Climate sceptic fail...

Hahaha! Yet another demonstration of the cluelessness and lack of scientific literacy of many climate 'sceptics'.

Saw a post at Climate Realists (h/t Skeptical Science daily article summary) claiming "Greenhouse Gas Theory Trashed by Groundbreaking Experiment"

Here's some quotes from the article summary, with my comments after.

Assumption One: Gases that absorb infrared light thereby block infrared light.

Reality: Such gases radiate, i.e., “scatter” or spread out the light they absorb, thus releasing light in all directions rather than blocking it.

Real Reality: Well, no. They absorb the IR. They do then re-radiate it in all directions, but that's a different physical process to scattering. Look it up sometime...

Assumption Two: Blocking the exit of light while allowing free entry will increase the temperature of an irradiated object.

Reality: The light an object emits is a function of its temperature; its temperature is not a function of the light it emits. Accordingly, if incoming light raises an object to a certain temperature, the object will remain at that temperature whether it emits light to its surroundings or not. Any temperature increase in a confined condition is only due to reduced convective cooling.

Real Reality: Um, are you perhaps familiar with the law of conservation of energy? You're effectively stating that Same energy in + less energy out = No Change in Temperature. Claiming that the only reason temperature increases is because convection is blocked, is like claiming the Titanic wouldn't have sunk if it wasn't for all that water in the ocean.

The obvious next question - what makes a sceptic think that climate scientists don't consider convective heat transfer when figuring out the response of the Earth's atmosphere to greenhouse heating? And if convection can 'carry away' all that heat, where does it go, other than into the Earth's atmosphere?

This is easily answered by actually looking at what climate science says. Oh, look, amazing, climate scientists include a convective heat transfer term... just look at the figure showing the heat balance in this article. Here's a link to just the figure. Here's the figure itself:



17 W/m2 from thermals. That's convection, right there.

Like I said at the top.

Climate sceptic fail.

Fun with (caffeinated) numbers...

I saw this post on Slashdot earlier:

This is a student project so the correct unit of energy is a "Library of Congress Stacked with Red Bull Instead of Books."

Now, you may convert that into Joules, if you care to.

I couldn't pass up that challenge...

The Library of Congress has 1,199km of shelf space.
A Red Bull can is 52mm in diameter.
A 250ml Red Bull can contains 481kJ of energy.

Doing the sums, I made the following estimate.

Assuming a single row of cans: 23,057,692 cans, and 1.109x10^13 Joules.

If we have a nominal shelf depth of, say, 250mm - let's call it 5 rows of cans - we get 115,288,461 cans, and 5.545x10^13 Joules.

For comparison, a kiloton of TNT releases 4.184 terajoules, so a Library of Congress of Red Bull contains the equivalent of about 13.25 kilotons of TNT - about 1 Hiroshima Bomb, give or take.

Fascinating stuff.

A taste of the future?

Headline from a news story this morning:

"Morgues fill as deaths double in sweltering Moscow"

Now, some of you will say "that's weather, it's got nothing to do with climate change". And you'd be right, mostly.

The difference is that, in a warming world, we can expect that extreme heat waves (and the forest fires that go along with them) will become more common. Already, record high temperatures are more than twice as likely to be broken as record lows. The last winter in Europe & the eastern US brought very heavy snowfalls & low temperatures. It was the coldest January in the UK for 23 years, according to the UK Met Office. At the same time, it was unseasonably warm over much of the Arctic, & the northwest US & western Canada (remember the problems they had with not enough snow for the winter olympics? They had to truck it in to some venues!).

Since then, it's been a pretty warm year. This Wikipedia page, listing all-time record temperatures for various countries, shows no less than ten new records have been set so far in 2010. Another 12 have been set in the last decade. That's all-time records, folks. 22 out of 58 have been broken in the last ten years.

The NOAA says that the January to June 2010 period was the warmest 6-month period on record. June 2010 is the warmest June on record, and is the fourth month in a row to set an all-time record.

Indications of a warming trend? Well, not in isolation, no - there's too much variability in weather for climatic trends to be statistically significant for anything less than about 15 years worth of records. However, it's certainly consistent with a warming trend. And if we go back far enough to get that statistical significance, there is quite a definite trend, so it's more appropriate to ask: "are current temperatures indicating any change from the previously established warming trend?" The answer is a categorical no. If anything, the current temps are tending toward an increased warming trend. There's definitely no evidence whatsoever that global warming is showing any sign of slowing down, more the opposite.

Back to heatwaves, the more serious implications are raised by this post on Skeptical Science. There comes a point where the human body is unable to shed heat, and body temperature starts to rise. At that point, you'd better have somewhere cool & air-conditioned to hide, or heat stroke is just a matter of time (just look at that Russian contestant in the Finnish sauna competition - 6 minutes in a 110º sauna, and he keeled over and died).

So we're looking at some nasty consequences for our high-carbon diet over the past few centuries. (And those forest fires & peat fires are releasing even more carbon!)

A nice analogy I saw on another post on Skeptical Science: if you crash your car into a concrete wall at 80km/h, there's a small chance you'll walk away with just a few bruises. But is that any reason to drive straight at it?

Quote of the week

"But [scientific] journals have lots of big words, and lots of small print, and very few illustrations to make it easy for me. You can see why climate deniers don’t like them."

From the enlightening Climate Denial Crock of the Week.

I thought Viscount Christopher Monckton was getting it wrong, I just didn't know *how* wrong...

One of the scariest videos I've seen for a while...

Someone was very, very lucky this day...

I thought it was a bit scary how close people were to the launch point. But the end of the flight is much, much worse.

Holy freakin' COW!

There's this chemical.

Dioxygen diflouride.
(No, not dihydrogen monoxide)

O2F2.

Some chemists write it as FOOF - and for good reason!

This stuff explodes when you mix it with other chemicals - and that's way down at -180ºC! I'd hate to see what happens when you try to do anything with it closer to, I don't know, the boiling point of liquid nitrogen?

Apparently it just can't be warmed to room temperature without Bad Things (tm) happening...

One example reaction: 4O2F2 + H2S -> SF6 + 2HF + 4O2 + 5920kJ/kg of energy

On an energy basis, a kilo of this mix would be as productive as, say, 1.3kg of TNT. Yes, the stuff that goes bang.

Nasty stuff...

via via

Why you shouldn't play with microwave ovens...

Some Swine Flu factoids

As at 2 October 2009, in Australia:

• 36,670 people have been confirmed to have swine flu
• 183 of them have died - that's about 1 in 200
• 4,806 have been admitted to hospital
• in the past week, 36 people have been admitted to hospital, 10 of them into intensive care
  

I found this data in the latest bulletin on the Australian Government's Health Emergency website, which has lots of info about the swine flu pandemic.

I dug this up while I was responding to a post on a forum, where a guy posted a link to an anti-vaccine video, which was referring to the 1976 swine flu vaccine in the US. In that case, 25 people died as complications from the vaccine, and about 500 more got Guillain-Barré syndrome.

But considering they vaccinated slightly north of 48 million people (48,161,019 according to Wikipedia), that's a death rate of 1 in 1,926,440, and a serious-side-effect rate of 1 in 90,528.

I'll take those odds over swine flu's 1-in-200 lethality rate any day!

To make it perfectly clear: For every person who died from the 1976 swine flu vaccine, it's possible that nearly ten thousand would have died from the swine flu itself, if not for the vaccine.

That's just deaths. Ignoring non-fatal complications, like having to have both of your feet amputated.

Now, I understand that modern influenza vaccines don't have anywhere near the rate of serious side effects as that 1976 swine flu vaccine. You'd think we'd hear about it if they did, considering there are literally hundreds of millions of doses given each and every year. But even if they did, they would still be saving tens of thousands of lives.

I know I'm getting the swine flu vaccine as soon as I can.

How about you?

Space is valuable...

It's an oft-repeated question: why should we spend so much money on the space program when we could spend it on more pressing needs here on Earth?

Here's a nice article spelling out the top 15 innovations that have come directly out of research supporting the space program.

Sending humans & spacecraft into an extreme environment is not easy, and lots of new ideas get floated to try and make it a little easier or safer - many of which have application in everyday life.

It's just a shame NASA doesn't get credit for this stuff. As I understand it, any licensing revenue from NASA-invented patents goes to the US Government, probably to spend on pork-barrelling for the next election.

I am a human pincushion...

Er, ok, maybe I exaggerate. I only got *one* needle today - the good ol' flu vaccination.

Supposedly, from what I hear, it's a type-A influenza vaccine this year, which shares some characteristics with the dreaded swine flu. So in a week or two, I might have some (minor) immunity, or at least resistance, to that one.

From what I've been hearing & reading, though, this swine flu thingy seems to be over-hyped.

Disclaimer: I'm not an expert on diseases, I'm an engineer fer cryin' out loud!

Okay, why do I think that?

1. There have been 13 officially confirmed deaths due to this particular flu. Lots of "suspected" deaths in Mexico, but their numbers keep getting revised downwards, as they do more analysis & testing;
2. The victims have been in poor health, or were elderly or very young (e.g. the sole non-Mexican victim was a toddler in the southern US);
3. Mexico City, where the outbreak was first noted, has 20 million plus inhabitants living in very close proximity, and there are only 300-odd confirmed cases and 12 deaths. To put that in perspective, there are estimates that "ordinary" influenza viruses kill a few hundred thousand people each year...

On the flip side, of course, we need to consider the potential threat:

• Normal influenza has a mortality rate of something less than 0.1% (i.e. less than one person in a thousand who get it will die from it, or from a secondary infection). The confirmed numbers so far for the swine flu suggest a mortality rate of at least 2.5%, which is comparable to the 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed millions worldwide.
• According to this article, "WHO has warned that it would be a mistake to be lulled into a false sense of security. The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic started mildly – and went on to kill 20 to 40 million people round the world."
• The level of health services in Mexico might be such that they're missing a large proportion of the infections, and the "possible suspected" deaths might easily be 10-20 times higher than the confirmed numbers (and similarly for the number of infections).

Ok. So. The media is doing it's usual big beat-up, but the threat is still there, I guess. A bit of reading reveals that the Spanish flu first emerged 12-18 months before the real killer strain swept the world.

Might be time to stock up on the tinned food!

Mmmm. I could do with a bit of Dynamite Chilli... :-D

That and some more flour - going to try to find somewhere that sells better quality flour than the usual supermarket stuff. Maybe some other ingredients, too.

Actually, that reminds me - I had Chicken, Szechuan style, for lunch today. Got it from the chinese takeaway down the road ("Yummy Yummy" - gotta love those names!). Pretty bloody good, if you ask me. A little too much zing, initially, but once I figured out it was a bad idea to breath in the chilli sauce, all was good. :-P

Interesting thoughts about existence and identity

Have a look at this movie:



I found it on the Dan's Data website, in a very interesting article about possible extension of human consciousness into computers, or duplication thereof... Some very interesting reading, it's highly recommended, especially the couple of "footnotes" at the bottom (which, as Dan says, contain more text than the article proper).

I particularly liked this bit, in a quote near the end:

"...waking consciousness is dreaming - but dreaming constrained by external reality"

It engenders some intriguing thoughts... I think I might have to buy that book to have a read sometime!

Goodness, gracious...

Via the wonderful Astronomy Picture Of the Day - go there today!

From the "Well, duh!" files...

This BBC News story says it all.

Who would have ever thought that artificial food colourings made kids go hyperactive? It's not like we haven't known about "red cordial kids" for, oh, thirty or forty years...

Global temperatures 'to decrease'

Hey, just saw an interesting article on the BBC News website.

In short, global average temperatures for 2008 are expected to be cooler than 1999-2007 inclusive.

This is because of the 'La Nina' phenomenon, which causes cooler temperatures across the Pacific, and increased rainfall in Australia (which we're very thankful for!).

As such, it's part of the natural variability of the Earth's climate from year to year. It is not, I repeat, NOT an indicator that 'global warming' doesn't exist, because the long term trend is still sharply upward.

Interestingly, the article ends with this:

Experts at the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre for forecasting in Exeter said the world could expect another record temperature within five years or less, probably associated with another episode of El Nino.

I'm sure the naysayers will still pretend that this means we can continue dumping millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere...