Even Smart People Can Be Stupid

So I was reading The Bent, a quarterly publication by Tau Beta Pi, like a good enginerd, and one of the letters made my blood boil. It was written by Pierre R. Latour, who worked on the Apollo Program, and was part of the back-and-forth on global warming that's been raging for nine issues. Let's go through some of it:

1. Earth's temperature is a property of a distributed, dynamic chemical process control system. A thermostat reduces variations about a desired set point by feedback manipulation of significant energy flows.

This letter was written by an engineer to an audience of engineers, and even though I'm an engineer, I don't know what he just said. Maybe it's because I'm the wrong type of engineer (civil, not chemical like Mr. Latour) or maybe it's because I'm still a lowly undergrad. Either way, this paragraph doesn't actually say anything, and merely serves to make Mr. Latour sound smart.

2. Earth's average atmospheric temperature is unmeasurable...

Okay, it's true that we couldn't take the temperature of every single point on Earth and calculate the exact average. But we could sample a bunch of points on Earth and get a good guess and a margin of error. If the sample average changes beyond the margin of error, then we can be confident that the actual average is changing. Apparently Mr. Latour never took a statistics class.

No professional control engineer would accept responsibility for engineering Earth's thermostat. His first duty is to do no harm...

First, I don't think anyone wants to engineer a global thermostat. A thermostat, as Mr. Latour was probably trying to say in his first, jargon-filled paragraph, responds to the current temperature. I want my apartment to be between 68^o and 78^o. If it's hotter than that, turn on the AC; colder, the heat. That's a thermostat. The response to global warming is closer to, "Hey, the heat's been on for a while. Let's turn it down before it's 90^o in here."

Second, you would think that "first do no harm" would be an argument to stop pumping CO₂ into the atmosphere. Under this guise, if you don't know what it will do, you shouldn't do it. The Earth seemed fine before we started pumping it out.

3. While Earth's temperature has been warming slowly for 25,000 years and drifted up 0.6^oC from 1975-98, (0.026^oC/year), [sic] it stopped increasing since 1998...

Hmm, the "unmeasurable" global average temperature increased 0.026^oC/year between 1975 and 1998? Interesting. And while the Earth's temperature does fluctuate naturally, there has been a sharp increase that started, incidentally, about the same time as the Industrial Revolution:

4. The melt rate of ice is proportional to atmospheric temperature, not the derivative of temperature [i.e. how fast the temperature is changing, for the calculus-deprived]. Ice melts because its surface is warm, not warming. A glacier shrinks because it is warm; [sic] even if it is cooling.

Wow. And if its surface keeps warming, it will be warm enough to melt.

5. The prime mover of Earth's energy balance and temperature is the sun. Atmospheric CO₂ lags ocean and atmospheric temperature because its solubility decreases with temperature, just like champagne bubbles do. So temperature changes cause CO₂ changes, not the other way around.

You know where else the sun acts as the prime mover of temperature? A greenhouse. But a greenhouse wouldn't be as warm without the glass. A greenhouse is, of course, in no way analogous to the effect to which it lends its name.

And temperature changes causing CO₂ changes doesn't automatically discount "the other way around." You would think a systems engineer would have heard of a feedback loop.

6. CO₂ is not a pollutant; it is green plant food. Its greenhouse-gas effect is irrelevant and benign. H₂O vapor effects are 1,000 times greater. The greenhouse-gas effect is essential for life...

Most of what Mr. Latour says here is true; he just fails to understand the concept "too much of a good thing." Carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect are both essential for life. (Without the greenhouse effect, the Earth would be about -17^oC.) Water is essential for Mr. Latour's life, but I doubt he wants me to pump 27 trillion kg of it into his house every year.

And it's true that the contribution of water vapor to global warming is higher than that of carbon dioxide, but the effect of adding more of it into the atmosphere is not as dramatic as that of CO₂. First, more water vapor means more clouds, which increase the Earth's albedo, reflecting sunlight back into space and reducing the amount of heat that reaches the earth in the first place. Second, increasing water vapor concentrations won't close the atmospheric window. (The greenhouse effect happens when molecules in the atmosphere absorb electromagnetic radiation, trapping it in Earth's atmosphere. But molecules absorb electromagnetic radiation only at particular wavelengths. Water, for instance, absorbs wavelengths around six microns, and practically none of that escapes the Earth's atmosphere. There is little in the atmosphere that absorbs in the 8-12 micron range. CO₂ does.)

8. By March 16, 2009, more than 700 international scientists have testified to the Senate's environment and public works committee,...debunking any claims of scientific consensus for anthropogenic global warming (AGW)...

While it's true that belief in AGW is not universal among scientists, 84% of scientists "think that earth is getting warmer because of human activity."

No benefit-cost financial analysis...has been provided...

Really? What's this?

11. It has been clear since 2006 that AGW is a scheme to tax people with CO₂ caps...

Really? Global warming is an elaborate hoax to provide political cover for taxing businesses? Since when have politicians put this much work into anything?

Besides, if they wanted to tax business, there are better things on which to base the taxation, like revenues or profits. I'd hope that the Democrats aren't such Milquetoasts that they have to invent an elaborate hoax and convince millions of people of its veracity before they are comfortable enough to enact a simple tax.

After the end of his letter, it says that Mr. Latour graduated from college in 1962, which means he's around 70 now. If he's wrong, he won't be the one who has to live with the consequences.