Hey, kids! Let's do some math...just for fun.

This month's issue of Geology has an article with the rather arcane title of "Covariability of the Southern Westerlies and atmospheric CO₂ during the Holocene."  As I was reading it - yes, yes, yes, I do read this kind of stuff for "fun" and I don't have a life and I do need to get out more, but let's focus for the moment - I started to wonder how much CO₂ is dissolved in the ocean.  Okay, so here is where the math comes in...I'll go slow.

Carbon dioxide can exist in water either as a dissolved gas, as it is in club soda or, more importantly, beer, or it can react with a water molecule to form a bicarbonate ion.  So the total amount of CO₂ in the ocean is going to be the sum of the amount of dissolved gas and the amount tied up as bicarbonate ions.  A few minutes Googling will give you these numbers which are 90 milligrams of CO₂ per kilogram of seawater and 104.6 milligrams of CO₂ as bicarbonate per kilogram of seawater.  Keep in mind that the salinity of the ocean varies with temperature, location, and depth, so these are rough numbers, but we're going for order of magnitude here.  A little more Googling tells me that there are 1.37 million trillion metric tons of water in the world's oceans...again, this is a rough number, the CRC Handbook gives a number 20% higher.  Punching a few buttons on a calculator reveals that there are an estimated 2.67 hundred trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide in ocean waters right now.  Keep in mind also that this is just the "free" carbon dioxide available in sea water.  If all this CO₂ were magically removed, it would be replenished by the dissolution of the calcium and magnesium carbonates that make up the bulk of sea floor sediments.  Consequently, it can be assumed that the levels of free CO₂ in the ocean are more or less constant and that sea water represents an inexhaustible source of carbon dioxide.

How big are these numbers compared with what is bandied about by the anthropogenic global warmng types.  I will quote the estimable Department of Energy's numbers for annual fossil fuel derived carbon emissions:  averaging 26 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year between 2000 and 2006.  One suspects that these numbers are as inflated as James Hansen's temperature measurements, but let's just go with these for the moment.  What these numbers tell us is that it would take a hundred years of coal-burning, SUV-driving, natural gas-heating, airplane-flying carbon emissions at the present record-high levels to amount to one percent of the carbon dioxide reserve in the ocean.

Let me further point out that the solubility of carbon dioxide goes down sharply as the temperature goes up, which is why it is never a good idea to open a warm can of soda.  Between 0 deg C and 20 deg C (roughly the range of ocean temperatures these days) the solubility of carbon dioxide in water decreases about 5% for every degree of temperature increase.  Consequently, if the average temperature of the ocean increased one degree, that would have the potential for releasing 13 trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - the equivalent of 500 years of current levels of fossil fuel-based emissions.

Which brings me back to the Geology article I mentioned earlier.  Without boring you with the grisly details, the authors discovered that there was a direct correlation between the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide (as determined from Antarctic ice cores) and how hard the Southern Westerly winds were blowing (as inferred from pollen populations taken from South American lake sediment samples).  These winds, to quote the authors, “…constitute the major driver of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the formation and overturning of North Atlantic Deep Water, and the up-welling of CO₂-rich deep water.”  In other words, 14,000 years ago, strong winds in the Southern Hemisphere drove ocean currents that caused CO₂-rich water in deep ocean basins to rise to the warmer surface where it devolved carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

This combination of westerly winds and ocean currents seems to have been operating for at least the past 800,000 years and, arguably, since the opening of the Atlantic Ocean about 40 million years ago.  The correlation between the Southern Westerlies and atmospheric carbon dioxide described in the Geology article would suggest that this has been the dominant mechanism for fixing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere for the past 14,000 years.

The take-away here:  The world's oceans represent a very large and temperature sensitive reservoir of CO₂  and air and ocean currents provide a mechanism for the exchange of CO₂ between the ocean and the atmosphere.  In the geologically recent past, this exchange has been the primary mechanism for fixing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.  This begs the question that has been dodged and ignored by the Jame Hansen/Phil Jones/Michael Mann crowd:  Are the present high levels of atmospheric CO₂ an artifact of rising global temperatures as opposed to the cause of them?  

Technology: Telecommunications Issues

I never answer my house phone.  Why?  Because anyone we want to talk to calls me or the redhead on our mobile numbers.  Since we never use our house phone, I had thought to disconnect it, but then I realized that, for $25 a month, I had a decoy number that would attract telemarketers (Do Not Call List ?...yeah, right.), political groups, alumni associations (how do those fuckers keep finding me?), pollsters, etc.  Any form that I am required to fill out that wants a phone number gets the house number.  Any douchebag who asks for my number, in those social situations where "Bite me" is an inappropriate response, gets my house number. Stockbrokers calling me with a "hot stock tip"? Buwuhahahaha! "Damn! That sounds awesome...but I need to read the prospectus first.  Overnight it to me and then call me tomorrow at (house number)."

Of course, I have an answering machine, so when these undesirables call, they get a message telling them to leave a message -- I'm thinking of changing it to something really smarmy (We're Very Sorry we missed your call and You Are Very Important to us, so Please, Please, Please leave a message and we'll get right back to you...WHEN HELL FREEZES OVER, YOU LOSER!!!  This last part won't be in the message.) -- and I dutifully hit the "Delete All" button when the display flashes the "Memory Full".

The other advantage of this strategy is that it turns my house phone into an entertainment device.  Here's the scenario:  I'm at home, I'm bored, and the phone rings.  I look at the caller ID and see that it's my alma mater.  I answer:

Me: Hello.
Earnest Student Volunteer:  This in MaiXiang from Small Eastern Technical School calling.  Can I talk to Dr. Wrath?
Me:  Dr.Wrath?? You've got a lot of fucking nerve calling here, missy!
ESV:  What? Why? What?
Me:  This is Squirrely's brother.  He never got over that Stonehenge Day incident at Small Eastern Technical School and dissolved himself in a vat of acid yesterday.  All that was left was his IHTFP t-shirt, which was polyester so the acid had no affect on it.  It was horrible and in all the papers out here.
ESV:  Oh, I am so, so sorry.  That is awful...
Me:  Oh, cry me a fucking river, chickie.  I've got 500 gallons of acid in the garage here that used to be my brother, the EPA pounding on my door, and I don't know whether to call a funeral home or a toxic waste disposal unit....[click]

Or:

Me:  Hello.
Telemarketer:  Sir...I wanted to let you know that we have a special on cleaning carpets this week.
Me: Well, that's fucking awesome, because we have 35 cats and pretty much gave up on the litter box thing two years ago.  How soon can you be here?
Telemarketer:  [click]

$25 dollars a month...I'm just saying.

Methane bubbles...

There are media reports coming out that, in addition to oozing a few bazillion gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the Deepwater Horizon site is on the verge of unleashing a massive methane bubble that will cause global warming on an inconceivable scale, leading to the planet heating up to where we will all be immolated and life as we know it will end.  These reports claim that the same thing happened 250 million years ago at the end of the Permian period when there was a mass extinction, allegedly caused by a methane bubble of indeterminate origin, that wiped out 90 percent of the species then living.

This is absolute and shameless douchery on the part of anyone who is propagating these reports.  There was, indeed, a mass extinction at the end of the Permian period.  It was so massive that life on Earth came very close to being wiped out and it took the biosphere something like 75 million years to recover.  To put this 75 million number in perspective, homo sapiens has been dragging its knuckles around the planet for about 20 thousand years.  Whatever happened at the end of the Permian period was some powerful bad juju, but the fact of the matter is that no one has a clue what happened.

The problem is that the geological record from 250 million years ago is very sparse.  The boundary between the Permian and the Triassic period, where the extinction event occurred,  has been preserved in only three places in the world; South Africa, central Russia, and reportedly, in a section of China.  That limited geological record tells us that at the end of the Permian period, there was an abundance of life and, at the beginning of the Triassic period, bupkus, nada, zilch.  The boundary between the Permian and the Triassic, where it has been preserved, is characterized by a thick layer of black, carbonaceous gunk...the remnants of trillions of tons of animal and plant life that checked out.  Oxygen isotope samples indicate a substantial increase in temperatures at this boundary (maybe 10 degrees Celsius).  This is what is known about the Permian mass extinction.  Truth.

So, what caused this catastrophe? -- and this was a catastrophe.  No one knows.  The extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period that wiped out the dinosaurs was recent enough that the geological record is mostly preserved and it is, at this point, unambiguously clear that it was caused by a big honking meteorite/comet slamming into the Earth at cosmic speeds off-shore from the Yucatan Peninsula.  Buh-bye dinosaurs.

The Permian extinction is much more mysterious.  The temperature increase suggested by oxygen isotope samples led some geologists to speculate that extreme global warming caused it...and indeed, there is evidence of massive volcanic eruptions in India at about that time period (India being far to the south and not part of Asia at the end of the Permian period).  However, estimates of the carbon dioxide released by those eruptions showed that the warming associated with that release was far short of what would be required to cause the indicated temperature rise.  It was then speculated -- and let me stress the word "speculated" -- that the temperature rise attributable to the volcanic emissions was enough to cause sufficient warming at the poles to stimulate the release of massive methane bubbles that were enough to account for the indicated temperature rise.

However, other geologists have looked at the record and claimed that the temperature rise is an expected consequence of the death and decay of virtually every living thing on the planet, which releases methane on a massive scale.  These geologists would claim that the origin of the Permian extinction is unknowable based on presently available information, but it is not inconsistent with a massive meteor impact or a massive solar fluctuation.  Other geologists have rejected the idea that the Permian extinction was the result of a single catastrophic event and have argued that the assembly of the supercontinent, Pangea, at the beginning of the Permian period radically altered ocean and air circulation around the globe, which set in motion climatic changes that most species then living were unable to adapt to and became extinct.  Keep in mind that the geologic record from that time period is so incomplete that it is impossible to determine whether the Permian extinction occurred suddenly or over the course of several hundred thousand years.

The moral of this story, kids, is that any "science" you read in the mainstream media has nothing to do with science.  It is junk science being used to push an agenda.

A very accessible book on the Permian extinction is Michael J. Benton's "When Life Nearly Died".  An even more entertaining and readable discussion of the Cretaceous (buh-bye dinosaurs) extinction is Walter Alvarez' "T-Rex and the Crater of Doom".  References to alternate explanations for the Permian extinction can be found in Frank Decourten's "The Broken Land" and Scott Baldridge's "Geology of the American Southwest'.

...and another thing.

Since I am on the subject of the current global warming douchery, let me make a few things clear:

1. "Climate" is caused by an extremely complex interaction of ocean and air currents that has only recently begun to be studied and is a long way from being understood with any degree of certainty.  With 6 billion people in the world dependent on intensive agriculture for survival, spending billions to perpetuate Al "Call me Mr. President, baby" Gore/Phil Jones/James Hansen pseudo-science instead of using that money to understand real climatic changes that have historically caused disruptions in human societies is truly criminal.
2. Solar radiation is the source of energy that drives the ocean and air currents that cause "climate", but the details of this interaction are no more well understood than the connections between ocean and air movements and climate change...and causal effects are neither simple or obvious.  For example, shortly after the last Ice Age (about 11,000 BC), warming in the Arctic released massive amounts of fresh water into the Atlantic Ocean.  This influx of fresh water disrupted the Gulf Stream which caused cooling in Europe and northern Asia and essentially returned this part of the globe to Ice Age-like conditions for the next 1000 years (yes...1000 years as in "10 centuries").  This time span is referred to as the Younger Drydas Period.  At the end of this period, the Gulf Stream restarted -- no one knows how or why -- and Europe warmed up again.
3. The UN IPCC report that Al "I think I'll go get a massage, Tipper" Gore claimed was the "nail in the coffin" for proving global warming is science practiced at the high school science fair level.  The "forcing model" that is the basis for all of the dire warming claims is almost embarrassingly rudimentary...a one-dimensional model that adds up things that trap heat in the atmosphere, subtracts things that reflect it back into space and comes up with a number that predicts how fast the earth will warm up.  Even if you assume that this simple-minded model reflects something remotely connected with reality, if you look at the margin of error assigned to all of the individual "forcing" factors, the margins on subtracting factors (variable albedo, airborne particulates, etc.) are so great that the model actually predicts cooling if these subtracting factors are higher than the IPCC "scientists" have assumed them to be.
4. Something I was unaware of until a recent conversation with an actual climate scientist:  All attempts to use the "forcing model" to predict actual climate change have failed...and this has not been from lack of trying or shortage of supercomputer time.  In other words, if you take the temperature increases predicted by the forcing model and plug them into an actual climate model, the results have never reflected the reality.  For example, these climate models consistently predict that increased global temperatures will result in much dryer, hotter weather in the midwest United States and this obviously has not happened.
5. Finally, how does one actually measure an average global temperature?  Using a strictly local phenomenon (temperature) to determine a global effect is an exercise fraught with peril.  So how do you do it to come up with a meaningful number?  Obviously, you take temperature readings all over the world and calculate an average.  However, to arrive at this average, you need to take into account things like variation of temperature with altitude, seasonal variations, variation of temperature with latitude (the farther north you go, the cooler it becomes), and environmental variations (a maritime climate will be warmer than a continental climate at the same altitude and latitude).  This can all be done, but you need to be extremely careful with how you sample temperatures to insure that you don't skew the results, especially since there are a lot of subtleties involved.  For example, suppose you have a sampling station that has been used to monitor temperature over 50 years or so.  If this station is in a location that has become increasingly urbanized over that time period, it will measure an average temperature increase purely due to the fact that vegetation is being gradually replaced by concrete.  James Hansen's models of temperature change in the United States in the 20th century embarrassingly ignored this issue.  Determining this average global temperature requires an enormous amount of processing of an enormous amount of data...and there is a lot of room for error -- or outright fraud -- in doing this calculation...and it is really the validity of these calculations that is the heart of the global warming controversy, as we have learned from the revelation of the flim-flam in Phil Jones' "research" group.

Rant over...

The curious case of sunspots...

The scientists at NASA (Motto: It's not rocket science...hell, what we do isn't even science) have announced that there has been a curious absence of sunspots for the past few years and this absence has been the most prolonged in the past 100 years....and there is hand-wringing at NASA that this may just be the calm before the Sun unleashes solar storms on a epic level.  This last is pure douchery as there is no clear idea as to what drives the sunspot cycle within the Sun...but NASA climate change dogma requires it be said.

Lack of sunspot activity is by no means unprecedented.  The sixteenth century marked the beginning of systematic astronomical activity and the presence or absence of sunspots received a great deal of attention.  Astronomers through the next three hundred years noted periods of unusually low sunspot activity.  These periods were even named after their discoverers, the Sporer Minimum (1425-1575), the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715), and the Dalton Minimum (1790-1820).  Long periods of low sunspot activity are well documented and yet, NASA, in its hand-wringing report of a couple of years without sunspots, fails to even mention these precedents.  Why?

There is really no big mystery here.  Large portions of the NASA budget are dependent on climate change research and by "climate change" we mean "catastrophic anthropogenic global warming threatening life-as-we-know-it that will require massive government funding (to NASA) in order to save us from ourselves".  Historical sunspot minima are especially inconvenient in the present context for NASA climate doomsayers because low sunspot activity correlates to reduced solar luminosity and the previous minima coincide with the coldest periods of the so-called "Little Ice Age" that occurred between roughly 1380 and 1850.  Imagine that...variations in solar intensity being a primary driver of climate changes.  Note that the NASA report implies that sunspot activity has been high for the past 100 years.  Hmmm...increased solar intensity over the same period of time that mankind has supposedly been raping the planet with carbon emissions? Coincidence?  I think not.

Imagine the budgetary disaster at NASA if they started talking about 30 to 60 years of cooling temperatures ahead.  James Hansen might actually have to start doing real science instead of just making shit up.

Welcome to Stalag 1050

The Fortress of Solitude is situated on a corner lot in an undisclosed location near Las Vegas.  For reasons unexplained, the original builder built the house facing away from the corner.  Consequently, the backyard faces the street.  This is not as much of an inconvenience as one might think as the lot grade is about four feet above street level and the back yard is surrounded by a four foot block wall.  So, the Fortress of Solitude is, literally, a fortress.  Were we set upon by barbarians, jihadists, or angry Harry Reid supporters, I could, at my leisure, pour boiling oil on them from the safety of my fortress parapet.  "Buwuhahahahaha...that looks like it hurts, you heathen bastards! Here...let me crack open another cold one while the next pot of boiling oil heats up.  Hahahahahaha!"

It's a sweet set-up, but with one minor drawback.  It is a corner lot and the city decreed at some point that there had to be a street light on this particular corner for the Greater Public Good.  What this "Good" might be in a neighborhood where a couple of 50-somethings, i.e., me and the redhead, are considered the "young punks" is an impenetrable mystery...regardless, there is a street light on the corner, immediately adjacent to the backyard of the Fortress of Solitude.  Now, when we originally bought the house, this streetlight was your garden-variety 400W high pressure sodium lamp.  Distracting -- when the redhead and I would sit in the backyard to enjoy the evening or take a late night swim in the heat of the summer -- but tolerable.  In truth, I've always harbored something of an affection for high pressure sodium lights as one of my first tasks as a callow youth at the General Forge and Foundry Co. just out of graduate school was to figure out why low wattage high pressure sodium lamps were failing long before their big brothers.  I did and now, you can go out and buy a 50 watt high pressure sodium lamp for your illumination pleasure...you're welcome.

But I digress...anyway, for years I enjoyed whatever late night frolicking might be in order under the pale yellow-orange glow of "our" streetlight.  But then, about a week ago, I head into the backyard one evening in the midst of a typical Las Vegas windstorm to secure lawn furniture, fish random debris out of the pool, wrap my windchimes in duct tape, and tie my garbage cans down so I don't have to go on a "treasure hunt" to find them in the morning.  I'm doing all these things -- of course, I have belayed myself to the house with 13mm climbing rope to insure that I, myself, am not the subject of a morning "treasure hunt" -- when, suddenly, it hits me...it's brighter than freaking daylight out here!  Either someone has detonated a thermonuclear "device" over Las Vegas or...Yes! That's it!...We have a new street light.

...and there I was, looking up at a five eleventy-bazillion lumen Ha-Larc street light that was lighting up my backyard like it was a prison compound.  WTF?  When did this happen?  Apparently, the city decided that a mere 400W high pressure sodium lamp was not bright enough to protect the neighborhood from...what?  An impending zombie apocalypse or vampire outbreak?  Clearly, they wanted to insure that any miscreants that might be lurking around the neighborhood at night will need to wear sunglasses.

The redhead basking in the near-demonically bright street light that has turned the Fortress of Solitude into Stalag 1050.


Obviously, this situation is intolerable and demands action, but what?  My first thought was an act of vandalism that might, say, cause the light to break.  The redhead counsels a more mature approach where we go to the city and complain.  Yeah, right...and when those complaints fall on deaf ears, as they inevitably will, we become the lead suspects when I implement my campaign of vandalism.  What about the homeowner's association? she suggests.  I remind her that we have been locked in a mortal, tag-team, battle-to-the-death with the stormtrooper-like compliance committee for nine years now.  It's unlikely we will find sympathy with that group of nebbishes, douchebags, and busybodies.

No.  I am afraid that vandalism is the only viable approach.  But how to put the light out?  Of course, the Fortress is equipped with an array of handguns, any of which would easily do the job.  However, I suspect that my neighbors might look in askance and the local constabulary disapprove if I stood out in my backyard and started banging away at the light with my Desert Eagle.  Similarly, treating the streetlight as a stationary clay pigeon and ending its reign of illumination terror with a shotgun blast would, no doubt, attract unwanted attention and draw protests from neighbors who might be peppered with errant 00 pellets.  It then occurred to me, if I opened a bedroom window and crouched in the bathroom, I would have a straight shot at the streetlight with my AR-15, with the bedroom muffling the report and hiding the muzzle flash.  Yes, that could work...but if I missed, I would end up sending 5.56mm rounds into the new housing development down the wash...and I'm just wanting to put out a street light, not snipe my distant neighbors, even if most of them are refugees from the People's Republik of Kalifornia.  No.  Sadly, I don't seem to be properly equipped for the bit of skulduggery that's needed.

However, a little Googling provided this.  Hmmmm...

Seriously...Western civilization as we know it is in peril!

I started this blog to occasionally critique technical reporting in newspapers, which really is abysmal and almost always pushing an agenda.  I thought, as I have some credentials and experience in things science-related, I could do my part to improve the general public's understanding of the usually complex technical issues that are being reported by total morons.  However, in doing so, I have discovered that I have turned a blind eye to some critically important, no, Mortally Important issues that are not being addressed at all by the mainstream media and even the so-called blogosphere, which prides itself on being on top of everything, continues to ignore.

I am, of course, referring to the crisis of near galactic importance that has been brewing at Starbucks ("brewing" "Starbucks"...get it?).   The coffee juggernaut has apparently changed its frappacinno recipe (OH! SWEET MOTHER OF GOD! NO! NO! NO!). I am indebted to Sheri Gilmour for bringing this to my attention, because although I am a regular Starbucks customer, I usually just go in, wade through the sea of small children, cranked up on sugar and caffeine, who are wilding in the store, stand in line behind a bunch of douches who are demanding a soy mocha-frappa-skinny-latte with whipped cream and an extra pump of some syrupy bullshit, and order - call me "old school" - coffee.  Consequently, I was blissfully unaware to the mind-boggling crisis that is shaking the very roots of our way of life!  A few minutes on MyStarbucksIdea.com will convince you of the enormity of the disaster in the making.  Long time Starbucks customers have actually threatened to NOT BUY THE NEW FRAPPACINNO!  Other customers are experiencing symptoms of stress.  Still others have complained that their dear sweet children have pitched a booger and refused to drink the new frappacinno...and it goes without saying that grave concerns have been voiced over the impact that this new recipe will have on the environment.

Of course, predictably, there are those drawing parallels between this fiasco and the New Coke disaster of the 1980's and others pointing out that this is only a harbinger of the end of the world in 2012.  There are even hints that the new recipe is the work of Dark Corporate Starbucks Overlords who have changed the recipe to advance their Evil Agenda.  There does seem to be some disagreement as to what this agenda actually is, but rumors of increased profits, sterilization of the undesirable, and take-over by the Republican Party abound.

I don't know...I'm just a simple rustic living in the distant provinces.  I go into a store and buy a whatever, taste it and think, "This tastes like crap."...I just walk down the street and buy something at Peet's that I might like better, but that's just me.  But I also realize that my simple world view is sometimes too simple.  It would seem that there are many people in this world convinced that Armageddon is here, life as we know it is ending, and unspeakable Evil is afoot.  Out of respect for them, I am begging everyone who reads this to take action.  Call, email, write your entire congressional delegation.  Hearings must be held!  Call, email, write your favored media outlets and demand to know why this is not being reported.  Organize grass-roots efforts to protest this abomination!  But most of all, contact Reynolds Aluminum and tell them to beef up production of aluminum foil...it would seem that a lot of Starbucks customers have lost their hats.