Science Moment by E.C.McMullen Jr.
THANK YOU TIP JAR THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT - 2004 USA Release: Jan. 23, 2004 Paramount Pictures Rating: USA: R

Is there really such a thing as a "Butterfly Effect"?

Yep, and this movie adheres pretty well to the scientific analogy. But the Butterfly Effect, a term coined by Jacques Hadamard in 1890, is just that: an analogy used to describe how very small things can have enormous outcomes over periods of time. It's not now, nor was it ever a theory or even a hypothesis. The Butterfly Effect is also known as the Ripple Effect and it was never meant to suggest that a butterfly in one part of the world, merely by flapping its wings, could possibly create a storm elsewhere in the world.

In 1961, the "Father of Chaos Theory", Edward Lorenz, after running a predictive weather computer model, discovered that his predictions were all wrong. How could that be? It was mathematically sound!

After a re-analysis of his data, he discovered that just one of his entry decimal numbers, .506, was largely accurate, but minutely inaccurate. The proper number to get a slightly more accurate prediction should have been, .506127. The difference of a mere .000127 is so seemingly insignificant as to have originally gone unnoticed the first time. But over a course of time, and with the great and dynamic force of planetary weather, that small number, multiplying itself billions of times over, became huge. Thus the allegorical idea of a Butterfly or Ripple Effect: The circumference of the ripple is much larger than the initial pebble. The air moving from out of a butterfly's wings is much smaller than a hurricane.

Of course, we can only see the ripples from a small pebble when we drop it on a virtually still surface, like a pond. Go to the beach and drop your pebble in the Ocean. What ripples do you see then? Weather, like life, is an extremely complex system, and predictive models - computer or otherwise - are unable to account for long-term dynamic interactions. Consider all of the life that is constantly moving air all round itself as well as the wide variety of weather conditions everywhere and the addition of a multitude of other factors, and the butterfly's wings and the pebble's ripples become meaningless. The movement of air is always roiling over the earth in billions of different ways and changing by the second, and so it's more like tossing a pebble in a tsunami and looking for the ripples.

The very idea of man-made global warming (or Anthropogenic Global Warming: AGW) is based on this Ripple Effect idea. That a "tipping point" is created when a gas like Carbon Dioxide, a trace element of the earth's atmosphere, is doubled, still remaining a trace element of the earth's atmosphere, but providing a tipping point for all the other, far more prevalent gasses like Oxygen and, the biggest greenhouse gas of all, water vapor.

To put this into the proper perspective, if the Carbon Dioxide emitted from our cars (and depending on the vehicle that can be far less than what we emit when we respirate) is contributing to global warming, and water vapor is about 12,000 times the greenhouse gas of Carbon Dioxide, then what is going to happen when we all start driving around in Hydrogen powered cars that emit water vapor (hydrogen powered cars being a green solution to the AGW problem)? The waste of Hydrogen fuel cells is water vapor. Clean burning propane? Propane chemically converts to Carbon Dioxide when ignited.* BioFuels? The waste gas emitted from burning BioFuels is Nitrous Oxide (N2O), an Ozone destroyer.

*
This may be explain why scientists who believe in AGW will gladly participate in unchallenged monologues on the subject once it is ascertained that there will be no scientists with an possing view to challenge them, or have debates with Christians and Creationists on Evolution - they know they are right. But decades of refusing to engage in debate with leading scientists, their peers and colleagues, who are skeptical of AGW?

Scientists debate science and research all of the time, even and especially long-standing science that has a "consensus built around it", is often challenged. Witness the fact that in the last 10 years, Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet and not an actual planet like earth or Jupiter.

We now know that despite all of those skeletons in museums, all of the tons of scientific literature, the Brontosaurus never existed. And neither did the Triceratops.

But there is one theory of the past 25 years where the scientists who promote it not only refuse to debate the merits of the science with other scientists~: those who support the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), a moniker changed in recent years to Anthropogenic Climate Change^.

The supporters of AGW not only refuse to debate other scientists on the theory, they actually engage in ad hominem and straw man fallacy attacks against them. The so-called godfather of Anthropogenic Global Warming, Dr. James Hansen, being chief among them (he later recanted and apologized to Dr. Freeman Dyson).

What most people outside the scientific community also don't realize is that there is more than one theory of AGW and that the two proponents of the two most popular theories have environmental solutions that cancel each other out. Worse, the other Godfather of AGW (to Europe) Dr. James Lovelock, claims that Dr. James Hansen's solutions will make matter worse. And Dr. James Hansen says the same of Dr. Lovelock. Yet they both agree that we have only one shot at getting the solution right or All is Lost.

This is actually less than a 50/50 chance. Because the odds are actually in our favor that doing nothing will produce a better result than attempting either man's solution.

Moreover, the third most popular theory of AGW is from the most accomplished of the three men, Albert Einstein's actual successor, Freeman Dyson. His solution is the easiest, most cost effective, technologically possible right now, can be solved without sacrifice. And if by chance it doesn't work, it does no harm. It also doesn't require protests and irrational accusations of being a terrorist or a Nazi bantered about (something that Dr. James Hansen employs frequently).

So of course, the media is largely ignoring him.

To make matters worse for the AGW crowd, Dr. James Lovelock has recanted much of his earlier theories of Anthropogenic Global Warming. The very minute he did so the AGW crowd, instead of considering his reasons, merely disregarded him as a crackpot. Why? At Discover magazine, Politics, not science, was the reason they gave.

It must be said however, that Edward Lorenz, who was better at predicting dynamic weather patterns than any person on earth in his lifetime, presented scientific evidence as to why the concept of AGW based upon computer models (which only calculate what you put in them), rather than actual experimentation and research, was in error.

~There was a single debate, announced over a year in advance, and held at one of the most prestigious science universities in the world: Cal Tech.

Not a single one of the world's leading Scientists in favor of the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming, showed up to attend and debate the merits of Anthropogenic Global Warming in 2006 at the Cal Tech Environmental Wars.

In the same year they had all the time in the world to show up on a moment's notice to various and sundry talk shows, Hollywood parties, Movie premieres, concerts, etc., and expound upon AGW without scientific rebuttle, they had no time for an actual scientific symposium and engaging with their colleagues. This despite the fact that one of the scientists on the forum was none other than Cal Tech president and Nobel Prize winning Scientist, Dr. David Baltimore.

And he wasn't there to debate, but to moderate.

Cal Tech had to largely make do with only seven scientists, seven non-scientists, largely pro-AGW bloggers (like politically partisan Chris Mooney), and/or marketing managers invested in Green technologies, along with four entertainers who sang songs or did a magic act.

Except for a single, local Pasadena paper, the Media largely ignored it, even though Pro-AGW media people actually attended.

In short, for a science debate on man-made global warming theory, it was a disaster: but an altogether a telling one.

Not one representative of the nation's major media wanted to cover the Science of Anthropogenic Global Warming debate From Scientists! At a Science Symposium! At one of the most respected Science Universities on earth!

^to accomodate the fact that, as of 2011, the earth isn't warming despite all the (now) wildly inaccurate predictions made since 1988, and all published in the long out of print book, DEAD HEAT (written by Dr. Michael Oppenheimer and known as the "Bible" of the Kyoto Accord: almost entirely based upon Dr. James Hansen's computer models), which was lauded by the top pro-AGW scientists of its time.

None of this is to refute a chartable increase in Global Warming, which we may very well be causing (Anthropogenic) regardless by wether or not the theoretical mechanism (our contribution to the rise in CO2 vs the actual effect caused by that increase) by which we are causing it is correct.

Dinosaurs existed regardless of whether or not we got a few species wrong.

Gravity continues to exist no matter what our theories in explaining the physical mechanism that creates it may say.

Pluto remains unchanged no matter how we choose to classify it.

This article copyright 2011 E.C.McMullen Jr.

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