Warming Could Be Quick - NSF
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From: Energy and Climate Information Exch <ecixdy>
Subject: Warming Could Be Quick - NSF
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/* ---------- "Warming Could Be Quick - NSF" ---------- */
Subject: NSF Press Release of interest to CLIMLIST subscribers
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CLIMLIST Mailing Number 92-06-07
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Members of this list may find this press release of interest.
Title : NEW EVIDENCE INDICATES GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE MAY OCCUR SUDDENLY
Type : Press Release
NSF Org: OD / LPA
Date : April 30, 1992
File : pr9246
Cheryl Dybas April 30, 1992
(202) 357-9498 NSF PR 92-46
NEW EVIDENCE INDICATES GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE
MAY OCCUR SUDDENLY
Rapid changes in air and sea temperatures around the North
Atlantic caused by sudden shifts in the ocean conveyor belt
circulation system that transports heat from the equator towards
the poles have been confirmed by National Science Foundation
(NSF)-funded scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The temperature and
circulation shifts may occur within a period of 40 years,
indicating that "greenhouse warming" and the melting of snow and
ice at the poles may be far more rapid than previously thought.
Scientists Scott Lehman and Lloyd Keigwin of the
Institution's Geology and Geophysics Department presented the new
data on the timing, rates and cause of circulation change in the
North Atlantic Ocean since the last ice age in a paper published
today in Nature. Their findings are based on a study of
microscopic animal skeletons and oxygen isotope variations in a
sediment core from the Norwegian Trench, an ocean-bottom core
with rates of sediment accumulation rapid enough to document
these sudden changes. While computer models have suggested that
a gradual atmospheric warming over a 100-year period might occur
in response to buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,
Lehman and Keigwin's findings suggest that greenhouse-induced
melting might lead to sudden circulation changes that could
result in dramatic cooling.
"Our results suggest that the present climate system is very
delicately poised," Lehman said. "The system could snap suddenly
between very different conditions with an abruptness that is
scary. It's a strongly non-linear response, meaning shifts could
happen very rapidly if conditions are right, and we cannot
predict when that will occur. Our studies tell us only that when
a shift occurs it could be very sudden."
Oxygen isotope records in ice and sediment cores from the
Greenland icesheet and Lake Gerzensee in Switzerland, and fossil
plankton in a sediment core taken west of Ireland in the North
Atlantic Ocean, have been used in previous climate change
studies. However, typical ocean bottom sediments do not
accumulate fast enough to provide sufficient evidence of rapid
temperature and circulation shifts, according to Lehman. The new
evidence comes from a core called Troll 3.1, taken in the
Norwegian Trench. The core was taken in an area where sediments
accumulated very rapidly from continental erosion during the last
Ice Age.
"Cores with such a long undisturbed record are rarely
available to ocean scientists because of the high cost of
recovery," Lehman said. Oceanographers normally work with
sediment cores 10-20 meters (33-66 feet) long, while cores from
the area studied by Lehman and Keigwin are 100-200 meters (328-
656 feet) in length. The core was made available to Lehman and
Keigwin by Norsk Hydro A/S, an oil exploration firm which was
prospecting for new drilling sites off the Norwegian coast.
Lehman and Keigwin reconstructed sea surface temperatures by
looking at planktonic foraminifera -- microscopic shell-forming
animals living near the surface of the open ocean -- with known
temperature tolerances. Ocean bottom sediments contain the
skeletal remains of these animals and have long been used by
ocean scientists as indicators of past changes in water
temperature. By counting the different types of shells in the
core and plotting them as a function of depth, Lehman and Keigwin
noticed many transitions between warm and cold water species.
They dated these changes very precisely using a recently
developed radiocarbon dating technique-accelerator mass
spectrometry-which directly counts carbon-14 atoms in the shells.
This data, together with the rapid accumulation rates, permitted
Lehman and Keigwin to precisely calculate rates of change.
Scientists have known for some time that during Ice Ages
polar species of foraminifera lived much farther to the south,
and at these times the Gulf Stream flowed straight across the
Atlantic toward Portugal rather than on its present path
northward toward Norway. What they didn't know until this study
was that similar shifts occurred many times at the close of the
last Ice Age, and occurred extraordinarily quickly.
Studies of ice cores from Greenland during the 1980s
revealed that large and rapid changes in atmospheric temperature,
by approximately seven degrees Celsius (28.80 Fahrenheit) in 50
years, occurred at the end of the last Ice Age some 14-8,000
years ago. Similar shifts appear in ice core records every 5,000
years or so back to approximately 70,000 years ago, and appear to
be a characteristic feature of the earth's climate. Scientists
have suggested that the sudden changes in air temperature and
ocean circulation patterns were caused by changes in the way the
ocean conveyor belt system operates. Lehman and Keigwin's
findings provide a direct evidence of this process.
"The ocean circulation system drives the climate system,"
Lehman said. "The ocean acts like a conveyor belt, carrying the
warm surface water of the Gulf Stream from the equator northward
into the North Atlantic and Norwegian Sea. Gulf Stream waters
become enriched with salt through evaporation as the waters pass
through the warm latitudes. As this water flows toward the cold
Norwegian Sea it releases heat to the atmosphere and becomes
dense enough to sink. This new water mass, known as North
Atlantic Deep Water, then travels south through the Atlantic,
around Africa and through the Indian Ocean into the Pacific like
a conveyor belt. New warm surface water is drawn northward to
replace this water and the cycle repeats itself. The conveyor
system is thus a heat engine."
It was suggested earlier that freshwater input to this
system, either from increased precipitation, decreased
evaporation or melting of snow and ice, could reduce the salt
content in surface waters enough to stop them from sinking,
thereby turning off the conveyor system and the northward flow of
heat. Lehman and Keigwin's studies indicate that the Norwegian
Sea limb of the conveyor belt was periodically shut down due to
inputs of freshwater at the end of the last ice age, leading to
sudden shifts in sea and air temperatures.
"If greenhouse warming occurs and leads to increased amounts
of precipitation in the Arctic and/or melting of snow and ice,
the Norwegian limb of the conveyor might be threatened, leading
to very rapid changes in ocean conditions and climate," Lehman
notes. "In such a scenario, the present climate of Britain and
Norway would change suddenly to that of Greenland and northern
Canada."
The National Science Foundation is an independent agency of
the federal government established in 1950 to promote and advance
scientific progress in the United States. NSF accomplishes its
mission primarily by competitively awarding grants to educational
institutions for research and education in the sciences,
mathematics, and engineering.
This and other information is available electronically on
STIS, NSF's Science and Technology Information System. For more
information about STIS contact the Publications Section at (202)
357-7861 and request the "STIS Flyer," NSF Publication #91-10, or
send and E-mail message to sti...@nsf.gov (INTERNET) or
stisfly@NSF (BITNET).
END
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John McCarthy
NEW EVIDENCE INDICATES GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE MAY OCCUR SUDDENLY
This press release has an error, seven degrees Celsius does not
correspond to 28.80 degrees Farenheit, but it does make one think.
What one thinks depends. One thought is that human actions can have
drastic effects, and therefore we should be careful not to do
anything. A different thought is that this confirms that Nature
doesn't love us, and we are likely to get zapped unless humanity gets
control of the mechanisms that affect plantary temperature
distributions.
--
John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
*
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
Steinn Sigurdsson
NSF Press Release
NEW EVIDENCE INDICATES GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE MAY OCCUR SUDDENLY
This press release has an error, seven degrees Celsius does not
correspond to 28.80 degrees Farenheit, but it does make one think.
What one thinks depends. One thought is that human actions can have
drastic effects, and therefore we should be careful not to do
anything. A different thought is that this confirms that Nature
doesn't love us, and we are likely to get zapped unless humanity gets
control of the mechanisms that affect plantary temperature
distributions.
A simpler point is that the concern that any anthopogenically
induced climate changes would be especially dangerous because
they occur on unnaturally short time scales is now weakened,
as evidently rapid natural climate fluctuations do occur.
* Steinn Sigurdsson Lick Observatory *
* ste...@helios.ucsc.edu "standard disclaimer" *
* If no one seems to understand *
* Start your own revolution, cut out the middleman... *
* So join the struggle while you may *
* The revolution is just a t-shirt away B.B. 1988 *
Larry Smith
> "Our results suggest that the present climate system is very
>delicately poised," Lehman said. "The system could snap suddenly
>between very different conditions with an abruptness that is
>scary. It's a strongly non-linear response, meaning shifts could
>happen very rapidly if conditions are right, and we cannot
>predict when that will occur. Our studies tell us only that when
>a shift occurs it could be very sudden."
"Sudden" is one of those words that don't travel real well between scientist
and media. The dinosaurs died off "suddenly" over a span of several million
years, the last ice age "suddenly" started over a span of 10,000 years.
Exactly how long do they *think* "sudden" will take?
> Lehman and Keigwin reconstructed sea surface temperatures by
>looking at planktonic foraminifera -- microscopic shell-forming
>animals living near the surface of the open ocean -- with known
>temperature tolerances. Ocean bottom sediments contain the
Known temperature tolerances are all well and good, but how do they guarantee
that temperature is what accounted for those deaths? Can they factor out
changes in salinity? Volcanic activity? Random population variations?
>skeletal remains of these animals and have long been used by
>ocean scientists as indicators of past changes in water
>temperature. By counting the different types of shells in the
Does that mean they have validated the technique in modern times by direct
measurement?
>core and plotting them as a function of depth, Lehman and Keigwin
>noticed many transitions between warm and cold water species.
>They dated these changes very precisely using a recently
>developed radiocarbon dating technique-accelerator mass
>spectrometry-which directly counts carbon-14 atoms in the shells.
What's the latest figures for accuracy of radiocarbon dating? I *think* it's
pretty good, but I still wonder about "suddenly".
>This data, together with the rapid accumulation rates, permitted
>Lehman and Keigwin to precisely calculate rates of change.
I see evidence here (modulo comments above) for concluding temperature changes
can occur "suddenly". I don't see any evidence for the conclusion that our
present climate is "delicately balanced". I noticed they were careful to
qualify that with "may", but I've also noticed such qualifiers tend to evap-
orate in the heat of debate...
> Scientists have known for some time that during Ice Ages
>polar species of foraminifera lived much farther to the south,
>and at these times the Gulf Stream flowed straight across the
>Atlantic toward Portugal rather than on its present path
>northward toward Norway. What they didn't know until this study
>was that similar shifts occurred many times at the close of the
>last Ice Age, and occurred extraordinarily quickly.
Of course, such shifts occured without human aid. Although human activity
may indeed be changing the climate, even dramatically, we do not yet know
how the "natural" system worked. It seems to me this problem becomes more
complex when human variables are added. This is an important datum, but it
argues most loudly for reducing the *rate* of human impact more than it
does for reducing the *scale*. By this logic, we shouldn't be trying to
significantly alter the rate of CO2 emission for, say, the next 10 or 20
years because we'll be throwing more variables into the equation and making
it more difficult, perhaps even impossible, to determine the real relation-
ships so reliable results can be depended upon.
I don't think I'd care to go that far with that particular piece of logic.
But I now think that perhaps the *rate* of reduction in emissions should
now be more carefully controlled, so the variables it adds to the models
used are, at least, fairly simple. That argues against drastic or draconian
measures. I have advocated that before, though I am at a loss as to how
controlling the rate of reduction (or even the rate of reduction of the
rate of increase) can be controlled so as to make as simple an overall curve
as possible, and I certainly don't think our present political setup in the
world is the least bit capable of such fine control. Battleaxes we got, what
we need is a vernier.
> Studies of ice cores from Greenland during the 1980s
>revealed that large and rapid changes in atmospheric temperature,
>by approximately seven degrees Celsius (28.80 Fahrenheit) in 50
>years, occurred at the end of the last Ice Age some 14-8,000
Is this the "sudden" I'm looking for? And by this measure, where *should*
we be, if we presume this is correct?
>years ago. Similar shifts appear in ice core records every 5,000
>years or so back to approximately 70,000 years ago, and appear to
>be a characteristic feature of the earth's climate.
(discussion of "ocean conveyer" elided)
> "If greenhouse warming occurs and leads to increased amounts
>of precipitation in the Arctic and/or melting of snow and ice,
>the Norwegian limb of the conveyor might be threatened, leading
>to very rapid changes in ocean conditions and climate," Lehman
>notes. "In such a scenario, the present climate of Britain and
>Norway would change suddenly to that of Greenland and northern
>Canada."
Hmmmmmmmmm. In other words, it will bring on an Ice Age? That seems counter-
intuitive, doesn't it? Certainly puts the kibosh on the "we're heading for
Venus" people, I think.
So this means we are looking for evidence of cooling and a *reduction* is
sea level? Cooler we've seen studies on (although many people called me a
liar about that, so perhaps we've not seen that). I've seen other people
referring to an increase in sea level but that was alleged to be due to
thermal expansion, but by this prediction the freezing that will follow
from the greenhouse effect should remove water from the sea and lower it.
Let's see, we might have a greenhouse effect or we might not, and if we do, it
might warm us up or it might cool us off, and in either event we know Earth
went through massive changes both ways in history before humans discovered
fire. I think that sums it up. So now we have a greenhouse effect AND an
Ice Age. That ties everything up pretty neatly. Not.
I think we flatter ourselves we know so much or have so much power. This
study confirms my opinion (again) that we really have no clue what will happen,
and that major and drastic action either way would be as likely to magnify the
effects as minimize them.
Larry Smith (sm...@ctron.com) No, I don't speak for Cabletron.
-------------------------------------------------------------
I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a "disgrace",
that two are called a "law firm", and that three or more become a "Congress".
dean alaska
>In article <JMC.92Ju...@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> j...@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (John McCarthy) writes:
>
>
> NSF Press Release
>
> NEW EVIDENCE INDICATES GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE MAY OCCUR SUDDENLY
>
>induced climate changes would be especially dangerous because
>they occur on unnaturally short time scales is now weakened,
>as evidently rapid natural climate fluctuations do occur.
>
like to point out that impacts on ecosystems that don't appear to hurt humans
are a problem while others less environmentally inclined usually conern
themselves with humans and only those animals or ecosystems that humans
directly depend on. Whether or not a sudden climatic change can occur
non-anthropogenically does not lessen the impact on human civlization.
Maybe sudden
climate change will hurt the human species _most_ Do you feel that the
possibility of sudden "natural" climate change in the past lessens our need
to prevent anthropogenic effects? Note that the fact that it may have
occurred before humans had a major impact does not mean that non-human
ecosystems can adapt fast. Maybe aliens from outer-space caused it. :)
>
>* Steinn Sigurdsson Lick Observatory *
>* ste...@helios.ucsc.edu "standard disclaimer" *
>* If no one seems to understand *
>* Start your own revolution, cut out the middleman... *
>* So join the struggle while you may *
>* The revolution is just a t-shirt away B.B. 1988 *
>
--
dingo in boulder (de...@vexcel.com)
Carl J Lydick
>> "If greenhouse warming occurs and leads to increased amounts
>>of precipitation in the Arctic and/or melting of snow and ice,
>>the Norwegian limb of the conveyor might be threatened, leading
>>to very rapid changes in ocean conditions and climate," Lehman
>>notes. "In such a scenario, the present climate of Britain and
>>Norway would change suddenly to that of Greenland and northern
>>Canada."
>
>Hmmmmmmmmm. In other words, it will bring on an Ice Age? That seems counter-
>intuitive, doesn't it? Certainly puts the kibosh on the "we're heading for
>Venus" people, I think.
Larry, are you really a moron, or do you just play one on the net? Given a
constant influx of sunlight, if we increase greenhouse gases, the global mean
temperature will increase. If Britain, Norway, etc. get colder, that means
someplace else gets even hotter. It's been pointed out time and again that
global warming does NOT mean that every spot on Earth gets warmer.
>Let's see, we might have a greenhouse effect or we might not, and if we do, it
>might warm us up or it might cool us off, and in either event we know Earth
>went through massive changes both ways in history before humans discovered
>fire. I think that sums it up. So now we have a greenhouse effect AND an
>Ice Age. That ties everything up pretty neatly. Not.
It's been pointed out here before that global warming COULD increase the amount
of ice in the polar regions.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Carl J Lydick | INTERnet: CA...@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU | NSI/HEPnet: SOL1::CARL
Disclaimer: Hey, I understand VAXen and VMS. That's what I get paid for. My
understanding of astronomy is purely at the amateur level (or below). So
unless what I'm saying is directly related to VAX/VMS, don't hold me or my
organization responsible for it. If it IS related to VAX/VMS, you can try to
hold me responsible for it, but my organization had nothing to do with it.
Bill Williams
>drastic effects, and therefore we should be careful not to do
>anything. A different thought is that this confirms that Nature
>doesn't love us, and we are likely to get zapped unless humanity gets
>control of the mechanisms that affect plantary temperature
>distributions.
Yet another is that human actions can have drastic effects, human ingenuity and
imagination can probably prevent or accomodate them, and so when we DO do
something, we'd better get it right. Cleaning up is always harder than not
getting dirty, but sometimes you have to get dirty to accomplish anything. If
one does enough arithmetic, one realizes that few things sum to zero or one.
Too bad, makes life complicated.
Steinn Sigurdsson
In article <STEINLY.92...@topaz.ucsc.edu> ste...@topaz.ucsc.edu (Steinn Sigurdsson) writes:
>In article <JMC.92Ju...@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> j...@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (John McCarthy) writes:
>
> NSF Press Release
> NEW EVIDENCE INDICATES GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE MAY OCCUR SUDDENLY
>A simpler point is that the concern that any anthopogenically
>induced climate changes would be especially dangerous because
>they occur on unnaturally short time scales is now weakened,
>as evidently rapid natural climate fluctuations do occur.
It is interesting that you point this out. In general, many environmetalists
like to point out that impacts on ecosystems that don't appear to hurt humans
are a problem while others less environmentally inclined usually conern
themselves with humans and only those animals or ecosystems that humans
directly depend on. Whether or not a sudden climatic change can occur
non-anthropogenically does not lessen the impact on human civlization.
Maybe sudden
climate change will hurt the human species _most_ Do you feel that the
possibility of sudden "natural" climate change in the past lessens our need
to prevent anthropogenic effects? Note that the fact that it may have
occurred before humans had a major impact does not mean that non-human
ecosystems can adapt fast. Maybe aliens from outer-space caused it. :)
Gee, I guess I'm not as anthropocentric as I have been accused of...
While humans are a concern of mine, I also like to consider impacts
on other species - while a rapid climate change would impact human
civilization, I think humans have a deomstrated ability to accommodate
rapid change, whereas the question of other species and ecosystems
responding rapidly was one that I felt was an issue - if there was
rapid (decade time scale) major climate change in the past (comparable
to realistic worst case scenarios for anthropogenic changes) then
self-evidently various ecosystems were resilient enough to handle
it, which is mildly reassuring. Not that this closes the issue, it
simply provides a little more data on one particular worry.
* Steinn Sigurdsson Lick Observatory *
* ste...@helios.ucsc.edu "standard disclaimer" *
* I know people whose idea of fun *
* Is throwing stones in the river in the afternoon sun *
* Oh let me be as free as them *
* - BB 1986 *
Larry Smith
>Larry, are you really a moron, or do you just play one on the net? Given a
>constant influx of sunlight, if we increase greenhouse gases, the global mean
Carl, are you really an asshole or do you just play one on the net? The farther
north you go in the northern hemisphere the colder it gets, if that cold moves
south, as implied by the study, you are flirting with an Ice Age. If at any
point the snow from the year just past doesn't have time to melt before the
next years snow arrives, that's an Ice Age, by DEFINITION.
>temperature will increase. If Britain, Norway, etc. get colder, that means
>someplace else gets even hotter. It's been pointed out time and again that
>global warming does NOT mean that every spot on Earth gets warmer.
WHAT spot is getting warmer? The study implies a GENERAL reduction in Earth's
temperature! What, is Britain going to look like Greenland and the North Pole
is going to be in the 90's? If the cold line moves south the equator is going
to get even hotter?
And frankly, I don't give a damn how many times it's been pointed that "global
warming does NOT mean that every spot on Earth gets warmer", that's just proof
by repeated assertion!
THIS study is implying an Ice Age, others are telling me Venus.
>>Let's see, we might have a greenhouse effect or we might not, and if we do, it
>>might warm us up or it might cool us off, and in either event we know Earth
>>went through massive changes both ways in history before humans discovered
>>fire. I think that sums it up. So now we have a greenhouse effect AND an
>>Ice Age. That ties everything up pretty neatly. Not.
>It's been pointed out here before that global warming COULD increase the amount
>of ice in the polar regions.
I've not seen a study predicting Britain looking like Greenland before.
James Hammerton
discussed whether the change is sudden or not, whether we should really
worry about mans impact on this problem. So I thought I'd like to put
this point forward.
If as the report said, the system is delicately balanced, then surely
it is best not to disturb that balance in case things go wildly against
us? I mean it would be in our own interest not to do so, since we know
the effects could be sudden and dramatic, and we don't know which
direction things would actually go in( and we probably couldn't
influence things quickly enough if the direction was bad for us).
James
--
James Hammerton,2nd year Computer Science at University of Edinburgh
Email: jam...@uk.ac.ed.castle Or: j...@uk.ac.ed.dcs
Steinn Sigurdsson
If as the report said, the system is delicately balanced, then surely
it is best not to disturb that balance in case things go wildly against
us? I mean it would be in our own interest not to do so, since we know
the effects could be sudden and dramatic, and we don't know which
direction things would actually go in( and we probably couldn't
influence things quickly enough if the direction was bad for us).
You assume that the "do nothing" option exists.
* Steinn Sigurdsson Lick Observatory *
* ste...@helios.ucsc.edu "standard disclaimer" *
dean alaska
First of all, I would challenge the notion that humans have a demonstrated
ability to adapt. I would suggest that any adaptation that was
demonstrated before our technological society developed may not have
relevence to our ability to adapt now. We have a very complex and
interdependent society. Just as an example, wet regions of the U.S.
feel a drought very quickly because they have very little storage
capacity, while drier areas have little infrastructure for preventing
floods. The cost of trading these infrastructures would be enormous.
The cost might even prevent us from developing new technologies to
deal with other environmental problems! Secondly, assuming that such
non-anthropogenic sudden warmings have only occurred rarely, ecosystems
might be impacted just as much as they would be by anthropogenic-based
impacts, as shown by the admittedly extreme example of the periodic
(65 million years) extinctions. The question relative to adaptation to
sudden change is how often does that sudden change occur? My guess is
that the limited habitat now available to wild ecosystems would magnify
any adaptation problems they would have.
>
>* Steinn Sigurdsson Lick Observatory *
>* ste...@helios.ucsc.edu "standard disclaimer" *
>* I know people whose idea of fun *
>* Is throwing stones in the river in the afternoon sun *
>* Oh let me be as free as them *
>* - BB 1986 *
>
Hank Roberts
Could someone point Mr. Smith to the Scientific American article on
reversals of ocean circulation, which came out a few years back? Now
that the recent ice cores have confirmed the possibility in fact occurs,
it would be useful for him and others skeptical of this process to look
at the original general-interest article on the subject.
Mr. Smith, you've "not seen a study predicting" this. But you can,
if you will read up on the past few years' discussion of ocean currents.
Steinn Sigurdsson
In article <STEINLY.92...@topaz.ucsc.edu> ste...@topaz.ucsc.edu (Steinn Sigurdsson) writes:
>In article <1992Jun9.1...@vexcel.com> de...@vexcel.com (dean alaska) writes:
> It is interesting that you point this out. In general, many environmetalists
> like to point out that impacts on ecosystems that don't appear to hurt humans
> are a problem while others less environmentally inclined usually conern
> themselves with humans and only those animals or ecosystems that humans
> directly depend on. Whether or not a sudden climatic change can occur
> non-anthropogenically does not lessen the impact on human civlization.
> Maybe sudden
> climate change will hurt the human species _most_ Do you feel that the
> possibility of sudden "natural" climate change in the past lessens our need
> to prevent anthropogenic effects? Note that the fact that it may have
> occurred before humans had a major impact does not mean that non-human
> ecosystems can adapt fast. Maybe aliens from outer-space caused it. :)
>While humans are a concern of mine, I also like to consider impacts
>on other species - while a rapid climate change would impact human
>civilization, I think humans have a deomstrated ability to accommodate
>rapid change, whereas the question of other species and ecosystems
>responding rapidly was one that I felt was an issue - if there was
>rapid (decade time scale) major climate change in the past (comparable
>to realistic worst case scenarios for anthropogenic changes) then
>self-evidently various ecosystems were resilient enough to handle
>it, which is mildly reassuring. Not that this closes the issue, it
>simply provides a little more data on one particular worry.
First of all, I would challenge the notion that humans have a demonstrated
ability to adapt. I would suggest that any adaptation that was
demonstrated before our technological society developed may not have
relevence to our ability to adapt now.
I'd argue we're more adaptable now. Historically we have to major
human adaptations to climate - the end of the last ice age and
the "little ice age" - the little ice age is fairly well recorded,
there were crop failures, some catastrophic extinctions of human
settlements and hard times but overall humans did just fine.
We have a very complex and
interdependent society. Just as an example, wet regions of the U.S.
feel a drought very quickly because they have very little storage
capacity, while drier areas have little infrastructure for preventing
floods. The cost of trading these infrastructures would be
enormous.
I think you overestimate the costs, in fact they might be lower than
the cost of trying to make societal changes in anticipation of climate
changes - which in worst case would be wrong, leaving both the cost
of societal change for the wrong threat and the cost of meeting the
actual change.
The cost might even prevent us from developing new technologies to
deal with other environmental problems!
History would suggest that the crisis would speed up technology
development, barring a conscious effort to suppress technology
development, which some seem to advocate.
Secondly, assuming that such
non-anthropogenic sudden warmings have only occurred rarely, ecosystems
might be impacted just as much as they would be by anthropogenic-based
impacts, as shown by the admittedly extreme example of the periodic
(65 million years) extinctions. The question relative to adaptation to
sudden change is how often does that sudden change occur?
Well, the Wood Hole data would suggest several times per megayear...
My guess is
that the limited habitat now available to wild ecosystems would magnify
any adaptation problems they would have.
That is a real possibility and could be a major concern.
Michael Tobis
about the atmosphere that I have time or patience to respond to and yet
it is very difficult to let his ramblings go unanswered. I would urge
everyone to take all his doubts with a grain of salt. I urge Larry to
actually try to learn some of the basics before he criticizes the science.
In article <41...@balrog.ctron.com> sm...@ctron.com writes:
>Known temperature tolerances are all well and good, but how do they guarantee
>that temperature is what accounted for those deaths? Can they factor out
>changes in salinity? Volcanic activity? Random population variations?
Again the urge to make climatologists look like idiots. Of course there
are uncertainties, and of course they are considered. Foraminifera are
one of the main information sources about past climates. I don't know much
more, but I'm confident that the researchers in this area do.
However, I wonder why this level of skepticism. Don't you
think that the people who spend their lives on this subject have thought
about these issues? If you really want to know, look it up. Don't just
complain about completely hypothetical failures of research you haven't seen!
>Of course, such shifts occured without human aid. Although human activity
>may indeed be changing the climate, even dramatically, we do not yet know
>how the "natural" system worked. It seems to me this problem becomes more
>complex when human variables are added. This is an important datum, but it
>argues most loudly for reducing the *rate* of human impact more than it
>does for reducing the *scale*. By this logic, we shouldn't be trying to
>significantly alter the rate of CO2 emission for, say, the next 10 or 20
>years because we'll be throwing more variables into the equation and making
>it more difficult, perhaps even impossible, to determine the real relation-
>ships so reliable results can be depended upon.
An interesting hypothesis, showing you are not completely lacking in
scientific insight, but anyway completely wrong. Do you suppose that radiative
balance responds to 1) atmospheric concentration or 2) rate of change of
atmospheric concentration? How would a ray of infrared travelling at
3e8 m/s know anything about rates of change of order 1%/yr. ?
Barring economic concerns, the most conservative approach is either to
keep the concentration at current levels, or to drop it to pre-industrial
levels. It is certainly NOT to allow the emissions to continue to accelerate.
Indeed, the proposal to limit the emission rates to 1990 levels is exactly
the proposal at hand in current negotiations. It strikes a plausible balance
between economic and environmental concerns. I guess you support it then?
>> "If greenhouse warming occurs and leads to increased amounts
>>of precipitation in the Arctic and/or melting of snow and ice,
>>the Norwegian limb of the conveyor might be threatened, leading
>>to very rapid changes in ocean conditions and climate," Lehman
>>notes. "In such a scenario, the present climate of Britain and
>>Norway would change suddenly to that of Greenland and northern
>>Canada."
>Hmmmmmmmmm. In other words, it will bring on an Ice Age? That seems counter-
>intuitive, doesn't it? Certainly puts the kibosh on the "we're heading for
>Venus" people, I think.
It doesn't, really. It only postulates a local ice age in northern Europe.
As for the possibility of a Venus-like runaway greenhouse effect, see
Dr. Ray Pierrehumbert's thought provoking article on that subject, now
appearing in a sci.geo.meteorology near you.
>Let's see, we might have a greenhouse effect or we might not, and if we do, it
>might warm us up or it might cool us off, and in either event we know Earth
>went through massive changes both ways in history before humans discovered
>fire. I think that sums it up. So now we have a greenhouse effect AND an
>Ice Age. That ties everything up pretty neatly. Not.
If this is not deliberate obfuscation, it certainly demonstrates a very
casual familiarity with the issues.
It is entirely likely that regions of the Earth will
cool in the radically changed circulation that would go along with global
warming. You do know what "average" means, don't you?
Indeed it is the polar warming that would CAUSE the European cooling in
this scenario. And yes, the sea level would still rise due to thermal
expansion, modulo the behavior of the Antarctic ice sheet.
And of course, natural effects can also stress the environment. People who
think this is reason for a lack of concern seem to ignore the enormous
stresses already extant. An additional large stress of an amplitude
comparable to the largest natural changes under such circumstances is
indeed cause for concern. Also, the social impacts shouldn't be lightly
dismissed.
>I think we flatter ourselves we know so much or have so much power. This
>study confirms my opinion (again) that we really have no clue what will happen,
>and that major and drastic action either way would be as likely to magnify the
>effects as minimize them.
You don't seem to "get" that there is a perfectly valid globally summed
energy budget that is a much simpler problem. (This is the radiative-convective
model that Mr. Halliwell referred to.) We know that it is greenhouse gas
concentrations, not their derivatives, that cause the effects. We can postulate
an enormous variety of plausible local consequences, some of which are mutually
incompatible. But we have a fairly clear sense of the global average changes
forced in a global integration of the radiation budget, given the changes
in atmospheric composition. It's a fairly simple calculation based on
very well established physical principles.
If you want to debate science, kindly learn some, please. If you just say
every damned thing that pops into your head, you are only adding to the
mystification of these issues that seems to be the mission of the popular
press. You claim to have an open mind, but it is becoming clear you have
an axe to grind.
Look, I'm happy to exchange views with you on policy and society and
objectives and so on, but I have no interest in debating atmospheric science
with someone who doesn't know any. I haven't the time to respond to every
silly thing you say about climate in any detail. But face it, you have no
clue on the matter and seem to resist getting one. That being the case,
I will have to restrain myself from rebutting every point you make. It's
a tremendous time sink. I think I'll just have to respond "wrong" "no"
"irrelevant" "misleading" "completely bogus" and so on.
mt
Michael Tobis
Juvenile flaming deleted.
The further
>north you go in the northern hemisphere the colder it gets, if that cold moves
>south, as implied by the study, you are flirting with an Ice Age.
It is possible for the pole to warm, northern Europe to cool, and the
temperature gradient to still point south. England is at the latitude of
Northern Canada, so there is no contradiction in saying it will be in
the same temperature range if the formation of Norwegian bottom water stops.
If at any
>point the snow from the year just past doesn't have time to melt before the
>next years snow arrives, that's an Ice Age, by DEFINITION.
irrelevant. Most of Northern Canada isn't glaciated either.
>>temperature will increase. If Britain, Norway, etc. get colder, that means
>>someplace else gets even hotter. It's been pointed out time and again that
>>global warming does NOT mean that every spot on Earth gets warmer.
>WHAT spot is getting warmer?
In this scenario, a warmer Arctic was specified. Or don't you read the
information that you are so excited about?
The study implies a GENERAL reduction in Earth's
>temperature!
Completely false.
What, is Britain going to look like Greenland and the North Pole
>is going to be in the 90's?
misleading
If the cold line moves south the equator is going
>to get even hotter?
quite possible
>And frankly, I don't give a damn how many times it's been pointed that "global
>warming does NOT mean that every spot on Earth gets warmer", that's just proof
>by repeated assertion!
I like this one!
That's not a proof by assertion, it's a proof by definition. What do you
think "average" means? Global warming is defined as "an increase in the
average surface temperature".
>THIS study is implying an Ice Age, others are telling me Venus.
No one is saying Venus is likely, although it is less implausible than you
might think. But this study postulates a mechanism for _local_ cooling as
caused by _global_ warming. There is no contradiction.
>I've not seen a study predicting Britain looking like Greenland before.
Just by the bye, you still haven't. You've seen a press release. You
ought to learn the difference.
mt
Carl J Lydick
>>Larry, are you really a moron, or do you just play one on the net? Given a
>>constant influx of sunlight, if we increase greenhouse gases, the global mean
>
>Carl, are you really an asshole or do you just play one on the net?
No, but I do have relatively little patience for morons.
>The farther north you go in the northern hemisphere the colder it gets, if
>that cold moves south, as implied by the study, you are flirting with an Ice
>Age.
You are flirting with glaciation in places that get as cold as the study
predicts they will
>If at any point the snow from the year just past doesn't have time to melt
>before the >next years snow arrives, that's an Ice Age, by DEFINITION.
No, that's glaciation, by definition.
>>temperature will increase. If Britain, Norway, etc. get colder, that means
>>someplace else gets even hotter. It's been pointed out time and again that
>>global warming does NOT mean that every spot on Earth gets warmer.
>
>WHAT spot is getting warmer? The study implies a GENERAL reduction in Earth's
>temperature!
It implied no such thing. It implied that if a certain current were somehow
stopped or diverted, the climates of Britain and Norway would get colder. In
case you haven't noticed, both of these happen to be on the North Sea.
>What, is Britain going to look like Greenland and the North Pole
>is going to be in the 90's?
No.
>If the cold line moves south the equator is going to get even hotter?
That's right.
>And frankly, I don't give a damn how many times it's been pointed that "global
>warming does NOT mean that every spot on Earth gets warmer", that's just proof
>by repeated assertion!
And the study we're talking about now says the same thing.
>THIS study is implying an Ice Age, others are telling me Venus.
This study is implying that a certain area may get colder. It's not implying
any global ice age.
Michael Tobis
to work for me, so you won't hear from me until I have a 3-D model
of the ocean. It looks like other capable hands are tackling the Larry
problem. So let me leave you with this:
In article <JMC.92Ju...@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> j...@cs.Stanford.EDU writes:
I find myself in the peculiar position of agreeing with John McCarthy's
suggestions for reasons which are philosophically much closer to Alan
McGowan's point of view. I suppose that holding radical views on both ends
of the "spectrum" makes me a centrist of a sort...
That is, I think there is an intrinsic moral value to ecosystems, and
that this intrinsic value should be an influential, possibly dominant
determinant of our behavior in the foreseeable future. On the other hand,
I feel that direct and deliberate human intervention on a global scale is
going to become necessary to protect what is left of natural systems.
Here's my prognosis for the broad historical outline of the next few
decades, as they will be remembered by the far future. I do believe
that global change issues will be the dominant feature of the coming
period. I am also confident that deliberate human intervention on a global
scale will eventually occur, and probably fairly soon.
==== BEGIN SCIENCE FICTION
"The end of immediate prospects for massive nuclear exchanges around 1990
combined with increasing awareness of the huge impact humanity was having
on the global environment. The first international conference on the
environmnet, held in Rio de Janiero in 1992 was a turning point.
The USA, representing the world's largest market and economy, felt immune
from external economic pressures, and found itself alone in maintaining
an economy-centered view at the conference. This, while politically useful
internally in a weak economy and a three-sided election, and also much
(though quietly) appreciated by certain economic interests in Europe, profoundly
weakened the global geopolitical position of the United States, driving the
developing nations into a much closer connection with Western Europe, as
global attention shifted from nuclear to environmental security.
Shortly thereafter, many of the rainforest nations, and notably and
quite vigorously the Brazilians and Indonesians, made major efforts
to stop the extensive burning of the rainforests. This period also coincided
with the major volcanic eruption in the Philippines, Mt. Pinatubo, in 1991,
and also with a period in which the greenhouse warming was just beginning
to accelerate to alarming proportions. This acceleration had been largely
masked by the volcanic eruption, and had also been considerably slowed
by the smoke from the enormously extensive burning of the rain forests.
The sudden lifting of these two masking phenomena around 1994, combined
with the rapid background increases in radiative forcing, led to the
Great Warming of the 90s. Agricultural failures were widespread, and
sea surface rises which had once seemed hypothetical now appeared imminent.
Extreme heat waves occurred in parts of America and China, causing much
human suffering. Demands for action were heard worldwide.
Suggestions for massive tree planting were widely implemented, but the
impact of these measures was slight. Then some wags suggested reinstating
the burning of the rainforest, and the possibility of massive deliberate
dust releases entered the public awareness. Environmental purists were
outraged, feeling that anthropogenic mitigation efforts were somehow as
immoral as negative anthropogenic impacts. This position was inadvertently
bolstered by some technophiles who claimed that economic activity should
be untrammelled by environmental concerns, and that repairs to the damage
could be implemented more efficiently and cost effectively than by limiting
the activities in the first place. (Of course, time has proven both these
positions to be drastically incorrect.)
In fact, the economic so-called conservatives ended up being a larger
impediment to the implementation of the Massive Dust Release Programme
than the so-called greens, the latter group being neutralized by the
support for dust releases by the majority of professional biologists and
ecologists who felt that the pace of warming represented an immediate and
profound threat to already highly stressed ecosystems worldwide. The
so-called conservatives resisted the loss of national sovereignty to
a worldwide institution that would be required to coordinate and regulate
the emissions due to economic activity, and to allocate the required
emissions to the appropriate geographic locations.
Nevertheless, in 2005, with the enthusiastic participation of the North
American Bloc, the World Organization of the Ocean and Atmosphere
(WOOA) was formed, the first actually sovereign instrument of world
government, with the participation of almost all countries. By 2019, the
few minor holdouts had been pressured into participating, with Kazakhstan
and Libya being the last to join.
In subsequent decades, control over climate was improved with careful
allocation of CO2 and dust emissions and sensitive salinity controls over
ocean currents. Massive ecosystem loss continued for some time, but the
climate control itself went well for about two centuries, until the source of
carbon was depleted, and suddenly the world faced the prospect of Global
Cooling, but that is a subject for a later chapter...
==== END SCIENCE FICTION
mt
Nick Janow
> "Sudden" is one of those words that don't travel real well between scientist
> and media. The dinosaurs died off "suddenly" over a span of several million
> years, the last ice age "suddenly" started over a span of 10,000 years.
> Exactly how long do they *think* "sudden" will take?
Hmmm, in a previous message you claimed that climate varies too rapidly for
scientists to predict a few decades in advance. Now you're arguing that
climate changes over very long time spans.
Which is it Larry, fast, slow or whatever suits your arguments best at any
given time?
--
Nick Janow
> Carl, are you really an asshole or do you just play one on the net? The
> farther north you go in the northern hemisphere the colder it gets, if that
> cold moves south, as implied by the study, you are flirting with an Ice Age.
> And frankly, I don't give a damn how many times it's been pointed that
> "global warming does NOT mean that every spot on Earth gets warmer", that's
> just proof by repeated assertion!
Your concepts of climate are terribly simplistic. I'm not a climatologist, but
at least I'm aware of wind patterns and ocean currents. Vancouver is nice an
warm in winter, partly due to a warm ocean current. Newfoundland is at the
same latitude but is colder; they have a cold ocean current. Central USA seems
to be colder in winter than much of Canada, due to wind patterns I suppose.
A few degrees of _global_ temperature increase could have major effects on
those ocean currents and wind patterns. Vancouver could get much colder,
Newfoundland much warmer and the southern states could experience cold winters
(I don't know enough to say it's impossible). Add in other local climatic
effects, such as increased cloud cover or loss of vegetation (ground
heats/cools faster), and the local situations may differ even more from their
present states.
Your climactic models may work fine on a mathematical sphere with no air or
fluid flows, but the Earth isn't quite that simple.
Of course, as I said, I'm not a climatologist. Perhaps one could confirm or
deny my comments.
--
dean alaska
>In article <1992Jun9.2...@vexcel.com> de...@vexcel.com (dean alaska) writes:
>
>
>I'd argue we're more adaptable now. Historically we have to major
>human adaptations to climate - the end of the last ice age and
>the "little ice age" - the little ice age is fairly well recorded,
>there were crop failures, some catastrophic extinctions of human
>settlements and hard times but overall humans did just fine.
>
that "extinction of human settlements" would be considered okay. In
modern terms, that may mean enormous refugee problems. I am not saying
it wil drive humans into extinction.
We may have better technology, but our needs have increased.
In the past migration has been a way to adapt but that option is not
available now.
> We have a very complex and
> interdependent society. Just as an example, wet regions of the U.S.
> feel a drought very quickly because they have very little storage
> capacity, while drier areas have little infrastructure for preventing
> floods. The cost of trading these infrastructures would be
> enormous.
>
>I think you overestimate the costs, in fact they might be lower than
>the cost of trying to make societal changes in anticipation of climate
>changes - which in worst case would be wrong, leaving both the cost
>of societal change for the wrong threat and the cost of meeting the
>actual change.
It seems to me that they would be quite expensive and I think you
_overestimate_ the costs of changes in anticipation of climate changes.
These changes will lead to more efficient production and consumption
technologies and will pay for themselves.
>
> The cost might even prevent us from developing new technologies to
> deal with other environmental problems!
>
>History would suggest that the crisis would speed up technology
>development, barring a conscious effort to suppress technology
>development, which some seem to advocate.
>
The existence of a crisis to focus on might weel speed technology
development, but if fundamentally different problems develop at the
same time, resources will be spread. While research certainly isn't
monolithic today, if the climate change problem does end up being a
serious one, research resources would want to focus much more on a
single issue. What is the limit on capital
available for technological development?
> Secondly, assuming that such
> non-anthropogenic sudden warmings have only occurred rarely, ecosystems
> might be impacted just as much as they would be by anthropogenic-based
> impacts, as shown by the admittedly extreme example of the periodic
> (65 million years) extinctions. The question relative to adaptation to
> sudden change is how often does that sudden change occur?
>
>Well, the Wood Hole data would suggest several times per megayear...
Is a megayear a 1000 years? If this is so then it might indicate an
ability for wild ecosystems to adapt, but I still believe human society
is less able to.
>
> My guess is
> that the limited habitat now available to wild ecosystems would magnify
> any adaptation problems they would have.
>
>That is a real possibility and could be a major concern.
>
>* Steinn Sigurdsson Lick Observatory *
>* ste...@helios.ucsc.edu "standard disclaimer" *
>* I know people whose idea of fun *
>* Is throwing stones in the river in the afternoon sun *
>* Oh let me be as free as them *
>* - BB 1986 *
>
Larry Smith
>Larry Smith seems capable of generating more confusion and misinformation
>about the atmosphere that I have time or patience to respond to and yet
>it is very difficult to let his ramblings go unanswered. I would urge
>everyone to take all his doubts with a grain of salt. I urge Larry to
>actually try to learn some of the basics before he criticizes the science.
Larry Smith is reasonably well-informed professional who is not given to
parroting lines given to him by environmental extremists with a social
engineering agenda. I would urge everyone to take *everything* in this
group with a grain of salt, mine, yours, Alan's, Michael Vandeman's, and
everyone elses, and let each one use his own brain.
As for learning the basics, I am, and I am continuing to. YOU might take
the same advice - I'd suggest a good basic computer text to start, then
a good intro into psychology.
>In article <41...@balrog.ctron.com> sm...@ctron.com writes:
>>Known temperature tolerances are all well and good, but how do they guarantee
>>that temperature is what accounted for those deaths? Can they factor out
>>changes in salinity? Volcanic activity? Random population variations?
>Again the urge to make climatologists look like idiots. Of course there
Asking questions about methodologies is making scientists out to be idiots?
Did you even bother to look at the fact that this paragraph asked honest
questions? Did you finish out the thread to realize that someone answered
these question quite definitively, without recourse to character assassination
or acidic sarcasm? No, I don't think the scientists who did that study were
idiots, I *asked* how they could make these determinations hoping for some
enlightenment.
>However, I wonder why this level of skepticism. Don't you
>think that the people who spend their lives on this subject have thought
>about these issues? If you really want to know, look it up. Don't just
>complain about completely hypothetical failures of research you haven't seen!
I have this level of skepticism, Mr. Tobis, because of raving environmental
lunies that twist and distort legitimate studies or fund bogus "studies" whose
final results are determined when the money is granted. And if you took your
own advice about grains of salt, you'd realize it. Of course, YOU are above
all that - that's why you raked me over the coals for posting questions about
an environmental study to sci.environment.
<points about implications of study>
>An interesting hypothesis, showing you are not completely lacking in
>scientific insight, but anyway completely wrong. Do you suppose that radiative
>balance responds to 1) atmospheric concentration or 2) rate of change of
>atmospheric concentration? How would a ray of infrared travelling at
>3e8 m/s know anything about rates of change of order 1%/yr. ?
Most left-handed compliment I've ever gotten in my entire life. It obviously
relates to (1), but that is the factor we have the least control over. Given
that we *do* have control over (2), something may be better than nothing.
>Barring economic concerns, the most conservative approach is either to
>keep the concentration at current levels, or to drop it to pre-industrial
>levels. It is certainly NOT to allow the emissions to continue to accelerate.
These two statements are not equivalent. The most conservative approach,
barring economic concerns, it to slow the rate of increase to zero, then
to slow the absolute increase to zero, preferably (I take it from the study)
at a relatively constant rate. I have *never* advocated allowing emissions
to continue to accelerate, and if your dire warnings about my attempt to
"confuse" people on the net is based on that then you have, I hope not
deliberately, misconstrued my position.
What you need to learn, Mr. Tobis, is that someone can disagree with your
methods and still desire the same end result. There *are* people in this
world - and a lot of them in gov't - who simply dismiss your concerns out
of hand. From me you get at least this minimal respect: I, at least, am
willing to argue with you - I hope to our mutual enlightenment.
>Indeed, the proposal to limit the emission rates to 1990 levels is exactly
>the proposal at hand in current negotiations. It strikes a plausible balance
>between economic and environmental concerns. I guess you support it then?
I support the idea. The plan for implementing it is completely absent from
the current negotiations as far as I can see - the cost of that plan, and
its potential impact on personal liberty, and the probability of success (in
order of increasing priority) are the factors I'd use to evaluate it. If it
is workable, cost effective, and sparing of reductions in personal liberty,
I would support it, otherwise I would oppose it - but I would be opposing the
plan, not the goal. It is high time you learned the difference, and it is
an important difference. YOU and *I* disagree on methods, many, many others
disagree that anything need be done anyway.
>>Hmmmmmmmmm. In other words, it will bring on an Ice Age? That seems counter-
>>intuitive, doesn't it? Certainly puts the kibosh on the "we're heading for
>>Venus" people, I think.
>It doesn't, really. It only postulates a local ice age in northern Europe.
Presumably the effect refers to that latitude, does it not? How is this
different from "real" ice ages?
>As for the possibility of a Venus-like runaway greenhouse effect, see
>Dr. Ray Pierrehumbert's thought provoking article on that subject, now
>appearing in a sci.geo.meteorology near you.
I don't have time to scan YANG (Yet Another News Group), if you could email
me a copy, I'm all eyes.
>>Let's see, we might have a greenhouse effect or we might not, and if we do, it
>>might warm us up or it might cool us off, and in either event we know Earth
>>went through massive changes both ways in history before humans discovered
>>fire. I think that sums it up. So now we have a greenhouse effect AND an
>>Ice Age. That ties everything up pretty neatly. Not.
>If this is not deliberate obfuscation, it certainly demonstrates a very
>casual familiarity with the issues.
It was also inflammatory, sometimes I can't resist baiting. In truth, the
cooling effect the researchers describe jibes much better with more stuff
than any other, and I'm inclined to give it much more credence because of
it. Nevertheless, questions remain - for one, cooling temperatures should
reduce the atmosphere's ability to carry water, and the increasing temp-
eratures, presumably around the equator, should encourage cloud formation,
which should drop their water as precipitation as they move north. This
implies in increase in precipitation - yet the US is distinctly drier these
last 10 years, and this year looks to set some records. No geographical
features have changed, obviously, NH's not behind any mountains, it's right
convenient to the Atlantic. So where's the rain?
>It is entirely likely that regions of the Earth will
>cool in the radically changed circulation that would go along with global
>warming. You do know what "average" means, don't you?
Do you want a debate or a flamefest? I'm up for either.
>Indeed it is the polar warming that would CAUSE the European cooling in
>this scenario. And yes, the sea level would still rise due to thermal
>expansion, modulo the behavior of the Antarctic ice sheet.
I find this hard to swallow. Care to expound further? Exactly how is the
coldest part of the globe going to become warmer while the temperate regions
become cold enough for extraordinary snows and glaciation?
>And of course, natural effects can also stress the environment. People who
>think this is reason for a lack of concern seem to ignore the enormous
>stresses already extant. An additional large stress of an amplitude
>comparable to the largest natural changes under such circumstances is
>indeed cause for concern. Also, the social impacts shouldn't be lightly
>dismissed.
In point of fact, they need to be weighed against the impacts of the solutions,
don't they?
>You don't seem to "get" that there is a perfectly valid globally summed
>energy budget that is a much simpler problem. (This is the radiative-convective
>model that Mr. Halliwell referred to.) We know that it is greenhouse gas
>concentrations, not their derivatives, that cause the effects. We can postulate
>an enormous variety of plausible local consequences, some of which are mutually
>incompatible. But we have a fairly clear sense of the global average changes
>forced in a global integration of the radiation budget, given the changes
>in atmospheric composition. It's a fairly simple calculation based on
>very well established physical principles.
It's these statements I really distrust. If some of your "plausible local
consequences" are "mutually incompatible" in your "fairly simple calculation",
then methinks it more likely you have dropped a decimal point somewhere. If
it was all as simple as you say, it would be a whole lot more obvious to
*everyone* and far less susceptible to the kind of "misinformation" you
decry in the media. You can't have it both ways, Michael.
>If you want to debate science, kindly learn some, please. If you just say
>every damned thing that pops into your head, you are only adding to the
>mystification of these issues that seems to be the mission of the popular
>press. You claim to have an open mind, but it is becoming clear you have
>an axe to grind.
If you want me to agree with you, you can damn well debate science with me
regardless of how much I know. If I don't know enough educate me. If you
don't care whether I agree or not, don't bother to follow up.
As for saying whatever pops into my head, what else is the net for? Do YOU
spend days or weeks composing each post? I've never seen your bibliography
at the end of your posts, do you strip it for brevity? This is an informal
forum, laddie, and if anyone is left mystified, well, maybe they'll be moti-
vated to do some research on their own.
Micheal, I'm enjoying this. I really am. For years I've put up with
instrusive posts from groups like this into rec.autos with this "of course"
cars have to go, and "you're all part of the problem", and I find I'm truly
enjoying an opportunity to bring some of the acrimony back over here. Some
of you really need a good kick in the pants, to make you rethink and rejustify
your positions. I find myself slipping very naturally into the Devil's
Advocate role - I push THIS button, I get THAT post from Vandeman, I push
THAT button I get THIS post from you, I push some other button and I get
some other one of the regular crowd.
You need a bit of exercise, Michael. You need to learn that people can
disagree with you and not be evil, that they can agree with your goal and
not with your methods, that they can think you might be right but want to
see some proof and explanation anyway. It's time for YOU to come down off
your high horse and start justifying some of YOUR positions.
>Look, I'm happy to exchange views with you on policy and society and
>objectives and so on, but I have no interest in debating atmospheric science
>with someone who doesn't know any. I haven't the time to respond to every
Then you have no right to bitch and complain when people disagree with you
on policy and society because "they don't know any atmospheric science".
>silly thing you say about climate in any detail. But face it, you have no
>clue on the matter and seem to resist getting one. That being the case,
I have lots of clues, but I *do* have an axe to grind. I want to see YOU
justify your position, I want you to prove to MY satisfaction that the dire
social requirements you advocate to address these problems are really needed.
Like I say, if you want me to agree, work for it. If you don't, don't bother
to follow-up. But don't whine about it.
>I will have to restrain myself from rebutting every point you make. It's
>a tremendous time sink. I think I'll just have to respond "wrong" "no"
>"irrelevant" "misleading" "completely bogus" and so on.
Oh, goody, I can do that to. Wait, I'll just clip this paragraph...yeah,
that's the ticket! Now I can just respond "wrong" "no" "irrelevant"
"misleading" "completely bogus" and so on. Sure, that'll help all those
mystified people out there.
Josh Rovero
atmospheric model. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right.... :-)
--
Josh Rovero (rov...@oc.nps.navy.mil) | or Internet 53...@cc.nps.navy.mil
Department of Oceanography, Code OC/Rv | Bitnet 5346p@NAVPGS
Naval Postgraduate School |
Monterey, CA 93943 (408) 646-2084 |
Larry Smith
>No, but I do have relatively little patience for morons.
Me, too. Maybe you should stop slinging insults around and try to explain a
little better.
>You are flirting with glaciation in places that get as cold as the study
>predicts they will
>>If at any point the snow from the year just past doesn't have time to melt
>>before the >next years snow arrives, that's an Ice Age, by DEFINITION.
>No, that's glaciation, by definition.
<sigh> What, exactly, is the difference? My understanding of "ice age"
states that an ice age IS a glaciation extending down from the pole into
the temperate zones, if you are working with any other please enlighten me.
>>WHAT spot is getting warmer? The study implies a GENERAL reduction in Earth's
>>temperature!
>
>It implied no such thing. It implied that if a certain current were somehow
>stopped or diverted, the climates of Britain and Norway would get colder. In
>case you haven't noticed, both of these happen to be on the North Sea.
Are you telling me that Britain will look like Iceland but NH will not? I
might buy it being worse because of the sea effects, but I've got to believe
NH will be colder, too, the trade winds would tend to distribute temperatures
would they not?
>No.
>>If the cold line moves south the equator is going to get even hotter?
>That's right.
Interesting thought. Supposing this is correct, how MUCH hotter?
>>And frankly, I don't give a damn how many times it's been pointed that "global
>>warming does NOT mean that every spot on Earth gets warmer", that's just proof
>>by repeated assertion!
>And the study we're talking about now says the same thing.
As my old writing teacher used to say, "telling" is not "showing".
>>THIS study is implying an Ice Age, others are telling me Venus.
>This study is implying that a certain area may get colder. It's not implying
>any global ice age.
I dunno, with Britain and the temperate zones under heavy snow or ice, the
difference may be one of those academic questions.
Larry Smith
>sm...@ctron.com (Larry Smith) writes:
>> "Sudden" is one of those words that don't travel real well between scientist
>Hmmm, in a previous message you claimed that climate varies too rapidly for
>scientists to predict a few decades in advance. Now you're arguing that
>climate changes over very long time spans.
>Which is it Larry, fast, slow or whatever suits your arguments best at any
>given time?
In this particular case, it wasn't an argument at all, but an honest question
to know what THESE scientists meant when they said "sudden". I'm getting the
impression that this study is pretty well grounded, I'm fairly impressed so
far with it, but I'm not at all impressed when lots of people who think they
have me neatly pigeonholed try to read my agenda into everything I post. Are
you so good at reading minds, Nick?
Larry Smith
>sm...@ctron.com (Larry Smith) writes:
>> "global warming does NOT mean that every spot on Earth gets warmer", that's
>> just proof by repeated assertion!
>Your concepts of climate are terribly simplistic. I'm not a climatologist, but
>at least I'm aware of wind patterns and ocean currents. Vancouver is nice an
>warm in winter, partly due to a warm ocean current. Newfoundland is at the
>same latitude but is colder; they have a cold ocean current. Central USA seems
>to be colder in winter than much of Canada, due to wind patterns I suppose.
Hmmmmmm. In many of my postings to this group I must plead guilty to being
"deliberately obtuse". There are so many things that so many people take for
granted here that I find myself trying to pick arguments just to get people
to reconsider their positions, to make them think about what they say and
advocate even if only to justify them again. I am suspicious of any cut-and-
dried assertions. It was cut-and-dried assertions about the viability of cars
and even the concept of personal transportation, smugly crossposted to
rec.autos, that brought me here.
I can read books, and have, and I have, I think, a pretty fair idea of the
global issues involved. I came to this group with three axes to grind. First,
to rock the boats of those people who seem to be committed to the idea that
solutions to environmental problems must, of necessity, reduce or eliminate
individual liberties. Second, to see if anyone can square the various
conflicting assertions I've seen in my reading regarding the effect of human
changes on the environment. Third, to make the authors of those smug cross-
posts justify their positions, to me, in detail. Not to fob me off with
lectures about how little I know, or to give me references to works, many of
which I've already read. Few of those scientists have advocated such extreme
social agendas, people in this group have. I am less interested in the
science (except insofar as #2) than I am in questioning the conclusions
implicit in the social engineering agenda.
>Of course, as I said, I'm not a climatologist. Perhaps one could confirm or
>deny my comments.
Facts, yes. The social engineers, I'm not so sure.
Nick Janow
> In many of my postings to this group I must plead guilty to being
> "deliberately obtuse". There are so many things that so many people take for
> granted here that I find myself trying to pick arguments just to get people
> to reconsider their positions, to make them think about what they say and
> advocate even if only to justify them again.
In that respect, you are failing miserably. If you want to encourage people to
back up their positions with facts or make them think of issues related to
their position, you have to phrase your comments a certain way. You seem to
phrase yours in such a way as to encourage simple dismissal of your comments.
For example, your comment about average global temperature increase meaning
that every point on the globe getting warmer didn't spur anyone to post any new
information; it just evoked a standard "don't be an idiot Larry" response.
A successful devil's advocate angers people into improving their arguments. An
unsuccessful one simply draws flames.
--
Steinn Sigurdsson
In article <1992Jun9.2...@cco.caltech.edu>, ca...@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU (Carl J Lydick) writes:
>No, but I do have relatively little patience for morons.
Me, too. Maybe you should stop slinging insults around and try to explain a
little better.
>>WHAT spot is getting warmer? The study implies a GENERAL reduction in Earth's
>>temperature!
>
>It implied no such thing. It implied that if a certain current were somehow
>stopped or diverted, the climates of Britain and Norway would get colder. In
>case you haven't noticed, both of these happen to be on the North Sea.
Are you telling me that Britain will look like Iceland but NH will not? I
might buy it being worse because of the sea effects, but I've got to believe
NH will be colder, too, the trade winds would tend to distribute temperatures
would they not?
If I may...
If you look at the west coast of Europe and comparable
latitude on the east and west coast of the Americas, then you will
notice a systematic pattern in climate as function of latitude
- california/spain and washington/england have very different
climates from florida and new england. The reason for this, crudely,
is that oceanic currents tend to circulate from the equator north
along the west side of the ocean and come down the east side - in
the Atlantic this is the gulf stream - as a consequence of which
East Greenland, Iceland, Norway and Britain have much milder climates
then would otherwise be expected given their latitude. In fact all
of western Europe and western US have milder moderate climates because
of these currents. An additional benefit is that the worlds richest
fisheries form where the warm current meets the cold arctic currents.
Now, the reason for concern, is that it has been noted the
Gulf stream is vulnerable to major shifts from relatively small
temperature and/or topography perturbations (this is not a real
issue in the pacific, as far as I know, the reason is basically
the combination of florida, caribbean and cuba). In fact it has
been suggested that the track of the gulf stream determines
european glaciation and possibly the transition to ice free
intervals during ice ages (such as we are in) - hence the
recent study on very rapid temperature changes.
So, if the gulf stream shifts, then East Greenland, Iceland
and Northern Norway go under ice in a few centuries - barring CO2
effects compensating, and the rest of western Europe has a more
extreme climate more comparable to the US east coast. If there were
no anthropogenic CO2, then an ice age might ve triggered - given the
CO2 - which might cause the current shift, the global average might go
up anyway, in spite of the increased arctic albedo - basically the
models can't tell for sure - either way Europe is badly hurt.
Steinn Sigurdsson
In article <STEINLY.92...@topaz.ucsc.edu> ste...@topaz.ucsc.edu (Steinn Sigurdsson) writes:
>In article <1992Jun9.2...@vexcel.com> de...@vexcel.com (dean alaska) writes:
>I'd argue we're more adaptable now. Historically we have to major
>human adaptations to climate - the end of the last ice age and
>the "little ice age" - the little ice age is fairly well recorded,
>there were crop failures, some catastrophic extinctions of human
>settlements and hard times but overall humans did just fine.
>
But these adaptations were to a much slower climate change. And I doubt
that "extinction of human settlements" would be considered okay. In
Now "ok" but not intolerable to civilization, probably less than
random internal crisis such as we have seen repeatedly this century.
modern terms, that may mean enormous refugee problems. I am not saying
it wil drive humans into extinction.
We may have better technology, but our needs have increased.
In the past migration has been a way to adapt but that option is not
available now.
> We have a very complex and
> interdependent society. Just as an example, wet regions of the U.S.
> feel a drought very quickly because they have very little storage
> capacity, while drier areas have little infrastructure for preventing
> floods. The cost of trading these infrastructures would be
> enormous.
>I think you overestimate the costs, in fact they might be lower than
>the cost of trying to make societal changes in anticipation of climate
>changes - which in worst case would be wrong, leaving both the cost
>of societal change for the wrong threat and the cost of meeting the
>actual change.
It seems to me that they would be quite expensive and I think you
_overestimate_ the costs of changes in anticipation of climate changes.
These changes will lead to more efficient production and consumption
technologies and will pay for themselves.
I'm all in favour of increasing efficiency and naturally beneficial
technologies. The cost estimates I had in mind are those in Nature,
357, 1992 - order 100 billion $ per year, global.
> The cost might even prevent us from developing new technologies to
> deal with other environmental problems!
>History would suggest that the crisis would speed up technology
>development, barring a conscious effort to suppress technology
>development, which some seem to advocate.
The existence of a crisis to focus on might weel speed technology
development, but if fundamentally different problems develop at the
same time, resources will be spread. While research certainly isn't
monolithic today, if the climate change problem does end up being a
serious one, research resources would want to focus much more on a
single issue. What is the limit on capital
available for technological development?
The limits on _development_ capital is probably educated manpower,
implementation limits are probably energy, manpower and resources
in order. For comparison, consider current military expenditures
on development and implementation.
> Secondly, assuming that such
> non-anthropogenic sudden warmings have only occurred rarely, ecosystems
> might be impacted just as much as they would be by anthropogenic-based
> impacts, as shown by the admittedly extreme example of the periodic
> (65 million years) extinctions. The question relative to adaptation to
> sudden change is how often does that sudden change occur?
>
>Well, the Wood Hole data would suggest several times per megayear...
Is a megayear a 1000 years? If this is so then it might indicate
million years. my guesstimate from what I remember of the study, plus
that it is unlikely they happened to find a unique event.
ability for wild ecosystems to adapt, but I still believe human society
is less able to.
I claim they can, certainly at less cost than the "reduce humanity to
10**8 people in five generations" proposals, and that it will be far easier.
Larry Smith
>back up their positions with facts or make them think of issues related to
>their position, you have to phrase your comments a certain way. You seem to
>phrase yours in such a way as to encourage simple dismissal of your comments.
>For example, your comment about average global temperature increase meaning
>that every point on the globe getting warmer didn't spur anyone to post any new
>information; it just evoked a standard "don't be an idiot Larry" response.
This is, I think, purely a matter of opinion. In this case, I don't expect
to actually reach the people I'm arguing with. What I am most hoping to
accomplish is to challenge this smug idea that "we all know the problems" and
"we all know the solutions". The arguments themselves accomplish something.
>A successful devil's advocate angers people into improving their arguments. An
>unsuccessful one simply draws flames.
I've got me "ol' Bessie". And what I lack in politeness I make up for in
persistance.
Larry Smith
...good commentary deleted...
> So, if the gulf stream shifts, then East Greenland, Iceland
>and Northern Norway go under ice in a few centuries - barring CO2
>effects compensating, and the rest of western Europe has a more
>extreme climate more comparable to the US east coast. If there were
>no anthropogenic CO2, then an ice age might ve triggered - given the
>CO2 - which might cause the current shift, the global average might go
>up anyway, in spite of the increased arctic albedo - basically the
>models can't tell for sure - either way Europe is badly hurt.
Best thumbnail explanation I've read - including those in the books.
Many thanks. Especially for doing it politely. Point yielded.
Okay, the study implies a considerable redistribution of heat, more to the
equator, less to the artic and temperate zones. How far can this go?
While this heat engine is in effect Earth's temperatures ranged from, 100 below
zero at the pole to 100 above at the equator. What is "normal" distribution
on a globe with no atmosphere or ocean moving heat around.
Carl J Lydick
>cooling effect the researchers describe jibes much better with more stuff
>than any other, and I'm inclined to give it much more credence because of
>it. Nevertheless, questions remain - for one, cooling temperatures should
>reduce the atmosphere's ability to carry water, and the increasing temp-
>eratures, presumably around the equator, should encourage cloud formation,
>which should drop their water as precipitation as they move north. This
>implies in increase in precipitation - yet the US is distinctly drier these
>last 10 years, and this year looks to set some records.
First, the study in question did NOT say that the sort of oceanic circulation
shift they describe has taken place. They say that such shifts have apparently
taken place in the past, and that the timescale on which they occurred appears
to have sometiemes been as short as 40 years. Second, you're once again
confusing global averages with local phenomena. The fact that a global average
changes does NOT mean that the value being measured must change in the same
direction everywhere.
>No geographical features have changed, obviously, NH's not behind any
>mountains, it's right convenient to the Atlantic. So where's the rain?
The recent California drought was not because of a decrease in Pacific storm
systems; it was because the storm systems did not drop their rain on
California. Perhaps the rain missing from New Hampshire was dropped further
south in part by the several of the severe hurricanes we've had the past few
years.
>>It is entirely likely that regions of the Earth will
>>cool in the radically changed circulation that would go along with global
>>warming. You do know what "average" means, don't you?
>
>Do you want a debate or a flamefest? I'm up for either.
Given that it's been pointed out to you over and over again that global warming
refers to an increase in the AVERAGE GLOBAL temperature, and you still seem to
think that it means that the temperature must increase everywhere, the question
as to whether you understand the term "average" seems perfectly appropriate.
>>Indeed it is the polar warming that would CAUSE the European cooling in
>>this scenario. And yes, the sea level would still rise due to thermal
>>expansion, modulo the behavior of the Antarctic ice sheet.
>
>I find this hard to swallow. Care to expound further? Exactly how is the
>coldest part of the globe going to become warmer while the temperate regions
>become cold enough for extraordinary snows and glaciation?
It was stated quite clearly in the press release. I'll try to explain it,
sticking to words of one syllable as much as possible.
The Gulf Stream now goes quite far north, and as it does so, it brings warmth
to places like Norway and Britain. At times in the past, the Gulf Stream
turned east by the time it got as far north as Portugal. This means that it
didn't bring warmth to Norway and Britain. If it should do this again, Britain
and Portugal will get colder.
With me so far?
As the Gulf Stream flows north, water evaporates. The concentration of salt in
the water increases. The water becomes denser. At some point, it sinks, and
forms another current, called the North Atlantic Deep Water, which flows south
at the bottom of the ocean. If a source of fresh water is added to the north
Atlantic, as it could be if some of the polar ice melts, the salinity will
drop. This makes the water less dense. The transition from the Gulf Stream to
the North Atlantic Deep Water might be impeded or forced further south. The
Gulf Stream might no longer flow past Britain and Norway. Both of these
countries are currently warmer than they would be without the Gulf Stream. If
the Gulf Stream doesn't reach them, they'll get colder.
There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
>>You don't seem to "get" that there is a perfectly valid globally summed
>>energy budget that is a much simpler problem. (This is the radiative-convective
>>model that Mr. Halliwell referred to.) We know that it is greenhouse gas
>>concentrations, not their derivatives, that cause the effects. We can postulate
>>an enormous variety of plausible local consequences, some of which are mutually
>>incompatible. But we have a fairly clear sense of the global average changes
>>forced in a global integration of the radiation budget, given the changes
>>in atmospheric composition. It's a fairly simple calculation based on
>>very well established physical principles.
>
>It's these statements I really distrust. If some of your "plausible local
>consequences" are "mutually incompatible" in your "fairly simple calculation",
>then methinks it more likely you have dropped a decimal point somewhere.
Not true. You're again failing to understand the nature of an average. If the
average global temperature changes, it's likely that atmospheric and oceanic
flows will be altered. There are many different ways in which they could be
altered. If you take a coin that's standing on its edge and flip it, you can
be pretty sure it's not going to come down standing on its edge again. It
might come up heads. It might come up tails. Coming up heads and coming up
tails are mutually incompatible outcomes for any single toss. Similarly,
the temperature of, say Pasadena might increase if the flows change one way.
It might decrease if the flows change another way. Pasadena's temperature
increasing is incompatible with its temperature decreasing. That's what's
meant by "mutually incompatible." Not that for a single scenario the
temperature changes in both directions, but that for two mutually exclusive
scenarios, it would change in one direction for one and the other direction for
the other.
>If it was all as simple as you say, it would be a whole lot more obvious to
>*everyone* and far less susceptible to the kind of "misinformation" you
>decry in the media. You can't have it both ways, Michael.
There's a simple part, and a complicated part. If you increase greenhouse
gases, then the GLOBAL AVERAGE temperature WILL increase. That's the simple
part. Figuring out HOW MUCH that average will increase, and what the LOCAL
temperatures will do is the hard part.
>If you want me to agree with you, you can damn well debate science with me
>regardless of how much I know. If I don't know enough educate me. If you
>don't care whether I agree or not, don't bother to follow up.
We've been trying to, and you simply choose to ignore what we tell you. You
don't "debate" in any useful sense of the word. You're simply carrying on a
monologue.
>>silly thing you say about climate in any detail. But face it, you have no
>>clue on the matter and seem to resist getting one. That being the case,
>
>I have lots of clues,
No, you are totally clueless.
Carl J Lydick
>>>before the >next years snow arrives, that's an Ice Age, by DEFINITION.
>
>>No, that's glaciation, by definition.
>
><sigh> What, exactly, is the difference? My understanding of "ice age"
>states that an ice age IS a glaciation extending down from the pole into
>the temperate zones, if you are working with any other please enlighten me.
An ice-age would be a large-scale glaciation. The decrease in temperatures in
Britain and Norway that the press release talked about is NOT large-scale.
>>It implied no such thing. It implied that if a certain current were somehow
>>stopped or diverted, the climates of Britain and Norway would get colder. In
>>case you haven't noticed, both of these happen to be on the North Sea.
>
>Are you telling me that Britain will look like Iceland but NH will not?
That's a possibility.
>I might buy it being worse because of the sea effects, but I've got to believe
>NH will be colder, too, the trade winds would tend to distribute temperatures
>would they not?
Given the mechanism described in the press release, New Hampshire would
probably get colder, too. However, since the circulation of the atmosphere
tends to bring warm air up in a northwesterly direction, probably not by as
much as Britain and Norway would.
>>>If the cold line moves south the equator is going to get even hotter?
>
>>That's right.
>
>Interesting thought. Supposing this is correct, how MUCH hotter?
We don't know.
>>>And frankly, I don't give a damn how many times it's been pointed that "global
>>>warming does NOT mean that every spot on Earth gets warmer", that's just proof
>>>by repeated assertion!
>
>>And the study we're talking about now says the same thing.
>
>As my old writing teacher used to say, "telling" is not "showing".
The study specified, in detail, a mechanism. However, try the following
demonstration. Take a long strip of metal. Put an ice cube on one end of it.
Hold a match under the other end. Chances are that the average temperature of
the strip of metal will change. But one end got hotter and the other end got
colder.
>>>THIS study is implying an Ice Age, others are telling me Venus.
>
>>This study is implying that a certain area may get colder. It's not implying
>>any global ice age.
>
>I dunno, with Britain and the temperate zones under heavy snow or ice, the
>difference may be one of those academic questions.
HOLD ON THERE. Where did you come up with the gratuitous "and the temperate
zones"? Britains climate is considerably warmer than that of most other places
at the same latitude. It's kept warm by the Gulf Stream. The press release
described a mechanism by which the unusually warm climate of Britain could be
brought down to a more normal climate for that latitude. Where does this "and
the temperate zones" come from?
David Halliwell
>Hmmmmmm. In many of my postings to this group I must plead guilty to being
>"deliberately obtuse". There are so many things that so many people take for
>granted here that I find myself trying to pick arguments just to get people
>to reconsider their positions, to make them think about what they say and
>dried assertions. It was cut-and-dried assertions about the viability of cars
>and even the concept of personal transportation, smugly crossposted to
>rec.autos, that brought me here.
>
>I can read books, and have, and I have, I think, a pretty fair idea of the
>global issues involved. I came to this group with three axes to grind. First,
>to rock the boats of those people who seem to be committed to the idea that
>solutions to environmental problems must, of necessity, reduce or eliminate
>individual liberties.
the scientific aspects in a reasonable manner, then come back to
SCI.environment or SCI.geo.meteorology.
> Second, to see if anyone can square the various
>conflicting assertions I've seen in my reading regarding the effect of human
>changes on the environment.
various assertions that you have read about and what you don't like
about them, and ask questions! When you post misconceptions and call
them "uncontrovertible facts" in an attempt to badger people with a
particular viewpoint, you are likely to shut off discussion with the
people on this group that actually understand the concepts well enough
to explain them to you and resolve your conflict. You catch more flies
with honey than with vinegar.
> Third, to make the authors of those smug cross-
>posts justify their positions, to me, in detail. Not to fob me off with
>lectures about how little I know, or to give me references to works, many of
>which I've already read. Few of those scientists have advocated such extreme
>social agendas, people in this group have. I am less interested in the
>science (except insofar as #2) than I am in questioning the conclusions
>implicit in the social engineering agenda.
part, you are just another bug on the windshield of life. I do need to
justify my existence to my employers, though. They expect me to do two
things in my job:
- perform research in climatology.
- teach and evaluate students in the subject of climatology.
I initially started responding to this thread with the hope that
you would learn something about climatology. I _do_ enjoy seeing someone
increase their knowledge base with my asistance. "Satisfaction is job#1."
Now that you have admitted you only have a minor interest in learning,
I'll give you your mark and let you go away. You got an "F", Larry.
I will only continue in this thread for one of three reasons:
- I see people that are genuinely interested in learning, and feel
that I have something to contribute.
- I see something that will help me learn and I need further
clarification.
- I see Larry saying something stupid again and feel the need
to point out to others that he doesn't know what he is talking
about, so they won't think that his rantings are "state-of-the-art"
knowledge of climatology.
<enter final exam mode>
Dave Halliwell | "So once you know what the question
Department of Geography | actually is, you'll know what the
University of Alberta | answer means"
Edmonton, Alberta. | - Douglas Adams
Larry Smith
> Then take it to talk.environment. If you actually want to discuss
>the scientific aspects in a reasonable manner, then come back to
>SCI.environment or SCI.geo.meteorology.
Did you give this sage advice to the ecolunies and their social engineering
projects, or is that SCIence?
> I don't need to justify my position to you at all. For the most
>part, you are just another bug on the windshield of life. I do need to
>justify my existence to my employers, though. They expect me to do two
>things in my job:
I've been considering your posts, and I've been considering what to do. I came
to this group following one of those smug crossposts I referred to earlier, and
my earliest posts questioned the social agenda, with the intent to get some in-
terest going regarding some practical alternatives. But the very first post I
found in this group was a ferocious attack on not only the idea and implement-
ation of personal mobility - that, at least is an arguable subject - but on
a fundamental right people have of being able to live where they like. It
advocated a program to export the costs of cities to surrounding suburbs, other
posts advocated confiscatory gas taxes, and many even less savory alternatives.
All of them presumed from tone and by outright accusation, that because I
disagreed with the agenda, "obviously" I must think there is no problem. Making
a virtue of necessity, I tried to get these social engineers to justify the
problem again, hoping that by taking the discussion back to its roots some
common ground could be obtained.
As Carl noted earlier, my attempts have not been notably successful. Rather
than finding common ground with the extremists, I find myself, to a large
extent, arguing with scientists who really know some of this stuff. That was
not my intent, it's isn't fun and I'm doomed to loose.
But, being the stubborn fellow that I am, I'll try another tack, and maybe
get some "constructive" (TM - Alan M.) discussion going.
As far as the CO2 issue goes, it's clear the amount already added to the
atmosphere will cause major climactic changes, and that furthermore these
changes are probably non-optimal for human beings. Clearly, reducing the
amount of CO2 being added to the atmosphere is the first step. Once that
is accomplished, further studies will tell us how far we want to roll back.
Having rolled back, some fancy footwork between gov't, academe, and industry
will result in policies to maintain the most desirable level. I leave that
at the handwaving point as I doubt we'll reach that in my lifetime, anyway,
but the first steps must be laid now.
I have little faith in major social changes to accomplish this. The gov't,
particularly the US gov't, is not especially good at getting people's
fundamental attitudes or desires to change to any great degree. It is, in
fact, very responsive to special interest lobbying, and is frequently at odds
with the majority of the electorate, even when the electorate is environ-
mentally correct. Nevertheless, it has assumed most of the power and right
to regulate many of the things which need to be controlled, the problem can-
not be solved in principle without the gov't. But it remains a slow and
creaky tool, and must be treated as the cantankerous device it really is.
Giving it additional power will not make it significantly faster or less
creaky, it will merely remove many of the safeties - an especially important
concern for the environmentally aware. As we have discovered much to our
sorrow, much of the regulatory power given the gov't in the environmentally-
conscious years of the Carter Administration has now been largely turned to
undesirable ends under Reagan and Bush. It is not wise to give a friend a
gun if his entire personality may change for the worse in eight years.
Given the foregoing, the gov't should be used as sparingly as possible, and
in roles where it has demonstrated success in years past. All reasonable
means of reducing CO2 emissions should be explored so long as they do not
threaten to bankrupt the economy. Aside from the human costs involved in
such economic damage stands the pragmatic reality that such bankruptcy will
inevitably end any attempt at controlling CO2. I therefore suggest the
following for discussion:
1. The gov't should protect existing forests and require better long-term
management of existing lumbering regions. This will push up the price
of wood, and make recycling paper more desirable and more economic.
The resulting damage to housing industry should be addressed with
significant tax breaks for houses that use as little wood or wood
products as possible.
2. The gov't should provide significant tax breaks for major replanting -
parks, green strips, etc. Entirely too many malls have these enormous
expanses of parking lots unrelieved by the tiniest shred of greenery.
Any area now lying fallow that had previously had forest or other such
environment should be agressively replanted.
3. Symbolic gestures like electric cars, absent any commitment to pollution-
free infrastructure, is stupid and pointless. Worse, it wastes time,
resources and money better spent on the real problems. Electric cars,
in particular, will not be viable until the US commits to nuclear power.
4. The only non-CO2-producing technology currently available and compatible
with existing power distribution networks is nuclear power. Clean on-site
power like solar is dealt with below, this item refers to centralized
power production. The US must remove nuclear power from the current
litigation-driven regulations. Public review and careful monitoring must
remain but stumbling-block tactics increase the price of the power without
changing the final outcome. Once the price of nuclear power is brought
down and older coal plants are decommissioned CO2 will drop not only
because of less coal being burned, but because electric cars will become
practical.
5. Extensive and generous tax breaks must be enacted for anyone who reduces
CO2 emissions, by whatever means (solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, whatever)
that reduces reliance on central power. These breaks MUST more than off-
set the rate hikes that invariably follow when power is conserved. Power
utilities must be put on notice that theirs is a shrinking industry, and
that profits have already peaked. This will make it more difficult for
them to issue bonds or attract investors, but this industry is more
expendable than is the auto industry - especially since it is shrinkage,
not elimination.
6. The gov't must commit to a long term plan to eliminate reliance on non-
renewable fuels. The only real alternative to fossil fuels that is as
practical as fossil fuels and which is compatible with existing technology
to use fossil fuels is alcohol. It has already been proven as a fuel, we
don't need more symbolic "demonstrations" like the California M85 project.
Availability must be mandated and use required in new vehicles exactly the
way it was done for the switch to unleaded gasoline. This program MUST be
combined with projects to set up renewable alcohol production from biomass.
Virtually all methanol made in this country is from natural gas, clearly
this must stop.
7. Cars must get smaller and lighter, and they cannot do so at the present
time because of prescriptive laws regarding safety, emissions, etc. The
gov't must switch to a descriptive form of laws, such as stating safety as
a statistic rather than simply requiring an air bag, for example. We
must also reject the "deep pockets" theory of liability as the moral,
ethical, legal, and practical quagmire it is, and return to the original
standards. This will require significant action from Congress, which must
take this power away from the courts, which have assumed it for their own
purposes. Once this is done, cars can cease to be made of metal, and can
become smaller and lighter.
8. Smaller cars cannot share the road with ever-increasing truck sizes, and
trucks themselves contribute not only to pollution and CO2 directly, but
to the high costs of highway maintenance. The current system simply was
not designed to take today's trucks, it has degenerated further and far
more rapidly than was anticipated because of trucks, and the rebuilding
is proving to be incredibly costly because of new engineering specs for
roadbeds and bridges to accomodate trucks. The gov't must institute a
graduated plan to increase taxes on trucks with the stated intention of
eliminating all trucks over some small limits - perhaps as little as 1 or
2 tons of payload. This should force goods transport, which does not
require point-to-point transport in one vehicle anyway, to rail, where it
belongs. This will make highways cheaper to rebuild and will enable to
last longer with less maintenance, as well as reducing traffic an making
the existing road system more useful. It will also turn rail back into
a profitable industry, and rail is more efficient at cargo hauling than
trucks are, anyway. This will require Congress to show enough backbone
to tell the Teamsters they're going to be railroad men before they retire.
It will also tend to concentrate goods distribution - malls that cannot
gain access to a rail right-of-way will perish, others will spring up.
It will encourage larger malls, stores, etc. but they will be more con-
entrated (which should make Mike Tobis happy).
9. The gov't should encourage almost all other forms of transport except
energy intensive or unneeded transport. To me, this means a formalized
trail system for bikes and other HPV's and tiny-motor vehicles like
mopeds, light motorcycles and (where and when practical) snowmobiles,
all of which are more efficient than cars, etc. Business travel, most
of it by air, should be discouraged, especially air travel, which should
be taxed heavily. The proceeds of that tax should encourage expansion
of the national communication networks, permitting virtual commuting,
presentations, etc. This idea will drastically downsize the airline
industry, but the advantages are well worth the cost and, again, this
industry is more expendable than cars IF the alternatives are available.
None of this requires major social engineering, though the costs and effort
involved will spread throughout the country. Only three industries will be
significantly affected and of those only one - a far smaller one than the
auto industry - will be eliminated. Aside from standing up to special in-
trests it requires nothing Congress hasn't done already, nor does it require
any erosion of individual liberty.
With central power coming from nuclear and other clean sources, with decentral-
ized power and heat from solar, etc. and with cars using fuel whose carbon is
removed directly from the atmosphere, we should be able to reach 0-increase
in 20 years. The increasing plant biomass program will then be able to turn
the rate negative, albeit at a much slower rate than increase that preceded it.
In 100 years our great-grandchildren would have to deal with the problem of
balancing CO2 production to maintain the climate at the desired level, but that
will give Carl and his friends time to perfect their models of the climate.
I expect I'll catch hell for this, but what the heck, I've got my flameproof
Doctor Dentons on.
Giles Morris
>I think we flatter ourselves we know so much or have so much power. This
>study confirms my opinion (again) that we really have no clue what will happen,
>and that major and drastic action either way would be as likely to magnify the
>effects as minimize them.
You make the point well. We have been causing major & dramatic action, and
continue to do so. Would it not make sense to (at the very least) lessen the
rate of increase of that action? You are equating allowing things to continue
as they are with a lack of "major and dramatic action" when the reverse is true.
Giles Morris ...uunet!viusys!gilesm
Giles Morris
>You need a bit of exercise, Michael. You need to learn that people can
>disagree with you and not be evil, that they can agree with your goal and
>not with your methods, that they can think you might be right but want to
>see some proof and explanation anyway. It's time for YOU to come down off
>your high horse and start justifying some of YOUR positions.
I've been wondering about this theme for a while, and I think that Larry is
performing a useful function in this. In fact I have to wonder whether it
might even be deliberate - it's hard to imagine anyone being this irrational
accidentally. But the population in general _is_ as stubborn, half-informed
paranoid, loth to change etc. as the best that Larry has to offer. The concept
of the "red team" is used successfully in business and in military planning,
and could work well for the environmental movement. Perhaps we need more LSs.
>I *do* have an axe to grind. I want to see YOU
>justify your position, I want you to prove to MY satisfaction that the dire
>social requirements you advocate to address these problems are really needed.
We tend to forget that there are many people whose thinking is _not_ changed
when a point is proved. For example, I might find a study from a respected
organization that shows smoking is harmful. QED? No, Larry will say that he
doesn't trust that organization because it is biased and deliberately lied - he
will only accept information from the NHTSA under its current director. Well,
there are a lot of people out there who react in the same way, and I am glad to
have been reminded of that.
Things are moving, slowly, but it takes a lot to change that huge mass of
people who will not be convinced because they do not want to be convinced.
Giles Morris ...uunet!viusys!gilesm
Larry Smith
>You make the point well. We have been causing major & dramatic action, and
>continue to do so. Would it not make sense to (at the very least) lessen the
>rate of increase of that action? You are equating allowing things to continue
>as they are with a lack of "major and dramatic action" when the reverse is true.
I do more than support lessening the rate of increase, I advocate 0-rate
increase, even allowing for reduction, and I think it's possible without
major social engineering, with no more power than the gov't has already.
Please see my "What Can we Do Now?" post for more details.
Larry Smith
>I've been wondering about this theme for a while, and I think that Larry is
>performing a useful function in this. In fact I have to wonder whether it
>might even be deliberate - it's hard to imagine anyone being this irrational
>accidentally. But the population in general _is_ as stubborn, half-informed
>paranoid, loth to change etc. as the best that Larry has to offer. The concept
>of the "red team" is used successfully in business and in military planning,
>and could work well for the environmental movement. Perhaps we need more LSs.
<chuckle> Well, I'll settle for that. In any event, the idea seemed worth a
try, but I'm trying something more positive at this point.
>>I *do* have an axe to grind. I want to see YOU
>>justify your position, I want you to prove to MY satisfaction that the dire
>>social requirements you advocate to address these problems are really needed.
>We tend to forget that there are many people whose thinking is _not_ changed
>when a point is proved. For example, I might find a study from a respected
>organization that shows smoking is harmful. QED? No, Larry will say that he
>doesn't trust that organization because it is biased and deliberately lied - he
>will only accept information from the NHTSA under its current director. Well,
>there are a lot of people out there who react in the same way, and I am glad to
>have been reminded of that.
And please further realize this is a very important factor in any cost-benefit
analysis. We can't ban cigarettes, people won't stand for it - but we can ban
them in public places, we can tax them, etc. and people will stand for that.
We can also try to redirect behaviour - encourage gum-chewing or whatever.
Social engineering, in any form, strives against this barrier, technology, and
the use of existing societal machinery does not.
>Things are moving, slowly, but it takes a lot to change that huge mass of
>people who will not be convinced because they do not want to be convinced.
If circumstances are as dire as you say, we cannot afford the time. Best we
work for the half a loaf, that, at least, is worth something in the interim.
If we get some discussion going on the "What Do We Do Now?" thread, I expect
opportunities to introduce arcologies, move major portions of the population,
etc, will present themselves - in a NON-coercive fashion.
Carl J Lydick
> CO2 emissions, by whatever means (solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, whatever)
> that reduces reliance on central power.
This might better accomplished by including CO2 in the proposed tradeable
pollution permits scheme.
> These breaks MUST more than off-
> set the rate hikes that invariably follow when power is conserved. Power
> utilities must be put on notice that theirs is a shrinking industry, and
> that profits have already peaked.
Given the ubiquity of rate-of-return regulation of power utilities in this
country, this condition isn't necessary. If tradeable permits to produce CO2
were implemented, there would be a point where the cost of buying and holding
the CO2 permits would exceed the regulated rate of return on the contribution
of the CO2-producing power plant to the rate base. At that point, the utility
would have an incentive to retire the plant.
>6. The gov't must commit to a long term plan to eliminate reliance on non-
> renewable fuels.
Again, this doesn't follow. Once you've internalized the external costs of
producing CO2 (e.g., by tradeable CO2 permits), you don't need government
intervention to reduce the dependence on the fossil fuels: the economic
incentive will be in place.
> Availability must be mandated and use required in new vehicles exactly the
> way it was done for the switch to unleaded gasoline.
If it makes economic sense to sell and use the fuel, it will be sold and used.
We don't need government intervention in the form of "mandates." For example,
the government regulations intended to reduce photochemical smog ended up
placing more restrictions on hydrocarbon emissions than on NOx, when in many
cases, NOx reduction would've been a better way to go.
>7. Cars must get smaller and lighter, and they cannot do so at the present
> time because of prescriptive laws regarding safety, emissions, etc.
But you're advocating exactly the same sort of laws for reducing dependence on
fossil fuels. Such laws nearly always have unforseen and undesirable
side-effects.
> The gov't must institute a
> graduated plan to increase taxes on trucks with the stated intention of
> eliminating all trucks over some small limits - perhaps as little as 1 or
> 2 tons of payload. This should force goods transport, which does not
> require point-to-point transport in one vehicle anyway, to rail, where it
> belongs. This will make highways cheaper to rebuild and will enable to
> last longer with less maintenance, as well as reducing traffic an making
> the existing road system more useful.
If it does this, then it will also require a fairly massive increase in the
number of rail lines. There comes a point where it doesn't make sense to have
a (relatively seldom-used) rail line that duplicates the route of an existing
highway.
> It will also turn rail back into
> a profitable industry, and rail is more efficient at cargo hauling than
> trucks are, anyway.
Not universally. There's some break-even amount of cargo per trip. With less
cargo, trucks are more efficient.
> Business travel, most
> of it by air, should be discouraged, especially air travel, which should
> be taxed heavily.
Again, if the external costs are internalized, there's no reason for a surtax
on any mode of travel.
David Halliwell
Sigh! Just one last fix before I go....
In article <42...@balrog.ctron.com> sm...@ctron.com writes:
> If at any
>point the snow from the year just past doesn't have time to melt before the
>next years snow arrives, that's an Ice Age, by DEFINITION.
any point on the globe has snow throughout the summer, then the entire
globe is in an ice age, or just that local point is in an ice age?
If you mean the entire globe is in an ice age, then we are in one
now. (Of course, you stated last week that it was an INCONTROVERTIBLE
FACT that the world was supposed to have gone into an ice age 10,000
years ago. Fact confirmed?) Of course, that *is* one valid definition
of "ice age", but Larry probably didn't read the recent postings on
the meanings of "ice age", "glacial", and "interglacial". I can't
remember if it was in sci.environment, sci.geo.geology, or
sci.geo.meteorology.
If you mean only that local point is in an ice age, then we must
have thousands of ice-age climates existing on a local scale in the
north of Canada, where small patches of prennial snow at the base of
north-facing slopes are rather common. Of course, these ice ages would
be surrounded by vast areas of non-ice-age climates, where the local
topography doesn't favour retention of snow. Interesting concept: an
ice age all my own, in an area as small as my back yard.
Larry Smith
<in response to my>
>>6. The gov't must commit to a long term plan to eliminate reliance on non-
>> renewable fuels.
>Again, this doesn't follow. Once you've internalized the external costs of
>producing CO2 (e.g., by tradeable CO2 permits), you don't need government
>intervention to reduce the dependence on the fossil fuels: the economic
>incentive will be in place.
>> Availability must be mandated and use required in new vehicles exactly the
>> way it was done for the switch to unleaded gasoline.
>If it makes economic sense to sell and use the fuel, it will be sold and used.
I agree with this assessment, but I point out the inevitable chicken and egg
problem with new fuels. Your scheme, while workable for powerplants and the
like, doesn't address this for cars - no one wants to sell alcohol if no cars
use it, and no cars will use it until someone sells it. All the gov't really
has to do is get the ball rolling to break the impasse, just like the switch
from leaded to unleaded.
>We don't need government intervention in the form of "mandates." For example,
>the government regulations intended to reduce photochemical smog ended up
>placing more restrictions on hydrocarbon emissions than on NOx, when in many
>cases, NOx reduction would've been a better way to go.
Ye, Gods, my own Libertarian stuff shot back at me! Yes, it's a flawed tool,
but I think the ball can't roll until the gov't starts it.
One way I *do* see it working is if there is a really considerable advantage
to the new fuel in a relatively short term. I frankly don't know how cheap
alcohol could be made, but if it cost, say, 25 cents a gallon and alcohol-
cars were exempt from taxes for the first five or ten years, then I could see
purely economic motives successfully transiting to it. But if alcohol winds
up costing a buck a gallon plus forty cents tax and the development costs of
the first alcohol cars put them into the $30,000 special luxury tax and so on,
no, I don't think it'll happen. Too much short-term benefit not to switch.
>>7. Cars must get smaller and lighter, and they cannot do so at the present
>> time because of prescriptive laws regarding safety, emissions, etc.
>But you're advocating exactly the same sort of laws for reducing dependence on
>fossil fuels. Such laws nearly always have unforseen and undesirable
>side-effects.
In this particular circumstance, better the devil we DON'T know, than the one
we do. Virtually all the major car manufactures in the US have experimented
with carbon fiber and other exotic ultralight material, and all of them have
indicated that they can't use it for fear of liability lawsuits. I suspect
they mean the cost of liability plus the cost of development plus the cost of
the new material makes the cars uneconomic. Of course, if they sell ultra-
lights in Europe for ten years, it makes a big difference, and that's why the
US got anti-lock brakes so many years after European cars had them.
>> The gov't must institute a
>> graduated plan to increase taxes on trucks with the stated intention of
>> eliminating all trucks over some small limits - perhaps as little as 1 or
>> 2 tons of payload. This should force goods transport, which does not
>> require point-to-point transport in one vehicle anyway, to rail, where it
>> belongs. This will make highways cheaper to rebuild and will enable to
>> last longer with less maintenance, as well as reducing traffic an making
>> the existing road system more useful.
>If it does this, then it will also require a fairly massive increase in the
>number of rail lines. There comes a point where it doesn't make sense to have
>a (relatively seldom-used) rail line that duplicates the route of an existing
>highway.
Been thinking about that. Consider this: SOME of the existing highway system
is DEDICATED to trucks, redesigned and rebuilt for trucks if needed, and
intended to supplement and feed to major rail arteries. Such highways would
not allow small vehicles, and the rest of the highways would not allow larger
ones. Ever. In your hypothetical case above, that road might be designated
a truck road, and if car access were really need in addition, you'd put down
some jersey barriers or whatever, like the dopey "carpool" lanes we already
have. Cars on one side, trucks on the other.
>> It will also turn rail back into
>> a profitable industry, and rail is more efficient at cargo hauling than
>> trucks are, anyway.
>Not universally. There's some break-even amount of cargo per trip. With less
>cargo, trucks are more efficient.
This is so, but I see no reason why smaller trains can't run, either. I also
suspect the break-even is also dependant on distance, cargo going cross-town
versus cross-country, and so forth. Feeder lines, as outlined above, would
help this, too.
>> Business travel, most
>> of it by air, should be discouraged, especially air travel, which should
>> be taxed heavily.
>Again, if the external costs are internalized, there's no reason for a surtax
>on any mode of travel.
The form of the tax matters little to me, but in this (for me, rare) case I
think a specific tax is called for. Businesses are less sensitive to price
than individuals and "business men" indulge in a very great deal of unneeded
travel - a staggering amount, really. Even today, conference calls, remote
teleconferencing, and so forth are underused. There is a lot of inertia
there.
Carl J Lydick
>>> graduated plan to increase taxes on trucks with the stated intention of
>>> eliminating all trucks over some small limits - perhaps as little as 1 or
>>> 2 tons of payload. This should force goods transport, which does not
>>> require point-to-point transport in one vehicle anyway, to rail, where it
>>> belongs. This will make highways cheaper to rebuild and will enable to
>>> last longer with less maintenance, as well as reducing traffic an making
>>> the existing road system more useful.
>
>>If it does this, then it will also require a fairly massive increase in the
>>number of rail lines. There comes a point where it doesn't make sense to have
>>a (relatively seldom-used) rail line that duplicates the route of an existing
>>highway.
>
>Been thinking about that. Consider this: SOME of the existing highway system
>is DEDICATED to trucks, redesigned and rebuilt for trucks if needed, and
>intended to supplement and feed to major rail arteries.
We've got something akin to that in California already. Trucks are restricted
to the two rightmost lanes of any freeway, and are prohibited entirely on some
freeways. While the two right-hand lanes on freeways are not DEDICATED to
trucks, the conditions in which automobile drivers will want to use these lanes
are those under which major accidents are relatively unlikely (it's hard to get
injured severely when traffic's moving at 5 mph :-). Of course, there's still
the problem of getting on and off the freeway, and one problem with California
freeways that I think makes the freeway traffic problems worse than they need
to be is that they have too many exit and entrance ramps.
>This is so, but I see no reason why smaller trains can't run, either. I also
>suspect the break-even is also dependant on distance, cargo going cross-town
>versus cross-country, and so forth. Feeder lines, as outlined above, would
>help this, too.
There's also the matter of increased flexibility of the highway system. It's
probably easier to schedule trucks such that they run without cargo less of the
time than would trains.
Larry Smith
>We've got something akin to that in California already. Trucks are restricted
>to the two rightmost lanes of any freeway, and are prohibited entirely on some
>freeways. While the two right-hand lanes on freeways are not DEDICATED to
Sounds like an existance proof to me! :D
>>This is so, but I see no reason why smaller trains can't run, either. I also
>>suspect the break-even is also dependant on distance, cargo going cross-town
>>versus cross-country, and so forth. Feeder lines, as outlined above, would
>>help this, too.
>There's also the matter of increased flexibility of the highway system. It's
>probably easier to schedule trucks such that they run without cargo less of the
>time than would trains.
Seems to me the question there is whether the increased flexibility is worth
the cost - whether in $, lives, CO2, or whatever.
A related idea is to simply torpedo the existing rail system and pave over the
roadbeds for use by heavy trucks - which would probably be dragging mucho
trailero just like a train anyway, if they didn't have to share with cars. But
then the question arises which industry can do the job better, and who has more
capital equipment it would be nice to salvage.
We can dicker over details, but I think the basic idea of splitting cargo and
personal transport is sound. No more trucks idling in traffic belching out
clouds of diesel exhaust, no more jacknifes on exit ramps, no more cars
mangled beyond recognition by encounters with trucks driven by caffinated
lunies, not to mention an end to the rail subsidies. I'd like to see some
study work done on it, but intuitively it seems much more efficient, particu-
larly after a few years when malls and other major outlets gets their own
spurs/feeder roads, etc.
But the biggest advantage is it removes one major safety objection to smaller
and lighter cars. This I know: I would never by a car that weighed 1000 lbs,
no matter HOW good its mileage or HOW good its CO2 emission if I knew the
first double-trailer truck was going to put me in a ditch!
Joel J. Hanes
>"deliberately obtuse". There are so many things that so many people take for
Obviously. If your posts had the saving grace of new information, or
cogent reasoning, they'd still be valuable, albeit irritating.
However, since you've amply demonstrated that you're clueless,
and openly admit that you're intentionally picking fights --
you're a waste of time.
/smith@ctron/a:j
---
Joel Hanes
Joel J. Hanes
It's known from pollen studies of lake deposits in Iowa that
Iowa, and by extension much of the Midwest, was too dry to grow
trees for at least two intervals since the Wisconsin glaciation
(i.e., within the last 10,000 years); during these intervals,
Iowa seems to have resembled eastern Colorado - dryland short-grass
prairie.
Now the foram-test study cited in the basenote offers evidence
that such climactic changes may occur relatively quickly --
that one day it may just stop raining in Iowa, and not rain
for a long time, until all the trees are dead.
So, who cares if there's trees in Iowa? We all should.
Humans have wonderful technology today, but we all eat, and
essentially all our food comes from agriculture. With only
few and short-lived exceptions, the incredibly productive
agriculture that feeds North Americans depends on adequate
annual precipitation, and even five years of drought provokes
considerable difficulty. California's production depends on
Sierra snowpack, and rainfall in the Feather River country;
in Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Kansas,
irrigation is rare -- if it doesn't rain enough, crops fail.
Our food reserves are not high -- (interestingly, the Federal
government surplus traditionally distributed to schools and
the needy is exhausted at present) -- and a decade
of serious crop failure would provoke economic and social
change on a scale that I, at least, prefer not to experience.
Note that very little grain farming is conducted on the dryland
short-grass prairies of the western Dakotas, western Nebraska,
eastern Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. Settlers tried to
farm these regions, and failed. True, vast aquifers exist,
and are tapped in some places, but they are insufficient to
support our agricultural base even if fully and agressively
exploited -- and such exploitation is a temporary solution,
since the recharge time is measured in millenia.
So: we have evidence for relatively sudden climate changes in
the recent past, and such a change occuring now would wreck
the productivity of US agriculture. So what?
In the US, the Dust Bowl was a minor foretaste of what
such a climactic excursion can mean -- it was one of the
forces that toppled an over-leveraged economy into the
Great Depression. (I'm no economist, but I think I understand
that the national economy is once again highly-leveraged, with
the banking system fragile, and many debt-burdened businesses
absolutely dependent on maintaining their cash flow for
continued survival.)
The high ratio of city-dwellers to farmers that has arisen
the world over is another kind of leveraging. Most of us
can't and don't feed ourselves by our own efforts -- we
rely on highly-productive specialists to produce for us,
and an elaborate infrastruture to bring it to a store near us.
If those specialists fail, or are even significantly interrrupted,
cities become untenable. Bread riots are an urban phenomenon.
Civilization depends on, and is a product of agriculture. No
cities existed before the invention of agriculture; my
Random House atlas points out that every city shown on the map
implies the existence of sufficient productive fields nearby
to feed its inhabitants. "Nearby" is relative -- before
1700, it meant "within fifty miles"; after the proliferation
of railroads and grain elevators, it came to mean "on the same
continent". In the nineteenth century, with the rise of
huge grain-carrying cargo ships, grain became a worldwide
commodity -- but that was the last technological innovation in
grain transport. Food is fantastically bulky and heavy -- the
corn from a single moderately-productive 100-acre Iowa field
(150 bu/acre -- 15,000 bu) weighs on the order of a million pounds,
and needs more than ten rail cars to get it to market.
Surprisingly, trucks are little used for grain tranport, because
of grain's high weight and low value; planes aren't even considered.
It would be an interesting effort to compute the number of semi-trailer
truck miles involved in moving the US grain harvest from local
elevator to barge terminus. Yes, barges -- grain is too bulky
for even railroads to carry if any other means is available.
To get to the point -- What impacts will people suffer if a
short-onset climate fluctuation happens and lasts for a
couple decades or a century? In the past, changes on this
scale have meant economic dislocation, social dislocation,
ill-considered changes in government, and the breakdown of
whole societies. Of course, it could never happen to us ...
still, I'm extremely unwilling to see my invested life savings
evaporate in a string of bank failures, or the return of
the Dust Bowl on a larger scale, or widespread business failure
and structural unemployment.
It seems to me that those who glibly say "eco-systems must be
resilient enough" are suffering from a failure of imagination,
an apparent inability to believe that _their_ lives will be
seriously affected by climate change. Perhaps they are young.
Ecosystems may be resilient, but human lives, institutions, and
cultures are not, particularly. Shit happens.
---
Joel Hanes
Larry Smith
>In article <42...@balrog.ctron.com> sm...@ctron.com writes:
>> ... In many of my postings to this group I must plead guilty to being
>>"deliberately obtuse". There are so many things that so many people take for
>>granted here that I find myself trying to pick arguments ...
>you're a waste of time.
Joel, go find your significant other and get a hug.
David Halliwell
In <42...@balrog.ctron.com> sm...@ctron.com (Larry Smith) writes:
>In article <1992Jun10....@meteor.wisc.edu>, to...@meteor.wisc.edu (Michael Tobis) writes:
>
>>Larry Smith seems capable of generating more confusion and misinformation
>>about the atmosphere that I have time or patience to respond to and yet
>>it is very difficult to let his ramblings go unanswered. I would urge
>>everyone to take all his doubts with a grain of salt. I urge Larry to
>>actually try to learn some of the basics before he criticizes the science.
>
>Larry Smith is reasonably well-informed professional who is not given to
>parroting lines given to him by environmental extremists with a social
>engineering agenda. I would urge everyone to take *everything* in this
>group with a grain of salt, mine, yours, Alan's, Michael Vandeman's, and
>everyone elses, and let each one use his own brain.
>
In my humble opinion, as a person who's job it is (in part) to
assess the climate knowledge of several hundred students per year, Larry
Smith is rather poorly informed in the subjects of meteorology and
climatology, and has spent most of the last couple of weeks parrotting
the lines given to him by anti-environmental extremists rebelling against
environmentalists. Larry's extremism has done little to foster useful
debate in this group. Instead, he has alienated knowledgable scientists
and enflamed the people he seems to be most upset about.
Of course, there are likely areas in which Larry is quite competent,
but climatology is not one of them.
>As for learning the basics, I am, and I am continuing to. YOU might take
>the same advice - I'd suggest a good basic computer text to start, then
>a good intro into psychology.
To suggest that Michael Tobis - who has departed this group until he
has a working ocean circulation model - needs an introduction to basic
computing simply demonstrates Larry Smith's woefully inadequate
understanding of this area of science.
>Look, I'm happy to exchange views with you on policy and society and
>>objectives and so on, but I have no interest in debating atmospheric science
>>with someone who doesn't know any. I haven't the time to respond to every
>
>Then you have no right to bitch and complain when people disagree with you
>on policy and society because "they don't know any atmospheric science".
If the person is advocating a policy based on a misunderstanding of
atmospheric science, then Michael is perfectly correct in pointing out
that misunderstanding.
Dave Halliwell | "Learn from the mistakes of others;
Department of Geography | you'll not live long enough to make
University of Alberta | them all yourself..."
Edmonton, Alberta. | - Canada Aviation Safety Letter.
Jan Schloerer
ca...@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU (Carl J Lydick) writes :
> The Gulf Stream now goes quite far north, and as it does so, it brings
> warmth to places like Norway and Britain. At times in the past, the
> Gulf Stream turned east by the time it got as far north as Portugal.
> This means that it didn't bring warmth to Norway and Britain. If it
> should do this again, Britain and Portugal will get colder.
>
> As the Gulf Stream flows north, water evaporates. The concentration of
> salt in the water increases. The water becomes denser. At some point,
> it sinks, and forms another current, called the North Atlantic Deep
> Water, which flows south at the bottom of the ocean. If a source of
> fresh water is added to the north Atlantic, as it could be if some of
> the polar ice melts, the salinity will drop. This makes the water less
> dense. The transition from the Gulf Stream to the North Atlantic Deep
> Water might be impeded or forced further south. The Gulf Stream might
> no longer flow past Britain and Norway. Both of these countries are
> currently warmer than they would be without the Gulf Stream. If the
> Gulf Stream doesn't reach them, they'll get colder.
That's how the "Atlantic conveyor" can get shut down. Just how quickly
might that happen ? As noone seems to have addressed this, and as some
more, potentially badly hurt, Europeans might be listening (sigh, another
"last" post) ...
Lehman's work is referring to the Younger Dryas. The Younger Dryas,
named for the arctic Dryas flower, is a 1000-year or so cold-spell
centering around the Northern Atlantic. It's onset and the shutdown of
the conveyor seem to have occured about 11000 years ago. Why was the
onset so sudden ? Broecker and Denton (What drives glacial cycles ?
Sci.American 262,1,Jan.1990,42-50) think it was due to a sudden outflow
of enormous amounts of fresh water from the melting North American ice
sheet. The ice sheet started shrinking about 14000 years ago; at first
the meltwater from it's southern edge flowed down the Mississippi to
the Gulf of Mexico. A vast lake (Lake Agassiz, Southern Manitoba) had
formed in the bedrock depression at the edge of the retreating ice
sheet. When the retreat of the ice sheet opened a channel to the east,
the meltwater started to pour into the North Atlantic, flowing across
the region of the Great Lakes and down the St. Lawrence. The water
level of Lake Agassiz seems to have dropped by 40 meters. btw,
does anyone know whether this is generally accepted or whether other
(reasonable :-) explanations have been proposed ?
Today, where might the fresh water come from ? There is no Lake
Agassiz. The Greenland ice sheet seems unlikely to collapse terribly
fast - see the recent post by Bob Grumbine: "on the order of several
hundred years". Next, precipitation. Many of the general circulation
models seem to vote for increased precipitation in the high latitudes,
although they disagree somewhat on amount and locations [IPCC 1990,
Working Group I, chapter 5]; of course, they tell nothing about the
ocean. In 1990 there was one _very_ _preliminary_ result from a
coupled GCM [IPCC 90/I, chapter 6, experiment by Stouffer/Manabe],
assuming CO2 increasing 1 % per year for 70 (?) years - when the
results were extrapolated to perhaps 150 years, the Atlantic conveyor
might have come to a standstill.
If and when the Lehman study gets into the media hereabout, we'll get
our usual amount of scaremongering ("ice age by the year 2000") and
debunking ("just a theory"). Are there any more recent results ?
Any additional information ?
Thanks, Jan Schloerer
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Jan Schloerer Internet: schl...@rzmain.rz.uni-ulm.de
Klinische Dokumentation Univ. Ulm Schwabstr. 13
Postfach 3880 D-W-7900 Ulm Germany
Nick Szabo
>NSF Press Release
>NEW EVIDENCE INDICATES GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE MAY OCCUR SUDDENLY
>What one thinks depends. One thought is that human actions can have
>drastic effects, and therefore we should be careful not to do
>anything.
Not at all. The Press Release discussed a _natural_ temperature
change.
>A different thought is that this confirms that Nature
>doesn't love us, and we are likely to get zapped unless humanity gets
>control of the mechanisms that affect plantary temperature
>distributions.
A third interpretation gets to the heart of the "ecological impact"
matter. Temperature changes on the order of +/- 10C in a century are
quite natural, probably quite common over geological time, and life on
Earth has been and will be quite capable of adapting to such changes.
Global warming is in no sense a catastrophe or crisis for either life or
civilizaiton. There will likely be costs, as well as benefits, from
global warming and the greenhouse gases that cause it. We should use
the many years we have to learn about climate and build our technological
skills, instead of reacting hastily in a panicked mindset.
--
sz...@techbook.COM Public Access User --- Not affiliated with TECHbooks
Public Access UNIX and Internet at (503) 644-8135 (1200/2400, N81)
Larry Smith
>assess the climate knowledge of several hundred students per year, Larry
>Smith is rather poorly informed in the subjects of meteorology and
>climatology, and has spent most of the last couple of weeks parrotting
>the lines given to him by anti-environmental extremists rebelling against
>environmentalists. Larry's extremism has done little to foster useful
>debate in this group. Instead, he has alienated knowledgable scientists
>and enflamed the people he seems to be most upset about.
<chuckle> And you've been a big help, David.
I've never seen so many people so blind to a point. First, there ARE anti-
environmental extremists, and they need to be answered, and not one of them
- not ONE - would have changed his opinion from the feedback I've gotten.
A bigger bunch of sniveling "experts" I've never seen, you're all loaded
with opinions but you can't justify them to anyone who isn't a "knowledgable
scientist". Pretty sad, Dave. It's one reason why Bush wouldn't sign the
treaty at Rio, *I* know a hell of lot more about climate and weather than
George does, if you can't get someone with some knowledge and more than a
little sympathy to understand and agree with your points, I doubt you'll ever
get George to sign, on that or anything requiring hard environmental choices.
But I granted all that, and moved on to some suggestions about what could be
done, got some agreeing email and disagreement on a couple of minor points,
and then it all just trailed off...
My conclusions from this visit are these:
"Knowledgeable scientists" *are* environmental extremists. Opinions regarding
some incredibly draconian gov't intervention pass with little remark, but
contrary opinions get flames. No attempt to justify them in laymans terms,
just flames, lots of heat and no light. And certainly not even the faintest
idea of what Constitutional law is, or why it should be preserved even in the
face of environmental disaster. Yet when presented with an array of ideas
which would, indeed, address their concerns without hitting on their social
engineering hot buttons, I get quiet agreement, but no concern whatsoever for
implementation - from which I conclude that environmental issues are not the
real reason for this group, discussions about controlling human beings to some
new standard are what you're into.
> To suggest that Michael Tobis - who has departed this group until he
>has a working ocean circulation model - needs an introduction to basic
>computing simply demonstrates Larry Smith's woefully inadequate
>understanding of this area of science.
Really? Mike Tobis is right up there with Donald Knuth and others? He's an
expert in verification of computer programs? Knows all about QA? Just because
he can write a program proves nothing, I have a eight-year-old cousin can do
that, he's even done climate modelling. But let's grant him all that, let's
say his programs are perfect, superior in every respect - his politics are
still flawed and objectionable, and if he sees fit to post them to a SCI
newsgroup I see can see fit to object to them in a SCI newsgroup. His opinions
about suburbs and the like do not arise from his near-Godlike abilities with
computers, they arise from a flawed political analyses untempered with even
the lightest seasoning of the rights of individual human beings.
> If the person is advocating a policy based on a misunderstanding of
>atmospheric science, then Michael is perfectly correct in pointing out
>that misunderstanding.
He hasn't done that very well, and others haven't done it at all, but it's
become very clear to me these past few weeks that this group isn't about
science at all - I've seen almost no articles regarding esoterica of models,
no exchange of data, no posting of interim results for verifications, nothing
ABOUT science, really. But I've seen lots and lots of reactionary opinions
regarding what "must" be done about these conclusions from studies whose re-
ports in the media so mystify the taxpayers. The aim, I can see, is to raise
emotion without facts, for facts require too much explanation. What you are
calling for is, in fact, good little solders, who will scream and march, and
call their representatives and senators to get into law your *opinions* regard-
ing what to do about these conclusions they do not question. There is no
science in that, just snake oil and hucksterism, politicking in the grand old
tradition.
Bill Williams
anger for quite some time now, I'd like to add a final (for me) note:
Flaming to the contrary, I've found Tobin's and Halliwell's contributions
interesting, informative, and, given the provocations, remarkably cool (well,
most of the time anyway). I am not an atmospheric scientist, and I felt I came
away from T- and H-'s postings more informed than before.
It is true, however, that people with a particular set of beliefs rarely find
scientific explanations persuasive (even scientists often have this problem).
Usually, something more forceful and dramatic is required, such as a
particularly hot summer (for global warming), a demonstrable increase in death
rates for a particular group (smoking), or a highly publicized disaster
(Chernobyl), even when the occurence of these things is not generally accepted
by scientists as evidence for the theory being debated (the hot summer in the
US last year, of course, resulted in several quite public statements by
scientists that this was probably NOT a sign of global warming).
Human beings are clearly not such logical creatures as we sometimes would like
to think. Scientists, therefore, must become salespersons, as Smith pointed
out.
Nick Szabo
>If at any
>point the snow from the year just past doesn't have time to melt before the
>next years snow arrives, that's an Ice Age, by DEFINITION.
In climatologist's terms you may be refering to an "onset of glaciation".
"Ice age" refers to the entire glaciation/warming cycle.
The important point is that glaciation increases the reflectivity of
the Earth's surface in the optical, inducing a positive feedback loop
towards _global_ cooling. If global warming causes increased
snow (via new precipitation patterns and/or local northern cooling)
that warming might be offset by the increased reflectivity of the
growing glaciers. The temperature effects of greenhouse gases and
glaciation may form a negative feedback loop.
David Halliwell
>lliwell) writes:
>> In my humble opinion, as a person who's job it is (in part) to
>>assess the climate knowledge of several hundred students per year, Larry
>>Smith is rather poorly informed in the subjects of meteorology and
>>climatology, and has spent most of the last couple of weeks parrotting
>>the lines given to him by anti-environmental extremists rebelling against
>>environmentalists. Larry's extremism has done little to foster useful
>>debate in this group. Instead, he has alienated knowledgable scientists
>>and enflamed the people he seems to be most upset about.
>
><chuckle> And you've been a big help, David.
explain aspects of climate models that you clearly didn't understand.
You obviously didn't learn anything from it, but that isn't my fault.
You didn't listen to anything others were saying about it either.
>
>I've never seen so many people so blind to a point. First, there ARE anti-
>environmental extremists, and they need to be answered, and not one of them
>- not ONE - would have changed his opinion from the feedback I've gotten.
that you seem to be complaining about in the environmentalists. You may
not be anti-environment (in fact some of you posts indicate clearly that
you do have some "reasonable" opinions in the matter), but your method
of initially approaching the discussion made you *look* like an extremist.
You obviously haven't changed your opinion, either.
>A bigger bunch of sniveling "experts" I've never seen, you're all loaded
>with opinions but you can't justify them to anyone who isn't a "knowledgable
>scientist". Pretty sad, Dave.
climate models were unreliable because weather forecasting is unsuccessful
after a week or so. A number of us tried to explain the difference, but
none of it has sunk in. You are still as clueless as you were when you
arrived. The only responses you gave were still of the "models are sh*t"
for all the same reasons, without demonstrating that you had understood
a single word of what was said. I can't help someone who can't even
recognize what it is they don't understand.
> It's one reason why Bush wouldn't sign the
>treaty at Rio, *I* know a hell of lot more about climate and weather than
>George does, if you can't get someone with some knowledge and more than a
>little sympathy to understand and agree with your points, I doubt you'll ever
>get George to sign, on that or anything requiring hard environmental choices.
>
you know. Before you can learn any climatology or meteorology, you are
going to have to unlearn all your misconceptions. However, you adamantly
refuse to do this.
>But I granted all that, and moved on to some suggestions about what could be
>done, got some agreeing email and disagreement on a couple of minor points,
>and then it all just trailed off...
>
other hand, perhaps everyone has put you in your kill file or has learned
to hit "n" whenever they see your stuff. You've poisoned your bathwater.
>My conclusions from this visit are these:
>
>"Knowledgeable scientists" *are* environmental extremists. Opinions regarding
>some incredibly draconian gov't intervention pass with little remark, but
>contrary opinions get flames. No attempt to justify them in laymans terms,
>just flames, lots of heat and no light. And certainly not even the faintest
>idea of what Constitutional law is, or why it should be preserved even in the
>face of environmental disaster. Yet when presented with an array of ideas
>which would, indeed, address their concerns without hitting on their social
>engineering hot buttons, I get quiet agreement, but no concern whatsoever for
>implementation - from which I conclude that environmental issues are not the
>real reason for this group, discussions about controlling human beings to some
>new standard are what you're into.
>
discussion. As I said before, I generally restrict my postings to
climate and meteorology matters.
>> To suggest that Michael Tobis - who has departed this group until he
>>has a working ocean circulation model - needs an introduction to basic
>>computing simply demonstrates Larry Smith's woefully inadequate
>>understanding of this area of science.
>
>Really? Mike Tobis is right up there with Donald Knuth and others? He's an
>expert in verification of computer programs? Knows all about QA? Just because
>he can write a program proves nothing, I have a eight-year-old cousin can do
>that, he's even done climate modelling. But let's grant him all that, let's
>say his programs are perfect, superior in every respect - his politics are
>still flawed and objectionable, and if he sees fit to post them to a SCI
>newsgroup I see can see fit to object to them in a SCI newsgroup. His opinions
>about suburbs and the like do not arise from his near-Godlike abilities with
>computers, they arise from a flawed political analyses untempered with even
>the lightest seasoning of the rights of individual human beings.
>
would learn all of that from an *introductory* course in basic computing?
To quote Spock, "That is not logical". You are *so* inconsistent it scares
me, Larry.
>> If the person is advocating a policy based on a misunderstanding of
>>atmospheric science, then Michael is perfectly correct in pointing out
>>that misunderstanding.
>
>He hasn't done that very well, and others haven't done it at all, but it's
>become very clear to me these past few weeks that this group isn't about
>science at all - I've seen almost no articles regarding esoterica of models,
>no exchange of data, no posting of interim results for verifications, nothing
>ABOUT science, really. But I've seen lots and lots of reactionary opinions
>regarding what "must" be done about these conclusions from studies whose re-
>ports in the media so mystify the taxpayers. The aim, I can see, is to raise
>emotion without facts, for facts require too much explanation. What you are
>calling for is, in fact, good little solders, who will scream and march, and
>call their representatives and senators to get into law your *opinions* regard-
>ing what to do about these conclusions they do not question. There is no
>science in that, just snake oil and hucksterism, politicking in the grand old
>tradition.
the conclusions are based on. I don't need to accept any concusions
without question because I am capable of looking at the scientific
studies and making *my own* conclusions. If you really care about any
of this, you will try to learn enough that you can make some informed
conclusions on your own, as well, instead of just accepting without
question the particular snake oil you like...
Steve Jascourt
>A third interpretation gets to the heart of the "ecological impact"
>matter. Temperature changes on the order of +/- 10C in a century are
>quite natural, probably quite common over geological time, and life on
Alright, Nick, tell us when such changes have occurred, giving us the
reference you used, and what the effect was on ecosystems and biodiversity.
This seems incredulous (except for the cooling associated with the debris
from an asteroid collision or whatever wiped out the dinosaurs, and that had
major effects on ecosystems, effects of that magnitude would be catastrophic
to human society and infrastructure), but if you have information we don't
know about, please tell us.
>Earth has been and will be quite capable of adapting to such changes.
>--
>sz...@techbook.COM Public Access User --- Not affiliated with TECHbooks
Stephen Jascourt stv...@meteor.wisc.edu
Michael Tobis
>In <42...@balrog.ctron.com> sm...@ctron.com (Larry Smith) writes:
>
>>In article <RN....@mts.ucs.UAlberta.CA>, user...@mts.ucs.UAlberta.CA (David Ha
>>lliwell) writes:
>
>>> To suggest that Michael Tobis - who has departed this group until he
>>>has a working ocean circulation model - needs an introduction to basic
>>>computing simply demonstrates Larry Smith's woefully inadequate
>>>understanding of this area of science.
>>
>>Really? Mike Tobis is right up there with Donald Knuth and others? He's an
>>expert in verification of computer programs? Knows all about QA? Just because
>>he can write a program proves nothing, I have a eight-year-old cousin can do
>>that, he's even done climate modelling. But let's grant him all that, let's
>>say his programs are perfect, superior in every respect - his politics are
>>still flawed and objectionable, and if he sees fit to post them to a SCI
>>newsgroup I see can see fit to object to them in a SCI newsgroup. His opinions
>>about suburbs and the like do not arise from his near-Godlike abilities with
>>computers, they arise from a flawed political analyses untempered with even
>>the lightest seasoning of the rights of individual human beings.
Geez, can we leave my personal talents or lack of them out of this? That I
have an ambitious Ph.D. research topic neither demonstrates nor refutes the
hypothesis that I have some talent. Like my parents, you'll just have to
wait for me to prove the pudding.
I admit to having an unusually strong distaste for suburbs. In this I was
speaking for myself, as I tried to make very clear. In his tirade against that
posting, Larry claimed that anthropogenic warming was a "non-issue", and that
CO2 increases had stopped. In this matter, I am on firm scientific ground, and
I know for a fact that he is wrong. My political analysis may indeed be flawed
and I am open to be dissuaded, but I can't imagine Larry shedding any light on
the greenhouse effect for me.
(In fact, that was only a minor point in the
original exchange, and far from the only reason I advocate taxing suburbs to
support cities, my opinion which apparently is untempered by the lightest
seasoning of the rights of human beings. I reiterate, it has nothing at all
to do with the general opinion among climatologists. Larry is apparently
generalizing from a very small data set.)
Finally, I agree with Larry that progress needs to be made in applying the
results of formal software development theory to the somewhat primitive
state of geofluid modelling, although some progress is already evident.
(The new GFDL ocean code is much improved over the previous generation,
which was probably Dijkstra's worst nightmare, for instance.)
>>He hasn't done that very well, and others haven't done it at all, but it's
>>become very clear to me these past few weeks that this group isn't about
>>science at all
!! you are the first person to mention this !! :-)
>> - I've seen almost no articles regarding esoterica of models,
>>no exchange of data, no posting of interim results for verifications, nothing
>>ABOUT science, really. But I've seen lots and lots of reactionary opinions
>>regarding what "must" be done about these conclusions from studies whose re-
>>ports in the media so mystify the taxpayers. The aim, I can see, is to raise
>>emotion without facts, for facts require too much explanation. What you are
I made several postings on specifically scientific matters, and gave references,
as did others. For a balanced and hardly entirely confident appraisal, you
might look at _Greenhouse-Gas-Induced Climatic Change: A Critical Appraisal
of Simulations and Observations_, Elsevier, 1991, M.E.Schlesinger, ed.
You might, but my guess is you won't.
This is not the atmospheric science newsgroup, btw. This group is broad and
interdisciplinary. Discussing enstrophy conserving differencing schemes
here, for instance, would be entirely inappropriate. Is that the sort of
'esoterica' you had in mind?
mt
Nick Szabo
>Here's my prognosis for the broad historical outline of the next few
>decades, as they will be remembered by the far future...
Good, I'll cross-post comments to rec.arts.sf.science, and keep your
text intact from here on.
>==== BEGIN SCIENCE FICTION
>
>"The end of immediate prospects for massive nuclear exchanges around 1990
Nope. Both Russsia and U.S. have arsenals at near all-time highs, and the
arsenals of China and Europe keep growing.
>combined with increasing awareness of the huge impact humanity was having
>on the global environment. The first international conference on the
>environmnet, held in Rio de Janiero in 1992 was a turning point.
Actually, Rio reemphasized that development is more important than
environment for most countries.
>The USA, representing the world's largest market and economy, felt immune
>from external economic pressures, and found itself alone in maintaining
>an economy-centered view at the conference. This, while politically useful
>internally in a weak economy and a three-sided election, and also much
>(though quietly) appreciated by certain economic interests in Europe,
>profoundly
>weakened the global geopolitical position of the United States,
Environmental concerns continue to play practically no role in
geopolitical positions.
>driving the
>developing nations into a much closer connection with Western Europe,
These connections have much to do with economic dependencies, and
very little to do with environmental concerns, and that has not changed.
>as
>global attention shifted from nuclear to environmental security.
Ie, the new fad is the environment, and nuclear concerns have been
forgotten until the next crisis.
>Shortly thereafter, many of the rainforest nations, and notably and
>quite vigorously the Brazilians and Indonesians, made major efforts
>to stop the extensive burning of the rainforests.
Brazil's rate of deforestation has been declining since the
late 80's. It is not clear Rio will have any impact on deforestation.
>This period also coincided
>with the major volcanic eruption in the Philippines, Mt. Pinatubo, in 1991,
>and also with a period in which the greenhouse warming was just beginning
>to accelerate to alarming proportions. This acceleration had been largely
>masked by the volcanic eruption, and had also been considerably slowed
>by the smoke from the enormously extensive burning of the rain forests.
>The sudden lifting of these two masking phenomena around 1994,
>with the rapid background increases in radiative forcing, led to the
>Great Warming of the 90s.
Ahah! I've been waiting for someone to point out this is a consequence
of the current "popular myths" in climatology (to borrow Jon's term :-).
Barring further Pinatubos, we should have a very large upward spike in
temperature in '94. If that doesn't happen, we have a refutation of most
global warming models. Finally, we have theories that are _testable_!
>Agricultural failures were widespread, and
>sea surface rises which had once seemed hypothetical now appeared imminent.
>Extreme heat waves occurred in parts of America and China, causing much
>human suffering. Demands for action were heard worldwide.
Doom! Gloom! Head for the hills! :-)
>Suggestions for massive tree planting were widely implemented, but the
>impact of these measures was slight. Then some wags suggested reinstating
>the burning of the rainforest, and the possibility of massive deliberate
>dust releases entered the public awareness. Environmental purists were
>outraged, feeling that anthropogenic mitigation efforts were somehow as
>immoral as negative anthropogenic impacts. This position was inadvertently
>bolstered by some technophiles who claimed that economic activity should
>be untrammelled by environmental concerns, and that repairs to the damage
>could be implemented more efficiently and cost effectively than by limiting
>the activities in the first place. (Of course, time has proven both these
>positions to be drastically incorrect.)
This is the most muddelled tech extrapolation I've read in quite
a while.
>In fact, the economic so-called conservatives ended up being a larger
>impediment to the implementation of the Massive Dust Release Programme
>than the so-called greens, the latter group being neutralized by the
>support for dust releases by the majority of professional biologists and
>ecologists who felt that the pace of warming represented an immediate and
>profound threat to already highly stressed ecosystems worldwide. The
>so-called conservatives resisted the loss of national sovereignty to
>a worldwide institution that would be required to coordinate and regulate
>the emissions due to economic activity, and to allocate the required
>emissions to the appropriate geographic locations.
Well, that's entertaining. :-)
>Nevertheless, in 2005, with the enthusiastic participation of the North
>American Bloc, the World Organization of the Ocean and Atmosphere
>(WOOA) was formed, the first actually sovereign instrument of world
>government, with the participation of almost all countries.
Naturally, Michael Tobis is elected leader of this august body. :-)
>By 2019, the
>few minor holdouts had been pressured into participating, with Kazakhstan
>and Libya being the last to join.
Ah, that maketh sense (oil-rich countries, for those not up on their
geography).
>In subsequent decades, control over climate was improved with careful
>allocation of CO2 and dust emissions and sensitive salinity controls over
>ocean currents. Massive ecosystem loss continued for some time, but the
>climate control itself went well for about two centuries, until the source of
>carbon was depleted, and suddenly the world faced the prospect of Global
>Cooling, but that is a subject for a later chapter...
Unfortuneately, you failed to demonstrate your thesis, namely that
climate will have an important role in future history.
--
sz...@techbook.COM Public Access User --- Not affiliated with TECHbooks
Jonathan Foley
:In article <JMC.92Ju...@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> j...@cs.Stanford.EDU writes:
:
:>NSF Press Release
:
:>NEW EVIDENCE INDICATES GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE MAY OCCUR SUDDENLY
:
:>What one thinks depends. One thought is that human actions can have
:>drastic effects, and therefore we should be careful not to do
:>anything.
:
:Not at all. The Press Release discussed a _natural_ temperature
:change.
:
:>A different thought is that this confirms that Nature
:>doesn't love us, and we are likely to get zapped unless humanity gets
:>control of the mechanisms that affect plantary temperature
:>distributions.
:
:A third interpretation gets to the heart of the "ecological impact"
:matter. Temperature changes on the order of +/- 10C in a century are
:quite natural, probably quite common over geological time, and life on
:Earth has been and will be quite capable of adapting to such changes.
:Global warming is in no sense a catastrophe or crisis for either life or
:civilizaiton. There will likely be costs, as well as benefits, from
:global warming and the greenhouse gases that cause it. We should use
:the many years we have to learn about climate and build our technological
:skills, instead of reacting hastily in a panicked mindset.
:
Facts, please. You are stating that +/- 10C changes in global mean
temperatures occuring within a century or so is a 'natural...common'
event over geological time. This is not true. The event you are
using to back your arguement (the so-called 'Younger Dryas') was not
'common' and also was not seen globally.
Large changes in global climate have NEVER occured on these timescales.
(With the possible exception of asteroid or comet impacts). Ecosystems
cannot, on a large scale, respond to changes of this magnitude.
For example, suppose we DO change the global mean temperatures by +5C
within one century. You would suggest that the global ecosystems will
just pick up and move with the changes in climate. Hmmm. How? Seed
dispersal and soil development take some time. In fact, paleoecologists
and paleoclimatologists have devoted entire careers to the study of the
time-lag in the response of vegetation to large (and SLOW) changes in
global climate.
Your conconlusion is not based on fact. You seem to be using conjecture
as fact to support a conclusion you have already made.
:--
:sz...@techbook.COM Public Access User --- Not affiliated with TECHbooks
:Public Access UNIX and Internet at (503) 644-8135 (1200/2400, N81)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jon Foley | email: fo...@meteor.wisc.edu |
Center for Climatic Research and -------------------------------
Department of Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences |
University of Wisconsin ---------------------------------------
1225 West Dayton Street | These views are my own and do reflect |
Madison, WI 53706 - United States | those of the University of Wisconsin |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Larry Smith
>I will lecture you, slightly. Engaging extremists in such a way as to make it
>appear you know nothing of what you're talking about damages not only YOUR
>credibility, but the credibility of anybody who happens to agree with your
>concusions. It's always a bad idea to venture into a battle of wits unarmed.
Cute, but that doesn't wash, Carl. I tried to engage people as one of the
people they need to convince. I realize now that you don't think they need
convincing, so your opinion is irrelevent, it will never be implemented.
>>I tried a relatively mild tack in attacking apparent discrepancies in studies
>>as reported in the media.
>In that case, a better strategy would have been to write letters to the editors
>of the newspapers and/or television shows.
I do. I also post to the net.
>E.g., it should be a written version of a "sound bite." That just doesn't
>work.
Let me check something...yes, yes, your posting from CalTech. You're in the US,
the land that INVENTED the sound bite and raised to a high political art form,
and you don't think it works? It's devastating, it's one of the most effective
forms of communication yet devised. Just look how much damage Reagan managed
to do with it. Entire campaigns are waged with it. It works, Carl. You don't
have to like it, but if you ignore it your message will not travel.
>Some things can't be simplified below a certain level without leaving out
>important parts of them. And wishing it weren't so won't change it.
"Yes, you, too, can State The Obvious". It's true and utterly beside the
point. If you can't get it simple enough for voters, only the ones who'll
take it an faith, or the ones who can turn it to their own ends, will vote
for it.
>>As I hope has become more obvious since the "What Can We Do" post, I _do_
>>know enough about climate to believe most of this. But the voters do not,
>>if you try to treat them the way you treated me you will see more and more
>>media articles like the Washington Post. People do NOT want to be educated.
>If that's the case, then they're probably going to believe whoever can come up
>with the scariest scenario. That's why _National_Inquirer_ and
>_Weekly_World_News_ have such high circulations.
Only the fanatical treehugging ludduites will believe the scariest scenario,
and that only because it serves another political end. The rest will believe
they don't have to do anything because no one has persuaded them to. They
will do nothing, or even obstruct progress if it costs them anything.
Carl, I hope you understand VAXes and VMS a whole heckuva lot better than you
do me. In any event, I figure at this point that your position is that it is
too hard and not worthwhile to try to communicate this stuff to people who
don't already agree with you. We agree to disagree. Have a good life.
Larry Smith
>In <42...@balrog.ctron.com> sm...@ctron.com (Larry Smith) writes:
> Can't say I didn't try. My first couple of posts were an attempt to
>explain aspects of climate models that you clearly didn't understand.
>You obviously didn't learn anything from it, but that isn't my fault.
>You didn't listen to anything others were saying about it either.
David, a newsgroup is a babble of voices. Not recognising a point you may have
made in some posting can be the result of two things: first, the post may not
yet have reached me, second, it may not be relevant to a particular point I may
be trying to make with someone else. Don't lecture me about whether it might
have been appropriate: at that time I was trying to engage extremists and was
getting scientists. The technique didn't work, and I changed it.
>>I've never seen so many people so blind to a point. First, there ARE anti-
>>environmental extremists, and they need to be answered, and not one of them
>>- not ONE - would have changed his opinion from the feedback I've gotten.
> And you are exhibiting the same kind of uneducated, opinionated blather
>that you seem to be complaining about in the environmentalists. You may
>not be anti-environment (in fact some of you posts indicate clearly that
>you do have some "reasonable" opinions in the matter), but your method
>of initially approaching the discussion made you *look* like an extremist.
>You obviously haven't changed your opinion, either.
Dave, if had a clue you'd be dangerous. First: what I know. I know enough
about climate models to know when I'm being snowed and when I'm not. I had
already concluded that CO2 build-up was a Bad Thing. I was interested in a
few details, but I figured it was sound in the main. It was not relevant to
my line of argument at that time. There ARE environmental extremists, and
you don't answer them the way you answered me. They will go off and vote for
someone who promises jobs, not forests. Referring to esoteric studies and
climate models is fine for someone, like me, who will actually try to look
things up and read them (at least when I have time), it will NOT apply to
someone who is hostile to your point of view in the first place.
I tried a relatively mild tack in attacking apparent discrepancies in studies
as reported in the media. You SHOULD have had a FAQ, or at least some
standard posting whose arguments are finely honed and as unanswerable as
possible. This means they are DEVOID of suggestions about what to do, it
should not provoke arguments about what should be done, but it should lay out,
for the layman, what CO2 build up (NOT "global warming", call it that and
then tell people about glaciers in England and they`ll conclude you can't see
a contradiction in your own assertions) really means, what it will do to the
climate as best we can tell and an overview of why. Lastly, it should contain
the list of references that support the included material. The whole thing
should be no more than a few pages.
So long as that short and sweet answer, with no apparent contradictions, can
not be given, only people *like* *me* - educated enough to take what we don't
understand on faith - will come to any reasoned conclusion. The rest fall
into three camps, the fanatic treehuggers, the kill-an-environmentalist-today
crowd, neither of whom require logic or reason, and the vast majority of
confused readers of the Washington Post, who will vote their pocketbooks
because it sure doesn't look like the scientists have their act together.
If you can't see this then your opinion _doesn't_matter_, in the clearest and
most demonstrable way, it cannot and will not trigger any change. It hardly
matters what you advocate, if it cannot be translated into action it is just
net flamefodder. Like Giles and his bikes-n-cars sharing the roads of
Washington, there is nothing there is _make_ people realize that a change is
needed, nor any mechanism for facilitating it. Thus, no change.
>>A bigger bunch of sniveling "experts" I've never seen, you're all loaded
>>with opinions but you can't justify them to anyone who isn't a "knowledgable
>>scientist". Pretty sad, Dave.
> What exactly do you mean by "justify", Larry? You *claimed* that
>climate models were unreliable because weather forecasting is unsuccessful
No, Sir. I stated that two problems in computation whose requirements for
solutions appeared similar probably have similar levels of reliability. In
point of fact, while I felt that was true at the time, my side research has
shown very different approaches. Now, many of the climate models disagree
with one another, and few of them seem to be able to replicate historical
results, for various reasons, but in the main I yield the point. But I stick
by my guns on this part: most of the people who will vote for or against the
candidates who espouse your position do not have a feel for the distinction.
When it rains on their picnic, they will take your predictions for the next
century very lightly. It may not be right or fair, but there it is.
>after a week or so. A number of us tried to explain the difference, but
>none of it has sunk in. You are still as clueless as you were when you
>arrived. The only responses you gave were still of the "models are sh*t"
>for all the same reasons, without demonstrating that you had understood
>a single word of what was said. I can't help someone who can't even
>recognize what it is they don't understand.
And the fact that you are still fixated on _me_, rather than on the generic
problem I am trying, by various arguments, to present makes it clear to me
that you have, are now, and will probably continue to, utterly miss my point.
>> It's one reason why Bush wouldn't sign the
>>treaty at Rio, *I* know a hell of lot more about climate and weather than
>>George does, if you can't get someone with some knowledge and more than a
>>little sympathy to understand and agree with your points, I doubt you'll ever
>>get George to sign, on that or anything requiring hard environmental choices.
> And that is the struggle we face here: you don't realize how little
>you know. Before you can learn any climatology or meteorology, you are
>going to have to unlearn all your misconceptions. However, you adamantly
>refuse to do this.
As I hope has become more obvious since the "What Can We Do" post, I _do_
know enough about climate to believe most of this. But the voters do not,
if you try to treat them the way you treated me you will see more and more
media articles like the Washington Post. People do NOT want to be educated.
Nor can you educate that many, you have problems enough with paying students,
and you grade hard. The objective is to _persuade_. That is the function
and heart of argument and rhetoric, education is wholly different. They can
have the same result, but you mistake one for the other at the peril of the
point you wish to make.
>>But I granted all that, and moved on to some suggestions about what could be
>>done, got some agreeing email and disagreement on a couple of minor points,
>>and then it all just trailed off...
> Give it time. It may take people a bit to read through you text. On the
>other hand, perhaps everyone has put you in your kill file or has learned
>to hit "n" whenever they see your stuff. You've poisoned your bathwater.
Perhaps so, though I'd find that instructive about the mentalities I'm
dealing with in any event. But sticking your fingers in your ears will not
make the situation better. What you _should_ have said to me is what you
_need_ to say to Bush, clearly, unambiguously, unanswerably, and if not to
Bush then to his successor, until gov't policy can be turned to removing
the damaging factors, preferably without bankrupting so many voters that
_nobody_ gives a shit about the environment any more. You could have
practiced on me, but you didn't. And I'm tired of trying. Now I'd prefer
to discuss possible solutions, and the steps we can take to implement them.
If people still killfile me, kismet. Until you learn to listen to your
opponent you will never be able to defeat him.
> I for one decided not to waste my time reading your political and social
>discussion. As I said before, I generally restrict my postings to
>climate and meteorology matters.
Then you are part of the problem and not part of the solution. If all you
want is to sit in your ivory tower and run simulations then stay off the net.
Most people will be far less inclined to listen to you than I.
> And Michael Tobis (he has stated, on the net, that he prefers Michael)
>would learn all of that from an *introductory* course in basic computing?
>To quote Spock, "That is not logical". You are *so* inconsistent it scares
>me, Larry.
And you are, I hope, being intentionally obtuse. My point is that he still
has much to learn. Most of the models I've seen have been pretty poor
examples of coding, I'd like to feel that his will be better. Not that that
will improve his politics, but it will make the basic evidence for the damage
caused by CO2 build-up to be more unassailable.
> ...seems that explaining things to you requires "too much", anyway.
As I said, _persuade_, don't "explain".
> The thing is, Larry, that some of us *understand* the science that
>the conclusions are based on. I don't need to accept any concusions
>without question because I am capable of looking at the scientific
>studies and making *my own* conclusions. If you really care about any
>of this, you will try to learn enough that you can make some informed
>conclusions on your own, as well, instead of just accepting without
>question the particular snake oil you like...
And that "some of you" will continue to see more Washington Post articles
with brain dead articles misrepresenting your work. And the President, whoever
he might be, will read the precis on a 3x5 card (Bush is smarter than Reagan,
he probably uses 5x9) and will see "global warming" "falling temperatures"
"Well, no consensus there! Let's see that jobs bill..."
Larry Smith
>In article <42...@balrog.ctron.com> sm...@ctron.com writes:
>>If at any
>>point the snow from the year just past doesn't have time to melt before the
>>next years snow arrives, that's an Ice Age, by DEFINITION.
>In climatologist's terms you may be refering to an "onset of glaciation".
>"Ice age" refers to the entire glaciation/warming cycle.
>The important point is that glaciation increases the reflectivity of
>the Earth's surface in the optical, inducing a positive feedback loop
>towards _global_ cooling. If global warming causes increased
>snow (via new precipitation patterns and/or local northern cooling)
>that warming might be offset by the increased reflectivity of the
>growing glaciers. The temperature effects of greenhouse gases and
>glaciation may form a negative feedback loop.
Okay, now I'm confused. No, really, not just playing dumb. Is this something
which is actively figured into climate models? Is this a real disagreement
with current models? It seems intuitive, yet it follows from the non-intuitive
result that increasing CO2 will drop temperatures enough to cause more snowfall
at least in Europe and even some glaciation. Can you expound when you have
time?
kyle leigh swanson
All of this is expounded in current models. The main idea is quite simple --
warmer summer beats more snow. This is the reason why the alpine glaciers
have in general been in retreat for the past several hundred years. As
far as expansion is concerned, it may happen on the ice caps (Antarctica,
Greenland) as warmer air means more moisture transport, but not for the
alpine glaciers.
The real stickler in this climate business is the North Atlantic ocean.
If greenhouse warming caused the gulf stream to shift to some other
equilibrium flow pattern, then Northern Europe would be more like
Canada, which would have profound effects on global climate, not
to mention local lifestyles. Also, there is the North Atlantic deep
water circulation, which according to a recent Nature series of articles,
could be a real wild card. Shutting that off would increase the uptake
of C02 by the ocean enormously, and could spawn a "quick" (as far as
glaciers are concerned) Younger Dryas--type glaciation on the time scales
of centuries, which would not be so nice.
The problem with the climate system is that there are more than one
equilibrium solutions -- and changes between these solutions can be
catostrophic, meaning they occur with great rapidity, due to the
strong nonlinearites within the system.
Kyle Swanson
k-sw...@uchicago.edu
Carl J Lydick
>made in some posting can be the result of two things: first, the post may not
>yet have reached me, second, it may not be relevant to a particular point I may
>be trying to make with someone else. Don't lecture me about whether it might
>have been appropriate: at that time I was trying to engage extremists and was
>getting scientists. The technique didn't work, and I changed it.
I will lecture you, slightly. Engaging extremists in such a way as to make it
appear you know nothing of what you're talking about damages not only YOUR
credibility, but the credibility of anybody who happens to agree with your
concusions. It's always a bad idea to venture into a battle of wits unarmed.
>I tried a relatively mild tack in attacking apparent discrepancies in studies
>as reported in the media.
In that case, a better strategy would have been to write letters to the editors
of the newspapers and/or television shows.
>You SHOULD have had a FAQ, or at least some
>standard posting whose arguments are finely honed and as unanswerable as
>possible. This means they are DEVOID of suggestions about what to do, it
>should not provoke arguments about what should be done, but it should lay out,
>for the layman, what CO2 build up (NOT "global warming", call it that and
>then tell people about glaciers in England and they`ll conclude you can't see
>a contradiction in your own assertions) really means, what it will do to the
>climate as best we can tell and an overview of why. Lastly, it should contain
>the list of references that support the included material. The whole thing
>should be no more than a few pages.
E.g., it should be a written version of a "sound bite." That just doesn't
work.
>So long as that short and sweet answer, with no apparent contradictions, can
>not be given, only people *like* *me* - educated enough to take what we don't
>understand on faith - will come to any reasoned conclusion. The rest fall
>into three camps, the fanatic treehuggers, the kill-an-environmentalist-today
>crowd, neither of whom require logic or reason, and the vast majority of
>confused readers of the Washington Post, who will vote their pocketbooks
>because it sure doesn't look like the scientists have their act together.
Some things can't be simplified below a certain level without leaving out
important parts of them. And wishing it weren't so won't change it.
>As I hope has become more obvious since the "What Can We Do" post, I _do_
>know enough about climate to believe most of this. But the voters do not,
>if you try to treat them the way you treated me you will see more and more
>media articles like the Washington Post. People do NOT want to be educated.
If that's the case, then they're probably going to believe whoever can come up
with the scariest scenario. That's why _National_Inquirer_ and
_Weekly_World_News_ have such high circulations.
Steinn Sigurdsson
In article 14...@techbook.com, sz...@techbook.com (Nick Szabo) writes:
:In article <JMC.92Ju...@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> j...@cs.Stanford.EDU writes:
:>NSF Press Release
:>NEW EVIDENCE INDICATES GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE MAY OCCUR SUDDENLY
:A third interpretation gets to the heart of the "ecological impact"
:matter. Temperature changes on the order of +/- 10C in a century are
:quite natural, probably quite common over geological time, and life on
:Earth has been and will be quite capable of adapting to such changes.
:Global warming is in no sense a catastrophe or crisis for either life or
:civilizaiton. There will likely be costs, as well as benefits, from
:global warming and the greenhouse gases that cause it. We should use
:the many years we have to learn about climate and build our technological
:skills, instead of reacting hastily in a panicked mindset.
Facts, please. You are stating that +/- 10C changes in global mean
temperatures occuring within a century or so is a 'natural...common'
event over geological time. This is not true. The event you are
using to back your arguement (the so-called 'Younger Dryas') was not
'common' and also was not seen globally.
Large changes in global climate have NEVER occured on these timescales.
(With the possible exception of asteroid or comet impacts). Ecosystems
cannot, on a large scale, respond to changes of this magnitude.
...
To be fair, Nick does not say _global_ +/- 10C warming,
one reading of what he says is that _local_ ecologies saw +/- 10C changes
in the mean on decade time scales as consequence of global
trends - which is what the article discussed, and one of the
major worries of 2C forcing of the global mean.
I do believe Nick is capable of figuring global
thermal equilibria well enough to be aware of what 10C global
changes involve.
* Steinn Sigurdsson Lick Observatory *
* ste...@helios.ucsc.edu "standard disclaimer" *
* If no one seems to understand *
* Start your own revolution, cut out the middleman... *
* So join the struggle while you may *
* The revolution is just a t-shirt away B.B. 1988 *
Nick Szabo
>>I'd argue we're more adaptable now. Historically we have to major
>>human adaptations to climate - the end of the last ice age and
>>the "little ice age" - the little ice age is fairly well recorded,
>>there were crop failures, some catastrophic extinctions of human
>>settlements and hard times but overall humans did just fine.
In article <1992Jun10.1...@vexcel.com> de...@vexcel.com (dean alaska) writes:
>But these adaptations were to a much slower climate change.
This thread began with a new finding that suggests very rapid
temperature changes (eg 7C in <50 years) are quite common over the
human evolutionary timeframe. (In contrast, IPCC glocal warming
scenario is 1.5 to 4.5C over 100 years).
>And I doubt
>that "extinction of human settlements" would be considered okay.
Our society is very mobile, and there are many examples of mass
conversion of settlements to other uses (eg "urban renewal").
>In
>modern terms, that may mean enormous refugee problems.
We already have these, and climate change over 100 years might not
contribute signficantly. For example, vacating 1 billion people
over 100 years gives us 10 million a year, but we already have
more than 100 million refugees a year across the globe.
>We may have better technology, but our needs have increased.
Our transporation capabilities have increased to a far greater degree
than our population. Per person, on a global scale, we travel farther
faster by bus, bike, automobile, ship, train and plane than ever before,
and we are also able to ship far more goods per person across the globe.
>> ...wet regions of the U.S.
>> feel a drought very quickly because they have very little storage
>> capacity,
I don't know where you got this. No region of the U.S. has gone without
food in this century, but we have had plenty of droughts.
>>I think you overestimate the costs, in fact they might be lower than
>>the cost of trying to make societal changes in anticipation of climate
>>changes
>It seems to me that they would be quite expensive and I think you
>_overestimate_ the costs of changes in anticipation of climate changes.
Given suitably accurate climate models (which we probably don't have
yet), it should be straightforward to determine real esate losses and
thereby the level of funding for preventative efforts. Determining
the cost of prevention per ton CO2 is much harder: we need to detailed
technological and economic analysis, not flames, to figure this one out.
While we're flaming, though, the cost of prevention would be much lower if
those advocating such changes did't turn around and attack the primary
alternative, nuclear power.
>These changes will lead to more efficient production and consumption
>technologies and will pay for themselves.
Here again, asserted for the millionth time without evidence, or much
common sense, the Big Lie. I suppose all us engineers are going to volunteer
our time to make all these efficient new technologies, without getting paid
for it? We should just ignore the opportunity costs to the many activities
(construction, transportation, farming, manufacturing, distribution, etc.)
that benefit from lower energy costs? If it's such a great investment, why
not just let business do it instead of promoting government intervention?
Oh, I forgot, we don't need engineers, we just need to give the
ecofascists power. In their infinite wisdom they will cast their Green
Spells over us, we will all start turning out the lights when we leave
the room, and all will be happy in the land.
>>[climate crisis will spark accelerated innovation]
>What is the limit on capital
>available for technological development?
Innovation isn't bottlenecked by capitial (engineers' never-ending gripes
about the equipment to the contrary :-). The bottlenecks are (a) trained
brainpower, and (b) motivation. (b) is pretty tricky: crises like war
are historically a much greater motivation to innovation than money.
(a) gets back to the issue of education, which is also in part an issue of
motivation. In a school where technology-bashing is taught, I fear that
the students will be very dis-motivated to learn about the technologies they
will need.
Nick Szabo
>> utilities must be put on notice that theirs is a shrinking industry, and
>> that profits have already peaked.
Why should electric utilities be a shrinking industry? Our economy would
be much better off with a growing, increasingly inexpensive energy base.
A shrinking, more expensive base puts many industries that rely on cheap
energy -- for example alunimum-using automobiles, airplanes, and
industrial processes -- in jeopardy.
I suggest that we now have the capability to deregulate electric utilities
by providing equal access of producers to the the electric distribution
system. This would get rid of the bizarre dicincentives to providing
inexpensive capacity. Utilities would stop browbeating their customers
about "conservation" and go back to their job of producing cheap power.
Should global warming become a problem, we turn greenhouse gases into a
limited resource, and trade CO2 limits much like we trade SO2 limits
today. Utilities will move to the many non-greenhouse sources of power much
more quickly than the hypothesized 100-year onset time for worst-case
global warming.
[Stein Siggurdson writes]
>Given the ubiquity of rate-of-return regulation of power utilities in this
>country, this condition isn't necessary.
This is one of the mad dicensentives built into the current monopolistic
setup.
>> Availability must be mandated and use required in new vehicles exactly the
>> way it was done for the switch to unleaded gasoline....
>>7. Cars must get smaller and lighter, and they cannot do so at the present
>> time because of prescriptive laws regarding safety, emissions, etc.
Customer preference regarding safety is a far more important factor.
With CO2 emissions fee on cars -- already measured at the local smog
ref in most cities -- this preference will be weighed against its
greenhouse impact. There is no reason to arbitrarily loosen restrictions
on smog-causing pollutants in order to tighten greenhouse pollutants.
While we're at it, 'twould be nice to tax smog-causing pollutants at
the tailpipe as well, instead of imposing universal limits beyond which
there is no incentive to improve.
Proceeds from CO2 fees might go to funding climate studies, and perhaps
the global cooling scheme suggested by Tobis. CO2 fees might also go
to recompensing for lost real esate if sea levels rise. Proceeds from
smog fees might go towards treating smog-related lung cancer cases. Etc.
When we have to resort to detailed regulations, politics tends to dominate
rational action. When we can link cause and effect through the market, we
get a big win.
>> The gov't must institute a
>> graduated plan to increase taxes on trucks with the stated intention of
>> eliminating all trucks over some small limits - perhaps as little as 1 or
>> 2 tons of payload. This should force goods transport, which does not
>> require point-to-point transport in one vehicle anyway, to rail, where it
>> belongs.
This, from a car fan? Have you been converted to the mass
transit biker's gang? Acckk! :-)
Trucks are often far more efficient than rail, for the same reason cars
are better than mass transit -- they can go many more places, with
far less restriction on time and space. They have a much greater choice
space. It would be tragic to give the decision of truck vs. rail to
central-planning bureaucrats.
Historical note: in the late 19th century, when rail dominated cargo
transfer, there was no end to bickering about price fixing, bribing
politicians, and other monopolistic practices by the rail company.
Communities literally became ghost towns if the railroad passed them by.
The railroad barons could dictate a wide variety of policies, even in
political and moral areas unrelated to their business, to communities that
depended on them. Trucks and the paved road network broke up those
monopolies, giving many communities a big increase in independence and
liberty.
Paul Dietz
> Power
> utilities must be put on notice that theirs is a shrinking industry, and
> that profits have already peaked.
Annual electricity sales in the US, in billion of kWh:
Year Sales
----------------------
1970 1,392.3
1973 1,712.9
1975 1,747.1
1980 2,094.4
1983 2,151.0
1986 2,350.8
1989 2,633.8
US electricity sales have been going up 2.7%/year since 1973, even with
the "energy crisis" (which affected nonelectricity energy consumption
to a much greater extent).
How is this a shrinking industry? Non-utility generators? Power
must still be wheeled.
Paul F. Dietz
di...@cs.rochester.edu
David Halliwell
cells]
> It was not relevant to
>my line of argument at that time.
you over with a Mack truck.
>There ARE environmental extremists, and
>you don't answer them the way you answered me.
catastrophe and had led to world-wide haze, I reacted pretty much the
same way as I have to you. First, I tried to explain some of the
atmospheric processes involved, and then spent time trying to educate
them in some basic meteorology and climatology. I eventually gave up,
as I am giving up on *you*, because I realized that they just weren't
listening. They had a specific belief and wouldn't accept alternatives.
>> What exactly do you mean by "justify", Larry? You *claimed* that
>>climate models were unreliable because weather forecasting is unsuccessful
>
>No, Sir. I stated that two problems in computation whose requirements for
>solutions appeared similar probably have similar levels of reliability.
made. You can't even remember what you have said yourself. Let me remind
you:
In <41...@balrog.ctron.com> sm...@ctron.com (Larry Smith) writes:
Christ, weather forecasters can't get a reliable seven-day forecast
three times out of five, why should we expect your models to be
accurate into the middle of the 21st century?
Perhaps my english comprehension isn't perfect, but I sure don't see
anything about solution requirements or reliabilty in that, Larry. The
statement *you* refer to was posted later:
In article <41...@balrog.ctron.com> sm...@ctron.com writes:
It is my general experience that the more complex the problem,
the more likely it is results will not correspond to reality.
My purpose in the weather forecast accuracy remark was to point
up two different activities with, it appears to me, similar levels
of complexity. One is notoriously unreliable, the other is as yet
unproved, but is used to justify all kinds of social change on the
basis of "protecting" the environment from what the models show.
This was in response to several people *trying* to explain to you
why weather forecasting and climate modelling are different. Instead of
responding to people's specific criticisms on your weekly weather vs.
next century blather, you just jumped to an alternate (equally ill-
informed) criticism.
> In
>point of fact, while I felt that was true at the time, my side research has
>shown very different approaches. Now, many of the climate models disagree
>with one another, and few of them seem to be able to replicate historical
>results, for various reasons, but in the main I yield the point.
reproduced 1880-1980 mean global temperature to 90% of the observed
variance. You just blather on about your perceived understanding without
reference to any scientific literature to support your claims. If you
read the paper, I'm willing to discuss the problems in that study that
I am aware of. You probably won't realize any of the problems, but you
seem to want a "fit to historical data" example, and 90% is pretty good.
>But I stick
>by my guns on this part: most of the people who will vote for or against the
>candidates who espouse your position do not have a feel for the distinction.
my sociological position is, regarding action in response to the
predictions of global warming.
>When it rains on their picnic, they will take your predictions for the next
>century very lightly. It may not be right or fair, but there it is.
>
don't try to explain any of it to the voters yourself. My job is
already hard enough as it is.
>And the fact that you are still fixated on _me_, rather than on the generic
>problem I am trying, by various arguments, to present makes it clear to me
>that you have, are now, and will probably continue to, utterly miss my point.
>
I was fixating on them as well, and was convinced that I was an environment-
hating technocrat. What's your point? I don't really care anymore. Why
not? I don't have the expertise or desire to judge your social agenda.
I *can* judge your knowledge of atmospheric science, and you don't know
what you are talking about. Why should I think that you do any better on
other topics?
>[another long diatribe deleted]
>> I for one decided not to waste my time reading your political and social
>>discussion. As I said before, I generally restrict my postings to
>>climate and meteorology matters.
>
>Then you are part of the problem and not part of the solution. If all you
>want is to sit in your ivory tower and run simulations then stay off the net.
>Most people will be far less inclined to listen to you than I.
>
decisions is a problem, then the world is indeed doomed. Did you ever
think, Larry, that if nobody had said anything about your earliest posts
then the result might have been several thousands of people saying "Gee,
noone responded: this guy must be right and we should ignore the whole
problem"??? I know you'll never admit to being an idiot, but I can sure
as hell make sure more naive or less well-informed readers reliaze you
are an idiot.
>>would learn all of that from an *introductory* course in basic computing?
>>To quote Spock, "That is not logical". You are *so* inconsistent it scares
>>me, Larry.
>
>And you are, I hope, being intentionally obtuse. My point is that he still
>has much to learn. Most of the models I've seen have been pretty poor
>examples of coding, I'd like to feel that his will be better. Not that that
>will improve his politics, but it will make the basic evidence for the damage
>caused by CO2 build-up to be more unassailable.
>
day, Larry? Which is it? Basic computer knowledge, or advanced leading-
edge/state-of-the-art techniques? They aren't the same thing, Larry.
That's it for me. I've got work to do.
dean alaska
>>In article <STEINLY.92...@topaz.ucsc.edu> ste...@topaz.ucsc.edu (Steinn Sigurdsson) writes:
>
>In article <1992Jun10.1...@vexcel.com> de...@vexcel.com (dean alaska) writes:
>
>>But these adaptations were to a much slower climate change.
>
>This thread began with a new finding that suggests very rapid
>temperature changes (eg 7C in <50 years) are quite common over the
>human evolutionary timeframe. (In contrast, IPCC glocal warming
>scenario is 1.5 to 4.5C over 100 years).
These rapid changes were suggested to have happened a number of times
over a period of a million years. Hardly a frequency that ecosystems
can be said to have adjusted to.
>
>Our society is very mobile, and there are many examples of mass
>conversion of settlements to other uses (eg "urban renewal").
>
The developed countries are very mobile. The rest of the world isn't.
>We already have these [refugee problems]
>, and climate change over 100 years might not
>contribute signficantly. For example, vacating 1 billion people
>over 100 years gives us 10 million a year, but we already have
>more than 100 million refugees a year across the globe.
>
And they live in squalid conditions. How many refugees have resettled
to conditions approaching their original lifestyle?
>>We may have better technology, but our needs have increased.
>
>Our transporation capabilities have increased to a far greater degree
>than our population. Per person, on a global scale, we travel farther
>faster by bus, bike, automobile, ship, train and plane than ever before,
>and we are also able to ship far more goods per person across the globe.
>
Again per person in the developed world. The rest of the world does
not have the wealth to adjust as well as we do. There are plenty of people
in the developing world who never travel out of the area they were born in.
>>> ...wet regions of the U.S.
>>> feel a drought very quickly because they have very little storage
>>> capacity,
>
>I don't know where you got this. No region of the U.S. has gone without
>food in this century, but we have had plenty of droughts.
I didn't say they went without food. Rationing is required very quickly
in these areas. And since we haven't had climate change yet, conditions
return to normal. If they didn't, the effect would be larger.
>
>>>I think you overestimate the costs, in fact they might be lower than
>>>the cost of trying to make societal changes in anticipation of climate
>>>changes
>
>>It seems to me that they would be quite expensive and I think you
>>_overestimate_ the costs of changes in anticipation of climate changes.
>
>Given suitably accurate climate models (which we probably don't have
>yet), it should be straightforward to determine real esate losses and
>thereby the level of funding for preventative efforts. Determining
>the cost of prevention per ton CO2 is much harder: we need to detailed
>technological and economic analysis, not flames, to figure this one out.
Agreed. If we had models that could predict _local_ climate changes
with accuracy, the calculations would be straightforward. We are
nowhere near having such models.
>
>While we're flaming, though, the cost of prevention would be much lower if
>those advocating such changes did't turn around and attack the primary
>alternative, nuclear power.
Who is flaming? I wasn't. If the choice was between coal and nuclear,
I would choose nuclear. But the nuclear fans continually label solar
alternatives as science fiction and never respond when I challenge this.
The newest solar _thermal_ production plants are operating at about
$.08/kwh which is not science fiction. It also isn't with the economy
of scale available to other technologies. Maybe we can't suddenly replace
all of our fossil fuels with it immediately, but I am not suggesting that
we do that. Solar is good enough for most extra capacity that we would
need in the developed world, especially when conservation is included.
Over 600MB are being pumped into the grid in CA right now. By the time
the existing fossil plants need to be replaced in larger quantities we
can see how much further solar technologies have come.
>
>>These changes will lead to more efficient production and consumption
>>technologies and will pay for themselves.
>
>Here again, asserted for the millionth time without evidence, or much
>common sense, the Big Lie. I suppose all us engineers are going to volunteer
>our time to make all these efficient new technologies, without getting paid
>for it? We should just ignore the opportunity costs to the many activities
>(construction, transportation, farming, manufacturing, distribution, etc.)
>that benefit from lower energy costs? If it's such a great investment, why
>not just let business do it instead of promoting government intervention?
Business will do it without government eventually, but capital costs and
R&D time will slow it down. It is already happening in some areas.
Southern Californias strong economic growth during the 80's was
accomplished with existing capacity because the utilities excouraged it.
Just as Saudi Arabia fought any renewable energy commitment in Rio because oil
is its bread and butter, many segments of the business community in the
U.S. have a big stake in the status quo.
You don't believe that action to prevent global warming leads to a more
efficient technology? Let me help you out. Such action requires using
less fossil fuels. One way to use less fossil fuels is to build
machines that do the same thing with less energy. Using less energy
means more efficiency. Get it? Engineers will develop these efficient
technologies because they will get paid just like they do for
everything else they do. Who is asking them to work for free? I
would suggest that government support some basic R&D as most others
do and as ours does for military. Private enterprise will take it
from there. I just feel that a nudge from government will speed the
process. It certainly works for MITI in Japan.
If this isn't common sense for you, then you must have uncommon sense.
The recent article in Science about global warming suggested that
these are the types of actions that are justified by the current
state of knowledge about global warming.
>
>Oh, I forgot, we don't need engineers, we just need to give the
>ecofascists power. In their infinite wisdom they will cast their Green
>Spells over us, we will all start turning out the lights when we leave
>the room, and all will be happy in the land.
>
Your silly name calling demonstrates your bias. This kind of rhetoric
places you in with those environmentalists who want to add oxygen to
the troposphere.
>--
>sz...@techbook.COM Public Access User --- Not affiliated with TECHbooks
>Public Access UNIX and Internet at (503) 644-8135 (1200/2400, N81)
--
dingo in boulder (de...@vexcel.com)
Paul Dietz
> Would Dean Alaska give a reference on the 600 megawatts in California
> and the .08 per kilowatt hour? I would find that impressive.
He is refering to the Luz solar-thermal generating units in
Southern California. The later units (80 MW) acheived around $.08/kWh.
However:
(1) 25% of the heat input to these units came from natural gas
(the limit was set by federal regulations, beyond which
they would lose favorable tax treatment). The natural
gas input is used to smooth over cloudy periods. Absent
regulations, purely gas-fired units would be cheaper.
(2) These are only peaking units, and achieve the 600 MW (or
whatever) only part of the time (a duty cycle of ~20% comes
to mind, but I'd have to check).
(3) Luz went bankrupt when the utility wouldn't buy anymore
of their power, and no longer exists.
The utility is more interested in third-generation power towers with
direct molten salt collectors and the new stretched-membrane
heliostats, which are projected to achieve $.03-.04/kWh (vs. maybe
$.20/kWh for Solar-1). Now *that* would be impressive.
An unrelated topic: I read with some interest that the UK, now that it
is deregulating (to some extent) the electric utilities, may have as
much as a 50% overcapacity in generating capacity by the late 1990s,
due to the construction of a large number of private gas-fired
generators (for cogeneration, mainly). They will have the option
of closing old coal fired plants, and delaying large new plants.
One would expect electricity prices to decline as well.
Paul F. Dietz
di...@cs.rochester.edu
dean alaska
>In article <JMC.92Ju...@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> j...@cs.Stanford.EDU writes:
>
>> Would Dean Alaska give a reference on the 600 megawatts in California
>> and the .08 per kilowatt hour? I would find that impressive.
>
>
>He is refering to the Luz solar-thermal generating units in
>Southern California. The later units (80 MW) acheived around $.08/kWh.
>However:
>
> (1) 25% of the heat input to these units came from natural gas
> (the limit was set by federal regulations, beyond which
> they would lose favorable tax treatment). The natural
> gas input is used to smooth over cloudy periods. Absent
> regulations, purely gas-fired units would be cheaper.
To what degree does the use of natural gas affect the cost? Is there a
figure for the solar generation alone? My questions are not rhetorical.
Better storage technology in the future could reduce this need.
> (2) These are only peaking units, and achieve the 600 MW (or
> whatever) only part of the time (a duty cycle of ~20% comes
> to mind, but I'd have to check).
By peaking units, I assume you mean the supply of peak demand. This
is the current need for utilities in this country, and is what solar
is best suited for for the time being since peak demand occurs
during the daytime.
> (3) Luz went bankrupt when the utility wouldn't buy anymore
> of their power, and no longer exists.
The utility (PG&E) bought the Luz facilities when they went bankrupt
and plans to build more of them on their own. The bankruptcy has been
discussed here before. Constantly changing tax incentives made the
getting of investment capital difficult. Federal solar tax
incentives were being renewed on an annual (at best) basis, which
does not provide long-term security for investors. In fact, one
solar company that I talked to locally said they don't want tax
incentives anymore because they are sick of the unreliability.
>
>The utility is more interested in third-generation power towers with
>direct molten salt collectors and the new stretched-membrane
>heliostats, which are projected to achieve $.03-.04/kWh (vs. maybe
>$.20/kWh for Solar-1). Now *that* would be impressive.
Are you referring to PG&E? Is Solar-1 the early Luz plant?
>
> Paul F. Dietz
> di...@cs.rochester.edu
Most of my information comes from the National Energy Renewables Lab
in Golden CO. Another source is the UCS.
Mark Wilson
>>> The gov't must institute a
>>> graduated plan to increase taxes on trucks with the stated intention of
>>> eliminating all trucks over some small limits - perhaps as little as 1
or
>>> 2 tons of payload. This should force goods transport, which does not
>>> require point-to-point transport in one vehicle anyway, to rail, where
it
>>> belongs.
I have a part time job stocking at Sears. This is one of their smaller
stores, and this year has been a little slow. (Economy you know.)
At this store we get 5-6 semi's a week of merchandise to sell. These trucks
arrive full and leave empty. You would have to replace the 5-6 semis with
at least 50-60 of your trucks. Are your trucks really 10 times as efficient.
Unless you can arrange to have train tracks laid to every mall and grocery
store, I don't see how your plan could work.
--Mark
Steve Chapin
}}
}} I have a part time job stocking at Sears. This is one of their smaller
}} stores, and this year has been a little slow. (Economy you know.)
}} At this store we get 5-6 semi's a week of merchandise to sell. These trucks
}} arrive full and leave empty. You would have to replace the 5-6 semis with
}} at least 50-60 of your trucks. Are your trucks really 10 times as efficient.
}} Unless you can arrange to have train tracks laid to every mall and grocery
}} store, I don't see how your plan could work.
The "obvious" solution is to leave the long-haul goods transport to
the trains, with a fleet of local delivery trucks. Will it work?
Yes. Will it be slower than the current system? Yes.
}} --Mark
s...@cs.purdue.edu Steve Chapin Today's Grammar Lesson:
"If you loose your arrow, you're likely to lose it in the weeds,"
was often heard in days of yore.
Beef: Real food for a dead planet.
Jan Schloerer
In <1992Jun12.2...@wega.rz.uni-ulm.de> I wrote :
> Lehman's work is referring to the Younger Dryas. The Younger Dryas,
> named for the arctic Dryas flower, is a 1000-year or so cold-spell
> centering around the Northern Atlantic. It's onset and the shutdown of
> the conveyor seem to have occured about 11000 years ago. Why was the
> onset so sudden ? Broecker and Denton (What drives glacial cycles ?
> Sci.American 262,1,Jan.1990,42-50) think it was due to a sudden outflow
> of enormous amounts of fresh water from the melting North American ice
> sheet.
> [ details deleted ]
> does anyone know whether this is generally accepted or whether other
> (reasonable :-) explanations have been proposed ?
Broecker's explanation has indeed come under fire, and the idea of just
a shutdown of the Atlantic conveyor might turn out to be too simplistic.
Perhaps, it is not only a question of "on/off" but also of "switches
between cold and warm conveyors". The books on the matter are not yet
closed. Presently, I lack the time to summarize the somewhat compli-
cated situation. If you are interested: read Zahn's paper. If you are
very interested then read also the papers by Lehman & Keigwin (featured
in the "Warming Could Be Quick"-Post) and by Veum, Jansen et al (their
data complicate the issue) :
Rainer Zahn: Deep ocean circulation puzzle.
Nature 356 (30 April 1992), 744-746
Scott J. Lehman & Lloyd D. Keigwin: Sudden changes in North
Atlantic circulation during the last deglaciation
Nature 356 (30 April 1992), 757-762
Veum, Terje, Eystein Jansen, Maurice Arnold, Ida Beyer
& Jean-Claude Duplessy: Water mass exchange between the North
Atlantic and the Norwegian Sea during the past 28,000 years
Nature 356 (30 April 1992), 783-785
This is not just an ivory-tower-exercise. Quote from the final
paragraph of Zahn's paper:
"In view of impending global warming, progress in understanding
this type of climate collapse is needed urgently. ... it seems
that since the early 1980s a slow-down of deep convection in
the Greenland Sea has already been under way."
Good bye for a while, Jan Schloerer
Kenneth James Clark
>stores, and this year has been a little slow. (Economy you know.)
>At this store we get 5-6 semi's a week of merchandise to sell. These trucks
>arrive full and leave empty. You would have to replace the 5-6 semis with
>at least 50-60 of your trucks. Are your trucks really 10 times as efficient.
>Unless you can arrange to have train tracks laid to every mall and grocery
>store, I don't see how your plan could work.
>
Someday, look at a railroad map of the US (better yet one from 40's and one
now). Then look at a map of your city and find the railroad line (again,
two maps are better than one). Finally go to some small town and look for
railroad tracks. Unless your city is brand new (Atlanta is pretty new,
but this should still hold), you should find that there is already a set
of tracks or two running through just about every decent sized American
city. Until the Interstates, those rail lines were the main freight
hauling infrastructure in this country (oops, barges and water freight
may have been bigger - are now!). Over the course of another 50 years,
it wouldn't be difficult to either put in new rail lines, or put the
stores back along the rail lines like they were before. All that is needed
is financial incentive.
Ken
John McCarthy
that caused the decline of the railroads. It started before WWI.
In 1955 I asked my landlord in New Paltz, New York about some tracks
poking through the asphalt in the main street. He told me that there
had been a rail line from Poughkeepsie across the Hudson River to
New Paltz but the line had been abandoned before the war. It turns
out he meant World War I.
To a fanatical adherent of the energy religion, restoring the railway
network with a siding at every shopping mall makes sense. If you
aren't an adherent of that religion and believe there is plenty of
energy to be had, the idea seems merely silly - wasteful of space
and human labor.
--
John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
*
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
Kenneth James Clark
>poking through the asphalt in the main street. He told me that there
>had been a rail line from Poughkeepsie across the Hudson River to
>New Paltz but the line had been abandoned before the war. It turns
>out he meant World War I.
Geez, John, one track doesn't make a railroad network. I've seen many
railroad grades used for logging that were abandoned before 1900.
Does that mean that it was loss of logs in the east that made railroads
disappear?
>To a fanatical adherent of the energy religion, restoring the railway
>network with a siding at every shopping mall makes sense. If you
>aren't an adherent of that religion and believe there is plenty of
>energy to be had, the idea seems merely silly - wasteful of space
>and human labor.
oomba joomba, oomba joomba, Praise the energy religion... :-)
Should I call you names and ignore half of your posts too? I suppose
it is more space efficient to build eight lane roads and 1000 car
parking lots, huh? :-)
oomba joomba (call me Ken) oomba joomba
R. Cage
>The "obvious" solution is to leave the long-haul goods transport to
>the trains, with a fleet of local delivery trucks. Will it work?
>Yes. Will it be slower than the current system? Yes.
Will it cause more waste and expense? Yes.
Think about it. If the speed of the delivery decreases,
then the store must have more inventory on hand, or risk
running out between the time items can be ordered and when
it is delivered and stocked. Going to a slower delivery
system requires more local storage (costly and wasteful),
more close-by warehouses (costly and wasteful), more
inventory in the system (costly), more handling of items
(costly), more returns of unsold items (which may
be scrapped; costly and wasteful), more spoilage and
waste of perishable items (costly, wasteful), et cetera.
Getting rid of long-haul trucks in favor of rail transport
would be a *disaster*, and I am not exaggerating.
If you want heavy trucks off the roads, you're going to
need a new type of transport to fill the gap. Ideally,
it ought to be cleaner *and* faster than trucks. I'll
leave it to you green-types to think of something that
fills the bill; you want change, you can do the work.
Steve Chapin
}}
}} Will it cause more waste and expense? Yes.
[ Russ's arguments deleted; he gives several reasons why costs would
increase. ]
I agree with your statement of the problems, given the current rail
configuration. That's whay I put quotes in the phrase ``the "obvious"
solution.''
Trucking is heavily subsidized (all those interstates where trucks
don't pay their proportion of the damage they cause), while rail is
not. At least some of the cost increase in my system is already being
paid in the form of trucking subsidies.
}} If you want heavy trucks off the roads, you're going to
}} need a new type of transport to fill the gap. Ideally,
}} it ought to be cleaner *and* faster than trucks. I'll
}} leave it to you green-types to think of something that
}} fills the bill; you want change, you can do the work.
It is my position that if we restored the rail infrastructure of this
country, and stopped the subsidies for trucks, we would find that
shipping by rail is competitive with trucking. As the market for rail
transport increases, more trains will run, and the delay in shipping
will drop. Trucks are limited to 65mph (well, legally anyway); trains
have the potential of faster shipment.
That is my hypothesis; I'm not advocating it at this time because I
don't have data to show that it would work. However, I submit that it
should be considered.
I don't have figures to back me up, so I'm sending followups to
talk.environment.
Carl J Lydick
While you're looking for the maps, you should also dig up some figures on
Sears. As recently as 30 years ago, a LARGE percentage of their sales was via
mail-order from large depots. Delivery time was on the order of two weeks.
Financial incentive isn't all that's needed.
Carl J Lydick
>It is my position that if we restored the rail infrastructure of this
>country, and stopped the subsidies for trucks, we would find that
>shipping by rail is competitive with trucking. As the market for rail
>transport increases, more trains will run, and the delay in shipping
>will drop. Trucks are limited to 65mph (well, legally anyway); trains
>have the potential of faster shipment.
Trains are also limited to about that speed limit, or lower, in some places.
To get the extra speed from trains, you're going to have to eliminate grade
crossings. Of course, when AMTRAK was created, one of the things that swayed
the vote in favor of it was that those promoting the bill promised that 90% (I
think) of all grade crossings would be eliminated within some specified amount
of time. I think that time has expired, without any significant reduction in
grade crossings.
Dave Scidmore
>>In <42...@balrog.ctron.com> sm...@ctron.com (Larry Smith) writes:
>As I hope has become more obvious since the "What Can We Do" post, I _do_
>know enough about climate to believe most of this. But the voters do not,
>if you try to treat them the way you treated me you will see more and more
>media articles like the Washington Post. People do NOT want to be educated.
>Nor can you educate that many, you have problems enough with paying students,
>and you grade hard. The objective is to _persuade_.
Speaking as one of the masses, of the uninformed public, it is just this kind
of elitist condescension that polerizes us common people against those trying
to persuade without informing. I am not even a college graduate (did I admit
that), but I can differentiate between facts and rhetoric. I have heard
what environmentalists have had to say for many years, but I found Dixie
Lee Rays book more convincing than much of what came before it. Why?
Because, whether she misquoted and lied or not, she filled her book with
facts, results of studies, research, *numbers*. She *educated*. Still I know
enough to look up her references and to know that quoting numbers from a
paper by the "Council For Environmental Ballance" was not quoting an
unbiased source. In fact it was because of that skepticism of Dixie Lee
Rays book that I tuned into "sci.environment" to see if I could believe
what she said, so I could hear the real arguments from real scientists
and not from the media or politician.
I'm sorry, but as long as scientists insist on persuading rather than
explaining the public will go on being skeptical, and the Dixie Lee Rays
who use facts (or supposed facts) to make their case will go on selling
book and making a better case than their opponents. If the public seems
apathetic about the environment perhaps it is because we hear to much
persuasion, to much rhetoric, and not enough hard facts.
There is nothing us masses hate more than being treated like we don't know
and can't understand, so we should just fall in line and start goose stepping.
--
Dave Scidmore, Heurikon Corp.
dave.s...@heurikon.com
Nick Szabo
>To be fair, Nick does not say _global_ +/- 10C warming,
>one reading of what he says is that _local_ ecologies saw +/- 10C changes
>in the mean on decade time scales as consequence of global
>trends - which is what the article discussed, and one of the
>major worries of 2C forcing of the global mean.
For the Younger Dryas "local" may include an area from Newfoundland to
Denmark to Portugal, so that YD ecological changes are comparable to those
from a similar global temperature change. I'm guilty of not explicitly
stating that reasoning (and messing up the subject line). Thanks for the
correction.
For comparision we might also consider the ecological impact of the even
more rapid, but short duration, changes over wide areas from ENSO.
Paul Houle
>>The "obvious" solution is to leave the long-haul goods transport to
>>the trains, with a fleet of local delivery trucks. Will it work?
>>Yes. Will it be slower than the current system? Yes.
I find this pretty hard to believe, at least with modern technology.
With unirail construction, well-established technology can speed cargo along
at 120 mph with about half the energy consumption of trucks. It is also
more reasonable to run trains 24 hours a day than trucks - you can reasonable
bring along two or three shifts on a train. Many of the people that I know
who used to be long haul truckers took methamphetamine and other stimulants
to stay awake continuously for the cross-country drive. This is a
~horrible~ situation for public safety. Automation can be applied to increase
the safety of rail much more easily than the safety of highway transport,
although it isn't a substitute for a well-rested crew.
Similarly, with good automation, it seems that switchyards could
be made extremely efficient. I can visualize a universal module that can be
either mounted on a rail car or attached to a tractor-trailer. A short-
haul trucker picks up fruit or gears or something and transports it to a
rail terminal, where the cargo module is loaded onto a rail car by crane.
This is assigned the quickest route to a destination rail terminal, where
the module is loaded onto a truck and then taken away by another trucker.
Sites that get enough freight could justify their own rail spur -- but this
kind of system combines the advantages of modern rail (speed, efficiency,
safety) with the flexibility of trucks (can use the existing rail network).
I leave it to the reader to think about how we could use free-market,
government, and mixed solutions to bring such a system into reality.
--
John McCarthy
can go both on flatcars and on trucks has been in use for about 20
years.
I haven't read of any freight trains running at 120 mph anywhere in
the world. One of the problems is that with present technology high
speed trains require continuous maintenance of the tracks. Probably
if the trains carry heavy loads the maintenance problem is worse. The
Japanese have had to slow their bullet trains (passenger) when the
condition of the tracks deteriorated.
Without quantitative information, all these proposals are just ideas,
and when the ideas are old and have been put partly into use, there
is usually a good reason why they aren't used more.
The next step for Mr. Houle is a trip to the library and trade
journals on railroading. I have not much idea of what he will find.
Nick Szabo
>To get the extra speed from trains, you're going to have to eliminate grade
>crossings.
To replace the main use of trucks -- distribution to malls and
warehouses -- with railroad spurs, we must _increase_ grade crossings
to a ludicrous degree. You think we have gridlock now!
Mark Wilson
In <18...@ector.cs.purdue.edu> s...@cs.purdue.EDU (Steve Chapin) writes:
>}} In article <53...@ncratl.AtlantaGA.NCR.COM>
mwi...@ncratl.AtlantaGA.NCR.COM (Mark Wilson) writes:
>}}
>}} Unless you can arrange to have train tracks laid to every mall and grocery
>}} store, I don't see how your plan could work.
>The "obvious" solution is to leave the long-haul goods transport to
>the trains, with a fleet of local delivery trucks. Will it work?
>Yes. Will it be slower than the current system? Yes.
For the most part this is what we have right now.
--Mark
>}} --Mark
Paul Houle
>the world. One of the problems is that with present technology high
>speed trains require continuous maintenance of the tracks. Probably
>if the trains carry heavy loads the maintenance problem is worse. The
>Japanese have had to slow their bullet trains (passenger) when the
>condition of the tracks deteriorated.
A train traveling at 120 mph is at the upper end of conventional
rail technology -- High speed rail systems, such as the TGV and the
Japanese bullet trains travel much faster - the TGV routinely travels
at 180 mph, and the next generation prototypes have clocked nearly
240 mph.
To attain speeds of 100-120 mph, the primary step that needs
to be taken is that older rail lines need to be upgraded to uniwelded rail,
which is already standard for new rail lines. Operating freight rail at
such speeds is not practiced now, largely because there is no incentive to
do this in the US. If rail were to become a more dominant means of
transport, the investment in technology would be very reasonable. To make
it all worthwhile, we would need a very efficient computer network to
manage the system -- prehaps all transport modules could have bar code
serial numbers painted on them for tracking, a technology which is already
being developed.
As such, fast rail freight could easily be availible if we made
a decision that this was a technology that we wanted to use to replace
long-haul trucking. This would merely be pushing the limits of non-
exotic rail technology, and wouldn't be anything really new like
magnetic levitation, 14,000 mph evacuated tube transports, or even
something just a little exotic like the TGV.
--
Kenneth James Clark
>The "obvious" solution is to leave the long-haul goods transport to
>the trains, with a fleet of local delivery trucks. Will it work?
>Yes. Will it be slower than the current system? Yes.
Don't be so sure about rail being slower in this case. I'd like to see
some statistics that show that rail can't do just-in-time delivery just
as well as trucks. This is your chance, truck advocates, show us statistics
that demonstrate that long-haul trucks are the only way to get cargo
to market in a timely way. I'll try and find statistics on just-in-time
delivery systems to find out what percentage of their deliveries are
by different transportation systems.
Can we all agree that just-in-time delivery is the most efficient way
for a business to operate, eliminating the need for storage without
work stoppages?
Until either side produces some kind of evidence, no one here can say
that rail couldn't work. How do you know?
Ken
Spiros Triantafyllopoulos
>Don't be so sure about rail being slower in this case. I'd like to see
>some statistics that show that rail can't do just-in-time delivery just
>as well as trucks. This is your chance, truck advocates, show us statistics
>that demonstrate that long-haul trucks are the only way to get cargo
>to market in a timely way. I'll try and find statistics on just-in-time
>delivery systems to find out what percentage of their deliveries are
>by different transportation systems.
If a good rail network is present, and good cargo train service is also
available, the answer is easy. Trains are far less likely to have delays
due to weather, driver needs rest, etc.
Trains do have their downside. Go right thru a train depot in say, Chicago,
and you'll see what I mean.
I am not sure about the local delivery part though. You still need
18 wheelers to carry stuff. Can't carry containers on your average
Dodge Ram pickup.
A final point about trains; many cities, Kokomo, In, included, were
elevated to industry towns in the late 1800's and early 1900's because
of rail service.
>Can we all agree that just-in-time delivery is the most efficient way
>for a business to operate, eliminating the need for storage without
>work stoppages?
Where applicable. If one can make most components in-house, or in the
same city, the need for shipping is reduced. It's easier to do JIT
when the supplier is accross the street, not across the continent.
Spiros
--
Spiros Triantafyllopoulos c2...@kocrsv01.delcoelect.com
Software Technology, Delco Electronics strian...@kosds1.gm.hac.com
GM Hughes Electronics, Kokomo, IN 46904 [A Different Kind of Disclaimer]
Mark Wilson
In <1992Jun21....@techbook.com> sz...@techbook.com (Nick Szabo)
writes:
>In article <1992Jun19.2...@cco.caltech.edu> ca...@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU
writes:
>>To get the extra speed from trains, you're going to have to eliminate grade
>>crossings.
>To replace the main use of trucks -- distribution to malls and
>warehouses -- with railroad spurs, we must _increase_ grade crossings
>to a ludicrous degree. You think we have gridlock now!
Another problem with running tracks to individual malls and shopping centers
is logistics. If the mall is sitting on a main line then the whole train
will have to be stopped to offload whatever the mall needs. Very
ineffiecient in both time and energy. (It takes a lot of energy to get
one of the big guys up to speed. It will take a long time to get anything
anywhere, as the train will spend most of its time sitting.)
Obviously this version will not work.
The second method will be to run a spur to each mall. This means that the
long haul trains will have to go to yards were they are broken up with
individual cars being sent to the various malls. (One engine hauling one
car, not very effiecient.)
The obvious solution (to me anyway) is to have long haul trains, hauling
goods between train yards. At the yards, the goods are transferred
between trucks and trains for local transport. This is essentially the
system we have now. Now you can make the argument that we could make more
use of long haul trains and less of long haul trucks. Now we get down to
arguing about how much long haul trucking can be reduced. I do not believe
they will ever be totally eliminated. They offer flexibility that trains
can never match. They can go anywhere at any time.
I have no problem with making the big rigs pick up the whole bill for the
damage they do to roads. (I have no truck with subsidies of any kind. :^))
--Mark
Jack Campin
[ about pros and cons of rail transport ]
> I am not sure about the local delivery part though. You still need
> 18 wheelers to carry stuff. Can't carry containers on your average
> Dodge Ram pickup.
Is there any reason suburban light rail systems can't carry containers or
other freight? Very few of them are designed for carriages smaller than a
container in length or cross-section, so tunnels and curves shouldn't be an
obstacle. Most of them are drastically underused at night, so capacity
isn't a problem either. The sort of situation where this would make a lot
of sense would be the haul from the mainline railway in Grenoble to the
Mayencin industrial estate; only a very small amount of extra track would be
needed as the light railway already goes most of the distance.
I've never quite understood why there is no standard shipping unit smaller
than a container - why not have a class of container that comes apart into
pallet-sized subcontainers that a light forklift could get onto a pickup?
I've never seen such a thing - is there some good reason why it doesn't
exist? The present situation often leads to the overuse of 18-wheelers for
ridiculously small loads; I'm sure we've all seen a workstation arriving in
solitary splendour in an auditorium-sized trailer.
--
-- Jack Campin room G092, Computing Science Department, Glasgow University,
17 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow G12 8RZ, Scotland TEL: 041 339 8855 x6854 (work)
INTERNET: ja...@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk or via nsfnet-relay.ac.uk FAX: 041 330 4913
BANG!net: via mcsun and uknet BITNET: via UKACRL UUCP: ja...@glasgow.uucp
Steinn Sigurdsson
In article <JMC.92Ju...@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> j...@cs.Stanford.EDU writes:
>
>I haven't read of any freight trains running at 120 mph anywhere in
>the world. One of the problems is that with present technology high
>speed trains require continuous maintenance of the tracks. Probably
>if the trains carry heavy loads the maintenance problem is worse. The
>Japanese have had to slow their bullet trains (passenger) when the
>condition of the tracks deteriorated.
A train traveling at 120 mph is at the upper end of conventional
rail technology -- High speed rail systems, such as the TGV and the
Japanese bullet trains travel much faster - the TGV routinely travels
at 180 mph, and the next generation prototypes have clocked nearly
240 mph.
To attain speeds of 100-120 mph, the primary step that needs
to be taken is that older rail lines need to be upgraded to uniwelded rail,
which is already standard for new rail lines. Operating freight rail at
such speeds is not practiced now, largely because there is no incentive to
do this in the US.
Ah, to run trains that fast the limit is the curvature and grade of
the track, both the bullets and TGV run on purpose built tracks,
straight.
BR tried "tilting" trains to go to higher speeds using the
old, curved track, didn't work out.
It is really not terribly important for freight rail to go
that fast, it is far more important for passenger trains, not much
cargo is that time critical, specially bulk cargo. Containerised
rail cargo with local redistribution by truck seems a energy and time
efficient way of distributing cargo.
It would seem sensible for the US to transport more bulk
freight by rail, but under current accounting rules even maintaining,
never mind building new track is "uneconomical". In the context it is
worth noting that the interstate system and most of Europe's track
was built for war transport!
Maybe a sufficiently high gas tax would have the same
effect...
* Steinn Sigurdsson Lick Observatory *
* ste...@helios.ucsc.edu "standard disclaimer" *
* But, oh, love is strange *
* and you have to learn to take the crunchy with the smooth, *
* I suppose - B.B. 1983 *
Steinn Sigurdsson
c2...@kocrsv01.delcoelect.com (Spiros Triantafyllopoulos) wrote:
[ about pros and cons of rail transport ]
> I am not sure about the local delivery part though. You still need
> 18 wheelers to carry stuff. Can't carry containers on your average
> Dodge Ram pickup.
Is there any reason suburban light rail systems can't carry containers or
other freight? Very few of them are designed for carriages smaller than a
container in length or cross-section, so tunnels and curves shouldn't be an
obstacle. Most of them are drastically underused at night, so capacity
isn't a problem either. The sort of situation where this would make a lot
of sense would be the haul from the mainline railway in Grenoble to the
Mayencin industrial estate; only a very small amount of extra track would be
needed as the light railway already goes most of the distance.
A lot of light rail in suburbs (at least in the US) is built on the
understanding that the new neighbours will get to sleep at night...
A deleted bit from the post referred to claims that trains have better
on-time delivery than trucks, this I think is wrong, it is easy to
show that it is almost impossible to design a robust "on-time" rail
network without having slack time to catch up on delays (usually at night
with freights and empty trains reshuffling). The basic reason is that
train delays cascade, partly due to late capacity being scheduled to
take up subsequent load, more importantly because track can only
allocated to one train at a time! Hence the notorious train delays
of Europe ;-) (espec network SouthEast!!!). To have a combined train
-truck just-in-time delivery local depots would almost certainly be
needed to smooth the load...
Steve Chapin
As the one who first (I think) suggested the use of a rail backbone
here, I think I'm being misrepresented. I clearly stated that under
my system, we would use rail for long-distance freight delivery, with
a local network of delivery trucks. By delivery trucks, I wasn't
limiting myself to pickups.
I never advocated laying rail to every mall, etc. I would expect that
a city such as Lafayette, IN (100,000 people) would have one depot
that the freight would feed through, and local delivery companies
could handle redistribution to malls, etc.
Someone (I think Mark Wilson) claimed that most of the freight
delivered in the USA goes by rail. I'd like to see his numbers. I
don't have any numbers either, but judging from the number of semis I
see vs. the number of trains, I will just as strongly assert that the
majority (and an overwhelming one) of freight is moved via truck, not
rail.
s...@cs.purdue.edu Steve Chapin Today's Grammar Lesson:
Brake your bike before the wall, or you'll break your bike upon the wall!
"Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in."
-- Robert Frost, "The Death of the Hired Man"
Paul Dietz
> Someone (I think Mark Wilson) claimed that most of the freight
> delivered in the USA goes by rail. I'd like to see his numbers. I
> don't have any numbers either, but judging from the number of semis I
> see vs. the number of trains, I will just as strongly assert that the
> majority (and an overwhelming one) of freight is moved via truck, not
> rail.
From the Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1991.
Intercity Freight Traffic, in billions of ton-miles, 1989 (est.):
Rail 1048
Truck 299 (ICC)
413 (non ICC)
Water 362 (rivers and canals)
82 (Great Lakes)
Oil pipeline 597
Dom. Airlines 9.8
----------------------
Total: 2,811
Rail is about 37%, trucks, about 25%. Local traffic is different,
of course, which may explain your observation.
Paul F. Dietz
di...@cs.rochester.edu
Kenneth James Clark
>here, I think I'm being misrepresented. I clearly stated that under
>my system, we would use rail for long-distance freight delivery, with
>a local network of delivery trucks. By delivery trucks, I wasn't
>limiting myself to pickups.
Actually, I think it was Larry Smith....
>Someone (I think Mark Wilson) claimed that most of the freight
>delivered in the USA goes by rail. I'd like to see his numbers. I
>don't have any numbers either, but judging from the number of semis I
>see vs. the number of trains, I will just as strongly assert that the
>majority (and an overwhelming one) of freight is moved via truck, not
>rail.
At the risk of sleeping with the enemy, Mark's claim turns out to be kind
of correct. From the "Transportation Energy Data Book: Edition 12" by
two researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, under contract to
the Department of Energy:
From Table 1.9 (p. 1-21) "Inland Surface Transport of Goods for Selected
Countries, 1985 (million ton-miles)":
Country Road Water Rail
Japan 127,972 127,895 13,754
France 69,597 5,220 33,556
Italy 89,562 125 11,716
Sweden 13,159 5,593 10,929
UK 63,445 25,912 9,507
W. Germany 83,330 29,951 39,770
US 609,593 382,161 894,816
From Table 2.31 (p. 2-23) "Intercity Freight Movement and Energy Use in
the United States, 1989":
Truck Rail
# of vehicles (thousands) 4,098 668 (cars)
Vehicle miles (millions) 137,244 26,196 (car-miles)
Ton-miles (millions) 716,000 1,013,841
Tons shipped (millions) 2,543 1,988
Average length of Haul (miles) 558 723
Energy Intensity (BTU/ton-mile) 3,483 427
Energy Use (trillion BTU) 2,494 433
From Figure 6.9 (p. 6-25) "Distribution of Railroad Revenue Carloadings,
1974 and 1989":
Cargo 1974 1989
Coal 17.0% 26.7%
Farm Products 11.3% 11.2%
Chemicals 5.5% 7.1%
Nonmetalic products 3.1% 2.5% (crushed stone, gravel, sand)
Food and kindred prod. 6.6% 3.2%
Wood and products 7.2% 4.0%
Metalic Ores 7.1% 2.5%
Stone, Clay, & Glass 9.1% 6.1%
All other 33.2% 36.8%
#of Revenue Carloadings
26,784,000 21,226,000
Make of these figures what you will. It appears that trains do indeed
carry about 1.4 times the ton-miles that trucks to, at about 17% of the
energy of the trucks. This is increasingly coal.
Ken
Larry Smith
>Speaking as one of the masses, of the uninformed public, it is just this kind
>of elitist condescension that polerizes us common people against those trying
>to persuade without informing.
Then I must envy you your faith in humanity, for I see no such evidence in
this country's political system that elitist condescension is anything but
the right way to go. Most are not so blunt about saying it as I.
But I would enjoy nothing more than being proven utterly and inexorably
wrong in this particular. The complete and utter defeat of all three
potential presidential contenders in favor of "None of the Above" would
be a wonderful first step.
Larry Smith (sm...@ctron.com) No, I don't speak for Cabletron.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Daily I'd go over to Congress - that grand old benevolent national asylum - and
report on the inmates there. Never seen a body of men with tongues more handy,
or information more uncertain. If one of those men had been present when the
Diety was on the point of saying "Let there be light" we never would've had it.
Mark Wilson
<1992Jun22....@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk>
>I've never quite understood why there is no standard shipping unit smaller
>than a container - why not have a class of container that comes apart into
>pallet-sized subcontainers that a light forklift could get onto a pickup?
>I've never seen such a thing - is there some good reason why it doesn't
>exist? The present situation often leads to the overuse of 18-wheelers for
>ridiculously small loads; I'm sure we've all seen a workstation arriving in
>solitary splendour in an auditorium-sized trailer.
As the container gets smaller, the weight and volumne of the container
as a fraction of the cargo gets bigger. (It's a version of the old r^3
law. Given that cubes are less efficient than spheres.) As the
container gets smaller, the efficiency of the packing system goes down.
At some point you pass through break even. Though I don't know just where
that point would be.
Steve Chapin
Thanks for the numbers. I withdraw my objection.
s...@cs.purdue.edu Steve Chapin Today's Grammar Lesson:
The effect of his affected accent affected her,
and effected a change in her affections.
Help stamp out variable length protocol headers!