Re: [asa] Creation Care

At 04:19 AM 1/23/2007, Don Winterstein wrote:

>Randy wrote: "I learned that there were no
>competing models and that the basic climate
>model, complex though it was, fit the data well
>enough to be considered the right model. That
>is, the community is not in the uncertainty
>phase since there is a framework of
>understanding that explains the key features of
>climate for the last 420,000 years."
>
>I need clarification on this. Wikipedia says,
>"The causes of ice ages remain controversial for
>both the large-scale ice age periods and the
>smaller ebb and flow of glacial/interglacial
>periods within an ice age." This Wikipedia
>statement is consistent what I heard throughout
>my 25-year career as an Earth scientist. Ice
>ages are certainly key features of climate,
>they've occurred within 420 000 years, and there
>is no agreement on causes despite multiple
>possible or likely mechanisms. This implies there are competing models. ~ Don

@ But once the opportunistic powers that be
force-feed their "consensus" (agreed-to guesses)
on the heretics, even Broecker will have to "go
along" with it in spite of what he knows if he
doesn't want to be ostracized. [NOTE: I have
added more "phases" to Randy's list of phases
below this commentary by Broecker about what he "knows"]:

Wallace S. Broecker (May 1997)
http://www.geosociety.org/pubs/gsatoday/gsat9705.htm:

CAUSES: IS WATER VAPOR UP TO THE TASK?

Now we must turn to a more speculative realm,
because explaining the global extent of these
changes is something that we're a long way from accomplishing.

An important piece of information in this regard
is the state of Earth's system during the extreme
cold millenniums of glacial times. At these
times, all of Canada and a major part of the
northeastern and mid-western United States were
covered by a huge ice sheet. The snow line
descended about 1 km on mountains everywhere on
Earth. Geomorphologists have traversed the globe
comparing the elevation of the present-day
mountain snowlines with those for the last
glaciation (reconstructed from geomorphic
features). Figure 3 shows results from the
American Cordillera. Everywhere from 40°S to
40°N, snowlines descended about 1 km! Thus, the
southern Andes and New Zealand's South Island,
which now have very small glaciers, had quite large ones.

What this tells us is that somehow Earth was in a
much colder condition during glacial periods. To
my way of thinking, no one has adequately
explained how this could have happened.

We now have new evidence from glacial-age corals
(Guilderson et al., 1994) and from glacial-age
ground waters (Stute et al., 1995) that the
tropics may have been as much as 5°C colder
during glacial times. How could the climate of
Earth have changed so much in the absence of any strong external forcing?

When I consider the mountain glacier record
together with the isotope record obtained for
glacial-age ice from 6 km elevation on Huascarán
in the Andes (Thompson et al., 1995), I must
conclude that the water vapor content of our
atmosphere must have been much lower during
glacial times. Hence, either the processes that
deliver or those that remove water vapor from our
atmosphere must have been different during
glacial times. This reduction is something that
no model of the atmosphere has yet to accomplish,
however. In fact, the models are powerless to
produce the large global changes that the
paleorecords prove to have taken place. Why
water vapor?, you might ask. The answer is that
water vapor is the atmosphere's most powerful
greenhouse gas. If you wanted to cool the planet
by 5°C and could magically alter the water-vapor
content of the atmosphere, a 30% decrease would
do the job. In fact, the major debate among
atmospheric scientists regarding the magnitude of
the coming greenhouse warming hinges on what's
referred to as the water-vapor feedback.

If the water vapor in the atmosphere were to
remain exactly the same as it is now, then a
doubling of CO2 would heat the planet only about
1.2°C. However, when CO2 is doubled in these
models, the atmosphere holds more water vapor,
enhancing the warming to 3.5 ±1.5°C. A 3.5°C
warming would certainly cause major problems for
agriculture, especially where conducted in continental interiors.

The debate concerns whether the models change the
water vapor ___in the same way that___ it will
change as CO2 rises in the real world.

...... The now famous El Niño cycle involves a
turning on and off of this upwelling. This cycle
has a strong impact on today's global climate. So
I think that somehow the change in the vigor of
upper-ocean circulation must have altered the
strength of upwelling into the equatorial region
and, in turn, the delivery of water vapor into the atmosphere.

This aspect of my argument is particularly
speculative, because we don't know how it could
happen. But to produce large and abrupt changes
in global climate that are symmetrical around the
equator, it seems to me that only the
atmosphere's water vapor is up to the task. If
water vapor is the cause, then we must look to
the equatorial systems for the key. My guess is
that changes in the freshwater budget of the
surface North Atlantic threw the ocean's deep
circulation into chaos. If it reformed in another
mode of operation, in so doing, it triggered
changes in other parts of the ocean and in turn
in the delivery of water-vapor to the tropical
atmosphere. Because this source maintains the
atmosphere's water-vapor inventory all the way
out to 35° north and south of the equator, the
impact would be global. This way of looking at it
suggests that we might be able to find in the
paleoclimatic record a causal chain from the
northern Atlantic to the equatorial Pacific and
hence to the atmosphere. ___But I doubt that we
can.___ The links probably act so fast that,
within the accuracy of even the most precise of
our dating tools, all the changes occurred at one
time. We have already seen that Greenland air
temperature, Asian dust production, and global
methane production changed together. Some of the
impacts may take longer than others to reach a
new steady state, but all were probably initiated
during a time interval of no more than a few decades. ..

So the question naturally arises, What is the
probability that through adding CO2 we will cause
the climate system to jump to one of its
alternate modes of operation? I contend that
since we can't yet reproduce any of these jumps
in computer simulations, we don't really know how
many modes of operations Earth has...

Our climate system has proven that it can do very
strange things. Since we've only recently become
aware of this capability, there's nothing
concrete that we can say about the
implications. .. We must prepare for the future
by learning more about our change-able climate system...

My lifetime study of Earth's climate system has
humbled me. I'm convinced that we have greatly
underestimated the complexity of this system. The
importance of obscure phenomena, ranging from
those that control the size of raindrops to those
that control the amount of water pouring into the
deep sea from the shelves of the Antarctic
continent, makes reliable modeling very
difficult, if not impossible. If we're going to
predict the future, we have to achieve a much
greater understanding of these small-scale
processes that together generate large-scale effects."

Randy wrote: ".... I have observed three stages
or phases in the resolution of a major question. ...

1) First, there is often a phase of
"uncertainty." This is when there is no framework
or overarching model that fits available data to
answer the question at hand. This may be because
the physics of the situation isn't adequately
understood, or the complexity is too great for
the modeling resources at hand, or there isn't
enough unambiguous data, or other reasons. ..

2) Then there is often a phase of "controversy."
This is when there are multiple models, each of
which fit the available data and could provide
the relevant framework for further work. The
scientific community then coalesces around the
various models (or proposes new ones) and the
race is on to find the definitive differentiating
experiment that will show which is the correct model.

3) Finally there is the phase of
"consensus." This is when there is ___no uncertainty or controversy___.

Janice will add the rest of the phases to the list:

4) Then there is the phase of "government (or
other deep pocket) grants" . This is when the
robber-baron form of capitalism at its worst is
allowed to go into effect full-tilt with those
involved having no fear of being called to
account for the messes they make under the guise
of "we are doing all this for sake of the children".

4) Then there is the phase of "Oops!". This is
when you get the bad news, followed by the good
news: "We forgot to add the Gell-Mann effect of
unwarranted credibility (making speculation look
more useful than it is) to our computer
models. Based on totally unexpected events - our
projections were proved wrong. The trillions of
dollars we spent weren't spent in vain, though,
because we gathered even more evidence to show
that it still remains true that noone knows what the future holds."

5) Then there is the phase of
"uncertainty". This is when the people who still
believe that the future can be known insist that
there are two groups of people that may know the
future, and therefore should be listened to. The
first is pundits. The second group are
specialists of various kinds. There are
"specialists" actually working in a field of
study-called futurism. The notion here is that
there is a way to study trends and know what the
future holds. They insist that futurists know
more about the future than you or I. Even though
their magazines over the years show an endless
parade of error, that just shows that there are
still people with expertise who haven't had a chance to be heard yet.

6) Then there is the phase of
"controversy". This is when the wise once again
point out that expertise is no shield against
failure to see ahead. They point out that Paul
Erlich, a brilliant academic who has devoted his
entire life to ecological issues, has been wrong
in nearly all his major predictions; - wrong
about diminishing resources, wrong about the
population explosion, and wrong that we would
lose 50% of all species by the year 2000. His
lifelong study of these issues did not prevent him from being wrong.

7) Then there is the phase of "consensus". This
is when there is ___no uncertainty or controversy___. This is when.. [snip]

~ Janice

>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: <mailto:randyisaac@adelphia.net>Randy Isaac
>To: <mailto:asa@calvin.edu>asa@calvin.edu
>Sent: Sunday, January 21, 2007 5:57 PM
>Subject: Re: [asa] Creation Care

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Received on Tue Jan 23 10:39:15 2007