Long article but shows why the premis of CO2, Global Warming and Kyoto is terribly flawed.
Argh, broken link.
Link is bad here is full article.
IT'S CURTAINS FOR GLOBAL WARMING
>From The Jerusalem Post, 28 June 2002
By BRET STEPHENS
As it turns out, God really is in the details.
In 1994, David Schmidt, a young Ph.D. candidate in engineering at the University of Wisconsin, was asked by his examiners to explain why thin shower curtains "suck in" whenever the water is turned on.
The solution to the riddle, like Fermat's last theorem, proved remarkably elusive. According to one theory, "curtain suck" is the product of the Bernoulli principle, which holds that pressure drops as air, water and other fluids accelerate, leading to lift. (This same principle explains how planes fly.) Yet another theory - the bouyancy theory - holds that curtain suck is the result of a disequilibrium between the hot air inside the shower space and the cold air without, which pushes in the shower curtain. But this theory fails to account for the persistence of curtain suck when the shower is run cold.
Intrigued, Schmidt, now at the University of Massachusetts, pressed ahead with the investigation. He designed a $28,000 piece of software that allowed him to model the flow of air and water within a simulated image of his mother-in-law's bathtub. He then filled the "tub" with 50,000 tetrahedral cells, which can detect velocity and pressure. Following that, he turned on a virtual shower that flooded his virtual tub with four gallons of virtual water over a period of 30 seconds. Then he let his computer crunch the numbers.
Two weeks and 1.5 trillion calculations later, Schmidt had his answer. Aerodynamic drag causes water droplets to decelerate, transferring energy to the air and creating air currents akin to a tiny hurricane. Low pressure in the eye of that hurricane then tugs on the lower end of the shower curtain. Voila! It sucks in.
WELCOME TO the curious world of climate modeling. As Schmidt's experiment makes clear, simply to understand shifting climate patterns in the space of a bathtub is no small matter. Yet today, huge political controversies have been stirred on the basis of climate forecasts for the entire globe, stretching decades into the future. According to the Worldwatch Institute, in the 21st century "the climate battle may assume the kind of strategic importance that wars - both hot and cold - had during the 20th."
The international fracas over US President George W. Bush's rejection last year of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change indicates that the battle is, indeed, a real one. But the question is, is the phenomenon over which the battle is being fought also real? And is it worth the agony, or even the ink?
You'd be forgiven for thinking that it is. According to Christine Todd Whitman, current head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, global warming is "one of the greatest environmental challenges we face, if not the greatest." US News & World Report has offered that "by midcentury, the chic Art Deco hotels that now line Miami's South Beach could stand waterlogged and abandoned. Malaria could be a public health threat in Vermont. Nebraska farmers could abandon their fields for lack of water." And then president Bill Clinton (in a televised, ABC News Earth Day interview with movie star Leonardo DiCaprio, no less) sketched out scenarios in which "the polar ice caps will melt more rapidly; sea levels will rise.... island nations could literally be buried."
Making the situation all the more deplorable, and giving it political edge, is the belief that changing climate patterns are largely the result of increased carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from man-made sources - cars, planes, factories and so on. According to CNN's Michelle Mitchell, leading climate scientists have reached "a unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse, and is due to man. There is no wiggle room."
>From this, it follows that what men have wrought, men must undo. The Kyoto Protocol calls on industrialized nations to hold their CO2 emissions to 1990 levels, principally by placing draconian limits on all energy releasing activities and by investing massively in such alternative fuel sources as wind power and solar cells. Anything short of this, says the conventional wisdom, all but guarantees an uncomfortably hot future for posterity. Asks Bob Herbert of The New York Times: "Do you think, maybe, we should be paying more attention to this?"
THE SHORT answer is no.
If there is one thing more remarkable than the level of alarm inspired by global warming, it is the thin empirical foundations upon which the forecast rests. According to Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, the best available evidence shows that global mean temperatures have risen by a mere 0.5 degrees Celsius over the past century, and that global concentrations of CO2 over a century have also increased by a statistically insignificant percentage, to 0.036% from 0.028%.
There is abundant evidence showing significant variations in past global mean temperatures, including a spike that took place around the year 1000, long before the advent of the internal-combustion engine. (And right around the time the Vikings settled Iceland and Greenland and briefly reached North America.)
There is no evidence whatsoever showing that man-made emissions are the principal source of global warming; cyclical radiation effects caused by sunsposts make for an equally plausible cuplrit. And where there is evidence of global warming, it appears to be happening in cooler places, thereby making temperatures more mild, not more insufferable.
All this stands to reason. Currently it is impossible - and it may yet prove fundamentally impossible - to make sound predictions about global weather patterns. Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, an erstwhile Greenpeace activist who turned skeptic after putting his own assumptions to the test, writes that "faithfully modeling all the important factors in the climatic system involves representing everything from the entire planet down to individual dust particles," and is therefore beyond the reach of current computational capabilities.
Adds Lindzen: "We simply do not know what relation, if any, exists between global climate changes and water vapor, clouds, storms, hurricanes, and other factors, including regional climate changes, which are generally much larger than global changes and not correlated with them."
Then, too, anecdotal evidence of global warming turns out, on closer inspection, to offer ambiguous lessons. Earlier this year, for example, came news that the massive Larsen B Antarctic ice shelf, three times the size of Hong Kong, had abruptly disintegrated, ostensibly furnishing further evidence of global warming. But then came word that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was growing at a rate of 26.8 gigatons per year, and that overall temperatures in Antarctica had declined by around 2.0 degrees Celsius.
"Continental Antarctic cooling," say researchers from the University of Illinois, "poses challenges to models of climate and ecosystem change."
Put simply, when it comes to climate change, much more is unknown than known, and what we do know suggests neither that mankind is on course to catastrophe, nor indeed that we could do much about it if we were. In fact, the only thing upon which climate scientists reliably agree is that the world emerged from a "little ice age" around 1880, and things have been warming, albeit slightly, with dips and variations, ever since.
Where it all might lead is anyone's guess. But simply to draw the most apocalyptic scenarios and then insist on drastic action hardly seems the most sensible way to move forward.
YET THAT is precisely what all of Europe, the Democratic party, a significant segment of the scientific community, and most other ordinarily sophisticated people seem to be doing. It's worth asking why.
Again, a little history is in order. Throughout the 1970s, the scientific consensus held that the world was entering a period of global cooling, with results equally catastrophic to those now predicted for global warming. Then, in 1988, Margaret Thatcher established the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research, largely to push the global warming theory.
The reason? Thatcher wanted to break the power of the coal miners' union and promote (non-CO2 emitting) nuclear power, and one way of doing so was to emphasize the dangers a hydrocarbons-based economy posed to the environment.
It was, however, a too-clever gambit, which the Left was bound to seize on. How could they not have? By 1988, every other fashionably leftist article of faith had proved a bugaboo. Oil was not running out. Overpopulation was not causing famines. Nuclear winter was not around the corner. But what global warming amounted to was the perfect doomsday forecast: an environmental catastrophe caused mainly by the overpolluting industrialized West, universal in its dimension, requiring massive social engineering. Global warming, like much of today's feminism, simply became another vehicle to impose the old left-wing social prescriptions. As the International Panel on Climate Control has itself admitted, debate over climate policy concerns "a wide range of issues, including development, equity, sustainability, and sustainable development."
Look at what the Kyoto Protocol proposes. Though every country is meant to be a signatory, only developed countries must abide by the Protocol's terms. The US, which by some calculations is said to emit five times as much CO2 as all of Europe combined, would bear the brunt of the treaty's costs. Meanwhile, China - the second largest emitter - would be under no obligation to make similar efforts. Countries that adopted Kyoto would need to raise gas and diesel taxes by as much as 25% in order to achieve called-for cuts in overall consumption. Electricity prices wold also have to rise by an estimated 100%.
The economic effect? The Japanese minister of environment estimated that it would likely shave off 1% of her country's GDP per annum. A study by the energy and economic consultancy DRI-WEFA estimated the costs of Kyoto to Germany and Britain at about 5% of GDP and an overall job loss of 2.8 million. Matters would only be worse if these countries also phased out nuclear power, as Germany is slated to do in the coming years.
Yet for all this, the effects of Kyoto on atmospheric concentrations of CO2 would be negligible, with temperature increases reaching "business as usual" levels by 2100, rather than by 2094. And Kyoto would just be the beginning: Jerry Mahlman of Princeton believes it would take 30 Kyotos to curb the projected rate of global warming, at a projected cost of $4 trillion per Kyoto.
EVER SINCE Malthus predicted that population growth would quickly outstrip mankind's ability to feed itself, the modern world has been routinely beset by scientific predictions of doom no less frightening, indeed more so, than what's on offer in the Book of Revelations. None yet has come to pass. Like the itinerant circus troupe in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, humanity as a whole has always outwitted the Grim Reaper. There's no reason not to think we won't do so again, even if every grim weather forecast proves true. We are an ingenious and adaptive species, that has survived everything nature has thrown in our way. We shall do so again.
The real question is - has always been - can we survive the traps we lay for ourselves? Or will the ghosts of our mind, from which we spend so much time running, eventually consume us?
© 1995-2002, The Jerusalem Post
Over the past several years, I have read several SCIENTIFIC, such as yours, and global warming is just a lie hoisted on us by libs. Next it will be the "sky is falling."
Theres also a front page article in Discover - claiming the core of the earth is a nuclear reaction - giving off plenty of heat. The global warming model assumes a core which is cooling with time.
