Swedish climate politics is based on a statement by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences under the title The Scientific Basis for Climate Change. The main author of statement is Lennart Bengtsson, the most prominent climates scientist in Sweden today.
In a correspondence with Lennart Bengtsson on the main Swedish climate blog Climate Scam (Klimatupplysningen) I pose the following question to Bengtsson (see also previous post):
- What would the surface temperature be on Venus with the same composition of the atomosphere as that on the Earth (78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 0.04% carbon dioxide and 0.5% water vapor) with mass conserved?
- What would the surface temperature be on the Earth with the same composition of the atomosphere as that on the Venus (96.5% carbon dioxide, 3.5% nitrogen, 150 ppm sulfur dioxide and 20 ppm water vapor) with mass conserved?
I then get the answer
- 1. Unfortunately I lack possibility to perform the necessary calculations.
I did not ask for a precise answer, just a rough back-on-the-envelop calculation. Bengtsson replies that he is not able to do such a calculation. I find this surprising and highly remarkable.
Let us compare with e.g. the following statements by Bengtsson in Towards Understanding the Climate of Venus and The Scientific Basis for Climate Change:
- 2. The main reason for the very high temperature of the surface of Venus is its atmospheric composition that consists of some 96% carbon dioxide as well as other constituents such as clouds of sulphuric acid and water vapor.
- 3. Anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases has led to an increase in the surface temperature of the Earth.
I have asked Bengtsson what calculations he has made to come to the conclusions 2 and 3.
I have also asked if Bengtsson is unable to give a rough answer to my above question, how can it be that he can give so clear assessments to the similar questions behind 1 and 2. Assessments that serve as the scientific rationale of Swedish climate politics, the most ambitious in the world!
I will report the answers by Bengtsson when they get posted...
February 9: No response from B; it appears that indeed he is right when admitting: Unfortunately I lack possibility to perform the necessary calculations.
The world of science is often surprising and contradictory.
February 9: No response from B; it appears that indeed he is right when admitting: Unfortunately I lack possibility to perform the necessary calculations.
The world of science is often surprising and contradictory.
"The world of science is often surprising and contradictory". This is because of the great diversity of rationalities that this happens, as explained by Paul Diesing in his "Reason in society: five types of decisions and their social conditions" (1962) at https://archive.org/details/reasoninsocietyf00dies plus fact that humans are masters of partitioning of their mental lives, probably because such partitioning has survival value, as a key component of higher order mechanisms of deceit, betrayal and so on, indeed of life in general !
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