Forests May Be Bad for Nature

Forests may be bad for the planet according to Stanford University Professor and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientist Ken Caldeira. According to predictions derived from algorithms programmed into a computer, some forests may be counterproductive to the goal of cooling down the planet.

Forests May Be Bad For Planet Canada's forests may actually worsen global warming rather than cool the planet, says a controversial study by a Stanford University physicist and environmental scientist. This doesn't mean we should bulldoze forests to fight global warming, says Ken Caldeira. Forests are still valuable ecological features in many ways.

I find it hard to believe an environmentalist research scientist is making a serious argument that inappropriate forests are a danger to nature but it’s true.

Temperate Forests Could Worsen Global Warming The researchers used complex climate modeling software to simulate changes in forest cover and then examined the effects on global climate. Their results were surprising. "We were hoping to find that growing forests in the United States would help slow global warming," Caldeira said. "But if we are not careful, growing forests could make global warming even worse."

The environmentalist movement is approaching cult behavior marked by an absolute faith that human activity has the power to overwhelm a 4 billion year old ability to cycle a natural molecule, essential for the existence of life on Earth. In the psychiatric need to validate this tenet of faith, the movement assigns credibility to software prophecy in spite of the rational understanding that no model of reality is real.

Carbon Cycle Modeling Lawrence Livermore modelers have been formulating and testing a suite of models to reproduce carbon absorption, transport, and storage processes. The models cannot possibly incorporate all climate factors everywhere--even Livermore's advanced supercomputers cannot provide that resolution--so modelers must select the most important climatic factors and influences and represent them as well as possible.

Climate models are no different than video games. Trying to build digital mirrors of reality is the same process regardless if you want to create digitally the behavior of a human face, or the behavior of the entire planetary atmosphere.

ICT Graphics One of the “holy grails” of computer graphics is being able to create human faces that look and act realistically. … Our “killer app” would be a device in which a person sit, and after a brief “scan,” yields a computer graphics model of their face that we could stick onto a video game character’s head, or composite into a movie frame for special effects shot. These computer-generated images would be so realistic that they would be indistinguishable from photographs. This level of realism is called Photo-realism.

Over the last several decades computer generated graphics have improved but software modeled human behavior is still beyond human capability.

Technology Review Why its such a hard problem exactly what our eyes detect as wrong in a digital human isn’t yet well understood. But University of Southern California graphics researchers Lewis and Ulrich Neumann are trying to find out. In recent experiments, their group showed glimpses of real and digital faces to volunteers to see if they could tell the difference. The results were striking and frustrating. We spent a year working on these faces, but we couldn’t fool people for a quarter of a second, Lewis says.

So computer models can not correctly model the behavior of a single person, but the climate scientists want to believe their models are correct with a precision necessary to predict the future. The cult of environmentalism has no tolerance for non-believers. In their world view the consensus has been achieved so the virtue of the cause is now beyond scientific skepticism. Skeptics are now deniers who refuse to accept the truth. The problem for the movement is that there are still scientists who understand the scientific method.

Reflections of a Climate Skeptic The advantages of accepting a dogma or paradigm are only too clear. One no longer has to query the foundations of one’s convictions, one enjoys the many advantages of belonging to a group that enjoys political power, one can participate in the benefits that the group provides, and one can delegate questions of responsibility and accountability to the leadership. In brief, the moment one accepts a dogma, one stops being an independent scientist.

The blind adherence to the harebrained idea that climate models can generate “realistic” simulations of climate is the principal reason why I remain a climate skeptic. From my background in turbulence I look forward with grim anticipation to the day that climate models will run with a horizontal resolution of less than a kilometer. The horrible predictability problems of turbulent flows then will descend on climate science with a vengeance.

Conservatives understand that socialism is a flawed approach for achieving a just and prosperous society, but that has not stopped Universities from being filled with well funded socialists. In the same way, the Universities are filled with grant money employees dependent upon the cash flow from uncritical sympathizers. Personally, I don’t care how big a computer is running the software, digital prophecy is simply not science.