Re: Ooops! My mistake! Point taken ... Controls in Closed Systems?
Posted by Dale on Feb 10, 2002 at 11:33
(204.212.212.83)Re: Ooops! My mistake! Point taken ... Controls in Closed Systems? (Eudaemonic Pie)
But, when the flipping valve breaks (say steam) in the tiniest pinhole aperture (not seen) and releases a tiny steam jet, and the steam jet instantly severs an blinded engineer's arm, cutting the damn arm off, in a millisecond, then control issues aren't theoretical math games anymore.I worked exclusively on large power boilers for 17 years and I know exactly what you mean except… You wouldn’t necessarily be blinded. Or even aware of a problem visually. I remember one particularly leaky boiler where there was a broom at the elevator door. You would walk down the catwalk swinging the broom in front of you. If the head of the broom fell off you would stop knowing there was a superheated steam leak directly where you were about to walk. Superheated steam is invisible until it cools off which may be somewhere on the other side of the roof ventilator. But I digress…
Now, if the enviro is a closed system…If we draw a sphere around the solar system then I would certainly expect that to be a pretty good approximation of a closed system for at least several thousand years.
How to get the flipping variables? – and how to get the evidence you're looking for?Spend more than 20 years looking? Don’t stop adding things to the model just because you have included the politically correct human alterable terms?
What else can we do but like what physicists did with QM in the ‘40's when their QM experiments gave infinite results, and they had to renormalize by adding controls back into the science in order to get useful (non-infinite) results?Sounds good to me. This might have been shortly before you arrived here but I posted several articles on additions that were being made to global warming models so that they weren’t so horrible at predicting what has already happened. One study showing promise was to add cloud cover as a predictor of surface temperatures. (My reaction? Well DUH!!!) Another was to add water movement carrying humidity and heat. Again DUH!!! At this point the global climate models that are predicting disaster are truly primitive. They include only the researchers (and politicians) pet variables. For example, as far as I have been able to determine, not one model (let alone the accepted “standard model”) includes any input from geothermal activity. Yet we know that a single volcanic eruption can have a several degree effect on average global surface temperatures within a year. What should the models include for predicting volcanoes? Well that would be difficult (and that is the reason there has been no attempt to include them) but SOME term needs to be included. At this point it needs to be a statistical average term with maybe a Monty Carlo simulation of various possibilities. But we can’t squander billions of dollars and millions of lives on models that we know can’t predict 10 years of the past, let alone 100 in the future.
Pretend (I know this is stupid) CO2 goes above whatever limit we all agree fits our social policies as interpreted, but by then, it's catastrophic (out of control), except that a few weird mutant humans breathe it, thrive on it, repopulate, and we're back off to the races .. a closed system?And let’s pretend a munificent God prevents this. There are a lot of what-ifs we could suppose. Give me some evidence such a catastrophic discontinuity exists and I’ll gladly agree we need to make sure we don’t exceed that level. I already gave you two such discontinuities (evaporation and freezing of all oceans). We get the water level down 10,000 feet or freeze the Atlantic south of Miami and I’m right there with you that we should start doing something serious real quick. The closest I’ve seen to a real potential discontinuity we could see in the next 1000 years is a change in the Gulf Stream. This could drastically increase the temperature differential between the British Isles and Africa. But it is still only a “local” phenomena. The majority of humanity would survive with minor inconvenience.
I guess I should really look up the previous threads where we discussed what could be done. (Give you more background into Danny’s intelligence – he once said it was impossible to change the humidity in air.) I believe I can design an atmospheric CO2 extraction system that would get us back to pre-industrial revolution levels in 25 years at a cost far less than we currently waste on reducing CO2 emissions. And I can build H2O removal equipment for a very fast temperature change if we decide that is what is needed. And remember Carl Sagan’s prediction that we would see a “Nuclear Winter” if the oil well fires in Kuwait were not extinguished in less than 30 days? It took 6 months so Carl was a little pessimistic (he used the “standard” global warming model) but there was a small drop in temperature after 6 months. We could always light them off again if we had to. We could even design nozzles that would maximize the soot production to make them more effective than they were. Build some tall stacks to carry it to the stratosphere and it could get real cold real fast.
I’m not saying it is easy to change the global temperature but it is possible. If we dump CO2 into the atmosphere for 200 years, we can raise the temperature 3 degrees. If we make a concerted effort to take it out for 25 we can get the temperature back down. If we need to change it 10 degrees in a couple of years, we have the technical (but not political) ability to do that also.