Climatology: A Generalist Study In a Specialized World February 27, 2010
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, CRU, Dr Tim ball, global warming, ipcc
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Climatology: A Generalist Study In a Specialized World
Dr Tim Ball
By Dr. Tim Ball
CFP, February 25, 2010
In the climate debate most are struggling because they can’t see the forest for the trees.
They’re confused by disagreements between scientists and the diversity of information from a multitude of areas.
Their dilemmas are a function of 200 years of evolution of knowledge and research, especially in weather and climate.
Historical Developments
We talk about Renaissance people, those with a wide range of knowledge, but not Universal people. The last identified as such was Alexander von Humboldt who reportedly knew all known science and was familiar through visits with all continents except Antarctica. Intriguingly, he died in 1859 the same year Darwin’s Origin of the Species was published.
Knowledge proliferated beyond the ability of one person to encompass even part of a discipline and academic departments multiplied accordingly. Gradually study and knowledge became specialized and compartmentalized. Further isolation occurred in introductory university courses with unique terminology and definition of terms. They institutionalized knowledge and thereby limited understanding. A student said he didn’t mention something in an exam because he learned it in another department and didn’t think it could be applied.
Interdisciplinary Studies
In the 1970s the trend to specialization triggered another academic reaction with further expansion, but no solution. People in the real world were confronted with problems that required integrated and generalized solutions, but found they couldn’t get useful information from academia. A farmer told me he went to the local university department of agriculture about problems with his soil. They only had specialists dealing with singular components such as trace minerals. Gradually new composite departments appeared under the rubric of interdisciplinary studies around society’s problems. Chief among these were departments of Environmental Studies, which attracted Arts students imbued with the new environmental goal of saving the planet, but most issues required understanding science.
Climatology is a generalist discipline and comes from the Greek word klimat that means angle referring to the angle of the sun. It studies the patterns of weather in a region or over time. Ancient Greeks determined there were three zones, Hot, Temperate and Frigid. In a historical twist most people knew about meteorology before they knew about climatology. It’s odd because meteorology is a specific part of climatology, the study of physics of the atmosphere. Momentum came from attempts to measure and understand the atmosphere and how the interactions that create weather. Meteorology continued ascendancy during World War I as pilots needed accurate forecasts. It’s why most weather stations are at airports and now suffer from interference from growing urban centers. Climatology gained attention in the academic world through the work of various people like Reid Bryson in the US, Kenneth Hare in Canada, Mikhail Budyko in Russia and Hubert Lamb in England. It only came to public attention when it became political.
Early Identification of the Real Problems in Climate Science
Hubert Lamb, founder of the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia, would be mortified at how his creation was misused. He set it up separate from the UKMO because there was no interest in climatology. As he explained in his autobiography, “When the Climatic Research Unit was founded, it was clear that the first and greatest need was to establish the facts of the past record of the natural climates in times before any side effect of human activities could well be important. A world-wide record was needed, particularly on the time scale of human history – a project which, surprisingly, no other body had attempted in any coordinated way. There was only one other similar, institution anywhere else in the world, the Center for Climatic Research set up by Reid Bryson in the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the nineteen-fifties, which soon became the nucleus for an Institute of Environmental Studies.” Inadequate historic data is still a problem and was a factor behind my doctoral research. The shift to Environmental Studies undermined Madison and many other programs but Lamb identifies the worst problem and one I experienced. Nobody was interested in getting the data needed to understand weather and climate. As Lamb explains, “We are living in a time when the glamour of the much more expensive work of the mathematical modeling laboratories, and the tempting prospect of their theoretical prediction, are stealing the limelight.” He hired a modeler, Tom Wigley, and the CRU degenerated to the fiasco exposed in the leaked emails.
Read the rest here
Thank you, Dr. Ball.
The issue is far more serious than the climate scandal [See George Orwell's Book, "Nineteen Eighty-Four"]:
The Climategate scandal has exposed the dark, shadowy outline of an international alliance of politicians [US's Al Gore, UN's Rajendra Pachauri, UK's Tony Blair, France's Nicolas Sarkozy, Germany's Angela Merkel, etc.], news media [BBC, PBS, CBS, CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times], public research agencies [NAS, NASA, EPA, DOE, etc], and research journals [Nature, Science, etc.] that seek to use science and scientists as a propaganda tool to save the world, after first getting in a position of control.
I do not doubt that their goals were initially noble – to eliminate national boarders and thus save the world from mutual nuclear destruction – as were the goals of other self-appointed world rulers.
Their immediate, short-term goal is preservation of their position of power. That will probably require them to appease climate critics ASAP, before critics discover and insist on dismantling the research agencies [NAS, NASA, EPA, DOE, etc.] that manipulated data, public funds, and publications to hide these empirical facts:
01. The Sun exploded as a supernova 5 G yr (5 x 10^9 yr) ago and ejected all of the material that now orbits the Sun.
http://www.omatumr.com/Origin. htm
02. Neutron repulsion – not Hydrogen fusion – powers the Sun and the cosmos. Nuclear rest mass data, when plotted against charge density, Z/A, reveals neutron repulsion in every nucleus. Neutron-emission from the solar core, followed by neutron-decay and partial fusion of the neutron decay product generates solar luminosity, solar neutrinos, and solar wind H in the proportions observed. H pouring from the surface of the Sun and other stars fills interstellar space with this waste product.
03. The top of the solar atmosphere is 91% Hydrogen (H) and 9% Helium (He) because H is the lightest element (element #1) and He is the next lightest one (element #2). Solar mass fractionation is experimentally observed across isotopes (3 to 136 atomic mass units) in the solar wind and across s-products (25 to 207 amu) in the photosphere.
04. The Sun discards 50,000 billion metric ton of H each year in the solar wind. If the Standard Solar Model (SSM) of a H-filled Sun were correct then the Sun is discarding its own fuel!
05. Nuclear manner is mostly dissociating, rather than fusing together, in the Sun and in the cosmos. Gravity is a nuclear force, because almost all of the mass of each atom is in its nucleus. Dynamic competition between the long-range force of gravity and the short-range force of neutron repulsion powers the Sun and the universe.
06. Anthropologic CO2 is no more dangerous than water. CO2 did not cause global warming. Earth’s heat source is the Sun – a variable star.
For a summary of the Sun’s influence on Earth’s climate, see: “Earth’s Heat Source – The Sun” , Energy & Environment 20 (2009) pages 131-144.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0905.0704
With kind regards
Oliver K. Manuel
Emeritus Professor of
Nuclear & Space Sciences
Former NASA PI for Apollo