Dan’s Wild Wild Weather Journal

I am constantly amazed at the amount of bad information about climate change that is available on the web, masquerading as Science. I frequently get questions asking or commenting on some of these ridiculous claims.

To be sure, there are a lot of things about the Earth’s Climate that are understood poorly. One of the biggest debates in literature right now is on the question of hurricanes in a warmer world. Will there be more or fewer. Will there be stronger or weaker storms. The answer to this question is still in the future. The current leading candidate for an answer is fewer storms but stronger ones. It is not settled and there is no consensus. There are tons of other questions from the affect of cloud on the radiation balance to how much CO² the oceans can absorb. It is a very fascinating field.

There is a consensus on the broad issues. An absolutely overwhelming consensus. In the past 10 years there has been no published paper in a respectable journal concluding that the basic theories on warming are wrong!

(Oreskes:Science 3 December 2004:
Vol. 306. no. 5702, p. 1686
DOI: 10.1126/science.1103618

The planet has warmed about 6/10 of a degree Celsius. Most of that in the last 50 years and the warming rate is increasing. The top 800 Climate scientists in the world have said that there is a greater than 95% confidence that this warming is mainly due to human behavior. (Adding CO² to the atmosphere)

I was ill and stuck in bed for almost all of last weekend (I will spare you the details, and be thankful!). I did use the time to catch up with some of the latest in Climate Change Science. Want to know what I found out?

It is worse than I expected.

Considerably worse.

Most of the latest published papers are indicating that the IPCC forecasts that were derided as being alarmists by some, are actually turning out to be too conservative. Just one example is Arctic sea ice. It is melting considerably faster than expected.

People tend to gravitate to explanations they understand when researching something. This is where the junk science sites do their best fishing. I think the world’s climate scientists have fallen down on the job a bit. Yes I know they get tired of refuting the same tired old claims over and over, but someone needs to help the public understand the real science. Especially on the web.

The junk science sites on the Internet have done a really decent job of confusing the issue. Much of it is a mix of a little truth, Spin disguised as basic high school Physics, and a whole lot of just plain wrong facts.

There are some shining examples of good science though.

The IPCC summary for policy makers is written in plain language and is very good. A group of very brainy climate scientists at the Goddard Inst. for Space Science (NASA) at Columbia University have been posting to a blog for about 4 years. It is probably the best source of information for someone who turns green when reading a paper published in a front line peer reviewed journal. The blog is called Real Climate. This blog has won awards from scientific organizations for it’s excellence.

So, what follows is Dan’s Junk Science detector. If you see any of the following claims on a web site purporting to give you unbiased climate science, run.

• Volcanoes produce more CO² than humans.
  (This one is quite popular with numbers and percentages from the Carbon cycle to make it’s point.)
• Global Warming stopped in 199*
• CO² does not cause warming
• The Troposphere is getting colder, and this does not match the climate model predictions.
  (There was a mis-match in data and this was very concerning for a couple of years, but almost all of it has been explained as errors in adjusting for instrument bias. (This episode is an excellent example of how science works) There is still some discrepancy over the tropics and this is the subject of much research) Real Climate mentioned above has links to some exc. papers on this.
• Antarctica is getting colder.
  (The climate models predict it should possibly cool some so if it is this means the models are doing well. Researchers do not really have a long enough data set to say for sure yet. The Antarctic Peninsula is warming very rapidly)
• Anything to do with water vapor being responsible for all the warming.
  (This is even on some of the sites that say we are not warming. Which is it??)
• Back in the 70’s they said it was going to get colder….
  (Actually the overwhelming opinion in the late 70’s was warming but no one then knew how much)

If you see any of the above, (and those are just a small percentage), then you should realize that you are being given information that is not based on peer reviewed Science.

No front line Climate Scientist would give them the time of day. Why? They have ALL been refuted (Some many times) in peer reviewed journals.

Even the few scientists who are skeptical of the consensus pay little attention to most of these claims.

I have a list of very good resources for anyone who really wants to learn more about climate change. If you want some pointers on where to go, email me. I will probably put them together in my next blog. The links above are a good start. If you hear some other outlandish claims, email me.

I collect them!

Later,

Dan

There is a lot of talk about these products that claim to extend your gas mileage by using electricity to separate the water in a tank in the trunk into Hydrogen and Oxygen. The ads are all over the net.

If you are considering spending money to hear about it or to buy the equipment, you might want to read the rest of this blog entry first.

First the good news.

A car will run on hydrogen gas (with modifications). You can also get hydrogen from water by running a current through it. It is called electrolysis. Some more facts.

Hydrogen burns very cleanly, with the by product mainly being water.

Now, the bad news.

There are no wells of Hydrogen. You have to make it, and making it requires electricity. Guess where that electricity comes from. Coal fired power plants in most cases. So until we can make a lot of hydrogen with nuclear, wind, and or solar power, it is not the answer to pollution, and climate change problems. I am amazed at how many politicians in both parties cannot seem to get their heads around this simple fact!

The news gets worse. Using electricity to get hydrogen from a tank of water in your car is not practical. Why? Because it takes a whole lot of electricity to separate water into Hydrogen and oxygen. Where is that electricity going to come from? Your battery, and generator. Where is your battery going to get the power from? Your gas tank!

There are two laws of Physics called the first, and second laws of Thermodynamics. Every science student learns them in their first year of college. In layman’s terms the first law says “You cannot get something from nothing”, and the second law says. You cannot win, you cannot even break even. You will always LOSE!

How this applies to these hydrogen gas mileage extenders is this.

It takes more energy to break apart the water to make hydrogen than you will get by using the hydrogen to extend your gas mileage. A low voltage current cannot produce enough hydrogen to make any difference so you will likely not see a measurable DROP in gas mileage. If you could produce enough hydrogen to help your car along. You would see a big INCREASE in the amount of fuel you use!

Let me put it this way, it takes 8 miles worth of gas to make 5 miles worth of hydrogen!

I wrote to Dr. Rob Park a Physicist who formerly headed the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland. I asked him to help me convince people that these hydrogen from water deals are just scams.

Doctor Park is an associate of the late Dr. Willie Fowler. Willie Fowler had a little statue on his mantle that had the words NOBEL PRIZE: PHYSICS on it. Trust me when I say that Dr. Park is an expert.

Here is what he wrote back:

*********************************************************************************

Dan:
The scam is nothing new. In the 1970s an inventor named Sam Leach claimed to have developed a car that ran on water, and demonstrated it by driving it across the country, filling the tank with water each morning. He explained that he was using electrolysis to break the water into hydrogen and oxygen and using the hydrogen as fuel. When it was pointed out that it takes more energy to separate the oxygen and hydrogen than you get back by burning the hydrogen, he claimed to have a secret catalyst to break down the water. Since the combustion product is water, that would violate the Conservation of Energy.

Investors who were unfamiliar with the Conservation of Energy, including the president of Budget Rent-a-car, invested millions. Leach simply retired with the money. I assume he had a false tank for the water. He spent his remaining years being driven in Rolls-Royce that used gasoline.

Those who have fallen for the scam included President George W. Bush who promised in his 2003 State-of-the-Union Address to free America from reliance on middle-Eastern oil with the hydrogen car. It’s easy to make a car that runs on hydrogen, but it will save no energy.

The only way to stop the scam is with better science education.

Regards,

Bob
Robert L. Park
Professor of Physics
University of Maryland
College Park Maryland 20742
****************************************************************************

So there you have it. These things are a scam. They will not work. There is a great episode of Myth Busters that busts this myth. It is episode 53 by the way. I got a kick out of watching it. The two MIT graduates who do car talk on Public Radio have also busted this scam. It is interesting to me just how much people want to believe in this. Perhaps it would make a great thesis for some graduate school Psychology PhD candidate!

Doctor Park may have a very good point. Our Science education is in sore need of improvement. If I have saved one person from spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on one of these scams, then the hour it took me to write this was well worth it!

Just to be clear- It will not work.

No how.

No Way.

Period.

As the commercial for the bank says on TV. SAVE YOUR MONEY!

On my Quick Science report the weekend of January 5th I talked about the meaning of one Billion.

Science has in the past used a different definition than the rest of the U.S.

In Europe and much of the rest of the world, the definition varies between countries.

In science, it is very important that mathematical terms have the same definition for all scientist and there the definition used in science journals used to be as follows:

1 Billion= one million millions.

Your Congressman uses a different definition when spending your money… he uses:

1 Billion= 1,000 millions.

You can read more about it here:

http://mathforum.org/~sanders/geometry/GP10BillionEtc.html

So which is right? It depends. If you’re a Congressman, then the usual U.S. definition is right.

If you’re a scientist, then itis important that fellow scientists understand what you mean so many times what we call 4.5 Billion is written as 4,500 million. That way no one gets confused. Science in general is rapidly adopting the new version however and eventually the original definition will be a quirk of history!

I think the original definition is better at stating the value of the number. So the Earth is 4,500 million years old.

Think of it this way, the Earth has celebrated its millionth birthday, 4,500 times. (and as usual I didn’t get invited to the party!)

So keep in mind that if you ask someone in Latin America to write our 1 Billion numerically they may write:

1,000,000,000,000. (We call this a trillion!)
Whereas a high school student here in the States would write:
1,000,000,000 (We call this a billion, but other places call it one thousand million!)

Now, if I were a student and knew this, I could play some nice head games with my science teacher!

HINT- HINT!
Later,

Dan

I have read some great books on science this year and I want to share them with you. If you saw my Quick Science report on Sunday morning, then these are the books I was talking about.

Two of them are by one author: Kerry A. Emanuel, Ph.D.

Doctor Emanuel is a professor of Atmospheric Science at what is arguably the best engineering school in the world. MIT in Boston. In my opinion he is the world’s greatest expert on hurricanes. His book Divine Wind is the best I have read on the subject. He has done the impossible in writing a book that is loved by scientist and non scientist alike. Buy it..you will not regret it.

Here is a link to the book on Amazon: Divine Wind
His newest book is about climate change and it is here: About Climate Change

Last but not least is another book on climate. The Two Mile Time Machine is not about the future climate but instead it covers the climate of the past… deduced from ice cores in Greenland. It is a much better and more interesting read than you think it is!

I link to Amazon for convenience, but you can order them from any book seller!

I did something this Summer I have wanted to do all my life. I went to the High Arctic. The first two weeks of August found me in the High Arctic of Canada and Greenland. Not just near the Arctic Circle but 1000km North of it!

Climate change is showing up better in the Arctic than anywhere else and I wanted to see it for myself. So, for two weeks I was on an expedition aboard the Russian vessel Akademic Ioffe. I will write more about it and post some of my more than 5000 pictures in coming weeks.

The Arctic can be a dangerous place…. I was over 1000km from the nearest medical facility. (We did have a Doctor aboard.) It was without doubt the most beautiful place I have seen. The one thing I will remember about the Arctic more than anything else, however, is the quiet.

The quiet is hard to explain but trust me when I say that I have never experienced anything quite like it. Another strange thing is getting used to 24 hour daylight. This seriously confuses your body clock, and you find yourself trying to fool your brain into thinking it is night!

So, that is where I have been, and I will tell the story in words and pictures on this blog and in September we will do a 2 or 3 part series on air showing the places I visited, and talking about the issues of climate change in the High Arctic.

Later,
Dan