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Hi Robert:
Well I do seem to enjoy debating over global warming, so I will
continue with you. First of all, regarding scientists agreeing with the
party line: I have quite a few friends who are top-notch government
scientists.
They all get a paycheck from Uncle Sam, either directly or indirectly.
They all have a specialty besides climate. They don't really know
anything more about climate than anyone else. They say I am the
smartest person they know. That's hard to swallow, since I know I am so
dumb... I feel honored in my dumbness.
Anyway these guys don't even really have a strong opinion one way or
the other on climate, and end up asking me what I think. But if they're
putting together a proposal for funding and it can mention lowering
greenhouse gas emissions or anything of the sort, it gets extra
brownie-points for funding and everyone knows it.
Polls of "scientists" showing a "concensus" can include 6th grade
science teachers. They are unlikely to have an original thought on the
subject, and almost by definition will agree with whatever the
politically-correct party line is perceived to be. Hint: things that we
know are right are not called "politically correct", they are just
called "correct".
Every science show I watch finds some way to tie in the horror story,
whether it's a show on planets where they play sad music while
explaining why, say, Venus is so hot, or a show on Earth's formation,
where any geological layer triggers some discussion of "climate change"
with some little implication that CO2 is a leading, rather than a
following, indicator for temperature.
You know as well as I do that they purposely leave out the part where
Venus is closer to the sun and instead try to blame the 800 degree
surface temperatures on higher CO2 content, whereas thinking people
ask, as I did in 3rd grade when they first were setting the stage for
our future ignorance, "Could the fact that Venus is closer to the sun
have anything to do with its higher temperatures?" and secondly "Is it
not obvious that the atmospheric content is more an effect of being
closer to the sun and therefor being hotter, so everything organic
boils off into the atmosphere, than a cause"?
Government scientists end up doing the job they are hired to do which
is to act like bureaucrats, running programs, generating reports, and
most of all, fitting into the system. They are busy and do not have
time to independently analyze, say, climate, from scratch. They instead
rely on other bureaucrats to generate valid opinions in their own
specialty.
This strategy is logical and mostly effective. It only falters when
there is an agenda that demands that the facts come out a certain way.
Then the scientists who can generate those "facts" get the funding, and
so that is the way science is seen to go, with or without the facts.
Science, historically, despite its best efforts, does NOT always get
the facts right. Sometimes official science is mistaken for years.
OK now that we've addressed the plethora of personalities that you want
to throw at the discussion, I'd like to discuss another fact. Note
we've only had to look at one fact so far, the scientific concensus of
an 11,000-year length of the average interglacial, which began,
according to scientific concensus, 11,000 years ago.
Now we are going to complicate this discussion, that had only 1 fact,
with a second fact. Can your mind handle a second fact? OK let's give
it a go:
Back when the alarm bells initially started their incessant peal, I
first congratulated myself on predicting that the panic over "cooling"
had neatly switched over to "warming", exactly on cue, as predicted,
without skipping a beat. Bingo.
The first thing I wanted to do was see what their scientific argument
was, and find a hole in it. It was far easier than I expected. Their
main argument had a hole you could drive a truck through, and, true to
form, simply stood reality on its head, substituting a complete lie as
its foundational "fact".
Every theory has basic, foundational facts that it starts with, called
"assumptions". The global warming nightmare story relied on an
unstoppable runaway heating process that, once started, would snowball
and build on itself, so that what started as a little melting would
quickly turn into a huge amount of warming. It was to be relentless and
unstaoppable. It was to get way worse, very fast, then faster and
faster after that. Panic-time. That unstoppable runaway scenario is why
sea levels were supposed to have risen a few feet by now.
There was not a warning that in centuries we might have sea levels a
foot higher. That was not enough to scare people. It was many feet
higher, and it was decades, even years, not a century. Certainly by
2020 we could expect Venice to have completely subsided, which it's
land is conveniently doing without any actual change in the sea level.
Anyway here's the single fact I examined, that the whole house of cards
is built on, and they gloss over the main assumption, which is
presented as the opposite of reality. Are you ready for the one fact
they have wrong?
That "melting arctic sea ice allows the water below to be warmed by the
sun". This one, simple wrong fact that the entire doom & gloom
scenario is based on, is 100% wrong! OK let me explain it:
The story goes like this: Increased levels of CO2 will cause some
atmospheric warming, which will cause arctic sea ice to melt. Open
water in the Arctic Ocean allows sunlight to enter the arctic water,
warming it. We'll stop there for now.
The simple question I asked was this:
Does melted sea ice actually allow the water to be warmed by the sun,
or is does the sea ice instead act as an insulator, or blanket?
The concept that occurred to me was all I had learned in thermodynamics
about "black body radiation", that everything has a temperature and
everything emits thermal radiation in a band of photonic frequencies
proportional to its temperature.
Then I remembered that the Earth is hotter inside, and that heat always
flows from hot to cold. Therefore Earth is a net emitter of heat. I
repeat: EARTH IS A NET EMITTER OF HEAT. That is the key fact to keep in
mind.
If you could see in the infrared, Earth would be seen as glowing like a
star. Giving off radiation. Giving off more than it absorbs (or else it
would be cooler in the center). One could call the Earth a very brown
mini-dwarf star, powered by its own internal low-grade nuclear furnace.
Summary: The Earth is a net emitter of heat.
Proceeding from acknowledging that Earth is a net emitter of heat, NOT
a net absorber, the next question is "Where does the Earth absorb the
most heat" and "Where does the Earth emit the most heat?", and finally
"Where does the balance between absorbing heat and emitting heat
consist of more heat emission than absorption? In other words, what
part of the Earth experiences a net emission of heat, on balance?
Another way of asking this question, is to first acknowledge that the
Earth is always cooling itself, then to ask where that cooling takes
place. Guess where? The arctic oceans when the sea ice has melted. Yup,
you got it. The place where the propaganda assumes the most heat is
absorbed, is actually where the most heat is emitted, on balance! Once
again, reality stood on its head!
Once again I turned to 3rd-grade level information to get back to
simple facts: I remembered we were taught that ice could act as
insulation and could keep people warm! Remembering that Eskimos build
igloos to keep warm, not for their air-conditioning value, I asked if
the arctic sea ice might also serve as an insulator. Could it be that,
like an igloo, sea-ice could act like insulation keeping the warm water
below from emitting its warmth into space as black-body radiation? That
seemed logical, actually.
Then the question goes back to "where does the Earth emit the most
radiation in proportion to how much it absorbs?" The answer? The Arctic
oceans of course! The water is comparatively warm, having been warmed
by the tropical sun and then flowed to the poles. That is called
"Earth's Air Conditioner": warm, tropical sea water flowing to the
poles to cool. To cool it must give off heat. It cannot give off heat
if it is covered in ice. The ice prevents the water below from cooling.
So I googled "sea ice" and "insulator". I quickly found the actual fact:
Sea ice is indeed an insulator. It has been well-known since day-one
that melting sea ice allows the water below to cool. Arctic waters even
visibly give off "steam" when the sea-ice melts and the warm waters
evaporate. That warms the air above, which radiates that warmth out
into space, cooling the Earth.
When the water has sufficiently cooled, the sea ice reforms. It is a
self-stabilizing cycle, not a potential runaway condition. Why? Because
the more ice melts, the more the water cools, and the faster the ice
can reform. The cycle lasts 30 years. It's variously called "decadal
oscillation" or "multi-decadal oscillation".
A little logic confirms this: If the Earth is a net emitter of heat,
and most solar absorption takes place near the equator, the poles must,
by definition, be strong net emitters of heat. And the strongest net
emission must be from the comparatively warm open arctic waters,
imported from equatorial regions.
The sun impinges on the arctic seas at a very flat angle that
encourages most photons to bounce off the water as a reflection anyway.
Think of the glare you see at the poles when you look at a picture of
Earth taken from space. Again, the poles are where the Earth is a net
emitter of heat.
The only thing that can STOP that net emission is a nice, insulating
blanket of sea ice, preferably covered with a further insulating
blanket of snow, that virtually guarantees that almost zero net
emission of heat can occur, inevitably leading to accumulated warming
of the water below, eventually causing the temporary melting of that
ice, which then allows the water to cool, starting the whole cycle over.
So there you have it: The concept that melted sea ice presents a danger
of "runaway warming" due to increased absorption of heat, from solar
radiation, by the arctic oceans, is the exact opposite of reality! The
well-known decadal oscillation proves this. The facts have been
presented as opposite to the reality. The entire foundation of the
scare-story: runaway global warming due to solar absorption by open
arctic oceans" is the exact opposite of the truth.
The truth is that if arctic oceans melt, that allows the water below to
cool since the sun just bounces off while the water emits black-body
radiation, that it could not, if covered with ice.
So there is fact number two. Melted sea ice allows the water below to
cool, not get hotter. Has your poor, overburdened and
bullshit-assaulted mind been able to understand this one, single,
simple fact? Or has the constant assault of misinformation rendered
your surviving brain cells as useless jelly by now, too battered
consider or to take in even a single fact?
What do you think about what the well-known multidecadal oscillation
means for the basis of the scare story, that open arctic waters are net
absorbers of heat, rather than net emitters? Which do you say is
correct?
This is what I mean when I say, the facts have long ago been abandoned
in favor of injecting a lot of confusion based on personalities.
Science is not about taking polls of how many elementary-school science
teachers agree with some theory and citing that as evidence. Science is
about constructing logical trains of events that provide solid and
logical explanations for phenomenae that we need to understand.
The minute you start reading about a "concensus" of "opinion" rather
than a logical presentation of scientific facts or a legitimate
examination of a proposed series of events, you know you are no longer
dealing with science, but instead "science" with finger-quotes, and
finger-pointing. Real science sticks with facts and does not need to
cite how many people agree, whatever their credentials or lack thereof.
Joe Friday said it best:
"Just the facts Ma'm."
:)
Doug S.
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