December 28, 2013

Saturday Morning Saturday Morning Essay: Extinction, Reconsidered

Brought to you by Peet's French Roast coffee...

Naturally, as a supporter of the scientific method, I hasten to add that the Thursday edition of my Saturday Essay was about a global warming paper that apparently had no refereeing or peer review. The writing was definitely over the top; I've been reading a lot about global warming over the last couple of years, and I don't know of anyone else, no matter how dire a spin they choose to place on the available data and reasonable extrapolations thereof, who's talking about the oceans boiling and 120 degree C air temperatures in the year 2080.  I just thought that Mr. Light (the author) provided a rousing, angry, human-bashing finish right up there with some of the best dyspepsia of Kurt Vonnegut on a downer day.  Who can resist that?

Perhaps the paper in question was an example of the increasingly common "open access" method of publishing scientific articles.  Indeed, the research scientist from the Great Southwestern University is so familiar now with this particular end-run around academic quality control that he's written a hilarious parody, "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down & Publish My Own Papers."  A sample:

I'm gonna sit right down and publish my own papers,
And make believe they're peer reviewed
Referees they drive me nuts
They're ad hoc & anonymous
Nerds strokin’ their libidos
Shootin their little torpedoes...

No doubt peer review brings out the snark in a lot of competitive academics.  On the other hand, maybe it makes it a little tougher to scare the shit out of your readers with unfounded claims.

Anyway, I favor the "intellectual commons" approach to discourse championed so eloquently by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty.  An idea should stand or fall on its own merits, and must withstand the most withering criticism if it is objectively true.

I actually found the paper in question on a thread commenced by Guy McPherson on Facebook.  It was Christmas, a slow news day, and the Near Term Human Extinction loyalists were out in force. The conclusions of this "paper" on the "methane bomb" were apparently accepted at face value by almost anyone, except a couple of "Extinction Deniers" who tried valiantly to inject some scintilla of hope, only to be attacked mercilessly for their Pollyannish addiction to "hopium" (as in hopium of the masses, I guess).

Speaking of Russian political history, it always astounds me how those of the Left hand side of things always manage to arrange themselves into warring factions. The Russian revolutionaries all opposed the Czar, but their hatred for his cruel despotism eventually took a back seat to the internecine struggles among the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Trotskyites.  Recall that Trotsky was eventually assassinated more than 20 years after the Revolution by a Stalinist hit man who found him in Mexico City.  The global warming movement has become sort of like that, too. 

Personally, I am failing to see the upside of accepting the inevitable extinction of humanity 16 years from now.  Especially when the hard science really does not point in that direction.  I know the situation is bad; I know that humans have never resided on Earth when the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was at 400 parts per million.  I know what the "hockey stick" of recent temperature trends looks like.  It's scary what has happened to the ice masses of the Earth in so short a time frame. I'm not a global warming denier.

Still, to help things along, I posted a link on that thread to David Archer's analysis of recent methane papers, an analysis I discussed previously here at the Pond.  David Archer knows his stuff.  He describes in considerable detail how the methane beds and permafrost were formed in the Arctic Circle and along the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.  He uses Henry's Law to support his argument that methane clathrates could not have formed at any depth shallower than 250 meters of Arctic water. The deeper they are, you see, the better, since dissolution of methane bubbles in the water column as they make their way to the surface is an important buffer, along with the fact that methane hydrates at depth are more resistant to melting in the first place.

I like Henry's Law.  Henry's Law governs the solubility of gas in liquid under varying conditions.  When you open a beer bottle, or pop a champagne bottle (maybe Tuesday night?) and hear that "pfft" or "pop" - that's Henry talking to you.  That's the sound of the carbon dioxide escaping into the room, CO2 that has come out of solution.  If you leave the beer bottle on the counter, eventually the beer will go flat, meaning the partial pressure of the CO2 in the beer will equilibrate with the CO2 level in the room.  I was thinking: if you had done that little experiment in 1966 (perhaps the first time I would have done so), the beer would be flatter than it would be today.  Not enough to notice, but still. Three cheers for global warming!

Others on the Facebook thread picked up my act of supreme dissidence (Objective Intellectualism, always a crime under totalitarian regimes, requiring re-education), and it got back to Guy.  I was in trouble now:

Guy McPherson: "^ Infused with hopium, as is customary at Real Climate. They favor the "it'll all be okay" approach forwarded by the corporate media and the corporate governments of the world. As we approach the brick wall, they propose accelerating."

I don't think that's fair, and not just because I like David Archer.  I find him a humane and circumspect fellow who really knows his stuff.  Questioning whether we'll all be dead in 2030 is not the same, in my view, as saying "it will all be okay."  

I guess that's what I get for being a Trotskyite.  But I'm still thinking: if David Archer is wrong, take him on directly and disprove his analysis.  Sittin' right down and publishin' your own papers is one thing; taking pot shots with only ad hominem attacks may be a good deal worse.




December 26, 2013

Saturday Morning Essay: On Graduating from Global Warming Class

Brought to you by Peet's French Roast...



From a paper provocatively entitled "The Non-Disclosed Extreme Arctic Methane Threat" by Malcolm P.R. Light, published a few days ago (https://sites.google.com/site/runawayglobalwarming/the-non-disclosed-extreme-arctic-methane-threat):

The Earth is a giant convecting planet, the underlying molten magma being heated by deep seated radioactivity and the oceans and atmosphere are its cooling radiator which allows the Earth the facility to vent this heat into open space (Windley, 1984; Allen and Allen, 1990). Mother Earth has carefully held the atmospheric temperature within a stable range necessary for oceans to exist for at least 4 billion years and nurtured the earliest bacteria to evolve into today's space faring humans (Calder, 1983).

The fouling up of the Earth's cooling radiator from Human emissions of greenhouse gases derived from fossil fuels will be counteracted by Mother Earth in her characteristic fashion by emitting vast volumes of deadly methane into the atmosphere from the Arctic regions. This will lead to the total extermination of all harmful biological species that produce greenhouse gases in the same way that Mother Earth did during the Permian and other extinction events. In this case however we have totally tipped the balance with our extreme carbon dioxide and methane emissions so that there will be no chance of recovery for the Earth in this time frame, because the methane release will cause the oceans to begin boiling off between 115oC and 120oC (Severson, 2013) in 2080 and the Earth's atmosphere will have reached temperatures equivalent to those on Venus by 2096 (460oC to 467oC)(Wales, 2013; Moon Phases, 2013).

Mankind's greed for fossil fuels will have completely destroyed a magnificent beautiful blue planet and converted its atmosphere into a barren, stiflingly hot , carbon dioxide rich haze. The earth will have moved permanently out of the magical zone (Circumstellar habitable zone, Goldilocks zone) where life (some of it probably highly intelligent) also exists elsewhere in the myriad of other solar systems that are located within the far reaches of our Universe.
Well, I must say, sir:  that's really bringing it.  Mr. Light is not shying away from identifying Who Fucked It Up.

With my course credits in hand, I naturally feel empowered to comment.  This is not the way we discussed things in my virtual class room.  David Archer, that is to say, who is a very skilled teacher, did not conduct the class with his hair on fire, and while we did discuss the fate of the other two "Goldilocks" planets (Venus and Mars), and we did touch on the topic of oceans boiling away and Venus suffocating beneath a blanket of CO2 so thick it's actually kind of like an atmospheric ocean, we did not talk about Earth in the same terms, now or in the future.  The future being 2100, because it's sort of alarmist to talk about shorter time frames.

I prefer the statelier pace of global warming discussed in class.  Such as the "Slug Theory," which is about the rate at which we belch CO2 into the atmosphere.  Essentially, we have an atmospheric "budget" for doing so, and given the long-lasting nature of CO2 once it's up there, in some senses it doesn't matter how fast you emit it.  It's the total load or "slug" that is introduced that matters. Currently, under this approach, we have emitted about half that budget since the beginning of the Industrial Age (about 500 gigatons of carbon).  To keep global average temperature below the Magic Level of 2 degrees C increase, what we consider (probably unjustifiably) the safe range, we should avoid emitting any more than that amount again until we stop CO2 emissions altogether.

You can kind of sense that's absolutely the wrong thing to tell a species like Homo sapiens.   You can have 14 drinks for the week, you tell the alcoholic on Sunday, and as many as you want (up to 14) on any given day, so long as you do not exceed that maximum.  You can be assured your alkie will knock back ten drinks on Monday followed by the remaining four on Tuesday, followed by various acts of subterfuge to get around the limit for the rest of the week. (The drunk will be seeking "alcohol credits" by talking a teetotaller out of beginning a life of boozing.) This is more or less exactly the approach followed by the nations of the Earth since they began the dog & pony shows of "CO2 reduction" a couple of decades ago. 

The Slug Theory is nice and linear, it has some pretty solid science behind it (climate sensitivity to CO2), it's given activists like Bill McKibben a full-time job, and it makes President Obama sound...presidential when he talks about "80% reductions by 2050" with a straight face.  It also places humans in a better light.  Sure, in our youthful exuberance about fossil fuels we went way over the line and blew through our allowance, about 531 gigatons so far.  But now that we know what sort of mess we've made, we'll begin the process of building solar panels on the moon which will microwave their electricity back to Earth (a proposal as one part of a new energy regime to make up for the terawatts of energy we will lose when we stop burning fossil fuels).

Then this damn methane shows up like The Masque of the Red Death at Prince Prospero's crib.  Natalia (or Natasha) was rueful about spoiling the party when we talked about this on the shores of the Laptev Sea.

"Is shame," she said.

"Is damn shame," I answered.  "Is ruining a lot of perfectly good geophysics textbooks."

"Is I know," murmured Natasha, stricken.

Well, I'm sure we'll still get to build the lunar solar panels; but first we have to build this Star Wars array of methane blasters up here in this godforsaken tundra.  Manned, or boyed, by a couple of 13 year-old American X-Box fiends powered not by fossil fuels, but by industrial quantities of Pringles and Jolt Cola.