The Obama Admin Admits More Than They Tell

Read this amazing article:

http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/05/27/steven-chu-white-roofs-to-fight-global-warming/

To understand what is shocking about this article requires that you understand some core realities of the global warming issue.

Here is a primer:

The core of the issue with global warming is the concern that the surface temperature of the earth will change significantly enough that it will change the environment. This is immediately followed by a debate about the effect increasing ratios in carbon concentrations have on that environmental equation. Within the carbon emissions (increasing that ratio) issue rests the debate about how much of those emissions are directly related to human activity. This debate is very complicated and rests mostly on the shoulders of statisticians who may or may not being reading data correctly on either side of the debate and they attempt to draw both correlation and causation with regard to human activity that causes increased earth surface average temperatures (Anthropogenic Global Warming or AGW.)

What most people don’t know or won’t tell you is that the predictions are coming, for the most part, from information provided by models. What does this mean? Well imagine that you are looking at a farmer’s almanac. The almanac tells you the weather history in that part of the country and from a series of recorded events the hope is that you can guess the weather for the time frame you are in at the moment, based on the past.

The fact is, that is too simple an explanation if we are supposed to imagine how predictions in global warming are established today. Imagine being a part of a collective of farmers. You watch your area while others watch theirs. Now, the manager of the farmers looks at all of the almanacs. From there they pull out their slide-rule and predict what the weather will be like tomorrow. Do you trust it? Sure. Why not. How about a year from now? Are you willing to imagine that the farm manager is so accurate based on the local information that you can decide if you will have a picnic outside a year from now? Now imagine 100 years from now. And you, as a farmer, have to invest $100 billion and your farms future on whether or not the farm manager’s prediction is accurate. What about a 1,000 years from now? Can you trust that? And now imagine that there are a couple farm managers working together and they have conjoined their results and are now delivering the following prediction, “We believe that in 100 years approximately the temperature will be between -200 degrees and +200 degrees F.” What is the value of a prediction like that? Now, imagine the farm managers feel they have read enough farmer’s almanacs that they decided to mostly throw out the almanacs and they are now going to plug their best guesses are the values of certain variables into an equation to come up with a prediction like that? Still feeling pretty good about the prediction (as well as the science and the math?)

This is AGW science. The predictions are based more on the results of people sitting in labs plugging numbers into models rather than information from the field. If the models don’t agree with field research then rather than challenge the science they just attack the scientist for being an “AGW denier.” The predictions across a number of teams modeling results can be as much as 400% variant (if you were on the job and your boss asked you for inventory levels for production and after you gave him the result you said “But my numbers may be as much as 400% off,” how long do you think you would get to keep your job?)

And even within those models, we now know that they underestimate certain factors and leave out others completely (this can be like trying to bake a cake and then forgetting to include flour or including way too much salt.) This is the science of models. This is what we are being told is the “undisputed” science behind much of AGW. Not facts, but models that predict with 400% variance at times.

So what does this article tell us?

To understand this, you have to understand one of the larger alternative understandings of Global Warming.

The Alternative Global Warming Understanding Primer:

While we do know that the carbon ratio is increasing, we know that we are only talking about parts per million. Now, maybe your mom once said to you that you are “one in a million” but that simply means you are really unique. Carbon at parts per million is debatably not a huge determinant of weather or global average temperature when you consider that it is minor compared to the full spectrum and intensity of all of the greenhouse gasses known in our atmosphere (again, in the world of greenhouse gasses carbon would be like the nerd in school who got expelled for aggressively flicking his booger at someone while the school mostly ignores the fact that the halls are being overrun with gangs that regularly beat people up.)

So what does affect the surface temperature record and is likely skewing AGW model predictions? The answer is “Urban Islands.” Urban Islands have everything to do with increasing the area of surface temperature around cities mostly due to land use and not carbon emissions. Said another way, these islands of heat are warmer than say, a forest, and as the city grows the heat island grows. Does this affect AGW? No. By definition temperature changes that are explained as local phenomena cannot be considered global (this is not my definition, this is the way it is measured and defined.) So how does this skew AGW numbers or modeled predictions? Well, they have to factor it out, which they do, but do they do a good job at that?

Imagine that you want to measure and see if people are regularly experiencing more pain than did people of a previous generation. We will call this measurable global analytical model Natural Global Pain or NGP. To determine the degree to which people are feeling pain we would need to find a previous record of pain. And for each degree of pain greater than the average, we add a point to the NGP Crisis counter.

Now, going into hospitals for that record would skew the results since they might be in pain if they are in the hospital. And let’s imagine that most people in the hospital are measuring 12 points above the pain average. Well, since a hospital is a “pain island” we have to adjust downward for these scores. If the average pain score in a hospital was then 12 above average, then naturally you would think we should adjust downward by 12 knowing that some people will be experiencing a measurable 14 which will add to the NGP Crisis counter. Well, if we are going to act like AGW scientists, then instead we adjust downward by only 5.

Naturally then we are saying that at least half of the pain in the hospital is not due to an isolated local experience putting us in the hospital (“pain island”) but rather that half that pain is really just higher because, well, people experience more pain now for some reason. But we don’t know that. We are simply just factoring our bias into the conversion offset scale. This is the affect that measurements on “urban heat islands” have on the models for AGW. They are bias and there are published scientists who have publicly stated that the offsets with regard to Urban Islands in the AGW equation are showing that bias. And even though they try to factor Urban Islands out, we believe they don't do this without unreasoanble bias. But nobody disagrees that Urban Islands need to be factored out.

So maybe you are starting to put two and two together. If the numbers going into the models (again, not facts but models that predict) are skewed, then the results are skewed. More over if they are hoping to dodge skewing the results by factoring out the affects of the Urban Island because they know it have nothing to do with “Global” warming, then they are admitting that the Urban Island isn’t an AGW problem but just something to skew data.

But in this article, the Obama administration is claiming that part of the solution for global warming includes dealing with Urban Islands by painting roofs white. Now either this leader in the Obama administration doesn’t really understand the arguments and (crappy) science behind AGW …or… they are just making a Freudian slip in revealing that amongst completely political “solutions” to AGW that simply serve to redistribute wealth across the planet under the guise of AGW Prevention, they know they also have to implement some steps that will lower the “perceived average temperature” experienced in Urban Islands so that people will say “See, we are fixing the problem by paying carbon taxes to the U.N. and reinvesting in a new Green Economy!” (where people like Al Gore have gone from a net worth of around $2 million to $100 million in only 8 short years mostly due to his “green” business investments that continue to ride the coattails of his movie.)

This news is just too telling. When will people round out their understanding of the issues surrounding AGW to include the very reasonable questions that they don’t even know to ask yet because they trust these politicians and “green” businessmen more than their own intelligence?