Transcription
When you started to object to the narrative, what narrative were you objecting to and on what grounds? This is back, say in '92. What narrative were you objecting to and on what grounds were you objecting?
"You're touching on something that took me a while to understand. Um, you know, Gerbles famously said, you know, if you tell a big enough lie and repeat it often enough, it'll become the truth. There's been a lot of that in this but there are aspects of establishing the narrative, i.e., what makes something the truth, that I hadn't appreciated. So the narrative was the climate is determined by a greenhouse effect and adding CO2 to it increases it, causes warming, and moreover, the natural greenhouse substances besides CO2, water vapor, clouds, upper-level clouds, will amplify whatever man does."
"Mhm. Mhm."
"Now, that immediately goes against Lhatalier's principle, which says if you perturb a system and it is capable internally of counteracting it, it will."
"And you, you think that applies? Okay. And so that's, that's a very germane issue because..."
"Well, but let me..."
"Even if... Please go ahead."
"Let me finish because... Okay. So that was a little bit odd. You began wondering where did these feedbacks come from and, um, immediately people, including myself, started, uh, looking into the feedbacks and seeing whether there were any negative ones or how did it work. But underlying it, and this is what I learned, if you want to get a narrative established, the crucial thing is to pepper it with errors, Mhm. questionable things, so that the critics will seize on that and not question the basic narrative. The basic narrative in this sense was that climate is controlled by the greenhouse effect. In point of fact, the Earth's climate system, which has many regions, but two distinct, different regions are the tropics, roughly the minus 30 to 30° latitude, and the extratropics, outside of 30° plus or minus. They have very different dynamics. In the tropics, the crucial thing for the Earth, by the way, and this is a technicality and much harder to convey than saying that greenhouse gases are a blanket or that 97% of scientists agree. Uh, this is actually a technical issue. The Earth rotates. Now, people are aware of that. We have day and night. But there is something called the Coriolis effect. When you're on a rotating system, it gives rise to the appearance of forces that change the winds relative to the rotation. And the only component of the rotation is the component that is perpendicular to the surface. So at the pole, the rotation vector is perpendicular to the surface. At the equator, it's parallel to the surface. It's zero. And this gives you phenomenally different dynamics. So where you don't have a vertical component to the rotation vector, motions do what they do in the laboratory, in small scales. If you have a temperature difference, it acts to wipe it out. And so if you look at the tropics, the temperatures at any surface are relatively flat. They don't vary much with latitude. On the other hand, you go to the mid-latitudes, extratropics, there the temperature varies a lot between the tropics and the pole. We know that. I mean, temperatures are cold at high latitudes. And if you look at changes in climate in the Earth's history, what they consist in is a tropics that stays relatively constant. And what changes is the temperature difference between the tropics and the pole. During the ice age, it was about 40° centigrade. Today it's about, it was about 60. Today it's about 40. During 50 million years ago, something called the Eocene was about 20. And so that's all a function of what's going on outside the tropics. Within the tropics, the greenhouse effect is significant. But what determines the temperature change between the tropics and the pole has very little to do with the greenhouse effect. It is a dynamic phenomenon based on the fact that if you have a temperature difference with latitude, it generates instabilities. These instabilities take the form of the cyclonic and anticyclonic patterns that you see on the weather map. Now, the tropics are very different. I mean, you know, even a casual look at a weather map, the systems that bring us weather travel from west to east at latitudes outside the tropics. Tropics. Within the tropics, they travel from east to west. The prevailing winds are opposite in the two sections. And we're saying that what changes due to the greenhouse effect, however you look at it, is amplified at the poles. That is not true. There's no physical basis for that statement. All they do is determine the starting point for where the temperature changes in middle latitudes, and that's determined mainly by hydrodynamics. Okay, that's complicated to explain to someone."
"And yet..."
"And yet it's the basis for claiming that these seemingly large, small numbers, you know, they say if global mean temperature goes up one and a half degrees, it's the end. That's based on it getting much bigger at high latitudes and determining that. But all 1 1/2° at the equator would do, or in the greenhouse part of the Earth, is change the temperature everywhere by 1 and 1/2°, which for most of us is less than the temperature change between breakfast and lunch."
"And so let me lay out the narrative and correct me if I've, if I've got it wrong. So, first of all, um, the world at the moment is making a big deal out of climate and associating climate change with the greenhouse effect, the trapping of heat. And they're associating, we're all associating the greenhouse effect with an increase in carbon dioxide. And at least initially, we were associating that increase in climate, in carbon dioxide, with with global warming. And then we've added the proposition that, well, not only will there be warming, say, of up to a degree and a half or 2° by the end of the century, and and maybe there's some variation in those predictions, but we're also looking at a system that's characterized by a variety of positive feedback loops, and those, the danger here is that a one and a half degree increase might not be catastrophic, but that that might trigger a sequence of cataclysmic events. We hear sometimes about the melting of the Greenland ice cap, for example, the rapid rise in sea level that would occur as a consequence, the increase of temperatures at the poles, the release of methane as a consequence, let's say, of the permafrost, um, um, thawing, and then a runaway greenhouse effect because of that. And you evinced some skepticism, well, about the whole narrative, but also more particularly, and perhaps more importantly, you don't sound like you're a big fan of the idea of runaway positive feedback loops."
"Oh, well, there are a lot of things shed in what you've said. Even the 1 and a half degree depends on the positive feedbacks. Otherwise, CO2 would be even less significant, much less significant. So those, you know, you assume that water vapor increases and amplifies it. But the whole picture is one-dimensional. So, you know, it's, you'd have to know the area where water vapor is important and goes through a mess of things, and we know now that that probably isn't occurring, even people who support the narrative."
"So, you keep..."
"Water vapor isn't amplifying carbon dioxide effects?"
"Um, if it is, it has to be considered as part of an infrared feedback, and nobody has detected that that is actually positive."