French catch "English disease"

It seems the French may have fallen victim to the “English disease.” No not that disease, not the one the Brits call the “French disease.”

I am writing about bad engineering design. In this case it is the TGV, the fast French train that plies its trade between the U.K. and France through the tunnel.

Just before Christmas the tunnel service was suspended when six trains failed and had to be towed back to France. It happened again yesterday. It seems that the cold weather has caused moisture build-up in the engine compartment and has shorted out the electrics.

This is bad design, because whoever put this together ought to have anticipated the impact of a hot engine on an influx of cold air and should have isolated the electrical components.

In the 1960s, my father, for reasons best known to him, became enthralled with English cars. Some folks today may not realize that the U.K. back then had a large auto industry that exported its products to the world. In fact, it was the largest car exporting nation at that time.

I think my dad took a liking to a nearby garage owner who also happened to have the local dealership for Austin and Vauxhall. Over a period of about 5 years our driveway had two of the larger Austin’s (which were not large at all by North American standards) and one Vauxhall. They were all purchased new.

Collectively, they spent almost as much time in the garage being repaired as they were being driven. They were terrible cars, completely unreliable. You could never count on going out in one of them and returning in the same vehicle.

We used to chalk it up to the fact that British automotive engineers had no idea about winter driving conditions in Canada when they designed them.

That theory ended in one spring when I took an Austin for a spin on a rain-soaked day. There was a nearby town that was located at the bottom of a river valley, with steep grades at either end of the highway that ran through the middle of the town.

I came down one hill, drove to the other side, and started to climb the hill out of town. Halfway up, the motor began to sputter and lose power.

I managed a U-turn and on the down slope the engine came up to full power. When I started up the other hill, the same thing happened, and I again pulled U-turn and used gravity to get the car up to speed. This time I roared through the town, greatly exceeding the speed limit, and tried to assault the hill. No luck, the motor died halfway up. I abandoned the effort and found alternative transportation.

Later we consulted with the dealer who said the problem was that the sparkplugs were all positioned in the front of the motor, just behind the radiator, and the rainwater had shorted them out. When we asked for a solution to the problem, he said the manufacturer provided a pull down blind that could be installed just behind the radiator. However, he cautioned, if you do that, your engine will overheat.

If the automotive engineers in one of the wettest countries in the Northern Hemisphere couldn’t design a car appropriate for their own climate, then it was time to go back to American cars.

And that is just what we did.

The irrelevance of Copenhagen and the relevance of the burka

If you ever wondered whether the world-wide meeting in Copenhagen this week has any relevance to the real world, this news story from Politico.com should sort that out for you pretty quickly.

COPENHAGEN –Iranian Prime Minister Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe plan to address negotiators at international climate talks in Copenhagen next week.


The three leaders are listed in a line-up of more than 180 government officials published in a United Nations schedule of speakers. Each head of state will have up to three minutes to address roughly 700 delegates, reporter, observers and civil society groups.


The assistant president of Sudan, Nafie Ali Nafie kicks off the speeches at noon on Wednesday.


Nafie chairs the G-77 group, a block of developing nations pushing hard for more money and stricter emissions cuts from rich countries.


Mostapha Zaher, director-general of Afghanistan's Environmental Protection Agency, is listed as the final speaker. He’ll take the podium slightly before 2 a.m. next Friday.


Other leaders addressing the conference include everyone from Saad Hariri, the prime minister of Lebanon, to French President Nicolas Sarkozy.


Roughly 110 world leaders plan to attend the talks, an unprecedented number for a climate conference. Typically, only a handful of top leaders attend the negotiations. President Barack Obama is expected at the meeting on Friday.

Note that the speakers are limited to 3 minutes each. The Iranian leader was limited to 15 minutes at the United Nations and went on and on and on for 40 minutes without interference from the Chair. With Mugabe and Chavez scheduled as well, look for more CO2 to be spewed into the atmosphere than is produced in this country in one year. I would like to see any of these three limit themselves to 3 minutes.

You may be wondering why I led off with the picture. It is a woman in the U.S. midwest who is dressed to deal with the deep freeze that is currently setting new temperature lows in North America as a result of global warming. I included the picture because I have been opposed to the Burka, but I think I may have discovered a practical use for this garment in combatting the intense cold caused by global warming.

Quote of the day

This one comes to us from Rajendra Pachauri, the jet-setting head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He once flew from New York to Delhi, over a weekend, to take in a cricket match.

He defended climate research in the face of a controversy over e-mails pilfered from a British university, which global warming skeptics say show scientists have been conspiring to hide evidence that doesn't fit their theories.

"The recent incident of stealing the emails of scientists at the University of East Anglia shows that some would go to the extent of carrying out illegal acts perhaps in an attempt to discredit the IPCC," he told the conference.

Pachauri seems unconcerned that the scientists on whom his panel relies have lost the original data, so fudged the data they have that it is incomprehenisble, and that they conspired to defeat freedom of information laws and corrupted the peer review process to hide their incompetence. The fact that these same folks beat themselves up because they could not explain the last decade of static or cooling temperatures with the AGW theory to which they cling (like religion and guns), seems not worth considering to our globe-trotting Chairman.

The next time somebody tells you what we need is a world government, keep this quote in mind.

Tipping points and climate confusion

What is a “tipping point”?

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a best-selling book with that title. He says it is the point at which something takes off and becomes a runaway phenomenon whose growth is exponential. He gives examples of everything from Paul Revere’s famous ride, to the spread of STDs, to the popularity of Hush Puppies.

I suspect Harry Potter would fit that category. It started out as a book that was rejected by every publisher in the U.K. but one. Eventually, people began talking about it and news of it spread. That is how I first heard about it, a friend raved about it over lunch. By the time I got around to reading it, everybody was into it.

That brings us to the use of the expression tipping point in the climate change debate.

James Hansen, the leading Chicken Little in the global warm-mongering camp, uses the term quite often. He says it is the point at which climate changes cannot be controlled by man, that nature’s feedback mechanisms take off and become like a shark feeding frenzy.

Think about that statement for a minute. It implies that we can manage climate. Not that there is any historical precedent for such a conceit. In fact, it is probably the most monumentally foolish idea of the 21st century.

We can have an impact on the climate, for sure, but we cannot manage something we barely understand.

For about 800,000 years the CO2 level has been about 280 ppm, sometimes a little higher, sometimes a little lower, but that is the order of magnitude. In the past century it has climbed to around 380 ppm; hence the alarm. It is generally agreed amongst the Hansenites that most of the cause of this climb in CO2 is related to the release of carbon into the atmosphere by humans. The real debate is that not all scientists buy into the idea that CO2 is the main driver of climate change.

To add further confusion, there is now a contradiction around the concept of tipping point that needs clarification if one wants to persist in claiming CO2 as the key.

Hansen claims that the maximum CO2 level that would preserve the status quo is 350 ppm. He says that at 380+ ppm we have already past the tipping point, and points to high Arctic and glacier ice melting as proof. This means that even if we substantially reduce our carbon contribution it is too late, nature is now in a runaway mode to much higher global temperatures that will see all the ice melt and the oceans rise. He also claims that 450 ppm is probably the maximum safe level.

However, in a just released study, a team of scientists from the U.K. and the U.S. have determined that declining CO2 in the atmosphere led to ice forming over the continent of Antarctica about 34 million years ago, a continent that had previously experienced a tropical climate. On its face, that result would not seem to contradict anything James Hansen says; except when you start talking about tipping points.

The new CO2 study determined that 34 million years ago the CO2 level dipped to 760 ppm. This was considered the tipping point for ice formation.

So which is the real tipping point: 350+ ppm when ice melts or 760 ppm when ice forms?

And what about the claim that CO2 levels are unsafe after 450 ppm? All kinds of new life forms emerged on other continents in an atmosphere of 760+ ppm.

This is far from a “settled science”.

All you unbelievers are going to burn in hell and probably take New York city with you!

Courtesy of Jewel Samad, AFP, Getty Images

Isn’t this a great picture of the Goreacle!

It reminds me of one of those old U.S. military recruiting posters, the ones the said “Uncle Sam want you”.

Except I don’t think the Reverend Gore is asking for people to follow him, since he generally only preaches to the choir. I think he is suggesting that bad things will (or should) happen to those who don’t follow his religion.

Like these folks, for example, and this guy.

And, he is not alone. Here is another pastor predicting the end of the world after receiving personal advice from God. He is suggesting stockpiling supplies for 30 days, an odd thing to do if the world is about to end. Perhaps the triggering event, which he predicts will occur in New York city, has to do with the deniers' meeting and Al Gore’s curse.

Fun with model trains and climate models

When I was a lad I got an electric train for Christmas. This was a big deal back in the 1950s. Retailers simply did not have the plethora of different toys now seen in the stores. The problem with the toy train was that it got boring after about 10 times circling its track. You could expand the track and build little villages around it to make it more interesting, but that involved skills I did not possess and money that my parents lacked.

I was reminded of that train when I read this article in the National Post concerning climate models. They seem to be going somewhere but never reach their destination.

The writer, Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor in the environmental studies program at the University of Colorado and a former director of its Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, makes several incisive comments.

According to Pielke, past events are not a satisfactory guide to future events, and climate models are designed to predict climate changes 20 to 30 years out and are unreliable to account for weather patterns of less than this time period. He points out that the climate models that informed the opinion of the IPCC in 1990 have now had 17 years to demonstrate that they did not accurately predict temperature change or ocean levels.

The first IPCC projections of future climate were issued in 1990, and with more than 17 years of observations since that prediction we can confidently state that the IPCC’s 1990 “best guess” overstated the global temperature increase as well as sea level rise for the subsequent two decades. But such retrospective evaluations are typically dismissed because those predictions were made using outdated models based on earlier understandings. The IPCC issues predictions for 20- to 30-year periods into the future, and updates them every 6-7 years, so in practice its current predictive capabilities can never be evaluated against real world data. As Tebaldi and Knutti observe, “climate projections, decades or longer in the future by definition, cannot be validated directly through observed changes.”

In short, climate models are interesting but perhaps useless as a tool to inform public policy regarding climate change.

On the issue of why worry if climate models are iffy instruments since it is more important to get action on climate change, Pielke says,

I have been asked by some of my colleagues why I raise these points, since action on climate change is a good thing and those questioning climate models typically are opposed to action. So what, I am told, if action on climate change is based on some exaggerations and false claims to certainty, isn’t the end goal important enough to justify bending the truth just a bit? After all, those opposed to action often show no hesitation toward exaggeration and hyperbole.

My short answer to such questions is that false claims to certainty were exactly what got us into the Iraq war. A somewhat longer reply involves explaining how both science and democracy flourish when we are open and honest about what science can actually deliver. Effective action on climate change is more likely when we fully appreciate what science can, and cannot, do. We should expect more from our scientific community.

Ice age ending

I love this cartoon. Thanks to www.iceagenow.com.

Finally, a face to face debate on climate change

In New York City, on March 14, scientific climate skeptics got to debate face to face with scientific climate crisis promoters. Go to this site to access the transcript of the debate in pdf format.

For a long time crisis promoters have been trying to shut down the skeptics and pretending that they don't need to debate them because there is nothing to debate or simply refusing to do so (Al Gore).

This debate was broadcast on public radio and the voting results were interesting, to say the least:

Before the debate, 57% of the live audience thought climate change is a crisis, 30% thought not, and 13% were undecided. After the debate, only 42% considered it a crisis, 46% thought not, and 12% were undecided. There was also an on-line poll after the debate and it broke down as follows: Again 42% thought there was a crisis, but 57% thought not, and only 3% were undecided.

I doubt you will see very many "chicken little industry" voices going out to debate the skeptics head to head after this one. They would be putting all their juicy grants in jeopardy and facing unemployment.