Pentagon on climate change

A couple of links today about a report that’s been obtained from the Pentagon detailing some possible effects of an abrupt climate change in the near future. Here’s what seems to be the original piece, from Fortune magazine, and here’s another, from the Guardian.

It’s interesting on a number of levels - political, scientific, and even on a philosophy of science level.

The political level is straightforward - the Bush administration in the US has been basically trying to deny that there’s any possibility that the climate may change, and the Australian government has been, as usual, following along.

The scientific level is particularly interesting. Most discussions about climate change center around the production of carbon dioxide etc, and their contribution to global warming. The problem is that the warming is only ever going to be the start of the process. As the report says, it’s likely that global warming, rather than just passively increasing the temperature overall, will flip the state of global atmospheric weather patterns, leading to greater instability in general.

The issue that I have with all of this is that everyone seems to be ignoring the other cause of global warming - the production of excess heat. My argument goes like this: The Earth has a total radiative heat capacity like any body of matter. If the total amount of change in internal heat is less than its radiative capacity, then the temperature won’t change. Simply, if you’re not creating more heat than the atmosphere can get rid of, you don’t need to worry about climate change in the long term.

So there are therefore two factors in global warming/climate change - the total radiative capacity of the earth, and the amount of heat being produced. I think that people overestimate the importance of the former and underestimate the importance of the latter.

A lot of the stuff I’ve thought about this comes from some ideas in Peter F Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn trilogy of sci-fi novels, where the earth is basically uninhabitable except in huge protected arcologies because of giant storms caused by global warming.

Something to think about for your Monday morning.

Links today…

Paranoia is being released in a new version soon! Here is the blog being run by the guys designing the new version. Looks very good indeed. Remember, the Computer is Your Friend, and Communists are everywhere. (link from Greg Costikyan’s website.)

Apparently one of the John Does being sued by the RIAA has countersued accusing the RIAA of racketeering and extortion. Basically, they’re saying that the RIAA is extorting money out of people by threatening them with expensive court cases and offering them a much smaller settlement straight away.

Adelaide, Valentine’s, Hospitals, and stuff

Well, as seems to be the trend at the moment, a lot of stuff has happened since I last posted.

There was a trip to Adelaide in there somewhere ( ), with a lot of visiting of wineries, and quite a number of cases bought between the five of us who went. Here’s an important lesson for those planning something similar in the future: If it’s 38 degrees plus, you really need to be drinking a lot of the free water, and not only the free wine.

Valentine’s day was very nice. Trang and I bought a selection of gourmet foods from DJ’s food hall, and proceeded to Coogee to have a lovely picnic. We weren’t the only ones with this idea - when we moved from our original spot close to dark so that we could sit on the rocks at south Coogee, there were couples everywhere! There was even one couple who had brought a foldup table and chairs and were having what looked to be a lovely dinner. Normally I’m against the ‘one day of the year’ kind of thing, but it is nice to have one day of the year be the day that you make a lot of extra effort. After seeing the table couple, I just know I’m going to have to figure out some way to beat that next year!

Trang and I ventured out to Westmead children’s hospital to see my niece Phoebe, who’s in hospital after an operation on Tuesday. She’s doing amazingly well - the nurses have apparently been bringing people down to introduce to her as she’s such a good patient.

Some links now:

For those of you who haven’t heard already, Star Wars is coming to DVD soon! Special Editions only apparently - the Word from George is that they were the editions he always intended to make, so they’re the only editions that will get a release. Looks like it will also be a boxset similar to Indy, with an extras DVD. Yay!

For those of you who wonder about what the hell people are going on about with all this supervitamin this and magnetic therapy that, there’s Quackwatch, a compendium of info (from the skeptical point of view) about alternative therapies etc.

For the obligatory world-affairs link, today we have this piece from the New York Review of Books entitled ‘Now They Tell Us”, which looks at some of the reasons behind the US media’s reluctance to question just why a war in Iraq was so necessary. It’s a good, if long, piece.