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A journal of sorts to record Jonathan Sturm's (and others') thoughts and observations on things worth thinking about. Feedback welcome, but be aware that unless you prominently say you want your communication kept private, I may publish it. |
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Saturday, 2 July 2005
It turned out that The Git broke a bone, rather than spraining his wrist. The bone in question is called the triquetrum. Naturally, there was much sympathy for The Git's plight as the following attached to his computer monitor at work attests:
A small chip has come away from the bone, but since The Git had delayed long enough before visiting the doctor, callus had already formed. Rather than going to the regular doctor, it seemed easier to go to one near work. Fortunately, Dr Rimmer's Christian name isn't Arnold, nor did he have a large letter aitch on his forehead. He did phone another doctor to discuss the issue, the plastic surgeon who practises on the floor above the office where The Git works! If he had known, The Git could have popped upstairs and talked to the landlord!
The great news was that there was no need for a cast, though falling over again would seem unwise for some weeks.
Some time ago, The Git made the observation that while the Antarctic Peninsula has been warming over the last few decades, the western part of the Antarctic continent has been cooling. It should be possible to encompass the whole area in a region where the warming and cooling cancelled each other out when the temperatures were averaged. Thus it could be said that there was no net climate change in that region. Expand the thought experiment to include the whole planet and you will have some idea of what The Git was thinking.
Does it make sense to average regional climates and refer to "global" climate, or does it make more sense to view climate as a regional phenomenon?
The Git had this brought to mind by a comment on the Climate Change Debate. One thing that gets The Git's goat is the mantra-like repetition of "unprecedented" in the pronouncements of the apologists for the IPCC. Some 8,200 years ago, there was a rapid fall in temperatures throughout the world. The Greenland ice cores, GISP1 and GISP2, indicate it to have been of the order of 5°C and the Vostok and Law Dome cores from Antarctica indicate a somewhat smaller, though equally rapid change. How rapid? On the order of a decade! The recovery to the prior temperature, estimated to be some 2-3°C higher than today, took considerable longer, on the order of a century, or so. The Git asked: "How can the current warming predictions be "unprecedented" in the light of the 8,200 yr BP event?"
The answer, apparently, is the same as the warmers' claims about the Medieval and Roman Warm Periods, and the Little Ice Age: they are local, not global events. For example, the 8.2 KYBP event was caused by the sudden draining of the Laurentide lakes into the north Atlantic. The Git also notes, somewhat wryly, that the CO2 levels dropped and returned to normal in synchrony with those temperature changes. The Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory claims that the covariance of CO2 and temperature is because CO2 drives temperature. So how did CO2 cause the sudden draining of the Laurentide lakes? Could it be that the cooling allowed more CO2 to dissolve in the oceans and the return to warmer conditions released that CO2 back into the atmosphere?
So, The Git had already concluded that if we are to understand/explain [delete whichever is inapplicable] climate change better, it would have to be at the regional level. While the IPCC has pretty much tried to push the idea that climate was constant prior to the 20thC, those who have studied paleoclimates know that climate change is the rule. As an aside, that is why geologists make up a very large proportion of Anthropogenic Global Warming sceptics. It's not because they "all work for the oil companies" (what a particularly stupid claim that is!), it's because climate change is blindingly obvious in the rock beds that geologists study. Where the Harappan civilisation arose in India is now desert. It wasn't desert when that civilisation arose. Underlying the region is an earlier desert.
Having reached this conclusion, the Universe universed and Eduardo Ferreyra kindly forwarded this translated paper to The Git:
"GLOBAL WARMING": MYTH OR REALITY?
THE ACTUAL EVOLUTION OF THE WEATHER DYNAMICS
Marcel Leroux, Professeur de Climatologie à l'Université J. Moulin, Directeur du Laboratoire de Climatologie, Risques, Environnement CNRS -- UMR 5600 -- Lyon -- France, Email: leroux@univ-lyon3.fr
ABSTRACT
The "Global Warming scenario" is a hypothesis derived from theoretical models, asserted but not proven. There are numerous inconsistencies between predictions and actual observed climatic facts. The "global" thermal curve has no real significance in climatic terms. Climatic change is not global, but regional: for example, in the North Atlantic aerological unit, the Western side is cooling while that of the Northeast is warming. The 1970s exhibit a fundamental climatic switch which is not "seen" by the models, but is associated with a gradual increase of violent perturbations and irregularity of weather, linked to a change in the general circulation mode (rapid mode).
-oOo-
C. Thermal evolution predicted for the high latitudes
A very hypothetical point is the enormous (presumed) increase of temperature in the high latitudes, which would reach 10- 12°C, paradoxically during winter of each pole, while at the same time tropical regions would only undergo weak changes. For what physical reasons would the poles warm so much? Does there exist in these latitudes a more intense terrestrial counter-radiation... moreover in winter, when at precisely the same time there is no insolation? Is there a larger greenhouse effect, even though water vapour content is smaller, and while cold waters bordering the ice sheets are considerable sinks for CO2? Is it possible that the supposed temperature rise, which cannot be a result of in situ phenomena, will be provoked by an intensification of meridional (N-S) transfers, even though during warm periods these transfers are conversely much weakened, the general circulation thus exhibits a slower mode (Leroux, 1993)? Because cooling had been more vigorous during ice ages in these latitudes, will, conversely, warming now be markedly greater?
Moreover, is all this conflict between observed phenomena and climate forecasts because climatic models are founded on the three-celled general circulation scheme (Le Treut, 1997) and particularly on the assumed existence of a polar cell? This unrealistic and unacceptable three-celled concept does not represent the reality of meridional exchanges: the polar cell does not exist, and as soon as it appeared (1856), Ferrel's scheme was contested and later "officially" rejected in 1950. Even the now popular Hadley cell has only been partially verified. In spite of this "inconceivable" (when one is not a climatologist) state of the art, the scheme used in the numerical models is precisely this three-celled model! The predicted increasing of polar temperatures thus appears to be nothing more than an artefact, a result of the fictional "polar cell"! This critique of the inadequacy of the models is not new: "Present climate models do not accurately integrate the physical processes that affect the polar regions" (Kahl et al., 1993), but nothing has changed in the GW community, despite the key importance of high latitudes in the forcing of general circulation. The explanation of the IPCC "experts" is as follows: "The reason is that snow and ice reflect sunlight, so less snow means more heat is absorbed from the sun, which enhances any warming..." and thus "by the year 2100, parts of northern Canada and Siberia are predicted to warm by up to 10ºC in winter..." (UNEP-WMO, 2001, info sh. 5). It is merely a question of the polar winter sun. Hardly!
D. Actual thermal evolution in high latitudes
The actual thermal evolution in high latitudes is not the one predicted by models. Over Antarctica there is no change, the observed temperatures curves (Daly, 2001), do not show any trend, while satellite observations (1979-1999) show a lengthening of the sea ice season over large areas around Antarctica (Parkinson, 2002). In contrast, the western Arctic is cooling, providing the most flagrant denial to the models' predictions: cooling reached 4 to sec (- 4.4°C in winter, and - 4.9°C in autumn) during the period 1940 - 1990 (Kahl et al., 1993). This trend in surface and in lower layers is confined by as marked a warming in the 850-700 hPa layers (+3.74 DC, between 1,500 and 3,000 m), which indicates that the resulting intensification of air streams came from the South, over the cold lower level anticyclones, the MPHs (Mobile Polar Highs). Rigor et al. (2000) show the downward trend from 1979 to 1997 over the Beaufort Sea and eastern Siberia, extending into Alaska, during autumn (1°C/decade) and winter (2°C/decade). Because of the dominant role played by high latitudes in the general circulation, this Arctic cooling and particularly of its western side, which is the starting point of a majority of MPHs, is a key fact in the northern hemisphere. This is absolutely ignored by the models."
So much for the IPCC "consensus" among climatologists! And The Git will bring up a few more climatological variables that are "absolutely ignored by the models" in the coming weeks. Among them some anthropogenic and other biological effects!
The Git came across his very first "copy-protected" CD this week. "Copy-protected" doesn't mean you can't copy it. It just means you can't play the CD on whatever machine you, the purchaser, choose. The Git, presumably in flagrant breach of The Law, made a digital-analog-digital copy from his portable CD player onto the computer. The resultant copy will now play on any machine in The House of Steel.
Mark Zimmerman wrote:
Hi Jonathan! On the anti-spam front, two tiny thoughts:
* if you remove all the "Feedback" tags with the "mailto:jpsturm@sturmsoft.com" behind them (and other instances of your email address), or better yet change the "@" symbol to "(at)" or something else not-trivially-harvestable by spam-bots, you might gradually get less spam because you will fall off the spambot-collected list of currently-valid addresses ... last year I took "z@his.com" off all my pages, or rather rewrote it as "z (at) his (dot) com, and I think I'm getting less spam than I used to ... other easily-human-readable encodings might work as well or better ... Bo Leuf writes one of his addresses as webdesign#at#leuf.net for instance ...
* you might close out the most spam-infested addresses and open new ones, with autoreplies to messages on the old addresses saying to recipients that the new address is whatever-it-is(at)sturmsoft.com, again not-trivially-machine-parsable ...
Anyway, just a couple of notions ... I've done the first but haven't had to try the second yet...
The "Feedback" tags all refer to feedback-at-sturmsoft-dot-com rather than jpsturm-at-sturmsoft-dot-com. The Git emailed the administrator of the sturmsoft mail server, but received no reply. So, he created an auto-response in Outlook for email addressed to jpsturm and auto-deleting those emails. The spam now creates a message bounce from the server of the spoofed From address, and those are readily distinguished from legitimate emails. Funnily enough, that eliminated all but one, or two spam emails a day. Clearly, the spam is coming from whoever harvested my old catch-all address, rather than harvesting the email address on my web pages over the last year, or so.
The Git can notify you by email when a new post is ready. Just email him to be put on the list, or removed if you are on the list and don't want to be.
Thoughts for the week:
"Despite the near-universal outrage generated by the photographs coming out of Abu Ghraib, and the evidence suggesting that such practices are being applied to other prisoners held by the USA in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere, neither the US administration nor the US Congress has called for a full and independent investigation.
"Instead, the US government has gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Conventions and to 're-define' torture. It has sought to justify the use of coercive interrogation techniques, the practice of holding ghost detainees' (people in unacknowledged incommunicado detention) and the 'rendering' or handing over of prisoners to third countries known to practise torture. The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law. Trials by military commissions have made a mockery of justice and due process.
"The USA, as the unrivalled political, military and economic hyper-power, sets the tone for governmental behaviour worldwide. When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity and audacity. From Israel to Uzbekistan, Egypt to Nepal, governments have openly defied human rights and international humanitarian law in the name of national security and 'counter-terrorism.'"
Irene Kahn (Foreword to Amnesty International Report 2005)
-oOo-
In the eyes of empire builders men are not men but instruments. -- Napoleon Bonaparte
Current Listening:
Robert Crumb and The Cheap Suit Serenaders -- Singing in the Bathtub
Mark Knopfler -- Screenplaying
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