Climate change and the "Economist."...

:grins: One thing I have learned after a few years on a site like MartialTalk, where people are intelligent and also willing to listen as well as talk, is that there is always common ground to be found. Once you have found it, you can use it to build discussions that are productive, even if they are not always any the less frank :).
 
This discussion brings back memories of watching Penn and Teller's BS. I am all for Nuclear power. It is cleaner, and safer than our current form of power generation and has less impact on the environment.

I'm also against this recycling craze. Recycling is a great idea, but our method of processing it does more damage to the environment ( through emissions and the like ) than recycling helps.
The fact is that we need more research and we need to work on better methods of saving the environment. Ignoring a problem doesn't make it go away. But neither does freaking out and acting without thinking things through. We all need to figure it out in that happy middle ground.
 
A look at why the climate change computer models are wrong...

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/04/why-are-the-alarmists-computer-models-wrong.php

The case for global warming hysteria rests entirely on certain computer models that committed warmist partisans have been paid tens of billions of dollars by greedy governments to develop. It is hardly a shock, then, that these programs crank out one alarming scenario after another. They predict endless cataclysms resulting from an always-warming Earth, even as the actual Earth, not the computer-generated one, stubbornly refuses to heat up, year after year. None of this should be a surprise, since a computer model will tell you whatever you program it to.
At The Week That Was, Ken Haapala and Vincent Gray explain some of the problems with the alarmists’ models that cause them to generate consistently wrong predictions:
Vincent Gray, a five time expert reviewer of the Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has reassessed his earlier review of the origins [of the] “greenhouse effect.” Also, he addresses many errors that arise in the models. They are too highly simplified versions of the climate system and fail to incorporate important components of the earth’s heat transfer system.
The paper (22 pages including references) may become controversial, as it should be. If Gray is correct, then the entire IPCC program, and the ones that parrot it, such as the U.S. Global Change Research Program and the EPA’s endangerment finding, are built on false assumptions that must be revised.
According to reports from the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Research Service, from 1993 to 2012 the US Government has spent about $140 to 150 Billion on global warming / climate change – creating the Climate Establishment. Based on continuing resolutions, current spending is about $20 Billion per year. This figure does not include subsidies for unreliable wind and solar, or Biofuels.
No doubt, the Climate Establishment will bitterly contest any major revision of their ideas and models, in which they have expressed great, if scientifically unfounded, certainty. The following is not intended to be a summary of Gray’s assessment, but just a brief list of some of the highlights.
* In postulating that carbon dioxide is a major greenhouse gas, Svante August Arrhenius used the wrong measurements – ones of water vapor, not carbon dioxide. He did not make the measurements, but used those by Langley.
* Arrhenius greatly over estimated the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere as compared with water vapor, by an average of 50 to 1.
* Guy Callendar, who continued the emphasis on carbon dioxide, ignored water vapor and believed that radiation was the only form of energy transfer in the climate system. He ignored the existence of conduction, convection, evaporation, and condensation as mechanisms of heat transfer.
* The IPCC has continued to emphasize radiation, ignoring the other mechanisms of heat transfer.
* The simplified model of the IPCC by Kiehl and Trenberth ignores the fact that the sun does not shine on the same place 24 hours a day. Measures of the average radiation from the earth are not suitable and measurements should include the difference between day and night.
* There are no estimates of the accuracy of the values of solar heating over oceans and land.
* The range in estimated values [for] solar heating effects of oceans and land is significantly greater than the calculated values of warming effects from increasing carbon dioxide.
* Thus, the value of warming effects from increasing carbon dioxide cannot be calculated with scientific precision.

Gray differentiates between an actual greenhouse and the earth’s climate. For the earth, both ocean and atmospheric circulation are critical. The movements of fluids are chaotic, and have not been satisfactorily described by mathematics. He states that the IPCC falsely claims that the chaotic behavior is managed; pointing out that, based on their calculations, the energy subject to chaotic behavior is about 60 times greater than the estimate of the warming effect of increased carbon dioxide (97 v. 1.6 W/m squared).

 
A look at why the climate change computer models are wrong...

You're in my area of professional expertise now, dude, and the models are good--the data in is what's mostly in question and that's where the questions of the rate (not fact) of future increase come from. These are the same models used to predict weather and climate for some time now. (E.g., Brazil has traditionally been a major buyer of supercomputers to predict the yearly climate--will be a wet year, a hot year, etc., to decide nationally what and when to plant. It's been very successful for them.) The models are simple physics and chemistry and have been used for literally centuries, though they have only achieved prominence in the supercomputing era. The models use the same aerodynamics used to develop airplanes, etc.

The case for global warming hysteria rests entirely on certain computer models that committed warmist partisans have been paid tens of billions of dollars by greedy governments to develop.

Ah. But I am using logic and facts where such an approach is clearly not appropriate.
 

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