1. Bringing Global Warming into a Lab
Imagine a basin containing four liters of water at zero deg C, in which a block of ice having a mass of 1 Kg is floating. Let’s light a fire under the basin and assume that water in the basin is absorbing heat at the rate of 2000 calories / minute. The process is assumed to be adiabatic so that we don’t have to deal with the slippery nature of heat, and we also assume that heat is transferred instantaneously to the water and ice (to make calculations simpler).
It so happens, that just before the start of our experiment, two Lilliputians friends (of Gulliver’s travel fame), one a global warming believer and another a sceptic take a wager regarding warming of the water; the sceptic offers to spend a night on the ice and measure the temperature of the water and prove that no warming is taking place. The global warming believer rows the sceptic to the ice block, leaves him there and rows back.
After measuring the temperature for fifteen minutes, where the thermometer refuses to nudge beyond the zero degree C reading, the sceptic curses the global warming crowd and falls asleep in his thermal sleeping bag. He is rudely awakened twenty minutes after he fell asleep to find that he is soaking wet and that the ice has practically disappeared. He starts the long swim to the shore and is saved from hypothermia by the gradually warming water; by the time he gets out of the water however he is badly scalded by the hot water – however happy to be alive. What happened?
Our lab thermometer shows that the temperature of the water increased as follows: (Time in minutes – Temp in degree C) 1-0, 5-0, 10-0, 30-0, 40-0, … 50-4, 60-8, 70-12, 90-20, 110-28, 130-36, 150-44, 170-52.
(Moral of the story: in such matters we cannot go by temperature readings alone )
The strongest proof that global warming is taking place is the disappearance of ice cover over the Arctic Ocean; since this fact is not in disputed, it is better that we concentrates on this issue. The laborious tabulation of temperatures worldwide to obtain global mean temperatures is important for scientific research, but not the most important proof of global warming.
from Pakistan: Kaghan loses four glaciers in twenty years:-------------------
(2) Assessing Risk
Is the global warming scare the greatest delusion in history?
To grasp the almost suicidal state of unreality our Government has been driven into by the obsession with global warming, it is necessary to put together the two sides to an overall picture – each vividly highlighted by events of recent days.
On one hand there is the utterly lamentable state of the science which underpins it all, illuminated yet again by “Climategate 2.0”, the latest release of emails between the leading scientists who for years have been at the heart of the warming scare (which I return to below). On the other hand, we see the damage done by the political consequences of this scare, which will directly impinge, in various ways, on all our lives.
Global warming may not be as severe as predicted
The authors of the National Science Foundation-funded study say there's no doubt that globalwarming is real, and that increases in atmospheric CO2 will have multiple serious impacts.
However, their data suggests that a doubling of CO2 wouldn't increase the rate of global warming by as much as the worst estimates of some previous studies – or even than projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2007.
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Should we accept the above write ups at face value? How good are we at risk assessment? What metrics must the public evolve to make an independent assessment of risk, free from the bias of interested parties?
1) First, how much credibility do our scientists, engineers, leaders and the media have?
It is good to keep in mind that even as the above actors were making themselves hoarse trying to convince us that we must cultivate a scientific spirit, they themselves were the main players in:
- - Over populating our planet.
- - Nearly completely destroying the natural environment that supports life.
- - Taking our economy beyond its sustainability limit
In short, these actors have no idea about risk, and it would be unwise to trust them fully.
2) Do our scientists in particular have the ability to assess risks?
- The second paper above says it all. Scientists will confuse one another so that all action gets delayed. Since they are highly dependent on supercomputers, it is not possible for them to visualise anything simple. This paper tries to derive wisdom from a time when a large part of North America was covered in ice. It is puzzling how this model can throw light on a situation when temperature is increasing and there is every possibility of a tipping event taking place, with uncontrolled release of methane and co2 locked in permafrost.
3) So, how should we ordinary folks react to all this creative confusion created by interested parties. After all, our lives will be on the line eventually?
- Let’s keep our mental model simple. I have been trying to understand the problem of ‘posture’, and I have a simple mental model; the x rays in Fig 6 of www.humanposture.com says it all; it provides 80% of the argument, that something is seriously wrong. (It is interesting to note that the Medical profession is still to even acknowledge that a problem exists!)
- Coming to the problem of global warming, we need to simplify our reasoning and not be diverted by each new media report put out by interested parties. My mental model for Global Warming is the melting of ice in the Arctic and the Antarctic….
OTTAWA — The current rate of sea ice loss in the Arctic is a change without precedent for 1,450 years, a paper published on Thursday by Nature concludes.
Scientists from Canada and the United States reconstructed the Arctic sea ice cover back to the year 561 using a variety of factors including ice core samples, tree ring counts and lake sediment analysis and, where available, ice observation records.
The scientists conclude that warmer air temperatures, most likely caused by climate change, are responsible for the decline of the multiyear sea ice at a rate of 8.6 percent a decade and “may soon result in an ice-free Arctic Ocean.” Other periods of Arctic sea ice loss were, by contrast, caused by shifts in the directions of warm ocean currents. The scientists said that both the magnitude and the duration of the current ice melt is without precedent.
- When ice melts, it does so silently, absorbing in the process 80 cal of heat for every gram of ice, even as the temperature remains constant at zero degrees C. Eighty cal is an enormous amount of heat; applied to a gram of water at zero degrees C, it would take the temperature of water to a sizzling 80 degrees. So, this talk of whether the atmosphere is actually heating up or not, and by how much, is misleading. We should be far more worried about the fact that so much ice is melting .
- Please visit my blog: http://warmingofglobe.
4) Can the nations of the world afford to delay actions to reduce the release of CO2 into the atmosphere?
- The answer is No. In engineering terms, the margin of safety we are working with is too low; in terms of (1) Our ability to properly model the phenomenon of global warming (2) Deploy resources to combat it (with severe constraint on resources looming over the horizon, the more we delay, the less resources we will eventually have to combat the problem – and the more resources we would have wasted on useless activities).
Selvaraj
