The Free Market and the Climate Model: Models, Water, and Temperature (8)
The Free Market and the Climate Model: Models, Water, and Temperature (8)
I am returning to my series of blogs on models, water, and temperature (see Intro, and previous entry). The earlier entries in the series are linked at the end.
The previous blog was a diversion from the series and reported on A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Accompanying the publication of that document a new website was published Climate Modeling 101, which is an introduction to modeling more anchored in scientific language than the series I am currently writing. Give it a try.
Doing Science with Models 1.5: I have used the example of balancing a checkbook to write about the balance of energy at the center of the study of the Earth’s climate. I have shown that despite the simplicity of balancing the budget of a single account, there are many ways in which complexity emerges.
Let’s look at just one of these exchanges of energy, say between the atmosphere and ocean. We have wind in the atmosphere, which as it blows over the ocean, exerts a stress that causes waves and large surface currents, for example, the The Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream is a warm-water current that carries heat from the Gulf of Mexico to the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. At high latitudes, heat is transferred from the warm water of the Gulf Stream to the air. This heat keeps western Europe far warmer than would be the case if warming came only from the Sun. We have here the transfer of energy by motion of air and water, referred to as kinetic energy, as well as the transfer of heat or thermal energy between air and water.
Rain also represents energy transfer. We naturally think of rain as a source of water. However, in order for water to get into the atmosphere from the ocean, it must evaporate – turn from liquid to vapor. This takes energy, just as you have to add energy to a pan of water to boil it. This type of energy is latent energy, because it just sits in the water vapor until it gets cold enough to give up that energy as it condenses back to liquid water or ice, maybe many thousands of miles from where it evaporated.
If you focus on evaporation, then the heat from the Sun that is absorbed at the Earth’s surface is one source of the energy that evaporates water. So in our accounting problem, we account for some energy from the Sun that is absorbed at the ocean’s surface, which evaporates water, transferring energy to the atmosphere that is released in the atmosphere when it rains.
Hence, as we break down the problem to understand the accounting of energy between the ocean and atmosphere, we find several types of transfers that can occur. If we extend our consideration to the land, then we would consider trees, which take up energy from the Sun to drive photosynthesis and move liquid water from the soil to water vapor in the air through their roots and leaves. If we are doing an accounting of what trees do, then we have to take into the specifics of different types of trees: oaks behave differently from pines and bristlecone pines behave differently from loblolly pines. Trees behave differently from grasses, which are different from cacti, which are different from mushrooms.
The diversity of the natural world presents us with enormous complexity when we desire to describe it quantitatively. But at the foundation of the accounting is the budget equation for energy
Today’s Energy = Yesterday’s Energy + Energy Gained – Energy Lost
We write an energy equation for the atmosphere, and that energy equation will include how much energy is lost to the land surface over grassy surfaces, tree covered surfaces, and sandy deserts. There will be contributions to the energy equation for each process on Earth that our point of view brings us to. The total energy accounting is computed by adding up all of these energy transactions.
I want to return, now, explicitly to the budget equation for money. I made the point in Ledgers, Graphics, and Carvings that many of us have become familiar and comfortable with the idea of using computers to do our accounting and account balancing. The budget equations that represent our checking and savings accounts and the transfers between them are managed by software like Quicken or in spreadsheets like Excel. It is possible to do monthly accounting to the penny. If we think about our credit union, it manages thousands of accounts with near-perfect accuracy. A large bank manages millions of accounts, and a credit card company manages billions of transactions. Therefore, it is routine to accumulate millions of accounts and billions of transactions into large calculations. This sort of accounting problem is large and complex and requires diligence, rigor, and checking to get correct. The same is true with climate modeling. Each of the sales and returns and the transfers are, individually, simple, and in their total, complex. All of these financial accounting challenges are shared with climate modelers. The fact that we can do this financial accounting should demystify climate modeling. The complexity is a challenge, but it does not suggest impossibility. There is no magic that has to be invoked in the building of a climate model. (And, yes, you could write a climate model in Excel.)
As we collect information from all of our financial accounts, we start to describe our economy. In the United States, we imagine that we want a free market, one whose behavior is described by the law of supply and demand. If there is low supply and high demand for gasoline, the price is high. If there is high supply and low demand for terrier sweaters, then the price is low. Our purchase of gasoline and terrier sweaters is a loss of money to us, but a gain of money to their respective industries. We also make money itself a marketable item; we loan and lend for a price. We find these relations that emerge, for instance, when money is tight, then it costs more to borrow. Again, it is an issue of supply and demand, which is viewed as a defining law of markets and economies.
It is at this point of my comparison of financial budgets with energy budgets that an important difference emerges. It is in principle easier to predict the Earth’s climate than it is to predict how our economy will evolve. Why? Behavior. In financial transactions and our economy, people make decisions based upon necessity and whim. The fortunate among us might spend vast amounts on terrier sweaters, simply because we want terrier sweaters. The energy transactions in the Earth’s climate are far more boring: they are constrained by physical laws of conservation. The amount of rain cannot be just any number. It can be no more than the amount of water vapor that is available in the atmosphere to condense and fall out. The sea ice in the Arctic requires a certain amount of energy to melt. Once that melting has occurred, additional heat warms the ocean, and some of that heat expands the water. There are strict limits on behavior of the individual parts of the Earth’s climate, which do not hold true when buying and selling.
For the Earth’s climate, a strong constraint in any quantitative description is the amount of energy provided to the Earth by the Sun. The Sun is relatively stable in the amount of energy that it emits. Over the life of the Sun, its energy emission has increased by about 25 percent (Newman and Rood (Robert)). Over the span of a human life, the Sun varies up and down only a percent or so. But this is not true with money. We print money as our economies and populations grow. We try to engineer a stable economy, which actually means an economy that is growing fast enough to provide employment to an increasing population. This requires exploitation of new resources, innovation, fashionable ideas, or, perhaps, printing more money.
There is no denying that quantifying the observed behavior of our climate is a problem of immense complexity. It is, however, not a problem that is difficult to conceive. We have simple relationships based on calculating budgets of energy: production, loss, and transfers. These relationships define and constrain behavior of the processes that make up the climate as a whole. There is no free will, no credit, no overdraft protection to behave outside of these constraints. Arguments that the climate problem is too large and too complex to model and understand are simply spurious. We just require diligence, rigor, and checking our work in our accounting.
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Series links:
Models, Water, and Temperature
Models are Not All Wet: Series Introduction
Models are Everywhere
Ledgers, Graphics, and Carvings
Balancing the Budget
Point of View
Looking Under the Cloak of Complexity
Reader Comments
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One guess,
...they Guard sheep.
: )
And even more alarming to the truly informed and knowledgeable!
MORE PROOF OF AGWT OR PROOF OF NOTHING?
Obviously, the answer is "Proof of nothing."
If you know anything about statistics (and I only know a little bit), a single data point is meaningless.
Are you just being snarky, or are you unaware of the relationship between weather, climate, and the fundamentals of global warming hypotheses?
AGW/CC "theories" posit that weather extremes and new weather-related records will occur with increasing frequency, but also that individual weather events cannot be easily tied to AGW/CC. Scientists are beginning to see relationships as data accumulates, and we "regular folks" will see the long term changes over time.
In fact, many past models underestimated the climate changes we are now seeing. New models are tested by trying to predict past events by running them with data available before the event. Plus, there are previously unknown factors and poorly understood large-scale environmental processes that scientists are desperately trying to recognize, analyze, understand, and model. Another difficulty is "connecting the dots." By that, I mean the difficulty of looking at changes in the biosphere, including the atmosphere, and oceanic and land biomes and subsystems, and separating out normal changes that would occur in a relatively stable climate.
Note: I studied "Biomes and Subsystems" under Professor (now Emeritus) Arnold Schultz at U.C. Berkeley in the 1970's. "[Professor Schultz] is a well-loved mentor of the College of Natural Resources (CNR) and one of the founding fathers of conservation and resource studies at UC Berkeley." I graduated with one of the earliest classes of the CNR program at U.C. Berkeley, where I learned to appreciate the complexity of the world we live in, and how to think critically about environmental/ecological issues.
That's what happens when the great lakes are so hot.......
Well since it is west of the great lakes, I do not see how this would effect it.
MAYBE WE CAN DRILL TUNNELS FROM MILES CITY, MT TO DULUTH,MN?
The ignorants such as yourself don't see a lot of things..
Soooooo, you did have written consent to copy and publicly reproduce images from a published document for your own financial benefit?
Nice!
I do smell something.......
In other news: I see nymore is back with us again, still confused about what climate change and global warming mean. Nymore, please avail yourself of some of the many excellent and extant resources created for steering neophytes such as yourself through the basics of climate science. Doing so will help you avoid repeating silly beginner's mistakes, such as assuming global warming means the end of snowfall.
Neapolitan is able to defend his actions for himself. However the ones he is responding to are well known here. Ossqss is "the music man" that also seems to have a beleif that he is the son of Apollo and that his father is responsible for all that we see. Ossqss is notorious for his drive by deposits of links to long debunked science and his posts of music videos. Ossqss can sometimes appear to be a jerk, but he will try to shift attention to the action of others. This is what he is best at doing. Understanding the science behind the AGWT is not one of his fortes.
Nymore is a nice person, but last year he confessed to being nothing more than a troll here. Nymore is an intelligent individual and I am still at a loss as to why he would use such trollish behavior on such a serious topic.
Stick around, TomballTXPride and you will be able to make some interesting studies of the personalities that will frequent here. Soon, if you are paying attention, you will discover who is bringing the actual science and who is trying to distort and confuse the science for the novice that is still trying to learn the truth.
i am mad we got scammed out of 90 billion for a green energy company that went bankrupt...
WashingtonPost.com
Romney also wrongly claimed that about half of the companies funded by these energy programs have gone out of business - a statement that was quickly rebutted by fact-checkers. (The true figure is less than 1 percent.)
Most of the MSM have posted "fact-check" articles on their web-sites this morning (with the exception of the "Fair & Balanced" one - they have already "called the election".)
BTW - (deleted - my bad math skills)
AZdailysun.com
the ones he named did go bankrupt and the statement pick losers more than winners is a true statement...
Does it make you mad when our tax dollars are used to subsidize some of the wealthiest companies in the world?
yeah it does and someone promised 4 yrs ago that he would end all that and now i see it was all an act...
then i suggest you go back to the other blog...
Congress controls the purse strings. All candidates seem to make promises that are not within their powers to keep. The only real power, that a sitting president has, is to withdraw troops. Executive orders can easily be over turned, by any incoming president.
the president has made plenty of executive orders...
"The evidence is right before our eyes. The climate system is out of control. I don’t mean 'our' control, we never had that, I mean out of control of its own self-regulating mechanisms. It’s changing in astounding ways, with frightening speed, and it’s going to get worse.
We are no longer in a position to consider the coming changes 'acceptable' or even 'tolerable. Adaptation is not a viable option. The coming changes involve food and water shortages, and all the human conflict (like nuclear war) which that kind of strife induces."
Tamino's Wordpress blog
Permafrost Projections
Modelling the permafrost carbon feedback
(A cheery snippet from that last link: "The permafrost feedback response to our historic emissions, even in the absence of future human emissions, is likely to be self-sustaining and will cancel out future natural carbon sinks in the oceans and biosphere over the next two centuries.")
Oh, sh--er, dear. :\
Which one?
Barack Obama
George W. Bush
William Clinton
George H. W. Bush
Ronald Reagan
Jimmy Carter
Gerald Ford
Richard Nixon
Lyndon Johnson
John F. Kennedy
Dwight Eisenhower
The presidents before this were involved with WWII and before.
In my unscientific terms, I had already felt that this was the case. I am just here to swat the flies, as the flesh begins to rot away.
MORE PROOF OF AGWT OR MORE PROOF OF NOTHING?
To think some of you think this guy is great.
WOW
Al Gore is NOT a scientist. When I want answers that require a scientist, I will ask a scientist. All you want to do is to shoot the messenger. What is your gain from this?
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