TheMillerCircle.org

No subject in the history of science has depended more on models and computer simulations than the science of global climate change. If you look back into our history, our knowledge of the distant past has been derived from studies of the the geological and fossil record that have been going on for more than two hundred years. And increasingly the view we get from these studies is that cataclysmic climate change can occur. But all of the past events have not been created by humans, but from other causes. If you try to look forward, by predicting our future climate conditions, it all comes from computer models and simulations that are extremely limited in their capacity to incorporate all the variables, primarily because the variables themselves are insufficiently understood. Events in the last few years have made it very clear: we don’t understand the variables that we need to know about in order to generate global climate change models that can tell us something which will give us confidence about our future. In the past year, we have witnessed the utter collapse of models that have proven the conservative nature of science and the scientists who study global climate change. There may not be enough time left to fix the problem. Climate models are being scrapped or rapidly revised to see if better predictions can be achieved by exploding the models to include as much as possible. I tend to think that this mass hysteria is going to fall short, simply because of the scale of the problem. I have spent a good part of my scientific career developing models of nerve cells, so I know something about how long it takes to get models that have good accuracy and I think the planet is probably more complicated than the single nerve cells I study and model. It is possible that we are at the beginning of a global emergency on climate change, but don’t know it yet because the computer models haven’t predicted it. But those models are now completely discredited and not because of a bad strategy, but because they aren’t sophisticated enough to be useful and helpfully predictive. They confirm that we may have a future problem, but they haven’t been able to predict the events of the last few years, particularly with respect to the melting of the polar ice caps and what this might do to sea levels and global temperatures.

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This week Nova is rebroadcasting "Car of the Future" with the "car talk guys" Tom and Ray driving and testing present and future cars of unique design and energy saving abilities. But, were you aware of things that have happened in the recent past that bear on this general topic? In the 1990s Toyota produced the RAV4EV , an electric version of their popular smaller footprint SUV. This car was available for only a few years for lease, and for a brief period, it was possible to buy one. It had a 95 amp-hour NIMH rechargeable battery and a fully charged car could get up to 78 miles per hour with a range of 100-120 miles. These cars are so valuable that a 2001 unit went for more than $68,000.00 recently. Some innovative owners created a solar panel means of recharging the battery, so their entire automotive needs created a zero carbon footprint. While they didn’t go over in a big way when gas was so immovable and relatively inexpensive, they would be a hot ticket item today. If you had a solar panel arrangement at work and could leave your car outside, you could enhance the range of the car, but not the speed. Nevertheless, one suspects that a 100 mile range covers the to and fro of work distance for a lot of people.
With the fascination Americans have for automobiles, you would think that the need for new cars with little carbon footprints would stimulate the rebirth of the great American automotive manufacturing era. It could begin in your backyard, like it did for some of the featured folks on the PBS website. With the threat of significant entry of electric, natural gas and hydrogen sources of automotive power, the cost of gasoline might tumble, as it currently has no relationship to the cost of getting it out of the ground and refining it. The game is on!

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In Alan Greenspan’s memoirs, published last year, he stung the Bush White House with his phrase “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” He repeated this comment many times and in doing so presented the counter view to all the reasons that Bush and Cheney had used to hype us into the war. But the new oil contracts that will be given to Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Exxon Mobil and Total have confirmed that Greenspan was right all along. Even if you believe that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, you surely would acknowledge that Bush and Cheney would never have invaded Iraq if the country didn’t have oil and lots of it. You might recall that Rumsfeld was content to let the entire country be raped and pillaged, including Iraq’s precious museums, while he insured that the Oil Ministry was immediately surrounded and heavily guarded (one of Iraq’s precious museums is now under blacktop for a US military base). It was about the only thing that the invasionary force targeted for protection.

Four decades after Saddam Hussein nationalized Iraq’s oil supply and kicked out the oil giants that had taken control of Iraq’s oil after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WW I, the same group will be returning. As Yogi Berra said, "It’s déjà vu all over again." And, their presence will require protection, something that is likely to tie up US troops for many years to come. Perhaps this is the Bush/Cheney good bye present to the USA. Who said imperialism is dead? Iraq’s oil fields are believed to contain the second largest oil reserves in the Middle East. Only the Saudis have more reserves. But those oil fields have been under constraints by UN sanctions and Iraq’s infrastructure for oil production has been seriously eroded. Thus, the initial no-bid contracts will be for the southern oil fields and are primarily for improving the oil production capability. Yet, ordinarily such contracts would be given to smaller, specialized companies for this purpose. The Iraqi National Oil Company (Inoc) is too corrupt and inefficient to accomplish these improvements on their own but Iraq’s oil minister, Hussein Shahristani, claims that, with these no-bid contracts, Iraq is not surrendering sovereignty over her oil and the lifeblood of her future. After all, we have made sure that the entire country needs to be rebuilt. This contract will presumably lead to an immediate increase in oil production of about 500,000 barrels a day, adding to Iraq’s current oil production of about 2.5 million barrels/day. Although these initial contracts are only for two years, the Western recipients are assuming that this will given them leverage for future long-term contracts and profitability.

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