Slashdot Mirror

Moving energy around through ships and pipelines would be akin to the internet running through a "vast network of little tubes."

What do you think "the grid" is but a vast network of metal wires.

1. Where is your proof that the grid has sufficient capacity for the foreseeable future? Thisand this> article have a different view.

2. Resistance is not the only issue with electricity transmission. As I stated, so is inductance and capacitance is present in AC systems and gets larger as the conductor get longer. induction leaches by causing voltages in nearby objects and capacitance stores energy and resists voltage change. This is the reason that large DC lines are being put in across the English Channel, the Mediterranean and the Baltic. Line loss is also not only issue. There are switching losses, transformer losses, etc. Take a look at this chart. Notice how capacity goes down as distance gets larger?

Moving energy around through ships and pipelines would be akin to the internet running through a "vast network of little tubes."

What do you think "the grid" is but a vast network of metal wires.

1. Where is your proof that the grid has sufficient capacity for the foreseeable future? Thisand this> article have a different view.

2. Resistance is not the only issue with electricity transmission. As I stated, so is inductance and capacitance is present in AC systems and gets larger as the conductor get longer. induction leaches by causing voltages in nearby objects and capacitance stores energy and resists voltage change. This is the reason that large DC lines are being put in across the English Channel, the Mediterranean and the Baltic. Line loss is also not only issue. There are switching losses, transformer losses, etc. Take a look at this chart. Notice how capacity goes down as distance gets larger?

Interesting, list doesn't include APR, Science, Nature, or any of the science outlets.

Just the MSM, which all get their news from 1-2 sources.

Let's take a look:

APR: what's "APR"? Applied Physics Reviews? Applied Physics Research? The former African Physics Review, now the African Review of Physics?

Science: Higgs Boson Positively Identified

Nature: No story I could find specifically about the Higgs boson, just the "Seven days: 8–14 March 2013" column, which mentions it in an item ("The new particle discovered last year at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva continues to behave just like the Higgs boson predicted by the standard model of particle physics, according to results presented last week at a conference in La Thuile, Italy. The latest data indicate that the boson decays into leptons as predicted, and also dampen earlier hints that the boson decays into pairs of photons more often than the standard model allows. No evidence yet points to theories beyond the standard model, such as supersymmetry (see Nature 491, 505–506; 2012).")

and various science outlets:

Science News: nothing at present

LiveScience: Confirmed! Newfound Particle Is a Higgs Boson

Phys.org: Now confident: CERN physicists say new particle is Higgs boson (Update 3)

and some random organization called "CERN" or something such as that: New results indicate that new particle is a Higgs boson

So a list that does include Science, Nature, and some science outlets does have some articles and, not surprisingly, they largely don't have the "God particle" stuff in the headline.

Thank you Mr. Troll, you know what you're absolutely right... I didn't take you the least bit serious, I did a quick Google figured I'd throw you a bone, shut you up and be on my way before finishing my cup of coffee... but Mr. Troll is persistent, and clearly not completely brain dead, just unimaginative. my original post was pure blue sky, but perfectly feasible. Of course one could just passively convert waste heat into electricity in situ, and that would moot any other conversation and there are now reasonable technologies to accomplish that with more than a modicum of efficiency. If you had made that point originally I would have had to concede workability, because my idea depends on tech which is at least 10 years away. But you didn't do that, you just called bullshit on the whole thing... so I notice in your last post you didn't even mention the conversation regarding thermal superconduction. Do you concede that in the future city, graphene base high temperature superconductiors might be used to move heat as easily as moving electricity, as well as provide maglev highways or some kind of mass transport? That such technology would make possible exciting and novel energy collection and cogeneration possibilities that don't currently exist (by the way, I didn't make any of that up, folks have been dreaming about these applications for a long time.)

So thermal superconductors would be an effective means to move heat from locale to concentration point. You mention my being at odds with physical reality, perhaps, but I don't think so. However, by all means school me, won't be the first time I was wrong or the last, I just think you're being a disagreeable snot, and are desperately trying to save face. Like I said, though show me to be completely wrong, please.

My original idea was to find a metamaterial that naturally resonated in the microwave region and had small tuned cavities to convert IR radiation into microwaves, again passively, but this must not be an easy thing to do because I'm finding a dearth of literature on such a process (though it should be possible) and most industrial applications are going the other way (from microwave to infrared, which if you think about make sense). I picked microwave in the first place because of their efficiency in passing through the atmosphere and the ease with which a proper receiving array on the moon could convert the microwaves into electricity. That's when it hit me what is the most common way to take an EM frequency and reemit another (often lower frequency) and it was then that it became obvious. Using IR to pump a maser, Duh! So it turns out it's possible to pump a maser with hot gas, citations here, so again I ask what part of my conversation isn't feasible, effective, and efficient. Heat is pumped off planet, and still harvested to do useful work on the moon. All necessary tech should be available over the next 10 years, sooner if it were a priority.

Sorry everyone for feeding the troll, but I found it a useful thought experiment, so I hope it was worth it. Oh, and Mr. Troll, thank you for keeping me honest.. you served a useful purpose, now if you could just get that personality thing handled you might even be able to work WITH people. Oh and the only prima facie eviidence you hold is that I didn't believe you had the intelligence to notice I was brushing you off... and at that I happily admit I was wrong, Your brighter than I thought and I'm still brushing you off. Bye!

Last time I had something published in a peer-reviewed (Elsevier) journal, I sent them a LaTeX file using their stylesheets, all formatted and ready to go (and boy are tables a b*tch in LaTeX!). They don't give you the actual styles they use to format papers, but presumably the ones they do make available are compatible, so there was very little work on their end.

You would think that and you would be wrong.

Note for TeX users:

Please note that AIP does not compose/typeset pages in TeX. Instead we use the generic markup language XML (Extensible Markup Language). As a result, the format and layout, especially math, may look somewhat different to what was originally created in TeX. While we appreciate the benefits to authors of preparing manuscripts in TeX, especially for math-intensive manuscripts, it is neither a cost-effective composition tool (for the volume of pages AIP currently produces) nor is it a format that can be used effectively for online publishing. XML is critical to ensure that online content is discoverable, searchable, and accessible well into the future. It is a W3C standard that has been adopted by many publishers as well as by many software industry market leaders. Information in XML can be processed easily by computers and is both hardware and software independent. Tagged XML data is an ideal archive format as identification and extraction of specific content for reuse is relatively easy. A single XML source file is generated from authors’ TeX or Word files and feeds our entire process. All end-products and deliverables, whether print or electronic, are derived from this single XML file, reducing the chance of errors or inconsistencies.

It was probably a valid critique of the contemporary model predictions of the time. Hansen was really the first to do a good job, first in 1981 and later in 1988 (links are to reviews of those predictions, with empirical observations conveniently overlaid).

Regional models have been predicting the ENSO months in advance for years. Global models produce oscillations. The timing is never identical with the real events, but this is not actually anticipated to EVER happen, ENSO is weather, not climate, you can predict the existence of weather phenomena, but not specific individual appearances. This has been the state of the art since the mid 90's. Clouds cannot be summarized by "we now understand them" or "we don't understand them", there are a lot of different cloud phenomena. What we CAN say is go ahead and plug in the most optimistic and pessimistic cloud physics assumptions, what happens? You STILL get realistic models that STILL show substantial sensitivity. How do you think the low and high ends of the range are determined? http://www.aip.org/history/climate/GCM.htm is a good summary of models and their history. They work quite well in terms of global predictions. As far as low level regional predictions it simply may never be possible to produce a single high confidence estimate because the exact pattern that evolves in the real world is partly dictated by processes with extreme sensitivity to input parameters.

Here you go:
Fast Particle-based Visual Simulation of Ice Melting
Dynamics of melting and stability of ice 1h: Molecular-dynamics simulations of the SPC/E model of water
Alcohol-water mixtures revisited

Now go find me a fucking peer-reviewed article that says AGW means a higher probability of storms, or go play somewhere else. Peer-review: it's how science works.

climatological warfare

You could try Spencer Weart's book / web-site survey. It was written in 2008, so no longer up-to-the-minute, but it's the book that took me from uncertainty about climate change to a reasonably strong belief in it.

No attempt at humor. I'm not going to be offended by you calling me willfully ignorant, because I didn't give you enough information. I've just noticed there seems to be an editorial bias on slashdot towards stories that deny anthropogenic global warming. I'd seen the science paper retraction story on another site. It is indeed disturbing, but it does show that the process of science still works. If those bad papers weren't being retracted then we'd be in a much worse situation. As soon as I saw the globalwarming tag, I knew the asshats who put them there were still trying to cast doubt on that humans were changing the climate. I'm not seeing anything in the article about retractions of papers on global warming, or rather about the study of ice cores, of tree rings, of sediment cores, of analysis of weather records over time--all the disciplines that are studied to form a picture of our climate and to predict what is happening.

The rise in retractions seems to have almost become exponential over the past 6 years. That we knew and had predicted humans were causing climate change by increasing the warming of the climate was pretty well understood by the late 1980's. In fact many of the predictions have been born out since then. We aren't seeing retractions of papers from the 1980's, but the late 2000's.

Anyway, here is an excellent resource called The Discovery of Global Warming (See the timeline: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/timeline.htm). It's also a book. I hope that clarifies where I stand on the issue and why I called them asshats. Because only an asshat would try to make a connection. And I'm still waiting for that list of retracted papers about global warming.

There is no such thing as an 'extreme position' on carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. The Earth would be a colder without it. Without any atmosphere the Earth's surface would be frozen. It is the thousands of years of empirical data that shows unequivocally that humans have changed and are changing the climate. Humans have pumped tens of millions of years of sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere in a little over two centuries. It means that there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and in the oceans. Not only is the climate getting warmer our oceans are acidifying.

For those who don't wish to remain willfully ignorant as some slashdotters seem to want to, here's an excellent resource that discuss the 100+ years worth of science of the study of global warming and the climate: The Discovery of Global Warming.

You should start by linking to the actual paper.

http://www.aip.org/history/gap/Millikan/Millikan.html
After 10 years of teaching he knew that he had to publish something great or give up research and becoming a professor.

This proves that you only need one paper, if it also give you the Nobel prize.

It doesn't matter. The point is ALL power plants that use a heat energy source will result in heating of cooling water, be it 1950s nuclear plant or 2010 gas fired plant or whatever. Period. The point of throwing nuclear in there is to scare people, nothing more. It is utter garbage.

There are regulations that limit temperature of discharged water. It is because of these regulations that power plants shut down during hot summer. There is NOTHING about power plants that prevents them from working at 50C water vs. 25C water, they are just less efficient.

Anyway, this is a garbage premise. Utter garbage. How about positives of local warmer water???

http://miami.cbslocal.com/2011/12/08/croc-boom-at-turkey-point-boosts-species/
http://blogs.aip.org/clean/2011/12/nuclear-power-plant-helps-save-crocodiles.html

A reptile was taken off the endangered species list, in part, because of a nuclear power plant. The Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant's 168 miles of cooling canals, located in southeast Florida, have provided an ideal breeding environment for the American crocodiles.

The cooling channels are used by many larger animals to stay warm.

Furthermore, in this decade we have seen research indicating that native speakers of tonal languages may be more likely to develop the musical skill known as "perfect pitch". (Short version here). If the very tonal structure of a language can dramatically shape the brain's ability to acquire/process/interpret/sort tones in general, can we so easily scoff at the possibility that the semantic structure of a language might shape the brain's ability to acquire/process/interpret/sort concepts in general?

Are you assuming here that the tonal structure of the language is shaping the brain, rather than the brain shaping whether the language is tonal or not? It's possible that genes that affect brain development can predispose populations towards tonal or non-tonal languages; could those genes also affect the ability to develop perfect pitch? (I.e., "A correlates with B" does not ipso facto imply "A causes B"; B could cause A, or C could cause both A and B.)

In the pages to follow, however, I will try to convince you, probably against your initial intuition, and certainly against the fashionable academic view of today, that the answer to the questions above [e.g. “Can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts and perceptions”] is – yes. In this plaidoyer for culture, I will argue that cultural differences are reflected in language in profound ways, and that a growing body of reliable scientific research provides solid evidence that our mother tongue can affect how we think and how we perceive the world. But before you relegate this book to the crackpot shelf, next to last year’s fad-diet recipes and the How to Bond with Your Goldfish manual, I give you my solemn pledge that we will not indulge in groundless twaddle of any kind. We shall not be imposing monistic views on any universes, we shall not soar to such loft questions as which languages have more “esprit,” nor shall we delve into the mysteries of which cultures are more “profound.” The problems that will occupy us in this book are of a very different kind.

I've only gotten 10 pages in so I'm not sure what his foundation will rest on, but the author has a precise and smooth writing style that promises to make the book an enjoyable read -- which is often a toss-up in nonfiction even when you're very interested in the topic.

I took some linguistics classes in college, and I remember learning about the Sapir-Worf Hypothesis, which the professor explained with obvious contempt. I've also read some of the work of both Pinker and Chomsky, and honestly, as persuasive and brilliant as both those men are, I never was convinced that there isn't a link between a group's native language toolset and the resulting thought process which might tend to be used to solve a problem such as differentiating between concepts or assigning priority or order to objects.

Furthermore, in this decade we have seen research indicating that native speakers of tonal languages may be more likely to develop the musical skill known as "perfect pitch". (Short version here). If the very tonal structure of a language can dramatically shape the brain's ability to acquire/process/interpret/sort tones in general, can we so easily scoff at the possibility that the semantic structure of a language might shape the brain's ability to acquire/process/interpret/sort concepts in general?

Yes I'm sure that will be a completely insurmountable problem that ,materials science won't be able to solve ever.

I suggest Skeptical Science and Spencer Weart's The Discovery of Global Warming which is available both in book form and online.

I think this is overly cynical. Publishers also handle the peer review process (lining up the reviewers, managing the reviews, etc.), which is hard for just anyone to do. Sure, anyone can publish, but what is the value is doing all that work and putting together a paper if nobody will see it? Do you want to write a thoughtful editorial on foreign policy and have it published in the weekly Penny Saver, or in the Sunday New York Times? Effectively disseminating ideas is not as easy as putting it up on a web site or dumping something into arXiv. I would love to see more authors voting with their feet and publishing in more reasonably priced journals with better access policies, because some of the private journals have outrageous price structures.

The American Institute of Physics has done a lot to address these issues, and I think they lay out their position fairly clearly. The legal issues certainly aren't as black and white as you make them out to be.

A great site for this is The Discovery of Global Warming.

You do realize that there was no such thing as a climate scientists until the IPCC came about and global warming activists wanted to restrict who was commenting on it right? Go ahead and show me some degree information on becoming a climate scientists from before 2000 or so. i would be really surprised if you could come close to it.

I see you didn't do your homework then. Here you go, a brife history of Climatology as a Profession. Climatology formed as a separate field of science in 1960s from several related fields where research on the topic was going on since early 20th century. A lot of important breakthroughs for climate science took place during 1930s and 1940 but it took a few more decades before those results from separate fields of science were pieced together into a comprehensive theory of the climate.

The climate scientists we have today are invented specifically for climate change and i would suggest that the first thing they are going to do is not publish something contradicting it and lose the rest of their career being blackballed.

Bullshit.

lol.. This is the entire problem with global warming, it's all "trust me", I know what 'I'm talking about". You don't see a problem there? How about if a used care salesman had that attitude?

No. You wouldn't like the answer because it involves a lot of research-related work on your part. There's no "trust me" in it, quite the contrary.

are you dense or something? The CRU emails were full of it. They blatantly dismissed research because it didn't fit into what they wanted.

Ok, but I'm still waiting for a specific example. Mind you, I've already seen a lot of alleged examples from the CRU emails but all of them were either deliberately misquoted or innocent scientific jargon misunderstood by laymen bloggers and journalists.

the models are broken and do not work for predictions. That's a plain and simple fact. They can only validate historical information if tweaked enough and have not even come close to accurately predicting future climate.

Really? I'd say that IPCC AR4 did pretty well forecasting the past decade and hindcasting 20 more years before that. And what do you mean by "tweaking"?

No, this is Laser FISSION! They use a pulsed laser to activate a gold-thorium plate where heated gold produces ultra high energy electrons, neutron and ANTIMATTER. This process split thorium atoms releasing simultaneously a lot of extra power and radiation. http://www.aip.org/png/html/lfission.htm

Actual web site of promoter. Even worse car-related web site of promoter. He's been plugging this since 2009 or so.

Laser-induced fission is quite feasible, and requires far less energy input than laser-induced fusion. Laser fission of thorium has been done on a small scale as a lab experiment. Thorium reactors have been built, with modest success.

A pure thorium reactor won't achieve criticality, because thorium has no isotopes that fission on their own. The fuel has to have uranium or plutonium mixed in to start the nuclear reaction. The laser concept seems to be to use a laser to get things going.

There's been some interest in accelerator-pumped thorium fission. It's been tried in Japan, but that group hasn't reached breakeven. It's a plausible concept, but so far nobody has been able to figure out a way to make it work.

Incidentally, this is not a "clean" process. It generates radioactive by-products where the accelerator beam hits the thorium, in addition to the usual nuclear reactor fission products. A car-sized version is a fantasy.

I suggest you take a look at Spencer Weart's online page The Discovery of Global Warming. It covers the history of climate research.

Excellent! You've *almost* got it!

At the risk of being even more pendantic, I'll assert that the seasonal temperatures are primarily moderated by ocean currents (with exceptions during, say, 1816 when sun-blocking aerosols over-rode "Summer").

Here's an interesting link for you:

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/oceans.htm

While the tone of the article is a bit alarmist and probably more up your alley than mine, there's some great information there about the history of ocean modeling and some of the major complications involved:

"Perhaps in earlier geological eras when the poles had been warmer, salty ocean waters had plunged in the tropics and come up near the poles. This reversal of the present circulation, he speculated, could have helped maintain the uniform global warmth seen in the distant past."

"New data hinted that much of the heat energy moving vertically from layer to layer in the oceans was not transported by some kind of average convection, as the models had assumed, but was moved by tides.Tidal mixing of coastal waters might be as important as saltiness and winds in driving the Meridional Overturning Circulation, which depended as much on the "pull" of water returning to the surface as on the "push" of water sinking in the North Atlantic."

My bet is that they have misunderstood the data they're seeing, in order to match it to their preconceived notions about CO2 - in particular, an observation of past "tipping points" without a clear source of anthropogenic CO2 makes their conclusions tenuous. If anything their historical analysis shows that climate has *often* dramatically switched from various stable states, and that humanity and the effects of humanity was not necessary for that. Now granted, it may seem plausible to *assume* that humanity has a significant impact, unfortunately they haven't built a falsifiable hypothesis here - for example, what kinds of historical data would have changed their mind about the effect of CO2? I think *any* data they gathered would have been interpreted in light of their preconceived notions.

Anyway, always good to chat with you, Lazyej, hope you have a great week ahead!

I guess some people are just stupid...

CO2 has been shown to be a greenhouse gas... by John Tyndall in a laboratory... in 1859.

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm

I guess, it's all propaganda to you... facts, if you don't like them, you will will them away! Sadly, reality cannot be willed away.

Do you understand the concept of "summary"? If this were a blog about materials engineering, I might agree with you that such detail is needed. As it is, most people here probably read the summary, thought, "Cool!" and continued reading other articles. Had they had more detailed information, they would have read the summary, thought, "Um... Okay..." and continued reading other articles.

If you're counting on Slashdot to give you detailed technical information in its summaries, perhaps you're reading the wrong blog. If you happen to be a materials engineer and want more detailed technical information, well, that's what TFA is for. The article, which, incidentally, is actually yet another summary of another article from the University of Technology in Sydney, which is a summary of an article in the Journal of Applied Physics, which in turn is a summary of probably a very detailed thesis or dissertation backed by metric craptons of research data by Ali R. Ranjbartoreh, Bei Wang, Xiaoping Shen, and Guoxiu Wang.

See how it works? You start with "10 times stronger!" and it's up to you to dig as deeply as you want to in order to find the level of technical detail and/or interest that suits you. Personally, given that I'm not a materials engineer and that "10 times stronger!" is good enough to suit my level of interest and make me say, "Cool!", I'm actually glad that more technical details were not provided.

(Slightly) More detail can be found at http://jap.aip.org/resource/1/japiau/v109/i1/p014306_s1?isAuthorized=no#tabs_1_113_1274104113_tab1 Cookies and subscription required for the full article, but they mention "carbon steel" as the "steel". So, I'm guessing they are comparing it to standard Home Depot, untreated, general grade crap mild steel. So, yep, marketing/fundraising talk.

And the actual published journal if anyone wants it

Here is the stress strain graph.

I appreciate the wisdom of your reasoning. It is an effective way to deal with incomplete information. But the crucial part of what you consider unknown about climatology is not unknown. It is known, knowable, proven fact.

American Institute of Physics

"As a dam built across a river causes a local deepening of the stream, so our atmosphere, thrown as a barrier across the terrestrial rays, produces a local heightening of the temperature at the Earth's surface." Thus in 1862 John Tyndall described the key to climate change. He had discovered in his laboratory that certain gases, including water vapor and carbon dioxide ( CO2), are opaque to heat rays. He understood that such gases high in the air help keep our planet warm by interfering with escaping radiation.(9)

This kind of intuitive physical reasoning had already appeared in the earliest speculations on how atmospheric composition could affect climate. It was in the 1820s that a French scientist, Joseph Fourier, first realized that the Earth's atmosphere retains heat radiation. He had asked himself a deceptively simple question, of a sort that physics theory was just then beginning to learn how to attack: what determines the average temperature of a planet like the Earth? When light from the Sun strikes the Earth's surface and warms it up, why doesn't the planet keep heating up until it is as hot as the Sun itself? Fourier's answer was that the heated surface emits invisible infrared radiation, which carries the heat energy away into space. But when he calculated the effect with his new theoretical tools, he got a temperature well below freezing, much colder than the actual Earth.(9a*)

The difference, Fourier recognized, was due to the Earth's atmosphere. Somehow it kept part of the heat radiation in. He tried to explain this by comparing the Earth with its covering of air to a box with a glass cover. That was a well-known experiment — the box's interior warms up when sunlight enters while the heat cannot escape.(10) This was an over simple explanation, for it is quite different physics that keeps heat inside an actual glass box, or similarly in a greenhouse. (The main effect of the glass is to keep the air, heated by contact with sun-warmed surfaces, from wafting away, although the glass does also keep heat radiation from escaping.) Nevertheless, trapping of heat by the atmosphere eventually came to be called "the greenhouse effect."(11*)

Not until the mid-20th century would scientists fully grasp, and calculate with some precision, just how the effect works. A rough explanation goes like this. Visible sunlight penetrates easily through the air and warms the Earth’s surface. When the surface emits invisible infrared heat radiation, this radiation too easily penetrates the main gases of the air. But as Tyndall found, even a trace of CO2 or water vapor, no more than it took to fill a bottle in his laboratory, is almost opaque to heat radiation.

This can now be proved in any respectable chem lab.

Roger Wilco:

There are also clues that there is a cause and effect relationship between the two, but as I understand that's less clear.

Marc Morano, Jim Inhoffe and the Viscount #3 of Brenchley, so-called "Christopher Monckton" and their corporate overlords would very much like for us to believe that, but it simply isn't so. As in any field of science broad enough to be its own field, some things remain to be determined. Some of the coupling constants in the Global Circulation Models are known with higher confidence than others. But the first order effect of carbon dioxide on temperature is absolutely not one of the things that remains to be determined. It is known, and has been a known fact since the 19th century. Later, quantum mechanics told us why this is so; certain wavelengths correspond to heat, and carbon dioxide refuses to emit wavelength at a significant portion of the

1) The sun is the biggest driver of the Earth's Climate

I have never heard anyone say otherwise. No sun == a very stable, if cold, climate. However, changes in solar irradiation have not been sufficient to explain observed changes in the climate.

2) There is already more than enough CO2 for a 'full' greenhouse effect so more will not make it 'worse.'

This statement is gibberish. See the explanation here: "Modern data show that even in the parts of the infrared spectrum where water vapor and CO2 are effective, only a fraction of the heat radiation emitted from the surface of the Earth is blocked before it escapes into space. And that is beside the point anyway. The greenhouse process works regardless of whether the passage of radiation is saturated in lower layers. As explained above, the energy received at the Earth's surface must eventually work its way back up to the higher layers where radiation does slip out easily. Adding some greenhouse gas to those high, thin layers must warm the planet no matter what happens lower down."

3) The Earth has been cooling since 2007.

Nope. In point of fact, 2010 was the warmest year on record. But such a short-term trend is irrelevant. A cooling trend over three days in May doesn't mean North American is not warming up as summer comes.

4) Current computer models of the Earth's long-term climate are not necessarily correct.

I've not heard anyone suggest that computer models of anything are 100% accurate.

Of course, these facts are inconvenient to believers of various irrational ideologies popular in the U.S. -- fundamentalist Christianity, laissez-faire capitalisms, etc. -- and so are likely to be rejected as heretical.

For gong on over 200 years designers have slaved away at various schemes to make self winding/powered watches. None of the modern electrical self powered have ever reached the mass, 'as in cheaply' produced watch category. Sure there have been a few novelty types and even the high end ones have been rather meager successes,
http://web-japan.org/trends98/honbun/ntj990207.html and http://jrse.aip.org/jrsebh/v1/i6/p062701_s1?view=fulltext that fit more into the category of novelty items. These certainly are not to be considered a mass produced success.

The most activity seems to be in making the illumination better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium_illumination if you like to be irradiated. But that is more tweaking and old idea.

So you want to show the world this is no gimmick tech. Produce a simple inexpensive self powered electrical wristwatch that 1 year later the Chinese ripoff factories produce ones that sell at Walmart for $10ea.

So do that before ever moving on to the futuristic ipod'ish widgets. Then we'll all have mass produced products that run off your body heat, sweat, or the pressure of you fat ass wiggling about on your computer chair and cost no more than whatever else you have stuck to the side of your face presently.

That's just great. Then people will never have any excuse to ever put any of that crap down and be disconnected from the virtual world while the devices recharge. That will really open the market for the; As seen on TV, self powered, full body, 3D glasses included, sex suit. The more you get your grove on, the more you power the realism of your fantasy. All yours for 3 easy payments....

Now that is mass production of power at its finest.

I have the equivalent of an AS degree in physics, and you have no idea what you're talking about. The Earth most definitely is in thermal equilibrium. Take, for example, these notes from the University of Oregon that states that "earth wants to stay in thermal equilibrium". If we produced thousands of petawatts of power from fusion, we could warm the Earth. The Earth would respond by emitting more radiation and cooling down. What is happening instead is that increased greenhouse gasses are causing less radiation to be radiated into space, causing warming. It's very simple physics, and all these effects were predicted by Arrhenius over 100 years ago.

But the rate of warming has recently increased dramatically. The slow warming that ended the last ice age was due to changes in the Earth's orbit. What has been happening for the last several decades, however, is warming caused by increased greenhouse gasses in the Earth's atmosphere, as predicted over 100 years ago. The rate of warming is 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade, far faster than it's been for the thousands of years prior to the industrial revolution.

I've seen many posts claiming that the world has been cooling since 1998. And there are the ones with links to pictures to a handful of weather stations that are in new parking lots or next to a newly installed air conditioner, claiming that the observed warming is due to an urban heat island effect. Then there are those that claim any increase in sea ice extent means that ice is not melting, even though sea ice extent measures only the surface area of ice, and the volume of ice has been decreasing for the last several decades.

Maybe now we can at least accept that the warming of the past several decades is real. This warming effect due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was predicted over 100 years ago.

Paper on molten salt tanksThis suggests that you have misunderstood. It appears to be economic to use ordinary carbon steel rather than a stainless steel for the containment vessel, for a cost saving of around 20%. I was too pessimistic in my own post (below).

It is possible that aliens will make conclusions about our development of semiconductors by looking for the signature of LEDs and lasers in our night side light emissions, but would be in the dark about our biology. Photons are a great invention.
 

In 1835, Auguste Comte, a prominent French philosopher, stated that humans would never be able to understand the chemical composition of stars. He was soon proved wrong. In the latter half of the 19th century, astronomers began to embrace two new techniques—spectroscopy and photography. Together they helped bring about a revolution in people's understanding of the cosmos. For the first time, scientists could investigate what the universe was made of. This was a major turning point in the development of cosmology, as astronomers were able to record and document not only where the stars were but what they were as well.

link

The modeled effects are derived from the assumption that any unknown drivers must be due to human emitted CO2. Again, the model cannot be its own proof.

Repeating a falsehood does not make it true. When the ability of CO2 to produce global warming was predicted more than a century ago, well before the big rise in CO2 and the warming that accompanied it, it is ridiculous to refer to this as an "unknown driver."

Historical climate data shows increase of CO2 in response to warming, not the other way around. Your prediction does not match the observations.

See the reference cited above. The prediction that an increase in CO2 would warm the climate long predates the big rise in CO2 and the modern warming.

Wrong. RTFA again

Read it. ROFL. For some comments from people who actually understand elementary physics, see here and here

Regardless if an atmosphere is a insulated container or not, the pressure versus temperature relationship of an atmosphere still holds - gravity acts as your container here

Only if you are inside a black hole does gravity prevent heat from escaping in the form of electromagnetic radiation. So the notion that the temperature of Venus can be explained by adiabatic heating is in violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics (Conservation of Energy).

Now, have fun explaining how Mars has 95.2% CO2 atmosphere, but never had any runaway global warming. Have fun, think hard, it helps.

Think hard? This is pretty trivial. This sort of thing is confusing only if you don't actually do the math. It's not the percentage of the atmosphere that is CO2 that determines the warming effect, but the partial pressure. The partial pressure of CO2 in the Martian atmosphere is over four orders of magnitude lower than on Venus, because even Mars's atmosphere is mostly CO2, there is less CO2 than in the Earth's atmosphere.

Which model is your favorite?

Doesn't really much matter, since they are all based on the actual physics, without the flights of fancy you've been advocating. All have a positive feedback between CO2 and temperature, so that CO2 will follow warming if solar output increases, and warming will follow CO2 if CO2 is added to the atmosphere (e.g. from combustion). And none of them give a runaway greenhouse with anticipated levels of CO2.

Look, if you can accept that the model is simply a sanity check and not proof, you're half way there.

Yes, so far all we have is a theory that passes the sanity check of mathematical modeling (which none of the objections to CO2 induced global warming have managed to do) plus a prediction, over a century old, that increased CO2 would produce warming, and observed warming that matches predictions, plus a large mass of historical and prehistorical data that also is consistent with the theory.

It's not surprising that the anti-AGW people avoid coming up with an actual model, because they probably know, subconsciously (and I suspect in some cases consciously) that it would sound ridiculous. It would have to go something like this:

1. There is some, as yet undiscovered, mechanism that limits the warming effect of CO2 on the atmosphere.

2. The apparent increase in average temperatures that has accompanied the modern rise in CO2 is either

a. The result of multiple separate statistical errors in land measurements, sea measurements, and satellite measurements; the fact that they all seem to show warming is sheer coincidence, or

b. The result of some as yet unidentified (but NATURAL!!) warming mechan

'mon, really? You're going to sit there with a straight face and accept that not measuring 75% of the earth's surface temp is fine and dandy?

Sounds pretty good to me. Polls can obtain highly reliable statistical results by sampling a much smaller % of a population. Do you have any evidence that 75% is insufficient? For example, a model in which sampling 75% of the earth's surface yields substantially incorrect conclusions?

Sure. Volanoes

BZZZT! Wrong. It is a myth that volcanos emit anything approaching the CO2 released into the atmosphere by man . But it is true that one way in which climate models are tested is by examining whether the predicted climate effects of volcanos match observations.

They reproduce it by hard coding it in, not by actually running the simulation.

BZZZT! Wrong again

Yes, in the 1800s ships took temperature readings of the ocean. And just how accurate, precise and numerous were those readings?

There were about 280,000 such readings, covering most of the world's oceans. With that many readings, you'd expect the means to be pretty accurate and precise. Unless, of course, you have some kind of model that demonstrates that more readings are required?

I love Fermi as much as the next guy, but a systemic bias isn't going to "cancel out".

Any fixed bias cancels out in determination of a trend. Try it yourself. Take a set of x,y values, do a linear regression. Then add a fixed value to all of the y values and do it again. You'll find that the slope of the fitted line does not change at all.

I'm arguing that the default here is an assertion of ignorance, not an assertion of culpability. Identifying gaps does not mean I've got a better idea, it just means that your idea isn't as good as you think it is.

In other words, you are engaging in exactly the same reasoning as the creationists, pointing to "gaps," and trying to suggest that current theory would be unable to account for the unknown contents of those gaps. When you assert with no theoretical basis that the number, accuracy, and precision of measurements is inadequate to evaluate climate change, you are making just such a "gap" argument.

And here's the rub -> negative feedbacks. Is climate highly sensitive to CO2, or insensitive? And here's where your basic physics kick AGW in the nards -> CO2 has a specific maximum spectrum it can absorb, after which, you get no additional warming.

BZZZT! False. This was an error in early modeling which has been known to be mistaken for half a decade. See here, here, and here. But just like creationists, who are still trotting out arguments that were debunked in the time of Darwin, anti-AGW debaters continue to trot out ancient fallacies. For estimates of climate sensitivity derived from a wide variety of observations, see here.

Look, in the end, if you're really thinking like a scientist here, tell me what evidence, either in the various proxy records or in direct observation, would convince you that the climate is not highly sensitive to CO2?

To have even minimal credibility, you need a mathematical model showing that it is possible to reasonably model historical and prehistorical climate change and the climatic effects

"It's been interesting to hear the narrative pushed at you from the wingnuts, you mean? Because the first notable paper on global warming, by Plass in 1956, was called “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change”."

Personally, in these cases I refer them to Svante Arrhenius, who had calculated that doubling CO2 level raises temperature by 4-5C. In 1908.

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm

so there have to be some assumptions here the article is not exposing. like enforcement of symmetry.

It took me a long time to find the real article. I think this paragraph addresses your concerns.

Interestingly, all the GA structures show similar patterns in their shapes, even for different heights. They contain no holes running across the bounding volume, which is necessary to intercept most of the incoming sunlight, and (less intuitively) they all have triangles coinciding with the 12 edges of the bounding box volume, so that they would cast the same shadow on the ground as the open-box. We emphasize that these patterns emerge from randomly generated structures, are not artifacts of the simulations, and are a fingerprint of emergent behavior resulting from the GA calculations.20 The primary shape of the GA structure [Fig. 2a] is a box with its five visible faces caved in toward the midpoint. A simplified, symmetric version of this was constructed, as shown in Fig. 2b; this idealized structure, which we refer to as the "funnel," generates only 0.03% less energy in the day than the original GA output, and therefore contains most key ingredients of the complicated GA structures.

Of course, is is pretty darn funny. Turns out after all this genetic algorithm stuff. A very simple structure is close enough to optimal to make other more complex structures pointless.

Please editors... at least link to the original press release if not the research paper.

What's the point of linking to other blogs that have crappy internal links all over the article?

I didn't know what one of these is until google helped.

The basic idea appears to be that you bounce a signal off the enemy radar array to jam it or generate false images in it, and use genetic algorithms to optimize the signal (a waveform based on a genetically controlled polynomial it seems) based on what it returns.
The fighter jet would include an "ECM Library" of algorithms from which the radar man and the genetic algorithms presumably can select functions to create new waveforms.

The way the article is written, it looks like fighter jets would also be somehow wirelessly hacking into enemy networks but I haven't seen anything in google about that. If there is anything like that, it would be cool if they could somehow "take over" enemy computing systems maybe via induced voltages somehow but the reality is probably more like hacking into a linksys router like some people have mentioned, i.e. war driving at Mach 1. You would have to be able to detect pretty sensitive return signals to know if you're having any effect and would seem like a pretty subtle mission for a fighter jet.

Military ECM concepts
Electronic Combat Systems

A paper
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Basic concept

Development of successful electronic countermeasure (ECM) techniques against target track radars is a time-consuming and expensive process. Recently, Nunez et al. reported a genetic algorithm (GA) optimization method for ECM techniques generation; this paper outlines the current effort to implement the approach with an operational radar system and to establish a methodology for arbitrary ECM signal generation in a closed-loop system. While this effort employs GA, the method applies equally to other optimization techniques. After defining the GA fitness function for a generic range gate pull off (RGPO) technique, the ECM signal is implemented with a very fast digital arbitrary waveform generator. The RGPO signal is injected into the radar environment, and the tracking radar response is measured and scored for optimization. The method is suitable for more sophisticated ECM signals and will be studied in future work.

Improvement of ECM Techniques through Implementation of a Genetic Algorithm

Abstract : This research effort develops the necessary interfaces between the radar signal processing components and an optimization routine, such as genetic algorithms, to develop Electronic Countermeasure (ECM) waveforms under a Hardware-in-the-Loop (HILS) architecture. The various ECM waveforms are stored in an ECM library, where an operator selects the desired function to use with a particular system. This optimization works with modular components, compared to previous research that embedded a genetic algorithm into the Range Gate Pulloff (RGPO) waveform optimization loop, which can be interchanged based upon the operator's desired hardware/software testing setup. The ECM library's first entries contain the RGPO and Velocity Gate Pull-off (VGPO) signals, developed mathematically for multiple polynomial profiles representing realistic moving false targets. The Lab-Volt training system and jammer pod provided a validation medium for the developed RGPO and VGPO waveforms. These waveforms were optimized using a Simulink model of the Lab-Volt radar system and the MATLAB Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Direct Search toolbox, contained in Version 7.4 (R2007a), using a defined parameter set, specified for the RGPO

For some reason, I expected some kind of two-slit or uncertainty principle thing with a very large object.

You might be interested in this:
http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=AJPIAS000071000004000319000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes&ref=no

The double-slit experiment not done with light, but fullerenes (aka buckyballs).

Now THAT is neat!

The irony of military robots is that we are using them to enforce a global economic system that is based on forcing humans to do labor in exchange for the right to consume the fruits of industry. Why not just build robots to do the work directly instead? Why not use global networks to freely share information about how to make the world a better place that works for everyone? The same is true for nuclear missiles intended to fight over oil and land instead of using the same technologies to build nuclear power plants (or solar ones and wind ones) or to create self-replicating space habitats or seasteads for endless new land. We need to start thinking in 21st century terms now that we have 21st century technology. Otherwise, we will likely accidentally kill ourselves with the tools of abundance.

As Albert Einstein said:
    http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/EinsteinQuotes.html
"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."

Or further:
    http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/nuclear1.htm
"""
"Concern for man himself must always constitute the chief objective of all technological effort -- concern for the big, unsolved problems of how to organize human work and the distribution of commodities in such a manner as to assure that the results of our scientific thinking may be a blessing to mankind, and not a curse."
"""

Or more on how Einstein was more than the disconnected absent minded professor he is made out to be:
    http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/sep2002/eins-s03.shtml
    http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm

It is not the nukes and drones that may kill us all eventually, it is the unrecognized irony.

[...]The estimations and computations show the possibility of making this project a reality in a short period of time (for payloads which can tolerate high g-forces). The launch will be very cheap at a projected cost of $3 - $5 per pound.

If we could send it into the sun, that might quiet the critics who would otherwise say, "but you're polluting space!"

Why not let your students choose some/all of the targets, subject to final vetting (or pre-screening) by you? In this way they gain a feeling of ownership over the process and generally become more invested in the subject matter. You could even point them to Stellarium for free home planetarium software to plan their observations.

Whatever you decide to observe, your students will get more out of it if they are actively involved -- i.e., no passive observing. If you have several nights, you could look at Jupiter each night and have them sketch the arrangement of the moons (c.f. Galilei 1610). If you have a solar filter, you could do the same thing with sunspots (if any are visible). Venus, Mars, or Saturn's rings may be attractive targets, depending on what you want to do with the observations.

Finally, there are additional astronomy education resources at the Astronomy Education Review, a free online journal.

There are these footnotes but I can't find the video

[18] See EPAPS Document No. 1 for a description of the experimental method. For more information on EPAPS, see http://www.aip.org/pubservs/epaps.html.
[19] See EPAPS Document No. 2 for a movie of the smoke visualization.