Jacob's

Ted Kennedy died.

2009-08-29T15:56:00.002+03:00

Like many people, I remember vividly the moment when I first heard about JFK's assassination. As a teenager, I was impressed by JFK, and terribly saddened. I lost my enthusiasm for this family very fast.
Now Ted Kennedy, which I was never a fan of, died, and I stumbled upon this long profile of his, by Michael Kelly, published in 1990.

Perhaps this seems unfair. From all available evidence, God created our elected officials to drink and screw around. Arrogance, too, is common. So is sexual recklessness (witness Gary Hart, Robert Bauman and Barney Frank); power dements as well as corrupts. But Kennedy’s behavior stands out.

(Bold is mine).
Eye opening article, written by a Liberal, not a political rival.

Obama to nominate Bernanke.

2009-08-25T13:10:00.003+03:00

Obama to nominate Bernanke for second term as Fed chairman. This is only natural. It's true, Bernanke is a Republican, and was nominated for his job by President G.W. Bush, but he is a RINO (republican in name only). I mean - if you didn't know his party affiliation you would never guess it from his policies. He fits like hand in glove with the Democratic credo of "print baby, print" more money.
Bernanke also did some succesful campaigning with his speech that said, modestly: "I, single handedly, killed the worst depression since the Great one". I think Ron Paul was more on the mark with this remark:

“The Federal Reserve, in collaboration with the giant banks, has created the greatest financial crisis the world has ever seen,” Representative Ron Paul, Republican of Texas, said at a House hearing last week in which Mr. Bernanke testified about the state of the economy.

Republican lawmakers portray the Fed as the embodiment of heavy-handed big government, and have called for scaling back the central bank’s regulatory powers.

Exactly. Bernanke's policies are the same as the ones recommended by Paul Krugman, the rabidly liberal (lefty) columnist of the NY Times. So, there's no wonder Obama renominated him. There are other reasons too: you don't change horses in mid race, and if anything goes wrong (which is sure to happen) you have a handy fall man.
While many, including the doom prophet Nuriel Roubini, praise Bernanke for indeed saving us from a big depression, other depression specialists, like Anna Jacobson Schwartz (Milton Friedman's co-author on the depression) have a very detailed and professional critique of his policies:

Mr. Bernanke seems to know only two amounts: zero and trillions. Before 2008 there were only moderate increases in the Federal Reserve’s aggregate balance sheet numbers, but since then the balance sheet has exploded by trillions of dollars. The increase was spurred by the Fed’s loans to troubled institutions and purchases of securities.
Why is easy monetary policy such a sin? Because in such an environment, loans are cheap and borrowers can finance every project that they dream up. This results in excesses, and also increases the severity of the recession that inevitably follows when the bubble bursts.

Roubini, though, beside praising Bernankes handling of the crisis once it happened, also states that Bernanke failed to do anything to prevent the crisis in the two years he reigned prior to it's outburst, when many, including Roubini, were predicting it.
I'm not optimistic about the economic recovery.

Quackery

2009-05-28T15:05:00.002+03:00

A compelling and lucid article claims that much of modern economics is quackery. Given the mad stampede of money printing that all governments are engaged in, nowadays, I don't see how anybody could believe otherwise.
Here are some quotes:

The 20th century was the century of quack everything. Perhaps most infamous was the great Soviet quack-geneticist, Trofim Lysenko.

No, the postwar Western university is our true Valhalla of quack. The sad fact is that almost everything studied and taught in Western universities today is quackery. The only exceptions are some areas of science and engineering.

And then there's economics.
Pretty much everyone thinks of 20th-century economics as a seething nest of quackery. Including most 20th-century economists. All they disagree on is who the quacks are.

It is incontrovertible that quack economics is alive and well in the world today. It is possible that the Austrian, Chicago, George Mason, New Keynesian, and "post-autistic" schools of economics are all quack. It is certainly not possible that they are all nonquack.

So we can reframe our quack detector by declaring that there are two kinds of economists: those who believe that monetary dilution is essential, and those who believe it is inessential.

And this is why dilutionists are quacks. Dilutionists are quacks because it is impossible to imagine a way in which the systematic pilfering of wallets could somehow be essential to commerce and industry.

Basically, what we're looking at here is the harsh but necessary process of waking up from the last century. There is a reason that quackery, in economics and poetry and nutrition and painting and history and psychology and paleoclimatology and computer science and just about any other department you can name, did so well in the 20th-century university system. Reality knows no master, but quackery is useful. Sometimes it's even profitable.

The impossibility of perpetual forcing.

2009-04-17T15:33:00.004+03:00

At a talk given by J. Hansen at the Climate Change Congress, “Global Risks, Challenges &Decisions”, Copenhagen, Denmark, March 11, 2009, he said (inter alia):

The planet’s present energy imbalance, at least to first order, determines the change of climate forcings needed to stabilize climate. Climate models, using typical presumed scenarios of climate forcings for the past century, suggest that the planet should be out of energy balance by +0.75 ± 0.25 W/m2, … (absorbed solar energy exceeding heat radiation to space).
If all other forcings were fixed, a reduction of CO2 amount to 350 ppm would restore the planet’s energy balance, assuming that the present imbalance is 0.5 W/m2. If fossil fuel emissions continue at anything approaching “business-as-usual” scenarios, it is not feasible to restore planetary energy balance and stabilize climate.

How Can Climate be Stabilized?
Must Restore Planet’s Energy Balance
Imbalance: +0.5 ± 0.25 W/m2
Requirement Might be Met Via:
Reducing CO2 to 350 ppm or less &
Reducing non-CO2 forcing ~ 0.25 W/m2

Dr. Hansen seems to me to be saying the following: The energy imbalance caused by CO2 (and other greenhouse gases [GHG]) – causes the earth to warm up. (So far, ok). As long as the imbalance continues – warming will continue – ad infinitum. (That is, as other alarmist say – until Earth turns into Venus – 900 deg. C hot). The only way to eliminate the imbalance is to reduce CO2 (and GHG) back to their pre-industrial levels (or to 350 ppm). All this based solely on GHG considerations – ignoring feedbacks. (Dr. Hansen doesn't mention feedbacks in the presentation.)

This seems to me fundamentally flawed – glaringly false – based on elementary, trivial, physical principles:
Forcing – or imbalance - is a relative term, relative to some previous state. It is not absolute. Suppose CO2 goes from 280 to 560 ppm. This will cause the earth to warm, due to the "forcing", but, in the new, warmer state, the earth will emit more IR radiation into space, until a new balance is reached and the "forcing" canceled. The earth will be warmer – but the forcing will stop, and no additional warming will occur (unless GHG keep growing). Infinite forcing is an absurdity.

This can be shown by an analogy: suppose we have a big pot of water, and a small flame under it. The flame forces the water to warm, until the amount of heat introduced by the flame is canceled out by the amount lost to the surrounding air. At this point the water stays at a constant temperature, and doesn't heat up more, despite the flame. Now, we increase somewhat the flame. An imbalance, or new forcing is introduced (relative to the previous state of balance). The water will warm up some more, until a new balance is reached, and then stop warming.

To "stabilize" the climate – all we have to do is stop the GHG increase. Once CO2 is stabilized, at whatever level, a new heat balance will be reached, and "forcing" will stop. Thus, reducing CO2 back to pre-industrial levels is not the ONLY way climate can be stabilized. I'm not discussing the temperature magnitude at the new balance level (climate sensitivity), only the fact that forcing cannot continue ad Venusum, or even until the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps have melted.

Also, due to the logarithmic heat absorption curve of GHG – temperature will stabilize at SOME level, even if GHG continue to increase – which makes the notion of perpetual forcing doubly absurd.
Dr. Hansen claims that the ONLY way to stabilize climate is to go back to 350 ppm of CO2 , else –> Venus. This seems bizarre to me.
I can't believe Dr. Hansen could make such a primitive mistake.

I know I'm talking about an extremely simplified scenario where there is nothing but GHG. I know there are feedbacks in the world, and there is big uncertainty about their magnitude and even their sign. But Dr. Hansen doesn't mention feedbacks. He seems to say that just GHG cause infinite forcing. This is impossible.

Not liberals, marxists.

2009-04-15T16:15:00.002+03:00

Roger Simon is writing about TBDS - Tea Party Derangement Syndrome - the opposition of the liberals to the tea party protests. People are protesting the enormous waste of public money by Obama's "simulation" plan. Curiously, or not so curiously, many on the left can't understand that this is a legitimate and reasonable protest and are starting to cry "racists", "bigots", "fascists" and all their usual cuss words.

Remarkable is the following comment on that thread:
Victor Erimita:

The Left is no longer composed of liberals, for the most part, and I wish people like Rush would stop calling them that. They aren’t any more.

Today’s Left is composed of Marxists, conscious or unconscious, people whose unexamined, knee-jerk opposition to enterprise and individualism has mostly been absorbed by cultural osmosis, not thought or analysis. They wear their politics like jewelry. Mix that college dorm Marxism with narcissism and immaturity, and you get tantruming at the audacity of any other expressed views.

Another strain of contemporary leftism is an ironically quasi-religious contempt for humans and individual endeavor, a kind of New Age of asceticism (always to be practiced by others) expressed in “environmentalism,” the so-called animal rights movement, the hatred of automobiles, the suburbs and other symbols of individualism. Half-baked notions of “The Planet,” big government and collectivist symbols like mass transportation have replaced God and the spiritually transcendent in the unformed minds of these solipsistic rejectors of the only kind of organized religion they can see—like Bill Maher they can only see the rigidly formed worldviews of others, not their own, and certainly not their own metaphysical assumptions. Tea Parties are an expression of the celebration of individual endeavor, a sin against their secular god of the state (or The Planet,) so they see it as evil, beneath civilized discourse, which ironically they themselves are no longer capable of.

Lloyd Marcus and his American Tea Party Anthem.

2009-04-15T13:19:00.003+03:00

An amazing story about the singer (and painter) Lloyd Marcus. He was 19 years an alcoholic, and 15 years homeless, and now he became the star of the Tea Party protest movement in the US.

Read the story, it is an amazing story of sudden personal success.

The meaning of Sarah Palin

2009-02-06T16:58:00.002+02:00

An excellent article by Yuval Levin capturing the meaning and potential of Sarah Palin.

The reaction of the intellectual elite to Sarah Palin was far more provincial than Palin herself ever has been, and those who reacted so viscerally against her evinced little or no appreciation for an essential premise of democracy: that practical wisdom matters at least as much as formal education, and that leadership can emerge from utterly unexpected places. The presumption that the only road to power passes through the Ivy League and its tributaries is neither democratic nor sensible, and is, moreover, a sharp and wrongheaded break from the American tradition of citizen governance.

Either way, the Palin moment shed a powerful light on the power, the potential, and the ultimate inadequacy of a conservatism grounded solely in cultural populism. It also exposed the vulnerability of the Left to a challenge to its most cherished claims—as the sole representative of the interests of the working class and the only legitimate path to political power for an ambitious woman.

And, perhaps even more telling, it revealed the unfortunate and unattractive propensity of the American cultural elite to treat those who are not deemed part of the elect with condescension and contumely. (my bold).

The intense, visceral hatred with which Palin was treated by the liberals was amazing, surprising and shocking. I kept telling myself: these people are crazy. Yuval Levin does a good job of explaining it.

A President runs a war.

2008-12-23T13:50:00.004+02:00

Here are some comments on the book "Tried by war" about the way President Lincoln run the Civil War, mostly about the military side.
Let's start with Donald Rumsfeld's remark "You make war with the army you have" - yes - and with the President you have. Lincoln didn't have any military experience at all, neither did he have any army. The Federal Army counted just 16,000 troops, deployed on western forts. The General-in-Chief was Winfield Scott, famous hero of the Mexican war, but 75 years old, and frail of health, he didn't help much and retired soon.
An army of 637,000 volunteers was raised, equipped and trained by April 1862, one year after the start of the war. You need also Generals, 583 Generals were commissioned during the war, many by political patronage, a method as good as any. General Grant was sponsored by Elihu B. Washburne, chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee and General Sherman by his brother John, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, without it they might have languished in obscurity.
For the post of commander of the Army of the Potomac (the biggest and most important army) Lincolm found the natural, proffesional, candidate 34 year old George B. McClellan, ranked second in his class at West Point, energetic, charismatic, adored by the soldiers, a good organizer, a good trainer of troops. Newspapers at the time called him "Young Napoleon". He was named to his command in July 1861, and soon after (November) General-in-Chief too. The only trouble with him is - he didn't like to fight. He was never ready, he always needed more troops, more horses or something. He never innitialized any battle, and never won one.
In July 1862 Lincoln named Henry W. Hallek General-in-Cheif (McClellan staying with the army of the Potomac). Hallek had written some books and was known as "Old Brains", he had a good administrative ability, but he was indecisive, and lacked the power to take control, impose his way and run things. Lincoln said he was a good clerck, and he needed him, so he kept him to the end of the war. In 1864, General Grant was named General-in-Chief, but Grant prefered to locate his headquartes in the field, near the army, so Hallek stayed on in Washington, as Chief-of-Staff.
It is remarkable how Lincoln couldn't find any military figure to run the war, and had to do it himself, single handed (at least until 1864, when he found Grant).
The problem wasn't solely the incompetece of the generals - there was plenty of that, but it also was much deeper - philisophical - about the aims of the war, the means to acheive them - derived from the aims. Lincoln believed you must seek out the enemy's army, engage it in battle and never let up until you destroy it. McClellan understood it would be an extreemly cruel, bloody enterprise. He had no stomach for such a total war of annihilation against fellow Americans. In the end, as presidential candidate in 1864, McCllelan embraced a settlement with the Confederacy. But Lincoln's aims were clear and firm, and undebatable: no independence to southern states and an end to slavery. He wouldn't settle on anything less, so no settlement was possible, and the bloodbath inevitable.
General Grant pursued the war as Lincoln wanted, not so much with brilliance, but with tenacity. He never rested, never let up, and the results followed - victory, but slowly - he suffered some bad settback at first - and at a terrible cost. Some called Grand a butcher. For example - in one two week period there were 30,000 casualties; in his first two months on the Potomac - some 90,000 (like McClellan suffered in 2 years). At first there weren't many gains to show for all these losses, and the impatient public seemed to sway toward the settlement.
Another interesting point is the question of strategy: the war's aims can, maybe, also be acheived by the indirect approach, by attacking not the enemy's main army, but his soft spots, untill you throw him off balance. This way you can acheive your aims with less losses. General McArthur employed this approach in WW2, he called it "hit them were they ain't". The approach wasn't known, or considered by Lincoln and his Generals, but was employed anyway, thanks to the brilliant initiative of General Sherman, who took an army of 60,000 veterans on a raid from Atalanta, Georgia, 287 miles, to the sea, at Savannah. Sherman raided the heart of the Confederacy hiterland, it's base of supply and economic and moral support. He renounced the securing of supply lines, lived off the country cut off from the Union, destroyed everything in his path. He outmaneuvered and outrun the enemy's army that was trying to stop him, he didn't seek battles, but rather succeded in avoiding them, acheiving his purpose without battles. He suffered almost no losses, but civilians in his path did suffer, mostly material losses. No wonder Sherman was the most intensly hated person in the South (maybe second only to Lincoln). Some say Sherman's raid was the decisive factor in ending the war.
The story of how Lincoln the inexperienced, unprepared politician run the whole war, including the military part, by himself, almost unaided, is fascinating.

What I missed in this book is a more objective approach to Lincoln, pointing out his mistakes, his missjudgements (if any). The Civil War was a very important, fundamental event, possitively: it abolished slavery, and maintained the Union. But it was also a terrible tragedy - more than 600,000 losses, and Lincoln presided over that too.
The book is an easy and absorbing read, it doesn't go into any details of military operations, but shows the events at the intersection between Lincoln and the military.

Obama and the communist program

2008-12-09T18:11:00.003+02:00

The communist parties, these days, have changed. They no longer advocate the things they used to: nationalizing all means of production, or at least "key" industries, violent revolution, or the dictatorship of the proletariat. (As recent as 1980, Francois Miterand, socialist president of France nationalized many industries, which have been re-privatized since, and Neil Kinock, leader of British Labor party advocaqted nationalizations too).
Nowadays the communist have an updated program. See the election flyer of the CPUSA (communist party of USA). They advocate:
Massive public works job creation, major clean energy developement projects (by government, of course), forced worplace unionization, government health insurance (i.e. - nationalization of health care services).
The sweetness & light blog concludes correctly:

Sound familiar?
Remember, this is the agenda of the Communist Party of the United States.
And Barack Obama’s.

What caused the crisis

2008-11-27T20:15:00.002+02:00

An incredible tale from an insider about the clueless, scandalous, ignorant way the banking system works.
"The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong."

"I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance."
"I thought I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last two full decades longer or that the difference in degree between Wall Street and ordinary life would swell into a difference in kind. I expected readers of the future to be outraged that back in 1986, the C.E.O. of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million; I expected them to gape in horror when I reported that one of our traders, Howie Rubin, had moved to Merrill Lynch, where he lost $250 million; I assumed they’d be shocked to learn that a Wall Street C.E.O. had only the vaguest idea of the risks his traders were running."

"Then came Meredith Whitney with news. Whitney was an obscure analyst of financial firms for Oppenheimer Securities who, on October 31, 2007, ceased to be obscure. On that day, she predicted that Citigroup had so mismanaged its affairs that it would need to slash its dividend or go bust. It’s never entirely clear on any given day what causes what in the stock market, but it was pretty obvious that on October 31, Meredith Whitney caused the market in financial stocks to crash. By the end of the trading day, a woman whom basically no one had ever heard of had shaved $369 billion off the value of financial firms in the market. Four days later, Citigroup’s C.E.O., Chuck Prince, resigned. In January, Citigroup slashed its dividend."

An amazing, long, story.

Vaclav Klaus against warm-mongers.

2008-10-21T12:07:00.002+02:00

An important speech by Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czhech Republic.

...the well-known Oregon petition which warned and keeps warning against the irrationality and one-sidedness of the global warming campaign. Rational people know that the warming we experience is well within the range of what seems to have been a natural fluctuation over the last ten thousand years. We should keep saying this very loudly. ...
I will try to argue and to convince you that even the global warming issue is about freedom. It is not about temperature or CO2. It is, therefore, not necessary to discuss either climatology, or any other related natural science but the implications of the global warming panic upon us, upon our freedom, our prosperity, our institutions and our legislation. It is part of a bigger story....
The explicitly stated intentions of global warming activists are frightening. They want to change us, to change the whole mankind, to change human behavior, to change the structure and functioning of society, to change the whole system of values which has been gradually established during centuries. These intentions are dangerous and their consequences far-reaching. These people want to restrict our freedom. It is our duty to say NO....
I know that its propagandists have been using all possible obstructions to avoid exposure to rational arguments and I know that the substance of their arguments is not science. It represents, on the contrary, an abuse of science by a non-liberal, extremely authoritarian, freedom and prosperity endangering ideology of environmentalism....
In the past, the market was undermined mostly by means of socialist arguments with slogans like: “stop the immiseration of the masses”. Now, the attack is led under the slogan: stop the immiseration (or perhaps destruction) of the Planet....
For the same reason I consider environmentalism to be the most effective and, therefore, the most dangerous vehicle for advocating large scale government intervention and unprecedented suppression of human freedom at this very moment.....

Read the whole hing.

2008-09-05T14:57:00.005+03:00

Artists toe the party line.

That's the name of an article in the NYTimes about an art exhibition in NY showing art from China's past, from the time of the murderous rule of Mao Zedong (or Mao Tse Tung as we knew him).

The painter Chen Danqing, active as a young artist during the revolutionary era, does not exaggerate when he says in the show’s catalog, “At the time I felt there was no difference between me and the Renaissance painters: they painted Jesus; I painted Mao.”

There is a difference.
Under totalitarian regimes you couldn't say what you wanted, you had to parrot the party line. And you couldn't paint as you wanted. You had to paint as they told you, in both substance and style. Those who tried to do otherwise were sent to "reeducation" camps. The communists had no use for art unless it served for propaganda. Any other kind was forbidden (a waste of time...).

Under Reneissance painters painted what they wanted. Some did Jesuses out of religious conviction, or because that's what their patrons (mostly the clergy) wanted and paid for. Others painted scenery, or portraits of other patrons. No painter was burned at the stake by the Inquisition, as far as I know (at least not for "incorrect" painting).

Still, a beautiful painting.

Bolivia and coca

2008-08-29T14:26:00.003+03:00

An article in the NY Times says (in the headline): "Bolivia is an uneasy ally as US presses drug war".
False. Here is a letter I sent the NY Times reporter Simon Romero, author of the article.

I lived for a while in Bolivia.

Your article on Bolivians fighting the coca is incorrect.
Bolivia has always produced and sold coca, and always will. It's maybe the main source of income, not only for those in the trade, but for politicians and military people as well.

Mr. Morales is correct and sincere in his anti American rhetoric.

Bolivia has always taken and will always take any money the gullible, crazy yankeys are willing to give them but they will never raise a finger against the coca.
Those Leopards are putting on a show. They never seek, and never destroy any coca labs, unless the owner failed to pay his bribes to them. They will put on a show for any visiting reporter or government inspector. They probably have build mock labs for just this purpose, in collaboration with their cocaine producing chums.
The US embassy staff in La Paz should know better, but the US is probably short on Spanish speaking diplomats, and they send political cronies there (Goldbeg !). They are clueless. A pity you take their word.

As to Bolivia, I love it. Wonderful country. Spent there some of the best years of my life. (And never even tasted cocaine...).
Best Regards,
Jacob

Another fine article by the same reporter: "A month to conjure luck with sacrifices and fire".

Solzhenitsyn

2008-08-04T10:18:00.004+03:00

Solzhenitsyn, Literary Giant who defied Soviets.

The above is the headline, in a good obituary in the NY Times.

Solzhenitsin was a giant of the spirit. A great writer, a great moralist, of outstanding courage and rectitude. A really great man.
He was the ONE single person most influential toward the defeat of the evil, murderous, insane empire.
One of the greatest, most influencial 20th century personages. His flaws were minor and insignificnat compared to the enormity of his personality.
R.I.P.

Poverty and the environment

2008-07-25T10:20:00.003+03:00

I found a fascinating article from September 2006, describing the problems with water and sewage in India, specifically: New Delhi. The caption:"Thirsty giant: In teeming India water crisis means dry pipes and foul sludge"
The description of the dire situation is very vivid and appaling. Maybe half the population doesn't have access to tap water, and those who have, have water only a few hours a day, maybe like 3 hours. Two thirds of the population, or some 700 million people have no sewage. Normal life in India is really beyond what a Westener can imagine - it's harsh, poor, and incredibly dirty, it's really a totally different world. Read the superbly written article by SOMINI SENGUPTA, in the NY Times (linked above). I have visited India and lived a while in "developing" countries, so it was no surprise for me. Still, it makes you think.
India doesn't lack water - as anyone who has experienced some of the mosoon rains there knows. Water pipe laying and sewage treatement isn't rocket science, neither does it cost terribly much. But that's the way the world is. Poverty and incompetence, there is no magic cure to it.
One lesson can be learned: there is no hope for the environment in a poor country. Poor countries are dirty, they can't afford to invest in a clean environment. India is incredibly dirty. Communist Russia was an environmental disaster. So are poor neighborhoods in all countries. You fight poverty, the environment takes care of itself, because affluent people demand, and pay for, a clean environment. Any "green" measures that hinder developement and perpetuate poverty will have a negative effect on the environment.

The amount of CO2 driven warming is miniscule

2008-06-11T16:15:00.002+03:00

Here is a quote from David Archibald, that makes sense, I think.

CO2-driven global warming in not totally wrong, but nearly so. It is only good for 0.3 degrees from here to eternity. Emissions to date are worth 0.1 degrees, there will be another 0.2 degrees to 620 ppm and then only a further 0.1 degrees to when the effect peters out due to the logarithmic effect you dread so much. … you might be able to tell the difference between having your car’s air conditioner set at 21 degrees and having it at 22 degrees. But I very much doubt that you could detect a 0.4 degree difference. So there you are. CO2 is one less thing …to worry about, because the effect is so miniscule.

From the comments at Warwick Hughes' site

5 year plan for energy.

2008-05-12T00:19:00.003+03:00

Senator Lamar Alexander delivered a plan for energy independence (for the US). It's the usual blah... blah... - all nonsense, like politicians are fond of delivering. Sample:

- Make carbon capture and storage a reality for coal-burning power plants.
- Make solar more cost-competitive with the burning of fossil fuels.

The best reaction was in a comment by peterjackson:

Good Lord, now we've got Republicans proposing Five Year Plans and Seven Step programs like some 1930's Soviet Beet Kommissar. The last thing we need is the know-nothings in Congress pretending they have the expertise required to plan the future of a market segment as huge and critical as energy. They have no such knowledge because that knowledge doesn't exist anywhere as some type of accessible whole. It takes a market with millions upon millions of people, each with their own intimate knowledge of their own needs and capabilities, participating in an open energy marketplace with free prices to coordinate such an unimaginably huge, ever-changing body of knowledge and action. Gas prices have been elevated for several years now due to many reasons, and already the marketplace is responding with the millionth shipped hybrid, high mileage clean diesels, flex-fuel vehicles, and endless number of promising technologies from compressed air vehicles to hydraulic drive trains, all with ZERO input from Washington.

Exactly. Anything the Government will try to do will turn out into a disaster, like the ethanol mandate. The best thing it can do is stay out of the whole mess. (Hat tip: Instapundit)

Who finances UK (and US) universities.

2008-05-04T17:12:00.003+03:00

The lefties love to declare that anyone sceptic of AGW must be financed by Exxon-Mobile.
Let's see who finances the left-leaning universities:

From an article in "The Australian" (hat tip: Instapundit):

... the Higher Education Funding Council for England held a special meeting to confront fears that Saudi donations were unduly influencing universities. Brunel University's Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies revealed that eight British universities, including Cambridge and Oxford, received more than $US465 million from Saudi and Muslim sources since 1995, mainly to fund Islamic study centres.
In 2005, a prominent Saudi businessman, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, was reported by The Washington Post to have donated $20million to Georgetown and Harvard universities in the US for the study of Islam and the Muslim world to promote interfaith dialogue and understanding.
At Scotland Yard, a security expert cautions that one of Islam's five pillars - Zakat - requires Muslims to give alms and that charity is considered virtuous and essential.
But Emerson, best-selling author of American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us, says Saudi Arabia should be allowed to bankroll religious initiatives in the West only when it becomes open to the idea of religious reciprocity. "I think there should be a law requiring religious reciprocity for funding coming from regimes that restrict religious freedom on their soil," he says. "Saudi Arabia does not allow the practice of any other religion, bars the operations of churches, confiscates Bibles ... As such, there should be laws passed by Western governments prohibiting Saudi donations to universities until and unless Saudi Arabia operates a pluralistic religious environment.
"Absent such laws, I believe that universities should be required to register as foreign registered agents - a law we have in the US - that designates the Saudi donors and their recipients as agents of a foreign power.
"That would certainly stigmatise the grant giving and give pause before a university accepts such money."

I don't know why I just remembered the anti Israel boycott proposed recently by the British lecturers...

Congress: "We didn't know what we were doing".

2008-05-01T14:00:00.003+03:00

Congress has second thoughts on the ethanol madness:

"The view was to look to alternatives and try to become more dependent on the Midwest than the Middle East. I mean, that was the theory. Obviously, sometimes there are unforeseen or unintended consequences of actions," Mr. Hoyer, Maryland Democrat, told reporters yesterday.

Only a year ago, Congress and President Bush seemed to view ethanol as a near magic solution to the nation's dependence on oil and counted on it to make a dent in greenhouse gas emissions. Republicans and Democrats together piled up the incentives and mandates that pushed farmers into planting corn for ethanol and consumers into buying gasoline blended with it.

"This is a classic case of the law of unintended consequences," said Rep. Jeff Flake, Arizona Republican, who introduced a bill this week to end the entire slate of federal supports, including the mandates for blended gasoline, the tax credits for ethanol producers, and tariffs that keep out cheaper foreign ethanol.

"Congress surely did not intend to raise food prices by incentivizing ethanol, but that's precisely what's happened. A jump in food prices is the last thing our economy needs right now," Mr. Flake said.

If they are so terribly dumb that they understood nothing about ethanol, and had no idea what they were doing a year ago, maybe they should be prohibitted from passing any legislation at all.
It's incredible that they adopted this dumb legislation without the least study of the effects.
Throw out the bums.

Update:

Things every last person knows. Only congress-critters are surprised by the "unintended consequences" of their dumb act.

5 Myths About Breaking Our Foreign Oil Habit By Robert Bryce:

The new energy bill requires that the country produce 36 billion gallons of biofuels per year by 2022. That sounds like a lot of fuel, but put it in perspective: The United States uses more than 320 billion gallons of oil per year, of which nearly 200 billion gallons are imported. So biofuels alone cannot wean the United States off oil. Let's say the country converted all the soybeans grown by American farmers into biodiesel; that would provide only about 1.5 percent of total annual U.S. oil needs. And if the United States devoted its entire corn crop to producing ethanol, it would supply only about 6 percent of U.S. oil needs.

Food and fertilizer scarcity vs ethanol madness.

2008-04-30T17:25:00.004+03:00

There is a new article in the NY Times about fertilizer shortages. Fertilizer is essential to getting good crop harvests, but demand outpaces supply and prices have risen sharply.

Interesting figures:

From 1900 to 2000, worldwide food production jumped by 600 percent. Scientists said that increase was the fundamental reason world population was able to rise to about 6.7 billion today from 1.7 billion in 1900.

Then this:

“This is a basic problem, to feed 6.6 billion people,” said Norman Borlaug, an American scientist who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his role in spreading intensive agricultural practices to poor countries. “Without chemical fertilizer, forget it. The game is over.”

How on earth our "beloved" leaders in the West think it is a good idea to burn our food, and how they think we have agricultural resources (land, water, fertilizer) to spare, is beyond me. These people are crazy, stark crazy. There is no other way to explain the fact that they passed legislation mandating the use of 10%-15% ethanol (produced from our food crops) in the fuel.

As UN Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food Jean Ziegler said: "this is a crime against humanity". (A very rare ocasion when I am able to quote a UN person approvingly).

The decadence of Academia in the West

2008-04-24T13:04:00.005+03:00

A good article by British academic Fabian Tassano on the nonesense and idiocy that much of Western Academia has become.

The larger part of academia has become obsessed with jargon and formalism, at the expense of meaningful content....

The purpose of academia has changed from producing real insights to generating reinforcement for the preferred world view. Academics are encouraged to generate spurious legitimacy for anti-individualistic social trends such as the abolition of civil liberties, or the ‘rights’ of doctors and psychiatrists to make decisions about people’s lives.

According to the Chief Executive of HEFCE, "it was once the role of Governments to provide for the purposes of universities; it is now the role of universities to provide for the purposes of Governments."
While one can't expect academics to have no ideological biases, the collectivised way the academy is nowadays run was bound to generate a monolithic consensus. Once established, we end up with a kind of ideological closed shop, with dissenters refused entry or hounded out.

There are academic disciplines, such as applied chemistry or cell biology, where the criterion of generating testable hypotheses still dominates. As for the rest, you can more or less take it as read that they've been infected by left wing ideology and/or what I have called "technicality" - unnecessary (and often totally vacuous) technical complexity.

...even when it becomes impossible to suppress awareness that something is seriously wrong with some area of academia, the fallout is remarkably limited. Everyone seems to keep on going pretty much in the same old way. Another area which it has becomepositively fashionable in some quarters to deride (because it's easy to do so), but where the effect of the derision has been minimal, is postmodernist philosophy...

Quoting Robert Fisk:

It's a new and dangerous phenomenon I'm talking about, a language of exclusion that must have grown up in universities over the past 20 years; after all, any non university-educated man or woman can pick up an academic treatise or PhD thesis written in the 1920s or '30s and - however Hegelian the subject - fully understand its meaning. No longer.

The definition of e.g. philosophy has become, “whatever is done under that name at a recognised academic institution”. Certification has become more important than content, and quality is no longer seen as assessable by an untrained person. The fact that many of the key innovations in the history of knowledge were made outside universities is conveniently forgotten. Someone working outside a university today can be ignored, since by definition they cannot be doing research.

Massification of degrees is said to be inevitable because everyone now aspires to higher education. Fine, but instead of letting the market provide this extension to the old model, it’s taken to mean turning the university system into an arm of the welfare state, rather like the NHS. I.e. run by the state, with everyone having equal entitlement to a low grade product, and subsidy based on poverty rather than ability.

The fact that little of benefit is acquired by most undergraduates is concealed by ensuring that everyone receives a qualification at the end of the process.

The net result is that academics are being forced to become badly paid handmaidens to a system which will be primarily about promoting equality and inclusion, like state school teachers already are. They are now also required to comply with increasing levels of state bureaucracy, and are monitored and assessed by government auditors

I myself, though not an academic, was appalled by the huge amount of nonesense and gobbledygook that many of the academic papers I heppened to read are filled with. The Academia has been taken over by the ignorant barbarians.

"Will President Bush join in the chorus of dead-end energy proposals?"

2008-04-16T18:23:00.003+03:00

A good, forceful article by Dr. Roy Spencer on energy policy:

The fact is that there is simply nothing we can do — short of shutting down the global economy — that will substantially reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Prosperity requires access to abundant, affordable energy. Thus, any mandated limits or taxes meant to slow the use of fossil fuels will limit prosperity as well, period.
While the developed countries take for granted conveniences like heating, air conditioning, refrigerated food, and the freedom to travel, our politicians continue to feed the myth that we have any realistic alternatives to carbon-based fuels. With the possible exception of a very slow (several decade) transition from coal-fired power plants to nuclear ones, there are simply no other options that will make any measurable difference for future global temperatures.
...and unless someone has the courage to stand up for the rights of humans to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the momentum we have generated due to our irrational fears will cause us all to topple into the sea.

Read the whole thing (it isn't long). (Emphasis mine).

Dr. Roy W. Spencer is a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and is author of the new book, Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians, and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor.

The credibility of UN's IPCC.

2008-04-12T12:15:00.004+03:00

Here is a comment from the above Coyote blog post by Dr. T.
It sounds authentic to me, though I don't know who he is.

I thoroughly read the most recent IPCC report, and I conclude that it is total garbage. I'm a chemist and a pathologist, not a climatologist, but I certainly know how to read scientific reports. I have taught statistics, and I also understand mathematical models and their limitations. The IPCC report contained poor science, terrible models, and completely unsupported conclusions.

The CO2 issue is more complex than what Adiran and Pieter noted. Even if we assume that CO2 is a 'warming' gas in the atmosphere, its impact is small compared to water vapor (which, based on greenhouse studies, has 20 times the warming effect because of better solar heat absorption and higher concentration). Methane is also a 'warming' gas, but its concentration is too low to have any significant impact on global temperatures.

The positive feedback discussion by the IPCC and by Warren Meyer irks me. First, positive feedback is a psychology term about how an organism responds to good (positive) stimuli. The term the IPCC really wants is something like multiplicative effects or potentiation (when two or more things combined give an effect that is multiplicative rather than additive, such as ethanol and barbiturates). But, in chemistry and physics, examples of multiplicative effects are rare. The IPCC models are so bad that they can essentially apply their forcing factors to anything (too many people hopping on one foot) and claim it relates to global warming. I trust nothing from the IPCC, because the group is about keeping itself funded and influential with governments. The IPCC is not about climatology.

"the group [IPCC] is about keeping itself funded and influential with governments" - true, but I would add to it: it's also about spewing their (vile) ideological viewpoint.

The confidence I have in the UN's IPCC report is about the same I have in the UN's human rights comission, headed by Ghaddafi's (Lybia) representative.

Positive feedback in Global warming

2008-04-12T11:34:00.003+03:00

Over at Coyote blog there is an important post, highlighting the issue of positive feedback which is at the core of the alarmist global warming scare.

Interestingly, the key to understanding this issue of the amount of warming does not actually lie in greenhouse gas theory. Most scientists, skeptics and alarmists alike, peg the warming directly from CO2 at between 0.3 and 1.0 degrees Celsius for a doubling in CO2 levels ... If this greenhouse gas warming was the only phenomenon at work, we would expect man-made warming over the next century even using the most dire assumptions to be less than 1C, or about the same amount we have seen (non-catastrophically) over the last century.

As I said before, man-produce greenhouse gases (CO2) may produce a small, minuscule, amount of warming, which is insignificant, quantitatively, among the natural variations. The catastrophic predictions aren't based on this minuscule warming. They are based on "positive feedback loops".

This theory hypothesizes that small changes in temperature from greenhouse gas increases would be multiplied 3,4,5 times or more by positive feedback effects, from changes in atmospheric water vapor to changing surface albedo.
Let me emphasize again: The catastrophe results not from greenhouse gas theory, but from the theory of extreme climactic positive feedback. In a large sense, all the debate in the media is about the wrong thing! When was the last time you saw the words "positive feedback" in a media article about climate?

Now, this positive feedback has absolutely no scientific base or proof, it's just a guess based on nothing - well, based on the ideological bias of the"scientists". It is not based on scientific data or theory.

Here is what Christopher Monckton writes about it:

The feedback factor f accounts for at least two-thirds of all radiative forcing in IPCC (2007); yet it is not expressly quantified, and no “Level Of Scientific Understanding” is assigned either to f or to the two variables b and κ upon which it is dependent....

Indeed, in IPCC (2007) the stated values for the feedbacks that account for more than two-thirds of humankind’s imagined effect on global temperatures are taken from a single paper. The value of the coefficient z in the CO₂ forcing equation likewise depends on only one paper. The implicit value of the crucial parameter κ depends upon only two papers, one of which had been written by a lead author of the chapter in question, and neither of which provides any theoretical or empirical justification for the IPCC’s chosen value. The notion that the IPCC has drawn on thousands of published, peer-reviewed papers to support its central estimates for the variables from which climate sensitivity is calculated is not supported by the evidence.

As I said, there is absolutely no scientific basis to the alarmist scare mongering. The IPCC, including the dubious positive feedbacks, predicts (i.e. guesses) a rise of 2-4 deg C in temperature, and 60-100 cm in sea levels for the year 2100. Even these predictions aren't yet catastrophic.

The chief scare mongers, Al Gore and Dr. James Hanson speak of 8-10 degrees, 10 m sea level rise and "tipping points" within 30 years. This scare mongering is based on absolutely nothing, not even on the exaggerated IPCC numbers.

Ideological bias in scientists

2008-04-09T17:27:00.006+03:00

The article "Usufruct & the Gorilla" by main climate alarmist scientist Dr. James E. Hansen is several months old, but worth mentioning and remembering.

An excrept:

Make no doubt, however, if tipping points are passed, if we, in effect, destroy Creation, passing on to our children, grandchildren, and the unborn a situation out of their control, the contrarians who work to deny and confuse will not be the principal culprits. The contrarians will be remembered as court jesters. There is no point to joust with court jesters. They will always be present. They will continue to entertain even if the Titanic begins to take on water. Their role and consequence is only as a diversion from what is important. The real deal is this: the ‘royalty’ controlling the court, the ones with the power, the ones with the ability to make a difference, withthe ability to change our course, the ones who will live in infamy if we pass the tipping points, are the captains of industry, CEOs in fossil fuel companies such as EXXON/Mobil, automobile manufacturers, utilities, all of the leaders who have placed short-term profit above the fate of the planet and the well-being of our children. The court jesters are their jesters, occasionally paid for services, and more substantively supported by the captains’ disinformation campaigns.

This reveals a deep anti-capitalist, anti-human, vile ideology or mentality.
The "captains of industry" are people just like you and me, nay, they are more able and talented than average, and they provide us with all the food, clothes and goods we need for living. They provide what we need and want.

Now, scientists, like all people, are entiteled to their ideology, opinions and biases. But they should not try to let their biases influence their science, or to present their biases as science. Hansen is oblivious to the fact that what he has uttered above is the expression of his ideological bias. Two senteces later he writes:

I am puzzled by views expressed by some conservatives, .... It is a bit
disconcerting as I come from a moderately conservative state, and I consider myself a moderate conservative in most ways.

It's puzzling to me that he doesn't understand the deep ideological (anti-capitalist) nature of his rant, and sees it as normal, uncontroversial, self evident opinions.

I think that the ideological roots of the main AGW alarmist need to be exposed.

Food security - biofuel madness.

2008-03-13T18:46:00.007+02:00

The blog EU referendum has an interesting piece on "Food Security the coming crisis".

The NY Times also writes "A Global Need for Grain That Farms Can’t Fill "

“Everyone wants to eat like an American on this globe,”said Daniel W. Basse of the AgResource Company, a Chicago consultancy. “But if they do, we’re going to need another two or three globes to grow it all.
Food prices are rising sharply and fast, already causing difficulties, especially to the poor people in the world ... A tailor in Lagos, Nigeria, named Abel Ojuku said recently that he had been forced to cut back on the bread he and his family love.

Yet the governments of the EU and US continue with their totally insane policy of biofuel and ethanol mandates. Currently biofuels provide some 5% of automotive fuel, but under existing mandates, they should rise to 20% within a decade.
It won't happen. There simply isn't enough land and agricultural resources (water, fertilizers ) to provide the food we need, let alone biofuel.

Global Warming hasn't caused any tangible damage yet (and is unlikely to, in the future), but global warming hysteria is already harming the hungry people of the world today (not in 2050).
While we debate whether temparatures have risen by some 0.6 deg Celsius over the last hundred years, and whether they are going to rise by another degree or two in the next hundred years - food prices have risen by 40-60% in the last year alone, and that's a fact, not a prediction based on models.

The governments should reverse course, fast, and strictly prohibit the burning of any agricultural products (biofuel, ethanol) as fuel.

Richard Branson is nuts

2008-02-25T13:48:00.002+02:00

Richard Branson, the famous aviation business mogul is nuts. That is - he is proposing to run planes on nut oil.

Virgin Atlantic Airways, the British carrier controlled by Richard Branson, tested a jumbo jet on Sunday that was partly powered by a biofuel made from babassu nuts and coconut oil, a first for a commercial aircraft.

“This pioneering flight will enable those of us who are serious about reducing our carbon emissions to go on developing the fuels of the future, fuels which will power our aircraft in the years ahead through sustainable next-generation oils, such as algae,” he said.

Someone tell Branson that all the babassu (whatever that is) nuts in the world won't produce the hundreds of tons of fuel needed for one lone transatlantic flight, let alone for the tens of thousands of daily commercial flights.

But that's ok. He has every right to pursue whatever dubious ideas he has, as he is spending his own money (not tax money), and it would be presumptuous for me to criticize him.
It's governments who mandate biofuels or ethanol or such that make me mad.

Biofuel madness revealed

2008-02-08T12:40:00.000+02:00

Two new studies conclude that biofuels produce more greenhouse gases than the oil they replace:

“When you take this into account, most of the biofuel that people are using or planning to use would probably increase greenhouse gasses substantially,”

As I said many times, I don't care much about greenhouse gases, as I don't believe they are a major problem. The madness is the mere idea that it is possible, or advisable, to burn our food (burn as a fuel). Agricultural land is needed for food production, and for conservation. All available land is needed for these ends. There is no spare land (and water) available for fuel supply.

The fuel consuption is enormous, all the cultivable land in the world will never supply more than a negligible amount of fuel, as compared to our needs. And the costs of biofuels are also high, they would never be feasible without govwernment subsidies and mandates. Biofuels are economically a terrible waste of resources.
And all this - for no environmental benefit at all - on the contrary - there are more greenhouse gasses released by biofuels, as these studies show.

All this goes for ethenol as well except, maybe, ethanol or methanol produced from biowaste, but there are not yet any known processes of biowaste conversion.

The European Union has set a target that countries use 5.75 percent biofuel for transport by the end of 2008. Proposals in the United States energy package would require that 15 percent of all transport fuels be made from biofuel by
2022..

Madness, terrible, inexplicable madness of our governments and leaders, in the EU and US

Flex-fuel mandates ? No !

2008-02-02T11:24:00.000+02:00

The Instapundit has abandoned some of his libertarian tendencies and is vigorously pushing Bob Zubrin's idea of flex-fuel mandates. A poor cause to bend you basic principles for.

Rick Santorum, the ex GOP senator also favors government mandates:

What we need is a government mandate! We need to mandate that all cars sold in the United States, starting with the 2010 model year, be "flex-fuel vehicles" - that is, they should be able to run on a blend that is 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline (the so-called E85 blend), or even a coal-derived methanol/gas mixture. This mandate would cost a fraction of the new fuel economy standard with the added benefit of saving barrels more oil.

Seems than installing a flex-fuel kit on cars is a cheap affair - only about $100, so why not ? Especially, since, as Zubrin claims, "it will free us of our dependence on foreign oil".
Of course, this claim is pure hyperbole, there is no way to produce enough ethanol to reduce considerably the use of oil in transportation. It sounds like the cranks who have an instant cure to all our ailments. It's snake oil.

But, but... 100 bucks for a flex-fuel kit is small change, why not install it ? Why not, indeed? Go and install one on your car, if you feel like it. If enough customers will demand it, it will be installed by car producers. If it offers an advantage, it will be demanded by consumers.
Do we need government mandates ? No, we don't. Government mandates are needed to cram down out throats a medicine that we would not use on our own, because it's not beneficial to us. We don't need a "one size fits all" government imposed wisdom.

And, Ethanol is not our energy remedy. It's expensive, it uses up a lot of energy and water in it's production process, and uses up agricultural resources needed for food production. Not a good idea, by a mile.
But who am I to determine the future energy blend ? I'm not endowed with clairvoyant powers or superior wisdom (neither is Zubrin...). Let the markets decide. When oil is scarce, and therefore expensive, market forces will work out some alternatives that will be better. Let's let them work, they'll come up with the best solutions. Avoid hampering the free development of new solutions with government mandates or subsidies.

No Global warming in Israel

2008-01-11T12:26:00.000+02:00

A Haifa University study found that local rainfall stats in Israel defy global warming fears. Local rainfall statistics have remained essentially unchanged in the 60 years they have been tracked. The researcher, Noam Halfon, concludes: "The common belief that weather events are becoming more extreme can therefore be attributed to greater press coverage of weather events, in particular extreme events, and not to an increase in these events"

Can the world support 72 billion people ?

2008-01-04T11:24:00.000+02:00

Professor Jared Diamond publishes an essay on the NY Times op-ed page summing up the current view about excess consumerism.
He says

The estimated one billion people who live in developed countries have a relative per capita consumption rate of 32. Most of the world’s other 5.5 billion people constitute the developing world, with relative per capita consumption rates below 32, mostly down toward 1....
China’s catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates. Oil consumption would increase by 106 percent, for instance, and world metal consumption by 94 percent. If India as well as China were to catch up, world consumption rates would triple. If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates). Some optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. But I haven’t met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies — for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy — they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people.

Sounds convincing, doesn't it ? Can the earth support 72 billion people ?

The answer is - we don't know. The earth and mankind are too huge for us to fully grasp and predict their development over time.

Doomsday predictions are not new. The most famous is perhaps Thomas Robert Malthus, who published An Essay on the Principle of Population, in 1798 and predicted the world will not be able to support much more than the about 1 billion people alive then (at a infinitely lower level of consumption). Other such publications include Paul Ehrlich's "The Populations Bomb" published in 1968 predicted "in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death".
The Club of Rome raised much attention with its report Limits to Growth, which has sold 30 million copies, it predicted that economic growth could not continue indefinitely because of the limited availability of natural resources, particularly oil.

The one who best refuted these doomsday scenarios was economist Julian Simon. "His 1981 book The Ultimate Resource is a criticism of the conventional wisdom on population growth, raw-material scarcity and resource consumption. Simon argues that our notions of increasing resource-scarcity ignore the long-term declines in wage-adjusted raw material prices. Viewed economically, he argues, increasing wealth and technology make more resources available; although supplies may be limited physically they may be viewed as economically indefinite as old resources are recycled and new alternatives are developed by the market."

The fact is that, so far, the doomsday prophets have been proven terribly wrong. The world is too big and complicated, by far, for us to make predictions.

Jared Diamond concludes his essay with the weasel words:

The world has serious consumption problems, but we can solve them if we choose to do so.

They are weasel words because he refrains from stating his recommendation for the "we can solve" part. What he means is that government must impose consumption limits by mandate on people. Lefties have a universal solution to all problems - government forcing people to do as they, the lefties, think advisable. Because all people are dumb and greedy, and don't know what is good for them, only the lefties know, and their superior wisdom must be imposed by force, else the world ends.

Let the world and it's people develop in a natural, free way. No one is wise enough to impose his views on all people by force. Attempts at totalitarian rule have proven catastrophic, on a gigantic scale. Let's not try it again.

To the question "can the world support 72 billion people" - my answer is - I don't know. It is possible that it can't. In this case people will not reach these levels of population and consumption. They will not consume what isn't available, of this I'm sure. In the natural course of development some equilibrium will emerge between the number of people, their consumption and the resources available. No one can predict what it will be, and no one can manage world growth by decree. We don't need any totalitarian "solutions". Just let things run their natural, free, course. We can't improve on that.

Contrarians vs. Bali

2007-12-27T00:50:00.000+02:00

John Tierney writes a nice piece in the NY Times about a group of 100 scientists who express their opposition to the idea that is being promoted at the Global Warming conference in Bali.
The scientists say: "don't fight, adapt".

Both pieces are worth reading.

Don't miss the over one hundred comments at the end of Tierney's article. They cover the issue really nice. The encouraging thing is that even at the NY Times, more than 2/3 of the commenters express skepticism about AGW.

Auto X Prize definition

2007-12-26T14:43:00.000+02:00

The Wired site writes about the auto X prize competition to be defined and started in 2008. basically it's about a car that gets a 100 MPG (miles per gallon) "efficiency".

That's a strange definition of "efficiency". Seems it's the standard definition in the press. This "Efficiency" is just about "how many mpg", for example: a 100 mpg car would be considered more efficient than a 80 mpg car.

That's not how an engineer would define "efficiency". An engineering (and logical, and correct) definition is: how much resources you use to do a given amount of work. In our example that means: how many mpg for a given car weight. It goes without saying that a 1000 kg. car will do more mpg that a 2000 kg. car. A 2000 kg car that makes 80 mpg is probably more efficient than a 1000kg car that makes 100 mpg. You have to state the weight of the car together with the mpg rating to get an efficiency rating.

So, the Auto X Prize people need to specify the minimum weight for the car, to qualify for the competition.

The Gulag Testimonial

2007-11-21T18:20:00.000+02:00

A new book appeared, based on NKVD files from the Ukraine, from the years 1938-39.
Shows how "normal" life was there, how people were routinely tortured and murdered for no reason at all. 700,000 of them in those two years alone...

Read the short review

Quote of the day

2007-11-15T17:53:00.000+02:00

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

Mark Twain

Burning our food.

2007-11-07T01:18:00.000+02:00

Pres. Bush has mandated that by 2030, 15% of vehicle fuel used in the USA must be biofuel - i.e. ethanol. In the EU there is a mandate for 5% biofuel.

This is crazy, totally crazy. The idea that we have surplus arable land and agricultural resources, and can permit ourselves to burn our corn or sugar cane is insane.

This article in The Guardian explains it well. Here is an excerpt:

It doesn't get madder than this. Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava. The government has allocated several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production in the district of Lavumisa, which happens to be the place worst hit by drought.

This combines the two themes: government intervention, and
green intervention. Madness squared.

Sea level rise

2007-10-30T16:19:00.000+02:00

The IPCC report says sea level may rise 30-90 cm in the next 100 years because of AGW.
Al Gore says in may rise 6-7 meters, but he is cautious enough not to name a date.

The sea has risen considerably in the past.

In the first century BCE, Herod the Great built the city of Caesarea, with a magnificent harbor.
Today the Herodian breakwaters are submerged 5m below the water surface.
(Same is true of the ancient harbor of Alexandria, Egypt).

Was it sea level rise proper, or was it a sinking of earth crust (acompanied by rising elsewhere) ? I don't know, I don't think anybody knows.

One thing is certain: it wasn't AGW, it wasn't CO2.

Blackouts.

2007-09-03T23:14:00.000+03:00

A big headline in the NYT proclaims: California heat wave causes blackouts.
That is as usual partly correct and part spin. What is correct is that there are blackouts.
What causes the blackouts is NOT the heat wave, but the lack of sufficient power, or a sufficient reserve of power, to take care of the peak demand during hot days.
Why is there a dearth of power ? Because the greens oppose to the building of new power stations.
For example: "We should ban the construction of any new conventional coal power plant, period. "
That's standard green policy, adopted by California's "green" Governor, the power terminator.

No new power plants mean blackouts as sure as 2+2=4.

I'm afraid that blackouts is something we need to adapt to, and live with, as they will become more and more frequent. They are the real world consequences of unrealistic agitation and green propaganda. There is no "green" energy there are only green blackouts.

Joseph Romm, modern scientist

2007-08-24T11:47:00.000+03:00

Joseph Romm is a Ph.D in physics from M.I.T. "Dr. Joseph Romm is a leading expert on hydrogen, fuel cells, and advanced transportation technologies."

Here is a link to Joseph Romm's bio. Here is a link to his blog.

Read the bio and you will see a frequent theme: Joseph Romm has made a big career in ideologically motivated activism, has written tons of words (for the environment), has published tons of books and articles.

Has he invented any useful device ? Is he doing any scientific work ? Any tangible, physical gadget? Any real solution ? Has he worked in some team that produced tangible solutions? Has he advanced theoretical knowledge ?
Nope, just public relations and ideological advocacy. (Also government administration jobs). He has produced words, words, words.

Words matter, writing is a respectable profession. But for a scientist, for a Ph.D. holder in physics from M.I.T. this is disappointing. But this is typical of today's "scientists".

The truth is - real scientists, real, ground breaking, scientists and engineers are a very rare breed. Most of the people calling themselves "scientists" and parading impressive titles are nothing of the sort.

(If he has produced something useful besides words I apologize. It wasn't mentioned in his bio.)

Cap and trade five year plan

2007-08-24T11:30:00.000+03:00

The “cap and trade” scheme is just like the old Soviet five year economic plan.

Greens (aka lefties) have a firm belief that is government applies just enough coercive power, anything can be made to work. But in the real world, some things work, and some don’t. The five year plan didn’t.

The cap-and-trade scheme adopted by Europe is a scam, has produced exactly zero reduction in CO2, and just hampers the economy for no benefit at all.

When will they learn the futility of “good intentioned” giant social engineering schemes, backed up by force ? They are blinded by ideology, in real life it won’t work.

Besides, when blackouts become frequent because greens are hindering the building of new power plants that really supply power (not renewable green feel-good), the public, the voters will kick them out. There is no way you can make people suffer blackouts just for “the future generations” (false) meme.
Greens hate oil, and coal, and and hinder the production of it, and building of new power plants or refineries. (it’s for the planet and the grandchildren).

They believe in some mysterious notion of “green energy” that just does not exist. They believe that if people are forced to sit in the dark (because of blackouts) they’ll go out and invent green energy. They believe that by using brute force you can make people invent anything.
Stop believing in fairies. There is no green energy. And there is no life without energy.

A complete list of things caused by global warming

2007-07-28T13:08:00.000+03:00

Here is a complete list of things caused by global warming

This AGW thing is a very interesting phenomenon: mass madness on a gigantic scale. A madness not unheard of in human history - maybe like witch hunting.

A moderately rational person who studies the matter finds out very fast that:
1. AGW, while possible, is far from being highly probable. That 90% probability assigned to it in the IPCC is nonsense. Even if it exists it's probably not big quantitatively.
2. The doomsday predictions are based on absolutely nothing. Just hunches, irrational fears and sensationalism.
3. There is nothing that can be done to reduce CO2 emissions short of killing off a few billion people. That is: nothing beyond what will happen naturally - let human ingenuity find solutions and adapt.

After reading some stuff I was mainly impressed by the unscientific approach of many alarmist scientists. They write like people on a crusade, not like scientists.

Global Warming explained

2007-06-06T13:49:00.000+03:00

Global Warming was caused by the end of the Cold war.

How much Global Warming

2007-06-01T13:55:00.000+03:00

Here is a short summary of what I think so far about global warming:

The question of man caused global warming, as I see it is as follows:
- Man burns fossil fuels and releases CO2 into the atmosphere, the concentration of CO2 has gone from 280 ppm ( 0.028%) to 380 ppm (0.038%).
- CO2 is a grenhouse gas, and causes some warming.
These are facts. (almost undisputed).

The question is HOW MUCH warming.

The answer - as far as measurable facts are concerned, i.e. the warming so far: 2/3 of a degree Celsius. No big deal.

As to the future - there are several possible answers; we (science) don't know which is true:

1. A minuscule amount, that is indiscernible in the general natural climate variation (like what happened so far).

2. A small (but discernible) amount - a couple of degrees or so. This is what the (worthless) climate models show. This is what the IPCC report says. This is what (dubious) science tells us. This warming has positive and negative effects, and the negative ones are small, we can easily adapt.

3. Catastrophic warming. For this to happen a warming runaway feedback loop has to take hold. Of this there is absolutely no scientific indication.

So the alarmist view, of a catastrophic warming is based on nothing, NOTHING AT ALL, except irrational fear. The alarmists themselves concede this point: there is no scientific indication of a warming feedback loop. It is just a vague possibility, it is in theory possible, but there is absolutely no indication that it is happening.

Would it be desirable to reduce CO2 emissions? Yes. (Would it be desirable to eliminate poverty? Yes.) Is it possible? No. (in both cases).

Insurance for Global Warming

2007-05-12T00:23:00.000+03:00

Many global warming alarmists, like , for example, Andrew Brod say: the science of GW is complicated, it's very difficult to be absolutely sure about it, we'll never be; we can't wait to be sure, but, nevertheless we should act to reduce CO2 emissions as an insurance policy against possible catastrophe. He writes “there’s no scientific evidence that my house will catch on fire next week, but I think I’ll buy homeowner’s insurance anyway.”

Let's see if the insurance scenario applies:
First is the question of cost. One is willing to pay for insurance only a small price. You would be willing to pay an insurance premium of, say 2, 3, or 5 thousand dollars p/a but if the price is higher you'll renounce insurance and take your risks. Same with GW. It would maybe be reasonable to incur some small cost, but not a big one. Kyoto, for example, (if properly implemented, which can't be done) would be a big cost.

Second is the question of security of the compensation. You would not buy an insurance policy if you had any doubt about the ability or possibility of the insurance company to pay the policy sum when required. But with Kyoto there is no doubt at all: even if implemented as intended (impossible), it would contribute next to nothing toward reducing GW.

Andrew Bord, being a professor of economics, should know that the insurance analogy holds no water.

Global warming - a scientist's view.

2007-04-20T00:48:00.000+03:00

Phaeton’s Reins - fisked.

Kerry Emanuel is a professor of meteorology at MIT and the author of Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes. In 2006 Time magazine recognized him as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.

He published the following article in the January/February 2007 issue of Boston Review.

It is a fascinating, and very interesting article, also full of information in layman's terms.

I copied it here in it's entirety, adding my comments.

Phaeton’s Reins

The human hand in climate change

Kerry Emanuel

Two strands of environmental philosophy run through the course of human history. The first holds that the natural state of the universe is one of infinite stability, with an unchanging earth anchoring the predictable revolutions of the sun, moon, and stars. Every scientific revolution that challenged this notion, from Copernicus’ heliocentricity to Hubble’s expanding universe, from Wegener’s continental drift to Heisenberg’s uncertainty and Lorenz’s macroscopic chaos, met with fierce resistance from religious, political, and even scientific hegemonies.

Also a lot, a greater lot, of false (un)scientific theories "met with fierce resistance ….." Meeting with fierce resistance doesn't prove the truth of your theory.

The hint that global warming alarmism might be a true "scientific revolution" that is "met with fierce resistance from religious, political, and even scientific hegemonies." is unsubstantiated.

The second strand also sees the natural state of the universe as a stable one but holds that it has become destabilized through human actions. The great floods are usually portrayed in religious traditions as attempts by a god or gods to cleanse the earth of human corruption. Deviations from cosmic predictability, such as meteors and comets, were more often viewed as omens than as natural phenomena. In Greek mythology, the scorching heat of Africa and the burnt skin of its inhabitants were attributed to Phaeton, an offspring of the sun god Helios, who, having lost a wager to his son, was obliged to allow him to drive the sun chariot across the sky. In this primal environmental catastrophe, Phaeton lost control and fried the earth, killing himself in the process.

So humans have a tendency to create myths where the end of the world is brought about by some human activity…. Hmm… sounds familiar…

These two fundamental ideas have permeated many cultures through much of history. They strongly influence views of climate change to the present day.

The myth of natural stability

In 1837, Louis Agassiz provoked public outcry and scholarly ridicule when he proposed that many puzzles of the geologic record, such as peculiar scratch marks on rocks, and boulders far removed from their bedrock sources, could be explained by the advance and retreat of huge sheets of ice. This event marked the beginning of a remarkable endeavor, today known as paleoclimatology, which uses physical and chemical evidence from the geological record to deduce changes in the earth’s climate over time. This undertaking has produced among the most profound yet least celebrated scientific advances of our era. We now have exquisitely detailed knowledge of how climate has varied over the last few million years and, with progressively less detail and more uncertainty, how it has changed going back in time to the age of the oldest rocks on our 4.5-billion-year-old planet.

For those who take comfort in stability, there is little consolation in this record. Within the past three million years or so, our climate has swung between mild states, similar to today’s and lasting from ten to 20 thousand years, and periods of 100,000 years or so in which giant ice sheets, in some places several miles thick, covered northern continents. Even more unsettling than the existence of these cycles is the suddenness with which the climate can apparently change, especially as it recovers from glacial eras.

The climate, then, has a proven record of great changes, totally unrelated to human activity, changes whose causes we don't know…. But the earth, and we, living beings, managed somehow to survive all those changes…

Yet we are deeply alarmed about some small change that seems to be taking place right now, as if it were some unprecedented catastrophe.

Over longer intervals of time, the climate has changed even more radically. During the early part of the Eocene era, around 50 million years ago, the earth was free of ice, and giant trees grew on islands near the North Pole, where the annual mean temperature was about 60°F, far warmer than today’s mean of about 30. There is also some evidence that the earth was almost entirely covered with ice at various times around 500 million years ago; in between, the planet was exceptionally hot.

Yet, despite being "exceptionally hot" no catastrophic feedback cycle took hold to destroy life completely! But that's precisely what we fear now. Why ? Doesn't the past teach us not to fear that ?

What explains these changes? For climate scientists, the ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica provide the most intriguing clues. As the ice formed, it trapped bubbles of atmosphere, whose chemical composition—including, for example, its carbon dioxide and methane content—can now be analyzed. Moreover, it turns out that the ratio of the masses of two isotopes of oxygen locked up in the molecules of ice is a good indicator of the air temperature when the ice was formed. And to figure out when the ice was formed, one can count the layers that mark the seasonal cycle of snowfall and melting.

Relying on such analyses of ice cores and sediment cores from the deep ocean, climate scientists have learned something remarkable: the ice-age cycles of the past three million years are probably caused by periodic oscillations of the earth’s orbit that affect primarily the orientation of the earth’s axis. These oscillations do not much affect the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth, but they do change the distribution of sunlight with latitude. This distribution matters because land and water absorb and reflect sunlight differently, and the distributions of land and water—continents and oceans—are quite different in the northern and southern hemispheres. Ice ages occur when, as a result of orbital variations, the arctic regions intercept relatively little summer sunlight so that ice and snow do not melt as much.

The timing of the ice ages, then, is the combined result of the earth’s orbit and its basic geology. But this combination does not explain either the slow pace of the earth’s descent into the cold phases of the cycle or the abrupt recovery to interglacial warmth evident in the ice-core records. More disturbing is the evidence that these large climate swings—from glacial to interglacial and back—are caused by relatively small changes in the distribution of sunlight with latitude. Thus, on the time scale of ice ages, climate seems exquisitely sensitive to small perturbations in the distribution of sunlight.

And yet for all this sensitivity, the earth never suffered either of the climate catastrophes of fire or ice.

This needs to be stressed: "And yet for all this sensitivity, the earth never suffered either of the climate catastrophes of fire or ice."

In the fire scenario, the most effective greenhouse gas—water vapor—accumulates in the atmosphere as the earth warms. The warmer the atmosphere, the more water vapor can accumulate; as more water vapor accumulates, more heat gets trapped, and the warming spirals upward. This uncontrolled feedback is called the runaway greenhouse effect, and it continues until the oceans have all evaporated, by which time the planet is unbearably hot. One has only to look as far as Venus to see the end result. Any oceans that may have existed on that planet evaporated eons ago, yielding a super greenhouse inferno and an average surface temperature of around 900°F.

But, despite climate being "exceptionally hot" in the past (+30 degrees F) this uncontrolled feedback hasn't materialized.

As to Venus – isn't it somewhat nearer the sun than earth? Can that explain the 900 degrees "inferno"? If so – invoking, or mentioning Venus - isn't this just an instance of fear-mongering by false associations ? Isn't it just wrong to mention Venus in this context?

Death by ice can result from another runaway feedback. As snow and ice accumulate progressively equatorward, they reflect an increasing amount of sunlight back to space, further cooling the planet until it freezes into a “snowball earth.” It used to be supposed that once the planet reached such a frozen state, with almost all sunlight reflected back to space, it could never recover; more recently it has been theorized that without liquid oceans to absorb the carbon dioxide continuously emitted by volcanoes, that gas would accumulate in the atmosphere until its greenhouse effect was finally strong enough to start melting the ice.

"…the earth was almost entirely covered with ice at various times around 500 million years ago". Yet this cooling runaway feedback hasn't happened either.

It would not take much change in the amount of sunlight reaching the earth to cause one of these catastrophes. And solar physics informs us that the sun was about 25 percent dimmer early in the earth’s history, which should have led to an ice-covered planet, a circumstance not supported by geological evidence.

So what saved the earth from fire and ice?

Life itself may be part of the answer to the riddle of the faint young sun. Our atmosphere is thought to have originated in gases emitted from volcanoes, but the composition of volcanic gases bears little resemblance to air as we know it today. It is thought that the early atmosphere consisted mostly of water vapor, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, chlorine, and nitrogen. There is little evidence that there was much oxygen—until the advent of life. The first life forms helped produce oxygen through photosynthesis and transformed the atmosphere into something like today’s, consisting mostly of nitrogen and oxygen with trace amounts of water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases. Carbon-dioxide content probably decreased slowly with time owing to chemical weathering, possibly aided by biological processes. As the composition changed, the net greenhouse effect weakened, compensating for the slow but inexorable brightening of the sun.

Wait a minute… could the current warming be caused by the "slow but inexorable brightening of the sun" ? At least part of it?

Thus early life dramatically changed the planet. We humans are only the most recent species to do so.

The compensation between increasing solar power and decreasing greenhouse effect may not have been an accident. In the 1960s, James Lovelock proposed that life actually exerts a stabilizing influence on climate by producing feedbacks favorable to itself. He called his idea the Gaia hypothesis, named after the Greek earth goddess. But even according to this view, life is only preserved in the broadest sense: individual species, such as those that transformed the early atmosphere, altered the environment at their peril.

So, maybe the theory that earth produces stabilizing feedbacks (processes that counter big changes) is more plausible that the one that predicts runaway feedbacks.

Greenhouse physics

As this sketch of the planet’s early climatic history shows, the greenhouse effect plays a critical role in the earth’s climate, and no sensible discussion of climate could proceed without grasping its nature. (A cautionary note: the greenhouse metaphor itself is flawed. Whereas actual greenhouses work by preventing convection currents from carrying away heat absorbed from sunlight, the atmosphere prevents heat from radiating away from the surface.)

But of course. Without the greenhouse effect earth would be too cold to support life.

The greenhouse effect has to do with radiation, which in this context refers to energy carried by electromagnetic waves, which include such phenomena as visible light, radio waves, and infrared radiation. All matter with a temperature above absolute zero emits radiation. The hotter the substance, the more radiation it emits and the shorter the average wavelength of the radiation emitted. A fairly narrow range of wavelengths constitute visible light. The average surface temperature of the sun is about 10,000°F, and the sun emits much of its radiation as visible light, with an average wavelength of about half a micron. (A micron is one millionth of a meter; there are 25,400 microns in an inch.) The earth’s atmosphere emits as though its average temperature were around 0°F, at an average wavelength of about 15 microns. Our eyes cannot detect this infrared radiation. It is important to recognize that the same object can both emit and absorb radiation: when an object emits radiation it loses energy, and this has the effect of cooling it; absorption, on the other hand, heats an object.

Most solids and liquids absorb much of the radiation they intercept, and they also emit radiation rather easily. Air is another matter. It is composed almost entirely of oxygen and nitrogen, each in the form of two identical atoms bonded together in a single molecule. Such molecules barely interact with radiation: they allow free passage to both solar radiation moving downward to the earth and infrared radiation moving upward from the earth’s surface. If that is all there were to the atmosphere, it would be a simple matter to calculate the average temperature of the earth’s surface: it would have to be just warm enough to emit enough infrared radiation to balance the shortwave radiation it absorbed from the sun. (Were it too cool, it would emit less radiation than it absorbed and would heat up; conversely, were it too warm it would cool.) Accounting for the amount of sunlight reflected back to space by the planet, this works out to be about 0°F, far cooler than the observed mean surface temperature of about 60°F.

Fortunately for us, our atmosphere contains trace amounts of other substances that do interact strongly with radiation. Foremost among these is water, H2O, consisting of two atoms of hydrogen bonded to a single atom of oxygen. Because of its more complex geometry, it absorbs and emits radiation far more efficiently than molecular nitrogen and oxygen. In the atmosphere, water exists both in its gas phase (water vapor) and its condensed phase (liquid water and ice) as clouds and precipitation. Water vapor and clouds absorb sunlight and infrared radiation, and clouds also reflect sunlight back to space. The amount of water vapor in a sample of air varies greatly from place to place and time to time, but in no event exceeds about two percent of the mass of the sample. Besides water, there are other gases that interact strongly with radiation; these include CO2, or carbon dioxide (presently about 380 tons for each million tons of air), and CH4, or methane (around 1.7 tons for each million tons of air).

Collectively, the greenhouse gases are nearly transparent to sunlight, allowing the short-wavelength radiation to pass virtually unimpeded to the surface, where much of it is absorbed. (But clouds both absorb and reflect sunlight.) On the other hand, these same gases absorb much of the long-wavelength, infrared radiation that passes through them. To compensate for the heating this absorption causes, the greenhouse gases must also emit radiation, and each layer of the atmosphere thus emits infrared radiation upward and downward.

As a result, the surface of the earth receives radiation from the atmosphere as well as the sun. It is a remarkable fact that, averaged over the planet, the surface receives more radiation from the atmosphere than directly from the sun! To balance this extra input of radiation—the radiation emitted by atmospheric greenhouse gases and clouds—the earth’s surface must warm up and thereby emit more radiation itself. This is the essence of the greenhouse effect.

If air were not in motion, the observed concentration of greenhouse gases and clouds would succeed in raising the average temperature of the earth’s surface to around 85°F, much warmer than observed. In reality, hot air from near the surface rises upward and is continually replaced by cold air moving down from aloft; these convection currents lower the surface temperature to an average of 60°F while warming the upper reaches of the atmosphere. So the emission of radiation by greenhouse gases keeps the earth’s surface warmer than it would otherwise be; at the same time, the movement of air dampens the warming effect and keeps the surface temperature bearable.

Why the climate problem is difficult

This basic climate physics is entirely uncontroversial among scientists. And if one could change the concentration of a single greenhouse gas while holding the rest of the system (except its temperature) fixed, it would be simple to calculate the corresponding change in surface temperature. For example, doubling the concentration of CO2 would raise the average surface temperature by about 1.4°F, enough to detect but probably not enough to cause serious problems. Almost all the controversy arises from the fact that in reality, changing any single greenhouse gas will indirectly cause other components of the system to change as well, thus yielding additional changes. These knock-on effects are known as feedbacks, and the most important and uncertain of these involves water.

A fundamental difference exists between water and most other greenhouse gases. Whereas a molecule of carbon dioxide or methane might remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, water is constantly recycled between the atmosphere, land surface, and oceans, so that a particular molecule of water resides in the atmosphere for, on average, about two weeks. On climate time scales, which are much longer than two weeks, atmospheric water is very nearly in equilibrium with the surface, which means that as much water enters the atmosphere by evaporating from the surface as is lost to the surface by rain and snow. One cannot simply tally up the sources and sinks and figure out which wins; a more involved argument is needed.

To make matters worse, water vapor and clouds are far and away the most important greenhouse substances in the atmosphere, and clouds also affect climate not only by sending infrared radiation back to earth and warming it up but by reflecting sunlight back into space, thus cooling the planet. Water is carried upward from its source at the surface by convection currents, which themselves are a byproduct of the greenhouse effect, which tends to warm the air near the surface. Simple physics as well as detailed calculations using computer models of clouds show that the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is sensitive to the details of the physics by which tiny cloud droplets and ice crystals combine into larger raindrops and snowflakes, and how these in turn fall and partially re-evaporate on their way to the surface. The devil in these details seems to carry much authority with climate.

This complexity is limited, however, because the amount of water in the atmosphere is subject to a fundamental and important constraint. The concentration of water vapor in any sample of air has a strict upper limit that depends on its temperature and pressure: in particular, this limit rises very rapidly with temperature. The ratio of the actual amount of water vapor in a sample to this limiting amount is the familiar quantity called relative humidity. Calculations with a large variety of computer models and observations of the atmosphere all show that as climate changes, relative humidity remains approximately constant. This means that as atmospheric temperature increases, the actual amount of water vapor increases as well. But water vapor is a greenhouse gas. So increasing temperature increases water vapor, which leads to further increases in temperature. This positive feedback in the climate system is the main reason why the global mean surface temperature is expected to increase somewhat more than the 1.4°F that doubling CO2 would produce in the absence of feedbacks. (At very high temperatures, the water vapor feedback can run away, leading to the catastrophe of a very hot planet, as mentioned before.)

Isn't there, as said, also a negative feedback – i.e. more water vapor produces more clouds, and clouds reflect sun rays back into space, causing cooling ? Feedbacks work in both directions, and it isn't clear what is the net effect.

The amount and distribution of water vapor in the atmosphere is also important in determining the distribution of clouds, which play a complex role in climate. On the one hand, they reflect about 22 percent of the incoming solar radiation back to space, thereby cooling the planet. On the other hand, they absorb solar radiation and both absorb and emit infrared radiation, thus contributing to greenhouse warming. Different global climate models produce wildly different estimates of how clouds might change with changing climate, thus constituting the largest source of uncertainty in climate-change projections.

"Different global climate models produce wildly different estimates of how clouds might change with changing climate, thus constituting the largest source of uncertainty in climate-change projections. "

Well said!

A further complication in this already complex picture comes from anthropogenic aerosols—small solid or liquid particles suspended in the atmosphere. Industrial activity and biomass burning have contributed to large increases in the aerosol content of the atmosphere, and this is thought also to have had a large effect on climate.

The main culprits are the sulfate aerosols, which are created through atmospheric chemical reactions involving sulfur dioxide, another gas produced by the combustion of fossil fuels. These tiny particles reflect incoming sunlight and, to a lesser degree, absorb infrared radiation. Perhaps more importantly, they also serve as condensation nuclei for clouds. When a cloud forms, water vapor does not form water droplets or ice crystals spontaneously but instead condenses onto pre-existing aerosol particles. The number and size of these particles determines whether the water condenses into a few large droplets or many small ones, and this in turn strongly affects the amount of sunlight that clouds reflect and the amount of radiation they absorb.

It is thought that the increased reflection of sunlight to space—both directly by the aerosols themselves and through their effect on increasing the reflectivity of clouds—outweighs any increase in their greenhouse effect, thus cooling the planet. Unlike the greenhouse gases, however, sulfate aerosols only remain in the atmosphere a few weeks before they are washed out by rain and snow. Their abundance is proportional to their rate of production—as soon as production decreases, sulfate aerosols follow suit. Since the early 1980s, improved technology and ever more stringent regulations have diminished sulfate aerosol pollution in the developed countries, aided by the collapse of the USSR and the subsequent reduction of industrial output there. On the other hand, sources of sulfate aerosols have been steadily increasing in Asia and the developing countries, so it is unclear how the net global aerosol content has been changing over the past 25 years.

Why is that unclear? Isn't the global aerosol content measurable?

Important uncertainties enter the picture, then, with water (especially clouds) and airborne particulates. But the uncertainties actually go much deeper: indeed, to understand long-term climate change, it is essential to appreciate that detailed forecasts cannot, even in principle, be made beyond a few weeks. That is because the climate system, at least on short time scales, is chaotic.

"…it is essential to appreciate that detailed forecasts cannot, even in principle, be made beyond a few weeks. That is because the climate system, at least on short time scales, is chaotic.

Very important statement. Yet scientists try to make forecasts for 100 years, using models….

The essential property of chaotic systems is that small differences tend to magnify rapidly. Think of two autumn leaves that have fallen next to each other in a turbulent brook. Imagine following them as they move downstream on their way to the sea: at first, they stay close to each other, but the eddies in the stream gradually separate them. At some point, one of the leaves may get temporarily trapped in a whirlpool behind a rock while the other continues downstream. It is not hard to imagine that one of the leaves arrives at the mouth of the river days or weeks ahead of the other. It is also not hard to imagine that a mad scientist, having equipped our brook with all kinds of fancy instruments for measuring the flow of water and devised a computer program for predicting where the leaves would go, would find it almost impossible to predict where the leaf would be even an hour after it started its journey.

Let’s go back to the two leaves just after they have fallen in the brook, and say that at this point they are ten inches apart. Suppose that after 30 minutes they are ten feet apart, and this distance increases with time. Now suppose that it were possible to rewind to the beginning but this time start the leaves only five inches apart. It would not be surprising if it took longer—say an hour—before they are once again 10 feet apart. Keep rewinding the experiment, each time decreasing the initial distance between the leaves. You might suppose that the time it takes to get 10 feet apart keeps increasing indefinitely. But for many physical systems (probably including brooks), this turns out not to be the case. As you keep decreasing the initial separation, the increases in the amount of time it takes for the leaves to be separated by 10 feet get successively smaller, so much so that there is a definite limit : no matter how close the leaves are when they hit the water, it will not take longer than, say, six hours for them to be ten feet apart.

The same principle applies if, instead of having two leaves, we have a single leaf and a computer model of the leaf and the stream that carries it. Even if the computer model is perfect and we start off with a perfect representation of the state of the brook, any error—even an infinitesimal one—in the timing or position of the leaf when it begins its journey will lead to the forecast being off by at least ten feet after six hours, and greater distances at longer times. Prediction beyond a certain time is impossible.

Not all chaotic systems have this property of limited predictability, but our atmosphere and oceans, alas, almost certainly do. As a result, it is thought that the upper limit of the predictability of weather is around two weeks. (That we are not very close to this limit is a measure of the imperfection of our models and our measurements.)

While the day-to-day variations of the weather are perhaps the most familiar examples of environmental chaos, variations at longer time scales can also behave chaotically. El Niño is thought to be chaotic in nature, making it difficult to predict more than a few months in advance. Other chaotic phenomena involving the oceans have even longer time scales, but beyond a few years it becomes increasingly difficult for scientists to tell the difference between chaotic natural variations and what climate scientists called “forced” variability. But this difference is important for understanding the human role in producing climate change.

On top of the natural, chaotic “free” variability of weather and climate are changes brought about by changing “forcing,” which is usually considered to involve factors that are not themselves affected by climate. The most familiar of these is the march of the seasons, brought about by the tilt of the earth’s axis, which itself is independent of climate. The effects of this particular forcing are not hard to separate from the background climate chaos: we can confidently predict that January will be colder than July in, say, New York. Other examples of natural climate forcing include variations in solar output, and volcanic eruptions, which inject aerosols into the stratosphere and thereby cool the climate.

Some of this natural climate forcing is chaotic in nature, but some of it is predictable on long time scales. For example, barring some catastrophic collision with a comet or asteroid, variations of the earth’s orbit are predictable many millions of years into the future. On the other hand, volcanic activity is unpredictable. In any event, the actual climate we experience reflects a combination of free (unforced), chaotic variability, and changes brought about by external forcing, some of which, like volcanic eruptions, are themselves chaotic. And part of this forced climate variability is brought about by us human beings.

Determining humanity’s influence

An important and difficult issue in detecting anthropogenic climate change is telling the difference between natural climate variations—both free and forced—and those that are forced by our own activities.

One way to tell the difference is to make use of the fact that the increase in greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosols dates back only to the industrial revolution of the 19th century: before that, the human influence is probably small. If we can estimate how climate changed before this time, we will have some idea of how the system varies naturally. Unfortunately, detailed measurements of climate did not themselves really begin in earnest until the 19th century; but there are “proxies” for quantities like temperature, recorded in, for example, tree rings, ocean and lake plankton, pollen, and corals.

What is the degree of accuracy of such proxies? To a tenth of a degree?

To one degree F? I don't think so….

Plotting the global mean temperature derived from actual measurements and from proxies going back a thousand years or more reveals that the recent upturn in global temperature is truly unprecedented: the graph of temperature with time shows a characteristic hockey-stick shape, with the business end of the stick representing the upswing of the last 50 years or so. But the proxies are imperfect and associated with large margins of error, so any hockey-stick trends of the past may be masked, though the recent upturn stands above even a liberal estimate of such errors.

The hockey stick has been shown to have been produced by an erroneous statistic method, and is false.

Anyway – the whole hockey stick depicts variations of +- 0.4 degree – are the proxies that it is based on so accurate? Of course not!

We know from written and archeological records that the climate was several degrees warmer in the middle ages (~800-1200 AD) than it is now.

Why are these facts not mentioned? Not even in order to be refuted? Strange omission. It's hard to believe that the author is unaware of these claims. If he thinks they are false he has to explain why.

Another way to tell the difference is to simulate the climate of the last 100 years or so with climate models. Computer modeling of global climate is perhaps the most complex endeavor ever undertaken by mankind. A typical climate model consists of millions of lines of computer instructions designed to simulate an enormous range of physical phenomena, including the flow of the atmosphere and oceans, condensation and precipitation of water inside clouds, the transfer of solar and terrestrial radiation through the atmosphere, including its partial absorption and reflection by the surface, by clouds and by the atmosphere itself, the convective transport of heat, water, and atmospheric constituents by turbulent convection currents, and vast numbers of other processes. There are by now a few dozen such models in the world, but they are not entirely independent of one another, often sharing common pieces of computer code and common ancestors.

Although the equations representing the physical and chemical processes in the climate system are well known, they cannot be solved exactly. It is computationally impossible to keep track of every molecule of air and ocean, and to make the task viable, the two fluids must be divided up into manageable chunks. The smaller and more numerous these chunks, the more accurate the result, but with today’s computers the smallest we can make these chunks in the atmosphere is around 100 miles in the horizontal and a few hundred yards in the vertical, and a bit smaller in the ocean. The problem here is that many important processes are much smaller than these scales. For example, cumulus clouds in the atmosphere are critical for transferring heat and water upward and downward, but they are typically only a few miles across and so cannot be simulated by the climate models. Instead, their effects must be represented in terms of the quantities like wind and temperature that pertain to the whole computational chunk in question. The representation of these important but unresolved processes is an art form known by the awful term parameterization, and it involves numbers, or parameters, that must be tuned to get the parameterizations to work in an optimal way. Because of the need for such artifices, a typical climate model has many tunable parameters, and this is one of many reasons that such models are only approximations to reality. Changing the values of the parameters or the way the various processes are parameterized can change not only the climate simulated by the model, but the sensitivity of the model’s climate to, say, greenhouse-gas increases.

How, then, can we go about tuning the parameters of a climate model in such a way as to make it a reasonable facsimile of reality? Here important lessons can be learned from our experience with those close cousins of climate models, weather-prediction models. These are almost as complicated and must also parameterize key physical processes, but because the atmosphere is measured in many places and quite frequently, we can test the model against reality several times per day and keep adjusting its parameters (that is, tuning it) until it performs as well as it can. But with climate, there are precious few tests. One obvious hurdle the model must pass is to be able to replicate the current climate, including key aspects of its variability, such as weather systems and El Niño. It must also be able to simulate the seasons in a reasonable way: the summers must not be too hot or the winters too cold, for example.

Beyond a few simple checks such as these, there are not too many ways to test the model, and projections of future climates must necessarily involve a degree of faith. The amount of uncertainty in such projections can be estimated to some extent by comparing forecasts made by many different models, with their different parameterizations (and, very likely, different sets of coding errors). We operate under the faith that the real climate will fall among the projections made with the various models; in other words, that the truth will lie somewhere between the higher and lower estimates generated by the models.

We operate under the faith that the real climate will fall among the projections made with the various models;

Indeed, that's what it is –faith. Not facts. Not science. Just faith.

The figure above shows the results of two sets of computer simulations of the global average surface temperature of the 20th century using a particular climate model. In the first set, denoted by blue, only natural, time-varying forcings are applied; these consist of variable solar output and “dimming” owing to aerosols produced by known volcanic eruptions. The second set (in red) adds in the man-made influences on sulfate aerosols and greenhouse gases. In each set, the model is run four times beginning with slightly different initial states, and the range among the four ensemble members is denoted by the shading in the figure, reflecting the free random variability of the climate produced by this model, while the colored curves show the average of the four ensemble members. The observed global average surface temperature is depicted by the black curve. One observes that the two sets of simulations diverge during the 1970s and have no overlap at all today, and that the observed global temperature also starts to fall outside the envelope of the all-natural simulations in the 1970s. This exercise has been repeated using many different climate models, with the same qualitative result: one cannot simulate the evolution of the climate over last 30 years without including in the simulations mankind’s influence on sulfate aerosols and greenhouse gases. This, in a nutshell, is why almost all climate scientists today believe that man’s influence on climate has emerged from the background noise of natural variability.

Ok, it's climate models, not facts.

It was explicitly stated that the belief in climate models is just a belief. The climate is far too complicated, and contains a great number of unknown factors, and a great number of factors, that though known, cannot be measured with precision.

Yet, all the case of alarmists rests on those models, and on them alone!

It was very well explained how complicated and chaotic the climate is, and how many unknown and un-measurable factors are involved, and how difficult it is to check the correctness of models.

Yet – by a jump of faith – the result of these models is presented as a scientific fact. It is – in my opinion, a mere guess, not a fact. We don't know how good a guess.

The consequences

Projections based on climate models suggest that the globe will continue to warm another 3 to 7°F over the next century. This is similar to the temperature change one could experience by moving, say, from Boston to Philadelphia. Moreover, the warming of already hot regions—the tropics—is expected to be somewhat less, while the warming of cold regions like the arctic is projected to be more, a signal already discernable in global temperature measurements. Nighttime temperatures are increasing more rapidly than daytime warmth.

Is this really so bad? In all the negative publicity about global warming, it is easy to overlook the benefits: It will take less energy to heat buildings, previously infertile lands of high latitudes will start producing crops, and there will be less suffering from debilitating cold waves. Increased CO2 might also make crops grow faster. On the down side, there will be more frequent and more intense heat waves, air conditioning costs will rise, and previously fertile areas in the subtropics may become unarable. Sure, there will be winners and losers, but will the world really suffer in the net? Even if the changes we are bringing about are larger than the globe has experienced in the last few thousand years, they still do not amount to the big natural swings between ice ages and interglacial periods, and the earth and indeed human beings survived these.

Even if the changes we are bringing about are larger than the globe has experienced in the last few thousand years,

Wrong on two counts

"we are bringing" – if you have big faith in those models…
"larger than" – even the predicted change isn't larger than what we had 1000 years ago!

But there are consequences of warming that we cannot take so lightly. During the peak of the last ice age, sea level was some 400 feet lower than today’s, since huge quantities of water were locked up in the great continental ice sheets. As polar regions warm, it is possible that portions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will melt, increasing sea level. Highly detailed and accurate satellite-based measurements of the thickness of the Greenland ice show that it is actually increasing in the interior but thinning around the margins, and while there are also patterns of increase and decrease in Antarctic ice, it appears to be thinning on the whole. Meltwater from the surface of the Greenland ice sheet is making its way to the bottom of the ice, possibly allowing the ice to flow faster toward the sea. Our understanding of the physics of ice under pressure is poor, and it is thus difficult to predict how the ice will respond to warming. Were the entire Greenland ice cap to melt, sea level would increase by around 22 feet—flooding many coastal regions including much of southern Florida and lower Manhattan.

Were the entire Greenland ice cap to melt

Is that a possibility? Does anyone predict that? Does any scientist predict the melting of the entire Greenland ice cap? Al Gore predicts it, but no scientist does.

If not – why mention it? Isn't that false alarmist hyperbole? Isn't that cheap, sensationalist journalism?

My own work has shown that hurricanes are responding to warming sea surface temperatures faster than we originally expected, especially in the North Atlantic, where the total power output by tropical cyclones has increased by around 60 percent since the 1970s. The 2005 hurricane season was the most active in the 150 years of records, corresponding to record warmth of the tropical Atlantic. Hurricanes are far and away the worst natural disasters to affect the U.S. in economic terms. Katrina may cost us as much as $200 billion, and it has claimed at least 1,200 lives. Globally, tropical cyclones cause staggering loss of life and misery. Hurricane Mitch of 1998 killed over 10,000 people in Central America, and in 1970 a single storm took the lives of some 300,000 people in Bangladesh. Substantial changes in hurricane activity cannot be written off as mere climate perturbations to which we will easily adjust.

Are there any "substantial changes in hurricane activity" already recorded and proven? Seems to me there are not. This is just unsubstantiated fear .

"substantial changes in hurricane activity" caused by the paltry 1 deg F that temperatures have risen so far in the last 100 years ?

Basic theory and models show another consequential result of a few degrees of warming. The amount of water vapor in the air rises exponentially with temperature: a seven-degree increase in temperature increases water vapor by 25 percent. One might at first suppose that since the amount of water ascending into clouds increases, the amount of rain that falls out of them must increase in proportion. But condensing water vapor heats the atmosphere, and in the grand scheme of things, this must be compensated by radiative heat loss.

Wrong. "condensing water vapor heats the atmosphere" ? No. The water vapor, when it was formed by evaporation, has absorbed energy from the earth (and the atmosphere), when it condenses it releases that same energy. There is no net addition of energy (and heat) involved in condensation.

On the other hand, simple calculations show that the amount of radiative heat loss increases only very slowly with temperature, so that the total heating by condensation must increase slowly as well. Models resolve this conundrum by making it rain harder in places that are already wet and at the same time increasing the intensity, duration, or geographical extent of droughts. Thus, the twin perils of flood and drought actually both increase substantially in a warmer world.

It is particularly sobering to contemplate such outcomes in light of the evidence that smaller, natural climate swings since the end of the last ice age debilitated and in some cases destroyed entire civilizations in such places as Mesopotamia, Central and South America, and the southwestern region of what is today the United States.

That is a new claim, never heard it before. Any evidence? (For the claim that past civilizations were destroyed by climate swings… ).

Suddenly, out of the blue, new factoids are born!

In pushing the climate so hard and so fast,

In pushing the climate so hard and so fast

What does this mean? Who is pushing what? The whole article detailed in great detail the uncertainties and the impossibility of making predictions – yet all of a sudden the climate is pushed hard and fast!

we are also conscious of our own collective ignorance of how the climate system works.

we are also conscious of our own collective ignorance of how the climate system works.

Nevertheless we must ignore our "collective ignorance" and behave as if we knew all about climate change with scientific certainty! Out of our "collective ignorance" we confidently predict catastrophe.

Perhaps negative-feedback mechanisms that we have not contemplated or have underestimated will kick in, sparing us from debilitating consequences. On the other hand, the same could be said of positive feedbacks, and matters might turn out worse than projected. The ice-core record reveals a climate that reacts in complex and surprising ways to smoothly and slowly changing radiative forcing caused by variations in the earth’s orbit. Far from changing smoothly, it remains close to one state for a long time and then suddenly jumps to another state. We do not understand this, and are worried that a sudden climate jump may be part of our future.

"…will kick in, sparing us from debilitating consequences. "

Even if no feedbacks kick in at all, there will be no "debilitating consequences"… (the 3 to 9 deg F over 100 years are by no means "debilitating consequences").

What you say in fact is that we know absolutely nothing. There may be positive feedback, there may be negative feedbacks, and we have no clue as to what the case is. This is absolutely correct.

Yet you say that "we are worried" about the unknown.

Well, man was always worried about the unknown. Maybe correctly so. But this is no science. This is pure sentimentalist, intangible fear.

Maybe justified, maybe in the end – correct – but devoid of any anchor in facts or in science. Purely irrational fear (though it's not impossible that what we fear will happen, it's only that we don't know, and cannot know, but we fear the unknown anyway).

Science, politics, and the media

Science proceeds by continually testing and discarding or refining hypotheses, a process greatly aided by the naturally skeptical disposition of scientists. We are, most of us, driven by a passion to understand nature, but that means being dispassionate about pet ideas. Partisanship—whatever its source—is likely to be detected by our colleagues and to yield a loss of credibility, the true stock of the trade. We share a faith—justified by experience—that at the end of the day, there is a truth to be found, and those who cling for emotional reasons to wrong ideas will be judged by history accordingly, whereas those who see it early will be regarded as visionaries.

The evolution of the scientific debate about anthropogenic climate change illustrates both the value of skepticism and the pitfalls of partisanship. Although the notion that fossil-fuel combustion might increase CO2 and alter climate originated in the 19th century, general awareness of the issue dates to a National Academy of Sciences report in 1979 that warned that doubling CO2 content might lead to a three-to-eight-degree increase in global average temperature. Then, in 1988, James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, set off a firestorm of controversy by testifying before Congress that he was virtually certain that a global-warming signal had emerged from the background climate variability. At that time, less was known about natural climate variability before the beginning of systematic instrumental records in the nineteenth century, and only a handful of global climate simulations had been performed. Most scientists were deeply skeptical of Hansen’s claims; I certainly was. It is important to interpret the word “skeptical” literally here: it was not that we were sure of the opposite, merely that we thought the jury was out.

At roughly this time, radical environmental groups and a handful of scientists influenced by them leapt into the fray with rather obvious ulterior motives. This jump-started the politicization of the issue, and conservative groups, financed by auto makers and big oil, responded with counterattacks.

financed by auto makers and big oil,

Nonesense. "Our own motives are always pure and true, but our opponents are motivated by filthy lucre!" It can't be that they have a case, that their theories need to be addressed, and are as valuable and as plausible as ours. No! They are motivated by filthy lucre, while we have a monopoly on noble motives!

They are insincere frauds, while we are honest and pure of heart!

Indeed, a very scientific claim J.

This reveals the true colors of the author. He isn't conscious of the absurdity of these claims.

This also marked the onset of an interesting and disturbing phenomenon that continues to this day. A very small number of climate scientists adopted dogmatic positions and in so doing lost credibility among the vast majority who remained committed to an unbiased search for answers. On the left, an argument emerged urging fellow scientists to deliberately exaggerate their findings so as to galvanize an apathetic public, an idea that, fortunately, failed in the scientific arena but which took root in Hollywood, culminating in the 2004 release of The Day After Tomorrow. On the right, the search began for negative feedbacks that would counter increasing greenhouse gases: imaginative ideas emerged, but they have largely failed the acid test of comparison to observations. But as the dogmatists grew increasingly alienated from the scientific mainstream, they were embraced by political groups and journalists, who thrust them into the limelight. This produced a gross distortion in the public perception of the scientific debate. Ever eager for the drama of competing dogmas, the media largely ignored mainstream scientists whose hesitations did not make good copy. As the global-warming signal continues to emerge, this soap opera is kept alive by a dwindling number of deniers constantly tapped for interviews by journalists who pretend to look for balance.

As the global-warming signal continues to emerge, this soap opera is kept alive by a dwindling number of deniers constantly tapped for interviews by journalists who pretend to look for balance.

So, those that have opposing theories and opinions aren't to be taken seriously, they are just "deniers"… We are the sole oracles of truth.

These claims take on a religious dimension – which is not surprising, being based, as the author stated himself – on faith (faith in impossible models).

And this – by a person who decries "extremists and dogmatists on both sides" !!

While the American public has been misinformed by a media obsessed with sensational debate, climate scientists developed a way forward that helps them to compare notes and test one another’s ideas and also creates a valuable communication channel. Called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, it produces a detailed summary of the state of the science every four years, with the next one due out in February 2007. Although far from perfect, the IPCC involves serious climate scientists from many countries and has largely withstood political attack and influence.

While the American public has been misinformed by a media obsessed with sensational debate,

Never has a truer statement be made! This whole global warming alarmism is a matter of the public being "misinformed by a media obsessed with sensational debate".

The IPCC reports are fairly candid about what we collectively know and where the uncertainties probably lie. In the first category are findings that are not in dispute, not even by les refusards:

Refusards – deniers … very scientific terms….

• Concentrations of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane, ozone, and nitrous oxide are increasing owing to fossil-fuel consumption and biomass burning. Carbon dioxide has increased from its pre-industrial level of about 280 parts per million (ppmv) to about 380 ppmv today, an increase of about 35 percent. From ice-core records, it is evident that present levels of CO2 exceed those experienced by the planet at any time over at least the past 650,000 years.

• Concentrations of certain anthropogenic aerosols have also increased owing to industrial activity.

• The earth’s average surface temperature has increased by about 1.2°F in the past century, with most of the increase occurring from about 1920 to 1950, and again beginning around 1975. The year 2005 was the warmest in the instrumental record.

1.2°F in the past century !!

Big deal! This is far below the accuracy level of our measuring instruments and methods over those 100 years!

We must distinguish between predictions of the future, which are speculative and ridden with uncertainties, and facts – which state what happened in the past, and are based on measurement.

So far there hasn't been much global warming. This is an undisputed fact. 1.2 deg F isn't much.

The whole debate is about future warming.

• Sea level has risen by about 2.7 inches over the past 40 years; of this, a little over an inch occurred during the past decade.

• The annual mean geographical extent of arctic sea ice has decreased by 15 to 20 percent since satellite measurements of this began in 1978.

In the second category are findings that most climate scientists agree with but are disputed by some:

• The global mean temperature is now greater than at any time in at least the past 500 to 1,000 years.

Greater by how much? 0.4 degrees ? Do our proxy measuring methods give us results accurate to fractions of degrees ?

(And this factoid isn't even true! It ignores the warm middle ages period.)

• Most of the global mean temperature variability is caused by four factors: variability of solar output, major volcanic eruptions, and anthropogenic sulfate aerosols and greenhouse gases.

What about earth's axis inclination variation, mentioned before? Can we be sure there aren't additional factors?

• The dramatic rise in global mean temperature in the past 30 years is owing primarily to increasing greenhouse-gas concentrations and a leveling off or slight decline in sulfate aerosols.

The dramatic rise in global mean temperature

Dramatic ?? Dramatic?? How much exactly?? Is "dramatic" a scientific term? Why jump from science to journalistic hyperbole ?

Is 0.4 degrees "dramatic"? How ? How many degrees is this "dramatic rise"?

Those agreed upon 1.2 deg F of the last century include the "dramatic rise" of the last 30 years !

• Unless measures are taken to reduce greenhouse-gas production, global mean temperature will continue to increase, about 2.5 to 9°F over the next century, depending on uncertainties and how much greenhouse gas is produced.

These are the only uncertainties? What about all those enumerated so eloquently in the first part of this article?

• As a result of the thermal expansion of sea water and the melting of polar ice caps, sea level will increase six to 16 inches over the next century, though the increase could be larger if large continental ice sheets become unstable.

• Rainfall will continue to become concentrated in increasingly heavy but less frequent events.

• The incidence, intensity, and duration of both floods and drought will increase.

• The intensity of hurricanes will continue to increase, though their frequency may dwindle.

As stated – these are highly speculative predictions, not accepted by all scientists.

But even if true – not catastrophic.

All these projections depend, of course, on how much greenhouse gas is added to the atmosphere over the next century, and even if we could be certain about the changes, estimating their net effect on humanity is an enormously complex undertaking,

estimating their net effect on humanity is an enormously complex undertaking,

Nevertheless we confidently predict catastrophe.

pitting uncertain estimates of costs and benefits against the costs of curtailing greenhouse-gas emissions. But we are by no means certain about what kind of changes are in store, and we must be wary of climate surprises. Even if we believed that the projected climate changes would be mostly beneficial, we might be inclined to make sacrifices as an insurance policy against potentially harmful surprises.

we might be inclined to make sacrifices

Depends on the cost – how big a sacrifice? And how sure can we be that the sacrifice will have the desired effect (i.e. – will not be in vain)?

The politics of global climate change

(Ok, since the science is already settled, we scientists can now indulge in politics)!

Especially in the United States, the political debate about global climate change became polarized along the conservative–liberal axis some decades ago. Although we take this for granted now, it is not entirely obvious why the chips fell the way they did. One can easily imagine conservatives embracing the notion of climate change in support of actions they might like to see anyway. Conservatives have usually been strong supporters of nuclear power, and few can be happy about our current dependence on foreign oil. The United States is renowned for its technological innovation and should be at an advantage in making money from any global sea change in energy-producing technology: consider the prospect of selling new means of powering vehicles and electrical generation to China’s rapidly expanding economy. But none of this has happened.

Paradoxes abound on the political left as well. A meaningful reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions will require a shift in the means of producing energy, as well as conservation measures. But such alternatives as nuclear and wind power are viewed with deep ambivalence by the left. Senator Kennedy, by most measures our most liberal senator, is strongly opposed to a project to develop wind energy near his home in Hyannis, and environmentalists have only just begun to rethink their visceral opposition to nuclear power. Had it not been for green opposition, the United States today might derive most of its electricity from nuclear power, as does France; thus the environmentalists must accept a large measure of responsibility for today’s most critical environmental problem.

But such alternatives as nuclear and wind power are viewed with deep ambivalence by the left.

False. Nuclear power is viewed with deep abhorrence by the left, no ambivalence at all!

There are other obstacles to taking a sensible approach to the climate problem. We have preciously few representatives in Congress with a background or interest in science, and some of them display an active contempt for the subject. As long as we continue to elect scientific illiterates like James Inhofe, who believes global warming to be a hoax, we will lack the ability to engage in intelligent debate.

"As long as we continue to elect scientific illiterates like James Inhofe"

Heh ! Could you please name some members of Congress that are scientifically literate?

Or do you wish to imply that only scientist are qualified to serve in Congress?

Or that anyone who disagrees with you is "scientifically illiterate"?

A not very scientific statement! The temper has trumped his brain!

Scientists are most effective when they provide sound, impartial advice, but their reputation for impartiality is severely compromised by the shocking lack of political diversity among American academics, who suffer from the kind of group-think that develops in cloistered cultures. Until this profound and well documented intellectual homogeneity changes, scientists will be suspected of constituting a leftist think tank.

On the bright side, the governments of many countries, including the United States, continue to fund active programs of climate research, and many of the critical uncertainties about climate change are slowly being whittled down. The extremists are being exposed and relegated to the sidelines, and when the media stop amplifying their views, their political counterparts will have nothing left to stand on. When this happens, we can get down to the serious business of tackling the most complex and perhaps the most consequential problem ever confronted by mankind.

the governments of many countries, including the United States, continue to fund active programs of climate research,

Here is a prejudice that all depends on governments, that only governments can tackle the problem.

Like it or not, we have been handed Phaeton’s reins, and we will have to learn how to control climate if we are to avoid his fate. <

When this happens, we can get down to the serious business of tackling the most complex and perhaps the most consequential problem ever confronted by mankind.

How do we tackle?

What needs to be done? What can produce the desired effect of reducing CO2 ?

We need to do…. Much is to be done… WHAT?? What exactly ?

There is nothing we can do!

(Except nuclear power, and except what is being done already – like research).

The alternative is to drastically reduce our use of energy – and that would have worse consequences, by far, that the supposed (and claimed, and guessed) effects of global warming.

In the service of oil companies

2007-04-18T17:43:00.000+03:00

Whenever one utters some inconvenient truth about the mistakes in some pet theories of some people (usually about global warming) they jump on you: "you are a servant of Big Oil, you're on their payroll, your research is bankrolled by them".

Doesn't matter that Big Oil is one of the biggest investors in "green" research... they would just love to find some green, profit producing energy... (who wouldn't ?).

Being on the payroll of Big Oil is no mortal sin, I wish I were...

But those shouters work usually in academia, or in some government agency, or government financed research. And they use their theories for advocating more government controls (carbon taxes, carbon permits, etc.). Shouldn't their research be suspect, in that they have ulterior motives in promoting the welbeing of the organization that finances them ?

I believe that research should be appraised according to it's contents, and not to the identity of it's financial supporter.

Bush and ethanol nonesense.

2007-01-28T14:04:00.000+02:00

Charles Krauthammer gets it right:

The President's SOTU energy segment (mainly about ethanol) was nonesense. Bush probably knows it (Cheney sure does), and why he beleives that talking nonesense is good politics is beyond me.

Krauthammer proposes 3 steps:
1. Drill in ANWAR.
2. Nuclear power.
3. A gas tax.

The first two will be adopted sooner or later, as there is no way around them. But - from adoption (implausible, politically impossible at the moment) to maturing - that is to bearing fruits - there is a 10-20 years gap. They won't help reduce oil imports or consumption in the next 20-30 years. Nevertheless - they need to be done - the energy problem won't go away until then, and there won't be better solutions.

As to the gas tax - it will have an immediate impact - but what impact?
It will reduce consumption some - how much is not clear - I guess a few percentage points. Not that much. And it will have a negative impact on economic growth; how much is not clear - maybe not catastrophic.
It might be worth giving it a try, though I doubt it.

One thing is obvious to me - we must not increase the overall tax burden, so if a gas tax is adopted, it must be offset by reductions in other taxes. Fat chance for that !

Race blind racial preferences

2007-01-26T12:35:00.000+02:00

In the NY Times:

Colleges Regroup After Voters Ban Race Preferences
By TAMAR LEWIN
Many public universities are scrambling to find race-blind ways to attract more blacks and Hispanics.

Renewable energy funding.

2007-01-25T18:24:00.000+02:00

Federal lab for renewable energy

The NY Times article complains that the federal lab for renewable energy doesn't receive enough funding.

Some people think that science can perform any miracle, and if you throw at it enough money (preferably other people's money, like federal funds) it will produce anything you may wish.

It ain't so. There are physical restrictions. There are those pesky laws of nature.

Maybe some completely new and unexpected renewable, nonpolluting and cheap energy sources (like John Galt's motor) will be discovered in the future. The chances are slim, and the chances it will happen in the Federal Lab - slimmer still.

The Energy department projects that renewable energy will not be available in significant amounts until 2030. I would hazard the prediction that they will not be available even in 2060.
Get used to the idea and stop dreaming.

$15 billion - what we got for it.

2007-01-24T02:07:00.000+02:00

From the white house release of the SOTU:

Including The 2008 Budget, The Federal Government Will Have Spent $15 Billion Since 2001 To Develop Cleaner, Cheaper, More Efficient, And More Reliable Energy Sources.

Ok. $15b spent and what has been achieved ? Where are the "cleaner, cheaper, more reliable energy sources" ?
There aren't any. Not any significant quantity. Nothing. All we got for those 15 billion bucks is hot air, rhetoric. They have joined all those billions spent by presidents Clinton, Bush 1, Reagan, Carter for "new" energy- down the drain.

Energy policy

2007-01-23T17:09:00.000+02:00

Cliff May writes on NRO:

Coffee Talk [Cliff May]

The president needs to talk, in more depth and detail than he has in the past, —
about measuring success in Iraq, the consequences should we fail there, and the
connections, which too many people still can't see, between Iraq and the broader
conflict. Also: how we begin, finally, to craft an energy policy that reduces
the economic/political/military power of Middle Eastern oil.
Reliable sources tell me he will do all of the above.

It's ok to talk about "an energy policy that reduces the economic/political/military power of Middle Eastern oil.". Talk is cheap. Talk makes people feel good. Bush should talk about this, absolutely !

There is an "energy policy that reduces the economic/political/military power of Middle Eastern oil." : start drilling like mad on the continental shelf, and in Alaska (for oil). Build nuclear power plants. But I bet Bush won't say this. It is not PC. He's got lately into the habit of parroting more and more of the nonesense that is fashionable, and less of the truth.

2007-01-14T18:22:00.000+02:00

20$ a barrel of oil.

Won't happen.
Victor Davis Henson writes:

...and collapse the world oil market though conservation, more exploration, alternative fuels, and nuclear power. 20 -dollar-a-barrel oil will take immediately nearly $500 billion a year out of the coffers of Middle East exporters—and with that loss, floating petrodollars for weapons and terrorists.

Get real people ! 20$ a barrel oil won't happen. Not in the next 30-50 years (probably never). All alternate energy sources known to us cost about $100 per barrel, equivalent. Oil is cheap, nothing comes near that.
As much as we would love to deprive those terrorism mongering nuts of their income - it won't happen. You need to think up some other terror fighting, planet saving, strategy.

Nuclear is the most promising energy source, but there won't be a new reactor going on line for at least 30 years, even in the unlikely scenario that someone decides to build one today.

Here I go

2007-01-14T18:10:00.000+02:00

This is to anounce my new blog. I heven't really decided to start one, but i might.