Barrel Strength

The Dark Lord has sent out us this fascinating assemblage of facts and analysis pertaining to energy consumption, global warming, and related matters. It is written by Prof. David MacKay of the physics department of Cambridge University.

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/cft.pdf

It is a book, freely available on the Internet, called “Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air”.  No one should be discussing energy policy without reference to it.

Of course he uses too many equations and he is something of a green, but that should only increase your respect for his factual inquiry.

Those of us who follow the debate about global warming, as if it were a debate and not a settled dogma, track the following questions:

1) is it occurring?

2) How much is man engendering?

3) How important is it to solve, and how readily is it solved, relative to all other ecological/disease/development problems?

Roughly speaking, here is what my readings have told me.

1) The earth has been warming since the end of the last ice age, roughly 15,000 years ago (with an extensive break for a micro ice age they call the Younger Dryas from 12-10,000 years ago). Warming may be accelerating in recent centuries. Contrariwise, it has been much warmer in the distant past, and vastly colder in the distant past. We have not yet attained the height of the previous interglacial warming period, when freshwater ponds stood near the Arctic Ocean, which are now called pingoes.

If the recent (last million years) past is any guide, we are currently in the last few millennia before the onset of the next ice age. We have been through 18 ice ages the last million years, with gradually increasing extremes of cold occurring as the ice age has progressed. All of human history, from the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago, has occurred in the latest interglacial.

More recently, global warming appears to have stopped as of the year 2000, but I don’t read too much into this one way or another, since any general trend in the earth’s climate less than a few hundred years long is generally of no enduring significance. Nevertheless, global warming and cooling can happen suddenly, so that we can be plunged back into an ice age in less than a decade. I cannot reconcile these two statements without recourse to longer explanations than you have time to read.

2) Not much. Having read as much geological history as I have, the claims of many scientists that we are tipping the world over into a heat death strike me as vastly implausible. I also notice that geologists, who are accustomed to dealing with a thousand years as the shortest possible time-span they reckon in, tend to have a distinctly different view of climate than climate scientists, who track weather over time, and deal, in essence, with air, not rock.

3) I side with Bjorn Lomborg that if we had a hundered major global problems to solve, such as malaria, clean drinking water, education for girls etc, global warming would be last on the list in terms of cost-effectiveness of solving. Cold kills more people than heat, every winter, year in, year out.

Now today’s sermon is about the meaning of science. The philosophy of science is that it is only provisionally true. It must frame propositions that can be disproved. If it cannot generate propositions that can be disproved, it is not science. Hence the Wolfgang Pauli insult than some things “are not even wrong” - cannot generate propositions whose truth can be measured against results.

It was intersting to read in the National Post yesterday (”Overheated Claims”) an article by Roger Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, citing two US climate scientists, Claudia Tebaldi and Reto Knutti, the following passage, quoted twice:

“It is important to note that climate projections, decades or longer in the future by definition, cannot be validated directly through observed changes. Our confidence must therefore come from other sources”

Would you please read that again and tell me where that confidence should come from? If observed changes over decades fail to track predictions, over decades, then where is our conficence in climate modelling to come from? The operations of the Holy Spirit?

As Pielke observes:
“The IPCC issues predictions for 20-30-year periods in the futiure, and updates them every 6-7 years, so in practice its current predictive capanbilities can never be measured against real world data.”

In short, if you read the words carefully, they are saying that climate predictions are not science, because not falsifiable. This is exactly the thrust of the scientific objection to Intelligent Design.

Hence you will understand my increasing belief that Climate Science has reached the stage of being voodoo for white people. Not just metaphorically, but now, as we cast aside the last links to falsifiability, to pure magical thinking.

In a seven acre space in Ottawa, a little west of Parliament Hill, stands Mount Suzuki. Mt. Suzuki stands eighty to one hundred feet high after several weeks of 15C-20C weather. It is attacked daily by large machines which rip its sides to expose the whitish snow left from last winter, so that it can melt before the snow yard has to be filled again with the snow removed from city streets in the winter of 2008-2009. Look at this immense acreage of black soot-covered snow. Talk to me about global warming at your risk.

A fine article in the Daily Telegraph “Watch the Web for Climate Change Truths” reminds us how disconcerting it is to the Left Establishment that we are not plunging into Venusian levels of man-created global warming.

The article covers several sources of data whose cumulative testimony is highly equivocal, with some places heating and many cooling. None of this would be the least concern save for the fact that global warming is a politically charged TRUTH whose existence may not be denied on pain of accusations of heresy, abdication of the scientific method, and evil intentions.

“The most dramatic evidence, however, emerged last week with an announcement by Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that an immense slow-cycling movement of water in the Pacific, known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), had unexpectedly shifted into its cool phase, something which only happens every 30 years or so, ultimately affecting climate all over the globe.

“Discussion of this on the invaluable Watts Up With That website, run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts, shows how the alternations of the PDO between warm and cool coincided with each of the major temperature shifts of the 20th century - warming after 1905, cooling after 1946, warming again after 1977 - and how the new shift to a cool phase could have repercussions for decades to come.”

And so forth. Windmills, anyone?

Joe Bageant is an entertaining leftie ranter who wrote Deer Hunting With Jesus, and who writes from his new home in Johnson’s Village, Belize, where he says he tries to live on $5,000 a year. By the way, per capita GDP in Belize is $7,800 a year (2007) so I think he doth protest too much.

 His article on inevitable population growth spurred me to a rejoinder. Read the rest…

Daily Tech records the following: All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

____________________________

The ice doth come and go as it listeth, and grindeth the earth beneath its vasty weight. When Toronto is pushed by advancing ice into Chattanooga, Tennessee, will David Suzuki please admit his manifold sins and errors? I doubt it.

There are thousands of useful sites that go for and against the notion that man is principally responsible for global warming. Some of us at Barrelstrength have written elsewhere about this phenomenon. Chiefly the consensus among us crusty reactionaries is that:

1) Global warming and cooling are principally natural phenomena related to solar output, albedo (earth’s reflectivity), ocean current heat transfers to arctic zones, influenced by the shape of continents, and many other attributes of the earth’s wobble, tilt, magnetic fields, as well as cosmic rays and possibly even the location in the local galaxy as the sun circles around it and goes through the galactic plane.

2) Opinion differs on rational grounds as to how much of the post-1970 global warming trend has been caused or increased by man, but the range of difference in this group would probably be from zero (no human influence) to some, in the 5-10% of increase, which are themselves trivial compared to fluctuations which have been recorded in human-recorded and in pre-human history.

3) Global warming as it is currently understood by most people is religious and not scientific, insofar as its function is to provide the sin for which humans must atone. The deity is Gaia, the religion is ecology, and the sin is ours, for breathing, heating, and all forms of energetic transformations, whose inevitable output is carbion dioxide and water. (That is the chemical truth, and cannot be avoided). 

Read the rest…

Eh?  David Suzuki, a real science guy, or the evidence of your own lying eyes?  Eh?

The ‘Icebox of the Nation’

The temperature falls to a record 40 below zero in Minnesota.

“