None of this is intended to be antagonistic or confrontational. It's an attempt to genuinely address Steve's points and try to move his (and others') opinions. If this does not somewhat alter Steve's perspectives on the subject (provided he reads it :-) ) I'll be surprised. I've been surprised before today. Prescript - those who are not interested in my "what we can know and whether it matters" verbose rant may like to skip to the end below my signature and look at the comment on the specific points Steve raised. Much briefer and MAY be useful. Maybe read that part first and then the rest if still interested. Steve Ravet said: > It was suggested that I not post statements such as "humans cannot > cause > or relieve global warming" without either an IMO or some > substantiation. > So I'll explain. > First is what seems to me to be common sense. ... followed by lots of very good and well reasoned material. I essentially do not disagree with most or all the points and questions that Steve raised - BUT I come to a somewhat different conclusion. I have no axe to grind on almost any subject whatsoever. This may sound like a surprising statement from a card carrying born again raving looney evangelical Christian (which I'm sure is the straight jacket that I'm bound in by many people). But, while there is very good reason to paint me that way, even that does not stop me questioning and/or evaluating much within the bounds of Christianity proper. OUTSIDE those bounds I have no really hard and fast certainties about any facts at all because, how do we know and how can we tell? Knowing the answers to those two questions is often as important in any given area as knowing answers to questions which directly relate to a given area. So, Steve has essentially asked these two questions about GW (Global Warming.). However, he has come up with the answers "We cant know and we can't tell SO we might as well not bother". My answers to the same questions go more like this: 1 The whole system constituted by the earth and its environment is exceedingly complex and we cannot model it perfectly. 2 We care about the answers because the direction that the system takes affects us and our children's children's children. So much so that the answers MAY mean that our children's children don't have any children! 3 If in fact we are able to make a difference to the system we'd like to know. [If we can break and/or fix it we want to know] 4 If we are able to know whether we are able to make a difference to the system we'd like to know. [We want to know if it's possible to know if we can break and/or fix it]. This is one level removed from the prior case and is quite a different proposition and a vital one. 5.1 The consequences of being able to affect the system are utterly world changing. 5.2 The consequences of not being able to change the system are utterly horrific. 5 general: We want to know which it is, even though finding out its the latter may be a pretty horrific discovery. 6.1 The consequences of knowing we can know are utterly world changing. 6.2 The consequences of knowing we can't know are ALSO world changing but in a different way. This last point is crucial, not just a tautological extension of the alternatives to make it a tidy and symmetric sequence, and are utterly relevant to Steve's points. SO 7 If we can alter the system and If the system is going to hell in a handbasket and If we can stop it Then we almost certainly will want to at almost any cost 8 If we can't alter the system and If the system is going to hell in a handbasket then We obviously can't stop it Then we may want to do something really really really radical instead. eg Developing Space Elevator technology to make off planet access far far far cheaper may be come a multi trillion dollar international priority under that scenario. BUT the above do not address knowing and knowing whether we can know. eg 20 If we can change it and If it needs changing But we don't know we can change it AND we don't know whether we can know whether we can change it Then finding out if we can know becomes a priority ALAS, reality as is often the case, is about the most complex mix of all. Where we are goes like this. 21 The system MAY be going to hell in a hand basket AND if it is Then We may be contributing fatally AND we may be able to tell whether we are or not AND we may be able to tell whether we can tell or not. That's (as you have no doubt noted) somewhat less precise than desirable and doesn't cover things exactly BUT is good enough to proceed from. 22 GW as a long term trend MAY be happening. Some say yes and some say no and some say ... [[12 3 down in the game of my childhood]] 23If it IS happening it may lead to medium to long term catastrophe due to - temperature rise. - triggering an ice age. (some models have warming doing this) 24 We are undoubtedly doing things that are contributing to global temperature increases BUT 25 - .1 This may have already staved off another ice age. - .2 This may be a irrelevant contributor to natural trends. - .3 This may be able to significantly worsen natural ends. - .4 This may be capable of providing a trigger to add to global trends in such a way that it produce a catastrophe that otherwise would not have happened or which may have happened much later. It's this latter possibility (25.4) which is the big fear and concern and priority for addressing. IF 25.4 and we take Steve's approach we 'die'. BUT IF 25.4 and 8 then no matter what we do we die so Steve's approach MAY be fine. BUT we may want to do other things differently if we know we are going to die. BUT We are back at 20. We may also be at 25.4 and we may also be at 8 but we don't KNOW. We don't know if we know enough to know. We don't know if we CAN know enough to know. We don't know if we can do things to make a difference or whether what we do will. If the system is going to hell in .... And we were able to do something about it. And we could have found out that this was the case and didn't. Or if we knew we could do something about it. Then our children's children's children will curse us chapter and verse, should they ever get to be born. Alas, the cost of getting to a stage where we can have any degree of certainty whether - anything needs doing - it matters what we do, - whether we can do enough or the cost of doing enough - whether we can know whether we can know is utterly horrendous. The system is so complex. The models are so uncertain. The data is so poor. The initial conditions are so ill determined that it will cost billions to trillions to start to find out well enough. BUT the worst case cost of getting it wrong when we could have got it right is a change in the earth's climatic system for thousands of years. If we precipitate a major climate change the worst case models say we cannot get it back. One such model is the stopping of the "Atlantic Conveyer" - the deep Atlantic anti-gulf stream current which carries warm water far into the North Atlantic and keeps it ice free. Once stopped this current may take 1000's of years to restart. Once stopped the UK would become permanently ice bound. This processed has been modelled now for perhaps several decades. At one stage there were strong suggestions that the current could be stopped in under 10 years by high enough CO2 concentrations. Recent things I've seen seem to suggest that a hundreds of years minimum is more likely. BUT this may be wrong, and even if right, there was no certainty early on that the under 10 years figures wasn't right. IF right now in 2006 we fund that the North Atlantic and the UK were permanently frozen and were going to stay that way for thousands of years it should be no surprise - although of course it would be. THAT outcome would have been an extreme but possible outcome of the models - and we didn't know. We didn't know the probability or the extent of the effect or the trigger levels and more. That is just one effect. *** BUT the worst case cost of getting it wrong when we couldn't have got it right is also a change in the earth's climatic system for thousands of years. If we can get to the stage of knowing if we need to get it right AND that we can or can't actually get it right then it behoves us to see how well we can refine the probability of the worst case occurring. *** If the odds of "all hell freezes over" is 1 in 10^6 per annum then we may decide to take a punt and go and buy a beer. If the odds of the North Atlantic freezing over in the next century lie in the range 0.0000000001 to 0.001 then we better do some work on finding out how good the 0.001 figure is. ie if there's 1 1/1000th chance of the NA going solid before 2106, how much would we like to spend to see if we can reduce the odds by a factor of 10. If the odds MAY be 1 in 10, how much then? And, that's where we are. There is enough indication that we MAY BE bringing damnation (and some very fine skating conditions) upon ourselves. And that we MAY be able to make a difference and that the consequences of not doing so are REALLY bad, that it may be worth spending a few 100 billions finding out. Even if the answer is "NO" the money may have been very well spent. None of this should be a problem for the citizens of earth if we fit it into our global priority scheme. It's just a cost of doing business. Levy everyone an average of $16 pa worldwide, adjusted as per the agreed international equitable cost model, gather in all the freely and joyfully given responses and go forth and spend the $100 billion pa of the people's money wisely for the people's benefit. About here we wake up (screaming if you're Mr JG, sweating profusely\y with a heart rate of 150 if you're me). This is NEVER going to work because as soon as there's a spare billion up for grabs, let along 100B per annum or whatever the gravy boaters, the swindlers, pork barrellers and all hop on board and utterly foul the water. The good science goes out the window, vested interest, career choices, toeing the party line and much more make it impossible to efficiently determine reality. There are 4 possible solutions: - Give up in disgust and walk away. - Join the crowd, there's money to be had. - Loudly decry the very existence of any problem and pillory them all. - Sigh deeply, put hand in pocket, contribute as one must and can and do one's best to steer the process as best as possible into the good science and integrity path of finding out what we can know and do. I am, alas, for the last option. If 5 to 10% of the input gets to be used effectively we may get somewhere and we may save the world and we may have our children's children's children rise up and bless us. We may have them just call us silly fools for wasting all that money when there was no need. But I think it's the best game in town when one considers the worst case outcome if we do nothing. Russell _________________________________________________________________ Some direct "brief" comments > What kinds of changes has > the earth been through that we know about? We (think we) a good enough idea to contribute usefully to the process. > ... complete snowball > ... grows in the hot water vents ... > ... large portions of North America have been under water ... > ... Sea fossils are found around Denver (5000 foot elevation). ... > ... Pacific has encroached as far west as Arizona more than once ... > ... Indonesia is all that's left of ... large continent > ... greenland used to be green ... Much of the above may be true. Some probably isn't :-) but, > The predictions that accompany GW are pretty extreme: tropical > diseases > run rampant, agricultural disasters, flooding, and widespread death. Such GW predictions are pretty much not based on how it happens but on what happens if it does. I see no reason not to think that any of these MAY NOT be true. They are certainly not invalidated by any of the preceding natural list. > I don't find it credible that human activity could create > environmental > change on par with plate tectonics, asteroid collisions, and other > "normal" (in geologic terms) environmental excursions. And there's no suggestion that such a comparison is being made. The effects of GW predictions can be analysed relatively independently of whether GW occurs or how. IF the seas rise by 300mm then ... . If they did many major things would happen. The fact that in the very long term far greater things have happened on the planet do not mean that smaller events are insignificant to us. IF we hand about on-planet for another 1 million years + we can expect to face larger challenges than short term GW. But that's not the question here. > Second is the modelling. We only have directly measured temperature > data > for the last 150-ish years, and most of this data was collected on > land > in the western hemisphere. There is some historical data from the > oceans, but only from shipping lanes. How accurate is temperature > data > collected by laymen, using 150 year old thermometer technology? Do > we > use 150 year old thermometers in science labs today? How much error > is > there when this incomplete and somewhat inaccurate data is > integrated to > come up with a global temperature? Partly addressed by my rant. The best answer to most things is "as good as science can make it and getting better by the month, and it will get far far better again if you can keep at last a few % of those GW $'s flowing into genuine research." There are all sorts of ways of measuring all sorts of things and a person not involved in a particular 'art' will often be stunned by what can be done. It is also possible for scientists to fool themselves utterly and peer review and independent replication are vital in areas of vital science. BUT most of the above questions appear to have from you the rhetorical answer "pretty poor" when that's not what atop scientist in any given area would say. > Other temperature data is inferred from tree rings, polar ice cores, > etc. How much error is associated with these measurements, and how > is > that quantified? "as good as science can make it and getting better by the month " > The scientists (and therefore their models) don't understand the > action > of water vapor in the air. It has both a warming and cooling > effect. > They don't understand, and aren't even aware of, all of the feedback > mechanisms that go into global climate. BUT their models are as good as science can make them and getting better by the month and they do try to know that they don't know and do something about it. Genuine experts have at least addressing all those points. > I am skeptical that data of unknown accuracy, and a model that is > admittedly incomplete, can make predictions about fractions of a > degree > far into the future. Would you even bother running a spice > simulation > if there was this much uncertainty in your transistor models? What is desirable, given as per my rant that it may be worth almost any amount of money to plow on blindly while trying to see, is the building of the best models possible and the determination of the distribution possibilities. We must be able to say is "the very very best we can say so far is xxx AND that gives us this sort of outcome probability distribution. If the outcome if the SPICE model MIGHT be as important as the outcome of these models MIGHT be then yes, I'd run it. > Even if it's real, what can we do about it? Here's a link to an 8 > page > footnoted article that raises good questions: Haven't read it. Will read it. Its answers are irrelevant :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) ie given how important the answer MAY be and given how much difference delaying MAY make and given how much difference acting now MAY make then being certain before we act is not an option. > http://www.oism.org/pproject/ > The atmosphere as 750 gigatons of CO2 in it. Other carbon > reservoirs > are the surface ocean, deep ocean currents, the land and marine > biomasses. The sizes of these reservoirs range from hundreds to > tens of > thousands of GT. Transport between these reservoirs ranges from 10s > to > hundreds of GT per year. Human activity contributes about 5 GT per > year > to the atmosphere. The tremendous sizes of these reservoirs, and > the > uncertainty in the transport volumes mean that human contributions > are > noise in the overall process. The best that can be easily said is that, based purely on GT ratios, that may be true but that, if we inject it into the stratosphere with Jet aircraft, send it into the sea as pollutants which then decay, "just happen" to add it strategically to the sea surface above the Atlantic Conveyer current "just so", ... THEN it MAY make a fatally large difference. AND may not. AND we don't know. > Should we do something anyway? Bjorn Lomborg, author of the > "Skeptical > Environmentalist" notes that a single year of the global cost of the > Kyoto Protocol would pay for water and sewage treatment for everyone > in > the world. Implementing Kyoto is the global equivalent of > mortgaging > your house, liquidating all your assets, and borrowing as much money > as > possible to ... Up until the "to" at the end this is probably essentially true. The next bit is what we don't know about, but the metaphor used is probably a very bad one. Coz: *IF* GW can do what it may be able to do and IF we can and do make the difference and stop the worst case THEN instead doing water and sewage treatment would lead to a lot better health and a lot more people alive for now AND utter disaster for the lot when GW bites (as it definitely will in this scenario as that was the starting assumption.) UNTIL we know if the very very terrible outcomes are possible or, better, what the outcome distributions are, then if forgoing expenditure on water and sewage get the GW work done it MAY be a better choice. Having people die short term to save many many more ling term may be a "good" choice. But not one I would ever want to have to make. Why not do both? We could easily do it if we wanted to. The only reason that substandard sewage and water facilities exist is because there is not a worldwide will that it not be so. At one stage ALL US citizens paid an average of $US0.50/day to fund sending 3 men to the Moon. A few more groups of 3 followed but the 1st 3 made the key point. Turned into current $ and done worldwide that would produce around 2 or 3 trillion $US a year. That sort of money could do quite a lot of good. If say everyone in the top half of the world's income distribution contributed say $US1/day to a fund,(entirely out of the kindness of their hearts because they decided that they wanted to*), which addressed the most critical long term needs of the lower half (no handouts, no direct aid, just FIXING things)(and if Al Capone and Saddam Hussein and Joseph Stalin all on probation rode shotgun on the anti-corruption oversight team) then what would be achieved?. Don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen. So > build a titanium meteor shield for your house. This puts the chance of GW fatally affecting an individual as the same as a personal meteorite strike. Obviously this was chosen for effect, but equally obviously there is no comparison in the relative probabilities. regards Russell * Mr JG anti-spoiler clause. He and such are excused their voluntary contribution if so desired. If he opts out I'll pay $US2/day to make up for it. -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist