Via Via Meadia comes this news:
The Economist also brings us big news on the “settled science” of climate change. A new study has found soot to be twice as bad for climate as was previously thought, making it the second most damaging greenhouse agent after CO2. This is actually good news for two reasons.
First, soot is easier to control than CO2, and targeting that kind of pollution provides lots of benefits that have nothing to do with climate change: it’s a dangerous pollutant and a health threat on its own. Second, controlling soot will seriously slow the speed of climate change. One of the study’s authors told the Economist that fully addressing the soot problem would strip half a degree from potential warming, buying politicians and scientists more time to make informed decisions.
I’m not particularly convinced that the second point is relevant to me – the Greenies have had a long and largely inglorious history of predicting looming environmental doom for going on half a century now – but if it’s relevant enough to somebody to get him or her to endorse getting that junk out of the air… OK, whatever. The goal is cleaner air.
‘Course, doing something about this means doing something about the People’s Republic of China. Which probably means removing the “People’s” part of the name, somehow. God knows you can’t trust a Commie to take care of the ecosystem…
Via Instapundit.
I have a crazy idea, Moe… Get all the Kyoto signatories back together, and point out to each of them that it’ll be 20 years – nearly a generation – in 2017… and that perhaps China should be expected to “make more significant contributions” due to their “improved situation” over 1997…
.
Mew
Makes a certain amount of sense. Black probably means a higher whatsit of adsorption, and small size means a high surface area, which means that thermal energy transfer happens faster when it happens.
.
The talk of ‘climate change’ and ‘rate of climate change’ strikes me as silly. Half because, as with ‘Unicorn Rainbow Castle’, I don’t have a clear idea of what it physically means. Half because I have about as clear an idea of the mechanism as I do of how throwing babies to the river spirit controls flooding.
.
Long term, if the claims about the models that speak to urgency are true, there is probably no feasible, plausible solution that does not involve mass murder. (If the urgently needed solutions are, on close examination, not workable, then if we are that desperate, we can only fall back on what humans have been able to do before. (Mass murder would work, if anything can, and if there isn’t time to sit down and convince me…))
.
There is an energy cost tied up with having a population. This is decreased by starvation, exposure and outright mass murder. There is an energy cost to a population doing stuff. This is easily decreased by wrecking the economy. (I have read Obama’s policy on energy and the environment, as of early 2009. I haven’t had any surprises.)
.
Revisiting the science side of things, I am unconvinced that the commonly cited climate models have avoided certain basic errors. How well the problem is posed and defined is vastly important for finding a solution. When it relates to experiments and real world measurements, such things as statistics, experimental design, and measurement error become important. What is appropriate for academic science can be inappropriate where human life is at risk, and vice versa.
The first question we need to answer is “What is the optimum temperature of the globe?”
I get the impression that Al Gore thinks it was during the Eisenhower years when the climate was mild enough to enjoy wearing his Davey Crockett coon skin cap but I would like to hear a greater discussion on the issue.
Before that we need to have a usable definition of ‘temperature of the globe’. By geometry, the hot bits towards the center will have a significant influence on the average. My understanding is that our error bars are huge for those parts, and will thus lead to errors greater than the trends we are trying to isolate.
.
Assuming a homogenous sphere of constant temperature would be fine for some problems, but we are trying to track very small scale variations. It may be understanding things to say that we are trying to detect something like the thermal properties of a small amount of bacteria on a basketball.
.
Yes, it is obvious that we want to know about the bits where we live.
.
A defined volume lets one figure out what temperature measurements need to be taken to get numbers for a given error. For the Earth, it is easy to make different legitimate definitions that will give different values for ‘Earth Average Surface Temperature on Time/Date’. Not all of these definitions are possible to calculate with the measurements we already have. Even some of the ones we can calculate now might not let us go very far back with any usefully low inherent error.
.
For many of the measurement schemes that we could devise for the Earth’s temperature, we might need to buy the thermometers now, start measuring, and only decades in the future have useful data over a long enough span of time. That is speaking simply, and not thinking about technical issues we might want to better solve first.
.
A sloppy definition that the investigators just slide into tends to lead to additional error and irreproducibility. (Try making a coat by grabbing a bolt of cloth and some scissors, and see how fast you screw the thing up beyond all repair.) Worse case is screwed up numbers with major statistical issues and not a clue that there is anything to be concerned about at all.
My point is, I just hope they do not pick the 1600s as the ideal since back then the Thames often froze so solidly that they were able to hold month long ice carnivals on the river in London.
What is this Global Warming you speak of we started the day at -2 degrees and a -12 degree wind chill. And that is not the coldest I’ve ever seen when I lived in Illinois -20 to -40 were not unusual. So if there is Global Warming that’s a good thing.