Peace Legacy

This post arises from an insightful comment by Howell Clark on my previous article. His thoughts are so important I wanted to blog at the top level about them rather than bury my answer in a comment. Howell says:

A short while ago I read this shocking and disturbing article about bird deaths from wind farms on climaterealists.com. I immediately asked myself: "Is that really true?" I wanted to know the right answer to this question, whether or not I liked it. If we want to create a peace legacy for future generations, to safeguard the planet for both humans and our non-human friends, we need to know the truth.

The issue is this: the story above claims that millions of birds are killed by wind farms. But a "green" friend I mentioned this to told me that this is absurd: she had studied wind farms in depth, she had personally visited them, and they were the safest, most wildlife-friendly places imaginable; the blades rotate so sedately nothing could possibly be killed by them; and there wasn't a dead or injured bird to be found anywhere around about. She went so far as to wonder if the writers of the above article weren't simply lying through their teeth.

The paradox I was struggling with was this: my green friend is without doubt one of the most truthful people I know. I did not doubt her account for a second. Equally, it seemed impossible that anyone could write such a credible-sounding article as the one linked above. Two truthful sources in direct contradiction - I needed facts that no one could dispute, because if lies are involved (and who won't at least wonder about the possibility?), it isn't good enough to merely discover the truth; I also needed it in a form that would allow anyone to prove it for themselves.So here's what I did.

If the poor Brits don't have it bad enough with their loopy Met Office, now the supposed bastion of careful thinking and good science, The Royal Society, goes completely off the rails. They want to spray pollution (real pollution, not carbon dioxide plant food) into the atmosphere to artificially cool the planet:

There's a story on wattsupwiththat about the UK MET office's hot new computer. The headline of the story is:

Met Office supercomputer: A megawatt, here, a megawatt there, and pretty soon we’re talking real carbon pollution

Of course Anthony Watts is saying that tongue in cheek, because carbon dioxide is plant food, not pollution. So the truth is the MET office has one of the GREENEST buildings in the UK. CO2 is nutrient. We should be glad of that small bounty as they go about proving the uselessness of their forecasts.

Here's the facts about numerical modelling: chaos principles guarantee that within a relatively short time the results are nonsense. No amount of speed or computer memory can change that. It's a mathematical fact. Three weeks out is probably the best possible, no matter what computing resources you throw at it.

I just noticed something on the local TV (9am show, Ten Network) that disturbed me for two completely different reasons.

They interviewed film maker and Orangutan activist, Stephen Van Mil, who discussed "the devastating effects of Indonesian deforestation to plant palm oil plantations, a commonly found substance in our grocery items." I have seen these plantations, and it is the typical 'monoculture' so loved by big business, keeping everything nice and simple and sterile. Nice for business, deadly for native animals. Disturbance number one.

What is the common factor in all these recent issues in Australia:

1. An ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme) to reduce carbon emissions and which will ruin the economy and add huge expenses to every single person in the  country;

2. Digging up prime agricultural land to provide coal for China to emit huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, and in the process ruining the standard of living of the rural people, and polluting the water supply and polluting food with heavy metals;

I see they're going to fire up the Large Hadron Collider at half power. For those who haven't been following this story, your life is being put at risk.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a project by The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN. Back in 1964, a physicist called Peter Higgs found an elegant mathematical theory by which he explained one of the great puzzles of particle physics, why mass exists.

There is some background to this question. The twentieth century produced two great theories of physics: relativity and quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics explained many curious puzzles in the subatomic realm, for example, why atoms don't collapse. Atoms have a field of electrons orbiting the nucleus; according to classical mechanics, any accelerating charged particle (like an electron orbiting an atom) should radiate energy. This means the electron should spiral into the nucleus and the atom should collapse. Obviously they don't because we are still here, made of functioning atoms! Another example is the radiation from black bodies. Only quantum theory can explain why the spectrum is what it is.

It is no exaggeration to say that the modern world only exists because of quantum mechanics: every piece of electronics that exists only works because of quantum mechanics, and a great deal of it was only discovered because we understood the theory behind it all. It is the most successful scientific theory ever. It has passed every experimental test ever thrown at it. But it doesn't explain gravity.

This is a reasonably short work, very different from Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth. Although Paltridge is an atmospheric physicist and erstwhile Chief Research Scientist with Australia's CSIRO, he has put together an accessible summary of some of the damning evidence against the global warming alarmism.

When I started looking into the claims of dangerous warming due to carbon dioxide, I was completely baffled, buried in details of climate models, puzzled by energy balance diagrams, and so forth. Was there a "greenhouse" blanketing the Earth, slowly frazzling us to death? The truth could have been anything. If you've followed this path too, you'll know what I mean. But one thing, one single piece of the jigsaw, cut through all the fog and answered the question. I want to show you the thing that absolutely clinched the global warming question for me. I have postgraduate training in physics, which helped, but the basic point is understandable by anyone, and in this article I want to explain what seems to me the key, conclusive fact in everyday terms.

Over on the newsgroups, folk are discussing a rather sad article from ScienceDaily, called "Apparent Problem With Global Warming Climate Models Resolved".

Apparently the folk at ScienceDaily, as well as a large fraction of the general public, need some basic lessons in how real science, the science that increases our understanding and helps us make sense of the world, works. Here's a textbook example of how not to do it: