Do You Believe in Magic?

Real Climate has a post on Bill Gray's meetings paper for the 27th Conference on Hurricans and Tropical Meteorology. The post argues that Gray, who attributes Hurricane frequency and some aspects of global warming to changes in the Thermohaline Circulation (THC), is pretty much making shit up. The case they make sounds convincing to me - not that I needed a lot of convincing to be skeptical of a paper that starts with Senator Inhoffe and ends with science fiction writer Michael Crichton.

The THC is undoubtedly important to climate, because it transports heat from one place to another. However it cannot do magical things. It cannot created energy out of thin air (or thick water), nor can it make energy mysteriously disappear. Thus, Gray's statement that "The average THC circulation cools the ocean by about 3 W/m2" is a scientific absurdity.
My italics.

I wrote a comment on this several days ago and submitted it to RC. I quoted the passage above and said, more or less:
Bill's number might be wrong, but is it a "scientific absurdity" dependent on magic? My radiator cools my auto engine without any magic, and we think CO2 warms the Earth by equally unmagical means. It is certainly true that ocean currents transport heat polewards. This transported heat may warm continents, be radiated into space or otherwise have the effect of changing the average ocean temperature, and certainly the temperature of the tropical ocean. Am I wrong?


The reason I mention it here is that I know some climate smart types occasionally visit, and for some reason, RC has apparently found my comment problematic or unsuitable - perhaps it's less germane than the other comments covering epicycles, the Catholic Church, petroleum geology, and the moose populations of Maine and Minnesota - and I would like to know the answer.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-Libertarian: re-post

The most pointed critique of social security and liberalism in general is the libertarian critique. The problem with libertarians, for a liberal, is that we have too much in common. We both believe in individual rights, tolerance of individual differences, and dislike government prescription of religion. The basic difference, it seems to me, is the different answers we give to Cain's (with thanks to the Captain - my original version had the corpse asking the question!) famous question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That's not really my basic bitch against the libertarians though. My real complaint is the same as my complaint against most religion - its premise is a fraud. For those who can't stand to wait for the punchline, I believe that trying to implement libertarian principles leads to tyranny or social disintegration. Demonstrating that takes some historical (and pre-historical) context. For all but the last 15,000 or so of the 100,000 years the human spec...
Read more

Uneasy Lies The Head

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown ........... Shakespeare Henry IV, Part II. So it is with us and our slightly distant primate cousins , so it seems. A 9-year study of wild baboons in Kenya by Princeton University and the Institute of Primate Research may turn conventional assumptions of alphas males upside down. The study found that alpha males have high testosterone levels, which allows them to dominate other baboons, get access to more food, and attract better mates. This is expected. Surprisingly, though, the alpha males also have high levels of stress hormone glucocorticoid, which scientists measured from their feces samples. In fact, the stress of alpha baboons was on par with low-ranking baboons. The convention wisdom is that access to food and females provides life security and thus less stress for dominant males. Conversely, weak males who are constantly threatened by starvation and physical violence from stronger males are thought to be more stressed. The st...
Read more

We Call it Soccer

The US played its best, and maybe only good game of World Cup, but lost thanks to brilliant goalkeeping by the Swedish keeper and the bizarre method soccer uses to settle ties when three US stars could not put the ball on frame from the 12 yard spot.  At the end it came down to a blocked shot that spun in by maybe a couple of centimeters. Well, that's football - too much like life.   Which brings me to a modest proposal.  Replace the thirty minute overtimes with as many 7-player 15 minute periods as needed to settle it.  Scoring should be much easier with fewer players.
Read more