If I stand back from the fraw a little, my view on Dr. Gray has changed alot. I know years ago I thought that if I were king for a day, off with his head. Now it's not so much that I am a skeptic in the sense of 'opposing' anthropogenic global warming (AGW) but have come as everyone seems to know come to third view that climate is forced by electrics and that CO2 is an electrical forcing and that the main risk is not warming but global climate instability.
From that perspective there are some extremely profound things that Dr. Gray has stated that are right on the money, some things his critics have stated that are incredibly stupid, and some things that, frankly, he's wrong about, including the ATC.
The first thing he has said/written that I have reposted here over and over again is that the models have made assumptions about convective processes and then the models integrate them over and over again, in Dr. Gray's thinking, promising huge errors. He argues that the makers of the models have not done the down in the trenches research about these non linear processes. For instance, what would happen if in a place like the Arctic which gets 10 cm of precip a year if all of a sudden convection changed there and it became stormy there? You can talk ATC all you want but if a storm or a pattern shift occurs from a non linear change, the water flows will change, too. Removing water from the oceans and placing ice on land will cause the oceans where the convection is occurring to become more saline, and change ocean circulations as well.
Gray's biggest problem IMHO is that he was born and studied in an area of mathematics which focuses on chaos theory. This causes his view of things to be molded, with all due respect, in a certain way. Many of the meteoroligical community suffers from the same myopathy, including, again, with all due respect, Dr. Masters. I think that the earth climate actually behaves much more like a biological system in that the climate system is modulated or dampened. The mathematical way that this is understood, then, from each of their perspectives lead to paradoxes that are not resolved and then to strong views as those in the debate come to either end of the paradoxes.
Only a dampened system predicts the oddity and improbability of the climate stability the earth shows . . . and if you argue from the data about the stability you are showing only the end result and not the input, the modulation or the potential weakness in the system from anthropogenic activity. If you focus on the extremes sometimes this opens up the opposing view for skeptical commentary that its about the chaotic input and not the anthropogenic activity. Both views are not correct.
Also in a dampened system the destruction of the feedback mechanism may not manefest itself immediately. The earth EMF has weakened about 8 percent in the past 100 years. Mars, without a strong EMF, lost its atmosphere, and with no atmosphere is dead, of course. It took 300,000 years for everything over 50 pounds to become extinct after the Chixculub asteroid struck--and you know how I have argued that this was an extreme electrical defect in the climate system, and that the K-T boundary was defined by it, and that even the largest tropical storms today like Wilma and Gilbert can't help but strike the Yucatan given the electrical significance of the impact site. Strangely, with all this talk of thermodyamics on this bb against an electrics theory, the asteroid impact would have had the energy of a good El Nino, which, as we all know, is energy that escapes out into space after a year or two. So three hundred thousand years later everything over 50 pounds dies, and even today there are tropical storms which move to the impact site . . . thermodyanmics doesn't do the trick, and the trick it doesn't do is predict non linear change to convective processes.
So, in this regard, Dr. Gray is right. He's right that the models are crap because they haven't got a handle on non linear convective processes. I tip my hat to him for that. But as for his politics, perhaps it is the catholic education and institutions I have been schooled in, I am more one to try to change the system than live outside of it. Try to alter the thinking from within about the problem of a living, electrical earth. |