I did post graduate work in physics - not atmospheric science.
That said, the climate debate has serious flaws by parties on both sides in blogs like this. What are sides? For the most part, they seem to be "believers", not researchers, or people with open minds with the ability to question in any useful way a claim, prediction, or a methodology.
1)
Science is not democratic 100% of scientist believe ... is junk. The most significant advances in science have been made by people like Einstein, Heisenberg, and many others who discovered disruptive principles by thinking outside the box of what contemporary scientists believed.
2)
Scientists - even big name ones -
make mistakes. Einstein - God does not play dice - could not agree to quantum mechanics. Enrico Fermi (Italian walk on water level physicist) gets Nobel Prize in physics for discovery of fission, which Lise Meitner questioned and was right - oops - was a chemistry issue, not fission. (Which would be very embarrassing to the Nobel Prize Committee, if it were better known.)
3) Yogi Berra - "
Prediction is very hard, especially about the future" - The corollary to this is that
the further into the future you predict, the harder it is. So 50-70 year predictions about the earth are simply bunk. They project today's conditions AND predictions about populations, politics, and all sorts of non-physical variables into physical models. In 1890 - the same modeling technique would have had us awash in horse manure based upon population growth and current (at the time) transportation options.
4) Plain old Newtonian physics is rock solid. That said,
we can't accurately predict solar orbits 100 years into the future. Even with low uncertainties about, mass, position, and speed of various asteroids, our window of where they will be in the future is more a problem of things like solar flux, the cross section of the object and how it moves and rotates, than even the multi-body uncertainties of the other solar objects in the solar gravitational field. If you do not know this, look at NASA predictions for potential catastrophic collisions with the earth. Measurement of time, position, mass, speed, etc. are orders of magnitude higher than things like temperature.
5)
True science is testable under controlled conditions. - Climate science can't do this. They can't set up two earths and keep all variables constant except one, and compare predictions about the two.
6)
Atmospheric science is inherently statistical - Statistical mechanics for temperature, heat flow, chemistry, etc. Everything about climate science is statistical modeling combined with atmospheric chemistry, atmospheric physics and that BIG FAT rock and water planet below the atmosphere. (This is more like predicting stock prices - you might be right or wrong, and less likely to be right the further into the future you make the predictions - see drunken walk problem.)
7)
Dynamic atmospheric models depend on differential equations, measurements of constants in those equations, and boundary conditions. (The butterfly effect limits the valid time frame of a model.) -
Meteorologists use entirely different models to predict the temperature over the next 24 hours, (next week?), next month, next year, future decades.
8)
Scientists will agree - not that it proves anything - with most of what has been said in 1-7.
9)
That does not mean that climate science predictions are wrong.
10)
It also does not mean that when scientists discover that the polar ice melted faster than the model predicted [substitute any predictive error here] that things are worse than they predicted. Hello - it means that their modeling was wrong - nothing more or less.
11)
Most of what you read (unless you are reading original scientific literature - you aren't doing this if you are not an expert in the field),
was written by some reporter, whose primary skill is writing - not science.
12)
Much of the source material for the writers in 11 are things like the IPCC reports, which
are written by politicians, not scientists.
13)
That said, even the IPCC reports are a bit beyond the scientific comprehension of journalists - and certainly beyond their ability to discern fact from opinion, so what you get from them is the "executive summary".
What should you believe? This might be hard to swallow, but you should probably
believe nothing that you have read [If you are reading scientific publications, you should look at the facts - and
question whether they are both plausible and whether how they were measured has flaws]. It is probably much more useful to understand the knowledge, perspectives, expertise, and motives of the parties writing what you see and
question what you have read.
Other things to consider.
1) Does what somebody ask, scale? If he suggests converting your car to run on used french fry oil, try to consider how many fries, and how much oil is being used in your town. This is good enough, because all towns wil have the same answer. (Hint - if your family does not eat enough fries to run your car(s), the town's families have the same problem.)
2) If his hypothesis is that the problem is caused by the US, consider the world population - nearly 7 billion - versus US populations 0.3 billion. The rest of the world has a 20 times bigger effect than the US. Sure maybe the US is 2nd or third now - It used to be first in CO2... But the rest of the world fully intends to catch up - quickly - How many coal electric generation plants did India and China (Germany) build last year?. What will we do to prevent that - LOL. If we are buyers of their cheap products... If we are selling our services to them ...
3) Motives and "religion" of the person proselytizing - Does he read Mother Jones or does he realize that nuclear energy (fission) is viable and far cleaner today than any scalable alternatives.
4) Does he understand that today's decisions have to be based on reality? Energy density is important. If you are generating it, it must be consumed at the same rate, or the difference stored. It can't be consumed at a higher rate than generated. When the sun goes down in the summer or winter, we still need energy for cooling or heating. When it gets hot and the wind stops blowing - not that that ever happens simultaneously - LOL, consumers still need energy to connect to BBO.
5) Should you just ignore the "problem". No! It is very likely real.
6) It is very important that you select the most likely options to work - practice finesses are not solutions.
What can I do?
1) Educate yourself to the point that you could get an A in high school physics.
2) Same thing in chemistry.
3) Mathematics - at least algebra and calculus. Statistics and numeracy are probably important, too.
4) Do you know the difference between power and energy? The units of either? (Most reporters do not, so if you don't, you have company - not good company)
a) Power is the rate at which energy is generated or consumed. Think of energy like miles and power like speed. So power is expressed in kilowatts and energy in kilowatt hours.
b) If somebody says that a plant generated 1000 megawatts last year, you know he does not know what he is talking about. It would be the equivalent of him trying to describe how many miles you drove and saying the you drove 75 mph last year.
5) Question what you read critically - Yesterday I read an article, from what should be a reputable source, that suggested that gun homicides only trailed 4 other causes of death for people in the US - it trailed accidents, unintentional poisoning, gun suicides, falls and some category that I can't remember offhand.
Credibility check - 2010 homicides were about 11,000. Suicides are about 38,000 per year - half of which were by firearms, auto accidents 30,000 ish. Would you quickly come to the conclusion that Americans are not dying, or are emigrating fast enough to make up for a birth rate. Check CDC.. Suicides are the TENTH most common cause of death (but only if you aggregate all the cancers into one category. In the real world, in 1000 deaths, only 4 are likely to be as the result of a gun homicide.
Why did I say credibility check?
Follow the numbers - 340,000,000 people in the country and only 11,000 died from the 5th leading cause of death! It doesn't take much to imagine that if the average life expectancy is about 75 years that we must be seeing about 2,500,000 people dying each year - unless we are pretty much celibate or emigrating. Ratios. Population:deaths:gun homicides = 340,000 : 2,500 : 11.
http://www.cdc.gov/n...tats/deaths.htm
For a reality check, think of all the people that you personally know that have died (not people that have been reported to have died). In which of the top ten categories in that link were they? For me 1-6 had at least one, 7-9, zero, and 10 - 2 both minors, neither involving guns.
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