Re: Stories for James Nicoll's Nightmarish Future


"Brett Paul Dunbar" wrote

> The reason that the argument over Anthropogenic climate change is
now
> political is that the scientific debate about its existence is over.
> There is disagreement about the scale of the effect and the scale of
the
> problems it will pose, there is little about the reality of the
effect.

Have you seen any research about decreasing pH in the surface layers
of the ocean? The RS report I have seen mentions some, but rather
spoils the effect by saying something like 'from measurement and from
our known models of the effects of increasing CO2': I don't like
modelling in this case*. There is also something about pH measurement
in a bay, but open ocean research is needed, surely. Simulation might
do it, but the acid test would be lots of bottles of seawater being
collected and numbers coming out. This is important stuff -- someone
must have real numbers. Headlines about acid oceans worried me, then I
found that the report actually says 'less alkaline', not 'acid'. I
suppose it made a smaller newspaper-selling splash.

I don't think I'm a denier.... but....

Is the CO2 being taken up by the oceans at the same rate as it was 150
years ago? Until then the system seems to have been able to cope with
fluctuations.

Is there research which measures oceanic cloud cover, in particular
the changes in albedo? I'd like data back to 1850, but 1940 would do.

Has the population of hygroscopic nuclei above deep ocean areas
changed? What about over land with off-ocean wind patterns?

Has the Earth's albedo changed in the last 150 years?

Have plankton populations changed in accordance with pH changes,
particulary those plankton associated with economically important food
fishes?

How polluted with oil and surfactant is the sea surface? Has this
changed surface behaviour of deep ocean areas? Any info I find is
covered with 'this research is difficult to do in situ' caveats.

> Climatologists might find the deniers annoying in the same way that
> Economists might find inflation deniers annoying in my analogy.

This stuff amuses me, when, that is, it doesn't scare my pants off.
Greenpeace makes huge noises about carbon-free power, then runs like
hell when anyone mentions fission as the saviour of mankind. Either
global warming is the greatest threat to us all or it isn't. They
should choose.

CO2 is going up. People are producing more CO2. Therefore people
should produce less CO2. This will fix the problem. Hmmm.... No, not
convinced.

How about this? CO2 is going up. People are producing more CO2.
People should produce less CO2. This will fix the problem if the only
problem is that people are producing more CO2. What if the real
problem is that people have polluted the ocean surface, damaging the
normally robust system which used to absorb fluctuations in CO2? Or if
the real problem is the reduction in albedo caused by a reduction in
the numbers of cloud-stimulating nuclei?

There must be research about this. I'd call Exxon, but, alas, it could
be that they're part of the second problem as well as the first.

JF
*Or generally. There was a piece of research about lemming populations
and attractors which stirred me, so I wrote a cellular automaton and
tried to find order in a simple ecology. I failed, but it kept me out
of mischief for years. Now I cannot see the M&S Christmas pudding
burning (lines of blue fire run over the surface, depleting local
resources and returning only when those resources have been
replenished) without wondering if the level of blue light might be
related to the same sort of numbers.






.

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