[FRIAM] Murdoch and Trump

[Jochen Fromm]

10 years ago we had 10 degrees below zero in Berlin and several days of snow. This winter we had not a single day of snow. Not a single one. The arctic is melting, Australia and California are burning like never before and Brasil is destroying the last pieces of its precious rain forest.And the worst thing is that it will be every year like this one, only worse. Billions of people are burning in a few decades the fossil fuels produced over millions of years. You don't need to be an expert to see that this really can not be reversed in a few months.I could even imagine that we burn so much fossil fuels that there will be regions where we have a lack of Oxygen. Earth was like this many million years ago. And the most powerful country of the world has a president who ignores all of it and considers himself a very stable genius. Sean Hannity gets 36 Million Dollar (!) a year from Fox News to praise him. Isn't it depressing? -Jochen
-------- Original message --------From: Pieter Steenekamp <pieters at randcontrols.co.za> Date: 1/20/20  22:59  (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Murdoch and Trump Eric asked for someone with a comprehensive knowledge of climate science and I do not put my name in the hat. But I do have some comprehension of the basic science and the big picture.But like all humans I have biases and very far from having a comprehensive knowledge of the literature nor the science. In my professional career as an engineer I have done a lot of engineering modeling and in my private time I am enthusiastic about emergence and have played with agent based models to simulate complex systems.   So, on the topic under discussion, there are issues that I reckon should not be questioned (“the science is settled”):a) On decades time scales the earth has warmed, the average sea level has increased and the average CO2 in the atmosphere increasedb) There are direct and indirect causal links between CO2 and temperaturec) The direct causal link is not sufficiently strong to be worried aboutd) It’s the indirect link that’s the source of the concerns. CO2 causes the temperature to rise a little. This causes more evaporation and subsequently more clouds. Some clouds cause cooling (negative feedback) and some warming (positive feedback).e) There are other factors than CO2 also affecting the temperature.Then there are issues that IMO are not settled.:I argue an issue that cuts to the very heart of the current climate change debate is the strength of feedbacks. If the positive feedback is strong and the negative feedback weak then Houston we have a problem we should listen to Greta. If not, Trump was probably right in withdrawing from Paris.PieterOn Sun, 19 Jan 2020 at 23:13, David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:Sorry…

My own typos are bad enough, but usually comprehensible.  But when the damned computer helpfully comes in and substitutes the word it thinks I must have meant, the result is a true obscurity:

> One also wants to take into account arctic se ice, which if I really is on a faster melting schedule then some models predicted, though I don’t have even a good impressionistic memory of what I have heard on that.

One also wants to take into account arctic _sea_ ice, which if I _remember_ is on ….

Eric



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