Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Cimate Change or Not to Change

Climate Change or Not to Change?

I find this climate change issue totally exasperating. No, not because I don't believe in climate change and I think we are wasting our time with a silly distraction that is  blunting economic growth. Nor is it because I think it is real, the situation is dire and we should not waste another minute debating.

Rather it is because I can't really tell. Which is it, exactly? Is the climate changing or not?

Here is an example. I start the day assuming climate change is real, but then stumble onto this, a discussion of the Geological Society of London's position on climate change. They are basically saying burning fossil fuels is releasing CO2 into the atmosphere which is allowing more heat to remain trapped on the surface of the planet, warming things up. Nothing controversial there, right?

http://euanmearns.com/the-geological-society-of-londons-statement-on-climate-change/#more-20587

The discussion is rather logical, many points seem to make sense. For example here is a comment by Euan Mearns:

1) At the glacial inceptions CO2 lags temperature by up to 14,000 years. This is a massive lag where full glacial conditions are established before CO2 begins to fall. This demonstrates that CO2 is not a significant driver of climate change during glacial periods. It simply follows temperature, closely at the terminations but with large time lags at the inceptions. The climate science community, starting with Petit et al, have simply brushed this key information under the carpet. The political, social and economic consequences of this error are too vast to imagine.

2) At the main turning points of the Vostok temperature curve, at the temperature high, CO2 reaches a maximum and albedo a minimum. If these variables were significant drivers it should simply continue to get warmer, but the exact opposite happens. The strong force – obliquity – simply sweeps these weak forces away. At the temperature minima, the opposite occurs. The stage appears set for the whole world to freeze, but what happens next is the ice sheets collapse.

End of quote.

What he is saying is that CO2 levels follow increases in temperature. That implies they can't cause, them but rather are caused by them. The debate goes on quite a bit more in the comments, most of it seems rational and well informed.

Well then. Maybe I should look into the more mainstream position, so I go to skepticalscience.com

There I'm quickly reassured that climate change is real, it's caused by us burning lots of stuff and cutting down trees. Things make sense and all is right with the world... or is it?

Unfortunately I make couple of mistakes before leaving the site. First I read the article about alternative energy ( The Key To Slowing Global Warming ) and quickly noticed multiple glaring errors. Here is a sample paragraph just oozing with complex issues hopelessly reduced beyond recognition:

The second approach is to replace fossil fuels – used by every country - with energy generated from renewable sources - solar, wind, thermal, tidal and hydro, all of which are free. Solar and wind are available in all countries while thermal, tidal and hydro are available to most others. All offer an alternative to the use of fossil fuels, though at present, only thermal can assure continuity of supply sufficient to meet the growing, though fluctuating demand for electricity for domestic, industry and transport use.

End of quote.

Where to begin? Anyone who has done some serious digging on renewable energy knows renewable are very intermittent. Smoothing out the flow of random pulses of energy into a consistent flow needed to sustain the modern world is no small task. Modest progress is being made on the issue, but it may fundamentally turn out to be physically impossible to replace fossil fuels and still have a constant and predictable energy system like we have with electrical grids today.

To start with, each one of the renewables mentioned above requires massive infrastructure to gather up this free energy. Just saying "free energy" is not an appropriate term. Crude oil and coal is also "free". In some parts of the world both are right there on the surface, you just have to bend down to pick them up.

The real cost is the effort required to gather up the energy, and the price of that equipment and the labour that goes with it. When it comes to renewables, that equipment has to be deployed on a gigantic scale, because the free energy it is gathering is dissipated over a wide area in the form of sunshine or wind for example.

This leads to the next issue, which is the correspondingly massive amount of materials needed to build this infrastructure. Steel, concrete, copper and all other required components have to be found somewhere. There is a very real limit to how much of these materials we can extract and process into wind turbines and solar panels.

Is it even worth it? What if it takes so much energy to build this massive fossil fuel free system that we end up causing as much pollution and CO2 emissions as the system we have now? Some researchers think this is the case but none of that is being addressed in the optimistic paragraph above.

Maybe the nice people at Skeptical Science stepped out of their field of knowledge and we should only consider what they say about climate change, not a fossil fuel free future.

So then I read this article here:

https://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models.htm

Unfortunately once more some clever people we making seemingly logical counter arguments in the comment section.

Obviously, this topic is going to take a lot more looking into. In the meantime, what position can I take that makes the most sense given that I'm not a climatologist and can't pick apart every little factoid? I think the best I can do is to assume that anthropogenic climate change is probably real, lets say two chances out of three. Computer models may not be all that accurate, but among climatologists the basic elements seem to be well accepted. CO2 is going up, temperature is going up. Climate modeling is better than nothing, even if I can't tell by how much.

Yes, trusting a group of people is never a sure bet. We are after all a herd animal, with a long track record of believing a wide range of obviously false things. If I keep in mind that there is one chance out of three this whole climate change thing might fizzle out I won't be caught completely flat footed.



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