There are many things I would like to write regarding the relativities of scale with respect to both energy and climate science, including the scale of our energy use versus what renewables can actually deliver, and the stark realities of energy density of renewable enrgy sources and their intermittency, that must unavoidably prevent any attempt to create a cheap energy dependent developed economy using the weak, diffuse and unpredictably intermittent energy sources of a feudal economy. The laws of ignorant political ideology cannot change the fundamental laws of physics, nor the properties of matter.
Such a belief is simply delusional in obvious and absolute energy fact and physics any qualified engineer understands and can quickly calculate, no models required, because the science is known, absolute, and guesses are of no merit when reality is known. The simple concept of electrical storage at grid scale is practically impossible, literally, and definitely unaffordable. Even if theoretically possible it would be so costly in resources it is a self-evident lunacy compared to the simple cheap abundant and sovereign solutions of nuclear energy. By contrast, the telatively weak energy of renewable sources is fundamentally limited by nature, so is expesnive and environmentally damaginng to collect.Not only is it a weak energy source, but we cannot control when it is available, it obviosuly cannot be scaled to meet any need on demand as dispatchable sources can. So how do you electrify fossil powered energy use with renewables when you can’t generate enough to meet current demand over an average year?
But what directed my fingers to the keyboard regarding the realities of scale was a question that came to me this weekend, when I was asked about the impact of wars on the climate by a journalist, and it struck me very strongly that this exposed a common delusion about the power of humans, relative to the power of nature we exist within, due to a total lack of understanding of the relative realities of scale involved.
So I wrote the commentary below. I hope it helps position the significance of humans on Earth, as almost undetectable in the scale of natural cause and effect on Earth’s natural systems.
The most obvious place to start was the reality of the significance of humans within the main natural systems of Earth climate, and of Earth systems at scale relative to the solar system it is a part of, which our efforts can neither affect nor change in any way. Annything humans can do will simply disappear into the sheer scale of natural reality most people cannot begin to grasp. Some even consider themselves or our species somehow significant within the reality of nature at a planetary scale, on which we are, in reality, an intelligent but temporary and tiny amount of sentient froth, powerful compared to other frith, of no consequence within the power of the climate and other system that control the Earth’s environment, undetectable in physical quantities that control the solar system.
Humans are a rather interesting development of the short lived primates over a few million years of Earth’;’s 4.5 Billion years, evolved by a geological tectonic event 3 Million years before present, (3Ma BP), the closing of the gap between NOrt and South America that ended the connection between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. This made us into a smarter, but still short lived, species. As Feyman says elsewhere on this site, these Apes stand around, trying to figure stuff out. Except, a few hundred years ago, we invented the scientific method and can actually figure out how nature works. and make tools based on what we figure. We can understand the natural world about us, use this knowledge to make machines that increase our power, and exploit the resources nature offers, especially those resources in the rocks beneath the Earth, that are an indispensable part of our development as a technologically enabled animal, and the surplus output the enrgy allows us tcreate, for thfirst time ever in thousands of years ofhuman existence, make it possible to protect humanity against the planet’s threats and extremes, both natural environmental extremes and biological threats. Even bio engineer ourselves in surgery and with drugs that maximise useful life expectancy, and create the environmental systems systems for a few to venture into the hostile freezing void of space that our planet moves within, but we can never adapt to. Send a robot? …… perhaps.
But such feats that protect us from the realities of a natural environment are, like humans flying or diving, a tiny effort within the natural planetary scale of things. To believe humans can control the natural world at a planetary scale is a massive level of delusion. Because the forces the more delusional humans might think they have are in clear and absolute fact wholly insignificant, compared to the scale of the natural forces we understand, that truly dwarf any impact we can imagine ourselves ever having, or being able to control if we could create such power.
So to relative scales and their inconvenient truths. I had a chat with a journalist who called to discuss an idea they were considering regarding how the wars going on now would affect climate, more than changes in CO2 from industrialisation, etc. I had to keep repeating what was apparently hard to accept, the realities of scale say the answer is “none”. For example the idea that one average Hurricane requires the energy of about 200 Hiroshima sized nuclear bombs kinda spoilt the perceived belief of some comparable relativity of power between humans and nature. This includes the tiny effect of both weapons and the effect of the tiny amount of AGW from CO2 and other greenhouse gasses, both measured to be infinitesimal at the absolute power of global energy systems. Weapons appear powerful because they concentrate the release of a significant of enrgy in human terms into a very small space to do a lot of localised damage to vulnerable animal like humans and their built structures, called explosions, but are insignificant on a World Wide scale.
The total radiative effect due to human activity since 1850 is guessed to be 1.6W/m^2. The level of negative stabilising control feedback from the oceans, net of water vapour GHE positive feedback, is circa 10W/m^2 for each degree of warming. So the claimed effect of all the AGW ever is less than 0.2 deg K. The rest is natural. Go figure.
And also, on a quick calculation I will check again later, the amount of solar energy falling on the planetary climate system every day is over 8 Million times that we generate for our own use in a similar period, that is 179TWh from all fuels and energy sources. So how much will this extra level of enrgy entering our weather systems affect the planet that is receiving 8 Million times more from the Sun? Answers on a postcard.
Don’t believe the Doom sayers for profit, do your own checks first, etc. It’s not hard. Ask Google and do the maths. It just multiplication and division at basic high school level.
So to human versus natural relativities, which I will return to later in an enrgy specific blog , having floated the overall global reality, as regards the realities of human energy production and the actual effect of its production on the global climate above.
While on the subject of scale, it is informative and sobering to consider the illustration below, as regards the overall water and freshwater proportion on Earth, the smaller of the two drops compared to the rocky Earth in the image.The freshwater on Earth’s surface is the smaller blue dot. The tiny skim of water that is Earth’s 70% ocean coverage has the largest effect on the Earth’s ability to control its global temperature within a narrow range, compared to a rocky planet.
https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/worlds-water-1613×2048.jpg
Interesting, but take another look at that rock. What is it in reality ? Under a wafer thin Creme Brulée skin, the Earth itself is in fact almost entirely molten and trying to get out through whatever small holes in its thin aging skin it can make, and the whole issue, together with the water and air on top of the wafer thin skin, is held together by gravity. ( But not powered by steam, for the Rugby fans here)
https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/80a24352-67a4-42eb-971a-a9a867ac1e98/d2wy2y4-f2a2c10f-57ab-4dca-ab87-361e98938a59.jpg/v1/fill/w_1095,h_730,q_75,strp/inside_the_earth_by_streincorp.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpc3MiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwic3ViIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsImF1ZCI6WyJ1cm46c2VydmljZTppbWFnZS5vcGVyYXRpb25zIl0sIm9iaiI6W1t7InBhdGgiOiIvZi84MGEyNDM1Mi02N2E0LTQyZWItOTcxYS1hOWE4NjdhYzFlOTgvZDJ3eTJ5NC1mMmEyYzEwZi01N2FiLTRkY2EtYWI4Ny0zNjFlOTg5MzhhNTkuanBnIiwid2lkdGgiOiI8PTEwOTUiLCJoZWlnaHQiOiI8PTczMCJ9XV19.2_c8oYWTD6JnOeYyntYfSasYzxnM-ShGJ6t_M209Yj0
That is why Earth is spherical and in fact so smooth and spherical, bulging at the equator. A ball of molten rock held together by its own gravity, which also keeps the water and atmosphere in place and under pressure, all wobbling like a giant rock jelly beach ball in the varying gravity of its solar system partners, to orbital change beats, mainly the Sun and Moon, and it gravity and that of the moon controls its shape, as well as its equilibrium temperature when in a stable orbit around the Sun, distorted by the Moon, varying on periods from geological to daily. Earth’s shallow oceanic puddles, over 70% of its surface, only 4km deep on a few km of rocky skin, change the dominant ocean surface temperature continually, to adjust to changes in incoming energy and the effects on outgoing radiation passing through the changing atmosphere to space, as regards water vapour content and other, less effective, greenhouse gasses, on which humans have a tiny effect, about 3% added to the natural and relatively small total greenhouse effect since 1850. The natural system is strongly controlled by the oceans that work continuously and wholly naturally to maintain a stable thermal equilibrium, which it does with massive oceanic feedbacks to and changes in the surface temperature. At all times the system must ensure a net enrgy balance, enrgy in = enrgy ut, nota t constant temperature, or the system would veer off heat balance one way or the other. The natural negative feedback that is created is proportional to the imbalance between heat in and out, so is always just enough to balance them. And, most important, there is always a strong negative feedback from three dominant controls to any imbalance that changes the current natural thermal equilibrium, and hence changes ocean surface temperature, which in fact must vary constantly, because it cannot be constant when its role is to balance the system in a varying environment. These controls are far more powerful than we can possibly imagine.
Note, carefully, that the concept of a stable system is fine, but that this requires constant change in temperature to balance the constantly changing system components, of which CO2 is a very small one, on multiple periods, as well as stabilis unpredictable extreme events, such as Asteroids and super volcnoes.Nature does not stay still, but it adapts. Even creates new species for changed environments. We can also adapt to change, but we certainly can’t control it, but the second, re engineering ourselves, is beyond us. Probably.
Even the expectation, of sustained stability without change, is self evidently delusional – when the known changes of the various variable factors involved is considered alongside the known variability of the past. As the geological record shows, constant change is the natural reality. An assertion of change as unnatural is a simple lie, if spoken by anyone claiming expert understanding of the natural systems. Otherwise the speaker self evidently has no serious knowledge of the subject, andcannot defend such assertion against the facts.
The continuous natural feedbacks to natural cyclical and extreme events, of massive scale relative to anything humans can create, balance Earth’s massive heat input from the Sun, a fusion reactor a million times bigger than Earth , against the Earth’s rate of heat loss to the absolute zero vacuum of freezing space. This happens mostly through ocean surfaces changing to whatever temperature that equilibrium requires, a form of planetary sweating that cools the surface by evaporation and also forms clouds that reflect the sun to reduce incoming energy reaching the surface.
Cool ;-). Especially if you consider the scale and volatility of the Sun’s activity and our changing orbit around it, which can vary the solar energy by over 26% at 100,000 year maximums extremes of the Milankovitch eccentricity, plus the lesser effects of obliquity and precession, of which there have been many cycles. The Sun, for scale, is a Million times the volume of Earth and is a very large fusion reactor held together by …. gravity. Just like Earth. But hotter, and MUCH bigger.
/https://tomroelandts.com/sites/tomroelandts.com/files/field/image/sun-earth-moon.png
The reality of “climate change”, as observed in the record, is whatever temperature that has been required to maintain Earth’s thermal equilibrium in space. Average global temperature is never constant, because it must vary to regulate the amount of energy energy going in and out, from multiple causes. The balance between such forces is at a scale impossibly large for humans to contemplate. Or to change significantly.
CONCLUSION: The temperature the Earth needs to be to maintain thermal equilibrium in space is delivered by natural forces more powerful than most people can possibly imagine, that dominate any effect that humans can create. Humans are passengers on this system. The best we can do with our technologies is protect ourselves from nature that kept us leading short mean lives as hunter gatherers through the mainly freezing periods of the last 2.8 Million years of ice ages we evolved within (but living much closer to the Equator, where most people still live, between the Equator and 40 deg North, probably for this historic reason, and the fact we are also a tropical species, until the warm Holocene interglacial again allowed farming and surpluses and thus led to technological societies, where the massive energy we can now at last command can keep larger numbers of us safe, able to communicate and also resist and avoid disease, famine and even war – protect ourselves from nature.
This can continue for as long as we can best apply human intelligence to best use resources that the Earth provides us with, from the air, land and sea. And maximise the energy we can extract from nature to do that as best we can. Certainly not allow givernmentsto impose the opposite by reversing energy use per capita to profit elites, while the mass of people raised up by indusrialisation have their prosperity and freedoms taken from them by elites, who reward their academic priests to promote their backward fraud on the measured facts above, usually inadequates with a poor grasp of maths, physics and the broad systems grasp required to join the science dots, as becomes obvious in any serious debate on the facts and physics.
Their great belief in their own abilities and wisdom is unsupported by their professional formation in almost all cases. Don’t know what they don’t know. Don’t wanna know any inconvenient truths they don’t wanna hear. And…..
Activists can’t handle the truth. So will not debate it on the facts, and attack those who debate reality because they have studied and understand it so can, as deniers, which they are, deniers of lies created to defraud the mass of people for political purposes. It is helpful to remember that informed sceptical debate and proof by observation are the basic principles of real science, which are no longer allowed in the mass media, in publicvenues or political debate entertained by any enterprise the government and elites have influence over. Becai ause thos realities are that nature has our back and there is no detectable problem on Earth that humans have, or probably can, create at a planetary scale that can change natural events significantly. Just a tiny amount of localised noise, on the measurements we have made. Earth and nature are not bothered by humans, at and global scale.
Given its scale, ONLY nature can decide what is real, by the way it changes, on the facts we can measure. Real science. Nature decides what change really happens, not models that falsify any effect’s humans may have on nature by exaggerating the effects of their chosen problem du jour in their predictions, by 100’s of percent, by simple assertion, no supporting phsyics attempted. Environmentalist models are contrived frauds, built on erroneous and cherry picked assertions and given wholly unrealistic powers by their modellers, AKA “sensitivities”, which border on “Superpowers” in hmasn as regards scake and reality. So models using these exagerrated guesses cannot expect to predict reality, and in afct get it very wrong when used to predict thefuture as result. Because the real climate doesn’t work like that. Climate models are are fairy tales, science fiction, made up n by their authors to prove an exxuse to reverse western econlies by UN derive laws, while Asia powers on unhindered, making te stuff we could still be maing, until we lose te transferred skils and become third world clieny ts of emrgig ecomies, as the UN planned it back in the 80’s,a nd their politicians made lain as their real objectives. Their enforcrs at national level simply repeat the UN climate liturgy to deceive for reward and academic recognition, in a branch of science corrupted by politicians, for the stated objectives of transfer of power and profit globally.
Only the observation of nature can tell us what is real, by the realities it commands and we observe, and about which there is only one truth, the one we measure. And those measurements expose the predictions of models that do not happen as claimed for them in the natural world as false. Now, and for ever, ever since satellite records began in 1979. The net zero scam is wholly regressive for humanity in evry way and neds to be shut dow, A rational energy transition is fine, and will e necessary over a few hundred years, no ruch, there is alot of oil, gas and coal in the griund still to find and extract, the rational lead is from fossil to nuclear for generation and, eventually, electricity for heating and synthetic liquid hydrocarbon fuel for long distance travel and flight, nuclear freighter ships, perhaps EVs in inner cities, but it will take 100s of years to electrify the roadside infrastructure to power the vehicles we need to continue to develop as democratic and free society. Exactly the prosperity and freedoms the overtly false claims of the climate “emergency”, and its false attribution of cause and effect, was created to end in the West. All based on a level of change above normal which is clearly has clearly not happened in measured fact, CO2 rises a lot temperatures hardly change, and Asia is plans wever more coal and other fossil burning. How long can supposedly rational educated people suspend belief in the rational truth? This is scientufic cognitive dissonance, on a massive scale.
I hope this was a good way to start talking scale, as regards our insignificant place in nature. And the false assertions thatpretend otherwise. There may one day be relics left to show an unlikely visitor or future intelligent species, from a planet far away, that an intelligent species that could build machines to serve them , powered by energy they had developed the skills to create to assist in that end, had once occupied this planet. But only if they drop in before the whole Earth is redistributed as its constituent elements as our Red Giant Sun consumes the Earth we were told to leave the resources we need to progress in. For whom or what we. are they being conserved, exactly? When its gone, its gone, as they say in Lidl..
It is overpoweringly obvious when contrasting our power that nature allows us to have, with the overall power nature has, that human activity can have no effects at the natural scale of the global environment. All is transient, everything changes, naturally, cyclically and exceptionally, The natural Earth feedbacks have control. Not humans. So far. Earth’s climate will spend most of the next 80.000 years 8 degrees colder on average than the short, current, Holocene interglacial, now inot 3,000 years of cooling down its neo glacial phase to the glacial floor (yup, really) , which the coldest end of in a few thousand years will render most of Northern Europe and Canada uninhabitable, until eventually much of the Northern regions nearest the sea are under kilometers of ice sheets, and the ocean levels are 130 metres lower than now ……… just like the last ten times. Makes 3mm pa sea level rise look a bit slow, and that’s natural change, mostly. Nothing we can do will affect any of this future significantly. There are more important questions to ask than about a few millimetres of sea level change pa, such as….
“Will civilisation survive when the people who built it are losing their lands under the ice, the Riviera is more akin to the UK South coast and the populations of whole sub continents must relocate or die.” Now THAT’s a climate migration, of the natural kind, on a planetary scale. All totally natural and inevitable. Forget that nation state border s***..
QUESTION: What level of stupidity can suggest humans reverse their use of cheap plentiful enrgy, after 1 Million years of hunter gathering subsistence survival in the cyclic ice age cycles was followed by a short 10,000 years period of warm plenty from agricultural surplus in the short warm Holocene we live in, when we learnt how to better protect ourselves from nature, how to ensure surpluses of food for a population of 10 Billion, that wil fall when infant mortality is no longer a problem anywhere, and most recently learnt how to generate the energy to do many more things at lower costs so all people in a society could live free, full safe lives protected from nature. The health, wealth and happiness they elites no wish to claw back from the masses by ending theri access to cheap plentiful energy, hence fredom to travel and associate, be warm, and challenge elite rule, etc.
The only possible consequence of climate action is a return to being clever animals in some post industrial feudalism run by self declared elites in the glacial phase of an ice age, in which elites alone are allowed the technological benefits they control, and ration a small proportion of to the masses by climate law, “for their own good”. In the name of things that self evidently cannot and do not happen as they claim.
It’s just obvious. Doesn’t anyone learn anything about real science and economics at school?
No. Because that’s not what they are told to believe by the woke teachers and academics who create and promote the climate science scriptures you must believe, because their salaries depend on promoting the narratives of the elites that employ them. Many of them don’t even understand the physical reality and facts of the hard science they repeat, just what they have been told to believe and proseletise, just ask them a hard question… the majority of the public they deceive must believe, never question, and surrender their share of energy use and natural resources to the elites, along with the wealth and freedom that used to give them, so only the elites orvtheir appted bureaucrats can now decide who is lucky enough to get them.
Something’s amiss, as Will would say. And it starts with a complete denial of the sheer SCALE of the fundamental reality of the controlling natural forces, that we already understand, and have developed ways of living with much more safely, using our ability to create a small amount of intense energy to make our small sophisticated cities and other more dispersed habitataions safer in so many ways, adapting to living within a natural World that, often and unknowingly, is extremely hostile to life on land, but with much reduced harm when humans can use the technologies that cheap plentiful energy has provided us with to warn, defend and protect us.
But always by adapting our defenses and behaviour to nature, never by attempting to control the whole planetary environment at scale, a self evidently impossible conceit in fact, and a stupidity on a massive scale to believe possible, in ignorance of the most basic scientific reality. On the facts we have measured.
PS This blog,. like human understanding and real deterministic science, will always be a Work In Progress. No science is settled, so all is questionable. Unless it’s a deliberately contrived lie as with climate action, and people profit from its belief, so it cannot be allowed to change. And is thus not science.
This work will be corrected by any input that correctly applies proven physics and verifiable datasources. As I rewrite this is the FOURTH edit, to make the same points better, from a finer tuned approach, after further thought. All I ask is you make the same informed and rational science effort in any response.
© Brian RL Catt October 2023
12:52 PM
