Tim Palmer - Greenhouse Blues

Great song! See The Right Way to Formalise Mathematics.


Perimeter Blues. More research and less hot air please! (skip to 3 minutes 6 seconds, unless you enjoy nauseating introductions)


At 48 minutes 24 seconds on power requirements and data representation, see Ben Eater on Running a Breadboard at 1MHz and The Right Way to Formalise Mathematics.

At 1 hour 1 minute 48 seconds on the question as to whether we should cut our emissions of greenhouse gas being outside the scope of physical science. This is no use, because there is no science which has this within its scope. What we need is a knowledge-based economy. See Economic and Technological Development of La Madre Tierra.

The reason Tim Palmer's abdication of responsibility for deciding what action we should take is useless is that if the climate models are to be any use at all beyond generating uninformed 'debate', then those models are going to have to include the effects of future human actions.  For example, they need to include the effects of high-altitude water vapour emissions from long-haul jet airliner traffic. They also need to include the effects of nutrient runoff into rivers and oceans and those of topsoil erosion. On soil carbon, see:


... and:


Maintaining soils is crucial to prevent catastrophic flooding:


On the effects of nutrient runoff, see:


But that is only the beginning. We also need to model how ecosystems react to climate change, because this dramatically impacts soil erosion and nutrient runoff. And a part of this will modelling how human ecology adapts to changing climate:


We also need to understand how human communities change as a result of land management changes:


These things can be modelled. See this talk by Roderick Dewar:


At 47 minutes 14 seconds on functional isomorphisms between ecological systems and particle physics, see How Viruses Work and John Horton Conway.

For more on how large-scale models can accurately model global parameters in spite of chaotic dynamics, see this paper by Dewar: 4 Maximum Entropy Production and Non-equilibrium Statistical Mechanics.

We also need to be able to model all the new metabolic pathways we discover, to understand how they are coupled with the climate. For example:


See Mitochondria Batteries and:


This deep sub-terranean micro-biome will turn out to be geologically important, and we need to be able to include geological activity in climate models:


... volcanoes on land ...


... and in the oceans:


Now as to the question of what we should do, ... you would think the big money would be interested in knowing the answer:


It is fairly clear that our first and most immediate priority should be to find a way to make rational decisions about what scientific research we do, what data we need to collect and what systems we need to make the best use of that research and data. See Rebecca Smethurst on the Crisis in Cosmology and On Progressive and Degenerative Research Programs.

We need telecommunications systems to do this:


At 31 minutes 42 seconds, on correlation between early language development and senile dementia, see John Searle on Philosophy of Language, Particularly this observation of Wittgenstein's at 4 minutes 57 seconds and The Last Word on Love.

This post brought to you by Tim Palmer and the ...


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