A news item from the National Academies, that to our delight does not mention climate change, does proclaim “Why Mapping the Ocean Floor Matters More Than Ever” and mentions that surprisingly little of it has been mapped. Or perhaps not surprising since it’s dark, cold and at crushing pressures. But also important if only because “Subsea cables carry the vast majority of international data traffic, and mapping is essential for their placement and maintenance.” But we are also struck by the contrast between how important oceans are to climate dynamics and how little we actually know about the former while many say we know all about the latter. To draw on yet another fascinating chapter in Canary in a Climate World Vol. 3, meteorologist William Kininmonth’s “Misrepresentations of Climate Science”, Chapter 13, “The oceans have a thermal capacity that is much greater than the overlying atmosphere. Because of its lower density and specific heat, the thermal capacity of the atmosphere is equivalent to only about the top 4 meters of the deep ocean.” So all this stuff about what’s warming what and where and why and how depends crucially on the mysteries of the deep. Which are, to a great extent even in our jaded world, still mysteries.
On which point, we also got a Bloomberg Green story “Africa’s Congo Basin, Vital to Earth’s Climate, Is Critically Understudied” which obviously did mention climate. Now why this particular river valley would be “vital” to the climate, and what exactly “vital” means, is unclear. Or should be, though of course in the all-carbon-all-the-time world of alarmists you already knew, or should have, that it would be that:
“The Congo Basin is the world’s biggest tropical storehouse of carbon, its forest stretching almost across the African continent and covering an area larger than India.”
And if carbon gets loose bye-bye climate or something. It’s simple physics and all settled, although also utterly obscure and worse than we thought. As the story immediately continues, “Yet little is known about it.”
So are the models a vapour of unsound assumptions? Not to read this story. Instead it’s carbon carbon carbon with a side of send more money to people like us:
“Ramping up research is key to understanding and protecting the expanse, which dictates the weather patterns of a continent, is home to a fifth of the world’s living species and absorbs as much CO2 as Germany emits annually, experts say. The forest is at risk from slash-and-burn agriculture, where farmers set fires to make room for crops, as well as logging, mining and demand for charcoal, used by growing populations for cooking.”
Of course there are those, for instance us, who say that if you’re concerned about people trashing an ecosystem in a desperate struggle to survive the best thing you can do is implement policies that foster growth, such as secure property rights, minimal taxation and regulation, strong anti-corruption measures and so forth. And if you want them to stop clear-cutting trees to make charcoal let them burn coal coal to make electricity so they can get heat and light without all the indoor pollution. It is well-documented that as prosperity increases, there is an inverted-U curve of GDP and environmental quality because at first growth requires spoiling the environment but past a fairly modest level, which much of Africa sadly has not reached, people can afford to care about it and governments can afford to look after it and things start to improve.
Though sadly for most greens, especially the climate-obsessed (but we repeat ourselves) only the last is likely to secure assent. Instead they advocate and fund policies, especially on energy development, that keep people poor and scrounging for firewood and “bush meat” where we least want them to.
So we’re all for more research, and more prosperity. But we’re also for less claiming the science on climate is settled and perfectly understood and exactly modeled when actually we know so little about much of it that we don’t know what the Congo basin is up to or why or on what time scale.
