“Lost in the undeniable complexity of my world, I, like so many others, want “things” to be simple to understand, vizualizable, causal—and therefore, predictable—and safe. I have often written that what one anticipates is rarely a problem, but anticipation is predictive, and to make a prediction, one has to know how both the past and the present add to make the most likely future. Anticipation is often a matter of null hypotheses and of taking into consideration what might not have happened, is not necessarily happening now, and what isn’t worrisome about the future. But no one can rule out every negative possibility in a complex world. A bride can choose a bakery for a wedding cake based on someone else’s cake, on the reliability of the baker, and on the assumption that a tall cake-building won’t collapse or fall over on the way to the reception regardless of her anticipating the potholes, the steps, the doorway, and the security of a table that might or might not be bumped by a passing waiter or running child.
“And that makes me think of soot.”
“Soot?” you ask.
“Soot, coal dust, little particles that make things dirty by accumulating. Even colloidal particles too small to be seen unless in masses suspended by air or water they affect the passage of light. I don’t know about you, but I grew up in a house heated by a coal furnace in a neighborhood—nay, a town—of houses heated by coal. I thought all trees had black bark. Yes, soot does that to trees. Since we’ve mandated cleaner coal, rains have washed the soot away, revealing the natural color of bark. I suppose the most famous instance of sooty vs. non-sooty trees comes from England and the study of changes in the peppered moth, Biston betularia f. typica and its variation Biston betularia f. carbonaria. The former is lighter colored than the latter, and the moth of darker color dominated the populations in areas where trees were sooty, enhancing their camouflage, fooling the birds. Yes, burning coal the old way produces soot. China is discovering what people in the United States and European countries discovered in the twentieth century. You have to burn coal cleanly if you want to reduce the soot and clean the local environment. But to return to where I began, soot by accumulating becomes vizualizable; I could see it on trees and houses, and I’m sure doctors saw it in the lungs of coal miners and others who lived in those neighborhoods heated by coal furnaces. Soot has a cause, a simple cause, the primitive burning of coal devoid of scrubbers and filters. Soot is predictable—or was predictable. Keep burning coal in home furnaces, and the neighborhood and trees will turn black. And unfiltered and un-scrubbed coal smoke is unsafe.”
“See,” you say, “and it’s not only the effect on the environment, but the effect on people’s lungs. I’m surprised everyone in your neighborhood didn’t die from black lung disease. Just living there must have been similar to working in a coal mine. And then, what about global warming? All that burning of coal released carbon dioxide. Think, to produce that greenhouse gas, you combine oxygen and carbon, the carbon in coal. Since the carbon in the coal is combined with oxygen, burning a ton of coal produces more than a ton of carbon dioxide. Definitely, we’ve been warming the atmosphere with our burning of billions of tons of coal.”
“Ah! You always bring the subject back around to your obsession with global warming, always to its cause, the cause you identify as vizualizable, simple. It’s a cause-and-effect world for you. You might be right, but this climate stuff is really complex, and dirty air makes it so. You have your prediction, and you’re sure about it, and that’s understandable and possibly correct. Just remember the somewhat still shrouded history of climate. We don’t know whether or not in the big picture, a warmer planet might not be a ‘better’ planet. Sure, the distribution of animals and plants will change with changing climates, but then, haven’t they always had to change in response to climate change? Look, there’s enough evidence to suggest that warm climates are the default climates of Earth with glacial epochs coming few and far between. What if, just what if, the current pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is staving off a return to the glacial events of the past two million years, all those events interrupted by brief warming periods called interglacials. We're probably in an interglacial right now, a period between the retreat of glaciers and the advance of glaciers over the continents. Remember that ten thousand years ago much of North America and northern Europe and Asia were covered by sheets of ice as much as two-miles-thick. Those ice advances followed warm periods that melted existing glaciers of the previous advance. Cyclic stuff, really, over two thousand millennia. If you try to visualize that past, your mind’s eye will envision unstoppable continental glaciers moving across millions of square miles, even cutting out rocks and overriding hills and mountains. If they advance again, say goodbye to Canada and the rest of the civilized North; say goodbye to Boston and New York.
“I know you have to your satisfaction a predictable future planned, and I know that it doesn’t include soot or any of the aerosols released by burning coal. But complexity does get more complex at times, the future is not easy to anticipate. Some little kid will play beneath the cake table at the reception and jeopardize the cake.”
“I don’t know where you’re going with this. Your’re mentioning a bunch of stuff: Soot, causality, glaciation, and the rest.
“I’ll try to tie it together in the context of your comments about coal and climate. Think incoming solar radiation. Some of it reaches the surface of the planet, converts to longwave radiation, and then gets trapped for a bit by the greenhouse gases (water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and others). Not all solar radiation reaches the surface, however. Some is reflected to space. You have had the experience of looking at the tops of clouds. They are white and bright as you see them from above, but people on the ground see grey to purple, depending on the amount of blocking ice and water. Well, a group of researchers just used NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer and found that aerosols, such as the colloidal particles produced by burning coal and making the air ‘dirty,’ reflect sunlight at high altitudes, enhancing the natural reflection of cloud tops. In other words, the stuff that escapes up the smokestack can help cool the planet. In fact, the ‘researchers found that clouds containing more aerosols reflected more heat than prior estimates had suggested—more than twice as much. More specifically, they found that approximately three-quarters of the amount of heat reflected was due to aerosols.’ * Just when you think you have complete understanding of something, someone comes along with a discovery that makes you have to readjust your thinking. Those researchers ‘note that this is important because climate change models include the amount of heat that clouds reflect back into space.’ Now, what am I supposed to do with conclusions based on those old models, the ones that don’t account for the additional albedo of sooty cloud tops?”
“So, what are you saying? That you would prefer those sooty days long gone, the ones that made moths of darker color survive against dark bark and the ones that gave your contemporaries black lung? Have you been to China’s big cities in the past ten years? Have you seen the pollution, the smog, air you could cut with a knife? How many young Chinese are destined to die from lung disease?”
“Yes, I’ve seen the pictures of smoggy Chinese cities, and no, I don’t prefer the old style of coal burning, that is, of unrestricted coal furnaces in every home spewing soot—and carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide—into the neighborhood air. But, at the same time, I prefer less arrogant conclusiveness on the part of scientists whose minds should always be open to further discovery and modification. What are we going to do with those old climate model predictions based on less reflectivity from cloud tops? There’s a world of laity out there driven to panic status over ‘climate change.’
“You know that old idea about one man’s garbage being another’s treasure. So, China and India pollute their air, and the rest of the world gets aerosols that mitigate the effect of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. It just gets complexer and complexer.”
“You’re not one of those climate deniers, are you?”
“Whatever that means. Climates change; otherwise, all the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere would be covered in ice from the Arctic to Pennsylvania. Having studied the subject, I know that climates change typically on a scale larger than that of an individual life. No one lived the full duration of the Medieval Warm Period, and no one lived the duration of the Little Ice Age. Even in the midst of those periods that we label warm or cold in retrospect, weather fluctuated, so individuals living at the time couldn’t get the big picture. Climate scientists believe they have a vizualizable future based on what has happened, what is happening, and what must happen. Can the change occur rapidly? Of course, but what does ‘rapid’ mean in respect to the change of the past 8 to 10 thousand years? The seas rose rapidly after the last big ‘melt,’ and then their rise slowed. Earth has its own circadian rhythms interrupted at times by solar output, orbital changes, volcanic eruptions, and orogenesis.
“And now a word from our sponsor. I keep seeing the commercial for a special pillow that is supposed to make sleeping better. Maybe the pillow works. I don’t know. But I keep seeing the commercial, and that repetition makes me question whether, as I adjust my pillow for comfort, or not I shouldn’t get that ‘superior’ pillow. In other words, the more we hear something, the more likely we are to consider it. That’s the story of ‘climate change.’ We can’t get away from the subject. Meanwhile, the temperatures do what they always do, fluctuate over the short term and fluctuate over the long term. Possibly, the models that didn’t account for increased reflectivity off dirty clouds and air are still correct. Probably, adding all the greenhouse gases will change who gets more and who gets less precipitation and who needs more and who needs less air conditioning. But maybe the potential warming will keep us in an interglacial period and prevent the bulldozing by ice of Canada, northern United States, and northern Eurasian lands. And maybe dirty air, that soot and those aerosols produced by an industrialized planet, will keep us cooler than the models predict.”
“You are sitting on the climate fence,” you complain. “You want me to believe that you accept the idea of climate change and that throwing carbon into the atmosphere will warm the planet, but at the same time you want me to think that there’s a possibility that we can’t anticipate because of the non-visualizable variables like the recently discovered reflection ratios of aerosols and soot. Make up your mind.”
“I will as soon as I can, as soon as the world is simple to understand, vizualizable, and causal enough to predict, as soon as I discover all those variables I didn’t know. Not everyone who grew up in my sooty town died from lung disease, and rains have since washed away the soot from the bark. Some of my elders are still alive or died in their nineties. Nineties. That’s a long life in any climate and in any environmental condition, even a sooty one.”
*Yirka, Bob. Researchers find cooling effect of aerosols in cumulus and MSC clouds twice as high as thought. Phys.Org. January 18, 2019. Online at https://phys.org/news/2019-01-cooling-effect-aerosols-cumulus-msc.html Accessed January 23, 2019.
“And that makes me think of soot.”
“Soot?” you ask.
“Soot, coal dust, little particles that make things dirty by accumulating. Even colloidal particles too small to be seen unless in masses suspended by air or water they affect the passage of light. I don’t know about you, but I grew up in a house heated by a coal furnace in a neighborhood—nay, a town—of houses heated by coal. I thought all trees had black bark. Yes, soot does that to trees. Since we’ve mandated cleaner coal, rains have washed the soot away, revealing the natural color of bark. I suppose the most famous instance of sooty vs. non-sooty trees comes from England and the study of changes in the peppered moth, Biston betularia f. typica and its variation Biston betularia f. carbonaria. The former is lighter colored than the latter, and the moth of darker color dominated the populations in areas where trees were sooty, enhancing their camouflage, fooling the birds. Yes, burning coal the old way produces soot. China is discovering what people in the United States and European countries discovered in the twentieth century. You have to burn coal cleanly if you want to reduce the soot and clean the local environment. But to return to where I began, soot by accumulating becomes vizualizable; I could see it on trees and houses, and I’m sure doctors saw it in the lungs of coal miners and others who lived in those neighborhoods heated by coal furnaces. Soot has a cause, a simple cause, the primitive burning of coal devoid of scrubbers and filters. Soot is predictable—or was predictable. Keep burning coal in home furnaces, and the neighborhood and trees will turn black. And unfiltered and un-scrubbed coal smoke is unsafe.”
“See,” you say, “and it’s not only the effect on the environment, but the effect on people’s lungs. I’m surprised everyone in your neighborhood didn’t die from black lung disease. Just living there must have been similar to working in a coal mine. And then, what about global warming? All that burning of coal released carbon dioxide. Think, to produce that greenhouse gas, you combine oxygen and carbon, the carbon in coal. Since the carbon in the coal is combined with oxygen, burning a ton of coal produces more than a ton of carbon dioxide. Definitely, we’ve been warming the atmosphere with our burning of billions of tons of coal.”
“Ah! You always bring the subject back around to your obsession with global warming, always to its cause, the cause you identify as vizualizable, simple. It’s a cause-and-effect world for you. You might be right, but this climate stuff is really complex, and dirty air makes it so. You have your prediction, and you’re sure about it, and that’s understandable and possibly correct. Just remember the somewhat still shrouded history of climate. We don’t know whether or not in the big picture, a warmer planet might not be a ‘better’ planet. Sure, the distribution of animals and plants will change with changing climates, but then, haven’t they always had to change in response to climate change? Look, there’s enough evidence to suggest that warm climates are the default climates of Earth with glacial epochs coming few and far between. What if, just what if, the current pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is staving off a return to the glacial events of the past two million years, all those events interrupted by brief warming periods called interglacials. We're probably in an interglacial right now, a period between the retreat of glaciers and the advance of glaciers over the continents. Remember that ten thousand years ago much of North America and northern Europe and Asia were covered by sheets of ice as much as two-miles-thick. Those ice advances followed warm periods that melted existing glaciers of the previous advance. Cyclic stuff, really, over two thousand millennia. If you try to visualize that past, your mind’s eye will envision unstoppable continental glaciers moving across millions of square miles, even cutting out rocks and overriding hills and mountains. If they advance again, say goodbye to Canada and the rest of the civilized North; say goodbye to Boston and New York.
“I know you have to your satisfaction a predictable future planned, and I know that it doesn’t include soot or any of the aerosols released by burning coal. But complexity does get more complex at times, the future is not easy to anticipate. Some little kid will play beneath the cake table at the reception and jeopardize the cake.”
“I don’t know where you’re going with this. Your’re mentioning a bunch of stuff: Soot, causality, glaciation, and the rest.
“I’ll try to tie it together in the context of your comments about coal and climate. Think incoming solar radiation. Some of it reaches the surface of the planet, converts to longwave radiation, and then gets trapped for a bit by the greenhouse gases (water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and others). Not all solar radiation reaches the surface, however. Some is reflected to space. You have had the experience of looking at the tops of clouds. They are white and bright as you see them from above, but people on the ground see grey to purple, depending on the amount of blocking ice and water. Well, a group of researchers just used NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer and found that aerosols, such as the colloidal particles produced by burning coal and making the air ‘dirty,’ reflect sunlight at high altitudes, enhancing the natural reflection of cloud tops. In other words, the stuff that escapes up the smokestack can help cool the planet. In fact, the ‘researchers found that clouds containing more aerosols reflected more heat than prior estimates had suggested—more than twice as much. More specifically, they found that approximately three-quarters of the amount of heat reflected was due to aerosols.’ * Just when you think you have complete understanding of something, someone comes along with a discovery that makes you have to readjust your thinking. Those researchers ‘note that this is important because climate change models include the amount of heat that clouds reflect back into space.’ Now, what am I supposed to do with conclusions based on those old models, the ones that don’t account for the additional albedo of sooty cloud tops?”
“So, what are you saying? That you would prefer those sooty days long gone, the ones that made moths of darker color survive against dark bark and the ones that gave your contemporaries black lung? Have you been to China’s big cities in the past ten years? Have you seen the pollution, the smog, air you could cut with a knife? How many young Chinese are destined to die from lung disease?”
“Yes, I’ve seen the pictures of smoggy Chinese cities, and no, I don’t prefer the old style of coal burning, that is, of unrestricted coal furnaces in every home spewing soot—and carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide—into the neighborhood air. But, at the same time, I prefer less arrogant conclusiveness on the part of scientists whose minds should always be open to further discovery and modification. What are we going to do with those old climate model predictions based on less reflectivity from cloud tops? There’s a world of laity out there driven to panic status over ‘climate change.’
“You know that old idea about one man’s garbage being another’s treasure. So, China and India pollute their air, and the rest of the world gets aerosols that mitigate the effect of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. It just gets complexer and complexer.”
“You’re not one of those climate deniers, are you?”
“Whatever that means. Climates change; otherwise, all the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere would be covered in ice from the Arctic to Pennsylvania. Having studied the subject, I know that climates change typically on a scale larger than that of an individual life. No one lived the full duration of the Medieval Warm Period, and no one lived the duration of the Little Ice Age. Even in the midst of those periods that we label warm or cold in retrospect, weather fluctuated, so individuals living at the time couldn’t get the big picture. Climate scientists believe they have a vizualizable future based on what has happened, what is happening, and what must happen. Can the change occur rapidly? Of course, but what does ‘rapid’ mean in respect to the change of the past 8 to 10 thousand years? The seas rose rapidly after the last big ‘melt,’ and then their rise slowed. Earth has its own circadian rhythms interrupted at times by solar output, orbital changes, volcanic eruptions, and orogenesis.
“And now a word from our sponsor. I keep seeing the commercial for a special pillow that is supposed to make sleeping better. Maybe the pillow works. I don’t know. But I keep seeing the commercial, and that repetition makes me question whether, as I adjust my pillow for comfort, or not I shouldn’t get that ‘superior’ pillow. In other words, the more we hear something, the more likely we are to consider it. That’s the story of ‘climate change.’ We can’t get away from the subject. Meanwhile, the temperatures do what they always do, fluctuate over the short term and fluctuate over the long term. Possibly, the models that didn’t account for increased reflectivity off dirty clouds and air are still correct. Probably, adding all the greenhouse gases will change who gets more and who gets less precipitation and who needs more and who needs less air conditioning. But maybe the potential warming will keep us in an interglacial period and prevent the bulldozing by ice of Canada, northern United States, and northern Eurasian lands. And maybe dirty air, that soot and those aerosols produced by an industrialized planet, will keep us cooler than the models predict.”
“You are sitting on the climate fence,” you complain. “You want me to believe that you accept the idea of climate change and that throwing carbon into the atmosphere will warm the planet, but at the same time you want me to think that there’s a possibility that we can’t anticipate because of the non-visualizable variables like the recently discovered reflection ratios of aerosols and soot. Make up your mind.”
“I will as soon as I can, as soon as the world is simple to understand, vizualizable, and causal enough to predict, as soon as I discover all those variables I didn’t know. Not everyone who grew up in my sooty town died from lung disease, and rains have since washed away the soot from the bark. Some of my elders are still alive or died in their nineties. Nineties. That’s a long life in any climate and in any environmental condition, even a sooty one.”
*Yirka, Bob. Researchers find cooling effect of aerosols in cumulus and MSC clouds twice as high as thought. Phys.Org. January 18, 2019. Online at https://phys.org/news/2019-01-cooling-effect-aerosols-cumulus-msc.html Accessed January 23, 2019.
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