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  • Sorry, Mark.

    By G. Rendell July 2, 2009 12:39 pm

    I woke up this morning to hear the end of a seemingly pleasant tete-a-tete between Mark Zandi (of Moody's Economy) and Robert Reich (currently at Berkeley). The statement that stuck in my mind came from the mouth of Zandi; he said "I don't think there's any other issue that policymakers face that is as difficult as the current housing foreclosure crisis."

    Ummm ... wrong.

    The foreclosure crisis, while difficult to solve, is a piece of cake compared to the global climate disruption crisis. Foreclosure causes are known and relatively transparent, the players involved all want the thing solved, the only questions remaining are what the best course of action is and who's going to get rich along the way. (Sure, all the press is about how people are going broke. But it's just not possible to throw around hundreds of billions of dollars without creating some real wealth in the process. General Electric has figured that out. I'm sure others have, as well.)

    But GE is at least up front about what it's doing. They lobbied for the money fair and square, and they're going to keep it. The corporate players on the climate disruption front aren't nearly so honest about their roles; they're more interested in maintaining plausible deniability.

    As if trying to understand the [I'm sorry, I'm at a loss for an adjective -- "labyrinthine" doesn't begin to cover it] complexities of the climate system so that we can estimate sensitivities and identify points of leverage weren't hard enough, scientists have to address climate disruption in a social milieu that's not only full of disinformation, it's full of disinformation about the disinformation (meta-disinformation?). ExxonMobil has been funding originators and purveyors of climatological falsehoods for over a decade. In recent years, it's claimed to have stopped. That claim is a lie. Who says so? Bob Ward of the Grantham Institute of the London School of Economics. A couple of years back, when he was at the Royal Society, Ward was fundamental in outing ExxonMobil's disinformation tactics and causing them to become one step more subtle in their approach.

    See, there are difficult problems and potentially insoluble problems. Enemy action, whether it's physical interference or information warfare, is an attempt to turn the former into the latter.

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Comments on Sorry, Mark.

  • The Climate Crisis
  • Posted by Robert L Hamilton, PhD , alumnus, College of Engineering at Oklahoma U on July 4, 2009 at 10:00am EDT

  • "The Common Good is the Final and Favorite Refuge of Public Scoundrels"

    The gaseous atmosphere weighs about (10)**19 pounds of which about 5*(10)**15 pounds is CO2. We add annually about (10)**12 pounds, half of which is sequestered in plants and oceans. This is nothing new. By late Nineteenth century we knew that Aristotle's Element, Air, was indeed composed of actual elements and compounds. Also, it was being found that the 6,000 year old 'constant' earth had gone through some prodigious changes in climate and some conjectured that CO2 might be the culprit -- the agent of climate change. This conjecture was examined by scientists of that day and found to be wrong.

    The Global Warmer's idea has been this: Radiation from earth skyward is intercepted by a molecule in the air thereby keeping the planet warm. This is referred to as the Greenhouse Effect. It's simply not so; there is no such 'effect' as was shown by Professor Wood of Johns Hopkins in 1909. Consider a molecule in a leaf in the Pecan tree in my yard. If it radiates energy skyward it has to cool and any molecule in the air that absorbs this energy warms, but the entire process is null as far as energy and temperature are concerned.

    Well then, what does moderate the temperature that we live in? It's convection; each pound of rain that falls has carried several hundred BTUs of energy from the surface to high in the atmosphere where that energy is released when the water vapor condenses to rain. When you point out these facts to global warmers they resort to the common good: ". . . but wouldn't it be nice if we had cleaner air? " or some such allusion to 'a better place to live.' I'm afraid their better place for us is a cave or Tepee where we burn corn shucks to stay warm.

    A more substantive and more interesting question is: how does the climate go through such enormous changes? And we know that the ice has prevailed more than once and then retreated. It is a cyclical process. And we spend money and effort on the affronts to Science: consensus science, settled science, collective science and such non-science nonsense.

    Thanks and have a nice day,

    Dr Robert L Hamilton, Engineer
    Richardson, Texas
    972-741-6784

  • Professor Wood, eh?
  • Posted by G. Rendell on July 6, 2009 at 4:30pm EDT

  • Before we go relying too heavily on the 100-year-old conclusions of "Professor Wood of Johns Hopkins", we might want to learn a bit more about that good gentleman and what else he was up to in 1909.

    I found only one specific reference, but it's instructive.

    http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9807E7D81630E733A25755C2A9679D946897D6CF

    Always a pleasure.

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