not currently part of the problem. Take a look around at what we have effected and what is truly natural, indigenous etc. Imagine what it looked like without us here.

Then tell me we don't factor into the equation, global warming or whatever else. It's ironic the contest is to effect the environment but we are arguing that we don't effect it. We can't take ourselves out of the equation, cause we got no place to go ; )

It's not a neat little package and the cause and effect involves everything. Consider maybe our form of ordering stabilized the climate but in a direction that wasn't sustainable. The amazonian canopy has an effect on the localized weather which is a component of the global weather, but we don't have an effect on the global climate?

So in this epic ramble I have not produced the smoking gun. The real question is with this degraded environment can a small stress that would have been balanced by other natural inputs now interact synergistically with our own negative stresses. We end up with a result that was created by different set of inputs in the past but this time we tipped the severity from minor to major.

A localized example would be the dust bowl that happened last century in the midwest. Our crops weren't indigenous so the effects were more catastrophic. Before my time so I think this is correct.

Makes me wonder what happened in Egypt, they sure like their sand ; )

[NinerSevenTango]

Originally Posted by jsage Taking another angle we are assuming that only the same inputs can create a given outcome.

No, it's that our inputs are likely negligible in the overall scheme of things, and predicting that our inputs are the cause of changes that already happen naturally is logically unwarranted.

Along with this logically unwarranted assertion comes a demand for us to submit to world rule by those who posit the scenario. Turns out the politicians are paying the scientists, who are feeding the politicians the data they want to hear, all for the purpose of leading the gullible to believe that the 'middle of the road most sensible' approach, is to just give in, give them the power, sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice. They are smarter than us, and they will do our thinking for us, and tell us what the truth is, and tell us what to do.

You will end up feeding them out of the product of your efforts while they use everything they gain from you to drum up support for more and more control over your life. And they know -- once they control your access to energy, and the energy input to everything you can buy or eat (which starts out as dirt until you put energy into it), they've got you under control, with no escape possible.

I suggest reading Karl Marx and other socialist/communist thinkers. Just substitute the word "environment" wherever you see the words "society" or "downtrodden workers", and the ruse becomes clear. It's an attempted power grab on an unprecedented scale. The difference is, once the downtrodden workers find out they will be slaves, they can throw off the yoke of the parasite masters. Since that ploy didn't work, a victim that can't talk back had to be found. The 'environment' will be ever silent, and her changes will happen slow enough that they might be able to gain power before she changes her fickle mind and starts cooling again.

With the common man unable to comprehend high school chemistry and physics, our society will swallow this hocus pocus hook, line and sinker, never adding up the data for themselves. When the new dogma comes to be enforced with the power of the government gun, arguing about the science will not only be pointless, it will be loudly shouted down by all the true believers, who are comfortable in their 'knowledge'.

"Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated!"

--97T--

[jsage]

I hear you.

How bout this for hypothesized outside perspective an extreme, polarized view with a kernel of truth. Hmm perhaps we should be more worried about computers.


Agent Smith

• As soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization.

• I'd like to share a revelation I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species, and I realized that you're not actually mammals. You see, every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You spread to an area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we, are the cure.

• I'm going to be honest with you. I... hate... this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, whatever you want to call it, I can't stand it any longer. It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it.

Quite ironically we are the most readily available organic matter that can be used to generate energy. How is that for juxtaposition.

[miljnor]

This brings to mind a recurring argument I have had in physics.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle doesn't mean we are uncertain that a chair will be a chair at any particular time (a popular misconception among Sci-fi/Fantasy book readers), it is merely a mathematical construct to say that OUR math isn't perfect and the error factor is present. Kinda like estimating your time of arrival at any particular destination.

My point is to read the actual studies and documents and principles behind the documents that state on conclusion or another.

Most of the stuff put up here and on other threads are just the hype or BS that public news or popular media throw out there with no particular emphasis on facts.

[jsage]

Exactly.

[fizzissist]

I'm going to propose that if we apply Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to GCMs and IPCC predictions, the result is simply the more accurate they propose to be, the less accurate they are in reality.

So far, this seems to be the case.

AlGore for President!!

[jsage]

it is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong j.g. UT actuarial science

To some degree our perspective, our existence, approach influences the outcome though we might oversimplify our view that we are objectively measuring an independent phenomenon. And so not to butcher this completely and tie back, we can generally parameterize the behavior while not being able to discern all the interrelationships that effect the observed phenomena. More to it but that was my shallow recollection of the concept. Error being unquantified factors and interrelationships.

Einstien hated it but could not dismiss it. It is the freaky unfinished science. Freaky because we can't fully explain the behavior but we know it exists.

Ultimately, I'd say we have to look at the best evidence thoroughly and pursue the least disruptive course whatever that might be. It really can't be a purely quantitive because the models will never spit out the exact answers and I'm not sure we have to. Instead, we would have to make a human assessment of what makes the most sense. Balance short term realities with long term risk mitigation.