Why do we battle climate change

I don't know about you guys, but my area is doing really well, so I won't have to pay climate taxes, right?

 

I don't know what a denialist is. I am a nuclear engineer by education, a computational fluid dynamicist by most of my technical experience. Without knowledge of probabilities of interactions among particles and between photons and particles, central to the physics I was immersed in, most climate warmunistas wouldn't have a clue about what was meant by the greenhouse effect. If extremists want to convince people the world is coming to an end, they need to quit cooking the numbers.

 

oil and coal.
Both of which Trump has sold his soul for due to his financial and political ties.

Incidentally Trump along with Russia, Saudia Arabia and Kuwait have refused to accept the wording of the latest climate report this week.
That's some classy company you're keeping there Donny.

 

Yes, fortunately, pollution does not cross international borders so you should be fine.

 

People like Chris Landsea and Judith Curry and Richard Lindzen end up being targets to the Democrats. To be desperately smeared and fought against.

 

Why do we battle climate change

Actually we really don't.

We do argue about it a lot and recycle though.

 

We need more like you and fewer that wind sewing bobbins discussing this. The alarmists are so desperate that we become frightened. Climate changes. To date, at least in my case, i have yet to see actual proven figures as to what man does that definitely modifies climate. Seems if it is that definite, scientists like Dr. Richard Lindzen would be warning us, rather than telling us it is really not bad at all.

 

Well, I have a 50 mile round trip commute to work, so a horse wouldn't cut it for me. But I too reminisce. I could get on my bike at the age of six and ride all over town. We had freedoms then, we learned to think for ourselves. We have lost so much to "progressiveness".

 

You are soooo right.

 

The global warming hoax is based upon two types of people, those anti-capitalists that want global wealth redistribution, and those arrogant liberals that want to feel good about themselves in fixing something they don't even understand...

 

I was still going to school when Liberals opposed renewable energy. They were so vehement about saving the snail darter that they were willing to turn the earth into a fiery inferno. As it turned out, the snail darter is doing just fine.

Liberals were so vehement about protecting the delicate ecosystems in the national forests that they fought to leave kindling that turned a run of the mill wildfire into a national disaster. I could smell California here in Ohio and it wasn't Gavin's poop piles. Every year, Southern California has a few months of rain and a few months of drought or near drought. They route water during their rainy season into the Pacific and irrigate during their dry, growing season.

Squeaky clean Southern California buys almost 3/4 of the output from coal-fired power plants near SLC in Utah ,,, the Intermountain Project. At one time I thought Los Angeles was listed as the owner. I was out there on a site visit when the plant was being built in the 1980's.

 

I have not investigated the sources of power for Los Angeles as i have for my own part of Cal, Northern Cal. I realize S. Cal needs water and power. So they should be busy adding to it, not ranting on how lousy climate treats them.

 

Could you explain how the probabilities of interactions among particles and between photons and particles (assuming you mean electrons here) central to physics is relevent to the science behind the greenhouse effect?

Just in general laymans terms would be fine.

 

Two examples.Insted of speculating and talking some urgenr actions should be taken to fix what is fixable.But hey, liberal elites cannit make money from it.Some future climate tax forcefully imposed on ordinary people is more important.

This is definitely more alarming than some projected CO2 emissions.

https://www.verdict.co.uk/yangtze-river-plastic-pollution/

https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-indias-ganges-river-pollution-2018-1?r=US&IR=T

 

Not sure "there's more than one pollution problem" is going to work!

It arguably gives more ammo against market liberalism and also questions the validity of solutions offered by Pigovian taxes (carbon tax) and the Coase Theorem (pollution permits). The focus switches to sustainability and more radical outlooks offered by approaches such as bioenvironmentalism.

 

They are called cross-sections and have the unit cm^-1. In the nuclear domain, the concern is about absorption, scattering, and fission caused by neutrons. There are published cross-sections for various atoms, sometimes as a function of the energy level of the neutron. U^235 is, for instance, fissionable by slow neutrons. When a fast neutron hits a hydrogen atom in the light water coolant , it gives up most of its energy, since the mass of a hydrogen atom and that of a neutron are virtually the same. When that slow neutron strikes a U^235 atom, there's a high likelihood, it will fission, releasing energy + 2 additional fast neutrons.

In the climate world, high energy radiation from the sun and black body radiation back out into space are at issue. The so-called greenhouse effect is caused by molecules that allow high energy radiation through and block low energy black body radiation from escaping. Water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas. On clear winter nights it gets colder than normal because black body radiation from the earth's surface escapes freely.

 

I highly recommend E F Schumacher - Small is Beautiful. Implementation of such policies would no doubt have a great positive effect on the climate.

Globalism is the route cause of many, many problems in the world today.

 

I'm sure mitchscove can answer for himself. But briefly, the interaction of photons at a precise energy level interacts with certain molecules, like CO2. The molecules absorb the photon energy into their vibration or rotation modes of energy (which does not increase the temperature). That molecule then collides with another molecule, of any sort, and can transfer its vibration energy to the other molecule's translation energy which is evidenced by an increased temperature. There are many details and nuances involved with this, but, in general, this is the way -- and the only way -- the greenhouse effect works.

 

Its not that your claim is necessarily wrong ... it is that your claim is unsupported.

 

Okay. Thanks for answering. I am not sure how you would actually measure the "probability of any of this happening on a global scale even if it was possible. By black body radiation do you mean infrared radiation. My plebeian he greenhouse effect is caused by CO2 absorbing radiation at the infrared range.

I found this powerpoint from the university of Colorado that seems to explain the concept quite concisely in terms of Solar and IR transmission properties of the atmosphere. Are you saying this this model is too simplistic because we do not understand probabilistic interactions of fast neutrons with other subatomic particles in other atmospheric gases or even uranium in the climate system?

http://cires.colorado.edu/outreach/...um/Fairall lecture note taking (Module 2).pdf

This is another slide I found where energy budget is measured in W/m^2:



Are you saying that this is not correct because we do not understand probabilities of interaction with neutrons?

Here is another example related specifically to climate change:



Another short explination:

http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/~sgs02rpa/CONTED/cl-intro.html

I am honestly trying to understand so pardon my stupid questions but are you saying that climate scientists have got it wrong because they are not including probabilistic effects of subatomic particles such as neutrons with photons? I so wouldn't the overall effect be observable by calculating an average or constant?

 

Not that mitchscove needs it, but I'll try to help a bit more. Whether a CO2 molecule actually absorbs a photon depends on a number of molecular things. Local Thermodynamic Equilibrium, concentration, Einstein constants, the number of CO2 molecules in a local environment that have already absorbed a photon, and the velocity of a molecule to name some (most?) The science has a difficult time analyzing and describing this physics at a molecular level, though they have a pretty good idea. You are correct that they can make average estimates on a more global level, but, though maybe good estimates, they are none the less estimates and not precise calculations. There are some areas where the uncertainty is fairly notable.

 

So what's that got to do with WV being a GHG?

 

Are the doomsday climate change predictions a bit much?
Maybe.
—That’s a big maybe.

If we have the technology and money to invest in new technologies that would help us control the changes of our planet; isn’t that worth looking into?

I think so.

Should the taxpayer’s continue to be pimped out for energy companies?

Certainly not; and if they’re going to appreciate the benefits of the public purse you better show some damn innovation beyond lobbying.

 

The greenhouse effect can't be measured on a global scale. That's the point. We understand the greenhouse effect on a molecular level. We think we see its effects in 1 dimension, vertical ,,, and we attribute it's effects to every transient 3D weather pattern we observe.

Out of one side of their mouths we hear that the science is settled. At the same time the people of settled science are launching satellites to study the effect of cosmic rays on cloud formation ,,, and we're still mapping the Pacific Ocean floor ,,, the Pacific Ocean having a dramatic effect on global weather.

If you saw the first visuals that came back from OCO2, they were laughable. The highest concentrations of CO2 were in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Zimbabwe was a close second. See, solubility of CO2 in water decreases with increasing temperature. So increasing CO2 levels could well be the result of carbon in the oceans. Just out of curiosity, I calculated the ppm CO2 levels in the atmosphere if all of the carbon in the oceans were in the form of carbonic acid or similar substance and were released in the form of CO2 by the warming of seawater. As I recall it was something like 30,000 ppm. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations are in the round-off error. by comparison.

Getting back to clouds. The sunspot number gives us an indication of solar activity, radiation and magnetic fields --- magnetic fields that influence the incidence of cosmic rays being nucleation sites for cloud formation. So, if we look at the sunspot number in time


Can you see from the above how the sun may have had something to do with the warming of the earth between 1860 and 1880? Can you see how warming might have accelerated since the 1950's?

So here we are ,,, the sun is less active than it has been ,,, so we should expect cooling ,,, right? Not necessarily. The Antarctic is growing ,,, ice is not melting. What might that say about the equatorial Pacific surface temperature? Might it be warmer, at least temporarily, an El Nino pattern that creates the flooding across the southwest through the south and southeast?

I spent the first years of my career helping analysts satisfy 10CFR50.46 ,,, developing methods to model the blow down of a nuclear plant from 2000 psi to atmospheric in less than half a minute --- transient two-phase multi-component fluid flow and heat transfer. That was less than nothing in complexity when compared to the models needed to support climate hysteria --- that don't exist. Big difference is that I couldn't pull the wool over the eyes of NRC Regulators.

In summary, we don't even know what we don't know despite jabber about some consensus of scientists and settled science. We do know one thing. Regardless of who or what is responsible for changes in the climate, we are going to have to adapt ,,, build taller sea walls, quit building FEMA protected mansions along the shores, etc.

 

I'm on Dr. Curry's mailing list. She provides the service of sharing research she runs across in the literature. I've never read anything in her writings that is the least bit controversial.

Fact is that people who can't back their extremism with facts have to attack scientists who know and are willing to articulate the maturity of the science, or lack thereof.