first published as weblog one hundred and forty eight on Sunday 28th May 2006

The case for Global Warming does not hinge on a tenth of a degree Celsius or a few experts quibbling over the technical details behind a graph of carbon emissions. What the Carbonistas need is something with emotional impact. Tsunamis fit the bill. So their present case hinges upon the sea-level records. It won’t last. Their case will shift again when the scientific community refuses to kow-tow to their paymasters by permitting misleading use of their data. But it has served their purpose well. Truth after all is not where it’s at. With the Fear Factory perception is all…from a Goebbel‘s Primer.

Climate Changelings are shining their spotlights on helpless, victimized, impoverished people being flooded out of their ancestral homelands. They talk of the terror of sea levels rising precipitously…and inexplicably…with no conceivable cause. They tell of extraordinary events and unprecedented happenings affecting the entire world in recent years. Something unknown is causing sea levels to rise and threaten innocent men, women and children.

The idea is that if a convincing record can be shown of rising sea levels then the Carbonistas will be on very strong ground. When the public and the policy makers commanding the public purse strings…insurance companies for instance…see the damage that has been done and the costs they might incur…and here the computer modellers come into their own…they will spend money to solve the problem and scan the horizon for someone to blame for the mess.

Grappling with problems is not what action-oriented types do. They define, act and solve. They get it sorted. Then they look for someone to blame…and somebody else to pay the bill. So not only is the sea level data important to the Carbonista’s Bait & Switch Strategy but the fact that sea levels are rising around the world must be beyond dispute.

Unfortunately that’s the rub. There is considerable dispute about sea level. It is not simple at all. You cannot just put a mark on a dock at high tide, measure it year after year, watch it go up and publish your findings. One of the core concepts in the measurement of sea levels is the geoid…the equipotential surface of the earth’s gravitational field that approximates the mean sea surface.

Then there are the complexities of glacio-hydro-isosatic modelling and the eustatic and tectonic effects on shoreline dynamics. Even with some rudimentary grasp of these subjects there is still holocene sedimentary sequences and intertidal foraminifera distributions to master. And when that is done waiting in the wings are the carbon analysis of coastal paleoenvironments and aminostratigraphy. Sea level is not simple.

Were this enough to determine the precise scientific nature of sea level data, a consensus about this data might be feasible even if some agreed to disagree. However there would be many different hypotheses about the causes of any drift or sudden shift in the data pattern. But unfortunately for the Carbonistas this is likely to be the wrong consensus.

One of several places around the Indian Ocean decimated by the Boxing Day Tsunami was The Maldive Islands. But it would be quite wrong to think that the inhabitants of these islands had been sitting on the beach for the past few decades waiting for the tsunami to strike. They had arranged for a team of Scandinavian researchers to study sea levels in the ocean around them. The scientists found no rise in several centuries…and a fall in the last twenty years.

Michael Crichton started his research for State of Fear...published in 2004...in 2001. At that time I was reading through Tom Clancy’s published works and was somewhat alarmed to notice that many of Clancy’s plots turned up in the real world a few years after he had seemingly invented them. I had two conspiratorial explanations. Either Clancy was on a retainer with the CIA or Mossad were reading the plot outlines he sent to his publisher.

Crichton and Clancy plots have wheels within wheels and move rapidly between different pieces of the action before bringing it all together in one hectic final sequence. Their plots are full of outrageous and improbable coincidences and...as in the old Westerns...the hero comes through unscathed while the baddies and the secondary good guys go down like flies. That’s not a problem for me...it’s the nature of the genre. But one of Crichton’s subplots worries me.

The Island of Gareda is one of the Solomon Islands off the coast of New Guinea north of Australia. Here the Pacific Plate slides under the Ontong Java Plateau resulting in the Solomon Trench...a huge underwater feature that curves in an arc all along the northern side of the island chain and is an active geological region with a deep trench. Along the length of the trench are undersea volcanoes with lots of slope debris and therefore the potential for undersea landslides which displace enormous volumes of water very quickly...the most common way a tsunami is formed.

In Crichton’s book the really really bad guy heads up a global environmental organisation. The underlying action that provides the fiendish plot for the novel involves three earth shattering natural disasters...each timed to take place on the first morning of a conference on Abrupt Climate Change...a lightning-induced flash flood in Yellowstone National Park, an enormous ice floe breaking off from a glacier in Antarctica and...you are there before me...a tsunami activated by giant Hypersonic Cavitators placed on the seabed off the Island of Gareda.

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first published as weblog one hundred and fifty five on Sunday 4th June 2006

In the early eighties I was a Special Graduate Student at MIT’s Alfred P. Sloan School of Management. During my two years as a student much of my waking day was spent in the company of MIT’s System Dynamics Group. The head of this group was Jay Forrester. In his commentary on his background research for State of Fear Michael Crichton remarks that Forrester was ‘one of the must important scientists of the twentieth century’. I had little to do with the great man personally but came to be familiar with his work...and worked closely with Professor Alan Graham and George Richardson. Two entries in my Curriculum Vitae make mention of this brief interlude in my life.

Under Schools and Colleges is the entry: 1980 – 1981; Special Graduate Student; MIT Sloan School Cambridge, USA; System Dynamics & Industrial Dynamics. And in the section on Own Work (1980-2004) under America’s Atlantic Coast (1979-1987): P-E Consulting Cambridge, USA 1979-1985 is another reference to my labours at MIT that goes like this. 'Assignments for a wide range of US clients including managing the European planning cycle and carrying out a corporate integration study in the construction products sector (Norton Company, Worcester); writing a proposal to the US Energy Department on soft energy systems (Technology & Economics, Cambridge); managing partner for project to relate innovation to shareholder value in high-tech high-growth companies (Smith Barney, Chicago); and working partner for the commercial development of a system dynamics model for Canadian printing firms (Interconsult, Cambridge)'.

Professor Jay Forrester was the most influential researcher to model complex systems on the computer. He did ground-breaking studies of everything from high-tech corporate behaviour to urban renewal, and he was the first to get any inkling of how difficult it is to manage complex systems. One landmark essay from Forrester was entitled ‘The Counter-Intuitive Behavior of Complex Systems’. Forrester’s work was an early inspiration for attempts to model the world...particularly the Club of Rome Study from Dartmouth College published as The Limits to Growth.

Forrester was quick to realize that the political voices behind the Club of Rome had a poor understanding of the limits of modelling...and even less interest in the science behind the modelling. They latched onto Forrester’s work because it backed up their pre-conceived notions and political agenda. So Forrester took care to distance himself from the consistent tone of urgent overstatement...bordering on hysteria...of the Limits to Growth book published by Donella and Dennis Meadows from their ivory New Hampshire towers...even though the book was a sexed-up dossier of Jay Forrester’s more technical and conservatively written World Dynamics issued by MIT Publications a year earlier.

Two other giants from the Envionmentalists’ Hall of Fame...Amory Lovins and Rachel Carson...receive a somewhat ambivalent response from Michael Crichton. Amory Lovins became an advocate for Alternative Energy when he authored the 1970s anti-nuclear text Soft Energy Paths: Towards a Durable Peace...which started life as an article in Foreign Affairs. Michael Crichton sees Soft Energy Paths as a major link in the chain of events and thinking that set the US on a different energy path from Europe...though I would not attribute it so much power and influence.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring published in 1962 is a poetic persuasive text that was read with alarm and excitement when it was first published. But with the passage of time the text appears more flawed and more overtly polemical. Crichton estimates it to be about one third right and two thirds wrong. My line would be somewhat different. But I would require that Silent Spring be read in conjunction with an earlier work by Rachel Carson: The Sea Around Us.

I think it unlikely that Rachel Carson would have endorsed the Global Warming by Carbon Dioxide Emissions Hypothesis. Large sections of The Sea Around Us have been airbrushed out of the Climate Debate. Central to the argument in my 1979 unpublished manuscript Green Homes or Blue Moonwaves was Carson’s reporting of the work of the Norwegian Marine Scientist Otto Pettersson. And Carson was also aware of the key role of oceans and algae in the Global Carbon Cycle...something that climate scientists have only recently started to rediscover.

Science has a poor understanding of the behaviour of the ocean’s algae...the subject of a future Shepherd on Climate weblog. Science has similar levels of ignorance about many other variables that might turn out to be crucial to an understanding of local and global climate patterns. Clouds and trees, aerosols and halocarbons, radioactivity and free radicals, solar winds and sun spots are just a few of the subjects on my current research list where I have noticed that good data is absent and well-reasoned hypotheses are thin on the ground.

But as more data is collected and as these specialist subjects are subjected to the scrutiny of Good Science so they will give up their secrets and it will become clearer what role each plays in our planet’s self-regulatory climate system. The natural greenhouse effect at the heart of the Carbonistas’ argument for Kyoto is influenced primarily by water vapour and not carbon dioxide. Does this mean a Khartoum Protocol on Steam Emissions is next on the agenda? Is fear of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to be the harbinger of a New One World Totalitarian Order?

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