re: #56 Spare O’Lake

Thank you. See link to my #55 and please comment.

The best comment I can give is one of magnitude and order.

Suppose I want to estimate the mass of an old truck from the days when they were made out of steel. Let’s say the actual mass is two tons.

To first order, I’ll call the truck a rectangle and imagine that it is made out of steel.

If I do that, I’ll get an estimate for the mass of the truck that is too large, say my two ton truck is now estimated to be four tons.

However, that estimate can make us pretty certain we are talking about something that weighs tons. There is no correction that will suddenly make it only weigh pounds.

But I want to be more accurate - and bear with me, suppose I don’t have a scale handy to just measure it directly.

But to second order there are big hollow places in the cab and in the truck in general. It is not a solid brick of steel.

Say I take that into account, now I am much closer to the two tons. Say I get 2.1 tons.

At this point there is no way at all, it will ever be something that is only say 100 pounds.

Now say I am a real stickler and I take into account that glass and the seats are not made of steel. This is going to third order. But this point, I’ve done a lot of measurements on this truck and I know for sure when I get a number close to two tons, it really is close to two tons in actual mass.

Notice that as I keep going up in order, the corrections get smaller and smaller.

The point of this is we have already looked at what the biggest effects are and ruled out the other things that could cause effects as big as we are seeing.

The effects of the solar variations are second and third order effects.

The denier types would falsely like you to believe that they are first order effects.

Now to make the most accurate predictions of exactly when and exactly how bad things will get with AGW we need to take third and even fourth order things into account. There is great debate raging on what those things are and how big of a small effect they will have.

Do not be fooled. There is no question that we are causing the warming or where it ends up eventually if we do not change. There is no question at all that even in the best case we are looking at some very bad consequences this century. Very bad means sea level rise, loss of fresh water, change in growing patterns, mass extinctions, ocean anoxia etc…

Those are things in the first and second order.

Third order is will sunspots delay that by a decade or so.