Bishop Hill Did Stern account for war and peace?
Jul 4, 2012 Climate: WG2 Economics GWPF outlines a study by Erik Gartzke that discusses the links between global warming and war. Gartzke notes that post-war industrialisation is not only the putative cause of global warming but has also been associated with a steady decline in military strife. In fact, what evidence there is suggests that periods of global cooling are usually associated with the outbreak of hostiliities.
"Ironically," as Gartzke writes in the concluding sentence of his paper's abstract, "stagnating economic development in middle-income states caused by efforts to combat climate change could actually realize fears of climate-induced warfare." And thus he states in the concluding section of his paper that "we must add to the advantages of economic development that it appears to make countries more peaceful," and that we must therefore ask ourselves if environmental objectives should be "modified by the prospect that combating climate change could prolong the process of transition from warlike to peaceful polities."
I wonder if Lord Stern considered changes in levels of military conflict in his famous report.
Reader Comments (60)
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Could not agree more.
We should have been dropping, not bombs, but generators, beer, refrigerators , satellite TV dishes , TVs and "Baywatch" DVD's on the Taliban. That would have kept em' quiet!
Would have been safer and cheaper....and the Taliban would have enjoyed it more as well.
The Gartzke paper is flawed. If the statistics are done properly, there is no relationship between climate and conflict.
http://www.prio.no/sptrans/-506653002/JPR%2049%281%29%20Response%20from%20Tol%20to%20Gartzke.pdf
"Hitler wanted a war and started it in September 1939. The war lasted six years and initiated a big climate change."
For that you deserve a Stern rebuke.......
Am I alone in thinking that this is silly? Both the original suggestion and the use of it as ammunition by GPWF? It is a supreme irrelevance. We don't need it. We need to sort out the dodgy science and then revise policy responses to it. In my view that would involve adapting to whatever comes, ice age or furnace.
"if the statistics had been done properly..."
Ah yes, if only the statistics had been done properly, the CAGW gravy train would not have left the station!
Rhoda Klapp:
Am I alone in thinking that this is silly?
Absolutely not but you'd still be right if you were. Even if, for argument's sake, one rejects Richard Toll's suggestion that the stats are faulty (I'm not competent to comment), it's ahistorical nonsense up there with similar tosh from those who argue that global cooling led to collapse of the Roman Empire. As George Kaser memorably said of the IPCC's glacier howler, "It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing".
From the Ecclesiastical Uncle, an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate with minimal qualifications and only half a mind.
Must be all that hot air mouthed by politicians as they work themselves and their people up to prior to declaring their wars.
@ "Hitler wanted a war and started it in September 1939. The war lasted six years and initiated a big climate change."
Links between naval warfare and climatic deviations during WWII are abundantly available. Discussing human activities in the marine environment in conjunction with three extreme winters in Europe (1940-1942), and the commencement of global cooling (1940-1970) is not done to write a history of naval warfare, but does not only demonstrate that the oceans and seas are the key to understand the functioning of climate, but to show how quickly human activities cause a threat to the weather and climatological system. http://www.seaclimate.com/a/a1.html
Climatology does not care! The connection between two naval wars and two climatic changes within 25 years has not been investigated and explained yet. http://www.seaclimate.com/j/j.html
I can see that competition for resources, made scarce by cooling, might be part of the underlying economic reasons for a war, but I don't see that a bit of warming is likely to cause scarcity in already well populated areas.....rice and bread supplies don't bother us much but the absence of sufficiencies of them, as a result of global cooling, might be enough to bring down governments in places like Egypt and Indonesia, those governments might consider preserving themselves by taking supplies from a neighbouring/nearby country....?
Wars are caused by restrictions on resources, natural and man made. For Europe it was reparations and in the Pacific it was cut off of raw materials that lead to WWII. Every climate change solution i've seen is essentially a restriction on fossile energy. If the UN ever succeeded in implementing a worldwide climate treaty that actually did drastically cut fossile energy, I would predict totalitarian governments taking over within 10 years in the countries hit hardest economically by the restrictions and major wars breaking out in another 10 years.
Gartzke's paper is part of a special journal issue on Climate Change and Conflict. It's pay-walled but the abstracts can be read.
http://jpr.sagepub.com/cgi/collection/special_issue_on_climate_change_and_conflict
I don't think there's a problem in the concept of trying to find empirical evidence for or against a hypothesis such as 'climate change will lead to more conflict'. The abstracts have a distinctly non-alarmist flavour, e.g. this from the editorial:
And a paper on 'African range wars' suggests that more not fewer resources are associated with conflict:
I thought this journal issue was making a commendable attempt to put some hard evidence into the ring, which might counter some of the 'billions of climate refugees' -type rhetoric.
Wars are caused by restrictions on resources, natural and man made. For Europe it was reparations and in the Pacific it was cut off of raw materials that lead to WWII.
Germany did not fight WWII because of reparations issues – Britain has taken as long to pay off WWI than Germany did. You have swallowed one of Hitler's lies – that reparations were ruining Germany. It was his desire, shared by enough of his country, to dominate Europe that started WWII. Reparations was a nice excuse, but every European power had been put into hock by that war.
The whole "wars are started by shortages" meme is basically bollocks. Wars are started because people want things that other people do not want them to have. The countries starting the wars tend, in fact, to be the powerful ones with more resources. Germany and France have started lots of wars, despite being large powerful countries. The Belgians and the Danes not so many in recent times, despite being short of resources.
From Richard Tol in 2010
http://www.springerlink.com/content/e78581pv740rx500/
Compare Lord Stern addressing the same topic in an 'improvised speech':
http://www.green-blog.org/2009/03/12/nicholas-stern-climate-change-will-create-billions-of-refugees-extended-world-war/
Jul 4, 2012 at 10:57 AM ArndB
"Links between naval warfare and climatic deviations during WWII are abundantly available."
Interesting.
Is it the movement of the ships or the explosions that cause the climate deviations?
splitpin: the article that claims this is delusional as appear to be most writings of the acolytes of the climate change religion, including Stern. It's because the physics is wrong starting with IR absorption
This levels off at ~200 ppmV CO2 in a long physical path, knowledge from the metallurgical literature completely ignored by the IPCC! So there can be no CO2-AGW!
splitpin: the article that claims this is delusional as appear to be most writings of the acolytes of the climate change religion, including Stern. It's because the physics is wrong starting with IR absorption
This levels off at ~200 ppmV CO2 in a long physical path, knowledge from the metallurgical literature completely ignored by the IPCC! So there can be no CO2-AGW!
Bish! Bish! It's back again![gone now]
Jul 4, 2012 at 12:38 PM Mooloo
Hold on. One followed the other.
The punitive sanctions on Germany post WW1 resulted in starvation, mass unemployment and ultimately the catastrophe of hyperinflation. This opened the door to Hitler.
More significantly, we've entered a period of global cooling recently. Syria, Israel, Iran anyone?
@ splitpin Jul 4, 2012 at 1:19 PM | “Is it the movement of the ships or the explosions that cause the climate deviations?”
Both! Sea mines, shelling, torpedoing, and bombing and so on. It is about changing the sea level structure (down to several dozen meters) with regard to heat and salinity, depending on the sea area and the season. The best way to observe it had been the war winters 1939/40, 1940/41 and 1941/42 in Northern Europe, respectively the impact of naval war on the North- and Baltic Sea. It resulted suddenly in the coldest winters for 100 years. The Englishman A. J. Drummond (QJoRMS, 194, p.17f): “The present century has been marked by such a widespread tendency towards mild winters that the ‘old-fashioned winters’, of which one had heard so much, seemed to have gone for ever. The sudden arrival at the end of 1939 of what was to be the beginning of a series of cold winters was therefore all the more surprising. Never since the winters of 1878/79, 1879/80 and 1880/81 have there been three in succession so severe as those of 1939/40, 1940/41 and 1941/42.” Drummond, A. J., 1943, “Cold winters at Kew Observatory, 1783-1942”
More at: http://www.seaclimate.com/a/a2.html
The Alarmists have no real raw Data to back up their outlandish claims .So they have turn to the Absract
Martin A: more reading required. Hyperinflation was a political stroke to destroy the debt 'burden' of Versailles. All indices of german production show that by 1927-8 it was exceeding pre-war levels, ie eceonomy recovered, reparations notwithstanding. 'Hitler as a result of Versailles' is balls. 'Unfairness' of Versailles was a myth which the German public eagerly swallowed, unwilling as they were to accept (a) they started WW1 and (b) they lost it. Politicians who tell people stuff they want to hear tend to do well. The more shameless they are, the better they do, especially when the y can crowd out/forbid competing messages.
a. "human activities cause a threat to the weather"
b. "the physics is wrong starting with IR absorption"
Difficult to decide which is the writers of the above two absurdities is the more deluded.
I guess I have to vote for "a" because at least "b" is conceivable, whereas "threatening the weather" seems to be a somewhat Alice-in-Wonderland concept.
In the meanwhile: war-caused climate change.
And yes, it'll be the soot.
I used to think all along that it was the establishment of a more cooperative international system that ended the wars between major powers. Silly me. It turns it it was global warming that brought peace and stability to the world.
Never mind that the world got fairly close to nuclear holocaust once. That might have been because of a whether extreme at the time. Has any one checked that?
Of course, there were wars, many of them, that were called 'proxy wars' that kept popping up all over the world since 1945. Why didn't global warming stop these wars? Or why didn't these wars cause some global cooling?
For once I side with Mike Hulme who published a paper criticising the tendency of climate scientists to explain everything in terms of climatic conditions. There was a post on BH about it late last year.
What's next? A serious paper showing links between global warming and the rise of piracy on the high seas?
It's still silly, but if there was anything in the se war thing it would be the oil on the wate interfering with evaporation. At least that's a reall effect.
Now, what was the effect of WW1, I see no cold winter there, indeed the years just before are renowned for being pretty strange weatherwise.
Sorry, it's still silly. I shouldn't get drawn in.
Re: Jul 4, 2012 at 2:03 PM | bill
"Politicians who tell people stuff they want to hear tend to do well. The more shameless they are, the better they do, especially when the y can crowd out/forbid competing messages."
Couldn't help thinking that with a bit of tweaking this exactly describes climate 'science' -
Climate scientists who tell politicians stuff they want to hear tend to do well. The more shameless they are, the better they do, especially when they can crowd out/forbid competing messages"
Jul 4, 2012 at 1:55 PM ArndB
This could be very useful in the event of catastrophic global warming materialising.
Re: Jul 4, 2012 at 2:52 PM | sHx
"What's next? A serious paper showing links between global warming and the rise of piracy on the high seas?"
I think they've covered most topics already -
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
bill:
'Hitler as a result of Versailles' is balls.
Quite. The best demolition of the reparations myth I've read is in the excellent "Weimar Republic" by the late D J K Peukert. They might have crippled the German economy had they been paid in full but, wiser counsel prevailing, they weren't. The causes of the rise of the NDASP and the onset of war are complex to put it mildly but I'd bet the farm that, though weather and climate played, as ever, an incidental role in e.g. the course of the war in the USSR, changes in climate played no part whatsoever in the drive to war or its outcome.
Rhoda Klapp , Jul 4, 2012 at 3:01 PM | “Now, what was the effect of WW1, I see no cold winter there,…”
The winter 1916/17 was the third coldest in Great Britain during the last century. Furthermore, the already cited Englishman Drummond (1943) [see above: Jul 4, 2012 at 1:55 PM | ArndB ] observed:
"Since the beginning of comparative observations in 1871, there have been only three consecutive winters (1939/1940, 1940/1941 and 1941/1942) that were as snowy as this, i.e. 1915/1916, 1916/1917 and 1917/1918”, conditions that could have been strongly influenced by naval war activities around the British isles.
There was also the sudden Arctic warming that started at the end of WWI in the Atlantic sector of the Arctic Ocean in winter 1918/19, which raises the question: Where did the early Arctic Warming originate? ; discussed here: http://www.arctic-heats-up.com/chapter_7.html. Actually almost all water from the west and east of GB flows northwards via Norwegian- and West-Spitsbergen Current to the region where the warming of the Arctic started in late 1918, at Spitsbergen and the Fram Strait.
Jul 4, 2012 at 1:55 PM | ArndB:
The North Sea is only couple of dozen meters deep in the center and south. A strong storm will mix all water already. Only near Norway and towards the Atlantic, it gets deeper.
Also, the Great War had much larger naval battles in the North Sea than WWII. The Battle of Jutland was the largest. The earlier Battle of Dogger Bank is named after a part of the North Sea that is less than 20 meter deep!
WWII might have started in 1939, it was very quiet in the first year. It didn't explode until spring 1940, so the cold winter of 1939/1940 cannot be attributed to any naval warfare.
Wikipedia mentions:
I don't think that the Baltic See has seen any major naval battles in WWII until 1945.
Bottomline: Attributing the cold winters in europe of 1939/1940, 1940/1941, and 1941/1942 to naval warfare in the region, does not seem to be consistent with the facts about the regional naval warfare.
Sjoerd Jul 4, 2012 at 5:33 PM | „I don't think that the Baltic See has seen any major naval battles in WWII until 1945.”
__Not sea battles are decisive, but a tremendous increase of naval activities and events since the 1st of September. There had been not only the three week long attack on Poland in the Bight of Gdansk, but also the Winter War between Finland and Russia since 30 November 1939. For details see chapter C3 of the reference book.
__After Germany had started war against Russia on 22 June 1941, the Eastern Baltic was battle ground since sea icing prevented further action. Many ten thousand sea mines were laid and exploded. [Book extract:] “While it is impossible to account for the full number of all explosive resources employed to hit the enemy, which ‘stirred and shook’ the Baltic, the drama that occurred in just six months might be illustrated by the recorded loss of ships. In very rough figures, the total losses for the Baltic Fleet were 120 naval and 90 non-military vessels. The Reichsmarine lost about 50 ships and about 15 cargo ships (some to German mines). The Baltic countries lost 100 merchant vessels, most of them sailing under the Russian flag. The Baltic countries, Sweden, and Finland, lost about a total of 15 naval vessels.” [see: chapter E2, p. 133].
For further information and analyses kindly note that the reference book needed about 150 pages (or ¾ of the volume) to present the first three war winters. The three war winters had been so extreme and exceptional that it seems time to know what has caused the winters, and did naval war contributed to the commencement of the global cooling lasting from 1940 to about 1970.
Sorry Girls but
Climate Change causes small willies Official.
http://be-betterlife.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/male-penis-continues-to-shrink-due-to.html
Jul 4, 2012 at 2:03 PM | bill
Jul 4, 2012 at 3:46 PM | DaveB
With respect, it is clearly not the case that punitive reparations "caused" WWII. But it is quite a stretch to suggest that there was nothing wrong with Versailles (and St.Germain and Trianon and Sèvres).
It wasn't just reparations.
The manifest unfairness of the way the "fourteen points" were on offer to some ethnic groups - but absolutely not to the "losers" (or to Ireland or any Colonial countries) certainly played straight into the hands of the ultra nationalists. Just consider the refusal to allow the German rump of Austria to join the defeated Germany. Just consider the resentment caused by the millions of Germans who found themselves in Czech Sudetenland or Italian South Tirol, the Hungarians who were left in Transylvania, Slovakia, Voivodina, the Turks who found swathes of their homeland given to the Greeks and so on.
In each and every case there are arguments on both sides. And subsequent events - and problems which in some cases persist until today - are poor excuse for the Nationalists' actions.
But let's not pretend that the 1919 / 1920 treaties couldn't have been considerably more sensible.
Jul 4, 2012 at 7:41 PM | ArndB
Firstly, let me note that you don't content my statements about the North Sea. Instead, you concentrate on one sentence on the Baltic Sea.
Secondly, the numbers you quote are on the attack on Russia, which happened in the summer of 1941, so cannot have influenced the winters of 1939/1940 nor 1940/1941. Whether they contributed to the winter of 1941/1942, I don't know.
So we're left with The Winter War that should have prolongued the 1939/1940 winter (as the winter had already started when the war started), and caused the 1940/1941 winter.
Wikipedia states:
The Finnish losses were a combined total of 26 merchant vessels.
To summarize, you seem to claim that a couple of dozen lost vessels, a couple of exploding mines, and increased naval activity in a small area caused two heavy winters? If that would be true, I wonder what the large scale naval practices during the Cold War should have caused!
Martin Brumby, no-one would argue Versailles etc was 'fair', winners won & imposed their terms. Principal points to not forget, French revenge re 1871, undue American influence. For example, were not the plebiscites (whose outcomes eg trapped Germans in Sudentenland, Tirol etc) at Wilson's insistence - 'self-determination' - trouble with majorities is minorities? And why would a settlement/treaty with Germany and its allies have anything to do with Ireland or our colonies.
Bish how about a separate thread for modern european history and sod all this climate stuff?
The mechanism whereby climate change causes war is clear. Scientists tell us that Toxoplasmosis is on the rise due to climate change, Toxoplasmosis infection causes risk taking behaviour and waging war is risky. QED. see:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/2012/07/04/toxoplasmas-dark-side-the-link-between-parasite-and-suicide/
"scientists predict that Toxoplasma prevalence is on the rise, both due to how we live and climate change. The increase and spread of this parasitic puppeteer cannot be good for the mental health of generations to come."
@Sjoerd , Jul 4, 2012 at 7:41 PM | ArndB : “Firstly, let me note that you don't content my statements about the North Sea. Instead, you concentrate on one sentence on the Baltic Sea.”
You said: “I don't think that the Baltic See has seen any major naval battles in WWII until 1945.” The pervious comment was the reply was to that.
In autumn 1939 the main naval activities occurred in the North Sea. Only one example! This time sea mines (excerpts from the reference book p.55):
“Mining: During the first four months of war the number of mines laid was possibly in the range of 75,000 to 150,000 or more. The Germans plastered the Helgoland Bight with 40 to 80,000 mines before the end of 1939, and the British Admiralty intended laying a 500-mile minefield of unprecedented size, in a “gigantic effort to check the German submarine campaign”. (NYT, Dec. 31, 1939) A few days later it was reported: “British naval vessels are sowing some of the last mines needed to complete Great Britain ’s 30,000,000-pounds protective shield for east-coast shipping. The minefield extending from Kinnairds Head , Scotland , almost to the mouth of the Thames , is the most extensive field ever laid.” (NYT, Jan. 11, 1940) If one assumes that the weight of those mines varied between 300 and 1,200 pounds, alone the number of mines laid in autumn along the east coast would be between 25,000 and 100,000 mines. Thousands of mines were also simultaneously laid in the Baltic, and not only from the German Navy, but also by Russia and Finland in the eastern Baltic, and in the Gulf of Finland . Also the Danish Government announced plans to plant mines in its waters." (NYT, Sept 5, 1939).
" Mine Sweeping: Minesweeping in WWII was a huge penetration into the marine environment, and on such a scale, that it might have reached the level of all other naval warfare activities together. It soon became a pressing issue for major countries at war. Sweeping for mines proved to be a tremendous around the clock operation, ships travelling millions and millions of miles at sea for detecting and destroying the ‘weapon in waiting’. Particularly Britain needed an effective force for minesweeping operations. The naval minesweeping branch requisitioned some 800 trawlers, drifters, whalers and fishing vessels. In December 1939 it was indicated that more than 100,000 men would be engaged in sweeping the German mines in British sea-lanes. (NYT, Dec 10, 1939) By the end of the year the sweeping force consisted of a searching force with 150 trawlers and 100 drifters, and a clearing force with 16 fleet sweepers and 32 paddle sweepers. (Slader, 1995) The Germans had presumably a corresponding force before the end of 1939."
Re: ArndB
Let's assume each mine weighed 2000lbs (an over estimation). That would make the total weight of mines to be 150,000 x 2000 = 3 x 10^8 lbs or 133,927 long tons. The Queen Mary 2 weighs 146,182 long tons. Clearly it can not be the weight that affected the 1939/40 winter otherwise the QM2 would be causing havoc every time it left port.
An alternative is the disruption caused by every one of the mines exploding. For a 2000lb mine the weight of explosive would be about 1250lbs which would mean 85,125 tonnes of TNT. This would produce 3.6 x 10^14 joules of energy. A severe thunderstorm releases more than 10^15 joules of energy and your average hurricane releases 6 x 10^14 joules every second. Clearly any energy released by these mines exploding is dwarfed by what nature is capable of on a daily basis.
Correlation is NOT causation.
"I wonder if Lord Stern considered changes in levels of military conflict in his famous report."
He had his brief and knew what was needed to meet and exceed it.
So no. This was not a requirement within the bounds of the instruction, but the bounds might be expanded to accommodate it within the purview of hindsight.
I note that the paper was published in the journal of "Peace Research."
...So maybe what John Cleese should have asked in Life of Brian was:
"What has the Roman Warm Period ever done for us....?"
:)
Jul 4, 2012 at 9:33 PM | bill
"And why would a settlement/treaty with Germany and its allies have anything to do with Ireland or our colonies."
Why indeed?
I suggest you read what I actually wrote.
I would suggest that Lord Stern didn't really write the report that carries his name. The main input came from the Tyndall Centre, with contributions from IPCC stalwarts Terry Barker, Rachel Warren, Robert Nicholls and Nigel Arnell. Finally Terry Barker edited the Modelling Costs Chapter of the Stern Review. Simon Dietz of Tyndall was seconded to the Stern team and is now at the LSE Grantham Centre with him.
In January 2006, at the opening of his new Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research, (4CMR), Dr Barker said “It may seem astonishing, but the global climate models, providing governments with estimates of the costs of climate stabilisation are nearly all reliant on one year’s data.”
Astonishing indeed, yet Stern produced a review using such data.
There had been previous attempts to try and prove that implementing Kyoto was a cheaper option than doing nothing, because perceived global warming would be more expensive. This paper goes back to 2001: "How high are the costs of Kyoto for the US economy?" – Terry Barker and Paul Ekins (Department of Applied Economics, University of Cambridge), School of Politics, International Relations and the Environment, Keele University. Tyndall Centre Working Paper No. 4 (4 July 2001)
The abstract says: "Estimates of the costs of implementing the Kyoto protocol are uncertain and most are based on assumptions that necessarily imply high costs. A selection of alternative (often more realistic) assumptions gives estimates that suggest net benefits rather than costs."
They concluded: "Provided policies are expected, gradual and well-designed, the costs for the US of Kyoto are likely to be insignificant."
There was also Stern Review input from Dr Otto Edenhofer of Potsdam. In 2009, he and Stern produced a report for the G20, entitled "Towards a Global Green Recovery": http://www.pik-potsdam.de/members/edenh/publications-1/global-green-recovery_pik_lse.
Lord Stern is now a member of the Potsdam Scientific Advisory Board, (Schellnhuber was originally Research Director at Tyndall), along with Brian Hoskins of Imperial Grantham Centre, Carol Turley from Plymouth Marine Laboratory, (Tyndall affiliate) and Jennifer Morgan, currently at World Resources Institute, on whose board sits Al Gore. Morgan is the former WWF Global Climate Change Director. Before WRI she was at E3G, a UK quasi-governmental organisation, set up by John Ashton, UK "Climate Czar", who used to work for Chris Patten in Hong Kong.
Morgan was also an advisor to Schellnhuber and Tony Blair. Such a cosy little club.
Re: Jul 5, 2012 at 7:29 AM | DennisA
Don't forget the infamous Julia Slingo (author of that shameful and dishonest Climategate petition) contributed to the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/our-scientists/senior-scientists/julia-slingo
And wasn't Blair seen in Australia advising Julia Gillard before she declared she was bringing in the carbon tax.
His climate change 'expertise' seems to be a nice little earner!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1281247/Tony-Blairs-new-job-green-advisor-Khosla-Ventures.html
As it is for other senior members of our political class
-
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2106313/David-Miliband-paid-70-000-just-days-work-advising-venture-capitalists-investing-green-technology.html
A cosy little club indeed!
TerryS ; Jul 4, 2012 at 11:44 PM
The impact of naval war is not about the joules released due to mine explosion but about the change of the water structure it causes in the upper sea level. Mine laying and sweeping operation may have had during WWII a much greater effect than the explosion of sea mines. There are many dozen military activities, which have a similar impact over a considerable range of depth. It is clearly reflected in the European winter conditions (1939/40- 1941/42), when due to the intensive naval war activities, the sea areas from GB to Finland released the stored summer heat more quickly than usual. For this to detect it is necessary to consider the whole process in detail, and according the physical specifics of each sea region, together with the specific sea conditions (e.g. sea ice) and the weather conditions (e.g. air temperatures) at the time in question.
For now let me say this: The climatic debate is about whether man can change weather and climate. I regard the oceans as the critical source [e.g. what impact have screw driven vessels], and this can be proved by understanding the reasons for the extreme WWII war winters, and by understanding what triggered or contributed to the three decade long global cooling. The naval war is a very likely aspirant. Best regards AB
Re: ArndB
Military activity during WW2 was minuscule in comparison to the current levels of commercial shipping activity. This site, as an example allows you to track 63,000 commercial ships fitted with AIS. On the other hand, the largest navy in the world in 1939 (the Royal Navy) had 15 Battleships, 7 Aircraft Carriers, 66 Cruisers, 184 Destroyers, 60 Submarines and 45 Escort and Patrol vessels.
Clearly, if the military ships sailing around on the surface (and below) had such an impact to the water structure in the upper sea level, then the current levels of shipping should have a greater impact.
Mine laying usually involved dropping the mines from aeroplanes, firing them from torpedo tubes, or dropping them off the back of a ship. None of these activities could have any significant impact on the oceans, especially since the mines have to stay near the surface so as to be triggered by a passing ship.
You could argue that the mines staying near the surface had an impact, but then I would argue that a shoal of fish near the surface would have just as much impact.
As for mine clearing, they usually converted a couple of trawlers and, er, trawled for mines by dragging a line between the 2 trawlers. An activity not unlike trawling for fish that happened before during and after WW2.
@ TerryS, Jul 5, 2012 at 11:49 AM |
It would be great to hear about a better explanation for what have caused the extreme war winters in Europe 1939/40, 1940/41 and 1941/42, than naval war.
With regard to shipping, science has not the slightest idea about this possibility and has never seriously taken it into account. Science is still not able to define what climate is all about, by explaining that: “Climate is the continuation of the ocean by other means” http://www.whatisclimate.com/. Shipping is a round the year running process and increased over the last 150 years steadily. Nature adopts, so it is difficult to assess whether shipping has contributed to global warming.
But there is hope. In NATURE, Roberta Kwok presented recently an article titled:
__”Jellyfish help mix the world's oceans. Marine creatures could stir up seas as much as do winds and tides.”
[Published online 29 July 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.745].
The impact of shipping is presumably significant higher, for sure.
As there has been nothing done over the last 150 years to assess the impact of shipping (and other ocean uses, e.g. fishing) on the marine environment and subsequently the weather and climate (e.g. air temperatures known as ‘global warming’), the special conditions in Europe (1939-1942), and throughout the Northern Hemisphere (1940-1945) by naval warfare during WWII, offer a unique opportunity to prove or reject the thesis, that man is able to change weather and climate by his activities in the marine environment. It seems reasonable to clarify the WWII impact soon. This climate field experiment commenced more than 70 years ago. Once that has been clarified the shipping issue would be the mandatory next step.