Unread post
by jjohnson » Mon Dec 31, 2012 3:39 pm
The debates about whether or not global warming is occurring reminds me of the debates about whether or not the EU paradigm is correct. In both cases, two groups of people, nominally scientists or educated laypeople like me, are looking at the same available data and drawing different conclusions as to cause and effect. While I don't dwell a lot on climate change (my lifetime guarantee does not extend far enough into my future to make that significant) but as a pilot I find weather fascinating, and its complex causes. But weather is an artifact of climate, and is fairly insignificant as it is merely an infinitesimal part of a much longer period of constant change from many influences.
Weather forecasts over a week are inaccurate, just as are stellar distances inaccurate over about 400 parsecs using geometrical parallax. Climate forecasts cannot be based on 100, or 400, or 5000 years of data. That is not climate. Climate is long term: cycles of hundreds of thousands of years, repeating over repeated revolutions of our star about the galactic center. Both Henrik Svensmark (The Chilling Stars) and John Kehr (The Inconvenient Skeptic) have books that look at data that purport to cover temperature modulation, inferred through various techniques, taken from ice cores, life forms, atmospheric gas compositions and many more items which come from research by careful consensus scientists. I won't get into the charge of "cherry picking" of the data sets, but try to show that the two authors above also try hard to stick with observations and infer the "facts" as best they know how.
Cosmic rays really aren't the issue of cloud seeding, directly - they are destroyed at some depth into the atmosphere, and release showers of muons. Muons do help create some cloud seeding at lower altitudes, which, along with other accompanying chemical processes both authors delve into, create the right-sized particles upon which water condenses readily and creates the light reflecting clouds that increase our planet's solar reflectivity - its albedo. And still, this is just one component in this intensely complex balance of ebbs and flows of power and radiation and movement. Kehr notes the importance of the difference in radiation uptake between the two hemispheres - the northern land-dominated hemisphere and the southern ocean-dominated hemisphere.
Kehr also likens the cycle of climatic temperature swings to the temperature swings of a year, with a long winter, a short spring and summer, cooling again through an autumnal period into the long winter spell once more. The differences are profound in a lot of ways, but it's a good analogy. They both show that it repeats, but not on the exact schedule each repetition. And winters are much longer than summers. The current conditions are "late interglacial", both writers observe (and as I read way back in grade school, believe it or not, before this debate came up).
The other point to make here is that everybody's data bob up and down over time. You and I want to know how cold it will be next week, but the night and day temperatures between now and then will go up and down several times before next week is here. On the climate scale, what we see as sudden (and therefore alarming) swings of temperature are doing the same thing - getting Earth through the autumnal changes after a short, hot summer, on the way to hundreds of thousands years more of really cold (for Earth) conditions. Kehr looks at these short-term swings and calls them "noise", just like static in a radio message, or changing rates of chemical re-combining in a lab experiment, or the random decay of a radioactive element into an inert block of its transmuted self. Those are always the same over time, but in short intervals signals vary, sometimes well away from the mean or "norm".
We may heat up for the next 200 years - or we might not. We may cool a lot after that, and have some really intense weather or unusually cold winters and more glaciation, but that too is a part of a larger, longer picture. If one draws the best fit curves in the really long term record which scientist have obtained, these days the long term of the graph slopes down. We are inexorably cooling, IF the longest-term scenario of what has gone before can safely be taken as the model we expect it to follow.
But is this model a successful one? We cannot tell from our limited temporal perspective. Some things we simply cannot know without more experience and exposure to the climate. Many things we do not yet know. I do not see the EU paradigm as jumping in and offering some different, cosmic electricity-based explanation of Earth's climate beyond noting that the electric power driving the Sun and stars, in its take on things, could be lessened or go out completely. Then ALL the global warming theories go into the tank, because we won't be around to argue these things.
If you want a hard, penetrating look into the problem of figuring out which theories work, and why or why not, read Exceeding Our Grasp, by P. Kyle Stanford, Oxford University Press, 2006. By hard, I mean he looks deeply into the logic processes of theory formulation and discusses The Problem of Unconceived Alternatives. [He uses terms which I have never seen before in theories of science discussions, but there is an entire litany of work to which most of us have never been exposed unless we are serious theoreticians.] These are alternatives that may explain the existing data on which a current model is based, but which can explain the observations and make predictions as well or better than the current model. It applies to medicine and chemistry and physics and astronomy and all sciences who must utilize an underlying theory in their research, ordering and exploration to understand the basic phenomena of their craft. Identifying what such an alternative theory might consist of is a devilishly difficult task - no one has thought of it as an explanation yet. But he shows that history is full of these unconceived alternatives, which are ignored or dismissed routinely until they "suddenly" as if from nowhere" suddenly transform and become dominant and successful - usually replacing the existing paradigm in the process.
The importance of that discussion is something that those of us here should be thinking about, whether it is in the EU context of astrophysics and historical/mythological antecedents, or climate change.
Jim
