Monday, November 6, 2017

Climate Change Fanaticism

You remember the Paris Climate Treaty—I mean, Deal—the one that President Barack Obama signed but did not submit to the United States Senate for ratification. When President Trump pulled out of the deal, the hue and cry was immediate. The world was going to end. Nature was going to wither up and die. Humanity was doomed. No one would ever take America at its word.... so much for the Constitution.

Since this is largely in the realm of prophecy we do not know to a certainty what is going to happen. Nevertheless the United Nations has published a new report suggesting that the Climate Deal that was going to save the planet will not really do what it said it would do. It was just a down payment on the eventual repeal of the Industrial Revolution.

Anyway, Investor’s Business Daily (via Maggie’s Farm) editorializes about the latest UN report:

Global Hot Air: Here's a United Nations climate report that environmentalists probably don't want anybody to read. It says that even if every country abides by the grand promises they made last year in Paris to reduce greenhouse gases, the planet would still be "doomed."

When President Obama hitched America to the Paris accords in 2016, he declared that it was "the moment that we finally decided to save our planet." And when Trump pulled out of the deal this year, he was berated by legions of environmentalists for killing it.

But it turns out that the Paris accord was little more than a sham that will do nothing to "save the planet."

According to the latest annual U.N. report on the "emissions gap," the Paris Agreement will provide only a third of the cuts in greenhouse gas that environmentalists claim is needed to prevent catastrophic warming. If every country involved in those accords abides by their pledges between now and 2030 — which is a dubious proposition — temperatures will still rise by 3 degrees celcius by 2100. The goal of the Paris Agreement was to keep the global temperature increase to under 2 degrees.

Of course, we all look forward to knowing what the climate will be like in the year 2100. But that assumes that we can control for all the other factors that can influence it. Lately, serious scientists, the ones who predicted that the earth is going to become a hothouse are warning us against global cooling. It would be nice if they could make up their minds.

The climate change crew is using the UN report as a reason to introduce ever more Draconian measures to control industry. Among them, ending the consumption of coal. It’s like saying that we need to confiscate all 300 million guns now owned by American citizens.

Investor’s Business Daily:

According to the report, "phasing out coal consumption … is an indispensable condition for achieving international climate change targets." That means putting a halt to any new coal plants while starting to phase out the ones currently in use.

Good luck with that. There are currently 273 gigawatts of coal capacity under construction around the world, and another 570 gigawatts in the pipeline, the U.N. says. That would represent a 42% increase in global energy production from coal. Does anyone really think developing countries who need coal as a cheap source of fuel to grow their economies will suddenly call it quits?

Are we all doomed? Must we allow industrial production to be controlled by bureaucrats who believe in the dogma about climate change:

So, does this mean the planet is doomed? Hardly. As we have noted in this space many times, all those forecasts of global catastrophe are based on computer models that have been unreliable predictors of warming. And all of the horror stories assume the worst.

What the report does make clear, however, is that all the posturing by government leaders in Paris was just that. Posturing. None of these countries intended to take the drastic and economically catastrophic steps that environmentalists claim are needed to prevent a climate change doomsday.  As such, Trump was right to stop pretending.

14 comments:

trigger warning said...

Let's take a simple problem: 15 colored balls and a cue ball on a pool table. All balls have been weighed and measured. The characteristics of the baize are known. Strike the cue into the racked balls at a known velocity and vector. Predict the exact location of the balls when they all stop.

Can't be done, despite the fact that it's a simple Newtonian problem.

Climate is the combined product of two gigantic fluids: the atmosphere and the oceans. Fluid dynamics is one of the thorniest topics in physics. Add to that the largely unsolved conundrums of turbulence, a nonlinear phenomenon, the mathematics of which are currently insoluble. Climate "models" are not models, they are simulations, vastly more complex than SimCity but less reliable. Demonstrably wrong. And they purport to predict climate for the next century and beyond. :-D It's a lucrative field, though. I'll give it that.

No, what we really need are gigantic high-voltage, supercooled, superpressurized (> 100 gigapascal) superconducting cables strung up ("green" jobs, anyone?) to carry "renewable" energy from vast solar farms shading the pristine Arizona desert to the far reaches of the continental US (excluding, I suppose, Alaska and Hawaii). Or so I've been told by authoritative persons with a background in science and math in these comment threads.

Sam L. said...

Then, too, there's good ol' Sol blazing away in the sky, the output of which...varies.
Global warming is real, and so is global cooling.

Ares Olympus said...
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Ares Olympus said...

trigger warning said... Let's take a simple problem: 15 colored balls and a cue ball on a pool table...

Your example is getting mixed up between weather and climate here. Climate is about statistics, and it doesn't deal with predicting daily averages, but annual averages.

Physics also has two systems of prediction - Newtonian physics on one side of exact outcomes of simple systems, and conservation laws on the other for complex systems. Conservation doesn't tell you where the extra heat will end up, but if we can predict more net heat absorbed decade after decade, we can make general predictions of outcomes, so warmer oceans will produce more violent storms, and a warmer ocean has thermal expansion that increases the rate of sea level rise. And warmer arctic regions melts more ice, and darkens the albedo of the earth, leading to more thermal energy produced, and more heat trapped.

I also have a friend who says superconducting lines are the future, so renewable energy sources, wind, solar, waves, and geothermal can be averaged out over larger distances, and I'm sure some technical solutions like that will happen in the future. But figuring out how to conserve seems more important in the short run. Javon's paradox applies to new efficiency, but that's why we need to increase the cost of energy, OR mandate development decisions that go in the right direction, perhaps things like demanding all new development to include 500% efficient geothermal heat pumps.

Anonymous said...

Ares Olympus is writing a lot about nothing again.

Please delete.

James said...

Climate Change Initiatives, Mass Transit, etc. All of these things may have some good things involved in them, may. But they are levied and administered upon us by those whose real motto is: "Where's the stash man?" In the end it is that simple. The high Muckety-Mucks of Western Europe, the USA, and other climes have constructed a nifty scam on us, but it is running out of the one thing it needs, money. Money to buy, bully, influence, corrupt, and they will do anything to get that money to keep the game going, expect nothing less, they can't help themselves.

trigger warning said...

AO: "Your example is getting mixed up between weather and climate here"

My example was about the limits of scientific predictability.

Ares Olympus said...

trigger warning said... My example was about the limits of scientific predictability.

And I suggested reasons why your example was flawed. Predicting the weather in 21 days is harder than the difficult prediction of the destination of pool balls after a break, which I agree is very hard.

In comparison predicting January as statistically colder than July in North America, even in the year 2100, is easy, although still only a statistical probability.

Sure, there are individual contrarians predicting global cooling, and without humans on earth we'd likely be falling into a new ice age within 13,000 years or so, but I'd not make any bets on cooling in the next 100 years and my vote wouldn't be with a lone-wolf architect beating the geophysicists and climatologists.
https://www.iceagenow.info Robert W. Felix, author of Not by Fire but by Ice and Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps, attended the University of Minnesota School of Architecture in the mid-1960s.

iOpener said...

Global cooling, billions die, global warming, I buy a large farm and orchard in the Yukon.

If it interferes with their many peculiar religions the left uses neither statistics nor first order logic.

I have yet to see a warmist admit that the calculus of errors exists much less apply it to the towering ziggurat of assumptions and conclusions, based on earlier conclusions, based on earlier conclusions, ^n

Prehistoric tree-ring data, because the only factor affecting tree growth is temperature, hardy, har har.

trigger warning said...

ao: "In comparison predicting January as statistically colder than July in North America, even in the year 2100, is easy"

Due to orbital dynamics and the planet's tilt. Statistically, Wales is warmer than Newfoundland in January, despite being on the same parallel, due to fluid dynamics.

General Circulation Models are rooted in atmospheric and marine fluid dynamics, hence the term "circulation" and the historical association with NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.

HMS Defiant said...

It all sounds fluid to me.
Can't we take a shot or something?
I mean we know what flu is don't we?
Can we all just get the sun right?

Recalling solar infall calculations on stuff stored in the middle east direct sunlight and engineers who insisted it never ever got that hot.

Ares Olympus said...

HMS Defiant said... Can we all just get the sun right?

Are you suggesting climate engineering?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_radiation_management
Solar radiation management (SRM) projects are a type of climate engineering which seek to reflect sunlight and thus reduce global warming. Proposed methods include increasing the planetary albedo, for example using stratospheric sulfate aerosols.

Their principal advantages as an approach to climate engineering is the speed with which they can be deployed and become fully active, their potential low financial cost, and the reversibility of their direct climatic effects.

Anonymous said...

Ares Olympus is a Climate Change Fanatic

Anonymous said...

The Maldives is not wiped ou, despite the most alarmist predictionst. How to explain that one... no change in sea level whatsoever. Huh. Terrible... no one is dead. Let's move on...

What is so striking about Ares Olympus are the excuses and gyrations he goes through to make his point, without the least acknowledgment (nor consideration) of his opposition's offer.

These are the rantings of a presumed rationalist fanatic, save that his rantings are not rational. He tells us by his dogmatic statements, which tell us that it is best that we heed the alarmist warnings so as not to bring on the impending climatological doom. Shoot first, aim later. Oops.... I think this is what he says about gun control opponents. I won't tell if you won't tell...

Witches at Stonehenge came up with presumably valid concerns about doom, destruction and mass death. With all their astrological and astronomical evidence generated from the sun's movement above the headstone. Yep, the sun's there every year... awesome, dude.

Does it all add up to a geopolitical-psychosocial-psychosomatic-spiritual-traversal-physical-quantun-loco experiment? Not really.

Each generation says the the previous one is defective. And vice-versa. Both are usually correct. Does anyone see this acknowledged in the mainstream media? Seems we're all treated to the same stories...

Yet despite our species' transformation, we're all still alive. Millennia later. Strange. Forgive the skepticism, I just don't get it. I guess I'm stupid, and Ares Olympus is not.

Strange... how does homo sapiens govern the climate, please?