Global Warming

Both Global warming and a return to an ice age have been proposed. Which is it to be? Are we getting hotter with global flooding? Are we going to get colder and have a return to an Ice age with glaciation's?

The answer -unfortunately, appears to be yes.

There is reason to think that we are headed into a major temperature spike with flooding which will be far worse than anything mankind has inflicted upon itself to date. Worse this spike is a trigger event that causes major climatic shifts that in turn cause an over-reaction bringing on major VERY rapid glaciation.

The warming alone will upset eco-systems. A disaster. But that is mild compared to the devastation caused by flooding. Almost all coastal cities will be flooded out, taking more than half the industrial base with them. And also more than half the best farm land. Amazonia is a shallow inland sea, with the island of Venezuela cut off from the Andes. Worse yet Europe has the port city of Paris, but looses Holland, Belgium Ireland, and all that remains of Russia is the Ural Arpeggio. But the worst hit of all is Asia where China looses most of its heartland, and India looses the Indus and Ganges river valleys. More than a billion people have no place left to live and work, or grow crops, and are forced to move.

Bad enough? Not quite, for this is just the first of a double whammy. The next stage is a major shift in ocean currents, as the new Arctic circum-polar current triggers a southward shift in the Gulf Stream. That shifts the major rain from Europe to Africa, returning the Sahara to its former verdant state *at least one good thing!! But that leaves the shallow sea where Russia used to be under a massive cold zone, which causes a freeze over. That allows white snow to cover the ice, and it reflects the heat from the sun, allowing summer to be colder-- MUCH colder. In fact the loss of heat is so rapid an so much that after a few years (under 10) there is a "Freeble winter " of Nordic legend, where the snow never completely melts, and starts a rapid accumulation. "The year there was no summer."

NOTE this is not man caused. Our activities certainly have not helped the situation, and have speeded it up, but the forces here are far beyond anything we ourselves have been able to create.. The energy of one evening summer lightening storm in the Grand Teton Mountains is about equal to the total electrical energy generated in the entire United States in one year. And the lightening is only a by product -almost accidental, and ignorable compared to the energy of the storm itself. The energy of one hurricane is more in one hour than all of the energy ever used my mankind, from the first fires of cave man to all of our nuclear bombs, all the oil and coal etc. - all combined. We certainly have been self aggrandizing and arrogant to think that WE would have much effect on nature. Nature almost ignores our puny efforts.... almost.. but not quite completely... ignores us.

Over time we have had an effect- rarely if ever a good effect. We have stripped vegetation from hills and turned cites in the mid east that were founded upon the resources of trees and farm land into abandoned rocky hillsides. The useless former harbor is a silted up marsh filled with the topsoil that had made the site so desirable millennia ago. We have accelerated the desertification of the Sahara, and other dry grasslands. We also have accelerated the drying up of former lake Niger and the Arial sea. Overgrazing accelerated a process of desertification which was already underway. The largest recent criminal mismanagement is the destruction of the rain forests in Brazil.

Not to worry, however; as mother nature is about to apply her own form of justice to these activities. Those who cut the forest in Brazil are about to be evicted as the Amazon basin becomes once more the Amazon sea. It was a sea before, and it is about to become so once more. The scorching of the residual grasslands before the renewal weather shift and rains will evict all the culprits from fringe Sahara.

We are focusing on CO2, Greenhouse effect which is our stupidity in action, Water vapor alone, ignoring clouds, has 52 times the "Greenhouse effect" effect of CO2. CO2 is only somewhat less than 2% of that effect. We are being arrogant again to think we are having a major effect. The clouds have even stronger effect than water vapor as they are white and reflect sunlight, and THAT does have a major effect on the energy balance. The cutting of rainforests has reduced water transpiration to the atmosphere, which has in turn cut the daily deluge in rainfall from those transpiration fed clouds, and thus has had a measurable effect. The criminal conversion of resources to cash by the lumber and conversion to grazing land, for a few pathetic years before the minerals all wash out to sea HAS an effect. And it is a disaster. That is accelerating the natural Global Warming!

WHAT CAN WE DO? First we must recognize what we can control; and what is beyond our control and prepare for that which we can not control.

If we quit wasting resources on CO2 emission, and re focus them on water vapor and cloud cover that can have a measurable effect. The loss of rain forest can be reversed by reforestation (not necessarily with the same plants, but at least with high transpiration species, NOT grass, low transpiration ground cover) and that in turn will pump more water into the air, making more clouds which reflect the incoming heat. The overgrazing in Sahara can be halted and new irrigated green plants introduced, again NOT fodder grasses, but heat rejecting ground cover, -that will slow or halt the desertification process. With extremely careful control we possible can reverse that desertification. We must halt the unthinking rape of the planet and reverse the damage where possible. Genetically modified Barley crops irrigated with Brackish water (almost sea water) can place millions of hectares into cultivation. That has the double effect of feeding a hungry world, and converting energy into chemical rather than heat form, as well as introducing water vapor back into the air, to help with cloud cover creation. In short we need conservation, but directed in different ways and on a massive scale.

INVEST AT LEAST as much into space programs. which are vital for racial survival, as is now placed into entertainment. Let's get our priorities right.

It is not possible for us to produce cooling or heating on the scale of the Solar insolation by many orders of magnitude. However; it IS possible to CONTROL and direct the incoming solar energy. It is possible to Control it and direct it where we want it to go, but it is not possible to generate or cool that much energy. A simple set of rings about he equator, or in trans polar position can reflect light away from the equator to cool it and by reflecting light to the north tundra we can warm that area. This requires a viable space launch system. It also requires political will to do it while we can. That requires an immediate redirection of MAJOR resources into space programs. Those programs have always repaid for the effort in serendipity- The whole microchip- computer- semiconductor industry came out of the Apollo program, .High tech programs pay for themselves many times over. They supply jobs in a cascade down, and create whole new industries which can not even be imagined at the start of the process.

Presented: Conference Global Warming at University Nacional Major San Marcos, Lima, Peru 2000 J. H. L. Lawler

GLOBAL WARMING, and

SOCIAL SCIENCE, and ETHICS

PART 1

Global Warming , Pacific Decadal Oscillations (PDO), El Niño and La Niña, Greenhouse effect, and Rise in Ocean Levels,

Global warming is real. The UN sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just concluded a second meeting, in October 2000 the first meeting having been in 1995. The total warming predicted by this prominent panel of hundreds of scientists has just been roughly doubled. They changed the predicted warming from 1.5 to 3.5 degrees C in 1995 to a new estimate of 3 to 6 degrees C. All of the factors in the Oct 2000 estimate tended to be increased from original estimates, resulting in the doubling of the figures. But this panel also was partially politically motivated, missing major factors that are politically incorrect and still fixing their attention on CO2 based “Greenhouse effect” which is now known to be trivial, and they also totally failed to present the probable results of this warming and its “secondary” effects which will be catastrophic. In November another major Global Warming meeting at the Hague started with a British keynote speaker showing a sandbag, and then blaming the recent world wide flooding on the United States CO2 emissions. This politically motivated misdirection, based upon bad science mixed with emotionalism and irresponsible attempts to “blame” others for natural disasters, unless checked, will make the whole situation intolerable by misdirection of resources and preventing the taking what positive actions are possible.

Cause - effect:

Global Warming causes an increase in CO2 levels. Close examination of the temperature and CO2 levels shows that these two are co functional—when Ocean and global temperatures rise CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere also rise. This was erroneously taken to mean that CO2 via greenhouse effect caused a rise in temperature. But closer examinations observes that first the temperature rises and then later the CO2 rises, meaning that Temperature causes CO2 rise not the other way about. There is a clear well known mechanism for this.

The amount of gas dissolved in a liquid is inversely functional with temperature. As a liquid is heated, as the temperature goes UP it dissolves LESS gas, and the Temperature goes DOWN it dissolves MORE gas. Everyone has experienced this with boiling water and carbonated beverages. As water nears the boiling point, first, before it boils, bubbles of air appear coming out of solution. Cold beer has more carbonation, warm beer retains less CO2. That is why cold beer releases bubbles slowly, and warm beer goes “flat” rapidly.

The Earth is very much a water planet, roughly 3/4 of the surface is Ocean. As the oceans heat up they can dissolve less CO2 and thus it is rejected into the atmosphere. As the oceans cool they can adsorb more CO2 and it is removed form the atmosphere. There is some 50 times more releasable CO2 in the oceans than in the atmosphere!!! (There also are large quantities of carbonates in the ocean, but they are not releasable).

In a bid to control energy production, and thus gain power the politically motivated Kyoto conference tried to blame Global Warming on CO2, and Greenhouse effect. This is clearly stated on the UN Geneva web site. But they know the truth, and are suppressing it. The UN web site actually admits that “Water Vapor has a larger effect than Carbon Dioxide” but then go on without further discussion or stating how much this effect is. The truth would put them and their cohorts out of a job, thus they try to ignore it.

Water vapor, not including cloud effects, alone has 52 times more Greenhouse effect than CO2. There is world wide on the average roughly 26 times more water vapor in the air than CO2, and it has an infra red adsorption band 2.0 times larger than CO2. Thus CO2 can have only 2% of the effect of water vapor. This alone totally negates the basis for the Kyoto treaty. If greenhouse effect were responsible for global warming we would need to look at water vapor, not CO2 as the dominant cause.

But this also does not account for clouds which are even more important than water vapor. Clouds are white and reject incoming energy from the sun, thus cooling the planet below the clouds. If we have more clouds we get less insolation (less energy coming into the earth system), and thus the planet cools. If we have fewer clouds we have more insolation that warms the earth. The clouds (condensed water vapor) thus have a major effect on Global Warming and this exceeds the Greenhouse effect of Water Vapor.

The effect of man on cloud cover over the oceans has been small. But the effect of man on Tropical Rain Forrest has been dramatic, and catastrophic. Further man also has contributed to loss of vegetation, reduced grasslands, and general desertification of the planet. In Turkey, along the Anatolian coast where verdant forests existed 5000 years ago we now find rocky hillsides that will not even support grass for sheep grazing. The sites of ancient cities famous for shipping, timber, and agriculture now are barren with the top soil long ago washed into the former harbor, silting it up into uselessness. All of these reduce the transpiration of water into the atmosphere causing loss of local cloud cover. Where there were rain forests there used to be massive afternoon rains – actually cooling the forests several ways – from the transpiration itself, from the cloud cover which built up and from the rains that cooled (and humidified) the forest.

As the trees are cut to create cattle grazing the transpiration drops dramatically, the clouds thin out locally, heating the grassland, and there is less rain, heading toward desertification. The Sahara at one time 6000 years ago was a fertile grassland. The Sahara Desert has been growing at the fringe by slightly more than 2.5 Km each year. Overgrazing is a major contributing factor in this. Lake Niger will be totally gone within the decade. The Aral Sea in Russia is drying out. Look into the Amazon Basin and you will see disaster in the making.

While the land is only 25% of the surface, it is more subject to energy variation than the oceans. The oceans actually are a buffer that resist change- particularly changes in temperature. They obey the LeChatlier principle in that as any change is made they react to minimize that change. And they are MASSIVE heat sinks, having stabilized the earth for roughly 12,000 years now. Thus we need to focus on the oceans for “inertia” and the land masses for causation of energy changes.

The key to understanding Global warming is NOT greenhouse effect, but energy balance. The effect of mankind overall in the basic energy balance is VERY small, less than 2%. But even that may be too much, and we need to check this VERY carefully. To illustrate our arrogance in thinking we are important two examples will suffice. The energy released in any major hurricane in the Atlantic or a Typhoon in the pacific ocean exceeds the total energy that mankind has ever released – all the coal and wood that has ever been burned, all the H bombs, and munitions , and all the oil etc. that have been used by mankind in all of its history !!!! We have indeed been arrogant to assume our CO2 would be so important. The electrical energy released in one night in a thunder storm in the Grand Tetons in Wyoming exceeded to total electrical energy generated in the entire U.S.A. for a whole year! Remember that the electrical energy in the form of lightening released in the storm is a minor, almost accidental, “byproduct”, of the total energy of the storm !!

Do we really need costly supercomputers to do climate work? NO. Any of the normal computers available today can be used to set up a grid that has sufficient detail to model the climate. The local weather is indeed more complicated, but the algorithms being used there also are overly complicated. What is needed is more clear thinking, better programming, and less use of massive electronics, and less use of inefficient or obsolete algorithms, and sloppy thinking / programming.

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation, PDO, has become a major topic recently. This is a trend that is overlaid on top of the El Niño and La Niña phenomena. The data presented so far only include about a century, but there is good El Niño and La Niña data exist going back 5000 years via dendrochronology. Thus the PDO also can be extended into far longer time than has been done. These all combine to paint a pretty fair (if dismal) picture of climate into the next century.

We have just shifted into a “cold” PDO phase. This “cold” phase is named for the Pacific Ocean waters off Peru, which are cold, while the waters off Japan and Hawaii will be warm. This is copied from the El Niño and La Niña zones, and thus really these are strongly linked data. It will obviously have an effect on Peru, but the rest of the world may be MUCH more strongly effected. For example Dallas / Ft Worth Texas has just sustained the longest period of 84 consecutive days without rain on record. The prior year had a stretch of weather hotter than 100 F that also was in the top three hottest years on record. There is a year 2000 crop loss of over a billion dollars, much of that in cotton and grains. This is the second year in a row for setting heat records, and including one more prior year it is a clear trend. The Ukraine “breadbasket to Europe” also was badly hurt. Overall taking Canada and the USA as a whole the crops will not be hurt too much. All that happens is the climate zones move further north, and the total acreage remains the same, you just grow it in a different place. This is because there is a place to move into. In China where there is a blocking desert, there is nowhere to move into. In the Sahara, there also is no place to go. In fact the trends are known for most of the world, but they are not being adequately put into a total global picture.

Thus there is a great deal of projection needed, and it is not unduly difficult, it just is tedious, and requires lots of work. It appears that many so called scientists are not willing to actually do this sort of tedious work, and thus it is going undone.

What about Flooding caused by Global Warming and melting of Arctic and Antarctic Glacial ice and Permafrost? There are internet sites that show the coast lines 15,000 years ago before the massive northern hemisphere continental glaciers started to melt, and the coastlines with only 15 meters of oceanic rise. That 15 meters rise is an absolute minimum that goes with 3 degrees C global waming. And it is catastrophic! We loose Holland, Belgium, Denmark, major areas in China and India, all of Florida, and much of the gulf coast in the USA, not to mention the most productive valley land in California that provides something like 50% of the fresh winter crops. But the reality is that the real ocean rise is likely to exceed 50 meters as a minimum, with 75 being realistic and 100 meters being quite possible. That last would inundate virtually every coastal city in the whole world, wiping out more than half the total industrial base worldwide, and flood roughly half the productive farmland in the world! Russia, is gone, leaving the Archipelago of the Ural mountains. The Amazon basin is gone, leaving the island of Columbia. India looses the Indus and Ganges river basins and China loosed the Yellow and Yangtze River basins. Those two displace something over a billion people ! That needs thought !

Discussion of that also is unpopular. It is politically incorrect since it is beyond ability of mankind to control. All we can do, at best, is to think how to move major populations and that is not politically even open to discussion. Those with prosperity and good productive land want to embargo those who do not have lands and wealth. (I am somewhat ashamed to mention this as the worst offender probably is the USA). Thus when (note not IF but WHEN) the coastal cites start to flood out, and the Ganges, Indus, Yellow and Yangtze river basins disappear under the rising ocean, where will those 2 billion people go? Perhaps we should give some thought into where we can resettle both people and industry, and how to increase crop production in places not available now as we loose other major crop areas. But such thought is politically impossible in that wars have been fought and are being fought over scraps of land, and we are talking about over tens or hundreds of millions of square miles! The area involved is truly continental.

PART II SOCIAL SCIENCE and ETHICS

Part of the problem is that we are in need of progress in the humanities, the social sciences and ethics. Our knowledge of the physical sciences has outstripped the knowledge of humanities, of how to act, of ethics, and proper political, social behavior. In fact I can name almost no nation in the world whose government does not flagrantly break several ethical rules. This is aggravated on the one hand by blatant theft of public wealth by those in political power, and on the other extreme by well intentioned attempts to “help the poor” and helpless “children”– but which concepts when moved into governmental form – no matter how well intentioned – just boil down to theft. Charity is one of the highest human virtues. Charity done by a government, robs us of our virtue. And since government involves use of force or at least threat of force, it transforms a virtue into theft.

Government is the opposite of freedom. Freedom will lead to innovation and self motivated, self responsible, productivity. Thus the best government is the least government that will provide stability, and a secure social structure against which wide variations in behavior – social experiments – and physical innovation - can take place.

Mankind is entering an age where we can have neither tolerance for petty tyrannical dictators, nor any form of Nationalism, nor “Ethnic” racism, nor Religious fanaticism in any form. Also all forms of “collectivism” from communism, to socialism, to “national socialism”, all must be rejected. We must have overall policy direction that allows maximal diversity from government. Government must enforce contracts, and a rule of law, but it must NEVER take wealth in any form by force from one person and give it to another who has not given something of equal value to the person deprived of the wealth. We must stop almost all forms of welfarism.

While the global warming / flooding problem is in the physical sciences, the solution involves ethics, politics, and social sciences in a way that has never even been openly discussed before. We need a precise form of ethics, which is not now commonly known, and we need a true SOCIAL SCIENCE, and a precise political science by which to form and control governmental forms. We can not get to the required solutions with the present imprecise generalities, based upon unproven assumptions which usually are accepted as true, but not supported by data (even often clearly contradicted by massive data) , and that exist in unquestioned form in the political and social sciences. For example “All men are created UNEQUAL”, every man is different from every other man, and in general men will have diverse needs and desires. Diversity is in and of itself a value. We need to re-examine all our assumptions, and discard those that are clearly erroneous. With a clearly stated set of corrected assumptions, it should be possible to make rapid advances in the areas of politics and the social sciences.

But rather than try to formulate these advances- those involved all too often “Defend their territory” close their minds and try to suppress the very things that will make the present muddled mess obsolete, (and the practitioners with it, which is why they try to suppress any major change) . Knowing why they try to suppress the changes that discredit the former “high priests” of these fallen religions we need to act to insist that they change their whole system of thinking and either work to make the change happen or get out of the way of progress. “Are you here to help with the solution or are you part fo the problem?”. If a person asks for a reference to obtain more information, that may be science, but if they ask for a reference to establish “credibility” and “authority”, then they are not scientists, but politicians and clearly part of the problem. The mass media use of polls to determine “public opinion” uses scientific tools in a meaningless perversion of science. “Can you name ANY case where the majority was right?” (R. A. Heinlein). The very concept of “Democracy” is flawed, and the Greeks who invented it virtually immediately, within a century, recognized the errors and changed to a Republican form (see Plato) – A republic being that form of government where the rights of the minority is protected, and specifically protected from the “democratic” majority. Those who create are always a very small minority, and if the majority does not vigorously protect that productive minority, then they will fall back into barbarism, and poverty.

This memorable quotation is from Sir Alex Fraser Tytler (1742-1813).
Scottish jurist and historian, he was widely known in his time and was
professor of Universal History at Edinburgh University in the late 18th
century.
The quotation is from the 1801 collection of his lectures.
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only
exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from
the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the
candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the
results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always
followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years**. These nations have progressed through this sequence:

from bondage to spiritual faith;

from spiritual faith to great courage;

from courage to liberty;

from liberty to abundance;

from abundance to selfishness;

from selfishness to complacency;

from complacency to apathy;

from apathy to dependency;

from dependency back again to bondage."