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Workweek Causes Climate Changes
Shipud writes "An
article
in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
reports that daily temperature ranges are smaller on weekdays than on weekends. This phenomenon is strongest in the US, but also appears in China and Japan. The researchers attribute this to human activity, although the exact mechanism is unclear. The prime suspect is
aerosol / cloud interactions. Here is the more legible version from
Scientific American"
... and that definitely contributes to more pollution being in the air which will definitely have an effect on temperatures.. I don't know what's being "discovered" here..
Just when you make it idiotproof, some idiot builds a better idiot.
why it's nice and sunny all week and then rains every weekend?
... the make up of most teams. After all, with the amount of hot air and BS coming from your PHB and the more difficult members of your team, do you wonder why there is an impact on the climate after a 2 hour team meeting?
A mandatory 7 day work week! This will result in stability.
I remember reading about similar findings by Australian academics in the mid-90's.
So that's why it's so cold in the north pole.
I don't use aerosol, I use roll on...
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
I know when I'm driving to work on weekdays I go through about 2 cans of aerosol spray. You know, just to pass the time. Maybe it's my fault, sorry guys.
The prime suspect is aerosol / cloud interactions. Here is the more legible version from Scientific American"
Because its the weekend at the Scientific American and they don't have the aerosol/cloud interactions making it hazy and unreadable. So their "legible version" is weekday free making it less blurry!
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
Weekdays are consistent. The roads are jam-packed with McDonald's eating slobs driving gas-guzzling SUVs in three hour long traffic jams every day. In and out. Add the heat due to stress from hustling and bustling in the rat race and you've got yourself a case of slightly affected climate.
Case closed. I wish all scientific inquiry was this easy!
This is the butterfly in china can cause a hurricane in Florida, only its humans and temperature. Cool. I feel my paradigm changing.
Just a guy with an opinion
most folks here don't use either ;)
Nah, this can't be right... The matrix would suffer from low power and the human's would start to see glitches. OMG! That's why I had to work weekends for the last year! Here I thought it was because we were hopelessly behind in our project! Maybe it is true!
Can you quantify whether there is a change in temperature variations when SCO publishes yety another press release?
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
He said if I kept farting during meetings, the earth's temperature would rise by 1 degree and the human race would become extinct!
Boy he wasn't kidding!!!!
So does this mean if I ate beans for lunch, my fart will warm the atmosphere by .000000001 degree? And all along we were told it was "Global Warming". Now we know its "Global Warming caused by massive bean eatage".
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
If we don't stop working and be slackers at home, we might not have our beloved home which would have been a target of mother nature's wrath!
There is no patch for stupidity
Visit my blog
Due to the unprecedented halt of all non-military air travel over the United States during the above period, scientists were able to perform research on the effects of jet contrails. During their research, it was found that a single jet contrail could be tracked by satellite across the U.S., growing from a narrow plume of vapor to substantial cloud cover as it traveled the country. Such detailed observation was not possible before, due to the thousands of flights a day crossing the U.S. I believe the study you are referencing is linked to this one.
y maille.com
The majority of flights across the U.S. are during the daytime hours on weekdays. Sounds like a high probability of a connection here, this deserves further investigation.
M.O.
http://www.madocowain.com
http://www.pla
No, the prime suspect is my co-worker Bob. Man, does that guy ever have B.O. Jeez.
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Heard something that air conditioners working extra duty on the weekend causes more heat in the cities and this is why tornadoes rarely go through there.
If deodorant of any type is the cause, then India will be unaffected by this phenomenon.
Relevant quote:
"As a result, they (contrails) help reduce the daily range in daytime highs and nighttime lows. Contrails, by providing additional insulation, further reduce the variability."
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
"Conservatives were quick to claim that this is really just part of a natural, long-term cycle. 'Any implication that humans could have any possible effect on climate whatsoever is bad for big business, and therefore bad for America, and only supports terrorism,' said John B. Stickindamud, R-TX."
I was trying to look for a report I read once that pointed to higher smog during weekdays as a major factor in rain occurring mostly on weekends.
This report probably says some of the same things, though:
Ozone Linked to Warmer Weekend Temperatures in Toronto
The effect that cities have (i.e. Microclimates) on the local tempatures in relation to the area around them has been known for some time and this seems to be a logical extention of the microclimate. As such it seems logical that the exaust from cars would tend to be greater on weekdays when people are going to and from work, and would decline on the weekends.
Thats it, i'm staying home during the week and going to work on the weekends. Gotta counteract this "weekend effect somehow"...even if it means going to work 3 days less during the week. I'll be taking one for the team here.
Many of the weather stations that record the data that these people used are simple mercury or alcohol thermometers that get read by humans.
I was one of these thermometer readers in grad school. During the work week, I was up for class or to go to the office, so I always read the thermometer at the same time, like I was supposed to. On weekends, it was hard to get the motivation to get out of bed early just to read a thermometer, so a lot of times I read it later than I was supposed to and guesstimated what the temp was a few hours earlier.
I worried about the researchers using data from my weather station, but not enough to drag my butt out of bed any earlier.
I can guarantee TIME itself slows down on the work week, and speeds up during the weekend.
Fact.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Twice as many air conditioners/heaters, lots of buildings using more power, lots of bosses filling whole auditoria with hot air--the heat has to go somewhere.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Did anyone test to see if the consumption of bean filled meals changed the environment? They blame global warming on bovine flatulence but it could it be the mass consumption of burritos?
I always wondered why it was so hot in Mexico... now I know! Wow, on Slashdot, you learn something new every day.
I already figured out why it's colder in Canada though... you see, people up here in Canada are more likely to wear insulated clothing, and that keeps body heat from escaping into the environment. This effect is most notable in the winter, when almost everyone wears several layers of insulated clothing when going out of their house, and this translates to even colder temperatures than usual. Of course, the interiors of houses still stay warm all year long, because people never wear bulky clothing indoors; that would be rather inconvenient, after all.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Really? Because global warming doesn't act over a period of days, for God's sake. So the answer isn't nearly as simple as your average uneducated slashbot seems to believe. Science rarely is.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I saw a book a few years ago called "The Way Things Really Work", which proposed something very close to this theory. It was a humor book, however. It also suggested that we add a few more days to the week to solve the problem.
Username taken, please choose another one.
He said, "Eating beans is a crime equal to eating the heads of one's parents."
Who knew the old codger had global warming figured out back then!
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
Can you explain why the effect moves one direction in some cities (i.e., the difference is smaller on the weekend) and another direction in other cities (i.e., the difference is larger on the weekend)?
Well, that's all the proof we need to start drafting the international treaties! Hey, it's about Global Climate Change! We can't afford to wait until we understand how it works! Think of the flooding for God's sakes! Didn't any of you see Waterworld?
Then can i get a tax deduction for working from home?
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
How about a seven day weekend.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
It's from all the goddamn hot-air spewing out from the self-important PHB's. I'd say huddling all the caffeinated, overweight engineers into a cramped meeting space for hours makes for a nice heat-sink.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Unemployment is the new environmentalism.
Read it and weep, you biatch whores!!!!
Hahahah... eat THIS, you suckers!
...all the hot air spewing from the mouths of morons in middle management.
When 9/11 occurred, I remember seeing an article saying that during the 4 days that worldwide flights were grounded, there was a 3-5%(I think) decrease in cloud cover. I presume this is because of con trails and exhaust conglomeration in the sky. It led to a rise in temperature during the day, and less insulation so it was colder at night. Does anyone have any links? I couldn't find anything.
I always used to fantasize that, "If I became king, I would outlaw all auto usage for one day a month at least." Maybe scientific validation won't lead me to begin my brutal takeover of the world...
-non sig-Welcome your new slashdot overlord!
But why aren't the people at nudist colonies hot?
We'll just have to get the government to mandate a 3-day work week, before this whole environment thingy gets out of hand.
All those work machines with Athlon CPU's that are normally turned off during the weekend.
To some extent this is serious though, I have noticed a definate increase in room temperature when lots of computers are on (hell, even 2-3 high-end machines at home make a difference on a hot day), any chance that this would affect the outside environment as well.
How about invisible brainzap waves from cellphones, etc? Do those dissipate heat?
It's gotta be from those butterflies in China. If we could control those butterflies in China, perhaps then, and only then, can we control the climate here in the US. =)
Unlike most of the "it's obvious" responses I read through the thread on this article (followed by a simplistic explanation of a single cause, etc.), these researchers (and the publishers) did a great job carefully explaining how they did the testing, what their conclusions were, and why the conclusion was the only one possible. They did not attempt to tie in a bunch of agendas to their research, they merely stated the clear and definite tie between our actions and the temperature difference.
/. can follow this example, and watch for this clarity in other "scientific studies" - if they aren't being this clear and precise, then they are pushing an agenda (and since that is such a simple conclusion, it's likely wrong (at least in some circumstances), but close enough...)
Now, if only we here at
This is, by and large, a left-leaning forum.
So, when you read this, everyone jumps to conclusions about smog and cars and whatnot.
Perhaps, the weather varies less because of all the buildings which act as a windblock, trapping the air rather than replacing it with cooler air?
Try not to jump to conclusions.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
If contrails get your conspiracy bones jittery, check out this piece our local weekly did on chemtrails and the people who love them.
You know what?
Duh! Most people huff aerosol sprays on the weekend! So we have a large concentration of aerosol sprays in addition to dumbfucks on the weekend.
Hopefully this experiment means that the people feigning humility with their "humanity can't have that much effect on the world" crap will have to shut up now. Unlike years and months, weekdays are completely arbitrary, so either humans are effecting the environment, or it's a billion to one coincidence.
..of the 2 day workweek. Monday is not so bad when you know the work week ends tomorrow. And we all need to do our part to limit the impact we have on the environment. Ill have to bring this to the boss's attention.
TallGreen CMS hosting
to the insanity created by the perversion of sleep cycles that the so-called work week creates.
Sleep studies have shown that if people are allowed to follow their natural cycles, they'll still sleep about eight hours a night. But what they won't do is go to sleep and get up the same time every day. That's totally artificial and there is no evidence that it is healthy or normal behavior for humans.
What happens is that people with unrestrained sleep cycles tend to go asleep an hour later every day. So, in the course of 24 days they will naturally form a complete cycle and return to their original bedtime.
Ben Franklin was an asshole and a hypocrite who loved to party and spent most of his life in France.
Only US flights (including international flights entering or leaving the US) were grounded. And the US was still doing some flying (military and government flights, including the one that took Osama Bin Laden's relatives back to Saudi Arabia). But yeah, US commercial traffic is a big chunk of total worldwide air traffic.
Of course, temperature differences in the atmosphere are the energy source for all storms, and now that we have a weekday-vs-weekend temperature change, the tornado thing might get looked at again.
You know, I have told my friends that DC is hotter because of all the hot air of Capitol Hill. I guess this is the proof I need....
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
The Republican Party immediately issued a statement pointing out that this 7-day cycle could be due natural processes which are not yet understood. They urged no action until further research was completed.
Ok I gotta ask, WTF does that have to do with Fen Branklin?
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d Capitalization really works: i helped my uncle jack off a horse
Did they compare temperature changes in the cities to temperature changes in areas of low population? If not, their results are meaningless, or at least the conclusion they draw is meaningless. This is another example of mixing up association with causation.
I remember hearing about this a few years ago. Then when I got to college (RPI), I noticed that the weather tends to be nicer earlier in the week.
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
people up here in Canada are more likely to wear insulated clothing, and that keeps body heat from escaping into the environment.
It also keeps human flatulence trapped inside insulated clothing, so canadians doesn't contribute to global warming that way.
Cheers...
This.
I remember hearing 15 years ago about the links between work patterns and climate, although it was a bit more focused on the effect holidays had on factories being closed, with a net result of diminished cloud cover and rainfall (less particulates for clouds to form aronud.) Also, anyone here familiar with "chemtrails" and their close cousin the contrail-induced cloud cover? Not new either - I saw in a 1979 issue of Omni that scientists were looking into jet contrails as the cause of high altitude cloud formation.
Of course we would be following the media lead in ignoring that silly correlation vs. causality thing, in doing this. But thats OK, because its for a good cause.
On a serious note, there is some discusion regading the effects of dinofarts on the Jurasic weather.
The week following 9/11 when the US was a no-fly zone also saw wider daily swings in temperature. I don't recall the source, but the experiment is rather difficult to reproduce. Does air traffic decrease on the weekend? I don't know.
If I recall correctly, air conditioners put out a large amount of exhaust heat, which can raise ambient outdoor temperatures by up to 5 degrees on average.
During weekdays, most of these home air conditioners are at work. Since they don't really want to pay an extra $20-$30 in electric costs, they turn them off, which gives a two fold effect. Less pollution from power plants, and less "heat pollution" in the overall areas.
In the winter, you get much the same effect (poorly insulated buildings dump heat into the environment almost as badly as air conditioner heat coils), along with the energy consumption of keeping their homes warm.
The office buildings and businesses they're working at have air conditioning too, but it's more localized (eg; restricted to one specific densely occupied area), and as businesses are even more anal regarding expenses, the air conditioners used tend to be perhaps just a bit more efficient.
So essentially, you have less energy consumption in residential areas during weekdays, along with reduced heat pollution to screw up minor things like air currents, which in turn modifies how clouds form, and possibly on a larger scale, how the jetstream travels.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Has any one thought that maybe the weekend is situated the way it is (workweek as well) simply becouse there is a previously undocumented climate system that we (human race) have adopted our work schedule around?
I guess the only way to prove this right or wrong would be to change the work week around....
I wonder what occums razor says is the most likely theory?
hook
I would not be at all surprised if this is an urban phenomenom. Seems I've seen stuff like this reported about cities before.
I bet rural stations don't show such fluctuations, so what's the point?
Clearly this is not a global effect, since the article names specific countries, so, what does it mean? What's the context? My bathroom gets steamy everytime I use it... so what?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I love how you ask the question, and then before even pausing to find the answer, you leap to your pre-determined conclusion; (That the science must be bad.)
Next time you stick your fingers in your ears, try also singing, "La La La." Works better.
-FL
you know what im talking about ...chemtrails
Bush's plan to save the enviroment is to see that there are no jobs.
Well done.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Okay. .
First off, this article was written by one of those AAN papers. --That is to say, a cookie-cutter pop-culture weekly owned by a family of millionaires. One brother is currently the mayer of Raleigh, N.C., and their father was the U.S. ambassador to Romania during the Ceausescu / Nixon years.
I've spent enough time with diplomatic families to know a few things. .
Sorry. Your posted story is pretty much useless. Thanks for playing.
-FL
Im the meantime you can all rest assured that penguins really do thrive in tropical humid and/or dry areas.............sorry again......
Actually, seven days on and seven days off might just be a good idea. One problem is that people with strong monotheistic religious convictions will want to take every Saturday or every Sunday (depending on faith) off.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Disclaimer: "I do recognize a joke." We now return you to your regularly scheduled reply.
Adding more days to the week wouldn't work too well, as it would merely shift the problems to the added days. On the other hand, staggering work weeks just might avoid climate change, but it would destroy the cultural concept of a "weekend" as a time for recreation.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Perhaps there was 3-4% less cloud cover for those 4 days, because of perfectly normal weather patterns?
Or perhaps the 3-4 percent decrease cloud cover was several sigmas out of whack, dropping sharply when all flights were grounded and then rising as jets took to the skies once again. I am not a meteorologist; I don't know what sort of variability to expect from the amount of cloud cover. A statistician can't make any informed judgments about the magnitude of a momentary change in a measured value without at least a knowledge of the standard deviation in the measurement caused by typical weather patterns.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Here's a link. You could have used Scientific American's search feature to find it. Or how about the abstract here. Perhaps the original poster assumed too much by assuming that you could remember back a whole year and a half to when the study was published.
I guess I'll have to stop eating those burritos in the morning.
CmdrTaco reports that Dr. Izzy Finklestern, assistant Agronomy lecturer at Taxidermy Polytechnic Institute of South Goshen, has written an article proving that popular Slashdot articles cause global warming due to the increase in computer activity from resulting discussion threads.
I just wish these stupid anticapitalist/socialist would just shut up, sit down, and do something constructive. Most of these idiots have NEVER had a job in their lives, just living off the expense of taxpayers with research grants for junk science like this. Grow up, get over it and get a job!
Be productive, and quit with this chicken little crap.
Drink coffee, no don't drink coffee, eat oat bran, no don't eat oat bran. Stay away from popcorn, no, popcorn is good for you. Get it? Remember the R12 freon crap a few years ago? Now that it's banned, and no one has it, and R134 dosen't work as well, lo and behold what do we find? Gee, we were wrong, R12 dosen't cause a hole in the ozone . Ummm, it's been happening for centuries, and we've only been monitoring it for a few decades. Whats a few decades in the LIFE of planet Earth? Something like a few miliseconds.......
Evidence of human activity impacting the weather are pretty old and commonplace.
Which evidence, you ask? Look, each time -- each freakin' time -- I wash my car, it rains. Same for yours, right?
The gummint obviously embeds a special weather transmogrifier in cars, which, triggered by a soapy water detector, prevents honest citizens from parading their shiny cars on country roads, so that these blasted civil servants can have them for themselves.
"Cattle mutilations are up." -- Sneakers
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
...call in sick.
MIT researchers in Boston concluded years ago that Boston receives less precipitation and has higher temperatures on weekdays and usually receives more precipitation and lower temperatures on the weekends, due to large amounts of standing traffic. They further suggested that this may be due to the emissions of the vehicles actually rising to form cloud barriers and reduce the rate of evaporation.
Thermometers travel more on weekends.
so that's why it rains every weekend, and is beautiful during the work week!
The program hypothosised that the weekend weather phenomina was due primarily to exhaust fumes of the commuters. The emissions would build up in the atmosphere during the week, with increasing cloud formations, and 'overflow' at the weekend - the rain.
The program was admittedly light on fine detail but there is a certain logic in the idea.
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
...this explains why it always rains on Bank Holiday Monday? Great Mystery of the Universe solved. Now we need to explain why there's always a James Bond film on TV.
That's the funniest link I've read in ages. These people make UFO watchers look sane. Thanks.