Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Truth is Inconvenient


Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" opens nationwide this week. The movie purports to enlighten the benighted masses about the global calamity facing humanity as a result of global warming. Unfortunately, for Al Gore Truth is Inconvenient because as we get closer to the truth about global warming it will be inconvenient that his "truth" will be revealed as a mendacious distortion of unrelated scientific facts. The Gore program for socialism, which has lost repeatedly in the polling place, now seeks victory through hysteria via world wide U.N. mediated regulation, and that is An Inconvenient Truth as history has clearly demonstrated that Socialism leads to misery and death on a vast scale.

Really scary images and wild assertions can be found at this website http://www.climatecrisis.net/. What will be lacking is hard science because by virtue of being hard it is not very popular and is not conducive to simplification, does not provide vivid gut wrenching imagery and is veiled in difficult mathematical formulas, concepts and reams of numerical data. The climatological record based upon observation is about 150 years old, which for a planet of some 4.5 billion years of age is a statistically meaningless sampling period. Nothing can be extrapolated from this data other than its' uselessness. Ask your friendly neighborhood actuary about the veracity of my statement.

Atmospheric dynamics is a subject of such complexity that any "expert" will readily admit that all of the models are no good, that is, have little to no predictive value (that's why the weather man is wrong so often). These dynamics are governed by the Navier-Stokes equation which cannot be solved, as a system of non-linear partial differential equations, the solution of which require boundary and initial value constraints that cannot be evaluated. Additional cmploicating factors are the multi-dimensional systems of chemical kinetics, radiation transfer from the Sun, as well as, radiative re-emission by the planet and its' gaseous envelope. All of these "models" require sufficient simplification such that they no longer represent the systems they model (sadly only a trained mathematician or physicist can recognize this drawback).

We live on a decent sized planet with a large atmosphere, the amount of carbon man can pump into it is trivial compared to the natural sources: biomass decomposition, animal flatulence, volcanic eruption and soil out-gassing to name a few sources that have been studied. There are Internet sites that abound with data on these assertions.
We also live reasonably close to the Sun which provides virtually all the energy mankind and the planet has. It would a vast oversimplification to think that this fusion reactor has a constant output over time.
The space weather link provides continuous monitoring of multi-spectral data that demonstrates that this is not, in fact, the case.

Those that have taken freshman chemistry will remember Le Chatelier's Equilibrium. The Earth's oceans provide a massive CO2 buffering system such that the atmospheric ocean system exchanges C02 continuously in copious amounts that will minimize concentration fluctuations.

The planet may be getting hotter, it may be getting colder. Some regions of the planet may be getting hotter while others get colder (they're called seasons), but none of these theories can model any of it with any accuracy. Even the experts admit this in the terse mathematics of their published papers, but never when requesting grant funding.

The Inconvenient Truth is that Al Gore has assembled a team of statist academicians to promulgate his theme. The theme so strongly rejected by voters of the last quarter century at the polls, an overwhelming NO to socialism. Every expert he brings forth in his evidentiary proceeding is on the tax payer dole, either directly like NASA employees, or indirectly as recipients of NSF grants for research.

Atmospheric Physics is a growth industry but only for those that sing the proper tune and in the proper key: the sky is falling and only bold, massive government and inter-governmental regulation and expensive investments( to be paid for by the taxpayer) can save the world. Al Gore is a lifelong politician that has never held a job, the son of a politician, and this is a just another shameless, self-promoting, dishonest and mendacious attempt at securing more taxpayers dollars which at best will squander billions on science without results (think star wars) or possibly a cruel lie that will lead to the death of millions through environmental mismanagement at its' worst. Now that is an Inconvenient Truth.


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