Climate and climate change: Envoi

And so we come to the end of the road we began 19 months ago. We've covered almost every aspect of Earth's climate, climate change, the "global warming" craze, basic physics, the nature of scientific theories and science as a culture, and the associated politics, policy, and journalism. Some points were only touched on, others explored at great length, with some tangents here and there. Friends tell me I need to turn the whole production into a book, and maybe I will one day.

On the blog, we'll continue to comment from time to time about climate trends, political trends, and related economic questions, which we haven't talked about much. This blog now has a significant list of climate-related posting labels that you can use to locate postings on particular topics. They include: climate, environment, geoengineering, global warming, polar, radiation, storms, thermodynamics. Some additional technical topics include: chaos, cycles, Fourier, statistics. And don't forget the excellent climate blogs to the right: ClimateAudit, CO2 Science, and World Climate Report.

The one-minute summary. Start with the Earth, its atmosphere and oceans, add the Sun and its heliosphere (solar wind and magnetic field). Add the most distinctive thing about Earth's climate, the presence of water and its astonishing repertory of possibilities. Radiation comes in from the Sun and is absorbed and re-radiated as infrared (IR) at a temperature of about 288 ^oK (56 ^oF = 15 ^oC). Carefully distinguish heat (some "thing" in a volume) from heat flow (some "thing" moving in some direction, with some magnitude). From the thermal point of view, the Earth is an open system; heat doesn't stop, but keeps flowing out, balancing what flows in. It's how it flows that determines the distribution of temperature and humidity.

Radiation (moving at the speed of light)
heat = heat flow

Matter (moving much more slowly): earth, water, air
heat ≠ heat flow

In matter, heat can:

• Flow through (conduction)
• Move with (convection)
• Transform phase (water)

The phases of water are:

Vapor ++evaporation/condensation++ Liquid ++melting/freezing++ Crystal (Ice) ++sublimation/deposition++ Vapor etc. *

From the mechanical and chemical points of view, OTOH, the Earth system is closed, if we draw the boundaries properly and include oceans, crust, air, and living things.

Heat flows upward through the atmosphere and, as radiation, back into space, determining its temperature, humidity, and cloud distribution by a mix of three types of flow: infrared-radiative, evaporation, and convection. The flow is not radiation alone, and the Earth's atmosphere is not a greenhouse, not even approximately.

Radiation is a steady flow, although it is strongly affected by clouds. Heat convection, an aspect of fluid turbulence, is chaotic and makes weather unpredictable beyond about two weeks ahead. On longer times, the weather exhibits fundamentally nonrepetitive patterns, in spite of the many aspects that do repeat. Atmospheric fluid turbulence is additionally complicated by the ceaseless transformations of water: liquid to vapor to condensed droplets (clouds) to heavier, falling droplets or crystals (precipitation), back to liquid or ice again. Fluid turbulence remains the hardest unsolved problem in physics. But not capturing the full nature and effect of clouds is probably the single largest failing in contemporary climate models.

Global warming as barely noticeable. The presence of IR-opaque gases in the clear air (water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane) directly modifies the outflow of radiation and indirectly modifies air and water temperatures, evaporation, clouds, precipitation, and convection. A "globally-warming" world would be one that looks a little more tropical, with the largest relative changes happening in the coldest regions (the poles) and during the coldest times (the winter). There's no evidence that this pattern is under way. The time scale is not decades, but a couple centuries, and on that scale and longer, plant and ocean absorption of carbon dioxide will have a major impact. It's very unlikely that a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration would have much of an effect, except perhaps for enhanced precipitation. A tripling would, but plant and ocean absorption might prevent that from ever happening.

Beyond doing nothing, the only justifiable countermeasure at this time is the easy and benign one of more and better plants, with CO2 emission taxes held in reserve in case of the problem is worse than foreseeable now. Scrap everything else, including cap-and-trade. Ignore Stern, Gore, and the other sanctimonious doom-preachers with wild, costly schemes.

I've never met anyone who hates trees, and there are plenty of places in the world that could use more of them.

Environmentalism, politics, and policy: My two cents. Another approach to the profoundly non-crisis nature of "global warming" is to take the cost and benefit estimates of a previous posting (Nordhaus), combined with the 2.5 kg of CO2 gas emitted for every gallon of gasoline burned. The estimated "global warming" cost (with the IPCC's too-high numbers) is about $8/metric ton CO2. A tax offsetting the cost would then be roughly (0.0025 metric tons CO2/gallon gasoline)*($8/metric ton CO2) = $0.022, or 2 cents per gallon. With a scaled-down estimate of the cost of "do nothing about CO2 emissions," we're below a cent per gallon.

Of course, you might say that such a cheap tax should not be objectionable, and, in a limited sense, you're right. If such a tax ever becomes necessary, our politicians would probably squander the revenue on some stupidity or other. But there's only one right place the money should go: to more trees and other plants. But that misses my larger point, which is the utter triviality of the issue compared to other, much larger, and far more pressing issues.

"Environment" and "energy production" are often lumped together, but they shouldn't be. Our economic and geopolitical need for a change to energy production (especially toward biofuels and nuclear power) is a real problem, right now, that needs addressing in the next few years, not the next couple centuries. The path forward is blocked partly by stupid and obsolete regulation. Pollution of the old-fashioned kind has not been much of a problem in wealthy countries for more than a generation. It is a major problem in "middle-income" countries undergoing rapid development, like China, Brazil, India, and Russia. Gases like carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor are not exotic poisons from Planet Krypton; they're gases the Earth's oceans and plants have been processing for billions of years.

While I'm optimistic about the power of reason on such issues in the longer term, and especially on ordinary voters, I'm much less sanguine about our decadent political class (politicians, media, environmentalists), with their heavy investment in bad theories, misinformation, and guilt trips. Their unquenchable addiction to pseudo-apocalypses and pseudo-messiahs has become an active danger to our future. At the same time, they ignore real problems, especially ones they helped to create. The scientific case for "climate change" apocalypse, never strong, has disintegrated. The blind juggernaut of bad politics, bad journalism, and hollow Official Science rolls on. It's up to us to shut it down.
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* The atmospheric pressure is too high on Earth for ice to sublime directly from ice to vapor. But not on low-pressure Mars.

Our energy mispolicy

If you can make sense of our energy policy, let me know - I'm more and more baffled.

We don't think twice when China starts to search for oil off the coast of Cuba, pretty close to US shores. We won't let additional American drilling happen on the same continental shelf.

One of the reasons gasoline prices have risen in the US is because gasoline sold here has to be refined in such a way as to meet US pollution standards. To the best of my knowledge, only US refineries can produce such gasoline from crude oil. No new refineries have been built in the US for about 30 years. Want to guess why?

Although we keep hearing about Brazil's growing use of biofuels, the main thing Brazil has done to improve its energy situation is to allow off-shore oil drilling.

While almost all other wealthy countries have revved up their use of nuclear power, the US is still stuck somewhere around 1980 on this issue. The main hold-up is disposing of the waste. But it's not a technical problem, merely a political one (i.e., Harry Reid).

Congress wants lower energy prices - so they say - but they will do nothing that would allow such an outcome. Instead, they talk about suing OPEC (!) and absurd "carbon caps" to stop the non-existent crisis of "global warming." They refuse to do anything to ease restrictions on coal-to-gasoline conversion, although the process continues to be greatly improved in both efficiency and cleanness.

Is the United States still a serious country?

Your Congress at work...

... with your hard-earned tax dollars: the revolting farm bill already passed in the House and now making its way through the Senate, appropriating $300 billion for, for example, those ridiculous ethanol subsidies - you remember those from yesterday, no? But it's also for outright corruption, like paying farm price supports to people who happen to own arable land, don't farm it, and live somewhere else. And remember the evils of corn syrup? This bill adds to domestic sugar subsidies: so watch your food prices go up.

Although Bush's motives are suspect - he failed to veto a single spending bill when the Republicans controlled Congress - he will apparently do the right thing and veto this monstrosity, even though many congressional Republicans are supporting it. It will probably pass with a veto-proof majority in the Senate, as it did in the House. Perhaps Congress can be shamed into not overriding Bush's veto, but don't count on it.

The DC Examiner excoriates the bill here, and the Washington Post casts its skeptical eye. And don't miss these charming little items.

It makes McCain's upcoming campaign easier, though. As we pointed out earlier this year, he merely needs to run against Congress. Oh yeah, McCain needs to vote against this thing too, and he did. Clinton and Obama did not.

The wages of enviro-politico-media hysteria

Shocking, no? But it's true, at least truer than all that "eat locally, fart globally" crap. The ethanol craze did this. Because it uses food and not by-product or waste, it raised food prices, markedly. Here, it was enough for us to notice. There - in poor countries, where the margin of life is much thinner - they did more than notice. They're going hungry, occasionally rioting, and even dying. Mark Steyn explains.

Important media outlets have made their point about the ethanol idiocy recently. But did they make the point that it was the eco-fanatics ... the media ... and their enslaved politicians who pushed these policies on us, say, five or 10 years ago? All to deal with the fake crisis of "global warming"?

This sort of thing illustrates perfectly the stupidity inherent in the conventional news media: in the end, even when they're wrong, they're always right, but the government is always wrong, and everything can be made well if they can pressure the government into some stupid policy or other ... until the next fake crisis, which will be "solved" by manufacturing a real one ....

POSTSCRIPT: I'm so mad about this, I might need one of these.

Inside the biofuels craze

I've been meaning to blog on this topic for a while. Reading the apparently opposing conclusions of Cinnamon Stillwell's blog and Robert Zubrin's book on biofuels, Energy Victory, pushed me over the edge.

The first thing to say is, human-induced global climate change isn't happening, at least not at a level significant enough to distinguish it from anything happening in climate anyway. The facts that biofuels, when burned, produce more carbon dioxide is not important from that angle. OTOH plants currently alive will love it - at least, until they're harvested to feed our fuel hunger.

Ah, the circle of life :)

Anyway, the corn-based ethanol industry does seem to be an unequivocal subsidized boondoggle. It's breathed new life into those ridiculous agricultural supports that Congress actually tried to phase out a decade ago,* but failed to. You pay twice for them: once through your taxes, and then again the grocery store - they indirectly drive up the cost of other commodities, as Cinnamon explains in her post. The craze for ethanol is also causing a lot of environmental damage, much of it government-subsidized: accelerated chopping down of rainforests and other trees, pollution run-off, pressure on water supplies, and so on.

The real argument for biofuels is geopolitical. It's a way for hydrocarbon-burning countries to get alternatives to the monopoly of petroleum. Moderating petroleum demand worldwide is the key, not the obsolete ideal of energy independence. Zubrin argues more in favor of biodiesel and methanol (which can be made from any biomass, and the latter from coal and natural gas as well). But his recent statements have increasingly gone over the cliff in promoting biofuels, and he's thrown away any earlier caution he had about ethanol. He does effectively demolish the claims for hydrogen as a fuel source, something that thankfully you no longer hear much about. He also smartly promotes nuclear power for fixed-site power generation. Virtually every other advanced country in the world has been moving rapidly forward with nuclear power; the US is stuck in the 1970s on this.

But there's still a significant role for conservation. Scandalously, the US vehicle fleet's fuel efficiency, which rose from the mid-1970s until the early 1990s, has been falling for more than a decade, thanks to all those SUVs and monster "light" trucks out there. There's been something of a turn-around recently, but not enough. It has to be larger and sustained for a decade-plus to make a real impact. Since this is a geopolitical problem, it's perfectly reasonable for the Feds to impose a much higher gasoline tax, say enough to pay for a quarter or a third of our military budget, that part tied up with the Middle East. The tax rate should be set up to rise or fall as the price of petroleum falls or rises, so as to maintain a roughly constant and high pump price for gas. The gas price doesn't have to be at European levels, but it does need to remain at a reasonably high, sustained level. A few years of oil price collapse would probably erase whatever progress is made, by removing the pressure to conserve.

There is a good case for methanol and biodiesel. They're derived from partially or completely transformed biowaste, not from plants grown for food, and their negatives are far less than ethanol. Methanol is also economically competitive at the $1.00 to $1.50 per gallon level. It's just then a matter of getting a vehicle fleet that can burn methanol pure or mixed with gas (so-called M-85 fuel and variants). That's what Zubrin's book is about. Unfortunately, there's no big payoff for politicians. Methanol is easier to produce than ethanol and can't be rewarded with targeted subsidies the same way. But selling cars with the right engines is complicated by pollution and fuel efficiency rules. Like many of our problems these days, this is more political than anything else.

POSTSCRIPT: Here are some basic science about ethanol and methanol, both alcohols, and some basics about alcohols as fuels.
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* Back when Congress still had a significant number of conservatives.