That the Earth has been warming steadily for the past few centuries and intermittently for over 10,000 years is incontrovertible fact. However, there have been a number of asser-tions about global warming that are half-truths or outright falsehoods. This blog will focus on my problems with the current conventional wisdom about global warming.

Fifteen years ago I accepted the conventional wisdom about global warming. My back- ground was in geology and operations research, and I had no reason to doubt what some climate scientists were saying about it. At that time I was engaged in an email discussion with an old college fraternity brother, and he happened to make an assertion about global warming that I knew was untrue because of my knowledge of the geologic record of the Earth.

By refuting what my friend had said, I precipitated a debate that went on until he died a couple of years ago. My friend kept citing things about global warming that were often scientific charlatanism or outright scientific fraud. To refute the things he said, I was forced to expand my own horizons in climate science, meteorology, biology, paleontology, oceanography, zoology, and even cosmology. As I did so, I found that the conventional wisdom about global warming had a rather large number of problems. Essentially this blog is a compendium of that research.

For the record, I regard myself as an environmentalist. I do not believe we should be burn- ing fossil fuels for energy because our posterity is going to desperately need them in a few centuries. I do not believe we should be driving species to extinction in pursuit of aphrodisiacs, perfumes, and culinary delicacies. I certainly do not believe that we should trash our natural environment with unbridled human development. And I believe there are numerous organizations, such as the Nature Conservancy, that are pursuing rational environmental policies.

However, there are three environmental organizations that I have serious problems with: the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the World Meteorological Organiza- tion (WMO), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In my opinion these organizations have been advocating a view of global warming that is riddled with half-truths and falsehoods. I believe this is because these organizations are dominated by scientists who are mostly meteorologists that are now calling themselves climate scien- tists. For the rest of this blog I will refer to these people as the Global Warming Crowd, or GWC for short. But, I want to be clear that I am only talking about a very narrowly defined group of environmentalists that espouse the following message about global warming…

1. The Earth’s climate has been warming continuously throughout the Industrial Revolution.
2. Climate change is due to increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.
3. The annual surplus of CO2 is all Man’s fault due to burning hydrocarbons for energy.
4. Global warming will continue so long as Man continues to burn fossil fuels.
5. Continued global warming will result in imminent economic catastrophes.
6. Continued global warming will result in imminent ecological catastrophes.
7. Venus once had permanent oceans but suffered a runaway greenhouse effect, which could also occur on Earth if Man continues to burn fossil fuels.

Of these statements, only the first statement is completely true. The second statement is only partially true. Atmospheric Methane has increased three-fold in the past two centu- ries. It now provides more that half of the greenhouse warming that CO2 does.

The third statement is also a half-truth. Man is very likely fully responsible, directly or indirectly, for the current CO2 surplus, but only about 25% of that surplus is due to the burning of hydrocarbons for energy. The fourth statement is highly unlikely to be true, because we are currently poised to return to a glacial phase of the Quaternary Ice Age.

The fifth statement depends on how we define “catastrophe”. If the polar ice caps com- pletely melt (the Earth has permanent polar ice caps only during ice ages), the area of the planet covered by water will increase from 70% to 75%. That will flood our coastal cities and inundate substantial areas currently employed for agriculture. However, there are some things the GWC neglects to mention. Sea level is rising at the rate of millimeters per year, so we will have a century or two to adjust. Sea levels have been rising intermittently for 10,000 years, so scuba divers in places in the Mediterranean Sea can view ancient cities that are now completely submerged. In other words, we have already been adjusting to rising sea levels.

In addition, we have no reason to doubt that the huge advances in agri- cultural productivity seen in the past half-century will not continue or be supplemented with aquaculture. While the economic effects of adjusting to rising sea levels will be quite substantial over a century or more, I don’t see anything approaching an imminent catastrophe.

For the sixth statement, IPCC provides a list of ecological catastrophes with the implica- tion that they could all occur with a rise of only a few degrees C. In fact, most of them, such as turning the Amazon basin into a desert, are regional weather phenomenon, not global climate issues. (Even then it is due more to clear cutting for homesteads by the Bra- zilian government than global warming.) One of the disasters in IPCC’s list, the sublima- tion of the methane clathrates in the continental shelves, is a true catastrophe, but has only occurred in the geologic record when the surface temperature of the Earth approaches 20°C warmer than present. Although such temperatures occur periodically, the forces driving them work very slowly, so we are tens of millions of years away from that sort of catastrophe.

One of the ecological catastrophes the IPCC cites, though, is happening right now. There is a much-publicized die-off of organisms in the shallow tropical seas, notably corals. What the GWC fails to mention is that this is the fourth such die-off in the past 800,000 years. In other words, it is a natural process that has operated since before Homo Sapiens existed, much less had kitchen matches. Another thing the GWC doesn’t talk about is that evolution is already compensating. There are already corals taking over the abandoned reefs that have mutated to withstand warmer temperatures and more acidic oceans. I don’t see that as a catastrophe and I certainly don’t see it as being all Man’s fault.

In fairness, I have to say that very few GWC scientists talk about the runaway greenhouse effect. That is because it is scientific nonsense. Venus has always been a hell-hole and never had liquid oceans. (I will explain why when I discuss extraterrestrial drivers of cli- mate.) In addition, the Earth has long-term climate cycles that are self-correcting and make the possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect extremely remote (until the Sun becomes a Red Giant in a few billion years). It is far more likely that the Earth will become an ice ball, as happened 700m years ago, than that it will have a runaway green- house effect.

The criticisms of the GWC Message above are by no means the only problems with the message; they merely represent a sort of executive summary. One thread you may have noticed is that there are facts that the GWC doesn’t like to talk about. This will be a recur- ring theme throughout the blog. One of the problems I have with the GWC is that they believe their message with religious fervor. This allows them to ignore contrarian data or dismiss it out of hand; they know they are right, so such data must be wrong. This is sup- ported, in part, by the fact that many of them have devoted their entire careers to the notion of continued global warming and the catastrophes they associate with it.

Let me list just a few more facts that the GWC tends to ignore:

The average temperature of the Earth for the past 540 million years since multi-cel- lular life evolved is about 7°C warmer than present. That is because we are living in the Quaternary Ice Age. We don’t see a lot of ice sheets because we are currently in an interglacial hiatus, a brief warming period. Though the hiatus is warmer than a glacial phase, it is still well below the norm for the Earth.

The average atmospheric CO2 level for the past 540 million years is well above 3,000 ppm. This is more than eight times the current level.

The Earth’s biosphere is most profuse and most diverse at the norms for tempera- ture and atmospheric CO2. That is, at those norms the tropical zone extends from the present 10° north and south latitude to as much as 60° north and south latitude.

The lowest level of atmospheric CO2, about 200 ppm, in the entire 4.5 billion year history of the Earth was reached about 12,000 years ago. The long term trend for CO2 is downwards; the present interglacial hiatus is merely a small, temporary reversal of that trend.

The minimum atmospheric CO2 necessary support photosynthesis in plants is 185- 225 ppm. In other words, 12,000 years ago we were on the verge of extinction, given that plants are the bottom of our food chain.

The first three facts tell us that IPCC’s ecological catastrophes are not quite as imminent or catastrophic as they would have us believe. The last two facts tell us that we should be putting more CO2 into the atmosphere rather than cutting it back. The present 400 ppm is far too close to the extinction level for my taste.

While this blog will be highly critical of IPCC, WMO, NOAA, and the GWC that controls those organizations, I must be clear that I do not believe there is any malevolent conspir- acy. Nobody is calling a meeting on the first Monday of the quarter to decide how to hood- wink the public. These people really believe what they are saying. Nor were there any palace coups to take over these organizations. Such organizations are primarily populated by invitation, so it is quite natural to invite like-minded individuals to join. Unfortunately, a few members of the GWC feel it is imperative to raise public consciousness about the impending catastrophes they believe are imminent, so they embrace the notion that the end justifies the means and they step over the line into scientific charlatanism and scientific fraud.

The remainder of this blog is divided into four parts: (1) a discussion of the several mech- anisms that actually control global climate; (2) a brief geologic history to demonstrate how these mechanisms interact with one another to drive the real climate of the Earth; (3) a description of the present interglacial hiatus, because its future is critically important to the survival of human civilization; and (4) a discussion of the deceptive ways the GWC promulgates their message.

2.0 Climate mechanisms

Though the GWC focuses almost exclusively on atmospheric CO2, there are actually several other important mechanisms that drive global climate. These can be roughly charac- terized in five broad groups of processes: extraterrestrial; atmospheric; plate tectonic; biological; and oceanic.

2.1 Extraterrestrial climate drivers

The universe is a dangerous place. For example, a neutron star in the WR-104 system, 8,000 light years away, will generate a gamma ray burst sometime in the next 500,000 years or so that could sterilize life on the surface of the Earth and, perhaps, blow away most of our atmosphere. While that burst is likely to be a near miss of our solar system, another neutron star could target us at any time. Nearby novas and supernovas could pro- duce similar results. Massive solar flares could also raise havoc with the Earth’s climate. There have also been mass extinctions roughly every 30 million years that some attribute to intersections between Earth’s orbit and a cluster of comets from the outer solar system in a highly eccentric orbit. While these and other simiar events can cause climatic mass extinctions, they are quite rare so I won’t deal with them specifically.

2.1.1 Our Warming Sun

One extraterrestrial event of interest, though, is that the Sun is warming. The Sun is cur- rently providing about 30% more energy to the surface of the Earth than 4 billion years ago when life first appeared on Earth. That increase has been fairly steady, but the rate of increase has been so slow that it is unimportant at any time scale of interest to Man.

I only mention it because it supports the Gaia Hypothesis, which is a favorite of SciFi writers. Under the Gaia Hypothesis, a planet can act to control its own surface environ- ment in an intelligent manner, much like a single, vast organism. I don’t subscribe to the Gaia Hypothesis. However, it is a remarkable coincidence that the Earth’s greenhouse effect, which is largely determined by highly diverse life on the surface, has decreased in lock-step with the Sun’s increasing energy to maintain the very narrow climate band of 10- 30°C necessary for carbon-based life as we know it. Maintaining that narrow band is a remarkable coincidence. In passing, I will point out a number of other, even more remark- able coincidences in the geologic record that seem to support the Gaia Hypothesis.

2.1.2 The Goldilocks Zone

Of greater relevance is the Goldilocks Zone. This is an orbital zone around a star where it is possible for planets orbiting in the zone to have permanent liquid water on their sur- faces. Cosmologists have found evidence of water all over our solar system in the past few decades, but Earth is the only body with permanent liquid water on the surface. The Earth is just inside the Sun’s Goldilocks Zone, about 0.3 astronomical units (Earth’s average orbital radius) inside the outer edge of the zone.

The operative word in the above definition is ‘possible’. Earth is so near the outer edge of the Goldilocks Zone, that it would be frozen solid without a strong greenhouse effect. (In fact, about 700 million years ago the Earth was an ice ball with an average surface tem- perature of -15°C, but that is getting ahead of the story…). While the Goldilocks Zone has nothing to do with day-to-day climate change, it is important to the idea of a runaway greenhouse effect.

Venus is actually just outside the inner boundary of the Goldilocks Zone (though it was barely inside the zone during the first billion years of its existence). It receives about 42% more energy from the Sun than the Earth does. The Earth cooled enough for steam to con- dense from the atmosphere into our oceans about 4.1 billion years ago. But because Venus receives much more energy from the Sun, it would not have cooled enough to condense oceans until about 3.5 billion years ago. However, by that time Venus was dry as a bone due to its lack of a protective magnetic field. Without that field, Venus is bombarded by hard radiation from the Sun. That radiation disassociated the steam molecules into sepa- rate hydrogen and oxygen molecules. The hydrogen rose in the atmosphere and was swept away in the solar wind, leaving Venus completely dry.

The lack of water on Venus means that plate tectonics on Venus has no lubrication. There- fore the crustal rocks on Venus respond to the larger tidal forces there by breaking and sliding, generating massive friction heat. That is why Venus always has almost continuous volcanism, more than any other planet in our solar system. That volcanism has produced an atmosphere that is now 99% CO2. Thus Venus has always been a hell-hole since it started to form 4.5 billion years ago.

The presence of large amounts of water on Earth and its position just inside the outer edge of the Goldilocks Zone pretty much precludes the Earth from ever having a runaway greenhouse effect. But to understand why, I need to discuss the roles of plate tectonics and biologic processes in determining the Earth’s long-term climate later in the blog.

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Fundamental Climate Processes

To understand how the Greens have fallen down the rabbit hole, I need to run through a quick description of basic Earth processes as they relate to climate. The Greens tend to be highly selective in choosing the processes they care about, and they often misinterpret those they do care about.

The Earth is essentially a big rock orbiting the Sun in a vacuum. Because it is internally warmer than space, due to radioactive decay, it radiates heat into space. That heat radiation is technically known as black body radiation. With the application of some esoteric physics, scientists can predict what the surface temperature of a body would be for a given level of radiation. The models that predict such temperatures are known as black body radiation models and they provide the basis of most of the discussions of global warming.

The prediction of temperature by those models is complicated by three things: the Earth is not black; the Sun provides energy to the Earth; and the Earth has oceans and an atmosphere. These complications lead to an entire suite of rather intricate models. The first place where Green organizations dominated by meteorologists, such as the IPCC, go wrong in interpreting their models is in using the wrong temperature. They focus on the average temperature of the bottom of the Troposphere, when they should be talking about the temperature of the surface of the Earth on which we are standing. However, this misinterpretation is minor compared to other Green misinterpretations that I discuss throughout this blog.

The big problem with focusing on atmospheric temperature is that it largely ignores the oceans. As it happens, the oceans are an enormous reservoir of heat and they store nearly twenty times the amount of heat as the atmosphere. One implication of that is that the oceans ensure long term stability for climate because it takes a lot of heat to modify the oceans’ temperature by even a small amount. Without the oceans, our daily temperature would vary by 120°C from 3 AM to 3 PM. Such a differential would lead to hurricane force winds circumnavigating the Earth continuously, driven by the day/night divide. A second implication is that small changes in ocean currents that transfer heat back and forth with the atmosphere can be enormously important to climate. For example, a relatively minor increase in heat transferred from the equator to the poles can result in an Ice Age.

The real complexity lies in the models of the atmosphere because gases absorb heat. Thus gases can absorb the heat radiating from the surface of the Earth as long-wave black body radiation so that it does not escape into space. (Short-wave radiation from the Sun is not readily absorbed by atmospheric gases, so it goes directly to the surface.) That absorption is the basis of the greenhouse effect, where atmospheric gases trap heat trying to escape to space and cause the atmospheric temperature to rise, which changes our climate. However, the elevated temperature due to absorbing long-wave radiation creates an unstable energy state that causes those gasses to re-radiate the long-wave radiation in all directions. Thus almost half of the radiation absorbed is retuned to the surface of the Earth and warms it above the warming due to incoming solar radiation. In extreme cases like Venus, this feedback can lead to climates incapable of supporting life as we know it. The greenhouse effect is what the Greens are worried about when talking about global warming.

To further complicate things, different gases absorb heat at different rates. The Greens tend to focus on carbon dioxide (CO2) as a source of the greenhouse effect, but water vapor (H2O) and methane (CH4) are also important causes of the effect. To describe the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere, the Greens rely on a particular model known as the Carbon Cycle. It essentially describes how the element carbon moves back and forth between the atmosphere and the surface of the Earth, mainly though CO2. There are several sources of atmospheric CO2, such as plant and animal respiration, burning hydrocarbons, and volcanism. There are also several ways CO2 is removed from the atmosphere, such as through rainfall via solution and photosynthesis. For carbon-based life, such as ourselves, to be viable, these sources and sinks need to be roughly in balance to provide a fairly constant ongoing amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. (Without life and the greenhouse effect, the Earth would be an ice ball with an average surface temperature of -13°C.) A problem for analysis of the Carbon Cycle is that there are large delays in the cycle, because CO2 tends to stay in the atmosphere for centuries before it is removed.

At the present time the carbon cycle is out of balance, and each year the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increases by about 1%. This is the primary concern of the Greens at IPCC, WMO, and NOAA. They see a direct correlation between rising CO2 content in the atmosphere and rising atmospheric temperature, as more black body radiation is trapped by the greenhouse effect. They see this as a major threat to our long-term survival. They predict rising sea levels as polar ice melts, and an increasingly arid climate that will greatly reduce food crops. To justify this fear, they point to mass extinctions in the past when atmospheric temperature and CO2 reached high levels — such as at the end of the Permian Period, 250m years ago, when as many as 95% of all species living at that time went extinct. The notion of a mass extinction is quite scary and the IPCC tries to present the threat of increasing CO2 and global warming in the scariest possible light. (In their zeal, they cross the line into scientific charlatanism and my last post in the blog describes a number of techniques they use to do that.)

One thing the Greens don’t tell you is that the range of CO2 that will support carbon-based life is actually quite large. Those climate-caused mass extinctions occurred when CO2 was 12-20 times greater than it is now and there was also a lot more methane in the atmosphere. They also fail to mention that current levels of CO2 are close to historic lows for the past four billion years. But I’ll have more to say about that later.

While the role of CO2 in the greenhouse effect is important and there have been climatic mass extinctions in the past, the IPCC is actually suffering from several problems in interpreting the black body radiation models and the Carbon Cycle. These are…

CO2 myopia. CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas. CO2 is a just one moderately effective greenhouse gas. It is important at the scale of millennia because of its role in the Carbon Cycle and because it is fairly common. Methane (CH4) is 72 times more effective in absorbing long-wave radiation than CO2 and nitrogen oxide (N2O3) is 230 times more effective. However, these gases are present in such small quantities (normally) that they account for only about 16% of the overall greenhouse effect at present. Curiously, the official list of greenhouse gases provided by the IPCC does not include water vapor (H2O). H2O is much less effective than CO2 but there is a lot more of it than CO2 in the atmosphere, so it currently accounts for roughly 60% of the greenhouse effect. The variability of its volume in the atmosphere makes it critical to most rapid climate changes, such as the notoriously rapid changes in temperature associated with the starting and ending of interglacial hiatuses. (I will be talking about this in the next post because we are living in such a hiatus at present).

If pressed, IPCC will justify not including H2O in their list of greenhouse gases because technically water vapor is not a gas because atmospheric temperatures are too low to support produce steam, the gaseous phase of H2O. Thus water vapor in the atmosphere is merely a suspension of liquid water molecules. I submit using this sort of pedantic quibble to justify ignoring it (I could not find a single reference to its effect on the greenhouse on the IPCC web site) is scientific charlatanism. You can’t talk about Earth’s greenhouse effect in any meaningful way without talking about water vapor. If IPCC was that concerned with technical definitions, they should have renamed their list “Greenhouse Components” and included water vapor to provide proper balance. But they didn’t because if the naïve reader does the math from their list, CO2 will seem to contribute over 70% of the greenhouse effect, which is exactly what they want you to think.

Recently the Greens have argued that the increasingly erratic weather worldwide during the past three decades is due to global warming from increased CO2 levels. That claim is completely false. Local weather is driven by temperature, water vapor, and local geography. Meteorologists have several equations that are used to explain everything from hurricanes to offshore breezes and cloud formations. Each of those equations has a term specifying water vapor content or temperature or both. None of those equations has a term specifying CO2 content. In fact, increasingly erratic weather is a harbinger of imminent rapid climate change due to changes in heat transfers between equator and poles via ocean currents, which I will have more to say about later in the blog. Note that the Earth has been warming fairly steadily for a few thousand years. If erratic weather is due to increasing atmospheric CO2 and erratic weather is driven by that, why has erratic weather only increased over the past three decades?

Assuming the natural Carbon Cycle is constant. A critical part of the Green position is that Man’s burning of hydrocarbons for energy is the sole cause of present global warming. That position is predicated on the assumption that the contributions of all the natural mechanisms of the Carbon Cycle, such as plant respiration, are constant over time. This enables the Greens to point the finger at Man for causing the current surplus, because Man has only seriously added CO2 via burning hydrocarbons since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century. That assumption of nature being constant is simply not true and a major goal of the geological history of the Earth in the next post is to demonstrate why it is nonsense.

Ignoring the geologic record. 550 million years ago multi-cellular life became dominant on Earth. If we look at the geologic history of the Earth since that time, there are a number of inconvenient facts for the Greens. The present atmospheric temperature and CO2 content are close to historic lows for that entire time period. The only times they have been lower is during the glacial phases of our current Ice Age. The average atmospheric temperature for the Earth for the last 500 million years is about 7-10°C higher than present, including ice ages. The average CO2 content over that time is well above 3,000 ppm. Yet life thrived at the mean levels with more diversity than at present; the Earth between the 30° latitudes, north and south, was a largely a tropical paradise. At the present time we are living in the Quaternary Ice Age that began about 2.6 million years ago and will likely continue for at least another million years. There aren’t a lot of ice sheets around now because we are currently in what is technically known as an interglacial hiatus. That is a short period (usually 1-2 thousand years) of temporary warming. There have been several previous hiatuses over the past 2.6 million years and they are all essentially identical — and there are well-understood mechanisms for starting and terminating them that I will talk about in detail later.

When your only tool is a hammer, the world is full of nails. The Green’s CO2 myopia and ignorance of the geologic record are only two examples of their focus on meteorology as the solution to the world’s problems, to the exclusion of other mechanisms. In particular, the Greens see atmospheric CO2 as driving atmospheric temperature. That is true up to a point. However, if you look at long-term trends in temperature and CO2 content, temperature actually leads CO2 content by about 800 years. That is, at major climatic turning points, the temperature trend will reverse before the CO2 trend does. The reason is that climate turning points are usually triggered by other mechanisms, such as changes in atmospheric water vapor content. My point here is that the Earth is a very complex system and there are a lot of powerful forces at work that drive conditions in the atmosphere and, consequently, climate. The Greens tend to focus only on atmospheric CO2 content.

Plate Tectonics. The last point allows me to segue into a discussion of one of the most important factors in the Earth’s climate: plate tectonics. The Earth’s crust is relatively thin, ranging from 5 Km thick for oceanic crust to up to 40 Km thick for continental crust. (That may seem pretty thick but it is quite thin compared to the Earth’s 12,000 Km diameter. If the Earth were reduced to the size and mass of a chicken egg, the surface would be so smooth that it would be impossible to pick up with two fingers.) That crust literally floats on the Earth’s Upper Mantle. The Upper Mantle is quite hot and under great pressure, so it has huge convective cells where solid mantle rocks flow via plastic deformation. Those cells push the continents around like slag on top of a bucket of molten recycled iron. The movement is slow – just a few centimeters per year. However, the momentum is huge, so that when continents collide massive mountain ranges are formed. An example is the ongoing formation of the Himalayas as India continues to crash into Asia (Mount Everest has grown 27 feet in the 150 years). Plate collisions also drive major amounts of volcanism that produce greenhouse cases (for example, the famous Pacific Ring of Fire).

[Man’s recorded history has been a remarkably quiet period compared to the rest of the geologic record. For example, there has only been one supervolcano eruption, Mt. Toba in Indonesia in 999 CE, in our recorded history. A single, smallish supervolcano eruption can thrust more than three times man’s annual production of CO2 into the atmosphere. There are 26 known active supervolcanos. Plateau basalts can produce similar amounts of CO2 in almost continuous eruptions for as long a 1m years.]

The movements of continents around on the surface of the Earth are called plate tectonics (or, more popularly, continental drift). Every physical thing we observe on the surface of the Earth, from Mt. Everest to a grain of beach sand, is a product of plate tectonics. The Earth is 4 billion years old, yet there are only a handful of locations on Earth where we can actually find rocks that are more than 3 billion years old. All the other rocks have been recycled many times through what is quaintly called the Rock Cycle (see the figure below, which describes how the three major classes of rock types morph into one another via geologic processes). That recycling is the direct result plate tectonics. Even the atoms of our bodies have passed through the Rock Cycle several times.

Plate tectonics does far more than manipulate rock materials, though. There are several ways it directly affects climate. A major example is that whenever the continental land masses are bunched together at the poles, we have an ice age. In that situation, the major ocean currents tend to simply circumnavigate the planet on the equator and do not transfer any heat to polar regions, causing the polar atmospheric cells to expand towards the equator. Similarly, when continents bunch up near the equator, we tend to have a tropical paradise. (This is a somewhat oversimplified explanation because life and atmospheric Hadley Cells combine to change the heat gradient between equator and poles as the continents move.)

At a smaller scale, the mountain ranges created as plates collide deflect winds. That causes the winds to drop moisture as rain as they climb over the mountains. Thus the western part of Washington State has high rainfall but the eastern part of the state behind the Cascade Range is quite arid. Major mountain ranges, like the Himalayas, also dictate where large convective cells in the atmosphere form. That, in turn, affects rainfall and creates monsoons for fertile areas like the ‘rice bowl’ in Southeast Asia that feeds nearly 4b people.

200 million years ago there was a single huge continent called Gondwanaland located on the equator. It was crisscrossed with large mountain ranges formed by the collisions of several plates. The result was a tropical paradise with rain forests and swamps everywhere. That paradise gave birth to the dinosaurs by supporting the gigantic herbivores at the base of their food chain (though there were quite a few small dinosaurs that don’t get much press). Alas, by the end of the Cretaceous Era, 65 million years ago, that continent had broken up into the continents we know today. They were starting to drift apart and most of the mountain ranges had been eroded away, drastically reducing rainfall. The new continents had arid interiors with Saharan-like sand dunes. That climate could no longer support huge herbivores and the dinosaurs went away.

Two other mechanisms have an enormous effect on climate. They are the two most important mechanisms with respect to life as we know it and they operate in tandem to control our climate…

Photosynthesis. This is the process where CO2, H2O, and sunlight are converted to hydrocarbons. The basic reaction is:

6CO2 + 6H2O + light energy => C6H12O6 + 6O2

The reaction varies and the large molecule on the right, glucose, will be substantially different in various plants and microbes. Without photosynthesis our atmosphere would be utterly toxic to human life. All plants and most microbes on the surface of the Earth employ some form of photosynthesis, but almost no animals provide the process.

Respiration. This is the process where hydrocarbons and O2 are converted into energy for cell formation, movement, and reproduction by all living things on Earth. It is essentially the chemical process of metabolism in carbon-based living things. The basic equation is:

C6H12O6 + 6O2 => energy + 6CO2 + 6H2O

Note that this is exactly the opposite of photosynthesis. All living, carbon-based organisms require respiration for growth, reproduction, and movement.

An obvious question is: If only plants remove CO2 and produce O2 while both plants and animals remove O2 and produce CO2, why doesn’t CO2 dominate our atmosphere? The simple answer is that plants and microbes, which are not very active, do a lot more photosynthesis than they do respiration. However, that ratio depends on the type of organism. Although there are exceptions, the general rule is that faster growth and more activity requires more energy, so the metabolism of the organism will be higher and more respiration will be necessary. Similarly, animals that live on land must fight gravity to move, so they have much higher metabolisms than animals in the ocean, which require less energy to move due to neutral buoyancy. As it happens, respiration of animals on land is critical to climate. That’s why ice ages occur when land masses concentrate at the poles: lower temperatures => shorter growing seasons => fewer land animals => less respiration => lower atmospheric CO2 => Ice Age.

In my geology days, I sometimes walked across fern meadows in the tropics. The temperature in the meadow is 5-10°F warmer than the surrounding forest. In the center of the meadow, one has a stifling feeling because the CO2 produced is replacing oxygen rapidly, so you can actually feel short of breath. Ferns are a plant whose respiration is quite high. The same is true for several human food crops. In contrast, trees tend to be slow growing and have low metabolisms for their bulk, so their respiration is relatively small compared to their photosynthesis. (Sap is moved primarily through capillary transport that requires very little energy.) Trees also store large amounts of carbon from CO2 for extended periods of time, while food crops tend to store carbon for less than a year due to harvesting.

Food for thought. Plant respiration emits hundreds of billions tons of CO2 to the atmosphere each year while Man contributes only about 15 billion tons each year burning hydrocarbons for energy. For the past several centuries Man has removed forests and replaced them with high metabolism food crops and grazing grasses to feed himself. For example, the central plains states of the northern Mississippi valley were completely forested prior to European settlement. Today trees are only found there in small, isolated pockets and decorating people’s front lawns. Europe has an even larger proportion of deforestation and the same thing is happening to the Amazon rain forests. Today, more that 50% of the continental land area is devoted to farming and livestock. Is it not plausible that man’s seven-fold population growth in two centuries has more to do with increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere than the burning of hydrocarbons? But I’m getting ahead of the story…

Oceans. The last major influence on overall climate is the oceans. I mentioned previously that heat transfers in the oceans are enormously important to climate. Winds blowing over ocean currents extract heat from the currents and distribute it elsewhere. A classic example of this is Europe. Madrid, Spain is on roughly the same latitude as New York City, yet it has a subtropical arid climate while NYC has a north temperate climate. Indeed, most of Europe is temperate despite being on the same latitudes as Newfoundland and the Northwest Territories, which have sub-arctic climates. The reason is that westerly trade winds pick up heat from the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic and transfer it to Europe.

Most of the heat transfers that affect local climate are in circular currents called gyres. There is a gyre in every major ocean, as shown in the following diagram. These currents flow clockwise in the northern hemisphere and counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere due to trade winds driving East to West on the equator and West to East at higher latitudes. These currents exist only in the surface of the ocean, down to about 300 meters depth. They are primarily wind-driven.

There are also major vertical circulations in the ocean where water moves between the surface and deep oceans, known as the Thermo-Haline Circulation (THC). There are two major upwelling zones, where water moves from the deep ocean to the surface, and two major downwelling zones, where water moves from the surface to the deep ocean. The downwelling zones are in the North Atlantic off Scandinavia and around Antarctica. The one in the North Atlantic occurs because the Gulf Stream carries warm water with high salinity from the equator. When that water mixes with cooler Arctic waters, its salinity makes it relatively dense and it sinks into the deep ocean. A very different mechanism operates around Antarctica. A permanent wind blows around Antarctica offshore, the Antarctic Vortex. That wind drags surface water. An exotic mechanism, known as Ekman Transport, causes the water to flow towards the continent all around this circle. The water was has no place to go except down into the deep ocean. (There is also a similar density change to that in the North Atlantic as the South Australia Current carries warm, salty surface water from the equator to the Antarctic.)

Ocean ice also contributes to downwelling at the poles. Sea ice is fresh water. When it forms, the salts in the water are expelled and form a brine under the ice. That brine is cold and dense, so it sinks into the deep ocean. (This mechanism only works for new sea ice; permanent ice packs accrete ice via precipitation from the atmosphere.)

Once in the deep ocean, the downwelling currents disperse widely through the vast deep ocean, which causes them to slow down to roughly 20 Km/yr (compared to ~10 Km/hr for the Gulf Stream). So they are more properly called a ‘circulation’ by oceanographers, rather than a ‘current’. Nonetheless, the downwelling flows from the surface displace deep ocean waters, much like massive hydraulic pistons. To balance these displacements, there are two major zones of upwelling from the deep ocean to the surface, which form two major cycles in the oceans. These are roughly on the equator just off the coasts of western Africa and western South America. (There are also a number of secondary upwelling zones that are driven by things like undersea volcanism, but these usually dissipate before reaching the surface.)

The mechanism that determines the location of these upwellings, known as divergence, is interesting. The gyres in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans provide parallel East-to-West currents near the equator. However, they don’t mix because weak Coriolis forces tend to bend them both away from the equator. That divergence creates a void between them. That’s impossible in a fluid, so water must fill the void created. That water is pulled up from the deep ocean at the upwelling points. One can actually see this on satellite infrared photos as a thin line of cool water between the two warm gyre currents.

These upwellings have to be linked to the polar downwellings to balance displacements. The upwelling point off Africa is linked primarily through the Gulf Stream off the East coast of North America to the North Atlantic downwelling. The upwelling point off South America is linked to the Antarctic downwelling primarily through the South Australia Current. This overall system is known as the Thermo-Haline Circultaion (THC) The link via the Gulf Stream is the most powerful for two reasons. There is no downwelling in the North Pacific because the Bering Straight is too narrow and too shallow to allow proper mixing with cool Arctic waters. In addition, the South Australia current is limited by friction as it moves over the huge, shallow shelf of the South China Sea and around the islands of the Indonesian Archipelago. Also, the Ekman Transport mechanism is weaker than the density differential off Scandinavia, so the downwelling around Antarctica is weaker.

Normally the gyre in the North Atlantic would have a volume flux of about 20m tons/second. However, there is an additional 30m tons/second added by the Gulf Stream to balance the welling displacements. This makes the Gulf Stream the largest current in all the oceans. It is 70 Km wide and 450 m deep. Thus it carries an enormous amount of heat from the tropics to the pole. In fact, this current is critical to terminating interglacial hiatuses, which I will discuss in detail later. Terminating an even larger version of the Gulf Stream triggered the current Quaternary Ice Age, but that is getting ahead of the story.

Before leaving the subject of oceanic influences on climate, I would like to discuss one classic example of how important oceanic currents are to climate. The upwelling point off Peru enables one of the world’s best fisheries. That’s because the surfaces of the oceans are actually rather short of critical nourishment elements like phosphorus, iron, and magnesium. (In this respect they are similar to the notoriously poor soils of tropical rain forests; the profusion of life has extracted all the nourishment.)  The upwellings bring these nutrients to the surface from the deep oceans. Those nutrients result in plankton blooms that support the large fishery off peru. (The Gulf Stream also carries such nutrients to the fisheries of the North Atlantic.)

Alas, there is a problem, known as the Southern Oscillation. The equatorial currents, driven by Easterly Trade Winds, pick up a lot of heat from the Sun as they cross the Pacific near the equator. That current piles up warm water in the South China Sea (literally; sea level is 2-3m higher on the Western side of the Pacific). That warmth creates a large high pressure dome in the atmosphere over that area. As that dome builds up over a few years, it gradually curtails the Easterly Trade Winds. Eventually the Trade Winds weaken enough so that gravity wins out and the higher sea level in the West evens out with warm water flowing back across the Pacific to Peru. That warm water shuts down the upwelling and the plankton bloom dies, creating an economic disaster for Peru.

This phenomenon of warm water moving back to Peru is known as El Nino. I mention it because it has far wider effects on climate than just the Peruvian fishing industry. El Nino has been linked to worldwide climate effects, such a increased frequency of hurricanes in the Atlantic and droughts in the US Southwest. That’s because when the Pacific Trade Winds are curtailed, the atmosphere has to adjust its own thermal displacements, which has far reaching effects — all because of a partial reversal of the South Australia Current. (The atmosphere is a chaotic system in a mathematical sense. One property of such systems is that a small push in one place can sometimes produce a major change a long distance away.)

There is a lesson to be learned from all this. Despite the myopic view of some meteorologists, now calling themselves climate scientists, the atmosphere only effects local weather, like tornados and floods. It has very little to do with the overall climate of the Earth (aside from ozone formation). Things like the greenhouse effect are actually driven by surface mechanisms, like photosynthesis and respiration, that add and remove greenhouse gases. Similarly, major atmospheric heat transfers are primarily driven by ocean currents. Finally, plate tectonics determines where major atmospheric convection cells live and where permanent climate features, like monsoons, do their thing.

Recently the weather has become more erratic; the ’00s decade had the most erratic weather worldwide in recorded history. The Greens have latched onto this and claimed it is just another example of the effects of global warming through increased atmospheric CO2 content. That is just plain wrong. Local weather is driven by solely by temperature and moisture content. All the equations that describe thunderstorms, tornadoes, monsoons, hurricanes, and even summer offshore breezes are dominated by moisture content and temperature terms. Those equations do not have any terms for CO2 content.

Erratic weather started in the mid-’80s and has been steadily increasing in severity since then. However, global warming began 10,000 years ago and has risen 7°C since then, while temperature has increased only slightly since the mid-’80s and not at all in the past 15 years. So what really happened in the mid-’80s to trigger erratic weather? The Gulf Stream began to shut down and the North Atlantic began to cool. That has caused the atmosphere to make adjustments for the reduced evaporation there and, much like El Nino, that has far-reaching effects. In fact, the oceanographer’s models back in the ’80s predicted erratic weather as a harbinger of a return to the depths of the ice age when the Gulf Stream shut down. In other words, attributing current erratic weather to increasing CO2 is utter nonsense.

The oceans are also the driver for rapid climate change. That is because of a mechanism known as positive feedback. Almost all of the moisture in the atmosphere is provided by evaporation of the oceans. The rate at which oceans evaporate depends primarily on surface temperature. At 0°C evaporation is near nil. The evaporation plateaus a little over 50°C because there is a physical limit to how much water vapor the atmosphere can carry at a given temperature. Evaporation rises in a nonlinear fashion from 0°C until it becomes asymptotic to the saturation maximum in a flattened ‘S’ curve. The evaporation curve changes most rapidly in our “normal” climate temperature range of 10-20°C.

This is critically important to climate. If the surface temperature rises significantly, say due to a sudden introduction of CO2 in a volcanic eruption, the oceanic evaporation rate will increase. That increase puts more water vapor into the atmosphere than normal. That sudden addition of water vapor, as a greenhouse component, raises the surface temperature another increment. That increment, in turn, increases the evaporation rate, which puts more water vapor in the atmosphere, and so on. This cycle is a positive feedback loop that can raise the Earth’s temperature very rapidly over several degrees in a few decades. That large, sudden rise has nothing to due with atmospheric CO2, other than the initial, triggering increment in surface temperature from the eruption. This is the primary mechanism for initiating interglacial hiatuses very rapidly. A super volcano raises the temperature 0.5°C or so. That triggers positive feedback in evaporation to raise the temperature another 6-7°C.

The same mechanism can operate in reverse to cool the Earth very rapidly. However, changes in CO2 cannot trigger such decreasing rapid climate change because there is no mechanism to suddenly decrease atmospheric CO2 as a trigger mechanism like volcanism raises it. The only way to trigger decreasing rapid climate change today is to have a catastrophic shutdown of the THC. That has happened several times in the past 800,000 years when several interglacial hiatuses were terminated by rapid climate change. When that happens, the heat transfer from the equator to the North Atlantic essentially stops and the North Atlantic experiences a sudden cooling. That sudden cooling triggers the positive feedback for a downward spiral in temperature.

Ironically, the catastrophic shutdown of the Gulf Stream is, itself, triggered by global warming. As the interglacial hiatus rapidly warms, the summers in Greenland become longer and warmer. Greenland has massive ice sheets that have been accumulating for 2.6m years. Eventually the warming leads to a tipping point where Greenland switches over from net annual accretion for snow and ice to a net annual melting of snow and ice. That releases fresh water into the North Atlantic. The Gulf Stream flows past the southern tip of Greenland, so that fresh water dilutes it at an increasing rate as the summers lengthen and warm. That dilution of the Gulf Stream’s salinity weakens the hydraulic piston effect at the downwelling point off Scandinavia. Eventually the Gulf Stream can no longer sink to the abyssal layer of the North Atlantic and the circulation of that portion of the THC is broken. That triggers a variety of other mechanisms that accelerate the temperature decline (e.g., longer winters in Europe increase the Earth’s albedo there and more sunlight is reflected directly back into space without warming the Earth’s surface). Those effects radiate out over the Northern Hemisphere. This results in an immediate drop of 3-5°C in Earth’s average temperature in 50-80 years. (The rate of cooling slows down then since it takes longer for ice sheets to cover the continents and increase the Earth’s albedo, so it takes another few thousand years to complete the return to the depths of the glacial phase of the Quaternary Ice Age.)

• The Earth’s present average surface temperature is at the tipping point and strong evidence indicates the Gulf Stream started its catastrophic shutdown in the late ’80s. The evidence is:
• The salinity of the Gulf Stream off Scandinavia began to decline at an increasing rate in the late ’80s.
• Erratic weather in response to reduced heat transfers in the North Atlantic has been increasing since the early ’90s
• Oceanographers making direct in situ measurements of the Gulf Stream’s volume flux (the amount of water flowing through a cross section per unit time) determined that the volume flux decreased a little over 30% in the ’00s decade.
• Atmospheric temperature has ceased increasing since the mid-90s, despite the fact that Man added 40% of the CO2 from burning hydrocarbons for the entire Industrial Revolution in just the ’00s decade as India and China became major industrialized nations without great concerns over pollution.
• In 2014 it was determined that the middle layers (1,500-3,000m) of the North Atlantic and Indian oceans suddenly began warming rapidly. This essentially means the Gulf Stream and South Australia Current can no longer penetrate to the abyssal layer of the ocean and are dissipating in the middle layer. IOW, the THC circulation has been broken. (The Gulf Stream and South Australia Currents will continue to run for another 1-2 decades because the inertia of the small pressure differentials that drive the flow will take that long to dissipate.)

The Greens are in a state of complete denial over this. They have offered several examples of scientific charlatanism to refute this possibility and it is interesting to look at them. I have already mentioned their claim that erratic weather is due to adding CO2 to the atmosphere. In fact, erratic weather is due to changes in winds, currents, and evaporation rates due to a reduction in heat flow from the equator to the North Atlantic.

The IPCC responds to the reduced volume flux with two papers that conclude the changes are “within normal variance”. One paper measured the surface velocity while the other did a statistical analysis of satellite radar imaging to determine sea level (because the Gulf Stream is relatively buoyant, it does bulge up above the water around it). The IPCC does not reference the oceanographer’s measurements. The oceanographers measured the flux by driving a boat across the Gulf Stream. The boat dragged a cable that extended to below the Gulf Stream and that cable had a bunch of flow meters spaced along it. Which measurements do you find most compelling? Why didn’t they even cite the oceanographer’s results?

The flat temperature for the past couple of decades is a really big problem for the Greens, given the 1% annual increase in CO2. One Green noted the rise in temperature in the middle layer of the North Atlantic and announced that the heat needed for that rise was the same as the heat the increasing CO2 would have added. Therefore, the heat went into the middle layer of the North Atlantic to account for the flat atmospheric temperature. Thus global warming was still happening. When I read this I laughed so hard that my sides hurt. Global warming is global because CO2 is distributed fairly evenly in the atmosphere. So why did the heat go into only the North Atlantic and Indian oceans? Why did it only start going there in the past few years when the climate has been warming steadily for two centuries? What heat teleportation mechanism got the heat from the atmosphere to the middle layers of the North Atlantic and Indian oceans without changing the temperature of the upper layer of those oceans? In fact, we know how the Middle layer is warming and it has nothing at all to do with global warming.

Recently a study was released by the Greens where they “reanalyzed” the temperature data for the past three decades and concluded that the temperature was not flat; it was actually warming. It turns out that they didn’t reanalyze the data; they just added weather stations and recomputed the average. If one wants to directly measure the average temperature of the whole Earth, one needs to section up the Earth’s surface by small, equal-area grid squares. One then takes the data from a weather station in each grid square, sums it up with the other squares and computes the average. There are complications because not all of the squares have weather stations and some squares may have diverse climates. You can deal with these problems with interpolation or using multiple weather stations in the squares (so long as you have the same number of stations in each square). That gives you a fair sampling of temperatures over the entire surface of the Earth.

The Earth does not warm uniformly. For example, the poles usually warm or cool much faster than the equator. So where did the Greens add their weather stations? They added most of them in areas of highest warming. Thus they deliberately biased the sampling to favor warming. Additionally, NOAA sponsored the “reanalysis”, but curiously the 1500+ deep ocean weather buoys they deploy along the equator, where temperature varies very little, were not added. In my opinion, that goes beyond scientific charlatanism into scientific fraud.

NOAA switched databases from CHGN to ISITI for the reanalysis (ISTI is a superset of CHGN). I went to the ISTI web site and found a bunch of diagrams that proved what they had done. Each diagram was a map of the world with colored dots showing where stations had been added. (The color coding was for the source of the station data.) There was one diagram for each update of the database, so walking through the diagrams in time clearly showed the addition of stations in high warming areas.

I mentioned this to an old college friend who followed up by talking to a Green who utilized the ISTI heavily and also had connections to NOAA. That Green replied that the sampling was not a problem because different groups used subsets of the data tailored to their specific purposes, implying that the “reanalysis” people would select a proper sample for their purpose. When my friend relayed that answer back, it did not give me a warm and fuzzy feeling because eliminating the temperature plateau seems like a pretty powerful purpose to me.

But the story doesn’t end there. A month or so later I referred someone else to the ISTI data, but they couldn’t find it. Those diagrams I had looked at are gone. In their place is a single page with a table listing sources, dates, and number of stations added for each update without any location data. The page was clearly a rush job because it did not fit in the web frame and there were no scroll bars to access portions that were not visible. In other words, not only did they cook the data, they also covered it up when they got caught at it.

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Geologic History of the Earth with Respect to Climate

The geological history of the Earth places the Greens in a very unflattering perspective. That history is full of facts that the Greens do not want to hear about. Before going into the details, I would like to point out that climate data from the geologic record is fact; it describes how the actual climate changes. IPCC et al run lots of model simulations to describe climate and justify their positions, buts models aren’t hard data.

I won’t spend much time on the first half-billion years when the Earth formed by accreting solar debris. Until 3.8 billion years ago, the Earth was pretty much a volcanic hell hole with an atmosphere so toxic that a couple of deep breaths would be immediately fatal to a human. However, by 3.8 billion years ago the asteroid bombardment had abated, the crust had solidified into continents, and the Earth had cooled enough to condense out oceans from the steam in the atmosphere. At that time primitive life appeared almost immediately, mostly in the shallow coastal seas, despite the fact that the atmospheric temperature was probably well above 50°C. They were very simple, single celled organisms, Prokaryotes, that were not readily identifiable as either plant or animal.

There were vast amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere, probably around 40% by volume, with no O2. So those single cell organisms adapted to the environment and they began to feed on the atmosphere via photosynthesis. For two billion years those organisms diligently converted CO2 to O2. In so doing, they reduced the greenhouse effect by removing most of the CO2. At the same time, large amounts of water vapor condensed out of the atmosphere as rainfall as temperatures dropped. So the Earth continued to cool. (Caveat: these organisms were cyanobacteria that had a different respiration chemistry from most plants and animals today. That was because there was no free oxygen and they obtained electrons from the large quantities of sulfur in the primordial oceans that came from intense volcanic activity. Cyanobacteria are still around today, but many varieties are actually toxic to our present environment, such as the infamous Red Tide.)

In fact, the increase in O2 caused a problem because it was actually toxic to some of these organisms in large quantities because it was a waste product of photosynthesis. So about 2b years ago they evolved into a more complex form of single-celled life — the Eukaryotes, which had a nucleus protected by a membrane that made them somewhat hardier in the changing environment. The Eukaryotes also formed colonies similar to stromatolites we see today in littoral environments, but they were still individually single-celled organisms. (At the same time there was stress in the environment because the atmospheric pressure changed significantly. Planetary scientists are still trying to figure out what happened, but it clearly stressful enough to drive mutations.)

Though the seas had lots of tiny organisms, the Earth itself was still basically just a big rock floating in space. Because space is very chilly, it radiated heat back out into space (the black body radiation discussed in the previous post). There are models for finding a balance between incoming radiation from the Sun and the outgoing black body radiation. Given the lack of land-based flora and fauna back then, the equilibrium temperature for the surface would be around  -18°F. Indeed, that’s pretty much where the Earth ended up 640 million years ago after most of the CO2  and H2O was removed from the atmosphere – an ice ball with the oceans frozen solid to a depth of at least several thousand feet and the continents completely covered by ice sheets thousands of feet thick. The surface temperature was about -13°C.

About 640 million years ago there was a cataclysmic event – probably a major asteroid strike that instantly melted at least an entire hemisphere of ice, putting vast amounts of steam into the atmosphere, along with molten rock, ash, and other particulate matter. The energy of the explosion also decomposed carbonate rocks to produce lots of CO2. That was followed by sympathetic earthquakes and volcanism over a long period of time, perhaps as much as 100m years, as the Earth compensated for the impact. (There are isostatic forces that restore a planet to a round shape after a chunk has been gouged out.)

There is another theory involving plateau basalts. However, those that we know about in the geologic record only raised the temperature about 5°C, which was not enough to cause the ice to melt. Thus there would have to coincidentally be multiple plateau basalts, which is rather unlikely because supercontinents take tens of millions of years to break up, which would spread out the plateau basalts in time and it only takes a few millennia to scrub the CO2 from a previous plateau basalt from the atmosphere, thus losing the cumulative effect.

This changed everything. There is a theory in biology that evolution only takes place when there is stress in the organism’s environment. The idea behind the theory is that if an organism is ideally suited to its environment, any mutation will be less suited and will not survive. Stress essentially creates a new environment for which critters are no longer ideally suited and they need to evolve to adapt to it.

What happened 640 million years ago certainly provides anecdotal evidence of stress-driven evolution. For 2.5 billion years life on Earth had not changed significantly; it remained very simple single-celled organisms eating CO2. Yet in the aftermath of that cataclysm, multi-cellular life evolved, and it evolved spectacularly. By 500 million years ago the Earth’s seas were populated by an amazing variety of complex creatures, comparable in size and variety to those we see today. And they were almost all animals that ate O2 and produced CO2! The single celled organisms were still around doing photosynthesis, but they were now on the bottom of the food chain.

As a result, CO2 levels started to climb, the Earth continued to warm up, and the ice sheets went away. As animal respiration brought back CO2, some single-celled organisms evolved in a different direction and managed to make their way onto land in the form of algae-like organisms that grew in colonies and developed their own more plant-like multi-celled variants. Thus multi-cellular life split into a fairly clear distinction between plants and animals roughly 400m years ago. The biomass was still dominated by the single-celled critters doing photosynthesis, but the complex plants and animals were catching up.

The animals reached a tipping point in the Carboniferous Period, about 350 million years ago. The O2 content of the atmosphere peaked at around 40-50%. (If you lit a kitchen match, it would literally explode and burn your fingers.) The Carboniferous Period was the Age of Insects and there were dragon flies with wingspans of 3 feet and beetles the size of Great Danes. Insects generally have very high metabolisms because they are extremely active relative to their size, so large insects require a lot of O2. (No matter how well leveraged its legs are, physics still requires a lot of energy for that ant in your ant farm to carry a food morsel five times its body weight for several feet.) So the animal respiration outstripped the photosynthesis of the plants and bacteria by a large margin, and the O2 content began to drop while the CO2 content rose faster. As the O2 content dropped, those huge, active insects ceased to be viable and insects reverted to the very small sizes we see today. (They were victims of the square-cube law in physics. External area increases as the square while internal volume increases by the cube of the radius as critters grow. Insects breath through their skin rather than lungs, so they are physically limited in how large they can grow for a given level of atmospheric O2. Animals have lungs with tiny fractal-like membranes whose total area vastly exceeds the total area of their skin.)

That took a while, however, and CO2 from respiration was still winning the battle. That continued on until end of the Permian Period, 250m years ago. All that time, the Earth’s atmospheric temperature and CO2 content were growing. Near the end of the Permian Period the climate was very inhospitable at about 20°C warmer than present and CO2 content was well in excess of 8,000 ppm. Coincidentally, a massive plateau basalt formed in what is now Siberia that dumped on the order of 100b tons of CO2 annually into the atmosphere for nearly a million years. That raised the temperature another 5°C. That warmed the surface layer of the oceans enough so that vast quantities of the methane hydrate deposits on continental shelves sublimated. As I indicated in the previous post, methane is much more effective than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. When that methane was released over as little as a few centuries, the Earth’s temperature shot up another 5-8°C. Finally, the plateau basalt also liberated lots of sulfur dioxide (SO2) and hydrogen sulfide (H2S), resulting in deadly acid rain. When absorbed in the oceans, that made them anaerobic. The result was a mass extinction where about 95% of all species on Earth at that time went extinct (depending on whose estimates you use). Paleontologists all agree that it was, by far, the worst mass extinction in the geologic record.

With almost all of the large CO2 producers at the top of the food chain gone, the Earth quickly cooled. Evolution tried another tack that culminated with the heyday of the dinosaurs in the Jurassic Period, 145m years ago. Coinciding with the surge of the dinosaurs, the Earth began to seriously warm up, in large part due to the dinosaurs themselves. In part that was due to plate tectonics as the huge super-continent, Gondwanaland, began to break up. The new continents drifted away from the equator into the regions 30° and 60° north and south of the equator. Due to the way atmospheric Hadley Cells form, those latitudes tend to be very dry. Today those latitudes contain many of the world’s largest deserts. So large areas of continents simply couldn’t support huge dinosaurs any more. When the Earth is warmer than present, those deserts increase in size and intensity.

However, the dinosaurs created environmental problems for themselves. Huge herbivores must consume tons of fiber every day. So they did not eat grass; instead they ate large shrubs and whole trees. If you have ever flown over the African veldt in a light plane, you have seen elephant tracks. A herd of elephants cuts a swath of complete devastation about 10-15 yards wide. They uproot every shrub, trample the grasses into the dust, and knock over every tree with a bole less than six inches thick. At the right time of year, those tracks turn to caliche and it can take decades before they are grown over. Imagine what a bunch of dinosaurs five times as large would do over 150m years to the planet’s forests. The only vegetation that could survive would be fast growing grasses and shrubs, all with higher respiration. At the same time, the dinosaurs were being forced into the few tropical lands remaining. That increased competition for food and the rate of deforestation accelerated.

However, changing plant respiration wasn’t the dinosaurs only problem. When a dinosaur consumes tons of fiber every day, it produces a lot of methane. (Today, the largest single source of atmospheric methane is domestic livestock, which has increased 3-fold in the last two centuries.) Thus the dinosaurs ate and farted themselves into a climate where they were no longer viable and they were already gone by the time the asteroid hit. Plate tectonics and the dinosaurs themselves conspired in their extinction.

The media loves the story of an asteroid killing off the dinosaurs. If you ask paleontologists who specializes in dinosaurs, though, they will tell you the dinos were long gone. They have two compelling proofs. If the asteroid killed off all the dinos in a few weeks, one would expect that strata to be littered with dino bones. The K-P boundary that marks the asteroid strike is the most heavily investigated piece of geologic real estate in the world. Yet not a single dino fossil has been found on the boundary. In fact, only a few small fragments of individual dinosaur bones have been found in the three meters of sedimentary rocks immediately below the K-P boundary and those fragments were very likely dragged by erosion from the site of a much older dino skeleton. (Sedimentary rocks are greatly compacted during consolidation into rock, so three meters of sedimentary rock can <sometimes> represent many hundreds of thousands of years of depositon.) The second compelling evidence is that the continental sediments beneath the K-P boundary around the world are almost always typical of hot, arid climates that could not support large herbivores. Thus the asteroid, at most, was a coup de gras for a few pockets of small dinosaurs that had managed to survive.

Now let’s fast-forward to 3m years ago. Most of the Earth was a tropical paradise about 6°C warmer than present. The Americas were moving in lockstep towards Asia, but they were not connected by land. The volcanism associated with moving plate edges caused a long string of volcanoes to form islands between the Americas, much like today’s Indonesian archipelago. Those islands eventually closed up and formed the Isthmus of Panama, which disconnected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans about 2.6m years ago. That caused a mass extinction, though not as extreme as the one 65m years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous, but it had a much more profound long-term effect on our climate. The Earth was plunged into the Quarternary Ice Age, which continues to this day. The Earth’s average surface temperature dropped 14°C very rapidly. Thus the ensuing mass extinction was due to cooling rather than warming.

When I talked about the oceans in the previous post, I mentioned the importance of the Gulf Stream. To understand why things changed so drastically 2.6m years ago, we need to look at what would happen to that current if the Isthmus of Panama was open, as it was 3m years ago. Then the equatorial current would travel straight through and continue across the equator until it hit Asia and turned North and/or South. In doing so it would collect a lot more heat, because the Pacific is much wider than the Atlantic at the equator. So when it finally got to the polar regions, it would have much more heat to transfer to the polar atmospheric cells and Antarctica would be quite balmy all year around. In fact, there would be no polar ice caps at all and there fossils of tropical life in Antarctica dating from 3m years ago. But when the Isthmus of Panama broke that current, we immediately plunged into the Quaternary Ice Age because the heat transfer contributed by the Gulf Stream ceased.

The Quaternary Ice Age will probably not end for at least another million years until the American plates move another several hundred miles or so from Europe and Africa. So where are the ice sheets? The reason we have no ice sheets at present is because the present THC and gyres transfer enough heat from the equator to the poles to almost, but not quite, prevent an ice age. The result is that the Quaternary Ice Age is meta-stable; relatively small events can trigger a brief warming period. In fact, as I mentioned in the introduction, we are presently in what is technically known as an interglacial hiatus. Basically that is a relatively brief period of warming, just enough so that most of the ice sheets melt. There have been several of these in the past 2.6m years and they all behave almost exactly the same way.

The hiatus probably starts with a coincidence of two things. One is the precession of the Earth’s tilt. The Earth’s axis of rotation wobbles at geologic times scales, known as precession events. That is due to a complex juxtaposition of planetary bodies and their orbits in our solar system. When the axis of rotation changes so that it is closer to vertical, that changes the angle of incidence of sunlight at the poles. That can have an effect on the formation of sea ice, which, in turn, can affect albedo and downwelling at the poles (as discussed in the previous post). There is a very high correlation between precession and the interglacial hiatuses of the past several hundred thousand years. The change in heat delivered to the Earth via precession angle, though, is rather small and is unlikely to trigger a hiatus by itself. Also, precession events occur every 26,000 years while interglacial hiatuses occur  every 100,000-300,000 years. However, it is quite likely that such a change is possible in conjunction with some kind of geologic event that tosses large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, such as a moderate asteroid hit, a supervolcano eruption, or a plateau basalt eruption. (Human recorded history has been an extremely quiet time in a geologic sense. The Earth is actually a very dangerous place and nothing we have seen in recorded history is remotely as bad as any of these three triggers.) This combines with the precession effect on the poles to cause up/downwelling and a resurgence of the enhanced Gulf Stream. (During the ice phases, the North Atlantic gyre is not supplemented with up/downwelling flows.)

The temperature warms rapidly for 1-2 thousand years and then the warming becomes very gradual or even plateaus. After 1,000 to 3,000 years the hiatus suddenly terminates and we go back in the deep freeze to an average temperature about 6-7°C colder than present and the ice sheets return. The hiatus is terminated by the catastrophic collapse for the THC, discussed in the previous post.

The diagram shows five interglacial hiatuses in the past 450,000 years. Note that they all reach a temperature about the same as our present temperature, and then terminate quickly. That temperature is a tipping point for global warming that triggers the THC shutdown and a return to the depths of the Quaternary Ice Age.

That is largely confirmed by very recent data. In 2014 it was discovered that the thermal layer between 1,500 and 3,000 meters in the North Atlantic has been warming rapidly for the past three decades. What that indicates is that the Gulf Stream no longer carries enough salt when it reaches Scandinavia to produce a density contrast large enough to sink all the way into the deep ocean. That is, it is only sinking 1,500-3,000m and then dissipating into that density layer. This says that the return path of the THC over the abyssal plain to the upwelling off Africa has already been broken. The reason the Gulf Stream continues to flow, albeit at a rapidly declining rate, is the inertia in the overall system. However, without that return path to the upwelling, the Gulf Stream will likely be completely shut down within, at  most, two decades.

The last time we were in the deep freeze, 70,000 years ago, human population dropped from a few tens of millions spread over Africa and Eurasia in the last hiatus to about 5,000 individuals. Now you can understand why I think the Greens are worried about the wrong problem.

However, the evidence for the Gulf Stream termination is more direct than computer models. Our present hiatus actually started 12,000 years ago. As usual, temperatures rose rapidly for 1,000 years. Then, suddenly, the hiatus terminated and we went back in the deep freeze for 1,000 years. Nobody understood why until some geologists in Canada figured it out. When things started to warm up 12,000 years ago, an enormous fresh water lake formed in Northern Canada that was vastly larger than the current Great Lakes system. Unfortunately, it was locked in by ice dams that had not melted yet. Eventually, though, 11,000 years ago the lake overflowed the dams. Once the water started to flow, the ice dams disappeared quickly. Within a matter of months the entire lake emptied into the North Atlantic in a flood of biblical proportions (boulders the size of small houses were moved dozens of miles). The result was an instant dilution of the Gulf Stream and a catastrophic shutdown of the THC. That timing and the hard evidence of the flood in Canada’s sediments is highly compelling.

There are several important points here that the Greens don’t like to talk about. I already mentioned that present temperature and CO2 content are far below the norm for the past 500 million years while multi-cellular life thrived, so it is hard to believe a rise of 2°C from the present would be catastrophic. (It would melt all the polar ice caps and sea levels would rise. But Man abandoning a bunch of port cities is not a mass extinction.)

It is also noteworthy that CO2 levels started at well over 30% of the entire atmosphere 4b years ago, but on balance photosynthesis has reduced them to the present 400 ppm and the levels in the Quaternary Ice Age reached the lowest point in 4.5 billion years. The minimum range of atmospheric CO2 that can support plant photosynthesis is 185-225 ppm. Thus we are now dangerously close to the point where plant photosynthesis is impossible. At that point all macroscopic life on the surface of the Earth, including us, will become extinct. (Microbes can do photosynthesis at significantly lower levels of atmospheric CO2, so they will still be around.) Kind of makes you wonder why the Greens keep making statements about current CO2 levels being higher than they have been in the last 800,000 years, implying that is very scary, doesn’t it? Once again, the Greens are worried about the wrong problem.

However, there is likely to be a number of extinctions if the temperature and ocean acidity rise another couple of degrees. That’s because the oceans are inhabited by creatures that survived 2.6m years of ice age. They are adapted to cooler, more alkaline water. The oceans have been warming and critters like corals are now right at the edge of their habitable temperature and acidity range. Thus there are already significant die-offs in the oceans.

Nonetheless, it is highly unlikely that further warming will result in a technical mass extinction (i.e., at least 30% of all species disappear worldwide). The geologic record tells us that the planet has come out of ice ages to higher temperatures and more CO2 content before without major disruptions. Typically the changes are slow enough that organisms mutate on the fly. Today there are already corals that have adapted to higher temperatures and acidity levels. Things like plankton at the bottom of the food chain can mutate on time scales of months. There will certainly be major die-offs as new adaptations take time to spread, but most species will likely survive in slightly modified form.

The biggest threat will likely be to critters far enough up the food chain to be on Man’s menu. We are already severely stressing the populations of larger fish through over-fishing the oceans. (In the past 50 years, Man has eaten 90% of all large fish in the oceans.) That, combined with environmental stress, could kill off a lot of larger species and it would take many centuries for the oceans to restock with new large species. Nonetheless, a true mass extinction is unlikely and a catastrophic mass extinction, as in the Cretaceous or Permian, is simply not going to happen.

The Greens would have you believe that Man burning hydrocarbons is the cause of all the warming. I will have more to say about that in later posts. For now, though, just let me point out that at present rates we will completely run out of hydrocarbons to burn long before temperatures return to anything close to planetary norms – even if burning hydrocarbons is the sole cause of global warming. The reality is there are geologic and biological forces in operation that dwarf anything man can do with present technology, so whatever is going to happen, is going to happen.

One thing that underscores that point is the assumption the Greens make when blaming Man for all warming. As I cited in the previous post, they assume that all other sources of CO2 in the atmosphere are in balance. Therefore, the present surplus is all Man’s fault because Man just started burning hydrocarbons heavily in the Industrial Revolution. My primary point in going through this geologic history is to demonstrate as strongly as possible that things like the rates of photosynthesis and respiration are far from constant over time at a planetary scale. In fact, they are very rarely exactly in balance. Though my examples have been extreme and at geologic time scales to make that point, the variance still applies in the short term, as my references to fern meadows and deforestation indicated. The reality is that the Earth is a complex and dynamic system. When the Greens deliberately oversimplify that by looking only at atmospheric CO2, they do so at the risk of ending up looking very foolish.

Before leaving this topic, let me summarize the individual mechanisms that terminate an interglacial hiatus – in the rough order they occur…

1. The North Atlantic cools. With less heat transfer from the tropics, such cooling is inevitable. Currently all the oceans are cooling, especially the North Atlantic. I describe the effects in the Northern Hemisphere here, but similar effects occur in the Southern Hemisphere.

1. There is less evaporation in the North Atlantic. Evaporation of sea water is proportional to temperature and it is non-linear. When the sea surface temperature is below about 50°F, evaporation decreases rapidly until it is close to nil near freezing. This drastically reduces water vapor in the atmosphere since oceanic evaporation is the primary source of atmospheric water vapor. This is the positive feedback mechanism that underlies virtually all rapid climate change.
2. The warming causes arctic ice sheets to “melt”. (Sea ice is actually fresh water; the salt is expelled during freezing as a brine under the new ice.) This “melting” is actually in the form of massive icebergs that break off the edges of the ice sheets and float south. They are caught by the Gulf Stream and are carried along with it as they melt. This accelerates the dilution of the Gulf Stream.
3. With less heat from the Gulf Stream, winters get tougher in Europe. There is more snow cover for a longer period. That removes moisture from the atmosphere as snow and ice for longer periods. Snow cover for longer periods increases the Earth’s albedo, causing more of the Sun’s short-wave heat to be reflected directly back into space without being converted to long wave radiation at the surface. Growing seasons shorten and animal populations decline, both reducing respiration and, consequently, both CO2 and H2O.
4. Without the Gulf Stream heat transfer, polar atmospheric cells expand and the polar vortex expands, extending deeper down into North America and Eurasia for longer periods during winter. That shortens growing seasons to further reduce plant respiration and reduce animal forage. It also traps more moisture in snow for longer periods and further increases the Earth’s albedo.
5. Eventually the polar vortex intrudes over the North Pacific and cools it, further reducing evaporation.
6. As waters cool in the North Atlantic, the gyre begins to move cooler water to the  equator. That compensates for the warming of equatorial waters by the Sun and oceanic cooling extends over a wider area.
7. Late in the cycle, temperatures in the North Atlantic go low enough for sea ice to return. That raises the albedo of the Earth and reflects more solar energy directly back into space. Sea ice also caps evaporation from the North Atlantic, further reducing atmospheric moisture.
8. The largest forests on the planet are in Northern Canada and Siberia. These migrate southward, which increases photosynthesis to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere. The reason that the terminations of hiatuses take longer is because of the buffering of CO2 in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. To get to the bottom of the Ice Age, the CO2 content must be near 200 ppm.

There is another effect that has nothing directly to do with the THC shutdown, but it compliments the process. As mentioned earlier, when the Earth warms, the equatorial temperature tends to remain constant while temperate and polar latitudes warm. Thus the poles tend to warm faster than any other part of the Earth. This is known as the Fulcrum Effect where the gradient in temperature between Equator and poles pivots up or down from the Equator. One can think of the midpoint of the fulcrum representing the mean surface temperature of the Earth. Thus changing heat transfers between Equator and poles tilts the fulcrum up an down and can change the Earth’s average surface temperature significantly without changing atmospheric CO2 at all. When the Greens address the THC shutdown, they ignore the Fulcrum Effect and only describe it in terms of atmospheric precipitation/evaporation models.

There are two effects associated with this. The jet stream is largely powered by the difference in atmospheric heat between poles and equator. As the poles warm, the jet stream loses power and its path becomes more erratic. That is the primary cause of the increasingly erratic weather we see in the Northern Hemisphere. (A similar high altitude current operates in the Southern Hemisphere.)

The second effect has been observed empirically, but the underlying mechanism is not understood. There is a large high-pressure mass of frigid air over each of the poles. As the poles warm relative to the rest of the planet, that mass expands more than normal during winter.  In the Northern Hemisphere, it moves down into central North America (known there as the Omega Block because of its shape) and Siberia. This expansion results in harsher and longer winters with the same effects as described above for the region around the North Atlantic.

There are three important things to note here. First, the effects are initially local to the North Atlantic and they slowly spread out. (There are similar effects around Antarctica, but they are less intense.) This is very important because the Earth’s overall average temperature does not change much during the initial Gulf Stream shutdown, even though the Gulf Stream shutdown is triggering an abrupt climate change.

Second, the climatic effects are driven by reducing water vapor, not increasing CO2. At the present time, the reduction in water vapor is in a standoff with the increase in CO2, so the Earth’s overall temperature has not changed for 15 years despite adding 40% of the total CO2 output of the entire Industrial Revolution in just the past 15 years.

Third, the effects form a sort of positive feedback chain reaction. Any reduction in temperature in the North Atlantic reduces atmospheric moisture more and causes lower temperatures – an effect that spreads into Europe and Siberia like a cancer as other effects come into play. This positive feedback mechanism creates a cascade effect that is critical and it continues for decades after the THC is completely shut down – until a new black body radiation steady state is reached where the Earth’s average temperature is about 6-7°C lower than present. The overall reduction in temperature also accelerates as the effects spread out from the North Atlantic, which is why interglacial hiatuses terminate so rapidly.

Before leaving the geologic history, I need to address one peculiarity about our current interglacial hiatus versus the previous ones. The current hiatus has lasted 10,000 years while the previous hiatuses lasted only 1-3,000 years. I will anticipate a Green argument that this proves we are breaking out of the Quaternary Ice Age for good and warming will continue. In fact, the reason this hiatus has lasted so long is a combination of supervolcanoes and Man feeding himself.

Supervolcanoes are volcanoes that erupt with massive explosions, tossing at least 100 Km**3 of material into the atmosphere. When they erupt they can also emit anywhere from 100b to 2t tons of CO2. There are 26 known supervolcanoes on Earth and they erupt about every 600,000 years, on average. Do the math, and you would expect one of them to erupt about every 20,000 years. However, each supervolcano tends to have a unique period between eruptions, from 400,000 to 800,000 years that depends on local geology. Thus it is possible to have periods of 100,000+ years with no eruptions and short periods with several eruptions as different cycles “bunch up”. During the first 6,000 years of  the current hiatus, there were six VEI 7 supervolcano eruptions, each hurling vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. There was also an increase in VEI 6 eruptions (the class just below supervolcanoes). The eruptions were roughly 1,000 years apart, or about the length of time CO2 stays in the atmosphere on average.

Those eruptions started just after the temperature reached the tipping point, roughly 10,000 years ago, where Greenland switched over from net accumulation of snow and ice to net melting of snow and ice. In effect, that increase in CO2 compensated for the reduction in water vapor as the THC shut down. That prevented the temperature drop cascade, so temperature waffled around the tipping point, even though the THC had shut down. How that played out can be seen in the following graph of temperature. (The colored lines represent different temperature estimates and the black line is a sort of Delphic mean of those estimates.)

About 4,000 years ago the temperature had dropped below the tipping point for Greenland and the THC started up again to stabilize the climate. (There was also one more supervolcano eruption in 999 CE.) About 5,000 years ago, though, something else happened. Man switched over from a hunter/gatherer civilization to an agrarian civilization. That didn’t have much affect on climate until about 500 years ago when Man’s population approached 500m. At that point, deforestation and farming became significant in raising CO2 levels. That went into high gear around 1800 when Man’s population reach 1b. In the two centuries since, the population reached 7b and in the last century there have been remarkable strides in breeding and engineering food crops. Thus we have reached the Greenland tipping point once again. Alas, we cannot count on a supervolcano bailing us out again.

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Productivity is also dependent on other things like languages, tools, subject matter complexity, skill levels, the size of the project, and a host of other factors. The problem is that the software industry, especially IT, has focused on keystrokes when coding at the 3GL level. Consequently, the industry’s solution to enabling higher productivity is to provide tools that reduce keystrokes. Those tools are primarily infrastructures that automate mundane programming tasks. Automation is a very good thing because it generally does, indeed, improve productivity. However, some judgment is required in deciding what and how to automate. My concern is that the industry is pursuing reduced keystrokes at the expense of good judgment.

Two potential problems with automation are size and performance. Automation via infrastructures requires somehow dealing with all the related special cases. That tends to cause infrastructures to bloat with code that deals with situations that are very rarely encountered. One example of this are modern spreadsheets that now have so many features that no single user knows how to use most of them and even the developers are often not aware of all of them. This results in huge applications with tens of MLOC that suck up Gbs of disk space and hundreds of Mbs of memory. Many productivity infrastructures do basically the same thing, but that bloat is largely hidden from the end user and even the application developer.

The processing in a spreadsheet tends to be very linear. That allows a single, commonly used feature to be optimized without a lot of difficulty. In contrast, the processing for infrastructures is usually not linear because they hide massive functionality from the end user or application developer. The infrastructures also tend to be complex because they routinely do things like concurrent processing. So for infrastructures, size is a problem but it is often secondary to performance. I will talk about some of the performance issues in later blog posts, but for now let me just say that performance is often a huge hit. IME, most IT applications that make heavy use of “productivity” infrastructures typically execute at least an order of magnitude slower than they would without the infrastructures.

One can argue that is an acceptable tradeoff, just as 3GL applications run 30-100% slower than hand-crafted Assembly applications. IOW, the productivity benefits in time to market and reliability far outweigh the performance costs. However, that analogy just underscores a much larger problem in the myopia of the industry on particular classes of tools. The industry myopia is on automation tools that reduce 3GL keystrokes. In fact, there are other ways to boost productivity that will yield vastly greater gains in productivity – just as switching languages did in the ‘60s.

Generally one can often enhance productivity through design far more than automating specialized 3GL keystrokes. RAD development itself is a classic example of this. By raising the level of abstraction of coding from 3GLs to a Table/Form paradigm, the RAD tools like Access greatly enhanced productivity. (They have serious limits in problem size and complexity, but in the right niche they are excellent.) That was simply a design insight into the fundamental nature of data processing based on an RDB. One can argue that the RAD tools are automation, but that automation is enabled by design insights into the problem space.

In effect, the RAD tools captured invariants of the RDB problem space and encoded them in tools. One can do exactly the same thing in any large application design. The basic idea is to encode problem space invariants while leaving the details to external configuration data. Doing so at the design level can reduce overall code size by an order of magnitude or more. The problem is that no one is talking about this in the industry. Rather than investing in slow, bloated infrastructures, the industry should be training developers to design properly. (My book has an entire chapter devoted to the use of invariants with examples of order-of-magnitude reductions in code size – just by thinking about the problem rather that leaping to the keyboard.)

The best example that I can think of for how the focus on 3GL keystroke tools is misplaced is translation. Translation technology has been around since the early ‘80s, but it was not until the late ‘90s that optimization techniques matured. Essentially translation is about programming in a 4GL rather than a 3GL. A popular, general purpose 4GL is UML combined with an abstract action language (AAL). A translation engine (aka compiler) then does direct, 100% code generation from the 4GL to a 3GL or Assembly program, including full optimization. The 4GL notation is several orders of magnitude more compact than a 3GL program because it is primarily graphical in nature, it only deals with functional requirements (the transformation engine deals with nonfunctional requirements), and it is at a higher level of abstraction. That compactness represents a huge advantage in source size compared with 3GL programs. (It also results in reliability improvements that are integer factors because the opportunities for the developer to screw up are greatly reduced.) To me, it makes no sense that the industry is largely ignoring converting to 4GLs coding to focus on Band-Aid 3GL infrastructures.

A more subtle problem with productivity infrastructures is maintainability. Such infrastructures are typically designed by vendors with particular development practices in mind. Worse, they are often designed for the convenience of the vendor when developing the infrastructure. This forces the application developer using those infrastructures to tailor the application around them. The most obvious — and, sadly, prevalent — example of this is the plethora of “object-oriented” infrastructures. In fact, many of them are not object-oriented at all and most barely qualify as object-based. Quite often application developers are forced to cut methodological corners just to be able to use them properly. In doing so, they negate the maintainability advantages of OO development. (I’ll have more to say about this in another post.)

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IMO, this is inexcusable. There are only three characteristics of binary data that differentiate data formats: the number of bits in the smallest aggregate of bits (i.e., the byte size in bits); which end of the aggregate has the least significant bit; and the ordering of aggregates within larger aggregates (i.e., where the least significant byte is in a word). Back in the ‘60s, computer vendors vied with one another to make the most efficient machines and various combinations of these three characteristics evolved. However, today those characteristics are no longer relevant to ALU optimization, so there is no reason not to standardize on a single set of characteristic values. (That’s not quite true for representing spoken languages, but memory is so cheap today that always using 16 bits for a character in a minor concern.) The overall cost in performance for all computing due to this failure to standardize is mind-boggling.

There are three approaches to resolving the inconsistencies in hardware data formats. Given that the hardware vendors refuse to standardize, they could at least provide firmware instructions to allow a foreign format to be converted to their native format on a word-by-word basis. From a performance perspective, this would be far and away the best solution, though it would require several instruction sets to accommodate each of the various combinations.

The second approach would be to use a software proxy to convert data coming from an external source to the format of the receiving platform as it arrives. This was done at a company where I once worked for their internal LANs. It is surprisingly simple to do and there is relatively little overhead, compared to the third alternative. The reason we did that was because our software would have been infeasible due to poor performance if we hadn’t; given the machines we were working with in the early ‘80s, you could have had children in the time it would take to execute using the third alternative.

The third approach is the one used by virtually all infrastructures in IT. The basic idea is to convert all binary numeric data to ASCII and transmit that between platforms because the ASCII format is a standard. One then reconverts it back to binary for computations. This is the worst possible choice for resolving binary data compatibility because the machine instructions to convert back and forth between binary numbers and ASCII numbers are very expensive. (In fact, they are not even individual instructions; on today’s machines, ASCII conversions can only be done with software algorithms that involve executing a large number of instructions, especially for floating point data.)

If the use of ASCII were limited to just pure interoperability issues around converting the hardware format from an external platform, the problem would only warrant a small head shake and a tsk-tsk about such foolishness. However, the ASCII approach has become ubiquitous in IT and it is manifested in things like overuse of markup and scripting languages (e.g., HTML, XML, etc.). So the use of ASCII is not limited to network port proxies; it permeates IT applications because it allows a generic parser to be built for any platform, thus saving the developer keystrokes for processing specific binary data structures in memory.

The result is mind-numbing overhead. In 1984 you could run a spreadsheet in less than a minute on a TRS-80 or Apple I that had 64K of memory, a floppy drive, and a clock rate measured in kHz. Today, you could not even load the same spreadsheet on such a machine and, if you could, it would take hours to execute. Some of that, memory constraints, is due to code and feature bloat, but most of the performance hit is due to ASCII processing in the bowels of the spreadsheet program. Every time I talk to an IT guy about specific performance where lots of keystrokes were saved using massive “helpful” infrastructures, I am astounded that their examples take minutes to execute when equivalent processing in a cycle-counting R-T/E environment would take a few tens of milliseconds. The frightening thing is that the IT people are so used to using such infrastructures that they don’t think there is a problem – they think such abysmal performance is normal!

One reason ASCII is so popular in IT is the use of markup and scripting languages that was triggered in the mid-‘80s by the World Wide Web. A few years ago I read a paper in a refereed journal where the author claimed that the first markup language was created in 1986. How soon they forget. (Perhaps more apropos: How soon they repeat the mistakes of the past.) In fact, markup and scripting languages were very popular in the ’50s and ‘60s. But, by the mid-‘70s they had pretty much disappeared. There was a very good reason why they disappeared. They were great for formatting reports, but they sucked for actual programming because they were slow and very difficult to maintain at the large application level. Show me a buggy web site and I will show you a Javascript website.

The post The Demon ASCII appeared first on H. S. Lahman.

Sadly, I think that today’s OO development can best be described by paraphrasing G. B. Shaw’s observation on Christianity: The only problem with OO development is that it has never been tried. The vast majority of OO applications today are simply C programs with strong typing. In many respects, they represent the worst of both the OO and procedural approaches. They tend to be bloated and slow, which is an intrinsic risk for OO abstraction, as well as being unreliable and difficult to maintain, like procedural applications.

So what went wrong? One problem is that 3GLs are closely tied to the hardware computational models. That makes procedural development much more intuitive in a computing environment. In the OO paradigm, one strives to express the solution in customer terms rather than computer terms. Nonetheless the OO developer needs to be disciplined so that the design can ultimately be implemented on Turing machines. Developing that discipline is not as intuitive as procedural discipline, so it is much easier for the novice OO developer to go wrong. Structured Programming brought order to the chaos of procedural development that existed prior to 1970. However, Structured Programming was quite simplistic compared to the sophistication of OO design methodologies; other than the notion of functional decomposition, Structured Programming was mostly just a suite of hard-won best practices. IOW, design (OOA and OOD) is far more important to OO development than Structured Design was for procedural development.

Therein lies the second problem. Most OO developers today do not follow any particular design methodology. I once encountered a developer at a social gathering. When he found I was an OO developer, the conversation went largely as follows:

He: We are about to rewrite our 18 MLOC C application in C++.

Me: Wonderful. What methodology are you going to use?

He, giving me a look reserved for Village Idiots: Uh, you know…  objects… C++.

Me: Hmmm. How much training have you had?

He: We had a one-week course in C++.

Me: Hmmm. Does anyone in your shop have OO experience?

He: A couple of guys did some C++ in college projects.

Me: Hmmm. Are you going to have a consultant to mentor you?

He: No, there’s no budget for that.

Me: Good luck, Huck.

That project was doomed to crash and burn; the only question was how deep the crater would be. It amazes me that companies will pay more to train everyone on how to use a new copy machine than they will pay to train software developers in a major development sea change for constructing their core product line.

The third problem is that in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, acres of procedural programmers converted to OO development. Instead of learning OOA/D, they jumped right into writing OOPL code. It’s just another language, right? That is the worst way to learn OO development because the OOPLs are still 3GLs and they are still married to the hardware computational models. Those converts were desperate to find something familiar about OO development, so they mapped their procedural design principles onto the OOPL code, mainly because that was easy to do in a 3GL. Thus they created the same C programs they usually wrote, but with strong typing. Sadly, those guys are now writing the OO books.

The post OO Development Problems appeared first on H. S. Lahman.

One example is MVC, the Model-View-Controller. Originally developed as a RAD paradigm for Smalltalk environments, substantial infrastructures have been developed around it in IT for other OOPLs. Like most RAD applications, that works fine if things are very simple, like viewing data in a database in different ways and performing very basic updates on it. However, it breaks down as soon as the application needs to do some serious work and requirements start changing. One reason for that is that the Model, View, and Controller are completely artificial concepts in the developer’s mind, rather than customer space concepts. Worse, they are based on an overall strategy for processing data in the computing space rather than what the customer actually wants done.

That approach violates OOA/D doctrine in two ways. The solution is structured around the computing space problem of managing data rather than the customer’s problem of, say, computing employee benefits. That kind of structural divergence guarantees difficulties during maintenance. OOA/D doctrine says that the solution structure should map as directly as possible to the customers’ space. That’s because customer don’t like change any more than software developers, so they will implement changes in their space in a way that minimizes disruption of their existing structures. If the software structure faithfully mimics the customers’ structures, then when the changes filter down to the software as new requirements, the customer will already have done most of the work. However, if the software structure is based on an artificial organization like MVC, one is doomed to mismatches that will require unnecessary rework to fit the new requirements into the structure.

The second way the MVC violates OOA/D doctrine is the way applications are partitioned. OO applications are partitioned into subsystems that reflect logically distinct problem space subject matters. Since each subject matter has its own unique functionality, this allows requirements changes to be isolated. The larger and more complex the solution is, the more subsystems one will tend to have in the design. In the MVC approach, though, the infrastructure supports only three subject matters, regardless of complexity. In a large application, that can lead to subject matter implementations that are very difficult to maintain just because of their size.

There are a variety of RAD layered models similar to MVC that are commonly implemented and they all suffer the same problems due to their rigid and artificial structure. Most of the keystroke-saving infrastructures in IT are based, at least to some extent, on those layered models.  One of the more common classes of IT infrastructure deals with allowing the application to talk to a relational database. Such infrastructures save a lot of keystrokes for the developer because they capture a lot of the grunt work of DB access.  That’s because RDBs and their access are very narrowly defined so that very generic access tools (e.g., SQL) can be used. However, from an OO perspective, that is a major problem because those infrastructures must be accessed directly from the application code that is actually applying business rules and policies to solving a specific customer problem.

The difficulty is that RDBs are an entirely separate problem domain. Worse, they are a computing space domain, rather than a customer business domain. OOA/D doctrine says that such unique domains need to be isolated and entirely encapsulated behind an interface as a subsystem. The rest of the application that deals with the customer’s problem should have absolutely no knowledge of the RDB. Put another way, the rest of the application does not care if the data is stored in an RDB, an OODB, flat files, or on clay tablets. But as soon as the developer uses those handy infrastructures, that isolation is impossible and the RDB semantics bleeds into the rest of the application.

One can argue, “So what? In IT everybody uses RDBs, so why worry about it?” Well, in my career I have seen five major DB paradigms (flat files, ISAM flat files, CODASYL, RDB, and OODB). Each one caused great gnashing of teeth when mountains of legacy code needed to be upgraded. Maybe RDBs are the endpoint for IT. But look at the amount of legacy code that will have to be changed and tell me that the virtually costless isolation of the DB access in a subsystem is not methodologically good insurance against a modern day Codd showing up with a better idea.

This can be taken to even greater extremes. A couple of vendors provide infrastructures for doing things like queries and joins in an OOPL. IMO, that is a really, really bad idea from an OOA/D perspective. RDBs exist for a single purpose – to provide persistent data storage in a generic fashion. Access through an RDB is generally much slower than through an equivalent flat file system that is optimized for a particular application (that’s why RDBs are about as common in R-T/E as penguins at the Equator). What RDBs provide is reasonable performance for each of many applications accessing the same data for very different reasons. Constructs like queries and joins are uniquely suited to that sort of generic access. IOW, the RDB approach is an optimal solution for the multiuser, arbitrary data access problem.

However, a particular application is solving exactly one, very particular problem for the customer. In that situation, one wants optimal data structures and access techniques that are hand-crafted to the problem in hand. In that context, generic constructs like queries and joins are always going to carry a serious performance penalty compared to a custom design. That’s why one wants to isolate the data storage mechanisms in a single subsystem with a generic interface.

But from an aesthetic OO perspective, the problem is much worse than performance. The relationships that underlie queries and joins are table-based rather than row-based (Table:Row::Class:Object). In OO development, relationships are object-based. That means that one thinks about relationship navigation very differently in an OO context than in an RDB context. That difference will be reflected ubiquitously throughout the entire design because of the way messages are addressed and collections are formed. As soon as you introduce a class-based relationship navigation mechanism, you cease doing OOA/D entirely.

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The first problem is that they focus too much on testing for reliability. Integrating testing with development was an excellent idea, but it is not the whole solution to the reliability issue. When the OOP-based Agile processes were introduced in the ‘80s, the industry average reliability was a little over 4-Sigma, or about 5K defects per MLOC. That was pretty awful compared to non-software products. The OOP-base Agile processes improved on that significantly because of the emphasis on integrated testing. However, in practice there is a limit on what testing alone can do. (I spent two decades in the electronics test business, so I know a bit about it.) That limit is roughly 5-Sigma, or 232 defects/MLOC. The only way you can get better reliability than 5-Sigma in software development is through militant defect prevention, but the OOP-based Agile processes do not do that at all.

The second problem I have with the OOP-based Agile processes is that they remove all accountability from the developer for reliability, schedule, and productivity. Reliability is defined as passing the customers’ acceptance tests. If the software passes those tests it is, by definition, meeting the customer’s requirements completely. Thus the developer is not responsibility for doing anything else to improve the quality of the product, like defect prevention.

The only schedule responsibility the developer has is to resolve small sets of requirements for a particular IID increment. The overall project schedule is the customers’ responsibility via “steering” the development by defining the next small increment’s requirements (which the developers will negotiate down until they are sure they can be completed within one increment).

Accountability for productivity is also removed from the developers’ shoulders because all the metrics employed (e.g., XP’s Velocity) are defined relative to the developer team itself. The metrics measure how well the team performs from one increment to the next. It is typically impossible to tell if one Agile team is more productive than another Agile team, much less more productive than another non-Agile team, unless both groups produce exactly the same product over all the increments. No wonder developers love the OOP-based Agile processes!

The last and biggest problem I have with the OOP-based Agile processes is that their popularity has set back software development by at least a decade. In the late ‘50s the introduction of 3GLs caused a major paradigm shift in software development by increasing productivity by orders of magnitude. In the ‘90s, the industry was poised for a similar paradigm shift from 3GLs to 4GLs. Unfortunately, the OOP-based Agile processes are militantly focused on writing 3GL code. Attempting to use more abstract model representations is dismissed as “BDUF” – Big Design Up Front. IOW, they want no part of 4GLs.

Today there are several commercial transformation engines that will produce an executable directly from just a UML OOA model using 100% code generation.  Shops that use those engines report order of magnitude gains in productivity and integer factor improvements in reliability. Yet that level of 4GL development is still in the Early Adopter stage because of the mainstream shift towards OOP-based Agile processes. In fact, there is no reason that agile processes cannot be adapted to 4GL development. Bob Martin, a pioneer of XP, has been on record several times saying that a 4GL is essentially just another programming language. Nonetheless the OOP-based Agile developers remain militantly focused on 3GL coding. Worse, most of them also dismiss 4GL development as BDUF.

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IME, most CS departments focus too much on details and elegance. They teach students how to code, but not how to design. They teach students LISP and Haskell because they are elegant and interesting while not mentioning that they are useless for commercial applications because they are too slow and/or virtually unmaintainable for large applications. They teach behemoth infrastructures like CORBA when any communications can be handled much more efficiently and reliably with simple messages having by-value data packets. Worst of all, they teach the mechanics software development activities, but not the overall process of software development. IOW, the CS departments are producing code hackers instead of software engineers.

Another of my pet peeves is textbooks where the author delivers the content in Sermon on the Mount mode. The author provides a vast bundle of tehcniques, practices, and guidelines as the proper way to do development without explaining why those are good things to do. They don’t talk about how to apply a few fundamental principles; instead they provide a plethora of cookbook tools derived from those principles. That leaves the student up a creek when a problem where the guidelines don’t quite work is encountered. Nor does it help when different guidelines enable plausible alternatives from which the student must choose. (Shameless plug: in my book I focus so much on explaining how one should think about design that I sometimes deliberately lead the reader to a poor design just to prove that the methodology is self-correcting, so that one will realize it is a poor design by thinking about basic principles.)

A corollary problem is that quite often authors don’t talk about things that they should talk about because they don’t want to confuse their readers with “unnecessary complexity”. A classic example of this occurs in most OOA/D books today. You could count on one hand the number of such books that mention Normal Form. In fact, every Class Diagram should be normalized just like a relational database. That’s because both are firmly grounded in the same set theory where Normal Form is an elegant way to ensure consistency and, more importantly, to avoid ambiguity. Similarly, you could count on one hand the number of OO books that discuss using a variation on design-by-contract (DbC) to resolve state machine interactions correctly. It is tedious, so experienced developers only use it when things are really confusing, but it is still an invaluable tool to ensure correctness in complex situations.

For that matter, try finding a methodology book outside R-T/E that describes how to use finite state machines. Why? The IT community thinks using state machines requires too much skill. It is true that getting state machines to work initially is tricky. But once they do work, they tend to be very reliable and robust in the face of volatile requirements. However, the real reason I think that attitude is, at best, condescending is because it is mired in a view of IT from the ‘60s when financial institutions had acres of entry-level COBOL programmers churning out MIS reports. Today IT is a very different beast. With multitasking, online processing, interoperability, concurrent processing, asynchronous real-time input, ubiquitous networking, and multi-user systems, IT is beginning to look a whole lot like R-T/E. It is time the IT industry moved into the 21st century and accepted that (A) minimal skills sets don’t cut it anymore and (B) you can’t hide complexity behind massive infrastructures without paying the tolls in performance, reliability, and maintainability.

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First Memory (age 6). I was building a tree house in woods near where we lived. Since I was the youngest, I was assigned to nail steps to the tree trunk. A kid several feet above me was nailing down floorboards with the back of a hatchet. The hatchet slipped out of his hand, rotated a full 360 degrees, and landed on the top of my head. The blow was painful enough to draw housewives from the neighborhood to see what the screeching was about. Some friends have suggested a number of aspects of my personality date from this incident.

Christmas Spirit (ages 6-10). My mother felt that brown looked good on me, so each Christmas I was given brown clothes instead of toys. I have not worn an article of brown clothing for the past seventy years.

Playing Checkers (age 7). Apparently, I was very competitive from an early age. One day one of my father’s friends played a game of checkers with me. When it became apparent that I was about to lose, I swept the entire board with all the checkers off the table with my hand and stormed out of the room. Over the years I have toned down the odious antics, but if we sit down to play poker, I am still going to tear your heart out and eat it. I’ll just do it politely.

My First Fight (age 8). Not surprisingly, my parents shuffled me off to summer camp. The first day there I was approached by a kid who asked if I wanted to fight. Big for my age throughout childhood, I was considerably bigger than he was. Seeing no downside, I responded, “Sure.” Whereupon, he gave me an uppercut to the groin. This was my first exposure to the Golden Rule: Do unto others before they do unto you.

Just Rewards (age 8). A group of kids were sledding down a hillside street, which ended in a ‘T’ at the bottom with another street. Because I was the youngest, I was assigned to watch for cars on the crossing street. For me to guard the street, I had to sled down first. As I got near the bottom I tried to steer the sled into a snow bank, but the road was icy and I continued to slide into the crossing street. I looked up and saw a car coming. The driver saw me, braked, and went into a skid. Just before the rear wheel ran over the sled I instinctively rolled off. I can still see the wheel and the wheel bolts that slid past my view six inches away as the front of the sled was crushed.

I was afraid my parents would be displeased at the damage to the sled, so I hid it in the basement. However, the driver had gotten my name and called my parents that evening to make sure I was OK. Predictably, my parents were not pleased and I went a round with dear old dad’s paddle. Moral: When you do something stupid, make sure there are no witnesses.

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Let’s go back a few decades to look at the Green reaction to ideas like pollution taxes. When real economists in the ‘70s suggested various mechanisms to make polluters pay for pollution, they were vilified by the Greens. Anyone who proposed such an idea was dismissed as a mouthpiece for Big Industry and Big Power in trying to deflect environmentalism so that they could continue to do what they always had been doing after paying an inconsequential fine. At that time the Green position was very similar in style to that of the NRA’s – all or nothing. The Greens vehemently opposed any solution that did not involve absolute banning of CO2 emissions, much like the NRA vehemently opposed any legislation that controlled gun ownership in any way.

The Greens have mellowed a bit in this area over the years, so that they now sponsor rational, market-based initiatives for various forms of pollution tax. That’s because governments implemented them, and the Greens looked a little silly in opposing measures that actually did reduce pollution. That brings me to my first example of Green economics. Recently the Greens were in an uproar because the EU decided not to subsidize the price of pollution credits. They made dire predictions of the end of anti-pollution measures and the collapse of the pollution credit market.

The idea behind pollution credits is that industries that reduce pollution below guidelines get credit for that. Then that credit can be sold in a market to industries, like power utilities, that have difficulty meeting pollution guidelines. The real purpose behind pollution credits is not to reduce pollution per se. It is to avoid inequities in industries that require time to install anti-pollution infrastructure as guidelines lower maximum pollution levels over time. If implemented correctly, energy credits do a good job of that, which enables governments to lower pollution level guidelines faster.

The phrase ‘implemented correctly’ is the operative phrase in this context. When energy credits were implemented in much of the EU, the Greens lobbied ferociously to include credits for everything in sight that had any remote effect on pollution, including energy consumption. The problem with this is that it inflates the number of energy credits because, effectively, the producer is already getting credits when the consumers reduce usage. In other words, since the producer is already in the credit market, the credits are being double counted by including consumer credits. That ended up producing an oversupply of pollution credits. With an oversupply, the price of the credits dropped to the point where it was cheaper for power utilities to buy credits than install any kind of anti-pollution measures. So the Green solution was for the EU to subsidize the pollution credit prices with taxpayer’s money to raise their prices enough so that utilities would again start cleaning up.

Ironically, this taxpayer bailout that the Greens backed was designed to solve a problem that the Greens created themselves when they lobbied for an implementation that inflated the number of pollution credits. The proper way to fix the problem is to reduce the number of pollution credits being given out by treating consumer credits as completely separate from producer credits (i.e., consumer credits really are a form of subsidy while producer credits are not).

Green Economics II. Since methanol burns somewhat cleaner than gasoline, a pet initiative of the Greens has been the addition of methanol to gasoline. This is a case of not thinking through the economics. Where does the methanol come from? It comes from various plants that are also sources of food and feed, like corn and sugar cane. When you divert food crops to produce methanol, what happens? The portion of those crops that goes to food and feed is reduced. That means the price of food and feed goes up as reduced supply meets the same demand at a higher price point. Since the relevant crops make their way into almost everything we eat, food prices go up across the board. If you look at supermarket prices, they have doubled in less than a decade. There are people in the third world starving to death today because they can no longer afford to eat. Good work, Greens!

Green Economics III. Some Greens in the EU got a bright idea a few years ago. They argued that wood was a renewable resource and it was carbon neutral (i.e., growing the wood pulled as much carbon from the atmosphere as was returned when it was burned). Therefore, coal-fired power plants should convert to burning wood pellets because burning fossil fuels was not carbon neutral since they just added carbon when they were burned. So in the EU, especially Germany, coal plants have been converting to burning pelletized wood at the rate of about one per week.

There are just a couple of problems with the basic economics of this idea. One is the notion that wood is carbon neutral. It isn’t because it must be cut down, transported, converted into pellets so it can burn efficiently, and transported again to the power plant. All that processing consumes energy, which means more carbon is being added to the atmosphere unless the forest is next to a hydro power plant, in which case you don’t need pelletized wood fuel. Another problem is the notion that wood is renewable. That’s true, but it takes time to grow a tree and with seven billion population we already need a lot of wood. The Greens forget that much of Europe and the Eastern US was completely denuded of trees in the 17th and 18th centuries because of the need to build buildings and provide heat for them. If you completely converted all fossil fuel plants to wood burning, you would probably run out of forests in a decade or two.

But, it gets better. What happens when you divert a substantial portion of existing wood production to generating power? The price of lumber goes up. Go down to your local lumber yard and ask them what has happened to lumber prices since the EU started scrambling to find more wood to pelletize.

Green Economics IV. My personal favorite Green economic debacle is solar panel energy. Back in ’73 the price of crude oil was $3/bbl. At that time the Greens said that solar panels were “almost competitive” with fossil fuels. In ’74, OPEC raised the price of oil to $34/bbl., an order of magnitude increase. In ’75 the Greens said that solar panels were “almost competitive” with fossil fuels. Apparently the Greens employed a large value of ‘almost’. They said the same thing when oil was over $100/bbl and when it dropped back to $60/bbl.

There is a reason that solar panels will never be economically viable in the foreseeable future. The problem is that solar panels require a lot of silica. Mining and fabricating silica is highly energy intensive. About 85% of the cost of a solar panel is energy cost. So if the price of the marginal cost of energy rises, so does the cost of a solar panel in lockstep. In ’74 the marginal cost of energy rose an order of magnitude and, consequently, so did the price of solar panels. That is why they continue – to this day! – to be “almost competitive”.  No matter how high the price of hydrocarbon energy goes, solar panels will remain “almost competitive” because you have to build them using the marginal cost energy supplier before you get their energy.

One of the more creative arguments I heard recently is from an old college buddy who enjoys pretending he is a Green to pull my chain.  The argument goes that if you bootstrap production using the “free” solar energy from panels to build more solar panels, then the cost of energy will eventually go to zero when all energy produced is solar. Evidently the Greens have employed Charles Ponzi as a consultant, and their economists slept through the lecture on marginal cost supply and demand. I won’t go into the theory from Economics 101, but I will say that solar panels will never become economically viable until at least one of three things happens: (A) we run out of hydrocarbons to the point where they can no longer match world energy demand; (B) enough solar panels are built to satisfy the entire world’s demand for energy; or (C) there is a major technological breakthrough to reduce the energy dependence of solar panel production (i.e., a breakthrough on the scale of the Hall Process for extracting aluminum from bauxite ore).

Recently the price of oil dropped by more than 40% and there has been a flurry of solar panel sales. There are two reasons for this. One is that solar panels are now 40% cheaper than they were, so they can be sold as “bargains”. The other is that governments are subsidizing them with taxpayer money through utility rebates. Thus the boomlet has nothing to do with their economic viability.

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Global Warming is All Man’s Fault for burning hydrocarbons to Produce Energy

This is a fundamental tenet of the Green Party Line. The basic idea is that Man has been accelerating the introduction of CO2 into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Man now contributes more than the deficit of the natural carbon Cycle, so all global warming is Man’s fault.

That is, of course, possible. Chaos theory tells us that little pushes here and there can have stupendous effects in large systems, and the atmosphere can be viewed as a chaotic system. The problem with buying the Green view is that there is no conclusive proof that it is true. For example, plant respiration (the metabolic combustion of cells that produces both CO2 and H2O) contributes many times Man’s contribution of CO2. How do we know that some evolutionary change has not occurred on a large scale (e.g., grasses worldwide) that changes plant respiration? Man is certainly tinkering actively with grain crops. Maybe there is a side effect that is causing them to produce more CO2 during respiration, so they are the real problem. The point here is that nobody, including the Greens, knows because we only started measuring the Carbon Cycle a few decades ago (and we still don’t measure it very well, as I will show in a later post).

On the other hand, we have the entire geologic record that says that there is nothing special about this particular interglacial hiatus. It is behaving exactly like every one preceding it when Man had no matches. So, why is Man suddenly the prime mover in the current interglacial hiatus? The geologic record also says that even if the Ice Age is over, global warming is only bringing the Earth back up to the normal levels that have prevailed between Ice Ages for the past 500m years. So what is the problem? Maybe the Greens should be thanking Man for getting us out of the Quarternary Ice Age.

By the way, in case you are wondering if the current climate were a harbinger of the end of the current Ice Age, rather than just another interglacial hiatus, that is highly unlikely. The current Ice Age started 2.6m years ago when the Isthmus of Panama closed, greatly changing oceanic currents. Until plate tectonics moves the Americas further from Europe and Africa so that the Gulf Stream has a longer reach to warm when crossing the equator, growing in power, it is very likely the current Ice Age will continue for the foreseeable future (though the hiatuses may become more frequent).

However, the most serious flaw in this Green position is a major assumption that they make: all the other sources of CO2 in the atmosphere remain constant. That is just plain wrong, as I demonstrated in my post on geologic history. However, in this context I will just make one point. Man probably is largely responsible for the global warming of the past two centuries, but it has little to do with burning hydrocarbons. Man’s population has grown 7-fold in the past two centuries. It takes a lot of food to feed that many people, and that has serious consequences for plant and animal respiration.

Currently the largest single source of methane — which is 72 times more effective as a greenhouse gas than CO2 — is domestic cattle. The increase in domestic cattle alone could probably account for global warming in the past two centuries. Animal respiration also changes substantially as well when continents move towards the poles, as I discussed in my post on fundamental mechanisms.

In addition, different plants have different levels of metabolism. Generally speaking, trees have lower metabolisms than grasses and shrubs. More importantly, agricultural plants tend to have very high metabolisms because we breed them for rapid growth. In the past two centuries, Man has converted forests to agriculture at a prodigious rate. That increases plant metabolism’s contribution to atmospheric CO2 content — very probably far in excess of all of Man’s contribution from burning hydrocarbons.

The bottom line: Man very likely is responsible for recent global warming, but it is because he has tinkered with flora and fauna rather than burning hydrocarbons for energy. So if the Greens want to focus on Man’s role in global warming, they need to focus on overpopulation rather than burning hydrocarbons.

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Green tactics I. The Greens employ a bunch of scare tactics to make their points, which I regard as scientific charlatanism. One of their most popular ploys is misdirection. They present data in ways that imply particular conclusions that are not justified by the data. One of my favorites is the following diagram of the Carbon Cycle:

You will note that human emissions are labeled in bright red. Usually red is associated with danger, so by choosing that color, the Greens are already saying there is something bad about that. It is also associated with the idea of halting something (e.g., stop signs and red OFF buttons), so it is subliminally suggesting Man should stop doing that. It also stands out starkly on the picture, so it emphasizes Man’s role. You will also note the red +3 and + 2 on the two photosynthesis paths out of the atmosphere. The Greens indicate the planet is desperately trying to compensate for Man’s boorishness, but can’t quite do it, right?

Why not label Man’s CO2 in yellow and label, say, plant respiration in red? A 4% increase in plant respiration would account for the annual surplus. Why aren’t we blaming evolution in those damn plants for global warming? The Greens would argue that the natural processes aren’t changing but we know Man is burning more hydrocarbons since the start of the industrial revolution. Alas, that is only half true. We know from the geologic record that the natural processes are changing constantly and they are rarely in balance. We also know that Man has been deforesting the planet in favor of high-growth agricultural crops with higher respiration. So why couldn’t increased plant respiration be the problem?

That segues to another issue for this diagram — the numbers are gibberish! In fact, no one knows what the contributions of photosynthesis and various respirations are. At best we can only make wild guesses that would have -50/+300% error envelopes because no one has measured those things on a planetary scale. However, we do know two numbers in the diagram with considerable accuracy: the total CO2 in the atmosphere and Man’s contribution through burning hydrocarbons. Man’s direct contribution is actually 30b tons, not 9b. And the total CO2 in the atmosphere is 2.06×10**15 tons, not 8.0x 10**11 tons. Those real numbers are completely inconsistent with everything else on the diagram. The bottom line here is that you cannot believe anything this diagram is saying quantitatively.

Alas, I have tried to find the original source of this diagram to find out what is going on without success. All the references are circular; they just point to other web sites with the same diagram. Given how far off the  known numbers are, I strongly suspect somebody simply made up this diagram for the sole purpose of blaming Man’s burning hydrocarbons for global warming.

Green tactics II. The IPCC sponsors and publishes research on climate as well as assessing risks in climate change. Having such an organization is probably a really good idea because we should understand what is happening around us when it can affect us in significant ways, like rising sea levels drowning coastal cities. The problem with IPCC, though, is that it is the mouthpiece for the Green Movement. It is dominated by meteorologists who now call themselves climate scientists. They focus on atmospheric CO2 being the root of all the Earth’s problems for the same reason that when one’s only tool is a hammer, one tends to see the world in terms of nails. As such, the most charitable thing I can say about their science is that they are extremely selective about what science they sponsor and publish.

A good example is measuring the Gulf Stream. Oceanographers started measuring this circulation in the ’80s because the models indicated it was driving Ice Ages and those models predicted a return to Ice Age temperatures by 2150 (that date is substantially closer now, like 2050). Oceanographers measured the salinity (density) and actual volume flux (volume of fluid moved per unit time) in situ (i.e., in the oceans themselves). They concluded the Gulf Stream started to slow down in the late ‘80s, and the flow dropped more than 30% since ’00.

Alas, this is news that IPCC does not want to hear because it says we need to buy snowshoes rather than bathing suits. So what we see in the IPCC publications are two different studies. One measured surface velocity and the other measured surface height using satellite imaging. These reports concluded that there is a lot of variation in the Gulf Stream over time that could account for any variations noted in other measurements. Therefore, there is no evidence the THC is actually slowing.

Thus, IPCC promotes two studies that didn’t even measure volume flux directly and it never mentions the studies that did so directly and in situ. Consequently, IPCC has issued a position paper that dismisses the shutdown of the Gulf Stream. That is selective science. Worse, the models IPCC runs on the THC use inputs that are patently unrealistc, such as temperature increasing by 3-4°C when CO2 doubles from 200ppm to 400ppm and they do not account for massive heat transfers from Equator to poles; instead they use precipitation/evaporation models to describe the THC. (Since 1800 CO2 increased 60%, yet temperature went up less than 1°C.)

There are serious problems with Greens controlling organizations like IPCC. One is that they can control the media. When a reporter wants to research climate for a piece, where would the reporter logically go? Obviously to the people who are experts in the subject matter. Where are they? At organizations like IPCC, WMO, and NOAA. But those organizations are dominated by climate scientists (nee meteorologists) who are Greens. The result is the media dutifully reports the Green Party Line, even though the journalist did due diligence in getting the facts from experts.

Much worse, that extends to research. Research into climate is classified as basic research because it has no immediate commercial value. Funding for such research comes primarily from governments. When lawmakers need to allocate limited budgets, how do they do that? That ask experts in the research field. Where do they find them? They find such experts at organizations dedicated to the subject matter, like IPCC, WMO, and NOAA (NOAA is actually a government agency that is supposed to advise lawmakers). Thus those same organizations also control the purse strings on climate research. If you want a grant for climate research, you better be a Right Thinker. Sadly, we are in very much the same position Russia was in during the ’40s and ’50s when Trofim Lysenko dominated Russian agricultural research and anyone believing in Mendelian Genetics went to the Gulag. That set back Russian agriculture by decades so by the early ’90s Russians were waiting in line all day for a loaf of bread and Russia had to buy wheat from its arch enemy, the US, to feed its people. In my opinion, the Greens are playing the same role as Lysenko in placing the entire world in a very bad place with regard to climate.

Green Tactics III. The Greens love to present small samples in formats that make its points while ignoring the rest of the data. Let’s look at a couple of these.

The last graph clearly shows that CO2 levels are higher now than in any of the prior interglacial hiatuses. But, there are two things to note. Temperature actually leads CO2 in all the hiatuses, but there has been no correspondingly dramatic leading rise in temperature for the Industrial Revolution. Also note that starting about 2,000 years ago, the rise in CO2 seemed to be topping out, just as it did in previous hiatuses. (In fact, the era around 1100 AD was known as the “Little Ice Age”.) So it looks like Man has fortuitously delayed a spiral back into the depths of the Ice Age. Nonetheless, there is a deficit in CO2 from natural causes, there are strong indications the THC is shutting down, and an abrupt climate change to cooler weather seems imminent.

Another important point about the red curve is that the years were chosen very carefully to support the notion of global warming being all Man’s fault because of burning hydrocarbons. The viewer is expected to connect the dots between the Industrial Revolution and CO2 emissions. But the graph doesn’t actually say that. All the graph says is that atmospheric CO2 content has gone up 60% in that time period. In fact, burning hydrocarbons is a relatively minor contributor to that rise in CO2.

Burning hydrocarbons for energy currently accounts for about half the direct annual surplus. However, over the entire Industrial Revolution, the contribution is much less. That’s because 40% of the entire output of the Industrial Revolution was in that last fifteen years as China, India, and other nations rapidly industrialized. In other words, our output of CO2 from burning hydrocarbons has grown at a much faster rate than the graph in recent years. (For example, in the early years of the Industrial Revolution power was supplied by water wheels, not burning hydrocarbons.) In other words, there is some other, at least comparable source of Co2 over the past 180 years to account for the total cumulative increase. Could that possibly be a combination of deforestation and planting high metabolism agricultural plants?

Just to put this in real perspective, CO2 content of the atmosphere has been well over 3,000 ppm for the vast majority of the last 500 million years. The only times it gets below that is in the depths of Ice Ages. And the Earth has been a whole lot warmer most of that time as well. The only times you get temperatures like the present is in Ice Ages. As scary as the IPCC may try to make things look, it doesn’t hold a candle (sic) compared to the normal state of affairs. Yet multicellular life thrived during that period.

Green tactics IV. The following diagram has been making the rounds of Green discussions since 2013. It is a classic example of scientific charlatanism. The numbers purport to be the average temperature in each decade.

You will note the rapid rise in the last three decades — a sure sign of global warming, right? If you go to the original source — the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) — and read the paper carefully, you will find that the bars are not averages of the annual temperatures in those decades, as one is likely to assume when looking at the graph (or the title of the article!). The bars actually represent averages of the maximum temperature worldwide achieved in each of the years in those decades. IOW, the bars average ten annual peak temperatures. If one did the same for the minimum temperatures in each decade, those bars would slope downward symmetrically since the ’80s.

What this graph is actually showing is that weather is becoming more erratic since the ’80s, when the THC started to shut down. While the average temperature did not change much, the peaks and valleys became more extreme. One of the things predicted by models of the THC shutdown, and demonstrated in the geologic record for the transitions of past interglacial hiatuses, is that weather becomes extremely erratic during the transitions around hiatuses. In fact, the decade ending in 2010 had the most erratic weather worldwide in recorded history. (Alas, things will get a lot worse as we transition back to a glacial epoch; for example, ARkStorms — hurricanes hundreds of miles across that sit in one place for weeks with 200 mph winds while dropping 400 inches of rain.)

What is unconscionable to me about this graph is that it was the centerpiece of an article entitled 2001-2010: Warmest Decade Since Record Keeping Began. That is factually correct because global warming did not pause until the mid-’90s, so the 2001-2010 decade must be the warmest complete decade on record. However, the implications of this graph, which was the centerpiece of the article, and the title itself are unambiguous in driving the point that the climate is continuing to warm at an increasing rate. The article does that even though the data in the graph demonstrates erratic temperature, not rising average temperature, and the Earth’s average temperature has plateaued since the mid-’90s. To me that represents outrageous scientific charlatanism.

Green Tactics V. There are two NOAA mappings of relative warming and cooling below. The first one is the raw temperature data. The second one has been massaged to show percentages of change. Note how in the second diagram the oceans showed less cooling and the warming areas were more extensive and intense. The way the percentages were computed made warming look far more pervasive and intense than in the raw data. Needless to say, you only see the second diagram on Green web sites.

A far more interesting feature is that areas changed from cooling to warming in several places. The question one has to ask is: how does the sign change when simply converting absolute values to percentages? It can’t — unless you also change the reference datum! Notice that the first diagram specifies the reference datum while the second doesn’t because someone might notice what they are doing. For the second diagram they chose a datum that was an outlier that was unusually cool. This goes beyond scientific charlatanism into scientific fraud because they “cooked” the data to make their point.

The question then becomes: why would they do that? The answer is that they are being remarkably subtle when spreading their message. Hardly anyone reads academic papers from IPCC, WMO, and NOAA. Most people in the public domain get information from the media and from web sites. There are a large number of web sites that preach the Green Message. When a Green blogger wants to make a point and needs a nice diagram from an authoritative source to do that, which one of these diagrams do you think the blogger will use on the web site? Clearly the second diagram makes warming look much more severe and that is going to be the one cited.

But why didn’t NOAA just display the last diagram for the bloggers to copy? Because they would have to identify the reference datum. Anyone familiar with climate data might recognize it as an outlier year and give them flack over that. So they provide both diagrams and let people assume the same datum was used for both and not notice the sign changes. Then the enthusiasm of the bloggers will get the second diagram published far and wide. As a bonus, the bloggers will probably erroneously cite the datum from the first diagram and NOAA will be off the hook for misrepresentation.

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I looked around to see where the snake was, but everyone seemed to be pointing at me. I looked down and saw a big water moccasin about two feet away, blithely swimming along the shoreline. I froze and he swam right over my hands, which were resting on the bottom. Meanwhile, my uncle had gotten his rifle to save me. As soon as the snake’s head was about six inches past my hand, he shot it. What he overlooked was that the muzzle was about six inches from my ear. It was only a .22, but I was deaf in that ear for a couple of days and got powder burns on my ear and shoulder. This was the first step on a long road to tinnitus.

My uncle had played center for Villanova back in the leather helmet days and it showed. One day he decided to give me a lesson in nature. A big black snake was hanging out in a peach tree on the property. He was explaining that black snakes were good snakes because they got rid of rodents and they were harmless. To demonstrate this he reached out and touched the black snake’s tail. This black snake, which had apparently slept through that class, turned and slashed my uncle’s forearm to the tune of about a dozen stitches.

A Born Contrarian (age 9). In 1947 my father took a post with the Occupation in Japan. (He was an economist and one of the architects of Japan’s post-war banking system. By the ‘80s he was getting flak for doing that job too well.) My mother and I joined him after he got settled. We went by sea from New York via Panama, San Francisco, and an unscheduled stop in Hawaii. The total sea time was thirty-four sea days and I was seasick for thirty of them, at which point they considered feeding me intravenously.

The four days when I was not seasick occurred when the ship answered a distress call from another ship in trouble in a typhoon. While everyone was sick in their cabins, I would stand in the glassed-in observation deck just under the Captain’s bridge and look out at the storm. The ship would plunge down a monstrous wave and the bow would plow into the side of the next wave. The ship would shudder and I would watch the water flow over the deck and then rush up the superstructure until all I could see out of the windows was foaming green water. There was so much damage to the bow that the ship had to pit stop in Hawaii for repairs. If I had been a little older, I would have been petrified, but at that age I thought it was bloody marvelous!

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The Army is big on training. My personal favorite was assault training. When you assault a fixed position, you walk up to within 15 yards taking an aimed shot every few steps to keep the enemy heads down. When you get to 15 yards, you load a fresh magazine and fire from the hip as you trot the rest of way, one shot every two steps. After the DI had carefully explained the technique, he asked if there were questions. I asked, “Sergeant, the guys are hunkered down in their foxholes as we approach and they can hear the change in rate of fire when we get 15 yards away. What’s to stop them each from lobbing a grenade out at us?” His reply was, “There are always casualties in combat.” Terrific.

One day they sent us off to Quantico for amphibious training. The course was taught by a very gung ho Marine drill instructor. He emphasized that we needed to scare the hell out of the enemy (as they sat behind their machine guns!) by running down the ramp of the landing craft screaming as loud as we could. The first time through the drill we didn’t yell loud enough for him so we had to do it again. (It doesn’t matter what branch of service you are in; you never do it right the first time.) The second time around, two hundred guys roared out of the landing craft screaming, completely unrehearsed, “Fuck The Army!” as loudly as they could. Even the Marine DI cracked up. Most of my company were draftees.

After basic I was assigned to a map making company. (All geologists get assigned to map making companies because they know how to survey. It didn’t matter that I hated surveying and was incompetent at it.) One day I am out in the boonies on a field exercise. (At Ft. Bragg you do a lot of 1-2 week field exercises. The cat houses in Readsville, the town next to Ft Bragg, do a booming business because somebody is always just getting back from a couple of weeks in the bushes.) Three of us were digging a sump for the field kitchen. We were down about 6 feet when it occurred to us that between us we had 18 years of college. Your tax dollars at work.

A secret that almost nobody in the Army will admit: Though they loudly proclaim their dislike for SOS (Shit On a Shingle, aka chipped beef on toast), most grunts like it more than any other breakfast.

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Only geologists regard a rainy day as good working weather because it keeps the mosquitoes and deer flies off.

Unless you live in Yosemite Park, the best places to find rock outcrops are road cuts and streams. So, field geologists spend a lot of time walking up and down the middle of streams, hopping from one slippery, moss-covered rock to the next. It is a really good day when you make it to lunch without falling into the stream.

Only geologists will routinely walk twenty-miles into the boonies all alone without telling anyone where they are going. There is an unwritten law that says if you slip off a wet rock in a stream and break your leg, you deserve to die of starvation for being clumsy.

If you look at the list of people killed during every volcanic eruption, there will usually be a couple of volcanologists. This is because the best time to get up close and personal in researching a volcano is when an eruption is imminent. Given the number of volcanic eruptions annually, I am amazed that there are any volcanologists left.

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The reason was that it was the year of the Whole Man at MIT. MIT was envious that Harvard’s endowment was vastly larger and decided that lab rats, despite all their Nobel Prizes, weren’t making enough money for grand contributions. So for the class of ‘59 MIT decided to recruit some potential Captains of Industry by paying more attention to the SAT morning tests than the afternoon tests for science and math. In my class they got a whole lot more than they bargained for, and MIT never repeated that mistake again. The class of ‘59 majored in Wine, Women, and Song and the actual average cumulative rating was 20% lower than the cum that MIT predicts for entering freshmen.

The author doing his bit for recycling ca 1958

By any rational criterion I thoroughly wasted the first 2-1/2 years of my college education. On the other hand, I would have to say that my undergraduate years were the best years of my life and I would do it all again in a heartbeat.

In 1978 the movie Animal House was made, produced by National Lampoon. National Lampoon had spawned from the Harvard Lampoon, Harvard’s humor magazine. That movie was a source of outrage for my college friends and me. It is well known that Harvard types have no lives, so the National Lampoon had to steal ours to make the movie. I can put a real name on every character in that movie, and every incident in that movie, except one, happened during my tenure at MIT.

The one incident that didn’t happen during my tenure was the dead horse in the Dean’s Office. That didn’t happen at all because we actually got along pretty well with Freddie Fassett, the Dean of Student Housing. He was a classic Mr. Chips character, down to his mustache and bow tie. On at least two occasions he bailed our people out of jail for various escapades. I particularly remember an abortive panty raid. Several of us, including Greg Doyle, whom Freddie had bailed out recently due to an incident involving borrowing an Irish flag, had heard about it and were checking out the burgeoning riot when Freddie walked up to Greg, peered over the top of his glasses, and just said, “Mr. Doyle. Go Home.” We did, because Freddie was a neat guy who actually understood students.

My wife, The Twit, read this blog and insisted that I should not use real names for the people involved in the incidents described in the posts. Since she knows where the cream cheese and pepper jelly is hidden, I really can’t afford to annoy her too much. So I have provided quaint sobriquets for everyone in true Tech Tool fashion — P1, P2, …, Pn. I should also mention that everything that follows is true; you cannot make this stuff up.

 

 

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That evening there was a Freshman Orientation. The speaker said, “Look at the person on your right. Now look at the person on your left. One of you will not be here in four years for graduation.” Little did he know that for the class of the Whole Man, none of us were going to be there.

In those days, Rush Week was held immediately following the orientation. That was a chaotic week where fraternities and other living groups desperately recruited new members from among the hopelessly naïve freshmen. I started out at Chi Phi, a fraternity on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. It was a nice place with nice guys, but it was a little formal for me with everyone dressed in suits. Also, the decor reeked of Old Money, so I was afraid of breaking something. My next stop was Phi Kappa, which was a couple of blocks down Commonwealth Avenue. Phi Kappa was very informal and owned nothing breakable. When I got there, there were three guys drinking beer on the front steps. One asked if I was a freshman. When I admitted I was, he handed me a beer from the six pack beside him and said, “Welcome to Phi Kap, kid,” and then went back to his conversation, ignoring me. I never left.

A few years later we were sitting on the front stoop playing poker and drinking beer on a nice summer day. The beat cop came by and paused. We said, “Hi, Officer.” (The ‘50s were a kinder, gentler time that allowed for better police/student relationships than the ‘60s.) He just stood there shaking his head and asked, “Don’t you guys ever go home?”

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P1, P2, and I decided to see every movie playing in Boston over the Reading Period just before final exams for second term of freshman year. We were all Physics majors because we didn’t know any better. P2 flunked Chemistry, which is forgivable as a Physics major. P1 flunked Physics, which is not so forgivable. I flunked them both, which was unforgivable for any major. (Curiously, P1 and P2 both went on to get PhDs in Physics.)

One thing we learned early on was that a good story was worth a good grade…

We wanted P3 to go out drinking, but he had a quiz the next day. We promised we would come up with a good excuse before the evening was over. P3 foolishly took our word because we were Responsible Upperclassmen. Surprisingly, we did come up with a brilliant strategy. As good engineers, we made a fake cast for his forearm with hidden catches that allowed it to be removed. We added enough dirt and cute, multi-colored signatures to make the cast convincing. It worked like a charm and P3 got to take a make-up exam.

Unfortunately, we did not think things through at 2 AM after an evening of debauchery. We forgot P3 would have to wear it to class every day for four weeks or so. That wasn’t a huge problem, but P3 woke up with a hangover one morning and put the cast on the wrong arm. (P3 used his MIT education in metallurgy wisely. If you google him, you will find about 1500 hits that all say something like, “P3, legendary rugby coach, said…” Among other things, P3 almost single-handedly got women’s rugby into the Olympics. He now tours the world with a bevy of young babes doing rugby tournaments while his wife, P3A, is home knitting.)

P4 was a fine Aeronautical Engineer but he didn’t do Humanities well. One night we wanted him to go out for a few beers, but he had a theme due the next day. I volunteered to dictate the theme to him since I generally aced Humanties because of my genetic gift for bullshit. Since his Humanities grades were abysmal, he figured he couldn’t do worse and agreed. Alas, the theme was on Hegel and I hadn’t gotten to Hegel yet in class. So I read five pages of his book and started dictating. Half an hour later P4 had his 1,500 words; after another half hour to clean the paper up and type it, P4 was out drinking. P4 got a B+, his highest grade ever on a Humanities theme. Personally, I felt the Prof really missed the point. (P4 ended up a VP at a Fortune 500. Clearly, Humanities was not a major concern at that company.)

[ed: The Twit also insisted that I expunge a marvelous story about how P4 managed to get poison ivy everywhere on a PK picnic.]

P2 had as much difficulty with Humanities as P4. Unfortunately, his story wasn’t good enough when he got back a Humanities quiz with a grade of 1, presumably for spelling his name correctly. It seems there was a question requiring a discussion of somebody’s dialectic and P2 read it as ‘dielectric’. Only P2 could make that kind of mistake because he was always a little out of phase with the universe the rest of us lived in. He once sent the IRS a letter that went something like, “I lost my W2 forms this year and I forgot to file my taxes last year. I think I owe you a little money this year but you owed me a little money last year. Let’s call it even.” P2 never heard back, and I would bet there is an IRS agent in a rubber room somewhere.

The post Academia appeared first on H. S. Lahman.

“Sir, I haven’t been to many of your classes and…”

“Yes, I did have the distinct impression I had never seen you before in my life.” Some professors actually remember when they were students.

“Uh… Yes. I have a schedule conflict with another class that has no textbook, so I had to go to that class to take notes.”

“Hmmm.”

“Uh, I was wondering how I was doing.”

He rummaged in his briefcase and then said, “Not well. You haven’t handed in any homework and your average for the first three quizzes is 44 points below the class average.”

That was somewhat worse than I had hoped, but it wasn’t completely surprising since I had not cracked the textbook yet. However, the conversation was not going well, so I was forced to bring out the A material and after ten minutes the Prof finally agreed to pass me if I passed the last quiz and the final. The night before the final I opened the book for the first time. By 6 AM I had read all the material and I concluded I had no chance whatsoever of passing the final. My roommate, P5, happened to have half of fifth of bourbon on his desk. I wasn’t a bourbon fan, but under the circumstances it seemed like a good idea at the time. (P5, by the way, eventually became a priest, left the priesthood, and then married an ex-nun, apparently to keep religion in the family.)

I went over to the final at 9 AM with a glass containing the last of the bottle. I looked curiously at the first problem and it seemed somewhat familiar. The final was open-book, so I paged through the text and found an almost identical problem as an example; only the numbers were different. I copied the book solution using the quiz numbers and used the old standby of “Solve for X” because I didn’t trust my arithmetic at that point. So, I looked at the next problem and it was also familiar. Same drill for it and all the other problems. I was done with the 3-hour final in 90 minutes, which was fortunate because I was out of bourbon.

The prof gave me a C. Ironically, that was one of the few courses I passed that term, and I flunked out. When I re-entered after the mandatory ten month hiatus, I was tempted to try the same fluid approach to unleashing my subconscious. However, I had so many zeros weighing down my cum that I had to maintain Dean’s List grades for the last two years to barely scrape by for graduation. I just couldn’t take a chance even though a clinical case study would clearly have been of great value to students everywhere. So for two years I went to class, did homework, and read the texts. (My graduating cum was 2.495, which rounded to the mandatory 2.50 for graduation, and I had to get extra hours added to my thesis to manage that so that I wouldn’t have to come back for another term.)

Thus, it is was no great surprise that Phi Kappa was on Academic Probation for twenty-eight consecutive terms and ranked dead last among all MIT living groups for twenty-six of them. Alas, things change. Today MIT is a zero tolerance dry campus and PK (now Phi Kappa Theta due to a merger with Theta Kappa Phi) wins awards for academic excellence. Those poor kids just don’t know what they are missing.

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