Beyond belief

Successful science requires imagination, not just a piling up of facts. What keeps science from being no more than imagination is its critical aspect, a willingness to place one's own theories on the line and put them to the test of evidence and logic.

In 1644, at the time modern science was born, the poet John Milton penned his Areopagitica, one of the first and still one of the finest defenses of freedom of thought and publishing in the English language. Rejecting the Platonic view of knowledge as an infallible super-rational, super-sensible intuition, Milton saw the partiality of each person, each idea, each point of view, and the inescapable necessity of debate and criticism in the search for truth:

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making ....

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.

Neither can our understanding of good be separated from our knowledge of evil. It is pointless to preach the former with no awareness of the latter:

Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche [the soul] as an incessant labour to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world .... When God gave [Adam] reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing.

Religious strictures against idolatry remind us of the impossibility of objectifying the divine or the totality of creation. But what religions have never adequately appreciated is that belief itself is problematic. Belief tends to objectify what resists objectification; it wants to turn the divine into an object of worship, not realizing that the divine isn't an object at all. Belief systems have always been Achilles' heel of religion. Belief, like false representations of gods, imposes a preconceived box on a realm that cannot be boxed.

This conflict has been variously characterized as a war between science and religion, between matter and spirit, between body and soul, or between mind and senses. Confronted with this history, we come to terms with humanity’s true original sin, the sin of shoe-horning, of Procrustes and his bed, of forcing round pegs into square holes.

Rationalist criticism of religion can be obtuse, blind to the truth a religious belief or practice points toward. But then again, religious belief can all too easily blind itself and become credulity and cruel superstition.

Forced to choose, we face a choice between the flight of the spirit and the ready-made boxes too small to contain it. Religion has often been turned into such a container, but self-imposed prisons have been made of anti-religion as well, of science, philosophy, art, and ideology. All are impairments of the spirit.

Like great art, science doesn’t preach; it shows. It leaves observers, critics, and later generations to draw their own, sometimes unexpected, conclusions.

If the heart of science is its quest for precision, consistency, and cutting away the false, skepticism - without cynicism - is its soul. The skepticism of science extends to beliefs, prejudices, unwarranted assumptions, and its own dearest theories - Milton's trial by what is contrary. Belief can delay this critical examination and pollute the uninhabited dimensions of thought, cluttering up the view. Belief speaks from narrow intellectualizing. A probing skepticism acknowledges the limitations of our minds and instead addresses us existentially, faced with an open and never-complete knowledge of our world.

Alienation and the growth of knowledge

... for he said: "I have been a stranger in a strange land." - Exodus 18

It's usually true in life that we never really know something or someone if we're merely familiar with it. An acquaintance, a familiar locale near home, a piece of road we drive over daily - how many of us really know these, as opposed to just nodding and barely registering what our senses take in? Really knowing something takes first not knowing it, and if we're already familiar with it, we need to first de-familiarize ourselves with it.

Alienation, which is usually viewed as a simply negative thing, is crucial to our developing any real understanding of the world around us. It has to seem alien to us, or we to it, for some period if we're ever really going to look at it hard and really understand it. This is also why it's easier to be objective about electrons, planets, and cars - and develop sciences and engineering based on that objectivity - than it is to be objective about other people and, all the more so, about ourselves.

Before Copernicus, the Earth seemed like a familiar place to people - yet almost everything about it was unknown. Copernicus proposed a strange idea that many balked at, because it violated "common sense" - that the Earth is a heavenly body, as Galileo put it. Explorers sailing the then-new ocean-going ships discovered that a lot of what the inherited culture of Europe and the Near East thought it "knew" about the Earth, its peoples, and their habitats and civilizations was wrong or radically inadequate. The shock of seeing this gap in authoritative received wisdom set off mental shock waves in civilization that still affect us to this day.

Much of what we take for granted about the Earth - the intertwined climate and biogeosphere - is certainly unique in our planetary system and probably unusual in our Galaxy. In the old days of science fiction, before about 1950, writers could project on to other planets circumstances that were a little weird and yet familiarly enough like Earth to not seem really strange. Then we got to know other planets for real and thus really know the Earth for the first time. (Now we're learning a lot more about other stars and extrasolar planets.) Obviously, such knowledge should make us appreciate the Earth in a way we couldn't before. But these cuddly feelings are not the whole story. The history of the Earth coming to seem strange to us as a prelude to real understanding doesn't just culminate in warm fuzziness - it's a scientific and philosophical triumph. To my mind, that's the fundamental significance of the Gaia notion.

You'd think philosophers, at least in modern times, would have picked up on the interplay of familiarity, alienation, and knowledge and not, unlike the ancients, taken alienation as a simple positive or negative. There is one philosopher who made this drama of naiveté, conflict, and enlightenment a key to his thinking - that would be Hegel, the great German Enlightenment thinker who was a friend of Schiller and Goethe and contemporary with Beethoven. (Hegel died in 1831.) His achievement was obscured by later popular legends spread by his students and critics - for example, Marx and his followers - that falsely portrayed Hegel's system as a cookie-cutter "dialectical" game of Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis and (worse) as the workings of "pure ideas."* While Hegel's system can be criticized - for its perhaps too-easy optimism or its Eurocentrism - such caricatures have often hidden what he achieved.

Hegel's notion, thoroughly explored in his Science of Logic and Phenomenology of Spirit (or Mind**), is a drama of "stages of consciousness," not "pure ideas." His is a biography of the individual and collective spirit (Zeitgeist, or "spirit of the times" - a Hegel coinage). All of our notions of developmental psychology ultimately trace their way back to him - as we say of someone, "he's just going through a phase." Behind that thought is Hegel's biographical, developmental, and historical - in our post-Darwin world, we should say, genetic - approach. In this, like anyone under the spell of the German Enlightenment, Hegel was in turn profoundly indebted to Goethe, an almost incomprehensible colossus himself.

Of course, stuck in alienation, we experience disorientation and pain, and all of us just want that to stop. But our spiritual enlargement hangs on how it stops - do we get stuck - or regress - or do we get to the other side and expand our understanding? It marks the real difference between being merely familiar with something and really knowing it.
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* Hegel did himself no favor in his major works by writing in a deliberately difficult and obscure style, a trend started in the late 18th century by Kant in his major works. Interestingly, both Kant and Hegel wrote shorter summaries for students and a general audience far more readable than their hefty opera magna. (The same dichotomy appears in Marx.) Later philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche both criticized Hegel and ended up owing him a deep debt, but proving also that literary German need not lead to the intellectual equivalent of indigestion.

** The German is Geist, which has no exact equivalent in English. Our word ghost is a cognate.

Meet the mother

... or speak with the Earth, and she will teach you. - Job 12

By now, it must be clear that something special is happening on the Earth that keeps its climate within certain bounds. This "something special" clearly involves more than weather per se; it also involves plant life as well as oceans, soil, and other geophysical processes, plus certain basic gross features of the Earth. Certainly compared with its terrestrial planet siblings in the inner Solar System - we looked at Venus and Mars, but didn't bother with Mercury or the Moon, because neither has an atmosphere - the Earth's configuration of geo- and biophysics seems unusual, if not unique.

In the 1980s, when scientists first began to think about other planets and life in a systematic way based on comparisons with other planets in our system (later, with planets orbiting other stars as well), this striking fact became so obvious that it cried out for a name. So biologists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis coined one: they called it Gaia, an archaic form of the Greek goddess of the Earth, spelled that way, I suppose, to get people to pronounce it correctly - not Gea or even the Latinized Gaea. Perhaps they were being humorous, although they must have known that using such terminology would bring the New Age weirdos out the woodwork. Maybe they were looking to cash in, living as we do in a media- and celebrity-saturated society with many spiritual seekers dissatisfied by traditional religions.

Gaia is sometimes and misleadingly called a hypothesis, which it certainly is not: everything you know about the biogeosphere tells you it's real now. But it's when you consider the Earth's history that Gaia really hits you over the head. Consider the striking fact that the Earth is a little over 4 billion years (4 Gyr) old, and life appeared on it at least as far back as 3.5 Gyr and liquid water at least as far back as 3.8 Gyr. Now consider that the Sun was much fainter earlier in its 5-Gyr history back then, growing steadily brighter with time. Life on Earth required liquid water, which must have kept from freezing by a temperature-enhancing mechanism like those we know today - or perhaps a different one no longer operative, such as large amounts of other infrared-active gases like methane (CH4) and ammonia (NH3).

We've exhaustively examined the "Goldilocks" climate regime (which is really a range of possible climates), which runs from Ice Ages to mildly tropical. (And don't be deluded by the "global warming" hysteria into thinking that the Ice Ages have ended - they haven't.) Two other, quite different possible Earth climate regimes (ranges) are known. One was touched on briefly months ago: the humid but almost cloud-free supertropical Earth of about 304 ^oK = 31 ^oC = 89 ^oF. The other, so far unmentioned, is the "snowball Earth": mostly covered in ice, which reflects incoming solar radiation as effectively as do clouds, an Earth of less than about 245 ^oK = -28 ^oC = -18 ^oF. Earth has avoided both fates.*

A lot of what goes under the name of Gaia has already been covered - in some sense, we're just slapping a label on a collection of mechanisms and features of the Earth. Where the real Gaian controversy comes is when the role of life and consciousness comes in. I should make it emphatically clear right away that the "life" that mainly matters for Gaia is simple but ubiquitous plant life - nothing so sophisticated as an insect, not to speak of mammals or humans. "Ubiquitous" beats "sophisticated" on most days. So don't get any ideas :-)

Clearly, a complex web of feedbacks are operating on the Earth. We've seen some of them, but by no means all. When you hear "feedback," you sometimes think "alive" or even "conscious" - but Gaia doesn't mean that the Earth as a whole is conscious or even living. That's really getting off into the mystical and well beyond what the science justifies. Some people have tried to do that, including scientists who should know better. The feedbacks here are not all-powerful or mystical and don't by themselves imply consciousness or life. "Feedback" is a more primitive and general concept. But that doesn't stop some people from trying to turn the Gaia thing into a religion - which it isn't.

There are also some gross physical factors involved in Earth's unique biogeosphere that don't involve feedbacks. Its orbital position (close to the Sun, but not too close), its surface gravity, and the continuation of plate tectonics through its whole history are also essential. Additional factors that enhance stable long-term evolution of life include the presence of a large moon and a nearby giant (Jupiter) that sweeps up dangerous comets and asteroids.**

Gaia also has a long but finite life. In a few billion years, the Sun, continuing to brighten, will become so strong that the liquid surface oceans unique to Earth will boil away. That's probably what happened to any liquid water on Venus. We can only hope that our descendants will have terraformed Mars - which will be quite balmy by that point - or left the Solar System altogether for a better spot.

Is the Earth unusual? Almost certainly. Is it unique in the Galaxy or in the Universe? No one has the faintest idea for sure, but probably not. Is such a collection of stabilizing feedbacks a sign of purposive causality, or teleology? Maybe. But if it is, it's like Aristotle's teleology: completely naturalistic - there's nothing supernatural about it, in the literal meaning of that word: something intruding from another reality that suspends natural laws. It's about how those natural laws and the peculiar conditions on Earth fit together to produce a wonderful and unexpected result.
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* Or maybe not. There's strong evidence that about 600 Myr ago, the Earth did go through a "snowball" phase. But even then, the magical properties of water saved the day (or saved the epoch). Solid water (ice) is less dense than liquid, an unusual material property. So ice floats on top of liquid water, and the surface of an ocean or lake can freeze while life continues in the liquid below - amazing. That's enough for me to believe in a just and benevolent G-d on alternate Tuesdays and Thursdays.

** Our moon is the largest relative to its primary parent planet in the Solar System. There other moons that are larger in absolute size, like Titan - but their parent primaries are much, much larger (Saturn in Titan's case).

Goldilocks and the three planets

The Earth has two neighboring "terrestrial" planets, compact and rocky, with significant atmospheres. They're places you can stand on, with climates, of a sort. What about them?


The first planet inward from the Sun is Venus, with a mass, size, and surface gravity similar to Earth's. But its atmosphere is wildly different - a CO2-dominated nightmare of extreme pressure and temperatures: at the surface, 92 Earth atmospheres and 735 ^oK = 462 ^oC = 864 ^oF. The middle and upper atmosphere is thick with CO2 and sulfur compounds that reflect over 3/4 of the incoming sunlight. The atmosphere also has significant levels of nitrogen and sulfur dioxide, as well as tiny amounts of water vapor and argon. The most natural assumption is that the CO2 outgassed from the solid planet early in Venus' history and never returned into the planet's interior - a very different story from the Earth's, in spite of the presence of other gases familiar from our atmosphere (nitrogen, argon, water vapor). The absence of oxygen, on the other hand, is exactly what we should expect: there's no plant life on Venus to exhale it.

Venus was once a science fiction favorite for a quasi-Earth setting. But remote measurements of Venus' atmosphere started in the 1950s, greatly augmented by visiting spacecraft operating in situ, and dashed the hopes of astronomers, biologists, and science fiction writers alike for an Earth twin. Trying to understand why a planet so similar to Earth ended up with such a radically different fate then became a cottage industry. Based on a few plausible assumptions, reasonable explanations have been worked out.

Venus is about 28% closer to the Sun than the Earth, and so it receives more solar radiation. But by itself, that cannot explain its extreme surface temperature. The atmosphere-free baseline surface temperature is 327 ^oK - corresponding to the 279 ^oK figure for the Earth. But with an albedo of 76%, Venus' surface temperature - absent any CO2 opacity or downward cloud reflectivity - would be a mere 229 ^oK, lower than Earth's reflective-clouds-only temperature of 250 ^oK.

Most of the extreme temperature is simply due to the sheer thickness of Venus' atmosphere. There's so much CO2 that the effective opacity of a vertical column of Venusian atmosphere is about 110 times that of the Earth's.* The opacity of a single CO2 molecule itself is increased because of the extreme pressure it experiences from surrounding CO2 molecules.** Additional enhancement of the surface temperature comes from sulfur compound cloud reflectivity bouncing infrared (IR) radiation back towards the surface (instead of absorbing and re-radiating it upwards).

Plate tectonics on the Earth are driven by interior heat released by radioactive decay. Venus' plate tectonics - if it ever had any - stopped a long time ago. That, plus the absence of water oceans and plants, meant the CO2 kept building up in the atmosphere.

Runaway greenhouses and more runaway metaphors. For historical reasons, major confusion once surrounded the theory of Venus' extreme temperatures. Going under the name of "runaway greenhouse," this theory is often misinterpreted as explaining Venus' extreme temperatures today as a function of its hypothetical past. But the vertical temperature profile of Venus' atmosphere requires knowing nothing about its past; it only requires knowing its present composition, heat flow, and surface gravity - just like Earth. The lower third of Venus' vertical temperature profile is dominated by radiative opacity, like the interior of a star - so much so, that even the gravity-work effect that is basic to the Earth's temperature profile is negligible by comparison. In the middle and upper Venusian atmosphere, the air is thinner, and gravity is the main factor controlling the temperature lapse rate.

There was a point to the "runaway greenhouse," however. If you make the plausible assumption that Venus started as a proto-planet with as about much water as the Earth, the striking fact that there's almost no water in Venus' atmosphere today demands explanation, and the "runaway greenhouse" met that demand. Liquid surface water evaporated and floated up (just as it does here), but because Venus' temperatures were always higher to start with, it had hard time condensing into clouds. Instead, the water vapor kept going, into Venus' upper atmosphere, where the deadly solar ultraviolet (UV) radiation dissociated the H2O into H and O2. Being very light atoms, the H's diffused away into space, while the O2's floated back down and reacted quickly with surface rocks. After a while, virtually all the water in Venus' atmosphere vanished in this way.

This mechanism should never have been called a "runaway greenhouse," because that makes it sound as if it has something to do with Venus' present extreme temperatures. It should have been called "runaway evaporation," followed by "catastrophic water loss." Some have even tried to rhetorically connect Venus' present extreme temperatures with climate change on Earth, which is absurd. The conditions on the two planets are so radically different, it's hard to see what direct application Venus' atmosphere has to ours. If it had the same thickness as ours, its surface temperatures would be only slightly larger than ours - instead of 2-1/2 times ours. That would be the hypertropical near-Earth twin envisioned in science fiction before circa 1950.

There is one important and relevant fact, though, that Venus does demonstrate. The temperature distribution of Venus' atmosphere shows far less relative variation than the Earth's. It is true that Venus barely rotates on its axis, but even so, there's little difference between say, poles and equator. This fact illustrates the "more uniformly hotter" principle mentioned in a previous posting. It's ultimately just the Second Law at work. Apart from an occasional sulfur compound shower, you would find "weather" on Venus very dull.

The Earth's tropics are like this, only Venus is far more so.

Our other neighbor, one planet outward from the Sun, is Mars. Like Venus it has a CO2 atmosphere and very little water. But the similarities stop there: the Martian atmosphere is much thinner than Venus' and thinner even than ours. Mars is about 52% farther from the Sun than we are. The surface pressure and temperatures are a thin, frigid 0.008 atm and 227 ^oK = -46 ^oC = -51 ^oF (seasonal mean). If our tropics are a faint image of Venusian hell, then our Antarctica is a faint image of Mars' parched, cold desert. And our stratosphere matches Mars' surface in terms of very thin air.

Mars is Venus' opposite in other ways too. If Venus has little "weather," Mars suffers from too much - violent springtime sandstorms with winds exceeding 300 km/hr, and violent episodes of upward convection. At the same time, Mars has no liquid or evaporated water, so its climate suffers from larger extremes over the course of its day (similar to ours) and seasons (also similar, although about twice as long). The thinness of the atmosphere has something to do with that as well - very much the opposite of the climate boredom of Venus. But Mars has only a limited climate repertory, unlike Earth, mainly because of the lack of water vapor.

Mars is a smaller version of Earth in some ways, but small enough and with low enough surface gravity, that it had trouble over its history in holding on to much atmosphere. Because Mars' atmosphere is so thin, taking pictures of its surface from orbit is not hard. The latest and greatest are these results from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

And finally, we circle back to the Earth we now know so well. Our atmosphere is thinner than Venus', but thicker than Mars'. We're close to the Sun, but not too close.

And then there is the extraordinary role of water, doing all the things we've learned about in the last few months: moderating temperature swings and variations, dumping some extra heat into the atmosphere, raising lower atmosphere temperatures by its mild infrared opacity effect, but never leaving the Earth because it condenses and precipitates out below the stratosphere. The absence of significant liquid or evaporated water is the most obvious difference between our atmosphere and those of our neighbors - apart from the even more extraordinary, although thermodynamically less significant - persistence of oxygen, thanks to plants.

And the Earth differs in less obvious but no less critical ways from Mars and Venus. It has the largest surface gravity of the three, making it easier for it to retain an atmosphere. And the continued functioning of plate tectonics, combined with persistent oceans, gets many gases out of the air (like CO2) and, chemically transformed, down to the ocean floors, where they're subducted back into the Earth's core from whence they came. The plate tectonics also wipe away the remains of meteor impacts so evident on Mars and our Moon. Finally, they drive the continents around, making geological and biological evolution on Earth much more complex.

The Earth's atmosphere has enough variety in its composition - plus the striking variety of behavior exhibited by just one compound - to keep its climate "interesting" - never dull like Venus', but not a limited, violent mood-swinger like Mars either.

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* Actually, total IR optical depth. No one uses the correct "venerean" or "venereal" as the adjectival form of Venus, for obvious reasons.

** The IR absorption lines of the CO2 spectrum are broadened by the ambient pressure and "cover" more of the IR radiation in wavelength than a CO2 molecule in Earth's atmosphere.

Ah ...

... the Gore effect strikes again.

But I can type and laugh at the same time. Some people can't, you know.

And it makes me wonder: how do these famous people keep a straight face?

Another good spanking

One of the authors of Taken By Storm, Essex, has written a short article for Canada's National Post on why the "global temperature" concept doesn't make sense.

In previous postings here, we've used it in an idealized climate model that is horizontally homogeneous (except for clouds). In that world, it's always early morning not long after spring or fall equinox, everywhere. Without drastic squashing and simplification, that's not our world. It's a thought experiment designed to illuminate basic climate mechanisms and the workings of thermodynamics. But it's a caricature of our climate. Used to analyze and aggregate actual measured temperatures of the air and ocean, spatially averaging temperature is not legitimate.

During the spring, Essex and two co-authors also published a technical article in Journal of Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics on what's wrong with the global temperature average. It's not as funny as the National Post article, but worth reading if you understand some basic thermodynamics.

Ozone and the light from above: The upper atmosphere

Through a number of previous postings, the Earth's upper atmosphere has come up as an important topic. The upper atmosphere is connected with the lower atmosphere (troposphere), but it's also interesting in its own right and deserves a posting all its own. The comparison of Earth's atmosphere with other planets will underline its importance.*

This is the atmosphere's vertical structure:


In short, the upper atmosphere is everything above the troposphere, from the tropopause and on into outer space. The highest layer (not shown) is called the exosphere.

Essential characteristics of the upper atmosphere. With two key points in mind, you'll understand most of what makes the upper atmosphere special.

The first is that the upper atmosphere is strongly heated by direct radiation from the Sun. That's different from the troposphere, which is heated largely from the surface. Of course, this heat flow does ultimately come from the Sun, and clouds do directly absorb some of the incoming solar radiation. But that's a secondary effect compared to the re-radiation from the surface as infrared (IR).

This direct absorption of incoming solar radiation is so strong that the temperature stops "lapsing" with altitude; that is, in parts of the upper atmosphere (stratosphere and exosphere), the temperature rises with altitude - there's that much solar radiation being directly absorbed. One of these temperature inversions starts at the tropopause and extends through the lower stratosphere; that's the inversion that puts a "lid" on the "boiling" convection of the tropopause. No upward vertical heat transport is possible by matter under such conditions, and indeed, upward heat transport is all radiative in the upper atmosphere. There are virtually no IR-active gases (water vapor, CO2) up there anyway, so the IR radiation proceeds almost without obstacle into space.**

Without the strong direct absorption of incoming solar radiation, the temperature would just keep declining with altitude, as pressure and density actually do. (In hydrostatic equilibrium, a negative pressure gradient is needed at every altitude to counter the downward pull of gravity.) The upper atmosphere would get colder and colder as it gets more and more rarefied farther from the surface. Instead, because of the rising temperature, the upper atmosphere at very high altitudes (exosphere) merges into the rarefied, hot plasma of the solar wind, the rapidly expanding outermost layer of the Sun's atmosphere. That is, the Earth's upper atmosphere and the Sun's mingle high above our heads, an important fact whose significance will become apparent.

The second point concerns the nature and effects of this directly absorbed radiation: it's energetic ultraviolet (UV) radiation - photons with energies higher and wavelengths shorter than those of optical radiation - that dissociates and ionizes the rarefied molecules and atoms of high altitudes. "Dissociation" means that molecules are broken down into their constituent atoms; "ionization" means that molecules and atoms are stripped each of one or more negatively charged electrons and themselves become positively charged. (These separated charges are ions. Without ionization, atoms and molecules are electrically neutral, as their internal charges balance each other.) A gas of electrically charged atoms and molecules is a plasma.

Although most of the Sun's radiation output takes place in the optical (visible) range, a significant fraction of it occupies shorter wavelength ranges. The "softest" (least energetic) part of the solar UV gets through to the ground; that's how you get a suntan. The "harder" (more energetic) part of the solar UV is absorbed by the upper atmosphere, thankfully - otherwise, we and other life forms on the surface would be toast. The absorbers are molecular oxygen (O2) and a famous by-product of O2 and UV called ozone (O3).

The modern convention for light wavelengths is nanometers (nm), billionths of a meter (millionths of a millimeter and thousandths of a micron). (Ten angstroms is one nm.) Visible light runs from 400 nm (deep violet) to 700 nm (deep red). The "soft" UV range that gets to the surface is higher than 320 nm. The "mid" UV range that ozone absorbs lies between 240 and 320 nm, at altitudes between 10 and 50 km. Diatomic oxygen absorbs "hard" UV smaller than 240 nm, at altitudes above 90 km.

Photochemistry of oxygen and ozone. The whole complex of radiation and forms of oxygen is a big tangle, but can be boiled down to a couple essentials.

In the high upper atmosphere (mainly above 90 km - the thermosphere), diatomic oxygen (O2) absorbs the hardest part of the solar ultraviolet: O2 + UV photon -> O + O. (Below 180 nm wavelength, diatomic nitrogen N2 also does some of the absorbing.) Some of the monatomic oxygen (O) floats down and combines with O2 to form ozone (O3). The third O in ozone is only loosely bound.

The ozone then absorbs two distinct types of radiation. Like Schroedinger's cat, O3 exists simultaneously in two quantum states: all three O's equally orbiting the others; and two O's deeply bound (quasi-O2), with a loose O in a "far orbit." †

Like the hardest UV, the intermediate UV breaks the "strong" O2 bond embedded within the O3; but the intermediate UV photon doesn't have to be quite so energetic, because some break-up energy can be taken from the third O. It's crucial for life, because it means that most of the solar UV is absorbed in the mid- to lower stratosphere, leaving only the "softest" component to reach us on the ground. While small doses of the soft UV (360-400 nm) benefit us by producing vitamin D in the skin, UV in high doses, especially below 340 nm, is very harmful.

Finally, the so-called mid-IR radiation (around 10,000 nm) from the Earth's surface breaks the "weak" bond that binds the third O to the O2. Below the bottom of the stratosphere (about 10 km), this absorption destroys virtually all O3 (by O3 + IR photon -> O2 + O, with the loose O's recombining to form O2). Only a tiny equilibrium O3 residual remains in the lower atmosphere.††

Ozone destruction and the polar ozone "hole." The absorption of all but the "soft" solar UV radiation by naturally existing O2 and O3 is critical for life on the surface, shielding living tissue and DNA from most solar UV radiation. Trace atmospheric chemicals from volcanic and man-made sources can enhance the destruction of ozone in the lower stratosphere, although it should be clear that these only add to the main ozone destruction channel of IR absorption. The critical point is that the intermediate UV penetrates the atmosphere more deeply when there's less ozone in the lower stratosphere. More of it gets through to the ground. The "hard" UV is absorbed by O2 in any case.

But the full situation is trickier than it first appears. The same Sun whose intermediate UV is blocked by O3 at lower altitudes also produces that O3 in the first place from O2 by its hard UV at a higher altitude. We should expect then that, in polar night, O3 should vanish from the stratosphere, and it does. Only when the Sun returns in the polar spring does its UV start producing O3 again. So the existence of an ozone "hole" in polar winter is not any surprise or cause for panic; that's the way it should be.

The right questions are, do these trace chemicals delay the formation of the equilibrium ozone layer in the polar spring? And, are the accelerated breakdown and formation retardation of O3 by trace chemicals allowing in significantly more intermediate solar UV a cause for concern? Maybe. However, measured UV levels at the ground (outside the polar regions) have been mostly falling for several decades. The panic over ozone depletion in the 1970s and resurgent in the early 1990s was overblown - a forerunner-in-miniature of the much larger "global warming" hysteria now playing on your TV.
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* The two classic books of Craig, the more technical The Upper Atmosphere: Meteorology and Physics and the popular The Edge of Space: Exploring the Upper Atmosphere, are out of print and somewhat dated but still excellent introductions to the topic.

** This does not preclude horizontal heat transport by matter (convective currents in air = winds). Indeed, the lower stratosphere features some very strong horizontal winds (like the jet stream).

† Chemistry students should think of a close cousin, bond hybridization.

†† A significant part of the trace tropospheric ozone is produced by lightning and ground activities. It has a distinctive tangy smell familiar to students of photochemistry and users of ionizing air filters.

Ozone itself is powerfully oxidizing and poisonous to humans in significant amounts. Sustained breathing of trace amounts produces headaches and nausea.

Like, her head literally exploded

But it's really not rocket science. The Daily Telegraph reports.

Science versus science fiction

Remember a long time ago, we said: science is about answering the answerable, not imagining the imaginable.

Much of the global warming literature is the latter, not the former. The executive summaries of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are a good example. They use the trappings of science without the substance and, each time they're released, show wide differences from the larger scientific reports that accompany them but which few non-scientists ever look at. These differences are a major scandal. That is, they violate all the basic canons of scientific honesty, twisting and mutilating the science until it fits the political preconceptions. And the IPCC has become ever more clever and manipulative in how they're pushed out to the public. The latest report (No. 4, 2007) separated the release of the scientific report from the summary by several months. Naturally, the summary material is all you ever hear in the media.

Hysterical literature of this type typically mixes the imaginable, the hypothetical, and the unlikely with the probable, the banal, and the obvious. A good example is the attempt in the IPCC's summary of impacts of global warming to simultaneously inflate probable changes in the polar regions and conflate those with unlikely major changes near the equator - all in an attempt, I suppose, to stir our sympathy simultaneously for stranded polar bears and the typically impoverished humans living in the tropics. As a previous posting explained, the polar bears have the better case here, although the absolute size of the changes in question is unlikely to be large.

A better way to think of these reports is that the members of the IPCC are trying to break into The Industry, as it's called, and the reports are preliminary drafts for a Hollywood blockbuster, The Warming After: The Movie. It'll star Angelina Jolie (she of the luscious lips and furrowed brows) as an NGO/humanitarian aid worker living in the tropics and trapped in 14 hurricanes, one after another - all late one summer. Alec Baldwin co-stars as an amorous and distinguished professor of climatology who splits his time between seducing graduate students and testifying on impending climate doom before Congress, where he's repeatedly confronted by a hostile Republican senator and global warming skeptic. Al Gore makes a cameo appearance as himself, brandishing a hockey stick and riding that platform contraption from Inconvenient Truth.

The story climaxes dramatically when Baldwin rescues the secretly-environmentalist daughter (Scarlett Johansson) of the hostile senator from her father's house as it slides into the ocean during a mudslide, taking the senator with it. They live happily ever after (in a very convenient ménage-à-trois) in a beautiful but ruined tropical villa that Jolie has discovered, where they curl up together every night to learn about thermodynamics and the evils of carbon dioxide and feed displaced polar bears. No farting allowed.

Occam, with razor

All mathematical models of physical reality are approximations in lieu of an exactly solved theory. There are few cases in science of exact, complete theories,* so models are unavoidable. But there are models, and then there are models, and they're not all made equal.

Everything else being the same, simpler models are better models. A good model captures every significant physical mechanism in play and respects general physical principles (like energy and mass conservation), but avoids uncontrolled complexity. The most complex numerical computer models are approximations and in some sense caricatures. The simple climate model picture used in these last months there is also a caricature - an approximation that captures every important mechanism at work in the lower atmosphere only one or two steps beyond mere bookkeeping (kinematics). But the complicated computer models of climate invoke a mix of approximations, some controlled and some not. There is no way to check many of the assumptions made; when they can be checked, they're often wrong.

A simple model like the one used here, by design, ignores important climate subtleties and doesn't directly address dynamical questions. But while it's a carefully sketched caricature, it's a caricature under full theoretical control. It doesn't make many assumptions, and those it does, can be checked and, if necessary, modified. Complex models with uncheckable assumptions and many moving parts are difficult to understand. Teaching a computer to solve those models as rapid numerical simulations doesn't magically make them right; it just means that the modelers are committing sophisticated theoretical mistakes faster than they would if they were solving the models with pen and paper backed by brainpower. Computer scientists have a name for this: GIGO, meaning "garbage in, garbage out."

Since the 1980s, the much larger, more complex climate computer models (called "general circulation models," or GCMs for short) have given a wide range of answers to the question of "global warming" (enhanced IR opacity due to CO2), with changes ranging from small to much larger than the simple estimates. These models are impressively complex - they're the Pyramids or Saturn moon rockets of computer models - but for precisely that reason not to be trusted - they make uncontrolled approximations and far more uncheckable assumptions than do the simpler estimates. But the place to discuss the GCMs is later.

"As simple as and whenever and wherever possible" is a modern form of a principle first enunciated by the medieval philosopher and Franciscan friar William of Ockham (1288-1348) as entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, which means "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity." The principle was dubbed "Occam's Razor" by Ockham's fellow scholastics. Here's a medieval doodle of William from a 1341 manuscript copy of his Summary of Logic.



Over on the upper right the Latin says frater Occham iste, which means "that's Brother Occam."

William was an early representative of the nominalist school of philosophy, which holds that universals or abstract concepts are strictly mental constructs and words; only particulars are reals - this dog, that dog, not Dog-in-general. This seems to have been an English specialty and closely related to the English taste for empiricism and individualism; it appears again and again later in Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Darwin, etc.

In modern terms, Occam's sharp blade means that, the fewer assumptions you make, the less likely you are to be wrong. And it is a lot easier to be wrong than to be right, especially if you're guessing.
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* In physics, there are only three: the harmonic oscillator, the Kepler problem (two-body gravitational problem), and the ideal gas.

Planting trees

A rigorous conclusion about increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere is that plants will benefit. While getting less light, they will receive more CO2 to breathe and more water precipitation. All plants will benefit from the latter; but certain plants - the kind that like to hang out in the shade of other plants, low-light types - will be selectively more favored. The relatively larger favoring of low-light plants is a case of Darwinian selection, but overall, the effect is anti-Malthusian. And since we humans tend to have a landlubber bias, it should be mentioned: "plants" here very much includes ocean plankton and the like.

The exact size of the plant enhancement and its effect in turn on removing some of the CO2 are hard to estimate. However, it is clear that plants are the most significant sink of CO2 in the atmosphere. They experience one to two growing seasons a year, which is a much faster response time than the nearest competing CO2 sink, ocean absorption (decades or longer). This geophysical effect is less important, although easier to estimate: the CO2 diffuses into ocean water, then dissolves and enters the carbonate cycle (time scale: about 10 years); the carbonates then sink to the deep ocean (time scale: 100 years), where they sediment out and are subducted into the Earth's crust (time scale: few 1000 years).

But the sheer impact of plants on the atmosphere is best gauged if you consider the following facts.

• Essentially all of the oxygen (O2) in the atmosphere is due to plant exhalation. Molecular oxygen is a highly reactive compound; without a source of continual replenishment, the O2 in the Earth's atmosphere would disappear quickly by oxidation reactions (like rust) with rocks and soil.*

• The atmosphere doesn't have much CO2 (somewhat less than 0.04%) compared to O2 (20%); the ratio is more than 500:1. The plant respiration reactions (photosynthesis) match one CO2 to every O2. So plants must be doing a lot of breathing to convert such a small amount of CO2 to such a large amount of O2.

• The famous Mauna Loa graph measuring atmospheric CO2 concentrations from 1957 (the first International Geophysical Year) shows the impact of plant growth in spring and summer in the significant cyclical squiggle imposed, year by year, on the rising CO2 concentration. In some years, the annual variability (which is mostly due to plants) is larger than the annual mean increase itself.

It's tempting to relate the CO2 concentration directly to plant growth in this way, but it must be kept in mind that both plant growth and the CO2 level are affected by multiple factors. For example, if the amount of plant respiration is lower in one year or a series of years for some reason other than reduced CO2 concentration (say, less rainfall or lower temperatures), then the CO2 concentration will rise - fewer plants means less less plant respiration and less CO2 converted to O2. The atmosphere, geosphere, and biosphere are linked by multiple and generally stabilizing feedback mechanisms of this sort.

Freeman Dyson, one of the last surviving giants of the heroic mid-century age of physics, discusses plants and their effect on atmospheric CO2, among other things, on these YouTube interviews here and here.

So plant trees. Actually, plants will respond on their own just fine to enhanced CO2 and precipitation; human planting will simply add to what the plants will already do by themselves. My real point is, planting is not expensive - and it is good for a lot of other, more tangible reasons: trees look nice, they provide shade (especially for urban heat islands), and (most importantly) they are excellent for holding soil and water.

In the meantime: relax. The human effect on climate variability needs to be viewed as important, but not urgent.** There's plenty of time to do more pressing things: understand the climate better, especially the Earth's CO2 and carbon budgets, which are now measured very imperfectly - more things climatologists should be doing instead of wasting their time with questionable computer models. Instead of guessing, imagining, and frightening ourselves, a better approach would be to measure lots of things, especially related to plants, that are not understood.

Advanced countries will adopt new energy technologies in any case. Here the political and economic need for change is far more pressing than the ecological one, operating on a time scale of decades, not centuries. A couple centuries from now, when manmade CO2 increases in the atmosphere will probably start to have a noticeable impact on climate, our descendants will thank us if we do good things (understand the climate better, develop reasonable and sustainable alternative energy technologies) but also if we don't do stupid things (wasting resources or destroying modern civilization in a fit of hysteria). Our legacy to them will be not just what we do; it will also be what we don't do - the dumb things we avoided.

I've ducked addressing the plant respiration subject in a quantitative fashion for just the reasons Dyson mentions: the whole question has been broached scientifically only in the last decade, and there's a lot to be learned. But there's lots of time to study it.
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* Indeed, in the next generation of searches for planets revolving around other stars, a key goal is to detect the presence of oxygen in their atmospheres, by looking for distinctive O2 spectral lines. Persistent O2 in planetary atmospheres would virtually clinch the case for the presence of plant life on those planets.

** As readers of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Planets will recognize.

Planting seeds

An earlier posting described the limits of Holocaust knowledge and how it's limited or non-existent outside the Western world. This has left a large vacuum malicious demagogues rush to fill.

One of this era's great Jewish institutions is the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. Its director, Rabbi David Landes, was recently in Indonesia connecting with religious leaders there to help stop the spread of radical Islam's denial of the Holocaust and all the related mental disorders that come along for that toxic ride. His visit was covered by the New York Times (requires registration), the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and - all of all things - the Press of Atlantic City.

We make a serious mistake if we assume that what they think in Jakarta about Jews or the Holocaust matters less what they think in Berlin.

C'est vraiment matin en France

Well - the French parliamentary elections have made it certain: it really is morning in France. The Gaullist era is over, and France is becoming a normal country.

The French National Assembly has 577 seats, and Sarkozy's party won over 400 of them. After next Sunday's runoff, his party will alone control more than 440 seats. Apparently Sarkozy captured almost all of the support that had gone to the centrist party of Bayrou. The Socialists will hang on with about 120 seats, but the far left was virtually wiped out. It's a landslide victory of the type enjoyed by Thatcher early in her government's rule or like Blair in 1997.

Here are summaries in English and in French. Even if you can't read French, you can enjoy the cool interface, with its interactive maps of the French départements.

All of the chatter in the US media in the next week will be about how this means that France is trending "rightward" like Germany - and of course, the media chatter will be clotted with half-truths and clichés, like Sarkozy as "neo-Bush" or some such nonsense. And there is "right," and then there's "right." First, the cryptofascist far right in France was crushed along with the far left. That's a good sign for France's political culture, which has been blighted with significant extremist parties for much longer than other Western countries - all representing curious and antiquated political conflicts from the 1930s and 40s or, in some cases, even farther back, to the age of Dreyfus and the Paris Commune.

But the real significance of Sarkozy is this. His victory, at the head of the Gaullist center-right party (Rally for the Republic) that saved France after it was liberated in 1944, means the end of France's perverse thumb-in-the-eye attitude towards the US and the rest of Europe. Unlike in many countries, such attitudes and policies were representative, not so much of the left, but of the nationalist right. De Gaulle did serious damage to NATO, the EU, and his country's standing by pursuing these policies from 1965 on - including his Arabist leanings, which contrary to legend, began before the Six-Day War and resulted not from that conflict, but withdrawal from Algeria. De Gaulle also undermined the democratic left (the Socialists) by cultivating the Communists and relations with Moscow. (In fact, the Socialists under Mittérand in the 1980s were more pro-American, pro-Israel, anti-Soviet, and "Atlanticist" than the Gaullists.) Finally, he allowed another type of political extremist to flourish by never being honest about what had really happened in France during the years of Vichy and German occupation (1940-44). Instead, until the 1990s, the issue was covered over with a Casablanca-type sentimentality. This perversity lingered on during the reign of Chirac, with France becoming more and more socially and economically like the rest of the West, but remaining politically out of step, as if caught in a time warp and pursuing the fantasy of still being a world power.*

In more immediate practical terms, Sarkozy's victory has another significance. This blog has mentioned it several times: one of Europe's main problems is that 1970s never ended there. The British and Irish in the 1980s and the Dutch and Nordics in the 1990s at least pursued successful economic reform, whatever their other problems. The core EU countries (France, Germany, and Italy) haven't even reached that point. Recognition of their problems and the formation of a successful political coalition to cope with them is imperative. At least a start has been made in Germany with Angela Merkel, although little progress has happened there - same in Italy. But with a political earthquake next door in France - the home of continental Europe's fatal romance with the all-powerful state - maybe things will head off in a truly different direction in the coming years.
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* But let's not be too hard on the old man: probably no one else could have saved France after the catastrophe of 1914-18 and humiliation of 1940. De Gaulle was proud and vain, getting extraordinary concessions from Roosevelt and Churchill to shore up his nation's wounded ego, like giving France a permanent seat on the UN Security Council - a concession unwarranted in 1945 and even more so today. Churchill once referred to De Gaulle as a "female llama surprised in her bath" - but never doubted for a second the necessity of supporting him.

Modern and anti-modern: The West and the rest

Decolonization - the dismantling of the overseas Western empires in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s - was one of the most important developments of the postwar era. Ideally, this process required newly independent countries to adopt Western forms of government, even while demanding the removal of the physical presence of Western armies and governments as controlling authorities, which seems like a paradox.

This paradox is only apparent. Although not all former colonies were fully successful at this, decolonization and independence had a simple logic that should lead to newly independent countries not being dependent on outside powers for either government or external protection. The Asian countries were most successful in this. Some Asian countries (like Japan and Thailand) had never become weak enough in the first place to allow or force Western powers to become the local sovereigns. In the 19th century, the rulers of these countries saw what had happened in India and what was about to happen in China and decided to unify and modernize themselves - lest they become historical roadkill.

The least successful at this were the African and Middle Eastern countries. The African countries have largely been abandoned. The Middle Eastern countries, from World War II on, however, have been of enough strategic concern - for their oil resources and crucial location during World War II and the Cold War - to trigger intervention by outside powers. Since the end of the Cold War, the essential weakness of these countries - the fact that they don't really have modern states or modern armies - means that they have to rely on outsiders for protection - and nowadays, that means us. They needed to be protected from outsiders - first the Germans and Italians, later the Soviets - and now they need to be protected from themselves. The expectations on the US have grown in parallel, from providing more limited protection from outsiders to more ambitious goals - protecting current regimes, policing borders, and resolving the region's problems.

Failed successor states are the flip side of successful decolonization and empire-dismantlement. Stronger, better organized external powers with a stake in the outcome inevitably get sucked into providing at least some of the functions of sovereignty in such situations. In the Middle East, the major problem is the combination of tribalism and religion that prevents many of these countries from becoming modern. The US intervenes to keep these governments from collapsing (which would create a whole other set of problems), but generates resentment with its ultimate origin in the fact that such outside intervention violates the Islamic-tribal ideal of closure and self-sufficiency. But it's precisely this condition that necessitates outside support in the first place.

The first scenario - successful decolonization - creates a virtuous circle. Former colony and imperial power (like Britain and the US, Britain and India, the US and the Philippines, and in some ways, the US and Japan) can re-approach one another as equals or near-equals.* The latter scenario - unsuccessful decolonization, followed by political and social regression - creates a vicious cycle by contrast. Former colony (or former tribal monarchy, like Saudi Arabia, which was never anyone's colony) becomes dependent on an outside power - which generates resentment, which stimulates the need for more outside intervention.

The 1991 Persian Gulf War was an earlier stage in this cycle of dependency, although it marked a large breakthrough in that trend. It led to the long-term stationing of US troops in Saudi Arabia and then to a pissed-off Osama plotting to overthrow the Saudi monarchy and creating a private army. The Oslo peace process of the 1990s represented another policy based on false expectations and assumptions about the Middle East - that it was ready for opening up, globalization, "normalcy." The 2003 Iraq War was an extreme and poorly thought-out response to the earlier stages of this dialectic, partly based on the wrong idea that the Middle East, or at least Iraq, is "ripe" to join the modern world. The Middle East is not eastern Europe in 1989, Latin America in 1980, or even Germany and Japan in 1945. If countries are not ready and willing to make the needed changes to themselves, outsiders cannot do it for them. But it's also important to recognize that all of these policies - up to and including the 2003 Iraq War - are based on faulty thinking with a long history. The Iraq War just took a mistaken logic much further in what was already a wrong direction to begin with.

This conclusion has some simple but startling implications for the pro-globalization policies pursued by the US, in widening circles, since 1945. An upcoming posting will explore some of them.
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* A good example of this virtuous circle is that happy Japanese face of globalization, sushi, as described so well by Sasha Issenberg in his new The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy. Like Adam Smith in the pin factory, Issenberg uses sushi to demonstrate the nuts-and-bolts of the globalized economy.

And unlike pins, you can eat sushi - I just had some today: another small but telling sign that World War II had a successful outcome.

Everybody's talkin' 'bout it

One of the Web's major weather forecasting sites, AccuWeather, has recently gotten a climate change blog. It has multiple participants, sometimes with opposing points of views, and is updated frequently. Take a look.

A third look: The doctor is in

In medical school, students learn about diseases and syndromes defined by a list of symptoms and underlying causes. When medical students become doctors, however, they don't work with disease entities; they work with patients. Patients present symptoms, not abstract disease labels or underlying causes, and what doctors see is collections of symptoms. Each symptom typically can match a number of illnesses. But the whole list of symptoms will usually match only one or two diseases, and any remaining ambiguity is usually eliminated by tests. The more symptoms you know - and test results can be viewed as just more symptoms to add to the list - the more a doctor can narrow down the possible diagnosis. Using multiple symptoms to isolate a unique disease is called differential diagnosis.

The same idea can be applied to the Earth's climate. Any changes humans make to the climate take place in a context of pre-existing natural trends. How can we be sure that one climate symptom indicates, say, enhanced infrared (IR) opacity ("global warming" in the popular sense), or solar cycle changes, or internal climate cycles? Actually, you can't be sure with one symptom. But a whole list of symptoms narrows down the scope of possible causes. If many symptoms simultaneously match a hypothesized cause, you can be much more sure that you've identified that cause correctly.

If enhanced IR opacity increases were dominating climate variability, would there be a distinctive or "smoking gun" list of symptoms? The answer is yes, all linked by a single theme: A "globally warming" climate of this type would become somewhat more like the tropics. Overall, the surface air temperature and pressure would rise slightly; evaporation would be enhanced, leading to more clouds and precipitation. Plant growth would be enhanced.

But what's really interesting is that this "tropicalization" is not geographically uniform. As always, it's differences that drive climate and everyday weather, and a slightly more tropical world would see disparate and distinctive climates impacts. A sense of these changes is communicated best by making a simple latitudinal division of the Earth into tropics (±30^o lat of the equator), temperates (+30-60^o lat away from the equator), and polars (within 30^o lat of the poles).*

The tropics would become slightly more tropical; the temperates would shift a little more toward tropical; the polars would shift noticeably more toward tropical. The temperates would experience longer growing seasons, but certain types of plants would be favored. All plants need CO2, water, and sunlight; they would get more of two but less of the third. Some plants like that, some don't, and the former would be favored relatively more.

What are tropics anyway? They're places that get more "vertical weather" (a steeper temperature lapse rate) and thus more locally generated storms, but less "horizontal weather" due to reduced horizontal differences in temperature and saturation water vapor pressure. Remember that "climate is driven by differences": fewer differences, less "weather." The tropics generally disfavor large, laterally moving storm systems and weather fronts. Storms and fronts are less frequent, less intense, and shorter-living. The temperates are a good comparison. These latitudes experience the most "horizontal weather" - storms and fronts - because they span the greatest differences in temperature, all the way from the semi-polar to the semi-tropical.

Simply put: Reduced horizontal temperature, pressure, and water vapor differences between the polar and equatorial regions; enhanced vertical temperature, pressure, and water vapor differences between the surface and the upper troposphere/lower stratosphere.

This overall qualitative picture is robust and consistent. The exact numbers don't matter as much as the correlated multiple trends of definite nature and direction - the whole symptom list: horizontal differences would decline and vertical differences would rise, even as temperatures would rise overall. That's an exact way of saying the Earth would become "more tropical." Since the tropics are already tropical, the change wouldn't be so big there. It would be bigger in the temperates and biggest in the polars.

Whatever the quantitative uncertainty in the numbers, the qualitative picture is rigorous and ultimately a result of the Second Law: the extra heat content in the lower atmosphere (heat capacity times temperature change + change in latent heat of water vapor) wouldn't be distributed evenly. The Second Law requires that it go more to where it's most "needed," namely the polars. Less of the increase would linger in the tropics. (The dominant exchange mechanism would be the poleward ocean currents.) Overall the Earth would shift closer to global thermal equilibrium (reduced spatial variation in temperature), even as the overall temperature distribution rises.

The atmosphere overall would still be a nonequilibrium system, so this idealized equilibrium would only apply to an instantaneous "snapshot" of climate. However, greater geographic uniformity of temperature still indicates the Second Law at work. Solar radiation is converted from its incoming narrow beam to isotropic outgoing terrestial IR radiation; this transformation from unidirectional to omnidirectional, along with the upward shift in radiation wavelength, represents a "randomization" of photon energy - an increase in entropy. The more uniform the Earth's geographic temperature distribution, the more complete the "randomization" of the outgoing radiation. An upcoming posting will introduce a neighboring planet - Venus - where this "hotter, but more uniformly hotter" principle holds to a far greater extreme.**
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* A more rigorous definition uses the tropical latitudes (±23.5^o of the equator) and the polar circles (±23.5^o of the poles), based on the obliquity or tilt of the Earth's axis with respect to its orbital plane (ecliptic). This figure determines which latitudes near the poles experience at least one full day of polar winter night and which latitudes near the equators experience at least one summer day with the Sun straight overhead at noon. A later posting will make it clear why I've used divisions based on 30^o latitude intervals instead.

** At least it's not a spherical cow emitting milk equally in all directions.

A second look: Global warming

To continue from the first look at CO2 in the atmosphere: what would doubling the 1950 value of the atmospheric CO2 concentration (300 ppm) do to the climate? First, the bottom line up front: "best estimate" of shift in surface temperature = +0.3 - 0.4 ^oC, a little more than a third of a degree Celsius.

The primary cause is an increase in the infrared (IR)-active gas concentration, which then triggers a lengthy list of secondary causes, some enhancing the temperature, some reducing it, until the final net result is reached. The specific number is an estimate. But the qualitative consequences are rigorous: the IR opacity increases; water evaporation, condensation, and precipitation increase; cloudiness and convection increase. The type and direction of these changes is not in doubt; the uncertainty is quantitative: different mechanisms of very roughly the same size pull the temperature in opposite directions.

We can assemble various partial estimates, although these are misleading if mistaken for complete estimates. For example, the clear-sky-only estimate with just the opacity increase from CO2 would be +0.95 ^oC, nearly one degree Celsius. Adding the effect of the existing clouds reduces that to +0.65 ^oC. They generally have a strong cooling effect:

• Clouds reflect incoming solar radiation back into space.
• Clouds efficiently convect heat upward.
• Clouds efficiently radiate heat into space.

But a full atmospheric estimate requires the full list of changes discussed here over the last few months:*

• Increased CO2 concentration (doubled)
  
• Enhanced evaporation, condensation, precipitation of H2O (rather more than 1%)
  
• Enhanced H2O vapor concentration (same)
  
• Enhanced cloudiness (shift from 0.54 to about 0.55)
  
• Enhanced convection from a steeper temperature lapse rate

These changes result in both temperature enhancements:

• Opacity increase due to increased CO2 concentration
• Opacity increase due to increased H2O concentration
• Enhanced latent heat release from H2O vapor condensation

and temperature anti-enhancements:

• Enhanced cloudiness
• Enhanced convection

The enhancement of cloud cover is the significant anti-enhancement; the enhancement of (clear-air) convection is small.

What happened to convection? Convection is present in the CO2-enhanced atmosphere, as it is in ours. But the increase in (clear-air) convection stimulated by the increase in IR opacity is small. Convection is larger in clouds and more enhanced there. Being much more efficient, cloud convection is very important in moving heat to the cloudtops, which are effective upward radiators.

And CO2 so far? This is effect of doubling the CO2 in the atmosphere. The increase from 1950 to 2006 has been 75/300 = 1/4 of that, so even the most extreme estimate (clear-sky only) is about +0.24 ^oC, one-quarter of a degree Celsius - half or less of the larger, pre-exiting variations in climate due to multiannual and multidecadal climate oscillations (NAO and El Niño) and solar luminosity variations. In reality, the half-century (1950-2006) trend is more like +0.075 to +0.10 ^oC, less than a tenth of a degree Celsius, smaller than the uncertainties inherent in the calculation, and definitely too small to detect against a background of non-anthropogenic variations.

Feedback on the CO2 concentration itself. Still missing are two important feedback effects that further moderate the effect. Both remove some of the CO2 injected from its sources (manmade, volcanic). These mechanisms reduce the atmospheric CO2 level:

• Geophysical: diffusion of CO2 into the ocean and subsequent fixing of C in sinking, dissolved carbonates.
• Biological: more plant growth (existing plants growing faster, new plants), since CO2 is plant air.

For the most part, we'll stick with atmospheric-only estimate. The important thing to notice at this point is that the estimated temperature enhancement is small. Although modern thermometer and satellite measurements are precise enough to detect such small changes locally, what they add up to globally is not a well-defined question. The pre-existing natural changes are larger, and it's hard to see how such a small effect in the current era could be identified.
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* The final "best estimate" also includes the slight loss of polar ice and snow and the consequent reduction in Earth's reflectivity (albedo). The mechanism is similar to the enhancement of evaporation, but the effect is like reducing the cloud cover slightly.

Forty years on

Here's a measure of how much American journalism has changed in 40 years: read Time magazine's account of the Six-Day War, whose 40th anniversary is this week, published shortly after the war.

As Charles Johnson puts it,

Reading TIME magazine’s account of the Six Day War, written in June 1967 shortly after it finished, is an amazing experience. The absence of cynicism and bias in this piece is a very marked contrast to the TIME magazine of today, and is a stark illustration of how deeply this magazine has gone wrong .... And notice: not once are the Arabs who lived in the area referred to as “Palestinians.”

Or you might say: how deeply an entire generation and whole intellectual establishment have gone wrong. One more measure of their bankruptcy.

How do you say McDonalds in Hebrew?

Funny video (via YouTube): Israeli ad for McDonalds. Warning: it's designed for Israeli audiences, so the English is subtitled in Hebrew and the Hebrew not subtitled at all.

And an example ...

One example of thousands - and a frightening one - of clueless and braindead administrators in charge of American universities is the case of Walid Shoebat and the University of California at Irvine. This school is now the first ever to be investigated by the US Civil Rights Commission for anti-semitism. You can watch an interview with Shoebat at Pajamas Media.

This case is also an example of something else clueless and braindead: many of the major American Jewish organizations have been completely asleep about the real threats to Jews here and elsewhere in the post-Cold War era and instead are obsessed with the declining, fringe threats of distant other times and places.* Some, to their credit - like the American Jewish Committee - are now partly awake. But not one is fully awake. The leadership in some cases - and the followers as well - live in a bizarre time warp - a self-imposed politico-cultural ghetto, really.

If the issues of political legitimacy and political Islam can be successfully resolved in a more liberal and pluralistic direction - a prerequisite for democracy and not a result of it - then secondary issues - refugees, borders, Jerusalem, and so on - become solvable in principle. That's the optimistic way of looking at it. You know the pessimistic way already.
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* I mean the once-real, although never major, threat of Nazi-like movements in the US. These are still a significant problem in Europe. I also mean the pseudo-threat of the Christian right.

Life on the plantation

Although graduate-level professional education and research in US schools is still the best in the world, American undergraduate education has been in serious trouble since the late 1980s, even as its costs continue to explode. The best-known indicator is what is commonly called political correctness, a double-barreled assault: the trashing of intellectual standards and teaching with stale and wrong 1960s ideology, and the censorship and intimidation of students - and occasionally faculty - who refuse to go along with it.

But the decline of undergraduate education (and high school education along with it) is a much larger trend - PC is just the most visible part of it. And PC is far from an anecdotal problem - it's taken over higher education in the last decade and a half like a tree blight attacking a forest. The essential problem is that American universities have become refuges and hideouts for 1960s leftovers who reject the real world and fervently believe in false ideologies. Their vision of the university - as a retreat from fact, reason, and reality in general - conflicts with education and the free pursuit of knowledge. Academics are far from all being like this - especially in the hard sciences, engineering, and even social sciences - but the PC blight is widespread, particularly in the humanities. Campus administrators play a crucial enabling role.

Evan Coyne Maloney has just released his new Indoctrinate U, a Michael Moore-style documentary-combined-with-send-up of the PC university (motto: Reductio Ad Absurdum). And unlike Moore's movies, it's even accurate :) Maloney is still trying to find a distributor, but you can take a look at the trailer over at his site. You can also sign up for email notification whenever the movie makes it to the cinema houses. The email signups go immediately into Maloney's portfolio to convince distributors to take his film. It has been screened at a couple of film festivals.

Maloney has already signed up over 20,000 interested would-be viewers. His film has also received mostly positive reviews - see these by Linda Seebach, Stanley Kurtz, and David Hogberg.
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POSTSCRIPTS: One of the stars of the film is Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), founded by liberatarian Alan Charles Kors and liberal Harvey Silverglate, a product of the academic PC wars of the 1990s. Kors and Silverglate co-authored the important 1998 study, The Shadow University, which all started with a water buffalo in Philadelphia .... FIRE does important work defending students and faculty steamrollered by the academic free-thought-stifling machine.

Indoctrinate U was funded by On The Fence Films, which also has a number of informative films on the reality of Canada's single-payer healthcare system (hint: it's very different from what you normally hear in the media here). Maloney and his film-making partner Stuart Browning were interviewed by Instapundit last year.

Free the bloggers!

A while back, a posting on the Middle East's new blogging culture described one of the few positive trends in the region. I was trying at the time to set aside my pessimism about the Middle East's future and not sound so negative. The blogging culture, taken at face value, is certainly an encouraging sign of constructive change there. To reiterate, this is one of those cases where I'm pretty sure my pessimism is right - but I would love to be proved wrong.

Egypt's best-known blogger is undoubtedly Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman (Kareem Amer). Soliman had been a law student at Cairo's famous Al-Azhar University, but was expelled in March 2006 for his criticism of the school's curriculum. As of February 2007, he's been in an Egyptian jail for the crimes of defaming Islam and Egyptian president-for-life Hosni Mubarak. Soliman's friends and supporters here and in the UK have pressed his case in various media.

You can follow their work through the online networking site Facebook.com, which has a Free Kareem Amer! group. The facebook.com site does require registration.

So what about carbon dioxide? A first look

Next to water, carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most important of the infrared (IR)-active gases in the atmosphere and contributes to the opacity of clear air as water does. Kilo for kilo, the absorption/emission effect of CO2 is about 1/4 that of water. Molecule for molecule, taking into account CO2's larger mass (44 versus 18 for water), it's about 60% the effect of water.

For now, we'll only consider present and recent values of the CO2 concentration, postponing consideration of possible future trends. As a baseline, use the 1950 value of CO2 concentration for the Earth's atmosphere, which was about 300 parts per million (ppm) by volume.* The main sources of atmospheric CO2 are:

• Volcanic and other geological burps (sporadic)
• Burning of fossil fuels (anthropogenic, or man-made)
• Oceanic release of dissolved CO2
• Organic release of CO2

The first two are the main sources. The most important sinks (mechanisms that remove the gas from the atmosphere) of CO2 are:

• Plant respiration
• Oceanic dissolution and carbonate fixing, followed by deep ocean exchange and sedimentation
  
• Photodissociation in the stratosphere

The first and third mechanisms convert the CO2 to C and O2, the latter remaining a gas. In the organic case, the C is "fixed" into organic tissue by photosynthesis. In the geological case, the CO2 gas diffuses into water (like carbonation in soda pop) and then dissolves by binding with H2O molecules. In dissolved form, it enters the oceanic carbonate cycle, then sinks to the deep ocean and sediments out. In the last case, the C floats around in the atmosphere and eventually precipitates out. The first sink is the most important; one way to see that is that there isn't a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere, but there's a lot of O2. Essentially all of the O2 we and other animals breathe comes from plant respiration, which per force must cycle a lot of CO2 to maintain that O2 level. Plant growing season is once or twice a solar year, so plants can respond fairly fast to changes in the CO2 level - it's their "air." Oceanic dissolution is slower, effective over decades; followed by sinking over centuries and sedimentation and crustal subduction over thousands of years. Photodissociation is the slowest, since there's almost no CO2 in the upper atmosphere.

What is man doing? Animal exhalation contributes a negligible amount to the total inflow of CO2 into the atmosphere. The only significant source of animal CO2 is our burning of fossil fuels. The increase is about 4/3 ppm per year. Thus in 2000, the concentration reached about 365 ppm. Everything else remaining the same, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 will double its 1950 value in 225 years, around the year 2175. Of course, evaporation, clouds, convection, plants, and oceans will respond, so that in reality, everything doesn't remain the same.

To fully analyze the effect of the baseline CO2 concentration (300 ppm), we'd need to look at all these ramifications. But for the present CO2 level, this is a moot point, and we'll analyze those effects in terms of future increases of CO2 concentration in subsequent postings. We'll leave it here by saying that the CO2 opacity contribution alone to the surface temperature is about +0.55 ^oC. The CO2 contributes 2% to the total IR opacity effect in the lower atmosphere, the other 98% being due to water vapor.**
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* Compare water vapor at about 9,000 ppm.

** For the experts: the "total opacity effect" means the total optical depth.