Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for April 27, 2009

Pondering Problems with Computer Climate Models: A Note from Michael Hammer

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SCIENTISTS have put a huge amount of effort into generating computer models of our climate system.  These models are very sophisticated and complex and their outputs suggest that increasing carbon dioxide will lead to significant temperature rises for our planet.  Indeed the model outputs now represent the main evidence in support of the anthropogenic (man induced) global warming hypothesis.   Why shouldn’t we take careful note of these results?

Computers are a tool allowing many calculations to be done extremely rapidly.  If we can describe a system we wish to explore via a set of interrelated equations we can then get a computer to repeatedly solve these equations with a small assumed time increment between each set of solutions and do it quickly. The output describes the future as predicted from the input equations.  This is a computer model.  It is important to remember that the model output is completely and exclusively determined by the information encapsulated in the input equations.  The computer contributes no checking, no additional information and no greater certainly in the output.  It only contributes computational speed.

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More Low-Carbon Research Needed: A Note from Bjorn Lomborg

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WE are often told that tackling global warming should be the defining task of our age — that we must cut emissions immediately and drastically. But people are not buying the idea that, unless we act, the planet is doomed. Several recent polls have revealed Americans’ growing skepticism. Solving global warming has become their lowest policy priority, according to a new Pew survey.
 
Moreover, strategies to reduce carbon have failed. Meeting in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, politicians from wealthy countries promised to cut emissions by 2000, but did no such thing. In Kyoto in 1997, leaders promised even stricter reductions by 2010, yet emissions have kept increasing unabated. Still, the leaders plan to meet in Copenhagen this December to agree to even more of the same — drastic reductions in emissions that no one will live up to. Another decade will be wasted.
 
Fortunately, there is a better option: to make low-carbon alternatives like solar and wind energy competitive with old carbon sources. This requires much more spending on research and development of low-carbon energy technology. We might have assumed that investment in this research would have increased when the Kyoto Protocol made fossil fuel use more expensive, but it has not.

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