My Old Dad was Onto Something

The Doctor

When I was 14 years old, I had an argument with my father. He was installing a brand-new electric heater in the old fireplace at our house in Wellington.

“You’re not doing the right thing,” I opined. “Electricity must be generated at a power station with maximum efficiency of 35%. That means that heater is wasting two-thirds of heat that was obtained from burning coal or oil at the power station. We’d be better off burning wood in the fireplace,” I finished, regurgitating a book I’d read.

My wise old Dad listened patiently and then asked me some questions: “Where did Wellington’s electricity come from?” “The South Island,” I said. “And how is electricity generated in the South Island?” “Hydro,” I admitted. “And how efficient is hydro?” “95-99%,” I conceded. “And how much carbon dioxide does hydro release?” “None,” I muttered, defeated.

Technical details matter when you are talking about a technical subject. And in many ways, the idea of “climate change” is very technical involving multiple theories that dynamically interact with one another.

For those interested in dynamical systems, that should already raise a red flag. Chaotic dynamics aka chaos theory implies that non-linear systems such as the atmosphere are sensitive to initial conditions. In the classic illustration, a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon could cause a hurricane in Florida. And chaos theory says that if you model the effect of the butterfly wings many times you will never get the exact same resulting effect. And this effect is inherent in non-linear systems. It cannot be eliminated, for example, by more accurate measurements.

But this is merely scratching the surface of the problems with the idea of “man-made climate change”. Its problems are so comprehensive and damning that I will have to write a series of articles to sketch them.

Today let’s start with a list:

1. All the planets are warming. Not just the earth. How can that be man-made?
2. Why are the changes in the sun ignored? These include solar irradiation (visible light), other electromagnetic radiation (such as cosmic and gamma rays) and magnetic interaction between the sun’s and the earth’s magnetic fields such as circulation currents.
3. Why is the changing location of the solar system with respect to galaxy ignored (procession of the equinox)? It influences cosmic radiation from the galaxy and magnetic interaction between the galaxy and solar system.
4. Why are the effects of atmospheric geoengineering ignored? Aluminium and barium oxide sprayed from aircraft supposedly to reflect the sun’s rays before they reach the earth also reflect heat back to the earth keeping it artificially warm.
5. Why is atmospheric pressure not taken into account especially when there is a clear link between pressure and temperature in the ideal gas law?
6. How come the changing relative location of ground-based temperature stations is not considered? In extreme cases, a station that was out in the country 100 years ago, now is at the end of an airport runway being blasted with hot gases from aircraft engines.
7. Why is the correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature assumed to be causative? It could be that increases in temperature increases carbon dioxide, not the other way around. Or perhaps both are caused by an unknown third cause. Causation should be proved not assumed.
8. Why are advocates so afraid of warming periods such as the medieval warm period? “Nothing to see here,” they say. “Move along.”
9. Why is the dynamic nature of vegetation ignored? We know that plants exposed to increased carbon dioxide absorb that increased CO₂ and become more drought resistant. In Bangladesh, crop yields have increased by 10% due to increased carbon dioxide. Without it, there would be food shortages in Bangladesh.
10. Why are the climate modellers so bad at modelling? The IPCC was forced to halve its temperature change prediction in its latest report. No explanation was provided that would inspire confidence that the new figure won’t turn out to be mistaken also.
11. Why are models treated as reality? My first-year class in applied mathematics insisted that models are always over-simplified and limited by our ability to solve the equations. And that does not even consider the non-repeatable effects of non-linearity.
12. Why are the climate change advocates’ statistics so bunk? I remember one figure in the media that was represented as predicting some doomsday scenario. But when you looked at the details, the confidence level of the figure was something like 45%. That means that the chance of the sample that generated the prediction reflecting reality is less than flipping a coin. Talk about nonsense (by comparison, regularly used confidence intervals are 95% and 99%).

But let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that man-made climate change as described by the IPCC is a real phenomenon. Then what about the solutions?

13. Why the obsession with electric cars? A truck stop bowser outside Rotorua delivers 76MW when pumping 2 litres of diesel per second. Current electric charging technology can’t match 1/1000^th of that.
14. Why the obsession with windmills and solar? These destabilise the grid (another dynamical system) necessitating more power stations (or expensive batteries) to stabilise it. They are also an environmental disaster, requiring a great deal of energy to manufacture and yielding unrecyclable and toxic waste after 20 years or so.
15. Why do some absorbers of carbon dioxide count and others not? For example, the grass that feeds cows absorbs carbon dioxide to grow but this absorption is ignored while inedible pine trees count as absorbers. Or take Australia. That vast country’s vegetation far out-absorbs all its carbon emissions, yet that absorption doesn’t count. Surely, Australia should be paid by the rest of the world for the great job it is doing. Similarly, depending on how you count the absorption of our native forests, the same could be said of New Zealand.
16. The analysis done in Bjorn Lomberg’s Skeptical Environmentalist should be required reading. It clearly shows that the best solution to excess carbon dioxide emissions is new technology. The worst is to try to suppress carbon emissions via tax due to the negative economic effects.
17. Why is alternative energy technology so taboo? Solar panels with efficiency exceeding 20% and new energy technologies such as low-energy nuclear reactions and zero-point energy are automatically classified as military secret technology by the US patent office. Other forms of nuclear energy such as Thorium and the Safire Project are routinely ignored and starved of funding.
18. And why is China ignored? At one point, China was commissioning a coal-fired power plant every week. They are the world’s biggest emitter. Yet they simply ignore the IPCC.

I think my old Dad was onto something. More to come.