Call it global warming or climate change, lots of scientists and educated people are convinced that CO2-generating human activity is having a significant impact on the atmosphere. My take on this is based on what I learned in college getting a degree in physics, with a math minor. What I learned is that the math associated with thermodynamics is hard. Among the most difficult classes I took dealt with partial differential equations. These are the equations that we use to model the physical world. Our instructor told us that a small subset of these equations can be solved to a closed solution. There is a whole field that solves special cases of PDEs numerically through finite element analysis.
Currently, meteorologists use PDEs to predict the weather. The most important inputs are initial conditions. This information is gleaned from various sensors in weather stations around the world. Most weather forecasts blow up after about 5 days, mainly because the initial conditions are not very accurate from a global perspective. After initial conditions, the driver of the function are insolence (solar radiation per unit area), clouds and precipitation, heat exchange with outer space, soil, vegetation, surface water, the effects of mountains, etc. In no instance is the concentration of CO2 an input to any forecasting model I am aware of.
Why is this important? Let’s start with the relationship between weather and climate. The true believers like to say that the two are unrelated. This is simply not true. In fact, there is a very well-understood relationship between the two that every person who ever took calculus will immediately recognize as true, which is that the climate is the integral of weather. That is, unless you believe that some cosmic Being has their thumb on the scale. Climate is the integral of weather, nothing more or less.
Now we know how integrals work. You have a function with variables and relationships between the variables, and there are rules for calculating the integral of the function. Note that if a factor is not present in the function, by definition, it cannot be present in the integral of that function.
The true believers want us to believe that a factor not even relevant for weather prediction is the dominant driving factor in climate. This simply does not pass the sniff test.
There are factors that affect the weather that aren’t in forecasting models. For example, volcanism. That is true, but volcanic eruptions definitely affect insolence, which is in the model.
Any mathematicians on the Fire see any flaws in this argument?
Convoluted and pointless when there is a easier more precise method to determine veracity...politicians and media love it, it is a lie.
