TEACH THE REAL STORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE

 

TEACH THE REAL STORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE not the idiocy of politicians.

            Global Warming has now been retitled “Climate Change” since predictions of doom in a dozen years never arrived.  Here’s a quick story that a 5^th grader can understand.

            If you add CO2 or methane to an atmosphere you get an effect of visible light being penetrable but not infrared.  Since most visible light from the sun strikes the surface wherein continents and oceans re-emits heat (infrared), a “greenhouse effect” takes place. The trapped heat can’t get out.  But that’s where political knowledge, having congratulated itself on intellect, seems to stop. The upper 8 feet of all the water on earth has a much heat storing capability as the entire atmosphere.  Middle School Proof: Atmospheric pressure is 14.7 lbs. per square inch.  That’s the weight of a column of air 200,000+ feet high and 1 inch by 1 inch at sea level on the bottom.  How much water does it take to equal that same weight atop 1 square inch?  It works out to 32 feet.  But water has 5 times the “heat capacity”, a measure of the heat it can store per pound, as air does.  That means that 6.4 feet of water over all the planet equals the heat capacity of the entire atmosphere.  But of course we only have water over 78% of the earth, so if we proportion this, about 8 feet of all the surface water on earth equals the atmosphere in ability to store heat.

            So all that talk about raising the temperature 10 degrees in 12 years is counterbalanced by the fact that a little sliver of oceans and lakes can absorb the heat and then by circulation with the deep, dissipate it. The oceans are almost everywhere 14,000 to 18,000 feet deep. Thus any climate model must take account of the ocean currents and water’s ability to take care of heat. 

            Next, if you raise the air’s temperature, what happens with water evaporation?  It increases, of course.  But when that moist air is carried aloft in the atmosphere, it forms more clouds.  Cloud tops are brilliant white and reflect 98% of the incoming visible radiation. That cools things. And studies show that this is happening a lot in the tropics.  The normal clear day absorption of heat which is over 70% falls to 2% on cloudy overcast days and cools considerably.  This means that any climate model must account for increased/decreased cloud cover and also air circulations like the N. Pacific 60-year cycle of air flow. For 60 years, the Arctic air comes down over Alaska, then it changes and weather comes from Asia. 

            Add to this the 500-1000 year cycles of Solar radiation where the sun burns brighter, then cooler.

            4 effects, maybe more. None is completely understood. It’s getting complicated, isn’t it.  Scientists use various tools to see what the climate has done historically. Greenland’s ice sheet is 10,000 feet deep in places and records about 3 million years of ice.  Each year has a cold winter of snow accumulation and a warm summer with partial melting, so each year leaves a record like a tree ring.  Radioisotopes can approximate the temperature of each year and atmospheric humidity.  There are also clever indicators of where the snow came from that caused the ice.  Ice ages have occurred 24 times in those 3 million years and its not been determined what causes them.  However, “nutation” of the earth must play a significant part.  Nutation is like when you spin a top and it spins nicely for awhile then suddenly goes into a few stutters before resuming smooth spinning.  That stutter is a nutation and the strongest of these occurs every 17,000 years.  It causes the tilt of the earth’s axis to change rapidly from 22.5 degrees to 24 degrees.  Rapid chill occurs over about 100 years and massive snows in the polar regions sends earth into an ace age where average temperature is 35 degrees colder.  But we also know that there are smaller ten degree changes during the ice age—25 years of Saskatchewan climate is superceded by 25-100 years of bitter cold like Greenland. One theory of why this happened explains how the temperature of the N. Atlantic Deep Water—water over 10,000 feet deep changed.  The entire circulation in and out of the Arctic sea comes from the N. Atlantic and thus affects all the oceans.

            I hope this illustrates how hog-washed and naive  the political activists are. At the end of the last ice age, warming started about 15,000BC, but then had a 17 degree pullback into cold for 1500 years beginning about 11,700 BC (Younger-Dryas episode) Then there were 2 Sahara warmings, the first at 4400 BC and the second 2200-2000 BC.  This changed the Sahara from a short grassland to harsh desert.  (There was a 150 year dust bowl after 2150 BC in Egypt that caused the Nile to not flood  and people revolted overthrowing the Old Kingdom. Pharaoh was a “god” who brought annual flooding, and when that stopped, people revolted.) During the Roman Empire it was warm all over Europe.  (So much so that grapes grew in England.  You can’t grow them very well there today—too cold.) But beginning in the 500s to 800s there was a colder climate.  Crops didn’t grow well and people starved.  Barbarians were displaced by climate in Asia and invaded.  It’s known as the Dark Ages.  Then there was a significant warming from 1000-1300 in which medieval life flourished in Europe.  Then in the early 1300s Europe fell into what is known as the little Ice Age.  Recurrent very cold spells took place through the early 1800s. (London used to have an annual ice fair on the frozen Thames river each year.  Today it never freezes.)  Siince 1900 we have had our current warming trend.   The bottom line is that climate is always changing and there’s much more to it than Al Gore preaches.

The bigger picture of climate change

 

  Climate changes.  But there’s far more to it than greenhouse gases. Ocean circulation is a big deal.  Here’s why.  The ability to store heat (‘specific heat’) of water is 5 times that of air.  Atmospheric pressure is 14.7 lbs. per square inch.  That is, one square inch area and all the air from sea level to the ionosphere in height weighs 14.7 lbs. That’s also the weight of a 32 foot column of water (1 X 1").  So in heat storage terms a column of water about 6 feet high stores as much heat as air as high as the atmosphere. 78% of the earth is covered by water. Thus the upper 8 feet of the oceans, lakes, etc. stores as much heat as the entire atmosphere does.

            Think what this means.  A big change in atmospheric temperature makes almost no change in the oceans. During the ice ages, deep ocean water was almost the same temperature. Beyond the continental shelves, oceans are uniformly 14,000 to 18,000 feet deep (exceptions are trenches and ocean ridges).  Only the upper 150 meters ever changes temperature.  Below the oxygen mimimum zone (just a little deeper), there is almost no light, 38 degree water, almost no dissolved oxygen to rot dead plants & critters floating to the bottom.

            Greenland is warming and cold freshwater flows off the island, which stores 1/3 the fresh water in the world.  When that sinking freshwater hits the ocean, it is denser than even deep ocean water and displaces the North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) to well up in the Grand Banks with nutrients such that ocean life has a feeding frenzy.  It also wells up near in the tropics offshore Africa where Sahara winds in the summer blow over the water and makes our hurricanes.  If you don’t get melting glaciers in Greenland, ice pack surrounds the island, there’s no NADW displacement and what little upwelling there is moves south of the equator setting up an La Nina condition in the Atlantic. The effect even caries over to the Indian and Pacific oceans The La Nina means drought from mid-USA to Central America like the dust bowl of the 30s.  As this progresses we get another ice age. But today, we live in a time of inter-glacial melting where the world constantly warms.  Ice cores from 3 million years of Greenland ice show that when an ice age starts it rapidly accelerates, often over a hundred  years or so. ¾ the arable land is lost.

            Why an ice age?  The increase of a large white polar ice cap has a reflectivity of almost 100% which further accelerates temperature decline.  How cold?  About 35F degrees is usual. If the cloudiness of skies increases as well (cloud tops have a reflectivity of 98%) the earth cools stunningly fast.  Bottom line: cloud cover and ocean circulation is an overwhelmingly large effect than CO2. 

            There’s more.  Solar radiation seems to rise and fall by about 1%.  The cause is as yet unknown.  But the fall from the 1300s to the 1800s caused a drop of as much as 10F degrees during the “Little Ice Age” of Europe and Asia. Volcanic eruptions have been shown to radically cool and disrupt crop production for 5-10 years causing mass famines.  Combined with  the nutation of the earth’s axis, these may serve to start another ice age.  We’re not sure. 24 of the last 26 ice ages correspond to nutation. Nutation is like a top that stops its smooth rotation to shudder in a few wobbles.  In the earth’s case our nutating axis tips from 22 to 24 degrees disrupting climate. Bottom line: We don’t understand all of this, but all these effects are very large compared to the 2 degrees of “global warming” due to industry that politicians love to pontificate about.

Europe's collapse into the Dark Ages

 How Europe fell into the Dark Ages is perplexing and complex. England in the 400s still had houses with glass windows and cities had aqueducts and baths, even though Celts (now Romanized) were running things. Yet by 546, a Welsh monk, St. Gildas, first wrote about how a certain “Arthur” was engaged in a desperate war to “break the heathen and uphold the Christ.” (Such was Camelot?)  In Gaul (France), Visigoths and Franks overran the country but assimilated to Roman ways.  In Spain, first Vandals then Visigoths did the same.  Theodoric the Ostrogoth (who was educated in Constantinople), was encouraged by the Eastern Roman Emperor Zeno to invade and take over Italy from the former Hunic tribes led by Odoacer that had taken over with the fall of the Roman emperor in 476.  All these barbarians had lived on the edges of empire and admired the Roman system.  What happened to make civilization fall so far? 

            An answer may lie in the turmoil of the church and the climate.  Emperor Justinian in the East was a very able politician, not a warrior, who spent most days administrating.  He started in behalf of his father Justin, a senator who usurped the throne in 518. Justin was frugal, lowered taxes, and limited government leaving a full treasury for Justinian.  Justinian was a spender with an eye towards restoring the empire, winning the West back from the barbarians, and building up Eastern governance.  His capable general Belasarius was dispatched to fight back Persia, then take back N. Africa from the Vandals, then Italy and Illyria (we’d call it Yugoslavia) from the Ostrogoths. But due to Justinian’s big spending on Constantinople, Belasarius was forever shy of troops and pay.  How could he have conquered so much? He had to let his army loot.

             In 535, Krakatoa erupted.  This volcanic ‘hot spot’ lies between Sumatra and Java. A hot spot is a weak spot in the crust where magma can repeatedly break through.  It exploded with a monstrous eruption in 1883 but chronicles left in Indonesia tell of a much greater eruption in 535. It completely obliterated 50 miles around it separating the two large islands with a crater that blew away enough island to make 30 miles of ocean. It created 120’ tidal waves, and, it has now been verified, put so much ash into the upper atmosphere that for 15 years the mean temperature worldwide got colder by about 10 degrees (compare this with a mere 2.5 degree rise predicted by climate scientists by 2200).  Low temps meant meager crops, famines and pitiful economies.  Thus weakened, the defending kingdoms couldn’t hold off Belasarius’ army which foraged and robbed peasants for food. It was an ironic reverse of the old story of barbarians invading Rome.  Add to this, the genius of Belasarius as a general.  Much of the West was reconquered while Justinian spent severely over budget. The conquered peasants were then plunged into famine and ruin and the Dark Ages began when cities, skills and education died.

            Justinian also fashioned himself a musican, architect, poet, lawyer, and theologian.  He rewrote Roman Law into the Code of Justinian that lasted almost 1000 years. In theology, he decided to favor the Trinitarianism of the Western Pope of Rome (perhaps as a way to force-unify the Arian Goths and Egyptian Monophysites).  Arians denied the complete divinity of Jesus; Monophysites, his humanity (was a ghost spirit).  But Empress Theodora (who had a sort of Hillary Clinton co-President role) sympathized with the Monophysites and softened Justinian into tolerance for that heresy. And thus the later part of their reign was filled with riots over famine, religious clashes, and the 542 plague. The plague is also a derivative of a sudden cold climate change.  [Another sudden cold occurred in 1309 according to Chinese records and this caused an 8 degree drop in European temperatures followed by the Black Death.]  When it gets cold, scavengers like rats thrive, and they carry fleas--vectors for bubonic plague.  It is thought bubonic plague occurred in 542 AD as well.

            So while civilization collapsed, orthodox Christianity not only overruled the heresies of east and west, but became the one sure hope of Europeans.  What survived in the West were not pagan verses of Virgil and Homer but Augustine and Patrick of Ireland. Yet it was a faith confused with superstition and un-Christian practices of the barbarians, and a lifestyle of poverty,malnutrition, pitiful technology and illiteracy. So what would one predict from such an outcome? God, through the Dark Ages, preserved the land from conquest and faith played out  through other Christians still to come.