Global warming
February 2007
Global warming
Quote: "The scientists said global warming was very likely caused by human activity".
A phrase that allegedly translates to a more than 90 percent certainty that it is caused by man's burning of fossil fuels. It was the strongest conclusion to date, by a number of dedicated proponents, making it "politically incorrect" to say natural forces may well be to blame.
This sentence shows up as a news item in one of our local newspapers and to my mind demonstrates perfectly the limited horizon these scientists seem to have in trying to understand what really drives the phenomenon now popularly called "global warming".
The same scientists all appear biased towards finding human made evidence that might contribute to the problem of global warming, if it really is a problem. They put the blame squarely on the economic and social exuberance of Western Civilization as the sole culprit. They appear to have a personal agenda, which colors their views and politicizes their opinions. But sadly, if not mischievously, there seldom is any mention of the overall energy changes in our solar envelope which, while certainly not man-made, could nevertheless have a critical impact on climate change.
Instead, the subject is invariably limited to the subject of GHG, greenhouse gases, of which CO2, carbon dioxyde, would be the best known contributor, although the primary one really is water vapor. To be sure, there is more carbon dioxyde in the atmosphere today than 100 years ago but now it is claimed that the resulting increased temperature, at the earth's surface and in the atmosphere, ipso facto is the result of wasteful western economic and social behavior. Supposedly it will have disastrous results unless we cap greenhouse gases, specifically CO2, very drastically and soon.
What this self-fulfilling reasoning actually does, apart from confusing the public at large, is to reduce the economic and thereby, military and political power of the United States of America. But what is most disturbing in our hi-tech world is the display of allegedly clear-thinking scientists endorsing the causes of climatic changes based on half-baked climatic science. Because, once this statement has been made, rational thinking is usually thrown overboard and doomsday scenarios follow and proliferate, every one of which with the most dire consequences for mankind. Lastly, these proponents drive another nail into the coffin of western capitalism and its greed culture, by indicting anybody driving SUV's, pleasure boats and airplanes and claiming that those are the ultimate causes of all the misery in the world. The USA is really the biggest bad boy of them all.
This completely politicized "discourse" on the subject of global warming has taken on a life of its own and cannot be gainsaid by any rational commentator, it seems. Most politicians and media have fallen for this junk-science based nonsense and are now agitating to have us use subsidized corn based ethanol, drive small cars again and generally go back to living the way our grandparents did 100 years ago.
Today, our doomsday proponents ignore any remaining open questions because enough media noise has now been created that looking at the facts is a waste of time. Enough political momentum has been generated to start organizing for the action phases of reducing the use of fossil fuel consumption as fast as possible by getting state and federal governments to mandate more fuel efficient vehicles of all kinds, to mandate immediate improvements in the operation of coal fired power plants, to disallow any further drilling and exploration for oil in North America and further mandate enormous subsidies for renewable energy such as solar, wind and wave. And finally, to raise the price of a unit of energy significantly, whether kwh of electricity, gallons of propane or barrels of crude and to continue to deny the need for building more nuclear power plants.
Our marvelously efficient national market, which has proven to be the only agent capable of arranging the adequate supply and demand for products needed by 300 million Americans and many foreigners, will go into a tail spin resulting in more government mandates that will have ever more deleterious effects. While any rational person would call this a ridiculous scenario, which it is of course, it is nevertheless a dogmatic belief by all our anti-Americans and they will do anything to realize their "Alice in Wonderland" dreams.
So, as a result of all this hullabaloo we are urged to take our economy down by several notches to help save the world and all the poor people in it. How they would be so much better off without our helping with every catastrophe they experience is not explained. Our fanatical and liberal anti-American friends and citizens will do anything to bring down this bad and wasteful American Empire and its Middle East war-making.
So now that we know what drives the people pushing for this horrible scenario lets take a step back and consider.
Because THERE REALLY IS ANOTHER SIDE TO THIS COIN.
Nobody denies that there may well be a measure of global warming, but CO2 is not the culprit. That subject has been exhaustively studied and a cause and effect relationship is only speculative, not proven.
Well, my personal view is that there are 2 plausible causes:
1 global heat balance variations
2 solar and space energy flux variations
1 As to the first possibility, we all know about the El Nino problem and its associated impact on certain weather patterns, storms and marine life changes etc. Scientists admit they do not really understand the ENSO phenomenon, the El Nino Southern Oscillation issue and no two El Nino seasons are ever the same. While we know a lot about what happens to the air once Pacific Ocean surface temperatures increase, I have seen no serious treatments of the question about what might conceivably drive this phenomenon. Could it be variations in the heat dynamics of the earth's core?
If one realizes that the earth's crust is really paper thin, may be 20 miles on the average and ocean bottoms very much less so, on the order of may be 3 to 5 miles at the deepest points of the Pacific Ocean, then heat penetration from the core to the cold water of the deep ocean becomes plausible. We are talking here of very large heat fluxes over lengthy periods of time but on a somewhat random basis with only a marginal opportunity for prediction as long as we do not have appropriate monitoring equipment in place.
When you think about it and because it is a Pacific Ocean event, why would it be far fetched to investigate the source of its heating as coming from some of the deepest oceanic trenches, like the famous Mariana trench, 36,000 feet, or about 7 miles, deep. Much work on this subject has been done for years already by scientists at the University of California at Santa Cruz, under Professor Lay. Others, like Hamlund in Paris, Garnero in Arizona and Thorne in Alaska have made significant contributions.
There is much to be learned still about how the various cores of our globe interact and what effect this has on the surface. But there is no disagreement that we are looking at a huge heat machine some of the energy of which finds its way to the earth's surface. Those heat incursions on our surface very likely will be found where the crust is thinnest, which is in a number of places in the Pacific Ocean basin. Question: why could this not drive the El Nino storms?
Furthermore, the somewhat irregular heat or energy fluxes from the core to the surface might also provide an answer to the glacier melting dilemma. Some are melting and some are getting thicker. Only an irregular energy exchange, not tied to one uniform global or solar source, could be considered a plausible candidate. Hence, more attention should be paid to our earth's core physics and dynamics.
The earth's crust may well be thinner in places where the ocean is very deep than elsewhere, hence from time to time the ocean floor in a variety of places is likely to warm and cool as a result of the variations in the effective hot magma flux in the outer core of our globe. The energy imparted at certain times to the ocean's water is possibly not much on the level of solar energy exchanges, but it may well be quite adequate to ruin our weather patterns for a while, with all kinds of consequences.
If the magma energy release to the earth's surface is increasing for a while, as it probably has done many times in the past, we should attempt as quickly as possible to find ways to measure and monitor it and extrapolate its consequences for the weather and heating phenomena we observe on the earth's surface today. One of these consequences may well be the gradual increase of the earth's surface temperatures, only a few degrees will really upset a lot of things, but unfortunately, the phenomenon is still hard to track and measure.
A quick review of Pacific Ocean temperature research (ENSO, TONG-TAO programs) during the past 20 or so years, suggests that a good understanding of the basic Pacific Ocean surface dynamics is in hand. But thorough and ongoing monitoring of deep ocean heat sources does not seem to be available at this time. Notwithstanding the fact that particularly the central Pacific Ocean has very deep troughs with permanent heat vents together with marine life peculiar to that environment, it makes little sense, in my opinion, to expect only obvious heat sources to be possible causes. Significant sections of the ocean's floor might warm up a number of degrees Centigrade for months, if not years, to drive warm water plumes to the surface with results now well documented.
If it can be made plausible that this could be the actual cause of the El-Nino problem, then why couldn't a slightly more intense phenomenon be the real cause of our planet's current "global warming" issue??
2 The second possible, and possibly more probable, cause of "global warming" may be related to the varying energy exchanges between the earth and the sun as well as other energy fluxes coming to us from outer space. While the earth is sending back energy into space at night it should not be lost sight of as atmospheric and surface conditions slowly change.
Paraphrasing some comments from a recent report on global warming it had this to say: "What causes variations in Earth temperature? The answer may be fluctuations in solar activity. Comparing 11-year moving averages of surface temperatures during the period of warming known as The Little Ice Age with solar magnetic cycle lengths for the same period show that even relatively short, half-century-long fluctuations in temperature correlate well with variations in solar activity. When the cycles are short, the sun is more active, hence brighter, and the earth is warmer. These variations in the activity of the sun are typical of stars close in mass and age to our sun".
Until we really understand the totality of global energy exchanges between the earth's surface, from inside our globe as well as from space, we are ill advised to conclude that we already understand enough to take costly actions that could be disastrous economically and fruitless environmentally.
Many competent and dedicated people have been working hard to throw light on a complex subject which affects us all. As with so many difficult to understand subjects in the public domain, too many politicians and the media end up exploiting them to show how concerned and enterprising they are as soon as the subject takes on a political life of its own.
This is gambling with the country's future, economically, culturally and politically in the worst way, not to say anything about the failure of some people in power to avoid critical thinking.
Global warming
Quote: "The scientists said global warming was very likely caused by human activity".
A phrase that allegedly translates to a more than 90 percent certainty that it is caused by man's burning of fossil fuels. It was the strongest conclusion to date, by a number of dedicated proponents, making it "politically incorrect" to say natural forces may well be to blame.
This sentence shows up as a news item in one of our local newspapers and to my mind demonstrates perfectly the limited horizon these scientists seem to have in trying to understand what really drives the phenomenon now popularly called "global warming".
The same scientists all appear biased towards finding human made evidence that might contribute to the problem of global warming, if it really is a problem. They put the blame squarely on the economic and social exuberance of Western Civilization as the sole culprit. They appear to have a personal agenda, which colors their views and politicizes their opinions. But sadly, if not mischievously, there seldom is any mention of the overall energy changes in our solar envelope which, while certainly not man-made, could nevertheless have a critical impact on climate change.
Instead, the subject is invariably limited to the subject of GHG, greenhouse gases, of which CO2, carbon dioxyde, would be the best known contributor, although the primary one really is water vapor. To be sure, there is more carbon dioxyde in the atmosphere today than 100 years ago but now it is claimed that the resulting increased temperature, at the earth's surface and in the atmosphere, ipso facto is the result of wasteful western economic and social behavior. Supposedly it will have disastrous results unless we cap greenhouse gases, specifically CO2, very drastically and soon.
What this self-fulfilling reasoning actually does, apart from confusing the public at large, is to reduce the economic and thereby, military and political power of the United States of America. But what is most disturbing in our hi-tech world is the display of allegedly clear-thinking scientists endorsing the causes of climatic changes based on half-baked climatic science. Because, once this statement has been made, rational thinking is usually thrown overboard and doomsday scenarios follow and proliferate, every one of which with the most dire consequences for mankind. Lastly, these proponents drive another nail into the coffin of western capitalism and its greed culture, by indicting anybody driving SUV's, pleasure boats and airplanes and claiming that those are the ultimate causes of all the misery in the world. The USA is really the biggest bad boy of them all.
This completely politicized "discourse" on the subject of global warming has taken on a life of its own and cannot be gainsaid by any rational commentator, it seems. Most politicians and media have fallen for this junk-science based nonsense and are now agitating to have us use subsidized corn based ethanol, drive small cars again and generally go back to living the way our grandparents did 100 years ago.
Today, our doomsday proponents ignore any remaining open questions because enough media noise has now been created that looking at the facts is a waste of time. Enough political momentum has been generated to start organizing for the action phases of reducing the use of fossil fuel consumption as fast as possible by getting state and federal governments to mandate more fuel efficient vehicles of all kinds, to mandate immediate improvements in the operation of coal fired power plants, to disallow any further drilling and exploration for oil in North America and further mandate enormous subsidies for renewable energy such as solar, wind and wave. And finally, to raise the price of a unit of energy significantly, whether kwh of electricity, gallons of propane or barrels of crude and to continue to deny the need for building more nuclear power plants.
Our marvelously efficient national market, which has proven to be the only agent capable of arranging the adequate supply and demand for products needed by 300 million Americans and many foreigners, will go into a tail spin resulting in more government mandates that will have ever more deleterious effects. While any rational person would call this a ridiculous scenario, which it is of course, it is nevertheless a dogmatic belief by all our anti-Americans and they will do anything to realize their "Alice in Wonderland" dreams.
So, as a result of all this hullabaloo we are urged to take our economy down by several notches to help save the world and all the poor people in it. How they would be so much better off without our helping with every catastrophe they experience is not explained. Our fanatical and liberal anti-American friends and citizens will do anything to bring down this bad and wasteful American Empire and its Middle East war-making.
So now that we know what drives the people pushing for this horrible scenario lets take a step back and consider.
Because THERE REALLY IS ANOTHER SIDE TO THIS COIN.
Nobody denies that there may well be a measure of global warming, but CO2 is not the culprit. That subject has been exhaustively studied and a cause and effect relationship is only speculative, not proven.
Well, my personal view is that there are 2 plausible causes:
1 global heat balance variations
2 solar and space energy flux variations
1 As to the first possibility, we all know about the El Nino problem and its associated impact on certain weather patterns, storms and marine life changes etc. Scientists admit they do not really understand the ENSO phenomenon, the El Nino Southern Oscillation issue and no two El Nino seasons are ever the same. While we know a lot about what happens to the air once Pacific Ocean surface temperatures increase, I have seen no serious treatments of the question about what might conceivably drive this phenomenon. Could it be variations in the heat dynamics of the earth's core?
If one realizes that the earth's crust is really paper thin, may be 20 miles on the average and ocean bottoms very much less so, on the order of may be 3 to 5 miles at the deepest points of the Pacific Ocean, then heat penetration from the core to the cold water of the deep ocean becomes plausible. We are talking here of very large heat fluxes over lengthy periods of time but on a somewhat random basis with only a marginal opportunity for prediction as long as we do not have appropriate monitoring equipment in place.
When you think about it and because it is a Pacific Ocean event, why would it be far fetched to investigate the source of its heating as coming from some of the deepest oceanic trenches, like the famous Mariana trench, 36,000 feet, or about 7 miles, deep. Much work on this subject has been done for years already by scientists at the University of California at Santa Cruz, under Professor Lay. Others, like Hamlund in Paris, Garnero in Arizona and Thorne in Alaska have made significant contributions.
There is much to be learned still about how the various cores of our globe interact and what effect this has on the surface. But there is no disagreement that we are looking at a huge heat machine some of the energy of which finds its way to the earth's surface. Those heat incursions on our surface very likely will be found where the crust is thinnest, which is in a number of places in the Pacific Ocean basin. Question: why could this not drive the El Nino storms?
Furthermore, the somewhat irregular heat or energy fluxes from the core to the surface might also provide an answer to the glacier melting dilemma. Some are melting and some are getting thicker. Only an irregular energy exchange, not tied to one uniform global or solar source, could be considered a plausible candidate. Hence, more attention should be paid to our earth's core physics and dynamics.
The earth's crust may well be thinner in places where the ocean is very deep than elsewhere, hence from time to time the ocean floor in a variety of places is likely to warm and cool as a result of the variations in the effective hot magma flux in the outer core of our globe. The energy imparted at certain times to the ocean's water is possibly not much on the level of solar energy exchanges, but it may well be quite adequate to ruin our weather patterns for a while, with all kinds of consequences.
If the magma energy release to the earth's surface is increasing for a while, as it probably has done many times in the past, we should attempt as quickly as possible to find ways to measure and monitor it and extrapolate its consequences for the weather and heating phenomena we observe on the earth's surface today. One of these consequences may well be the gradual increase of the earth's surface temperatures, only a few degrees will really upset a lot of things, but unfortunately, the phenomenon is still hard to track and measure.
A quick review of Pacific Ocean temperature research (ENSO, TONG-TAO programs) during the past 20 or so years, suggests that a good understanding of the basic Pacific Ocean surface dynamics is in hand. But thorough and ongoing monitoring of deep ocean heat sources does not seem to be available at this time. Notwithstanding the fact that particularly the central Pacific Ocean has very deep troughs with permanent heat vents together with marine life peculiar to that environment, it makes little sense, in my opinion, to expect only obvious heat sources to be possible causes. Significant sections of the ocean's floor might warm up a number of degrees Centigrade for months, if not years, to drive warm water plumes to the surface with results now well documented.
If it can be made plausible that this could be the actual cause of the El-Nino problem, then why couldn't a slightly more intense phenomenon be the real cause of our planet's current "global warming" issue??
2 The second possible, and possibly more probable, cause of "global warming" may be related to the varying energy exchanges between the earth and the sun as well as other energy fluxes coming to us from outer space. While the earth is sending back energy into space at night it should not be lost sight of as atmospheric and surface conditions slowly change.
Paraphrasing some comments from a recent report on global warming it had this to say: "What causes variations in Earth temperature? The answer may be fluctuations in solar activity. Comparing 11-year moving averages of surface temperatures during the period of warming known as The Little Ice Age with solar magnetic cycle lengths for the same period show that even relatively short, half-century-long fluctuations in temperature correlate well with variations in solar activity. When the cycles are short, the sun is more active, hence brighter, and the earth is warmer. These variations in the activity of the sun are typical of stars close in mass and age to our sun".
Until we really understand the totality of global energy exchanges between the earth's surface, from inside our globe as well as from space, we are ill advised to conclude that we already understand enough to take costly actions that could be disastrous economically and fruitless environmentally.
Many competent and dedicated people have been working hard to throw light on a complex subject which affects us all. As with so many difficult to understand subjects in the public domain, too many politicians and the media end up exploiting them to show how concerned and enterprising they are as soon as the subject takes on a political life of its own.
This is gambling with the country's future, economically, culturally and politically in the worst way, not to say anything about the failure of some people in power to avoid critical thinking.
posted by Schaesberg at 1:08 PM
