Climate Control

ABSTRACT:
I am not a climate scientist. My education and career was in developing and controlling processes. The design of the system (or process) for maintaining a livable temperature on earth is massive, robust and, thankfully, so far not able to be fixed or fouled up by man. I will explain how the system works and present some surprising facts that show that made-made carbon gases are inconsequential. I will also discuss global temperature. Global temperature is a construct that was constructed not as a tool for science but as an aid for persuading the ignorant. Unfortunately, all politicians and most leaders fall into to this latter category.

BACKGROUND: It is amazing to me that this is a big issue, but it is. The earth has been through many warming and cooling periods; most of which were much more extreme than what we have seen the last hundred years. The recent hoopla started about 50 years ago when someone proposed a global warming hypothesis whereby emitted carbon-based gases collected in the atmosphere and formed a barrier that acted like a green house, holding in heat. These emissions of carbon-based gases purported to come from man using carbon fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) to power all ships, trains, cars, houses, airplanes, machines and factories since the mid 1880’s i.e. The Industrial Age. This was a plausible theory, and it remains as such today. Politicians and opportunists love this concept. Not because it has been proven true and is fact; since it has not. No, they love it because it is very difficult to prove that it is not true. Imaginations can run wild and unchecked, and they have: Man-made global warming causes droughts, hurricanes, tornados, illnesses, melting ice caps, flooding coasts and who knows what else. The catastrophes are only limited by one’s imagination but certainly include destruction of the planet and an end to humanity. But I am a scientist by career and would like to take a sane look at this. True scientists look for facts and proof and they are skeptical until there is proof. I might point out there is an obvious and significant difference between denier and skeptic. Every true scientist is a skeptic until the hypothesis is proven. They may conjecture, since hypothesis is a key part of the scientific method, but they do not conclude without proof. This is the troubling part of this issue. The most compelling proof for man-made climate change proffered thus far is the number of scientists who have jumped on board. But the laws governing the universe are not voted on, physics is not a democracy. Furthermore, not many, if any, true scientists are on board. To give some idea of how much weight to give to consensus, I will relate a lesson from history: At the beginning of the 17th century the hypothesis accepted by the political and religious leaders was that the solar system was geocentric; that is earth was at the center and the sun and other planets revolved around the earth. The consensus of scientist then, as today, followed the money and leaders control the money. However, a few true scientists, including Galileo and Copernicus before him, thought the data pointed to a heliocentric solar system; i.e. sun centered. In 1632 Galileo published his conclusions: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. The book was immediately banned and Galileo was banned from teaching or publishing such heresy. With time the science became clear and Galileo was correct!

Temperature control system:

Both water vapor and carbon gases are greenhouse gases but water vapor will be shown to be the primary medium that absorbs and reflects heat radiating to the earth or emanating back from the earth to maintain the temperature within a livable range. Carbon gases also do the same, and perhaps at a higher efficiency, but since the amount of these gases is so small, they merely have a ripple effect on earth’s temperature. (Note that carbon dioxide, like water vapor, is also cyclical: It is emitted from decaying plants and burning fossil fuels and is absorbed by living plants, including algae, and the oceans.)

There is an old saying in science that the devil is in the details. One of the techniques for avoiding the details in science, particularly thermodynamics, is looking at a macro view via a closed system. A closed system is like an empty box that you can monitor what goes in and what comes out. We will use North America and the atmosphere above it as our closed system and understand the process or system.

The system is the cycle of water and, as I said earlier, the design is massive, marvelous and robust. The process starts with evaporation of water from the oceans and seas. This becomes water vapor in the atmosphere. Most water vapor in the air is invisible; it only becomes visible as clouds when the air becomes saturated and the water vapor begins to condense. This water vapor drifts over the land (into our closed system) and falls as precipitation. All of the water in the lakes, rivers, streams and snow packs of North America come from this precipitation. This is the input into our closed system. That output is an enormous, almost unimaginable, amount of water that flows out every day from all the rivers and streams that empty back into the ocean and seas surrounding our closed system, North America. In Oregon alone, if I walk along the beach, every few hundred yards there is a small stream cutting across the sand into the ocean. And every twenty to thirty miles a river or large creek and then, at several points, large rivers like the Columbia or Umpqua or Roque. Now imagine the amount of water that flows from every stream on all of the coasts of North America. That is the output from our closed system and is a measure of how much water vapor was in the atmosphere. This water vapor is a greenhouse gas that controls our temperature on earth. There is an enormous amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, as much as 100 times and maybe 1000 times more than all the carbon gases combined. So it is reasonable to conclude that man-made carbon gases cause just a ripple effect in the earth's temperature. See chart below.

(Note. A significant amount of the water vapor that transports over the land does not precipitate over the land but moves back over the oceans or seas out of our closed system. There is no good way to measure this but it makes the estimate of water vapor in the atmosphere significantly lower than it actually is. So, the estimates are understated!)

Global Temperature measurement: 

Statistics demands that to demonstrate that the global temperature has significantly changed in the last century, the measurements made over that time must be far more accurate than the change. Alas, that is not the case. The problem is that temperature is a continuum that is constantly changing over time and over space. The technique that has historically been employed to determine global temperature is to gather into one place measurements taken from a multitude of spots around the earth and do some mathematical operations on them to come up with a statistical estimate of global temperature. The first issue is the coverage. The locations that contribute temperature data has changed over time. For example, at the start of the 19th century there were few or none locations in such places as the Arctic, the Antarctic, the Australian outback, and the multitude of islands throughout the world. This seems significant when you consider that at any time the temperature is typically several degrees different just between Oregon cities of Corvallis and Albany (~10 miles) and we are talking about one-degree (or less) change over a century. A second issue is that the precision of a statistical estimate depends on the number of measurement points. Consequently, the precision of historic estimates is considerably less than current estimates. Now statistical estimates are admittedly not exact and the beauty of statistics is that it can very precisely tell you what confidence you should have in the estimate. So, what a “true scientist” would do is present the estimate and the confidence limits so you know how much stock you can put in the estimate. What the charlatan would do is take the estimate and make extrapolations and imagine consequences based on these and put this out for public consumption. You judge how often you hear discussions of the confidence interval of the global temperature predictions and you can assess which brand of scientist you are dealing with. This clouds the issue of changes in global temperature. I have not run the numbers, and have some doubt that it is possible, but my intuition tells me that the window of statistical confidence around the estimates of global temperature is much greater than the changes in global temperature we are talking about. This is the most plausible reason why we don’t hear about the confidence interval of the temperature changes.

Conclusion: We have shown that water vapor is the temperature control system and is wonderfully designed, massive, and very robust. Thankfully man has no control over our temperature, to either fix it or screw it up. There is no proof yet that any changes in climate are the result of man-made carbon gases. That is not to say there is no global warming or cooling. The earth is, and has always been, going through periods of cooling (ice ages) and warming (ice melting). The latest trend is warming since the little ice age (~1850). In recent years we have measured an increase in carbon gases in the atmosphere but that is not the case in some of the historic warming episodes. But it is faulty logic, casual fallacy, to conclude since temperatures are increasing and carbon gases are increasing that carbon gases cause global warming. Perhaps some unknown source is causing both! It would be a huge contribution to mankind if we could understand the factors that cause these temperature swings.

When we start making decisions before we understand the root cause, we are wrong and aggravate the problems as often as we are right and help it. We do not have a viable alternative to carbon based energy at this time. We have dissipated a huge amount of our wealth on subsidies for wind turbines and solar panels and neither of these is viable now or likely to be in the future. There will be a viable alternative (perhaps hydrogen fuel cells or clean nuclear) and when it is ready the market will adopt it and subsidies will not be necessary. A serious consequence of focusing on carbon-based gases is that the production of food depends on carbon products and restricting them seriously increases hunger and starvation worldwide.

Some other points of interest:

Good book by true scientists is: “Hot Talk, Cold Science” by Fred Singer et al

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