This is a comment by Dr. Robert Brown on the What we don’t know about Earth’s energy flow post. I thought it was so insightful on the topic of climate stability being “pushed” by CO2 forcing that I’ve elevated it to a separate post. – Anthony
Is it fair to say that the two systems would oscillate within the same parameters but the probability of them being synchronized is nil?
Sadly, no, not over long times. The systems could be as different as a ferromagnet magnetized up and an “identical” ferromagnet magnetized down. Or in the case of the Earth, as different as Glacial Earth and Interglacial Earth. The point is that both of these latter possibilities can be “stable” states for exactly the same insolation, etc, because feedbacks in the global system can themselves reconfigure to make them stable.
If you look at the link to chaos theory I provided, and look at the figure that shows two loopy braids of lines, that provides an heuristic picture of the kind of possibilities available to coupled nonlinear differential systems.
At the heart of each loop is something called a “strange attractor”, which is typically a limit point. The x and y axes are coordinates in a generalized (phase) space that represent the state of the system at any given time, x(t),y(t). The lines themselves are the trajectory of the system over time moving under the influence of the underlying dynamics. The point of the figure is that instead of their being a single “orbit” the way the earth orbits a regular attractor like the sun, the system oscillates around one attractor for a time, then the other, then both. Instead of nice closed orbits the orbits themselves are almost never the same.
Two trajectories that are started close to one another will usually start out, for a while, orbiting the attractors the same general way. But over time — often a remarkably short time — the two trajectories will diverge. One will flip over to the other attractor and the other won’t. After a remarkably short time, the two trajectories are almost completely decorrelated in that the knowledge of where one lies (in the general accessible phase space) provides one with no help at all in guessing the location of the other.
It’s only in this final sense that you are correct. Either system has to be found in the space of physically consistent states, states that are accessible via the differential process from the starting points. There is no guarantee that the trajectories will “fill phase space”. So in this sense they are both going to be found within the phase space accessible from the starting points. If those two starting points are close enough, they will probably sample very similar phase spaces, but there is no guarantee that they will be identical — especially if there are (many) more than two attractors, and if some simple parameter. In stat mech, with different assumptions, there is a theorem to that regard, but in the general case of open system dynamics in a chaotic system, IFAIK no.
If you are interested in this sort of thing (which can be fun to play with, actually) you can look up things like the “predator-prey differential equations”, e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equation
IIRC this is one of the simplest systems exhibiting an attractor and limit cycle, and illustrates many of the features of more complicated dynamical systems. The attractor/fixed point in this case is the population of e.g. foxes and rabbits that remains in perfect equilibrium from year to year. Note well that this equation is deterministic, but of course a real population — even being modelled — always has random (or at least, “unpredictable”) variations — a certain amount of noise — and is actually discretized and not continuous as one cannot have half a cheetah eating \pi baboons.
A better continuous “kind” of differential equation for describing systems like this with noise is something called a Langevin equation in physics — a system with “fast” microscopic degrees of freedom that one accounts for on average with a stochastic term, and slower degrees of freedom one integrates out like the predator prey equation. In physics it is a special limiting case of something called a generalized Master equation, which is the full integrodifferential description of a many body open quantum system and is really, really difficult. The general approach, however, is not inapplicable here — and is a presumed part of most of the simplified climate models. When you “smooth” the temperature by e.g. doing a running average, you are giving up information (the short time variation) and trying to reduce the complexity of the system by focussing on the slower time scale dynamics.
If the system really is simple — has a single attractor and is in a very regular oscillation around it where the “noise” one is smoothing out really is irrelevant and just adds small variation to a single trajectory — this is probably OK. If the system is multistable and has many locally stable points, or worse if some of the degrees of freedom are things like the Sun whose time evolution is completely outside of “the system” and whose future you cannot predict and whose effect you do not precisely know, so that the attractors themselves can be moving around as the system evolves locally — it is probably not OK.
The symptom of the latter kind of multistable system where it is probably not OK is a series of punctuated equilibria, visible in the smoothed data. The 30 year satellite data and SST data fairly clearly shows this kind of behavior.
One final very important point — systems that oscillate almost always have negative feedback. In fact, that is the fundamental thing that defines an oscillatory system — it has attractors in it. Attractors are themselves stable (equilibrium) points such that if the system is perturbed from them it is pulled back towards equilibrium, not pushed away from it. In the general case of attractors in high dimensional spaces, this leads to the (Poincare) cycles around the attractors visible in the predator-prey equations or the Chaos figure with two strange attractors, except that they can get very, very complicated (and difficult to visualize) in 3+ dimensional spaces (where I’m not talking about physical spaces, note well, but parametric “phase” spaces, state spaces). Within some neighborhood of an attractor there is generally a fair bit of local stability — trajectories in that neighborhood will oscillate tightly around the one attractor and will be relatively unlikely to switch over to other attractors. Hence glacial and interglacial periods tend to last a fairly long time (compared to all of the many shorter timescales available to the system.
Moving a single underlying external parameter — e.g. anthropogenic CO_2 concentration, Solar state, geomagnetic state — can be thought of as moving the fixed points of the multistable system. If we linearize, we can often guess at least the direction of the first order direction of the movement. For example, more CO_2, given the greenhouse effect, should increase heat trapping, hence increase average global temperature. The stable fixed point should thus move a bit up in the warming direction.
Nearly all of the argument “revolves” (in more ways than one:-) around two simple problems, and note that I’m presenting them in a very different way than usual:
a) Is this linear response assumption valid? This is not a trivial question. Increased CO_2 in a multistable system doesn’t just move the local attractor, it moves all the attractors, and not necessarily in simple linear ways in a really complicated system with many negative feedbacks (there by hypothesis all over the place because the system is dominated by attractors). In many systems, there are conservation principles at work (not necessarily known ones) that act as constraints so that moving one attractor up moves another one down or increases the “barrier height” between two attractors and hence deforms all of the limit cycles.
b) Is the response the order of the mean difference between attractors being predominantly sampled within the system already? If it is greater, then it is likely not just to move the current attractor but to kick the system over to a new attractor. And it may not be the attractor you expect, one on the warmer side of the previous one. More warming, as warmists state in more heuristic terms, can make the system oscillate more wildly and hence be both warmer at the warmest part of the oscillation and colder at the coldest part of the oscillation. If the new excursion of the oscillation is great enough, it can kick the system into oscillation around a new attractor altogether on either side of things.
Note that this latter statement is still oversimplified as it makes it sound like there are only two directions, warmer and cooler. But that is not true. There is warmer with morewater vapor in the atmosphere, warmer with less water vapor in the atmosphere, warmer with the sun active, warmer with the sun not active, warmer with sea ice increasing, warmer with sea ice decreasing, warmer with more clouds, warmer with less clouds, and the clouds in question can be day side or night side clouds, arctic or antarctic clouds, in the summer, fall, winter or spring, really month by month if not day by day, with feedbacks everywhere — tweaking any single aspect of this cycle affects all of the rest, and I haven’t even begun to list all of the important dimensions or note that there are really important time scales with nearly periodic oscillation of many of these drivers, or noted that the underlying dynamics takes place on a spinning globe that generates airflow vortices as standard operating procedure that have lifetimes ranging from days to decades.
I have argued in posts above that the punctuated quasi-equilibrium evident in the climate record makes it very likely that the answer to b) is yes. The anthropogenic CO_2 shifts the system by order of or more than the distance between attractors, simply because the system jumped around between attractors even during time periods when there was no anthropogenic CO_2. Furthermore, the excursion of the system as it wandered among the attractors was as great as it is today, and not qualitatively different.
This strongly suggests that while the the linear response assumption made in a) may be valid (per attractor) — or may not, but it will be a huge problem to prove it — the effect is less than the natural excursion, not greater than the natural excursion, and the negative feedback factors that make the multistable attractors (locally) attractive also act as negative feedback on the CO_2 induced shift!
The latter is the fluctuation-dissipation theorem, as I already noted in one thread or another (two tired of writing to go see if it was this one). In an open system in a locally stable phase, the oscillations (fluctuations) couple to the dissipation so that more fluctuation makes more dissipation — negative feedback. If this is not true, the locally stable phase is not stable.
This is a strong argument against catastrophe! The point is that given that CO_2 is making only small, slow, local shifts of the attractors compared to the large shifts of the system between the attractors, if there was a point where the system was likely to fall over to a much warmer stable point — the “catastrophe” threatened by the warmists — it almost certainly would have already done it, as the phase oscillations over the last ten thousand years have on numerous occasions made it as warm as it is right now.
The fact that this has not happened is actually enormously strong evidence against both positive feedback and catastrophe. Yes, anthropogenic CO_2 may have shifted all the attractor temperatures a bit higher, it may have made small rearrangements of the attractors, but there is no evidence that suggests that it is probably going to suddenly create at new attractor far outside of the normal range of variation already visible in the climate record. Is it impossible? Of course not. But it is not probable.
I’ll close with an analogy. When physicists were getting ready to test the first nuclear bomb, there was some concern expressed by the less gifted physicists present that in doing so they might “ignite the Earth’s atmosphere” or somehow turn the Earth into a Sun (note that this was before there was any understanding of fusion — the sun’s energy cycle was still not understood). I’ve read (far more recently) some concern that collisions at the LHC could have the same effect — create a mini-black hole or the like that swallows the Earth.
Both of these are silly fears (although offered up, note well, by real scientists, because they could see that these outcomes were possible, at least in principle) and here’s why.
The temperature and pressure created by the nuclear bomb is not unique! Although it is rare, asteroids fall to the earth, and when they do they create pressures and temperatures much higher than those produced by nuclear bombs. A very modest sized asteroid can release more energy in a few milliseconds than tens of thousands of times the total explosive energy of all of the man-made explosives, including nuclear bombs, on Earth! In a nutshell, if it could happen (with any reasonable probability), it already would have happened.
Ditto the fears associated with the LHC, or other “super” colliders. Sure, it generates collisions on the order of electron-teravolts, but this sort of energy in nuclear collisions is not unique! The Earth is constantly being bombarded by high energy particles given off by extremely energetic events like supernovae that happened long ago and far away. The energies of these cosmic rays are vastly greater than anything we will ever be able to produce in the laboratory until the laboratory in question contains a supernova. The most energetic cosmic ray ever observed (so far) was a (presumably) proton with the kinetic energy of a fastball-pitched baseball, a baseball travelling at some 150 kilometers per hour. Since we’ve seen one of these in a few decades of looking, we have to assume that they happen all the time — literally every second a cosmic ray of this sort of energy is hitting the Earth (BIG target) somewhere. If such a collision could create a black hole that destroyed planets with any significant probability, we would have been toast long, long ago.
Hence it is silly to fear the LHC or nuclear ignition. If either were probable, we wouldn’t be here to build an LHC or nuclear bomb.
It is not quite that silly to fear CAGW. The truth is that we haven’t been around long enough to know enough about the climate system to be able to tell what sorts of feedbacks and factors structure the multistable climate attractors, so one can create a number of doomsday scenarios — warming to a critical point that releases massive amounts of methane that heats things suddenly so that the ocean degasses all of its CO_2 and the ice caps melt and the oceans boil and suddenly there we are, Venus Earth with a mean temperature outside of 200 C. If we can imagine it and write it down, it must be possible, right? Science fiction novels galore explore just that sort of thing. Or movies proposing the opposite — the appearance of attractors that somehow instantly freeze the entire planet and bring about an ice age. Hey! It could happen!
But is it probable?
Here is where the argument above provides us with a great deal of comfort. There is little in the climate record to suggest the existence of another major stable state, another major attractor, well above the current warm phase attractor. Quite the opposite — the record over the last few tens of millions of years suggest that we are in the middle of a prolonged cooling phase of the planet, of the sort that has happened repeatedly over geological time, such that we are in the warm phase major attractor, and that there is literally nothing out there above it to go to. If there were, we would have gone there, instead, as local variations and oscillation around the many> minor warm phase attractors has repeatedly sampled conditions that would have been likely to cause a transition to occur if one was at all likely. At the very least, there would be a trace of it in the thermal record of the last million years or thereabouts, and there isn’t. We’re in one of the longest, warmest interglacials of the last five, although not at the warmest point of the current interglacial (the Holocene). If there were a still warmer attractor out there, the warmest point of the Holocene would have been likely to find it.
Since it manifestly did not, that suggests that the overall feedbacks are safely negative and all of the “catastrophe” hypotheses but one are relatively unlikely.
The one that should be worrisome? Catastrophic Global Cooling. We know that there is a cold phase major attractor some 5-10C cooler than current temperatures. Human civilization arose in the Holocene, and we have not yet advanced to where it can survive a cold phase transition back to glacial conditions, not without the death of 5 billion people and probable near-collapse of civilization. We know that this transition not only can occur, but will occur. We do not know when, why, or how to estimate its general probability. We do know that the LIA — a mere 400-500 years ago — was the coolest period in the entire Holocene post the Younger Dryas excursion; in general the Holocene appears to be cooling from its warmest period, and the twentieth century was a Grand Solar Maximum, the most active sun in 11,000 years, a maximum that is now clearly past.
IMO we are far more likely to be hanging out over an instability in which a complete transition to cold phase becomes uncomfortably likely than we are to be near a transition to a superwarm phase that there is no evidence of in the climate record. The probability is higher for two reasons. One is that unlike the superwarm phase, we know that the cold phase actually exists, and is a lot more stable than the warm phase. The “size” of the quasistable Poincare cycle oscillations around the cold phase major attractor is much larger than that around the warm phase attractors, and brief periods of warming often get squashed before turning into actual interglacials — that’s how stable they are.
The other is that we spend 90% of the time in glacial phase, only 10% in interglacial, and the Holocene is already one of the longer interglacials! There is dynamics on long timescales that we do not understand at work here. We have only the foggiest idea of what causes the (essentially chaotic) transition from warm phase to cold phase or vice versa — very crude ideas involving combinations of Milankovich cycles, the tipping of the ecliptic, the precession of the poles, orbital resonances, and stuff like that, but there is clearly a strong feedback within the climate cycle that enables cold phase “tipping”, probably related to albedo.
It could be something as simple as a quiet sun; the LIA-Maunder minimum suggests that we should actively fear a quiet sun, because something in the nonlinear differential system seems to favor colder attractors (still in the warm phase major attractor) during Maunder-type minima. One has to imagine that conversion to glaciation phase is more likely at the bottom of e.g. the LIA than at any other time, and the Holocene is probably living on borrowed time at this point, where a prolonged LIA-like interval could tip it over.
To be honest, even a LIA would be a disaster far greater than most of the warmist catastrophic imaginings. The population of the world is enormous compared to what it was in the last ice age, and a huge fraction of it lives and grows food on temperate zone land. Early frost and late spring could both reduce the available land and halve the number of crops grown on the land that survives, even before full blown glaciation. Cold (warm) phases are often associated with temperature/tropic droughts, as well, at least in parts of the world. IMO, the “rapid” onset of a LIA could kill a billion people as crops in Siberia and China and Canada and the northern US fail, and could easily destabilize the world’s tenuous political situation to where global war again becomes likely to add to our woes.
We may ultimately discover that AGW was our salvation — the CO_2 released by our jump to civilization may ameliorate or postpone the next LIA, it may block cold-phase excursion that could begin the next REAL ice age for decades or even a century. In the meantime, perhaps we can get our act together and figure out how to live together in a civilized world, not a few civilized countries where people are well off and all the rest where they are poor and more or less enslaved by a handful of tyrants or religious oligarchs.
Note well, this latter bit is itself “speculative fiction” — I don’t fully understand climate cycles either (it’s a hard problem). But at least there I can provide evidence for a lurking catastrophe in the actual climate record, so it is a lot less “fiction” than CAGW.
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DirkH says:
January 9, 2012 at 7:17 pm
“Ecologists have throughout the 70ies and 80ies tried to simulate Runge-Kutta systems, describing ecosystems, with classical cybernetics, using analog computing networks; these are not quantized in any way. They wanted to find equilibrium conditions but their models kept oscillating unpredictably. (one such researcher was George van Dyne)”
So, their efforts to apply their ideas to physical reality failed. Why are you giving them a pass? Physicists have to abide by Galileo’s standard of “well confirmed physical hypotheses that can explain and predict the (real world) phenomena in question.” Do you want a lower standard for your ecologists?
RGB said;
” The Earth’s climate is in fact proven empirically (probably) stable for at least one more additional degree absolute and at least down to 2-3 almost completely missing solar cycles. ”
Now that’s seriously interesting. Can you do an article on that please.
Obliquity is currently 23.5 degrees and decreasing. So does less obliquity mean warmer, I wonder. So might the World in fact miss the next glaciation altogether ?
On a more pessimistic note you said ” perhaps we can get our act together and figure out how to live together in a civilized world, not a few civilized countries where people are well off and all the rest where they are poor and more or less enslaved by a handful of tyrants or religious oligarchs. ”
Yes perhaps we can, but only with a much smaller population size. A full blown glaciation will deliver that population reduction. But of more immediate interest, will be the impact of of a near Maunder style minimum in the next 20 or so years, given that the Worlds population is so very much larger, and food supply is possibly as tenuous as it was then despite modern farming methods.
Dr. Brown,
Thanks for your recent posts. I think everyone here would agree that the science on what effects global, let alone local climate ( which is what I care about in the here in now and for the next 50 years) isn’t settled. I concur 100% with “The Earth is a rather complex system.”
Personally I keep getting stuck on when I should be using physics first principle say E=mc^2 , Pv=nrt, heat and energy balance equations, vs considering, or is it including, the effects of emergent biological process that seem to keep happening on my homestead all the time. I leave a water bucket out for the gophers, moles, etc so that they don’t fall into our horse water buckets and/or eat a hole through my irrigation lines. I think I have found a few of the missing watts……………. My bucket ends up with a fair mass of algae (my water comes from a well) in it. More heat more algae, the energy went to the biological systems to make some mass. The pond across the street from me is a bigger example of how the biological world responds to a dab more heat- more plant material……… A day like today lots of mass is being generated it’s- 62f.
Thanks for your posts, and as long as my electrical energy costs don’t keep going up to much (someone has to pay for the output of the large utility scale PV farms that Mr Buffett and other other investors are buying up to help our state meet the 33%RES) I will continue filling up my water bucket. The pond across the street doesn’t need human intervention to convert some of the extra watts of energy into some mass. A natural springs has been running since the gold rush days (likely longer but we don’t have any data……….. ) that keeps the pond full.
“Sparks says:
January 9, 2012 at 8:34 pm
Deterministic chaos, that’s interesting!”
Wikipedia on chaos theory:
Chaos theory studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, an effect which is popularly referred to as the butterfly effect ……….. even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos.
J Martin says:
January 10, 2012 at 2:32 pm
“Yes perhaps we can, but only with a much smaller population size.”
Ridiculous. People, on average, produce more than they must consume. As a result, it is a given that having more people makes everyone wealthier, as the extra production per person increases the per capita surplus of goods and services progressively above and beyond that needed for subsistence. Such a sentiment can only be expressed by someone who takes all the benefits of a larger population for granted, and thinks they will all still be there when the population is reduced.
Theo Goodwin says:
January 10, 2012 at 2:28 pm
DirkH says:
January 9, 2012 at 7:17 pm
Ecologists…wanted to find equilibrium conditions but their models kept oscillating unpredictably.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
So, their efforts to apply their ideas to physical reality failed.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
And the real world doesn’t oscillate unpredictably? Seems to me they confirmed my observations. But then I’m only an Ecologist trained to observe, deduct and speculate, not predict an unpredictable system. Some things simply defy mathematical reduction. That is reality.
Philip Peake says:
January 9, 2012 at 4:14 pm
That was an *extremely* good read. Thank you.
Ditto, I enjoyed it too.
……………………….
Doug Cotton says:
January 9, 2012 at 4:23 pm
“A very interesting article. My only comment is that there is in fact no warming effect from carbon dioxide because it has been proved by Professors Claes Johnson (1) and Nasif Nahle (2) that backradiation cannot warm the surface. But there could be a cooling effect due to carbon dioxide, so the reference to the next “Little Ice Age” (which I suspect could happen within 450 to 600 years) does become perhaps a greater concern.”
(1) http://www.csc.kth.se/~cgjoh/blackbodyslayer.pdf
(2) http://principia-scientific.org/publications/New_Concise_Experiment_on_Backradiation.pdf
Robert Brown says:
January 10, 2012 at 11:17 am
It is reasonable to conclude that some of that warming has been due to anthropogenic changes including CO_2, land use changes, irrigation, blowing black soot around, air pollution, and so on. It’s really OK even for a skeptic to include CO_2 in the list, also — it is silly not to as noted above.
Which might make sense to some, but, what you noted above says:
I frankly doubt the proof. First of all, backradiation does not “warm the surface”, sure, but it damn sure can slow its daytime cooling and increase the retention of heat. Go out and buy a “space blanket” — one of those ultrathin reflective pieces of plastic — and wrap your hand in it. Second, the physical mechanism is well understood, makes sense, and is consistent with laboratory experiments.
How does equating CO2 with a space blanket when it is less than 99.96% of the atmosphere, and the anthropogenic contribution of that around 3%, make for a reasonable conviction that if the whole becomes doubled it will make even a rough 1°C increase in temperature? A blanket with so many holes is keeping this heat in? How? And, your secondly, please do describe these laboratory experiments which have made this mechanism well understood and making sense. I’ve yet to see any such experiment in the years I’ve been looking for proof.
If you want more proof, note the correlation between nighttime temperature and clouds. I mean this one is simple — you can do it yourself almost any winter night that start out cloudy but is due to clear or vice versa. The temperature is extremely uniform as long as there are clouds overhead backscattering heat and hence slowing radiative cooling, but as soon as the clouds depart it cools, even if there is almost no wind (so it isn’t just that the air coming in is cooler). Finally, note the diurnal temperature differential for hot deserts as a function of local humidity. When it is dry, it is as large as 45C. When the air is relatively humid, it is much smaller.
? The clouds, if cloud cover extensive, slow down convection, and heat rises, especially if there is no wind…. Deserts show us what the temperatures would likely be over the Earth without the Water Cycle, which is that the Earth would be some 52°C hotter because evaporation takes the heat of the Sun’s direct thermal radiation warming of land up and away thereby cooling the Earth. So yes, there is a greenhouse effect, but the detail I’m arguing about is that this has been wrongly been categorised as greenhouse gases having a warming effect, when the main greenhouse gas water vapour is the prime cooling agent of the atmosphere. And I say this is the major argument with the ‘greenhouse scenario dynamics’ and should be settled first.
The major argument involves the feedbacks and the details of the dynamics. If there is no feedback at all, a doubling of atmospheric CO_2 would lead to a probable increase in mean temperature of the Earth of roughly 1C, not really a problem. If there is net-negative feedback (which I offer a possibly “new” argument for above, although in the world it probably isn’t unique) it will probably be less than 1C. If there is net-positive feedback, it will probably be greater.
I have the most basic need to understand what you’re saying here. Even if Carbon Dioxide levels quadrupled, what difference can it possibly make? It doesn’t accumulate in the atmosphere but is fully part of the Water Cycle, all pure clean rain water being carbonic acid, no matter how much is in the atmosphere at any particular point in time it descends to Earth in the colder rain, when it isn’t descending anyway since it’s heavier than air, and compared with the real cooling of the major greenhouse gas water any ‘warming’ it might do is even more insignificant against this dynamic than even being a practically 100% holey blanket in the atmosphere.
but about the details, in particular how greenhouse trapping of heat due to CO_2 in general and anthropogenic CO_2 in particular
Carbon dioxide is an extremely poor trapper of heat – in other words, it doesn’t, it releases its heat practically instantly – oxygen and nitrogen hold onto heat longer and water significantly longer which is what makes it such a good cooling mechanism in our atmosphere.
To Dr. R.G. Brown or anyone else who can enlighten me:
In response to Dr. Brown’s comment at 1/10/12/11:17 a.m. regarding the 11,000 yr. grand solar maximum: I have noticed on “skeptic” and “lukewarmer” blogs alike that everyone seems to accept that for the late 20th century, the PMOD reconstruction (or something like it – Svalgaard) is correct such that TSI decreased from from the late1980’s to the early 2000’s. Please point me to the definitive proof that the Scafetta and Willson’s Acrim Gap Reconstruction was in error.
To Dr. Brown: In your comment [at 1/10/12/12:17 P.M.] you state that there was a “significant” decease in global temperature from 1945 to 1965. But how can this possibly be correct? Hansen and GissTemp have shown, haven’t they, that there was virtually no decrease in global temperature during that period?
Leigh B. Kelley,
In fact there was a significant temperature decline during that time:
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/USHCNvsCO2.jpg
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0128772998bd970c-pi
Bart says:
January 10, 2012 at 6:07 pm
J Martin says:
January 10, 2012 at 2:32 pm
“Yes perhaps we can, but only with a much smaller population size.”
Ridiculous. People, on average, produce more than they must consume. As a result, it is a given that having more people makes everyone wealthier, as the extra production per person increases the per capita surplus of goods and services progressively above and beyond that needed for subsistence. Such a sentiment can only be expressed by someone who takes all the benefits of a larger population for granted, and thinks they will all still be there when the population is reduced.
=============
Well said.
Seems we can’t all fit onto the Isle of Wight anymore, http://www.ampneycrucis.f9.co.uk/PARK/Population.htm
but, I think we all get a house and garden in Texas. Ah, not now:
” Well, the initial calculation was done by Thomas Sowell in 1984, when the world’s population was 4.4 billion. http://www.carlopelanda.com/econaut/Butler%20Richard%20on%20Population%20Growth.htm
Quote:
In 1984, it was proven by the economist Thomas Sowell that the entire world population (4.4 billion at the time) could live comfortably in the state of Texas. He wrote “Every human being on the face of the Earth could be housed in the state of Texas in one-story, single-family homes, each with a front and a back yard. A family of four would thus have 6,800 square feet- about the size of the typical middle-class American home with front and backyards.”(Carter 99) According to more recent research on the topic, all of the world’s 1997 population (5.84 billion) could fit on the small Island of Bali in Indonesia.(Stiefel 98) ”
Does put it into perspective though… 🙂
Robert Brown said @ur momisugly January 10, 2012 at 2:25 pm
There is the other hard problem: the mind and I suspect we won’t understand the world without some better understanding of the understander. And I disagree about World of Warcraft; Pompous Gits prefer Civilization; turn-based allows more time think strategy.
OTOH, your essay on climate is easily the best I’ve read and I have read a rather large number since being interviewed on Australian national radio as part of a panel these many long years ago (20+?). The conclusion I reached at the time was that none of the interviewees knew WTF they were talking about including me. I had recently read Gleik’s Chaos and reached much the same sort of conclusions you reach here, so confirmation bias likely comes into it. Many thanks; you write very well.
davidmhoffer says:
January 9, 2012 at 11:01 pm
Right on!..
That is why, when I see “R. Gates says,” my eyes kind of glaze over and the mind shifts into neutral until I skip to the next comment.
Dr. Brown … I agree we have seen a net cooling trend over the last 10,000 years or so of natural variability … that said – at least compared to the three most recent prior inter-glacial peaks – it would seem we have not reached the “peak” yet … some mechanism has halted the rise, and put the climate into a 12,000 or so year, mostly steady state … at temps well below the recent (last 3 cycles or so) expected inter-glacial maximum.
Something triggered this stopped increase, and precipitated the climate entering into the current steady state we’ve seen for 12,000 years. It certainly was not CO2. And it was bot human habitation. Neither significantly changed 12,000 years ago.
To me that is the great question – what was that trigger?
We are wasting a lot of effort and money on the CO2 ruse – when it is highly unlikely to be any real culprit or contributor. And ignoring whatever really caused the stability we’ve seen for 12,000 years.
Ridiculous. People, on average, produce more than they must consume. As a result, it is a given that having more people makes everyone wealthier, as the extra production per person increases the per capita surplus of goods and services progressively above and beyond that needed for subsistence. Such a sentiment can only be expressed by someone who takes all the benefits of a larger population for granted, and thinks they will all still be there when the population is reduced.
To use a bit of reductio ad absurdum, let’s look at two limit points. One is a world population of one person. OK, that’s a bit lonely and not self-replicating, headed for extinction. So there is a clear marginal benefit to adding more people, and enormous benefit when the population is very small. Now consider a world where we have filled every available acre of land with a house or a factory, where we’ve tunnelled underground to fill ten floors of underground with houses and factories, where we’ve covered the ocean with houseboats and factories, where we use every watt of solar energy plus thermonuclear fusion to provide energy for everybody, and have basically expanded to the limits of scarcity for every critical resource. Animals and “the biosphere” are just a memory — there are some trees and plants on the enormously expensive property of the surface dwellers but the oxygen cycle now involves gene-tailored algae power grown on every horizontal surface to produce foodstock. Hmmm, sounds like this might suck too.
Let’s also be aware that human ability to produce more than they consume to produce modern civilization is primarily predicated on technology. We reached the limit of synthetic advantage otherwise way back in the earliest city-states. For any given technological level, starting at the low-population side one hits a point of diminishing returns where benefits of more people level out. As the undesirable high side also demonstrates, at some point the marginal returns don’t just diminish, they decrease. In between, as a matter of pure reason, fundamental theorem of calculus or something like that, there is an optimum.
The optimum is determined by a number of things. How much land do we want to be able to “own” in our imagination of a wealthier world? Some people think that people who make a lot of money and live in an apartment in Manhattan that would fit into my living room and dining room combined are well-off, but I’m guessing that they are in a minority as we aren’t rushing out to build arkologies. Do we consider things like forests, the ability to go hunting and fishing, the preservation of natural ecosystems in parks and conservation of species worldwide to be “wealth” and do we count ourselves poorer as that wealth diminishes? Is there a point of diminishing returns, wealth-wise, or is owning two cars and two houses, three cars and three houses (cars and houses being a traditional measure of wealth once one can pay for food and clothing and more mundane affairs) per person? Does “wealth” linearize? There are finite resources underlying much that we consider wealth. Platinum (used to make cars). Rare earths (used to make semiconductors). Oil (plastics, if not gasoline and oil for cars and fertilizers). Iron. Aluminum. Coal. Uranium. Wood. Meat. Fish. Grain. We cannot increase mining or production of these resources without bound, and the costs of generating most of these follow inexorable economic laws and go up as we increase demand for them, up rapidly as we approach the limits of supply. I think it is pretty clear that the optimum we might build in our mind’s eye, while no doubt somewhat different for every person, is very definitely not something that scales without bound with the population.
So sure, your assertion that at some population levels (given a resource and technology base) there is a marginal advantage to a higher population is correct. But in general it is not the case that a larger population always leads to more wealth per capita — at some point you have to start divvying up the finite wealth you’ve got tied up in one or more critical resources.
Now let’s look at the world. The wealthiest countries — per capita — are they the ones with the highest populations? They are not. Even in India and China, two countries that are in the middle of modernizing at a furious pace, driven by remarkably well-educated and ambitious populations, the new wealth generated by modernization runs square into the population problem.
I can best speak to India, as I lived there seven years growing up and have visited there again fairly recently, well after they began their recent frenetic push to modern times. Understand, the population of India is roughly three times that of the United States. This population is living in a country that is roughly 1/3 the land area of the United States. Of that land area, only around 1/3 is really suitable for occupation — land use in India is necessarily centered on rivers and water sources and has to avoid both mountains and large tracts that aren’t quite desert, but aren’t sufficiently watered to support agriculture. In India the primary rivers are all gods (or goddesses) because they support life. It is, in other words, a landscape where the population has always lived bounded by scarcity.
During the partition, tens of millions of people were driven both ways across the borders. India promised the refugees land, but of course there was no land — the land abandoned by the Muslims being driven the other way was instantly snapped up by neighbors and farms in India have been passed down from father to son for hundreds of years — “entailment” in medieval England had nothing on India. The actual place most of the refugees “resettled” was on streetcorners in the cities, where they built shanties and tried to stay alive.
When I recently returned, the great-grandchildren of those resettled people were still living on the same street corners, joined by the vast numbers of second, third, and fourth children flowing in a constant stream from the rural farms, that cannot subdivide the family farms any more and still end up with a farm that will support a family. There is still no land — there is less available land than there was sixty years ago and far more price pressure on what little there is, and these are the poorest people you can imagine. I saw linear miles of Mumbai streets with 10 foot sidewalks that would have been spacious and beautiful — if it weren’t for the fact that the population density living on those sidewalks was close to one person per linear meter of streetside. Call it thirty square feet per person, a whole economy. People walked in the streets if they wanted to get by. I saw spaces between two buildings, separated by maybe sixty feet, that had been filled with bamboo superstructure four stories high, floored and roofed with tin sheets, and housed an entire warren, a miniature city within a city, with its entire water supply one single tap in the middle of the field that served the entire community for what open fields always serve the rural Indian population.
This is an example of life on the far side of the optimum. It doesn’t matter what sort of wealth India manages to generate for a growing middle class, not really. It has always had a wealthy and middle class (by Western standards). But there are simple limits one how much they can grow, or what the benefits of that “wealth” are compared to here, where I live on a 1/2 acre plot in a 3200 square foot house (currently occupied by three people and a dog) with deer that eat my flowers and squirrels and rabbits in my tree-filled yard, with lakes a short drive away and a boat and a car and lots of clothes and a wife with more purses than one can count — there is apparently no point of diminishing returns in “purse wealth” for women, dammit. The only way India can really become wealthy is to cut its population by 2/3! The only way China can really become wealthy (per capita, remember) is to cut its population by 1/2! Even Japan, which already is wealthy, is sorely constrained by overcrowding, and its population is dropping all on its own, tired of living cramped into cities no matter how productive cities are.
Where do wealthy people live in US cities? Mostly “not”. That’s why God invented suburbs and commuting. Most people would rather have a house of their own with their own yard and trees than live in a small apartment in the middle of a big apartment building, and even if the people living in that apartment building make more money, they are not wealthier.
In most of the developing world, population is an enormous problem. Yes, their use of technology is limited, their lives could be improved substantially even at their current population levels — but in the end, they are constrained by hard resource limits — available water, available usable land — or by technologies and wealth that it takes generations to build and generations of still larger populations would eat the benefits faster than they could be reaped.
This still doesn’t address, not really, what the ideal, optimum, population carrying capacity of the Earth is. That doesn’t really have an answer. It has a lot of local answers, and some global constraints. The Earth is an enormous example of the Tragedy of the Commons (by Garret Hardin) — an essay I would encourage you to read. Real wealth is the maintenance of unexploited commons, so that all of the extant population (whatever it is) has relatively free access without having unbounded access. We can all use the public parks, but “use” doesn’t mean we can walk in and homestead there, or use them to dump our garbage, or cut down all of their timber, or go hunting there with helicopters and machine guns. If we were “free” to do the latter, we’d have no parks left and the commons would be destroyed, and at a sufficient population pressure, the cost of maintaining the commons or the share of the commons each person gets drops eventually to where it isn’t worth much. Central Park in New York City isn’t much, split up among literally millions of people, not compared to the Smokies in Western NC.
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And the real world doesn’t oscillate unpredictably? Seems to me they confirmed my observations. But then I’m only an Ecologist trained to observe, deduct and speculate, not predict an unpredictable system. Some things simply defy mathematical reduction. That is reality.
I wouldn’t say that it defies mathematical reduction, only that it is a study of intertwining relationships, many of which can be “reduced” to mathematics if only statistically. Remember, math embraces “greater than” and “less than” reasoning and logic (or is it vice versa), not just functional analysis. However yes, quantitative predictions are often nearly impossible (although not always) because the models become more and more complex until they fail — they aren’t really computable, except using e.g. Langevin equation simulation with a fair bit of noise, and then all one gets is an ensemble of outcomes.
But as the predator-prey equations demonstrate, one can reduce some relationships to math — just don’t expect reality to precisely follow the model, not in a complex world where not just foxes eat rabbits and foxes die from things besides starvation.
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To Dr. Brown: In your comment [at 1/10/12/12:17 P.M.] you state that there was a “significant” decease in global temperature from 1945 to 1965. But how can this possibly be correct? Hansen and GissTemp have shown, haven’t they, that there was virtually no decrease in global temperature during that period?
I am monumentally skeptical about modern attempts to recompute global temperature estimates across that period, conducted by people who have invested their entire career into proving CAGW, notably Hansen. Hansen (along with Mann and a few others) is one that has absolutely zero credibility in my book. Every textbook and the IPCC reports themselves all uniformly showed a significant drop during that period right up to the point where Mann showed them all how to produce temperature reconstructions that are whatever they want them to be, and the benefits of doing exactly that.
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Robert Brown says on January 11, 2012 at 7:08 am:
“But as the predator-prey equations demonstrate, one can reduce some relationships to math — just don’t expect reality to precisely follow the model, not in a complex world where not just foxes eat rabbits and foxes die from things besides starvation.”
Yes, indeed so.
In the complex real world one then finds that some prey populations just don’t do what the model suggests, but evade being eaten by those pesky foxes.
Then the biologists stand there, scratch their heads, and remember the absolutely vital question which must be asked in all such cases: “if not – why not?”.
It is the answer to the ‘why not’ which, after much observation (usually in the rain and cold …), produces explanations which drive the science (biology) forward.
Thanks Smokey [1/10 at 7:04 p.m.] and Dr. Brown [1/11 at 7:13 a.m.]. I certainly agree with both of you on the mid-century temp. decline. The “haven’t they” I inserted was a lame attempt at sarcasm. Regarding my first question about the Scafetta-Willson ACRIM Gap recon, their conclusion was that there was a significant ramp up1980’s to early 2000’s) in TSI alone (without secondary mechanisms, e.g., cosmic ray decline) which implied a global temp. increase during that period which constituted a correspondingly significant portion of the overall observed surface temp. increase. This was the opposite of the Frohlich and Lean PMOD Recon over the ACRIM satellite gap. When I have a chance to get at my copy of the Scafetta paper I can supply the TSI and implied temp. increase numbers they came up with. What I am seriously interested in is whether Scafetta and Willson have been shown to be seriously in error.
It is the answer to the ‘why not’ which, after much observation (usually in the rain and cold …), produces explanations which drive the science (biology) forward.
And I have the greatest respect for my colleagues in biology, and ecology, and environmental science, and… pretty much all of the sciences, and most of the soft sciences and humanities. We’re all on the same side — understanding how everything works, bringing the light of knowledge to a world of ignorance (including ourselves). It’s damn hard work, often in obscure little nooks and corners of the total corpus, but every little bit of work, well done, advances the boundaries of the known. To quote Tennyson,
an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
What it’s all about, baby. Even most climate scientists, I firmly believe, are honest and honorable; they’ve just let themselves be seduced by the twin sirens of “saving the world” and “getting research support and a certain amount of fame doing it”. They are, after all, only human. They let themselves become catspaws — willing catspaws, perhaps — of a political elite with a global agenda that has little to do, really, with the climate.
rgb
The “haven’t they” I inserted was a lame attempt at sarcasm.
Not lame, but don’t forget to add smileys! For example, 😛 or 😉 would have clued me in to your tongue in cheek or sly wink. Don’t forget, this is an open site and people do defend both sides of the issue, often quite well. No, we don’t get a lot of input from Michael Mann or James Hansen, but I’m pretty impressed with the science offered up even by the supporters of the CAGW hypothesis, when they aren’t shouted down by acclamation. Which I think is a mistake, BTW — I think that where a good-faith argument is advanced, a good-faith rebuttal is in order. Remember, the world doesn’t really consist of “warmists” and “deniers” even though the labels are used as part of the rhetoric. It consists of humans, and warmists are just humans that weigh what they know of the science and come down on one side of the issue. Sometimes skeptical arguments that are pretty much bullshit are offered up as well — in all cases, bullshit arguments should get called, really by both sides. Skeptics don’t do the skeptical case any favors by being uncritical of any argument as long as it is supports the skeptical conclusion. That’s far more characteristic (I hope) of the “warmist” community, at least some parts of it.
As you may have noticed, I will call people on it myself if I hear bullshit physics offered up in skeptical argument, such as “there is no such thing as the CO_2 Greenhouse Gas Effect”. Piffle, of course there is. The only question is how large it is (with sensitivity/feedback accounted for), and whether it is “the signal” or “the noise” compared to the other drivers. Claiming that there is no such thing ignores basic physics and is just silly; it’s the kind of thing that permits “warmists” to rightly claim that skeptics are “deniers”, because you can’t deny a straight up physical argument with ample experimental support.
Similarly I’ve had some harsh things to say about efforts to argue that there is some sort of “adiabatic warming” associated with the ideal gas law at work in the atmosphere. I’ve taught intro physics, including thermodynamics, for over 30 years, and I have absolutely no clue what that could possible mean. Heat requires a source of free energy, and in an open system in radiative “contact” with a 3K blackbody “perfect absorber” (the rest of the Universe, within a hair) it requires an ongoing flow of free energy to maintain an (approximate) equilibrium temperature. Adiabatic compression leading to warming is not a steady state source of energy in the system — the real source of all the energy that flows as air masses rise and fall is Mr. Sun, almost without exception and almost without any other really significant contribution from elsewhere. And I would be perfectly happy to debate the hell out of that with any and all takers online.
If we clean up the science in the skeptical arguments, we only improve them, and make it more difficult for them to ignore (at least, more difficult to dismiss out of hand).
rgb
Perhaps there is a strange attraction to the visulization or imagination of a coming catastrophe–but then again, sometimes, the wolf really is at the door…
My first post to this blog (although a medium term lurker..)
That was a great read. Eye opening to say the least, and it gave my brain a good work out. Better than going to the gym!
rgb
Robert Brown says:
January 11, 2012 at 11:09 am
[Moderator’s Request: Myrrh, please go back and read Dr. Brown’s comments in context. If you still have an objection, maybe you’d consider… ummm, moderating it? -REP]
Climatologist have always seemed to have an universal ignorance of what mathematical chaos is and isn’t. Perhaps it’s denial of fact, must be tough to even consider that your life’s work of trying to predict the un-predictable is a waste of effort. The simple fact is chaotic systems are It is self-similar (at least approximately or stochastically) so if weather a short term instance of climate is chaotic, then so is climate chaotic. Yet Feigenbaum showed that even unstable dynamical system like the Bifrication diagram of the Logistics Map has a surprising predictability.
Myrrh says:
January 11, 2012 at 3:04 pm
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Robert Brown says:
January 11, 2012 at 11:09 am
[Moderator’s Request: Myrrh, please go back and read Dr. Brown’s comments in context. If you still have an objection, maybe you’d consider… ummm, moderating it? -REP]
? I gave the context – I quoted him exactly. Look, I’m really, really fed up with this ‘distinction’ being made that those refusing to buy into the crap science that both anti and pro AGW claim exists – without any proof – that there is such a critter as ‘greenhouse gas warming’ and ‘proved science that CO2 is such a greenhouse gas therefore contributing to warming’ – it’s nonsense.
I’ve given sensible basic physics about CO2 and water vapour, and instead of directly replying to my post I got the crap assumptions regurgitated. I’m really getting annoyed with these kind of arrogant dismissals – please, put my post back. I’m addressing a very specific point here which no amount of well written ‘anti AGW’ can balance. I want answers.
[Moderator’s Reply: It’s a good thing I usually keep copies of what I snip…. just for moments like this. As you wish… -REP]
As you may have noticed, I will call people on it myself if I hear bullshit physics offered up in skeptical argument, such as “there is no such thing as the CO_2 Greenhouse Gas Effect”. Piffle, of course there is. The only question is how large it is (with sensitivity/feedback accounted for), and whether it is “the signal” or “the noise” compared to the other drivers. Claiming that there is no such thing ignores basic physics and is just silly; it’s the kind of thing that permits “warmists” to rightly claim that skeptics are “deniers”, because you can’t deny a straight up physical argument with ample experimental support.
Yeah right.. And I call bullshit physics on the garbled nonsense you’re spouting here, repeated ad infinitum with never a smidgin of sensible scientific explanation and it’s always ‘experiments prove’ when no experiments are ever shown that prove any of it. Come on, where the hell is it? The claims made for carbon dioxide are physically impossible. Not least that it lags every dramatic real climate change in and out of interglacials by 800 years! What greenhouse warming when the main greenhouse gas is water vapour and that cools the planet?
Don’t you bloody dare work in ‘deniers’ when you’ve not shown one bit of science to prove that there is such a thing as this AGWSF nonsense that ‘greenhouse gases warm the planet’.
Piffle, of course there isn’t.
Because after thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of realists asking for proof, none is ever provided. NONE. You’re merely assuming it exists, because if it was actually proved you wouldn’t have to bullshit that it ‘exists somewhere’. If you think it exists, show your workings.