Khadafi’s Box; Climate Change Experiment: anyone want to bet?

View 697 Friday, October 21, 2011

They are now displaying Khadafi laid out on a child’s mattress stuffed into a freezer in a mall. Sic semper tyrannis, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, but it does raise some problems of International Law.

The UN mandate to NATO and the US strike forces was to protect the civilian population of Libya from Kadaffi and his sons and his mercenaries and his tribal supporters and the Libyan fascisti who found his rule congenial. I don’t understand how shooting up his 40 vehicle convoy fleeing his home town was any larger threat to the civilian population of Libya than the 42 vehicle cavalcade in which President Obama is riding. Surely Qadafi wasn’t driving through shooting everyone he saw. Surely he was no threat to the civilians?

Now of course I do not mourn Khaddaffi and his sons. But I do mourn blows to the Constitution of the United States, which clearly gives the Congress the power to declare war. We understand that the war powers are and must be ambiguous – particularly so in the thermonuclear ear. During the Cold War the President had the power to order the release of thousands of nuclear weapons in retaliation for an incoming strike to the United States. One of the problems I worked on was how to structure the chain of command – now just organizationally but physically – so that the counterstrike could happen without putting the power to begin Armageddon into the hands of a bored Captains and Lieutenants sitting in concrete bunkers in bases out near the end of nowhere; and how to train those Captains and Lieutenants to make it credible that they would, at need, launch those birds at need.

All those war and peace decisions in which a mistake could wipe out a significant portion of humanity  — Herman Kahn asked, “Will the survivors envy the dead?” – all those decisions might have to be made in minutes. There wouldn’t be time for a Congressional debate or even to summon Congress into session. I do not believe that is true of Khadaffi, It seems to me that if we wanted to wage war on Khadaffi – and I certainly argue that shooting up his convoy, killing his sons and bodyguards, is close enough to war as to make no never mind – if we are to wage war on Qadhaffi then let the President go the Congress and explicitly say so. That is what the Constitution demands.

I do not mourn the tyrant, and he go not more than he deserved, and less than he meted out to others. His sons were not such rapacious monsters as the Sons of Saddam Hussein are reliably said to have been, and I know those who argue that had power passed from the Colonel to one of his sons the result would not only have been good for Libya, but better than the Libyans will now get; but I do not know that my opinion is worth much. I do know that the tyrant of Syria must be frantically casting about trying to buy at least one nuke from North Korea.  If he isn’t, he hasn’t thought out the situation.

And the haggling over who gets the body continues. Perhaps the similarities to the fate of the other founder of Libya willl continue.

And meanwhile there are to be elections in Tripoli, while many pray that the Mamelukes will get their act together and regain control of Egypt. Syria boils. Yemen froths. And the United States, having engaged in the territorial disputes of the Mid East, is broke, dependent on Middle East oil, and refuses to develop the resources that are already close to home and developable with less environmental impact than wars have…

Incompetent Imperialism is a very expensive policy.

A Global Warming Demonstration

I was going to put this in mail, but I ended up writing so much that it became a view if not a report.

Subject: Replicating Al Gore’s Climate 101 video experiment shows that his “high school physics” could never work as advertised | Watts Up With That?

Jerry,

Interesting test of Al Gore’s cookie jar experiment.

(URL given below.)

The bottom line is that Gore’s experiment is a fraud.

Jim Crawford.

Well, to begin with, the bottom line is that if the reported duplication of the experiment is a true report of an actual event, and if the analysis of the reported original experiment is correct, then one might be justified in saying that the original experiment is a fraud; although the word “fraud” implies deliberate misrepresentation.

First, the Climate 101 video. It’s shown on the Wattsupwiththat video (URL below) but perhaps it’s better to start with it from a neutral source: http://vimeo.com/28991442 .

I haven’t been able to find a date for this videocast. There’s a lot in it, pretty well all favorable to the view that Earth is warming due to man’s release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A major part of it is a presentation of a dramatic experiment. I will describe what is shown:

Two identical jars are shown. In each there is one of the old glass mercury human temperature thermometers. Above each is a large heat lamp, clearly putting out considerably more than the something less than the solar constant of under 1.5 KW/square meter. The two thermometers show identical values of about 96 degrees F. There’s a tube leading into one of the jars, and it’s apparently connected to a CO2 source; the narrator tells us this, and tells us that the jar is now filled with CO2. Within seconds the temperature of that jar begins to rise, headed up to about 100 F before the camera cuts away from the experiment and the narrative continues, telling us that the lamps are like out sun and the jars (each of which contains a small globe of Earth) are like the atmosphere.

The rest of the narrative gives a fairly standard summary of the Global Warming Believer position, including a rather distorted moving line chart of rising CO2, and the statement that increased CO2 brings increased temperature, which makes warm air; warm air contains more moisture; the air above the ocean is now more saturated than it used to be (no references to that given) and this makes for more extreme weather. The videos show hurricanes.

It’s all very scary.

There’s another critique of the two thermometers video, (it’s on the URL that was in the message) but before you go to that I want to analyze the experiment’s relevance to the Global Warming/Climate Change discussion.

My first thought was that it looked pretty clear to me that when the CO2 was injected into the jar, it was a lot more than doubling the CO2 level already in there.

The atmospheric CO2 level is certainly rising, from 315 part per million in 1958 to above 375 parts per million in 2004. It’s clear from the experiment video that what was in the CO2 augmented jar was more like 750,000 parts per million; the experiment isn’t all that valid an analog to the real world. Moreover, the heat lamps shining on the jars were putting out one heck of a lot more than a KW/ square meter.

My first reaction was that this is a clever visual, but it’s not a relevant experiment confirming the validity of the CO2-caused Global Warming hypothesis. (We’ll call that the Anthropogenic Global Warming or AGW hypothesis for the rest of this essay.)

I was also a bit puzzled. I’d already seen the experiment and result, but it wasn’t the result I’d have predicted. What we’re measuring here is the temperature of the glass rod surrounding the mercury in the old-fashioned clinical thermometers used in this video. Those thermometers were exposed to both the air temperature in that globe and also the radiation from the heat lamps. The heat lamps were clearly a lot hotter than the jars. It’s hard to estimate what the direct radiation temperature of the thermometer would be, but I’d think it would be hotter than the atmosphere in the jar. This made me wonder if the experimenter had allowed the thermometers to reach equilibrium temperature before he injected the CO2 into one of the jars.

And clearly injecting just-expanded temperatures into the jar should result in cooling, which wasn’t observed in Gore’s video, but perhaps that was very brief. It all depends on how fast the air temperature in the jar is recorded on the oral thermometers – and of course an oral thermometer won’t show any cooling, since they don’t. You have to shake them down to make them show a lower temperature.

See what’s happening: the heat lamps are heating the jars. The jars then heat the air in the jar. But some of the radiant heat goes through the glass and into the jar and strikes the thermometer bulb, directly heating it; I don’t know, but I’d guess that this is may be a a more significant heat source than either the air or the CO2 in those jars. I’d think the equilibrium temperature in those jars would be higher than the 96 F (about 300 K) that I get from a close look at the video at the moment of introduction of the CO2.

In other words, the results of the experiment surprised me a bit. They weren’t what I expected.

Now I show you a replication of the Gore experiment.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/18/replicating-al-gores-climate-101-video-experiment-shows-that-his-high-school-physics-could-never-work-as-advertised/#more-49446 (This is the URL that was in the original message.)

The result surprised me, although not as much as the Gore experimental results did: the replication did not show any temperature change at all in either jar, although the jar lids got fairly warm. That surprised me, but it wasn’t astonishing; the Gore video results are astonishing.

Explanation? Well, the air to glass temperature conductivity at 300 K isn’t high for either air or CO2, so it’s going to take a while for the heat lamps to heat the jars, the jars to heat the air, and the air (or CO2) in the jar to heat the glass thermometers. You sure won’t be able to do it in a short video, or indeed at all.

Second, there’s no reason for the CO2 jar to come to a different equilibrium temperature than the air jar because neither one of them is letting a significant amount of radiant heat from the IR lamps into the jar. If there had been, the thermometers would actually register higher temperatures than the air temperature in the jar. All the recorded heating is lamp to jar lid to air to thermometer. There isn’t any greenhouse effect. My mistake was in assuming that some of the radiant heat did pass through the jar lid and down to the glass bulb of the thermometer, and that would be enough to be recordable. Apparently there isn’t enough.

Gore’s problem is that not even the AGW theory would predict that this experiment would give the results shown on the video: meaning that the video was staged, it wasn’t an experiment at all, it was a video production. I can’t prove that, but it sure seems the likely result.

A number of web sites are saying that Gore’s video was a fraud. I won’t go so far as to say that, but I am now confident enough that I would be willing to be Al Gore a lot of money that he can’t replicate the experiment to get the results he claims. Since I can’t bet Al Gore, I’ll see if I can find someone closer to hand willing to bet say, $5,000 that the experiment can’t be replicated. . .

Some have stronger opinions. http://www.westernfreepress.com/2011/10/11/gores-climate-101-video-very-likely-faked/

It is that time of the year: KUSC is having its pledge drive. I time mine to coincide with theirs, so be prepared to be bombarded for a week with exhortations. I operate this place on the Public Radio Model – it is free, but if not enough donate, it will go away. So far it is healthy. It needs subscriptions and renewals to keep it that way. SUBSCRIBE NOW! RENEW NOW! Thanks!

This sure would be a good time to renew your subscription. If you  never subscribed, jump aboard! This is a great time to do it.

OATH OF FEALTY is a best selling novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle; it is about an arcology built in Los Angeles after rioters managed to destroy a large part of the city (and themselves). I still like the story a lot.