Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Mathematical Musings on Global Warming

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?

Not a mathematician, but it definitely makes sense that a whole is made from it's parts.

I know the global warmists would have you believe that weather has nothing to do with climate change...unless it is unusually hot or extreme. Then, of course, climate change is the obvious culprit.

You can't use logic to critique a religion.

I got lost on line five.

Exactly what it is.

Like talkin' to a brick wall. Only the wall carries more IQ points.

Like

Weather is a short term local phenomenon. Predictions are hard due to turbulence and the inability to quantify all the variables.

GLOBAL (note that word) climate is a long term integrated (to use your word) phenomenon.

It is elementary that adding CO2 (or other greenhouse gases) will in fact increase global temperature. We are doing this by burning fossil fuels. It is also a fact that other influences (sun variations, volcanoes) and feedback effects (more heating makes more water evaporate which makes more clouds which reflect sunlight etc.) influence climate.

Although I will stack up my university physics education against yours if need be, it takes no more than a high school chemistry class to realize that we are, in fact, adding more CO2, and that increases average temperature over what it would have been from other causes alone. That is indisputable. What I disagree with is the assertion that this is 100% bad and also with the suggested remedies, which the Paris accords seemed to think should be the US giving trillions of dollars to third-world tin-pot dictators, while China, which emits more CO2 than us, gets a free pass until "later."

The US has reduced emissions more than any other country just by our competent economic growth.



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The theory that humans can cause climate change is where the flaw is.

Just like with acid rain.

And with the huge hole in the ozone that was supposed to fry us all by now.

Their theory includes guilt. That's what makes it a religion.

Punishment includes banning plastic straws, driving a Prius, using a Cat-O-Nine-Tails on themselves when they fart accidentally.

It is absolutely plausible that human produced CO2 causes a rise in global temperature. But, is it 90% or .01%? The warmists would have you believe that it is 90% or more. This is based largely on the close correlation of C02 levels and temperature over the last several hundred thousand years. This in no way shows causation. In, fact the evidence shows that rising CO2 levels actually follows temperature by a couple hundred years and not the other way around. It is likely that rising temperatures caused more CO2 to be released from the oceans which are the largest reservoir of C02 on the planet. There is some other mechanism that is the primary driver of climate change with many possible candidates. The fact that CO2 is the only variable considered and that it can be taxed should tell you all you need to know.

The Economist Thomas Sowell noted this at the very beginning of the global warming debate. The order is backwards for the alleged cause and effect.

pde= partial differential equation

Bullshit. Always cracks me up that the biggest slice o' bullshit in an argument is often prefaced by "it is elementary". The global scamming scientists got no idea what the atmospheric level of CO2 was in the past.
And they hadda fake the hockey stick, along with the CO2 lie, to try and make this bullshit stick.



More bullshit. The cause of formation of clouds is still unknown to this day. And it ain't simply evaporation, otherwise it'd be cloudy over the oceans all the time.

There is no close correlation between CO2 and temperature. More precisely, many times through history there have been seriously skewed relationships.

So...what is the most prevalent "greenhouse gas" of all?

It is NOT indisputable. More clouds reflecting more heat causes COOLING, not heating. Else why do volcanic eruptions result in global cooling? Even as recently as the last decade, Mt Pinatubo lowered global temperatures by a significant amount.

More CO2 results in more vegetation, which is supposed to be good for the climate, is it not?

Human activity can indeed affect weather on a small scale, but there is absolutely no evidence that we affect climate.

I am neither a physicist or a mathematician but I see things in simple terms. The population of the earth has more than doubled since 1960. The demand and use of non sustainable resources far exceeds the population growth because of increased expectations of the rapidly expanding population, most of whom consume more than they produce. The natural sources of environmental buffering, forest, ocean etc are rapidly becoming less significant due to decreased volume and capability secondary to exploitation and pollution.

In geological time man's impact is difficult to measure because we have not been doing it for very long.

You don't have to be a rocket surgeon to realize that too many people are consuming too many resources for the system too be sustainable. My solutions would probably not be politically correct.


mike r

The main variable and determining factor in our climate is that giant yellow ball of gas 93,000,000 miles out there.

You could do the world a favor and reduce the problem by one.

You'd be a hero.

I heard just recently that some some knotheads are thinking they can devise a way to regulate the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth. I think we should cut their freekin heads off before they utter another word about it.