Who's Afraid of Global Warming?

Science works by means of prediction. Once data is collected and evaluated, and a hypothesis formed, scientific method requires that certain predictions be made to act as tests of the overall theory. If the predictions work out, we can regard the hypothesis as proven. If not, we vow to do better next time.

Take general relativity, for instance. (Full disclosure: this example is stolen in toto from Rush Limbaugh's program of February 2nd.) Einstein's theory was dismissed as lunatic by many classical physicists on its introduction in 1905. But he proposed a series of simple and straightforward tests, among them that starlight close to the sun's rim would be seen to bend during a total eclipse. In 1919, just such an eclipse was carefully photographed by Arthur Stanley Eddington, not yet the dean of British astrophysics. The photos showed that the stars closet to the sun had shifted a small but measurable degree, and the world was never quite the same thereafter. (When later asked what he'd have done if the photos had shown anything else, Einstein said, "I'd have been sorry for the Good Lord Almighty.")

There exists today a large and growing class of theories on subjects that are either too vast, too small, too remote, or too complex to allow adequate testing. These include such abstruse concepts as string theory, brane theory, and dark matter. So critical has the situation become in some fields that there has been talk of "the end of physics", or even the end of science as a whole - surely a premature diagnosis.

Among all the cutting-edge ideas not susceptible to testing there's one that's quite familiar - global warming. The earth's climate, we're told, is far too large and complex (in both the mathematical and common meanings) a phenomenon to be subject to any conceivable form of testing. All the same, the dangers presented by climate change are so great that we cannot wait for actual evidence. The risk is infinite, so we have to act now, while there's still time.

But is that in fact the case? It's quite true that a planetary climatic system exceeds any test that we can design. The best we can do is model it, through computer simulations that are by their very nature incomplete (not to mention contradictory). Wouldn't it be nice if we had access to some natural example comparable to what's occurring now, so that we could analyze it and get some idea of what we're facing?

It so happens that we have exactly that. This isn't the first time warming has occurred on earth - it's a commonplace and recurring phenomenon. As we've seen previously, one such episode took place in relatively recent historic time - the Little Climatic Optimum, better known as the Medieval Warming Period. During the LCO, worldwide temperatures rose by 1 to 3 degrees centigrade for a roughly three-hundred-year period beginning in the 10^th century and ending late in the 13^th century. Records from the era are abundant and easily available.

This is one of the most popular topics among global warming advocates, probably because it lends itself to spectacular visuals: maps of Florida "after the warming" are commonplace, while the honest and well-researched film An Inconvenient Truth features scenes of an underwater New York City. Speculations as to the height of the inundation vary from roughly a meter in the 2000 IPCC report to twenty feet from filmmaker Al Gore to double that from Australian activist Tim Flannery.

And during the LCO? Over three centuries, the highest oceanic level was eighteen inches above the previous norm. That foot-and-a-half may sound like quite a lot, but the damage it caused appears to be minimal. There are no records of massive flooding either in Europe or elsewhere. No seacoast villages were relocated that we know of. Florida was certainly not overwhelmed.

A related matter, one that plays very well in places like Hawaii, involves fears that beaches worldwide will be swept away in the deluge. This appears to be based solely on the experience of Tuvalu. A small cluster of atolls in the South Pacific about 600 miles north of Fiji, Tuvalu (formerly the Ellice Islands) was widely featured in the news a few years ago due to claims that it was being "washed away" by rising sea levels. Suggestions were made that the entire population of 11,000 be settled elsewhere. Grim lessons for seacoast communities were drawn.

It developed that Tuvalu's beach erosion was caused by overbuilding. Putting too many houses on a beach upsets shoreline dynamics, literally pushing sand out to sea (the same phenomenon can be found all up and down the New Jersey shore). Tuvalu has not been evacuated and, if its web site http:// can be trusted, has just elected a new prime minister.

What does the LCO tell us about beach erosion? For that we can turn to the Furdustrand, literally, "wonder strand", so named by the Vikings who were the first Europeans to come across it about A.D. 1000. The Furdustrand, a white-sand beach close to forty miles long and in places 200 feet wide, is in truth spectacular, and would be a lot more widely known if it was anywhere on earth more accessible than northern Labrador.

The point is that Furdustrand today looks exactly the way it did when the Vikings first grounded their ships on its sands. The rising sea levels of the LCO, the retreating levels of the Little Ice Age, and the return to higher levels since 1850 appear not to have harmed it one iota. Fears of disappearing beaches can be dismissed.

The idea that coral reefs will be wiped out by global warming is an oddity, thriving as coral does in the warm waters of the tropics. The best known is the Great Barrier Reef off Australia's tropical northeastern coast, and of course, the entire South Pacific is dotted with atolls that began their careers as exactly such reefs. (Tuvalu itself is comprised of several coral atolls.) You will look long and hard for any such islands in the cold waters of the Arctic or the Southern Ocean.

For some years, large stretches of coral in the world's oceans have suffered "bleaching" as the living coral dies and leaves only the basic skeletal structure. The contention that warming is to blame appears to arise solely because it's happening at the same moment: the earth is warming, coral is dying, therefore, warming is killing the coral.

But the same coral reefs existed during the LCO, and appear not to have been affected by the large-scale warming that occurred at the time. There are no beds of dead ancient coral visible, no legends of mass die-offs by Melanesians or other native peoples (dying coral would have deprived fish of a safe environment, leading to a drop in the food supply). We have to conclude that no such thing happened.

Mass extinction is another favorite of warming advocates, with figures of up to "one-quarter" to "one-half" of all species disappearing, though there's no concrete evidence of a single species actually being threatened by warmer temperatures. As with much warming rhetoric, this seems to be sheer speculation, based on the premise that certain "niche" organisms will die out as their marginal environments are changed.

The problem with this thesis is that no species appears to have vanished as a result of the LCO. While it's certainly possible that a marginal species limited to a single locale might have suffered, the simple assumption cannot be made. Certainly no massive die-off as predicted by the more hysterical Greens and their media allies ever took place. Warming and cooling has occurred continually throughout the geological history of the planet earth. It's safe to assume that most organisms have developed means of dealing with them.

Severe storms are mentioned for pro forma reasons as much as anything. We're all aware (much as the media has chosen to neglect the fact) that last fall's hurricane season, predicted to be second only to the Day of Wrath in violence, was a complete washout, with not a single serious hurricane troubling American shores. This was a grave disappointment to Greens after 2005's wild roller coaster ride.

The run amok storm thesis is a result of junior high science: the atmosphere is a heat engine, so if you add more heat, there will be more activity, with storms growing in frequency, duration, and violence with no perceptible upper limit. (At least two disaster novels have already been written using this premise, both of them truly lousy, so don't even think about it.) In truth, most warming occurs at higher latitudes, effectively erasing differences in atmospheric temperature and meliorating weather.

This is clearly seen in the LCO, a period of generally calm and predictable weather, with lengthy summers, gentle winters, and fierce storms relatively rare and all the more striking for that. This calm literally lasted for centuries, enabling the Vikings to carry out their explorations in open boats at very high latitudes, areas afflicted with horrible weather even to this day. Numerous violent storms reappeared when the climate cooled in the late 13^th century, with terrifying results. Consider the fate of Winchelsea, an English port swallowed by the waves of the Channel during a days-long rainstorm in 1297. Even worse were crop failures caused by dismal weather all across Europe that resulted in repeated general famines. Clearly it's cooling that leads to foul weather. Which may prompt us to wonder exactly what's behind the past few weeks' spate of killer blizzards.

It's possible that warming may actually add to the thickness of the continental ice sheets by increasing evaporation, which then falls as snow. This seems to be happening to both ice sheets. Is this part of a planetary homeostatic system that keeps things in rough balance? We simply don't know. Perhaps James Lovelock can ask Gaia about it.

Warming is predicted to bring about a vast increase in disease, particularly tropical diseases taking advantage of newly-opened ecological niches - yaws in the Midwest, hookworm in Nova Scotia, altogether an ugly picture. (Some claims have been made that this has already occurred. A sometimes deadly tropical fungus has apparently transplanted itself to Vancouver Island, with global warming to blame. It's difficult to see what the mechanism for this could have been, unless the fungus is capable of reading the IPCC report. Certainly there's no reason to believe that Western Canada has suddenly turned tropical. It is, like nearby Washington state, one of the wettest areas in North America, making it homey for any number of fungal diseases, which could have easily hitched a ride on any ship or aircraft heading north.)

What's the testimony of the LCO? While by no means disease-free, the medieval warming period was as close to it as any era before the pre-modern world can show. The black plague, the chief dread of the period, completely retreated from Europe to its original home in central Asia (evidently, rodents in the Caucasus have adapted to the plague bacillus and serve as a steady, living reservoir). There are no outbreaks of plague on record during the LCO and few of other diseases. This was the direct result of a combination of gentle weather and good harvests - well-fed people tend to have robust immune systems.

But in truth, movement during the LCO was considerably freer than in many later eras (the late 13^th century was Marco Polo's epoch). Along with the Vikings, there are the Mongols, who burst into Europe just before the era drew to a close. A curious fact about these episodes is that they were not followed by massive exchanges of diseases, which normally occurs when cultural bubbles are broken after long periods of isolation. (Consider the varied and deadly plagues that killed much of the native population of Mexico after the Spanish invasion.) Whether this is due to the influence of the LCO is impossible to surmise, but it's a telling sign.

It's difficult to discern the exact nature of the purported relationship between warming and economic performance, and Green rhetoric offers little assistance. I would guess that the specter of a crashed economy is simply added on as a matter of course, as a kind of Fifth Horseman armed with pink slips and foreclosure notices rather than scythes or swords. Certainly there's nothing inherent in any warming scenario that would lead to the economy going south. It must be all those plagues and storms.

That ended when the cooling came, at the close of the 13^th century. The encroaching cold was accompanied by the medieval depression, which lasted for over two centuries. (Consider the 1930s in light of that.) The trigger was declining harvests and the plagues that followed. All of which suggests that we should hope for warmer weather, if anything. Bulls are associated with hotter climates, while bears don't mind the cold.

A close study of the LCO would prove valuable, not only as regards warming but as an example of human beings living in an environment subtly but definitely different from the one we're used to. But don't expect it anytime soon. The debate, we're told, is over, and the cost of understanding has gotten very high.

J.R. Dunn is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.

Einstein gives a fundamentally different description of the phenomenon.

You are absolutely right, but to answer your next question too. Newton's equation GmM/r² is accurate to one part in 10⁷. Newtons basic equations may not be 100% accurate but Einstein didn't 'disprove' them either.

I think anyone who doesn't know the difference between two of the greatest scientific ideas of the past century should keep his mouth shut about science.

Kind of hard to argue against that logic :) I just prefer to give him the benefit of the doubt on the date.

I found the hypothesis that a warming environment might ameliorate the weather to be interesting. For some reason I had just bought into the propaganda that a warming climate would create much worse weather. I just assumed that more energy in the system would create more chaos. I need to be more skeptical than I am.

They EITHER gets 1 or 0??

No, they get a random number from zero to one (inclusive) but no number in that range is preferred to any other, that's what "uniform" means. For example, you might get 0.5 or 0.34598231 or 0.99991413872 etc. But of course the likelihood is zero of getting a number with finite precision like that because such numbers are so few compared to all the real numbers in the range.

One way to think of it is as a limit of a sequence of finite sets of numbers. For example, a finite instance would be to get a random decimal fraction between zero and one with 100 or 200 or 1000000 digits of precision and then let the amount of precision grow very large.

If you wanted to simulate the game very closely in a program, you'd use a random number generator, let's say one that produces integers from zero to 2³²-1 and then divide by 2³² to obtain a fraction. Both players get one and they can keep it or turn it in a draw another random number the same way. The numbers they end up with are compared and whoever has the greater one wins.

And so the puzzle is to devise a strategy a player can follow to ensure he wins with probablility at least 1/2 no matter what strategy the other player follows.

Newton's equation GmM/r^2 is accurate to one part in 10^7

I don't see how that can be true, that the discrepancy can be no larger. The masses can presumably be increased without limit and I bet that for a given r there's some large mass that the error would be larger.

But there are errors in kind too where Newton would predict zero effect but Einstein predicts non-zero and in such a case the error is infinite. For example, if a mass is rotating, it actually makes spacetime rotate too. A test mass falling toward the "equator" of the rotating one would appear to a distant observer to move laterally. Newton would have the test mass fall straight toward the other.

Could be. Increased clouds without an increase in water-vapor level (hard to get, but comic rays or dust could do it) will lower the temperature, I think. Increased water-vapor without clouds, possible at lower dew-points, should increase temperature.

And therefore ... what? He knows it's wrong but uses it anyway? Sure.

No. He's making known it's source. I get the impression from you that unless someone has a degree in physics, then any commentary on global warming isn't worth the time of day.

I didn't bother to read further.

I find it interesting that the person who made that comment is still making more comments on this thread.

Anyone who thinks if the predictions work out, we can regard the hypothesis as proven just doesn't get it.

How did the laws of motion and thermodynamics start, as manna from On High?

If a theory makes predictions about something as yet unknown in the natural world, which then turn out to be correct when the experiment is done, that is extremely strong support, or 'proof'. In Physics, it is always understood that it is only proven until future well-supported data arises which is inconsistent with the predictions of the theory. That is because Physics is an evolving understanding of the natural world, not a static set of axioms like Mathematics.

It's worth noting that a new theory (e.g., Special Relativity replacing Newton's equations of motion) must account for all the existing valid data that the previous theory predicted, as well as new effects, and make predictions that later are seen to be true. That is quite a tall order.

These same devices will be useful if we wish to bring water-ice to Mars as part of a Terraforming project.

That reminds me, did you hear that Mars once had water on it and now is like a desert? Some kind of marcian warming must have taken place. As of yet scientists have not been able to discover the SUVs that may have been responsible for the warming. Stay tuned.

.....there are errors in kind too where Newton would predict zero effect but Einstein predicts non-zero and in such a case the error is infinite.

This is not a reasonable way for a physicist to look at it. Newtons's result for the classical equation of motion is regarded as a limiting value of the Einstein result from special relativity. In other words, it is the value of the special-relativity equation of motion in the limit of v/c going to zero. There is no 'infinite error'.

"With the politics in the US right now there is zero chance of any type of primarily US-led big science effort."

I would agree with this assessment. Perhaps except for the zero. Probability seldom reaches the asymptote.

But just as Keynesian Economics ruled politics for many decades, the anti-science attitudes of today may slowly erode as science does its slow and steady work to solve problems which will not yield to political pressure.

Glacially, perhaps, the realization that we need a larger presence in space may penetrate even the brie and croissant crowd in Washington.

In reluctant recognition that the sun may have something to do with their indisputable Global Warming, they may allow activities intended to ameliorate the effect. It is, after all, hard to blame global warming on Mars on those ubiquitous SUVs here.

Newton's equation GmM/r^2 is accurate to one part in 10^7

You might find this interesting.

As seen from Earth the precession of Mercury's orbit is measured to be 5600 seconds of arc per century (one second of arc=1/3600 degrees). Newton's equations, taking into account all the effects from the other planets (as well as a very slight deformation of the sun due to its rotation) and the fact that the Earth is not an inertial frame of reference, predicts a precession of 5557 seconds of arc per century. There is a discrepancy of 43 seconds of arc per century.

An error of 43 out of 5557 is nearly one part in 10^2. So I guess I'm not sure what you meant.

"That reminds me, did you hear that Mars once had water on it and now is like a desert? Some kind of martian warming must have taken place."

Actually, it may have been the gradual cooling that was to blame for Mars losing its water. Ice ages promote desertification.

As the atmosphere thinned and cooled, what water vapor was in it may have dissociated under sunlight in the upper atmosphere, and been carried away on the solar wind.

Very likely Jupiter, greedy scavenger that it is, gobbled up the majority of that water, but it is possible that some of it could have fallen to Earth. Those heavily invested in Noah's flood may like this idea.

I've been pushing the notion that if global flooding due to melting icecaps is the fear, we should send our excess water to Mars to replenish its oceans. More could be obtained from the icy rings of Saturn as well. It would be the first step toward terraforming Mars.

Who decides (for the next thousand years) what constitutes a threat we will respond to and which do they determine to ignore?

I bet you thought that was a tough question to see if we were paying attention.

The answer, of course, is the omniscient immortal manbearpig himself!

:-)

I get the impression from you that unless someone has a degree in physics, then any commentary on global warming isn't worth the time of day.

I didn't mean to give that impression. I don't have one but I have some interesting things to say nonetheless. The difference being that I know what I don't know and don't pretend otherwise.

I find it interesting that the person who made that comment is still making more comments on this thread.

The responses can be interesting or amusing. For example the guy who called me a dim bulb but is unable to solve a problem I could in a few hours. But also one of the other posters made some good points. I guess you could say the thread is lot's more informative than the article.

How did the laws of motion and thermodynamics start, as manna from On High?

Scientific laws are derived from observation, they are straight forward extrapolations of those observations. They are not explanatory in the way that hypotheses and theories are. So I'm not sure why you bring these two up when clearly we are talking about hypotheses and theories.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.