June 2008 IssuE

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Readers’ Forum

‘Engineers Have Faced the Licensure Music’

Re: R.P.T.s Earn Professional Privileges, by Douglas J. Shapansky, R.P.T.(Eng.), Readers’ Forum, The PEGG, April 2008.

I assure my fellow APEGGA member that my position was not directed against him or his fellow technologists now registered as APEGGA members. Nor am I in any way threatened by his membership.

The rules governing engineering membership were quite acceptable to me. You either graduated from an accredited engineering program and accumulated relevant experience, or you passed various examinations and accumulated the experience. You faced the music, as most members have had to do.

It is my firm belief that APEGGA has indeed denigrated the engineering profession by opening membership to those who have not qualified by one of the aforementioned processes. APEGGA in my judgment has bowed to political pressure and been forced to violate its own long-standing rules for membership, ones that worked very well to served the public.

I look forward to the emulation of APEGGA by the legal, medical and dental professions.
Horace R. Gopeesingh, P.Eng.
Calgary

Educational Difference
Cannot be Ignored
Re: R.P.T. Proves the Other Side, by Karl Miller, P.Eng., Readers’ Forum, The PEGG, May 2008, and R.P.T.s Earn Professional Privileges, by Douglas J. Shapansky, R.P.T.(Eng.), Readers’ Forum, The PEGG, April 2008.

An unfortunate rift exists between professionals and para-professionals — a rift that would not exist if we were on the same team and on the same page. However, Mr. Miller has written a response to Mr. Shapansky that I must support.

Before I come off sounding like an engineering snob, I’d like to point out that I studied technology seriously, as my intended career, before entertaining the notion of becoming an engineer. I am not one to turn up my nose at anyone, especially a technologist, because I understand how much grunt work actually goes on in our field and how important it is that those workers be fairly compensated and respected.

And if you suspect I was born with a silver spoon because I graduated from technology to engineering, let me tell you about the toilets I scrubbed and the rocks I dressed on my way to where I am now, a piping stress analyst. I do not look down on technologists.

But — and this is a big but — there are things technologists did not learn in school, and things they are never made aware of on the job because they weren’t introduced to the ideas in the first place. They may never fully appreciate the tool box they were given because they were never forced to make a tool from scratch.

I have an intimate knowledge of the differences between our curricula because I experienced each. Mr. Shapansky appears to have fooled himself into believing he is educated and experienced enough to be indistinguishable from an engineer.

He should write the exams, all of them. And do it in good time too.

Engineers have learned that the proof is in the pudding, rather than one’s self image. The universe does not bend to our egos, only to our minds.

Will Milburn, E.I.T.
Edmonton

Climate Consultation
Confirms APEGGA’s Role
Re: Which Climate Change Debate Should APEGGA Support? by J. Edward Mathison, P.Geol., Readers’ Forum, The PEGG, May 2008.

I expect a number of members find the charge that “APEGGA and its membership have discredited the whole scientific enterprise” very troubling. 

APEGGA is a self-governing association with a mandate to regulate the professional practice of its members. While it may make policy recommendations to government concerning the regulation and practice of its members, it certainly does not have authority nor member consent to make statements or give opinion outside of its jurisdiction on behalf of those members.

APEGGA’s Climate Change Consultation clearly speaks the opinion of our members. We support a number of initiatives for members to express and explore climate change issues — but without APEGGA endorsing or advocating any specific cause.

This does not impair developing initiatives in sustainable energy, energy efficiency and environmentally friendlier technologies. These are inherently valued activities and inarguably desirable.

The efficacy of carbon trading and large scale carbon dioxide storage for centuries and millennia fall well on the other side of the scale. Although many qualified scientists and engineers have contributed to the efforts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the presented work is a product of politics rather than science.

I hope our membership continues to offer up their individual opinions and insights in order to add to the debate and understanding. Isn’t that what science is about?

J. Aumuller, P.Eng.
Edmonton

Writer Missed
Much of the Literature
Re: Many Sources Build Stance on Climate Change, by David J. Parker, P.Eng., Readers’ Forum, The PEGG, April 2008.

Despite the writer’s claim of “extensive reading” on this subject, a considerable amount of information appears to have gone unnoticed.

Over the past 10 years a considerable amount of research, analysis and meticulous data gathering have been done. The result is that a majority of the world’s experts in this field have come to the conclusion that there is no scientific evidence to support the IPCC hypothesis that anthropogenic CO2 is a significant component in climate change. In addition, a number of economists have studied the cap-and-trade process and found it a dismal failure.

Let’s get down to the specifics of Mr. Parker’s article, point by point.

1. Starting with a result — a temperature profile from the past and a set of relationships, for example — and then constructing an algorithm to replicate it is pure mathematical gymnastics. The accuracy of the model can only be proven when forecasts are made which are verified by subsequent data. The 18 original general circulation models have been tested for the past 10 years and not one has come even close to the required accuracy.
   As for a mean global temperature, the concept is mathematically impossible.

2. A paper by Joe D’Aleo compares the average temperature of North America over the past 100 years to the atmospheric CO2, the sun’s irradiance cycles and the Pacific and Atlantic surface temperature cycles. There is a remarkable correlation of land temperature with ocean cycles, which oscillate every 60 to 70 years, a slight correlation with sun’s irradiance and no correlation with CO2.

3. There is no documented evidence that extreme weather occurrences have been any different in the past 20 years than in any other 20-year period.
   In Antarctica 45 years ago, 460 automated weather stations were distributed evenly across the continent. The result of 45 years of observation showed an increase for the first 10 years, then no change for the next 35 years up to today. Satellite surveys of ice sheet thickness indicate it is thicker today than in the last 30 years since measurements began. The Antarctic ice melt is occurring at one point on the circumference of the continent because of the impact of a localized warm ocean current.
   The thickness of the interior of Greenland’s ice sheet is increasing.

4. I have seen the original data base from which Arrhenius selected his data. His selection (about 10 per cent) was carefully contrived to prove his point. As for infrared absorption, check out water vapour. That carbon dioxide is “the major greenhouse gas” is not true.

5. The economic impact of making a significant change to anthropogenic CO2 runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Justification for this expense requires a little more than “there may be an element of validity” when there is so much solid scientific evidence against the hypothesis.

6. One per cent of the global GDP is a vast amount of money.

7. It is true that there are still very diverse opinions regarding the cause of climate change and the role of CO2. However, the news media are heavily biased towards the IPCC’s alarmist views because they are good for the news business. The general public has not been given adequate exposure to the many facets of this complex subject.

8. The Vostok ice core (not Vladivostok) experiments and the 430,000-year observations did come first, and they indicated four cycles between 180 and 300 p.p.m. A point on their curve represents a 500-year average. Anyone who compares a daily flask sample result with a 500-year average is really selling snake oil.
   If the atmosphere ever went as low as a 180 p.p.m. average for 5,000 years, half the plant species would become extinct and the surviving plants would be so weak and undernourished that there would be a major extinction of animals. None of this happened so it’s clear that the Vostok results are substantially flawed.

9. There were many dissenting opinions by IPCC peer review scientists, but their edits were tossed in the garbage for being politically incorrect.

10. Yes, CO2 level is a result of the global temperature and not its cause. With regard to the “positive feedback hypothesis,”  starting with Stefan’s law of radiation, a body emits radiation proportional to the fourth power of its absolute temperature. In order for there to be increasing radiative forcing, the temperature of the atmosphere must increase.
    This was recognized by the IPCC so it published its computer model predictions of lower atmospheric temperatures in 1998. Of course an increase was predicted.
    NASA satellite scans of the lower atmospheric temperatures over the last 30 years have shown a slight decrease, thus if we accept the Stefan-Boltzman and Planck theories of radiation, there has been no increase in radiative forcing in the last 30 years. Once again the IPCC computer models bomb out.

11. “Nine of the last 10 years have been the warmest on record.” The year of the super El Nino, 1998, was the hottest of the 1990s and much hotter than anything since. However, the hottest year on record was 1934 and the hottest decade was the 1930s.
    NASA was audited and its sampling and averaging techniques found to be very skewed. The above are the revised data.
    Average temperatures dropped slightly from 2002 to 2006 ( 0.025 C), which is not a lot but there is a steady downward trend and this will increase dramatically when the 2008 data come in. For example, in the last nine months there have been record lows and snowfall all over the world.

12. The medieval warm period from 800 to 1200 AD is well documented by many different researchers using different methodologies. It affected not just Greenland but the entire northern hemisphere.
    Proxy data can only ever be an approximate average. The further back in time, the longer the timescale for the average and the greater the degree of error. Proxy data are useful for detecting trends as long as the data are generated consistently.

13. I watched the BBC special on the post-September 11 absence of contrails. Shortly after that I was lying by the pool in Las Vegas looking up at a clear blue sky and trying to estimate the percentage of sky affected by the contrails. I would say one tenth of one per cent is an overestimate.

14. CO2 levels are well within normal levels. In fact in the distant past levels of 4,500 and 7,200 p.p.m. have existed. That was a time of dense vegetation, and the world and oceans were teeming with animal and aquatic life. So your disaster scenario has no verification in past history.

15. There are considerably more than just a few critics of the global warming hysteria. A large number of eminent scientists — world leaders in their fields — are very critical of the IPCC hypothesis. In fact 400 leading scientists testified before the U.S. Senate Environmental and Public Works Subcommittee last year.

16. Not worth a comment.

Please refer to my article in the March 2008 PEGG for website data. A few more addresses are:
www.icecap.us
www.heartland.org
www.heartland.org/NewYork08/proceedings.cfm
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/climate-library
www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/carbontracker

Barry Moore, P.Eng.
Calgary