Snow Foolin'. As I write, it is snowing steadily. The temperature is 27 degrees Fahrenheit. On March 16th in Newark, New Jersey. Expected accumulation here is 5-8 inches. That is practically unheard of around here. But the drumbeat of propaganda about "Global Warming" doesn't skip so much as one beat. Late last nite, as rain was turning to snow, I watched two episodes of Scientific American Frontiers on cable (hereinafter, "SAF"). In the first episode, the beginning of which I missed, the subject was the danger that Global Warming may pose to the "halite circulation" (which is also called the "thermohaline circulation"). A good lay-language explanation of that mechanism appears here.
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The premise that SAF discussed is that Global Warming has so increased rainfall around the Arctic Ocean that the freshwater discharge into the Arctic, mainly from deep in the Russian hinterland, could markedly increase the amount of fresh water in the Arctic. At the same time, high rates of evaporation in the tropics induced by Global Warming could significantly increase the salinity of the sea in equatorial regions. The combined effects of these two paired results from Global Warming might produce insufficient difference in water densities to sustain the vast heat exchanger of ocean currents. Arctic waters would stay in the Arctic, tropic waters would stay in the tropics, with potentially catastrophic consequences for northern regions, which would become hugely colder. Yes, that's the bizarre assertion of some Global Warming "Chicken Littles": Global Warming will produce a new Ice Age in the north.
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There are problems with this whole idea, key among them being that temperature difference in itself, without a difference in salinity, drives currents:

When something is cooler it is more dense and when it is warmer it is less dense. We have already experienced this in many chapters [of the book cited at that website] as we have seen hot magma move upward buoyed by lower density.

The oceans do much the same, warmer water moves upward and cooler water sinks. Coupled with this there is also a salinity difference. Water at any given temperature will have higher density if it contains more salt.

Thus cold saline water will sink further than cold fresh water.

So tho saltier water might sink farther, cold fresh water will still sink. We can see plainly that cold fluids produce currents when they adjoin warm fluids, by simply looking at another fluid body, the "ocean" of air, our global atmosphere. Canadian Arctic air masses do not stay in the Arctic but flow south, to, among other places, Newark. In March. Five days before the start of spring.
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A further moderating factor is that fluids tend not to stay stratified by salinity but mix so that over time, fresh water is invaded by salt and saltier water is invaded by fresh. So there is both heat diffusion and molecular diffusion at work to mix water types, cold with warm, salty with fresh. These are dynamic processes constantly at work.
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We need to be very wary of bald assertions like this one:

Computer modeling indicates that the warming-induced precipitation increase [at high latitudes, affecting Russian rivers' greater output of fresh water] can be traced only to human releases of greenhouse gases, not to natural variations in the rain cycle [Wu, 2005].)

What a bunch of bull! "Computer modeling" is wholly dependent on the assumptions written into the program, famously expressed, "Garbage in, garbage out". It's like computer poker or slot machines. You can get any result you want just by writing the program to do what you want it to do. Computer modeling is not science; it is gaming, electronic fiction.
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Some scientists are not cowed by the attempt of the Global Warming advocates / champions to silence dissent. The New York Post, with whose editorial policy I almost always disagree, on February 26th published something sensible (by mistake, I must assume): "Global Warming: What We Don't Know", by Roy W. Spencer. (It's still online free, but may not be for much longer.) Spencer is "principal research scientist" at a climate institute at the University of Alabama. The website ExxonSecrets.org ("Documenting Exxon-Mobil's funding of climate change skeptics") implies that he can't be trusted. I'll leave that to you. I approach the world by reason. If it sounds right, it probably is right. If it sounds wrong, tho, it probably is wrong. Even if ExxonMobil is funding some scientists, (a) does that mean that those scientists will lie? and (b) might some other interest be funding scientists on the other side, as might impact their stated results?
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Spencer addresses the issue of computer modeling:

[Our view of Global Warming] all depends on [our] level of faith in our understanding of the atmosphere. We put equations into a computer that describe the basics of how we think the atmosphere works, and then we expect the computer to predict how much warming we will get when we turn up the greenhouse gas "knob."

Spencer's major premise is that a balance between evaporation and precipitation regulates worldwide climate and keeps things from getting too far out of whack. For exactly how that works, read his piece. It's less than 1,000 words long (or, little more than 1/3 the length of this blog entry).
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One thing to bear in mind is a little high-school physics: the process of evaporation is endothermic: it absorbs heat. That is the principle behind evaporative air-conditioners. In itself, then, evaporating sea water absorbs some of the excess heat we are supposed to worry about. When that water vapor condenses, an exothermic process, it is high above the surface of the Earth, in a part of the atmosphere that is naturally cold. The amount of warming that condensation that high produces has little effect upon planetary temperature, given how cold the high atmosphere starts out.
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Aside from Spencer's concern, precipitation, let us consider two other factors: albedo and biological removal of carbon dioxide.
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Albedo is the ratio of lite / solar energy absorbed by the planet as against reflected back into space. One of the concerns of climatologists inclined to believe in manmade Global Warming is that as glaciers retreat and icecaps shrink, the reflection of solar radiation drops, because white ice is replaced by exposed rock. But as water evaporates, it forms clouds. Clouds are white. Tho they let some warmth thru, and are conceived of as "holding warmth in", especially at nite, when radiational cooling is damped by clouds, you know from personal experience that as a cloud passes over you on an otherwise sunny day, there is an acute drop in temperature in the area shaded. More evaporation creates more clouds, which produces more shade over more of the planet and more reflection of solar energy. Thus to some considerable extent the process of global warming is self-limiting, if not wholly self-regulating, because 80% of the planet's surface is water (not, for this purpose, counting ice as water).
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Another self-regulating Earth process is biological removal of carbon dioxide. The warmer the planetary climate, the longer the growing season in the temperate zones north and south. The longer the growing season, the more carbon dioxide is removed by plants and converted to carbohydrates and woody biomass. Moreover, carbon dioxide is also used by living creatures to create calcium carbonate, which forms the shells of marine animals and snails, coral reefs, and birds' eggs. This removal can be, for all practical purposes, permanent, since huge quantities of calcium carbonate precipitate out of water to form limestone, which endures for thousands or even millions of years.

Since many sea organisms such as corals, algae and diatoms make their shells out of calcite, they pull carbon dioxide from the sea water to accomplish this .... This is fortuitous for us, as carbon dioxide has been found to be a green house gas and contributes to the so called "green house gas effect". Environmentally then, calcite is very important and may have been quite important to the successful development of our planet in the past. By pulling carbon dioxide out of the sea water, this biological activity allows more of the carbon dioxide in the air to dissolve in the sea water [thru the process of diffusion] and thus acts as a carbon dioxide filter [sink] for [t]he planet. Environmentalists are now actively engaged in determining if this activity can be increase[d] by human intervention to the point of warding off the "green house gas effect". A significant amount of calcite precipitation in sea water is undoubtedly inorganic, but the exact amount that this contributes is not well known.

This biologically moderated regulation of temperature (which works in reverse too: as temperatures drop, growing seasons shorten, and less carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere, which tends to warm things up a bit) is known as the Gaia Theory. Oddly, the guy who came up with the Gaia Theory, British scientist James Lovelock, while he was working for the U.S. Government's space agency NASA, is among the very most pessimistic observers of manmade Global Warming. But why would processes that worked for millions of years stop working now? It's preposterous. Maybe the guy is just getting senile (he's in his 80s).
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One explanation of why biological moderation of planetary temperature might fail is to be found in this passage from a story in the New York Review of Books:

[Lovelock] differs with more conventional forecasts mostly because he thinks they have underestimated both the extent of the self-reinforcing cycles that are causing temperatures to rise and the vulnerability of the planet, which he sees as severely stressed and close to losing equilibrium.

You see, at the same time as carbon dioxide outputs are high, forests are being destroyed and oceans poisoned by silt and chemical wastes that kill algae. Left alone, forests and algae might successfully cope with any slite increase in carbon dioxide. In the industralized world, forests are very healthy, and indeed increasing in size, in part due to tree-farming for paper and wood. The industrial nations have also taken measures to reduce runoff of pesticides and fertilizers that have produced problems for oceanic plankton (phytoplankton convert* carbon dioxide to biomass; some zooplankton convert carbon dioxide to calcium carbonate). So where are forests shrinking and plankton and algae being destroyed? In the Third World.
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Rainforests have been ravaged, and continue to be destroyed at an alarming rate, from Brazil to Indonesia, not by the First World but by the Third World. One consequence of that destruction has been a huge increase in erosion and thus in the discharge of silt from tropical rivers that has devastated reefs by smothering them (and thus destroying or severely reducing the removal of carbon dioxide in the form of coral reefbuilding). Moreover, runoff from these rivers also carries large quantities of (wasted) fertilizer and pesticides into nearby ocean waters, adversely impacting plankton and thus reducing their ability to absorb carbon dioxide. So perhaps the people inclined to blame the First World for Global Warming have it exactly backwards, and it is the Third World that is doing the most harm!
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Still, this planet has remained congenial to life for millions of years, despite the (apparent) fact, as conceded even within the Chicken Little article in the New York Review of Books mentioned above:

the sun, because of its own stellar evolution, has become significantly hotter.

Despite a general trend toward greater energy output over eons, the Sun has occasionally faltered. We have had a series of great Ice Ages, and may still be emerging from a Little Ice Age, which SAF spoke to:

It was only a few hundred years ago that the earth experienced its last ice age. Global temperatures started falling during the 1300s and hit their lowest points in the late 1700s and early 1800s. New Yorkers could walk from Manhattan to Staten Island across a frozen harbor[.]

We need to ask whether we are getting warmer because of human activity or just because the Little Ice Age has ended and we are returning to normal. Emerging from a Little Ice Age might not be sudden, but gradual. We might still be in that emergence, and not yet have hit normal. After all, if the Little Ice Age started in the 1300s but did not hit coldest until the late 1700s and early 1800s, a lapse of 500 years, and we are only 200 years from the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, we could very well simply be emerging, still, from the Little Ice Age. Since the Little Ice Age began in the 1300s, and we didn't have reliable weather records from the 1200s, how are we to know if we are above "normal" or not even back to normal? Ice cores from Greenland may show what was happening in Greenland, but they don't show what was happening in (what is now) Newark, London, Moscow, or Tokyo. (And yes, I care more about Newark than about those other places. Thanks to the Gulf Stream, which the Chicken Littles are worried might stop flowing and which bypasses Greenland (remember that; it could be really meaningful), London is generally milder in winter than Newark, despite being some 745 miles farther north. (To put that in context, Daytona Beach, Florida, is about as far south of Newark as London is farther north.) Unfair! The Gulf of Mexico is in my Hemisphere. Why should the Other Hemisphere get its warmth? I want it here!)
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(There is also a tiny shift in the length of warm versus cold seasons in the Northern Hemisphere: winter is shrinking as regards the number of days of the year it occupies, due to the wobble of our planet.)
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If 99% of any planetary warming that may in truth be going on is the result of increased solar output and other things (e.g., volcanic discharges) that we have absolutely nothing to do with, why should we beat ourselves up over it? And how much can we do, really, to reverse it?
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SAF showed some things that technology can do, from switching from carbon to hydrogen as our prime source of energy, even in cars, to using algae to scrub emissions from power plants — again, biological modulation. Maybe the best we can do to adjust around and fite Global Warming — manmade or not — is to save the rainforests and oceans from human rapacity. To do that, we need to give people in the Third World ways (a) to control population, the base engine behind all forms of devastation the Third World is suffering (one means?: induce all Third World countries to legalize homosexuality, a natural, biological brake on overpopulation); (b) to make a living without destroying the rainforest (land reform, industrialization); and (c) to learn improved agricultural techniques, to slash not rainforest but erosion.
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The First World can also stop suburban sprawl that destroys forests and farms, and indeed re-green areas now plantless. This can be done by a bunch of little things that, combined, produce significant greening: installing window boxes, rooftop gardens, community gardens in vacant lots; "backfilling" (repopulating) older towns and cities that have been partly abandoned for suburbs; planting lots of trees in new suburbs, malls, industrial parks, office campuses — everywhere in the First World; and using things like the biological emission-scrubbing algae that SAF hilited. If we can simultaneously reduce needless production of carbon dioxide and even take up CO₂ we did not produce, so much the better.
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Meanwhile, the debate goes on as to whether people are responsible for such Global Warming as may actually be happening. This has become not an open-minded discussion but a heated debate, politically motivated and tainted by selectively presented data. My colleague in Northern England sent me email to say that Channel 4, a major TV network in Britain, recently broadcast a major documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle, that challenges the new orthodoxy that it's all our fault. Roy Spencer, whose opinion piece in the New York Post I mentioned above, contributed to it. My British colleague wrote:

When I mentioned the documentary 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' (which makes a case against the theory of man-made global warming) to my mother after watching it, her reply was "I bet the Americans were behind it, so they can carry on driving their gas-guzzling cars".

Do you think that one of the principal purposes of alarmist global warming propaganda is to attack the United States?

By the way, a point made during that documentary is that Margaret Thatcher was one of the earliest political leaders to champion man-made global warming theory, because she hoped to use it as an excuse to destroy Britain's coal industry (and with it, the National Union of Mineworkers under their quasi-Communist leader Arthur Scargill).

I replied:

Skepticism is alive and well at Channel 4, I see. That same company broadcast documentaries skeptical of the AIDS-as-HIV premise years ago. Curiously, tho U.S. public-TV stations usually ADORE all things British, none of those documentaries was shown here. Moreover, The Sunday Times ran a major article about reasons to doubt the HIV theory, and that was completely ignored by major media here too. Let's see if anybody here picks up that Channel 4 documentary about global warming.
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Plainly the United States is scapegoated for lots of things it has nothing to do with, or little to do with. "Globalization" itself is seen by many as a plot by U.S.-based corporations to take over the world, as vanguard for a U.S. governmental colonization of the planet. I guess they see this as imperialism on the British model: the flag follows the trading post. All nonsense, of course, and globalization is hurting Americans badly.
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Modernization too is seen as Americanization, because the U.S. not only invented a lot of the things the use of which constitutes modernity but also has taken many useful devices from many other places and popularized them globally. From the Walkman and karaoke (Japan) to food processors (France?), many things have entered the world's modern culture thru the U.S. It has gotten to the point that unless you track them down, you can't know where much of anything originated nowadays. They all get ground up and distributed by the U.S.-influenced global culture. Take the "English" language, for instance, the prime auxiliary language of the entire planet. It's not ours but yours. But that doesn't stop people from charging us with cultural imperialism for spreading your language!
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As will not surprise you, I hate Margaret Thatcher and regard her as proof that the world would NOT be a better place if women had more to say about it.

Whether Global Warming is happening at all, whether people have anything to do with it, and whether human activity can alter it are not settled matters, no matter what you may have heard from major media. "Scientists" are not simply presenting (all) the facts. They are choosing which facts to present and stress, depending on which side they have taken. Make no mistake, scientists, who are just people, are not simply evaluating the data impartially and spitting them out like computerized robots. They are taking sides and manipulating data selectively to make their own side's case while poohpoohing the other side's case. I'm an advocate myself, so yes, I'm making the case for my side, against manmade Global Warming. But you know that I'm an opinionated advocate. And you hear the other side (the wrong side) all the time. You need to consider the right side. That would be mine.
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* Altho some authorities say that "plankton" is singular in form, so takes a singular verb, it doesn't sound right here to me. And I'm an expert in English (if you doubt it, just ask me). "Plankton" is a collective, like "family", and collective nouns can take singular or plural verb or pronoun, depending on how the collectivity is conceived in the particular spot, and how the relevant phrase sounds. "Convert" sounds right. "Converts" would sound wrong. I have spoken.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,210 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:19 PM