... the main alternative to dark matter, MOND, was recently quite thoroughly refuted by new experimental data showing that gravity acts the same at both local and galactic scales, as measured by red-shifting of light climbing out of gravity wells (not the usual redshift due to the light source receding at a rapid speed).
I agree that dark matter explains the sum of available evidence better than MOND, but I've never heard of this particular experiment before. Could you post an arxiv link so I can learn about it? Thanks.
I rather think it silly to want to sue someone on Slashdot for something they said. It's about as silly as accusing them incorrectly of committing libel.... You're not a lawyer, but that's still no excuse for using using terms inaccurately.
Your statements are false, and the baseless arguments you're repeating have done harm to the scientific community. I've documented these facts extensively. The third criterion seems redundant; making false statements means that by definition you made them without adequate research into the truthfulness of your statements. I don't think that scientists count as celebrities, but even if they do, 'intent to do harm' seems to be supported by the hyperbolic insults and malicious language you've used to baselessly accuse scientists of outright lying and making ridiculously incompetent mistakes.
But you're right, I'm not a lawyer. Maybe you would be able to successfully defend yourself in a libel trial by arguing that you were simply one member of a legion who were all repeating these libelous accusations, so it's difficult to prove that your particular repetitions caused any damage on their own. But why take that chance? If you don't want to be accused of libelling scientists, you might consider finding a hobby that doesn't involve libelling scientists. Would that really be so difficult?
Flush your GI tract with some Fleet's and a antibiotic chaser. Are you still 90% bacteria? No. So obviously "we" are not made of bacteria.
You're also not going to be able to properly digest food, and the population will recover within a few days. The fact that you can temporarily reduce the population of microflora in your large intestine doesn't mean that normal, healthy humans don't require the presence of these symbiotes to extract energy from food efficiently. That's why the ScienceDaily article says "healthy adult human" and the Savage article said "normal human organism". If you actually managed to completely eliminate intestinal microflora permanently, I suspect that would result in serious health consequences.
If I love to call you a dogmatist, then surely you can find at least one quote from me supporting that accusation?
"I try very hard not to be a dogmatist." -ShakaUVM
"I think you need to keep trying." -Khayman80
Care to print a retraction? No? Of course not.
How depressingly repetitive all these conversations are. Remember that Jane Q. Public threw around accusations of fraud like it was going out of style. Then she misinterpreted my description of her accusations of fraud as though I was accusing her of fraud, and threatened to sue me. When I mentioned this incident to you, you had some choice words to say about her behavior.
So let's look at the exchange you actually quoted, the way I actuallywrote it:
I think I finally understand your confusion with me. I try very hard not to be a dogmatist....
I think you need to keep trying. In the meantime, I'll start to address all the weird assumptions you wrote right after that statement, but I'll have to group them with all the other similar statements you've made that I haven't addressed. So this might take a while.
Notice that I was saying "I think you need to keep trying to understand my 'confusion' with you," not "I think you need to keep trying to not be a dogmatist."
In fact, if you read your original comment, you'll notice that after you finished musing about Galileo and praising yourself for not being a dogmatist, you continued: Your mind is overly reductive, though. You equate someone looking at an issue from an oblique angle, and reduce that to one side or another. If I come up with a way to test ID as a scientific theory, you reduce that to mean that I'm an IDer (I'm not, I simply think it'd be fun to test). You see me say that Watts contributed something with his surface station survey? You reduce that to mean that I agree with Watts on every issue. You see me take issue with predictions of the Greenland ice melt, you reduce that to me thinking all predictions are nonsense.
In other words, you were accusing me of being "overly reductive", contrasting that with your noble non-dogmatic approach, and saying that you finally understood me. So I pointed out that your understanding was wrong; you need to keep trying to understand why I don't like being called a dishonest idiot dogmatist by every programmer with an axe to grind. Hint: it isn't that I'm not trying as hard as you to not be a dogmatist.
How could I accuse you of making strawman arguments, when you're obviously conflating my arguments with that of a person (Jane Q Public) that I've never even heard of?
If our muscle cells were 90% bacteria running around in disguise, then we'd lose a significant portion of our weight when we took antibiotics.
Sadly, I need to repeat that this would only be true if bacteria weren't thousands of times less massive than human cells. And that nobody you're talking to is talking about muscle cells.
Funny, it was my college biology professor that made the point that - in a number of significant ways of looking at it - our GI tract and other things are treated by our bodies as being exterior to our body.
This is depressingly typical. I quoted and linked peer-reviewed articles showing that only 10% of the cells in the human body contain the human genome. Those articles are very clearly using the definition that the GI tract is part of the human body. Then you make a vague reference to a professor saying something contrary, without naming the professor or referencing his peer-reviewed paper or showing why it's relevant to the articles that I linked.
Your problem is that while you love to call me a dogmatist, the simple truth of the matter is you can't bend your mind around different ways of looking at things, even if they are true.
Wow! If I love to call you a dogmatist, then surely you can find at least one quote from me supporting that accusation?
I just explained that you were wrong to call me and my colleagues dishonest idiot dogmatists (not to mention all the other libelous smears you've thrown at us). Bizarrely, you then claimed that I was calling you an idiot dogmatist, when I'd just explained to you and to Jane Q. Public that obtaining a graduate-level understanding of the physics of the climate requires... well... taking actual graduate level courses in physics related to the climate. A non-physicist who doesn't understand graduate-level physics isn't an idiot, as I carefully explained to Jane Q. Public. However, a professional physicist has no such excuse, which is why Jane's accusations (and your incessant accusations) that the overwhelming majority of the scientific community are lying and/or making ridiculously incompetent mistakes really are accusations that we're dishonest idiots.
If history is any guide, this is the point where you claim that you've never made any of these accusations, and that I'm making up strawman arguments. Please do that. I plan to eventually collect all your accusations of dishonesty, and then display them next to all your statements that you're not accusing scientists of dishonesty. Adding more examples will make the cognitive dissonance more amusing.
Think about why semen is salty some time. I'll let you get back to me on that one.
I'll pass, thanks. Is this really the legacy you want to leave behind?
I did. Read my other posts in this thread, you'll see I've been very careful to make this point every time.
I just quoted all your posts in this thread to show that the people you were lecturing about biology weren't making claims about bacterial cells in blood or muscle, and neither is the scientific literature. That's just something you latched onto once your original point about dropping from "400 pounds down to 40" was shown to be based on an incorrect assumption.
... believe it or not, the large intestine is external to your body. Think of the hole in a donut. If there is bacteria in the donut hole, do you say that donuts are made of 90% bacteria? It's a completely misleading statement, which has led to the scientific urban legend status it has now.
If the donut used its donut hole to digest food, yeah, I'd say donuts are 90% bacteria. But the point is that biologists treat the large intestine and other body orifices as part of the human body when they say that only 10% of the cells in the human body contain the human genome. Again, I'm just a physicist, not a biologist. Your problem is with the biologists who stubbornly refuse to use the ShakaUVM definition of the human body.
Again, you have trouble wrapping your mind around a concept it's not very familiar with.... Don't revel in your ignorance.
So, once again, you say you've just been making a point about topology this whole time? Let's see if that makes any sense...
90% of the cells in the human body are bacterial
Modern urban legend that isn't even vaguely true. Ask yourself - if you take a powerful wide-spectrum antibiotic, do you suddenly drop from your natural 400 pounds down to 40?
This doesn't seem like a point about topology. It seems like you jumped from "90% of the cells in the human body are bacterial" to "90% of the mass of the human body is bacterial." That's an incorrect assumption because bacterial cells are thousands of times smaller than human cells. For instance, each E. colimasses a femtogram, while each human cell masses a nanogram. Therefore, E. coli cells are ~1000x smaller than human cells, so they can outnumber our cells 10 to 1 while only making up ~1% of our mass.
Also, I can't help but notice that epine didn't say 90% of the cells in our blood or muscle are bacterial. He just said "90% of the cells in the human body are bacterial", which is entirely consistent with statements made in the peer-reviewed literature. You said this was a "modern urban legend that isn't even vaguely true".
Now, there really is a modern urban legend regarding biology involving a 10% statistic that "isn't even vaguely true": the notion that we only use 10% of our brains. That's evolutionarily absurd because the brain consumes a whopping 20% of the body's energy. If humans only used 10% of the brain, it would wither away like the appendix. In fact, we pay an even greater cost: the diameter of the female pelvis limits our skull size at birth, so human infants are helpless for much longer than other primates and mammals.
It's wrong to call both of these ideas "modern urban legends that aren't even vaguely true." There really are 10x as many bacterial cells than human cells in the human body. You just don't consider your large intestine to be part of your body, apparently.
by count you have more bacteria than cells read this.
Right, I've read that article before. Just because it's on the internet doesn't mean it's true. It doesn't say where all these bacteria are supposed to be living. You know - the ones that it claims outnumber us 10 to 1? It makes vague references to the gut and the skin, which might very well be true, but it's certainly not true for us, overall. When we actually have bacteria running around at those levels in our blood, it's called septicemia, and it kills you.
Yes, not everything on the internet is true. But that particular article matches statements made in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. So you're wrong to imply that it's just an urban legend.
And it most certainly is true for us "overall", defined as counting the total number of cells in the human body containing the human genome (~10^13) and counting the total number of cells in the human body without the human genome (~10^14). Also, I can't help but notice that the ScienceDaily article didn't say 90% of the cells in our blood or muscle are bacterial. It just said "The number of bacteria living within the body of the average healthy adult human are estimated to outnumber human cells 10 to 1", which is entirely consistent with statements made in the peer-reviewed literature.
It seems like you're trying to parse too much into it because you're letting yourself get hung up on an idea which is only in your head. By mass, yes, bacteria aren't dominant. By cell count (which I believe is what they're talking about)? Quite believable that th
A 10-second Google search turns up the following quote at the top of a Wikipedia article: Bacterial cells are much smaller than human cells, and there are at least ten times as many bacteria as human cells in the body (approximately 10^14 versus 10^13).[6][7]
Because Wikipedia isn't a primary source, it's necessary to examine the peer-reviewed references to verify this claim:
The adult human organism is said to be composed of approximately 10^13 eukaryotic animal cells (27). That statement is only an expression of a particular point of view. The various body surfaces and the gastrointestinal canals of humans may be colonized by as many as 10^14 indigenous prokaryotic and eukaryotic microbial cells (70). These microbes profoundly influence some of the physiological processes of their animal host (49, 103). From another point of view, therefore, the normal human organism can be said to be composed of over 10^14 cells, of which only about 10% are animal cells. The vast majority of the microbial cells in that mass reside someplace in the gastrointestinal tract (70)....[Savage, Microbial Ecology of the Gastrointestinal Tract, 1977]
Sorry, it is only your perception... You fail to notice... you have no clue at all... CO2 reduction... you know... the USA do NOTHING about it, absolutely NOTHING. Germany already has reduced its CO2 emissions and we continue to do that and will drive them to ZERO during the next 50 years. So instead of teaching us how safe and secure nuclear power is, why don't you just solve your own problems? The world would be a much safer and much nicer place if the USA had not toyed with it the last 65 years so badly.
After browsing through the references you cited to back up your claims, it seems clear that anything I say will be viewed as clueless, hypocritical imperialist yankee meddling.
New plants have zero exhaust except for CO2... and even that will be stored away in a few years.
Emphasis added, because we have to cut CO2 emissions as fast as we can. Carbon sequestration isn't guaranteed to be available in a few years, or guaranteed to be as cheap or as safe as nuclear (we'd basically be creating new potential "killer lakes"). Meanwhile nuclear plants, while not perfect, are much safer than coal plants, and only emit a few percent of the CO2 from equivalent coal plants.
The records are all there if people care to read them. If you want to state your official position is "I don't care about empiricism", then so be it. There's lots of room in climatology for people that don't work empirically.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. If you actually tried to copy and paste phrases from that conversation, you'd notice that I was explicitly saying that there had already been multiple independent empirical studies of the temperature record. Watts simply didn't do a thorough literature search before declaring himself to be the only person empirically studying the temperature network. If he were the first person to try to study the surface stations empirically, or if his "survey" added anything new to the sum of human knowledge, then I would agree with you because you're wrong to imply that I don't care about empiricism. So you can holster the Feynman quotes; I've already got quite a collection.
I'll add the rest of that comment to the perpetually-expanding list of accusations you've made that I haven't yet addressed. Again, this could take a while.
Which I applied to both sides, in case you can't read the quotes you're quoting.
What's your point? I've already disagreed with those accusations against "the other side": I most certainly do not think you're an idiot. At worst, I think you're making mistakes while talking about a highly advanced subject that lies far outside of your own professional experience. Everyone does that. It’d be a different story if I were saying that you were pathetically wrong about your own life’s work
I think it's wrong to say that climate change contrarians are dishonest idiot dogmatists. They're just examples of the modified salem hypothesis. In other words, they're honest people who aren't necessarily idiots or steeped in dogmatism. They're just trying to lecture about a highly advanced scientific subject, while not noticing that their background (programming, engineering, etc) isn't sufficient to understand the nuances of that subject. Ironically, I said this in an attempt to try as hard as possible to avoid writing down the kind of insults you are, but you seem to determined to see this as an insult, while innocently wondering why calling someone a dishonest idiot dogmatist is offensive.
I think I finally understand your confusion with me. I try very hard not to be a dogmatist....
I think you need to keep trying. In the meantime, I'll start to address all the weird assumptions you wrote right after that statement, but I'll have to group them with all the other similar statements you've made that I haven't addressed. So this might take a while.
You see me say that Watts contributed something with his surface station survey?
Again, I find it interesting that you only seem to remember writing "Watts contributed something with his surface station survey"... it's funny how you don't seem to remember writing "None of the issues surrounding energy production and global warming aren’t [sic] particularly hard to understand – the only reason it is so time consuming is that figuring out who is bullshitting on which point of contention takes a while. For example, the issues surrounding bad station data is rather complex. RC.org hand-waves the issue, saying that they have “taken it into their calculations”, but on this issue, it seems obvious that RC.org is bullshitting."
This comment is depressingly similar to the bizarre version of our conversation that you just posted. Remember when you said you could copy and paste links to make me look stupid? Remember that I just encouraged you to try do that? The key words here are copy and paste. When you try to actually copy and paste phrases from that conversation, you'll find that you were accusing scientists of bullshitting about temperature records, and that I was consistently saying that Watts's "survey" wasn't original and didn't support your repetitive accusations of bullshitting. That's still my position, and it's bizarre that you keep crowing about "dragging me kicking and screaming" to admit that Watts's work had any value. I still think his
Fascinating. I'll respond to this (and all your other accusations that I haven't yet addressed) whenever I get the time.
I finally looked at the gigantic wall of text you’ve erected in my honor.
Khayman, I find it hilarious you request comments be at “DH4 level or above, when you go and accuse me of being a Rush Limbaugh that apparently wants to draw and quarter climate scientists. (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2388172&cid=37183020)
I love how many quotes you have of mine that are cherrypicked out of context. For example, you state that “ShakaUVM claims that “intelligent design” is falsifiable science.” What I said is that it is *possible* to formulate ID as a falsifiable scientific theory, by restating it as a statistical interference with normal evalutionary processes. By cherrypicking that quote though, you’re attempting to libelously categorize me as an IDer (I’m not) or worse, a YECer.
To the ten people that actually read this blog, ignore Khayman’s cherrypicking. Here are my beliefs:
1) AGW is real, and a serious problem. (Yes, see, I’m just like Rush Limbaugh!)
2) Evolution is probably right, but it could be fun to scientifically test ID to see if there’s any evidence for it. We’ll need statistical tests to determine design *anyway* (as we move forward into a future with more and more bioengineering), so we might as well apply them to the historical record as well.
3) Climategate was mostly overblown hype by the anti-AGWers, but there were some serious issues discovered involving Phil Jones dodging FOIA requests so that AGW deniers couldn’t get access to the same data he shared with everyone else. Scientific inquiry needs a free exchange of data, and yes, this includes people you don’t like. He shouldn’t be drawn and quartered, but losing his chairmanship is appropriate, considering it could be argued he broke the law.
Note: the inquiry board agreed with me (the data should be free), which is in contrast to what Khayman and RC.org both said (they claimed it justified Phil’s actions), and the CRU recently did, in fact, make their data freely available.
4) For this and other reasons, Khayman (aka Dumb Scientist) and RC.org are biased sources of information. It’s not like I think they’re wrong in most cases, but they engage in partisanship. When RC.org reviews An Inconvenient Truth, it lightly brushes over the several major mistakes Al Gore made in the film, as well as the outright lies about the Drowning Polar Bear Myth. But when they criticize things made by AGW deniers, they’ll take them to task for failing to capitalize and punctuate every sentence correctly.
Khayman/Dumb Scientist engaged in a long, drawn out, teeth-pulling debate with me over if the Surface Station Survey was valuable or not. The cognitive dissonance was so strong in his head, that he couldn’t wrap his brain around the fact that even though 1) Watts may very well be a AGW-denying loon that 2) He might have something valuable to contribute to science.
I had to ask Khayman, over and over again, quote, “Look, let me simplify the whole issue down to one question: Politics aside, is it better or not to know the quality of your surface stations?”
Khayman could not give a straight answer to save his life, always dodging the question asked, answering one of two things: 1) Watts Is A Crazy, or 2) Even using the “good” stations from Watts, it doesn’t change the climate record.
This went on for several days, with me trying to get him to actually answer the question I asked, as opposed to making a non-sequitor (and non-sequitors they were). I even pointed out various climatologists that thanked Watts for his work. To the keen-eyed observer, it should be clear that Khayman/Dumb Scientist
I try to not read anything on your blog. It's got one of the worse layouts I've ever seen - a tiny font, with you cherrypicking quotes from people from *other* blogs and responding to them... and then you expect for me to respond to them, there? As I've said repeatedly, if you have any criticisms of me here, make them against my posts here. Your blog sucks monkey balls. [ShakaUVM]
Charming. That's why I posted the original comment at Slashdot as a reply to one of your comments, as I do with all the other comments I write... but that little detail hasn't stopped you from repeating the same charming and constructive criticisms. Again, read the original comment on Slashdot and let posterity know whether or not you regret your baseless attacks.
An honest skeptic would look at the Greenland melt data and say that there wasn't enough evidence. An honest Al Gore would have looked at the Greenland melt and put large error bars around his predictions. Dishonest people on either side refuse any results that disagree with their presumptions. I recall watching CSPAN and seeing climatologists talking about how the Greenland melt rate would be 10 times greater than we'd expected, because of the wet pancake effect or something. I'm not an AGW skeptic, though I *am* critical of idiots like that, that claim more evidence than there is. He's up there scaring senators, and... he's wrong. (Or probably is - the Greenland melt is an active area of research.) I'm also critical of people like Sarah Palin who think that human beings can't possibly, ever, affect the climate. Unfortunately, it seems most people are dishonest dogmatists for one side or another. [ShakaUVM]
When you accused me and my colleagues of being dishonest idiot dogmatists based on Dr. Xiaoping Wu's paper, I made my disagreement quite clear. Since you never responded to my points, I can only assume you didn't read my original comment. Please read it and let posterity know whether or not you regret your baseless attacks. [Dumb Scientist]
I don't agree with Rush Limbaugh on this issue - I certainly don't think that climate scientists should be "drawn and quartered"... I certainly don't think climatology should be defunded and the practitioners thrown in jail, like some Republicans do, apparently.... accusing me of wanting to murder climatologists is about on Imus' level. [ShakaUVM]
Compare your original comment to my reply, and look for evidence that I've accused you of wanting to murder climatologists or throw them in jail. In reality, I've already pointed out that you've accused climatologists of being fascinated with plans that will kill people... in fact, one of your comments implies that 6 billion people would die, which is closer to genocide than it is to murder.
If I said that I think it's harder to estimate Greenland ice losses than people think, that doesn't mean that I want to kill you, and your little dog, too. [ShakaUVM]
Again, look for evidence that I've accused you of wanting to kill me and my "little dog, too".
Dear Rush Limbaugh, ShakaUVM, and many other climate change contrarians,
Last year, Dr. Xiaoping (Frank) Wu et al. published a paper which claimed that the present day mass trends (PDMTs) of regions such as Antarctica and Greenland had been overestimated in previous studies because their glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) corrections weren't large enough.
... [Dr. Wu's] “GIA estimated” uses GPS and GRACE to simultaneously solve for GIA and PDMT. For Greenland, "GIA estimated" has a PDMT of -104 +- 23 Gt/yr. [Dr. Wu's] "GIA corrected" uses GRACE alone to solve for PDMT, correcting for GIA using the widespread ICE-5G model. For Greenland, "GIA corrected" has a PDMT of -161 +- 35 Gt/yr. These new estimates are compared to Velicogna's Greenland PDMT of -234 +- 33 Gt/yr over the same timespan.
In that same comment, I explained that Dr. Wu's estimates of Greenland's mass loss rate conflict with several other GRACE estimates, measurements that subtract ice discharge from surface mass balance, laser altimetry, radar interferometry, and other empirical evidence regarding ice history since the Last Glacial Maximum. I even suggested some potential areas of improvement in Dr. Wu's algorithm, including the statement "I suspect this effective sensitivity kernel wouldn’t be smooth, and that the “GIA corrected” PDMT estimate is too small because (for instance) it overweights the mass gain in the interior and/or underweights mass loss on the coasts."
Then, at the GRACE science team meeting earlier this month, Xiaoping Wu revised his numbers. For Greenland, "GIA estimated" now has a PDMT of -144 +- 27 Gt/yr. For Greenland, "GIA corrected" now has a PDMT of -219 +- 33 Gt/yr.
After his presentation, I asked Dr. Wu what changed in his methodology to make his new numbers more closely match those of Velicogna, Chen, Luthcke, and all the other non-GRACE measurement techniques. He said that he expanded his sensitivity kernel to 0.5 degrees off the coast of Greenland because secular trends in the ocean are very small compared to land. Thus his new inversion doesn't underweight the mass loss (as much), because it's occurring primarily on the coasts.
So after Dr. Wu fixed one of the issues I mentioned, his "GIA corrected" PDMT increased from 68% to 93% of Velicogna's Greenland PDMT. His "GIA estimated" PDMT has increased from 44% to 61% of Velicogna's Greenland PDMT.
Rush Limbaugh, do you regret calling GRACE research a "sham" and a "hoax" (four times) based on numbers that are being corrected as we speak? Do you regret calling for climate scientists to be drawn and quartered because you fell for the overhyped and manufactured drama called climategate? Do you regret weaving that conspiracy theory into your attacks against me and my colleagues by saying that we "forgot to hide the decline"?
So you're saying I'm right, then. "-144 +- 27 Gt/yr" is nowhere close to "-219 +- 33 Gt/yr"[ShakaUVM]
You probably meant to compare Dr. Wu's -144 +- 27 Gt/yr "GIA estimated" PDMT to Velicogna's -234 +- 33 Gt/yr Greenland PDMT. The comparison you actually wrote makes no sense; you're comparing the revised numbers from one of Dr. Wu's techniques (GIA estimated) to the revised numbers from another of Dr. Wu's techniques (GIA corrected).
This is the fourth time you've claimed that I agree with your libelous smears. I've already asked you to stop. Please do so.
Last year, Dr. Xiaoping (Frank) Wu et al. published a paper which claimed that the present day mass trends (PDMTs) of regions such as Antarctica and Greenland had been overestimated in previous studies:
... [Dr. Wu's] “GIA estimated” uses GPS and GRACE to simultaneously solve for GIA and PDMT. For Greenland, "GIA estimated" has a PDMT of -104 +- 23 Gt/yr. [Dr. Wu's] "GIA corrected" uses GRACE alone to solve for PDMT, correcting for GIA using the widespread ICE-5G model. For Greenland, "GIA corrected" has a PDMT of -161 +- 35 Gt/yr. These new estimates are compared to Velicogna's Greenland PDMT of -234 +- 33 Gt/yr over the same timespan.
At the GRACE science team meeting earlier this month, Xiaoping Wu revised his numbers. For Greenland, "GIA estimated" now has a PDMT of -144 +- 27 Gt/yr. For Greenland, "GIA corrected" now has a PDMT of -219 +- 33 Gt/yr.
After his presentation, I asked Dr. Wu what changed in his methodology to make his new numbers more closely match those of Velicogna, Chen, Luthcke, and all the other non-GRACE measurement techniques. He said that he expanded his sensitivity kernel to 0.5 degrees off the coast of Greenland because secular trends in the ocean are very small compared to land. Thus his new inversion doesn't underweight the mass loss (as much), because it's occurring primarily on the coasts.
I took a picture of the slide in his presentation which contains these revisions, but it's illegible. When the GRACE meeting slides appear on the web (hopefully later this month), I'll share the address of these slides and the exact slide number so my report of his revisions can be verified.
Also, tidal power would get imperceptibly smaller because the Earth's slower rotation means the time between each high tide would increase. I'm neglecting the decreased kinetic energy of the Moon in a higher orbit.
... too many people keep saying that tidal and wave power will "run out" if we try to harness it.
Technically true, but not because extracting tidal energy will cause the Moon to move closer to the Earth. In fact, the Moon would recede from the Earth even faster, resulting in an imperceptibly small decrease in tide heights, because lunar tide heights are proportional to the inverse cube of the distance between the Moon and the Earth.
Thanks for reminding me that i had things wrong - but at the same time mind doing the math for the correct answer?
Extracting tidal energy would cause the Moon to move away faster, so one could ask "how much potential energy would the Moon gain by moving away from the Earth by 1 km?" Well, G = 6.67x10^(-11) m^3 kg^(-1) s^(-2) and m1 = mass of Earth = 6x10^24 kg and m2 = mass of Moon = 7.3x10^22 kg.
The (current) average distance from the Earth to the Moon is r = 384,399 km. So the potential energy of the Moon in its current spot is -7.60007x10^28 J. (Gravitational potential energy is negative.) Moving the Moon 1 km away from the Earth raises its potential energy to -7.60005x10^28 J, an increase of 2x10^23 J.
But, as I pointed out, the Moon's gravitational potential energy isn't the source of tidal energy. The rotational kinetic energy of the Earth is. The Moon's ascent from Earth would be a byproduct of extracting tidal energy, not the source of that energy.
Knowing that the rotational kinetic energy of the Earth is the source of tidal energy, we can approximate the Earth as a solid uniform sphere which has a moment of inertia of I = 2/5 m1 a^2, where a = mean radius of Earth = 6371 km. So the Earth's moment of inertia is 9.74x10^37 kg m^2. Since KE = 1/2 I omega^2, and omega = 2*pi/sidereal_period (currently 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.091 seconds), the Earth's rotational kinetic energy is currently 2.59001833x10^29 J. In 100 years, the Earth's sidereal period will be ~2 ms longer, at which point the Earth's rotational kinetic energy will be 2.59001821x10^29 J, a decrease of 1.2x10^22 J.
The lost rotational kinetic energy is converted into frictional heat on the ocean floor and continental boundaries, and some of it goes into raising the Moon's orbit. Thus we can perform a sanity check by verifying that the energy gained by the Moon is smaller than the lost kinetic energy of the Earth. If 1 km of lunar recession is worth 2x10^23 J, then using a linear approximation 3.8 cm of recession each year is worth 7.6x10^18 J of additional potential energy each year, or 0.24 TW. Each year, the Earth's rotational kinetic energy drops by 1/100 the amount it does each century, which means 1.2x10^20 J are lost each year, or 3.8 TW. (Note that this is close to the 3.7 TW reported by Munk and Wunsch.)
So the Earth's rotational kinetic energy is the source of tidal energy. It's decreasing faster than lunar potential energy is increasing, which is physically plausible. Roughly 6% of the lost rotational kinetic energy goes into raising the Moon's orbit. The rest is converted to heat by friction and turbulence.
I know it's bad form to link your your self but i did the work for this last them we talkd about it.
Anyone who follows that link will see my response:
No. PE=m*g*h is only an approximation to be used when g is approximately constant. This is useful if you're puttering around on the surface of the earth where g really IS 9.8 m/s^2, but you're applying it to a situation where g changes enormously. Try PE = -Gm1m2/r instead.
More importantly, later I explained that harnessing tidal power will actually move the Moon away from the Earth faster, not slower or even reversing it as you're implying it would. That would only be possible if the Earth rotated in the opposite direction to the Moon's orbital motion.
No. I've already discussed this. Harnessing tidal energy increases drag on the tidal bulges, which will move the Moon away from the Earth more quickly.
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Hmm.. are you referring to this Nature article titled "Gravitational redshift of galaxies in clusters as predicted by general relativity"?
I agree that dark matter explains the sum of available evidence better than MOND, but I've never heard of this particular experiment before. Could you post an arxiv link so I can learn about it? Thanks.
Your statements are false, and the baseless arguments you're repeating have done harm to the scientific community. I've documented these facts extensively. The third criterion seems redundant; making false statements means that by definition you made them without adequate research into the truthfulness of your statements. I don't think that scientists count as celebrities, but even if they do, 'intent to do harm' seems to be supported by the hyperbolic insults and malicious language you've used to baselessly accuse scientists of outright lying and making ridiculously incompetent mistakes.
But you're right, I'm not a lawyer. Maybe you would be able to successfully defend yourself in a libel trial by arguing that you were simply one member of a legion who were all repeating these libelous accusations, so it's difficult to prove that your particular repetitions caused any damage on their own. But why take that chance? If you don't want to be accused of libelling scientists, you might consider finding a hobby that doesn't involve libelling scientists. Would that really be so difficult?
You're also not going to be able to properly digest food, and the population will recover within a few days. The fact that you can temporarily reduce the population of microflora in your large intestine doesn't mean that normal, healthy humans don't require the presence of these symbiotes to extract energy from food efficiently. That's why the ScienceDaily article says "healthy adult human" and the Savage article said "normal human organism". If you actually managed to completely eliminate intestinal microflora permanently, I suspect that would result in serious health consequences.
How depressingly repetitive all these conversations are. Remember that Jane Q. Public threw around accusations of fraud like it was going out of style. Then she misinterpreted my description of her accusations of fraud as though I was accusing her of fraud, and threatened to sue me. When I mentioned this incident to you, you had some choice words to say about her behavior.
So let's look at the exchange you actually quoted, the way I actually wrote it:
Notice that I was saying "I think you need to keep trying to understand my 'confusion' with you," not "I think you need to keep trying to not be a dogmatist."
In fact, if you read your original comment, you'll notice that after you finished musing about Galileo and praising yourself for not being a dogmatist, you continued: Your mind is overly reductive, though. You equate someone looking at an issue from an oblique angle, and reduce that to one side or another. If I come up with a way to test ID as a scientific theory, you reduce that to mean that I'm an IDer (I'm not, I simply think it'd be fun to test). You see me say that Watts contributed something with his surface station survey? You reduce that to mean that I agree with Watts on every issue. You see me take issue with predictions of the Greenland ice melt, you reduce that to me thinking all predictions are nonsense.
In other words, you were accusing me of being "overly reductive", contrasting that with your noble non-dogmatic approach, and saying that you finally understood me. So I pointed out that your understanding was wrong; you need to keep trying to understand why I don't like being called a dishonest idiot dogmatist by every programmer with an axe to grind. Hint: it isn't that I'm not trying as hard as you to not be a dogmatist.
As I just said, you definitely have
Sadly, I need to repeat that this would only be true if bacteria weren't thousands of times less massive than human cells. And that nobody you're talking to is talking about muscle cells.
This is depressingly typical. I quoted and linked peer-reviewed articles showing that only 10% of the cells in the human body contain the human genome. Those articles are very clearly using the definition that the GI tract is part of the human body. Then you make a vague reference to a professor saying something contrary, without naming the professor or referencing his peer-reviewed paper or showing why it's relevant to the articles that I linked.
Wow! If I love to call you a dogmatist, then surely you can find at least one quote from me supporting that accusation?
I just explained that you were wrong to call me and my colleagues dishonest idiot dogmatists (not to mention all the other libelous smears you've thrown at us). Bizarrely, you then claimed that I was calling you an idiot dogmatist, when I'd just explained to you and to Jane Q. Public that obtaining a graduate-level understanding of the physics of the climate requires... well... taking actual graduate level courses in physics related to the climate. A non-physicist who doesn't understand graduate-level physics isn't an idiot, as I carefully explained to Jane Q. Public. However, a professional physicist has no such excuse, which is why Jane's accusations (and your incessant accusations) that the overwhelming majority of the scientific community are lying and/or making ridiculously incompetent mistakes really are accusations that we're dishonest idiots.
If history is any guide, this is the point where you claim that you've never made any of these accusations, and that I'm making up strawman arguments. Please do that. I plan to eventually collect all your accusations of dishonesty, and then display them next to all your statements that you're not accusing scientists of dishonesty. Adding more examples will make the cognitive dissonance more amusing.
I'll pass, thanks. Is this really the legacy you want to leave behind?
I just quoted all your posts in this thread to show that the people you were lecturing about biology weren't making claims about bacterial cells in blood or muscle, and neither is the scientific literature. That's just something you latched onto once your original point about dropping from "400 pounds down to 40" was shown to be based on an incorrect assumption.
If the donut used its donut hole to digest food, yeah, I'd say donuts are 90% bacteria. But the point is that biologists treat the large intestine and other body orifices as part of the human body when they say that only 10% of the cells in the human body contain the human genome. Again, I'm just a physicist, not a biologist. Your problem is with the biologists who stubbornly refuse to use the ShakaUVM definition of the human body.
Charming.
Correction: each E. coli masses a picogram, while each human cell masses a nanogram. Therefore, E. coli cells are ~1000x less massive than human cells
So, once again, you say you've just been making a point about topology this whole time? Let's see if that makes any sense...
This doesn't seem like a point about topology. It seems like you jumped from "90% of the cells in the human body are bacterial" to "90% of the mass of the human body is bacterial." That's an incorrect assumption because bacterial cells are thousands of times smaller than human cells. For instance, each E. coli masses a femtogram, while each human cell masses a nanogram. Therefore, E. coli cells are ~1000x smaller than human cells, so they can outnumber our cells 10 to 1 while only making up ~1% of our mass.
Also, I can't help but notice that epine didn't say 90% of the cells in our blood or muscle are bacterial. He just said "90% of the cells in the human body are bacterial", which is entirely consistent with statements made in the peer-reviewed literature. You said this was a "modern urban legend that isn't even vaguely true".
Now, there really is a modern urban legend regarding biology involving a 10% statistic that "isn't even vaguely true": the notion that we only use 10% of our brains. That's evolutionarily absurd because the brain consumes a whopping 20% of the body's energy. If humans only used 10% of the brain, it would wither away like the appendix. In fact, we pay an even greater cost: the diameter of the female pelvis limits our skull size at birth, so human infants are helpless for much longer than other primates and mammals.
It's wrong to call both of these ideas "modern urban legends that aren't even vaguely true." There really are 10x as many bacterial cells than human cells in the human body. You just don't consider your large intestine to be part of your body, apparently.
Yes, not everything on the internet is true. But that particular article matches statements made in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. So you're wrong to imply that it's just an urban legend.
And it most certainly is true for us "overall", defined as counting the total number of cells in the human body containing the human genome (~10^13) and counting the total number of cells in the human body without the human genome (~10^14). Also, I can't help but notice that the ScienceDaily article didn't say 90% of the cells in our blood or muscle are bacterial. It just said "The number of bacteria living within the body of the average healthy adult human are estimated to outnumber human cells 10 to 1", which is entirely consistent with statements made in the peer-reviewed literature.
Yeah, that's why I leave my large intestine at home if I don't plan on using it while I'm out.
A 10-second Google search turns up the following quote at the top of a Wikipedia article: Bacterial cells are much smaller than human cells, and there are at least ten times as many bacteria as human cells in the body (approximately 10^14 versus 10^13).[6][7]
Because Wikipedia isn't a primary source, it's necessary to examine the peer-reviewed references to verify this claim:
The adult human organism is said to be composed of approximately 10^13 eukaryotic animal cells (27). That statement is only an expression of a particular point of view. The various body surfaces and the gastrointestinal canals of humans may be colonized by as many as 10^14 indigenous prokaryotic and eukaryotic microbial cells (70). These microbes profoundly influence some of the physiological processes of their animal host (49, 103). From another point of view, therefore, the normal human organism can be said to be composed of over 10^14 cells, of which only about 10% are animal cells. The vast majority of the microbial cells in that mass reside someplace in the gastrointestinal tract (70). ... [Savage, Microbial Ecology of the Gastrointestinal Tract, 1977]
After browsing through the references you cited to back up your claims, it seems clear that anything I say will be viewed as clueless, hypocritical imperialist yankee meddling.
So... sorry I bothered you. Have a nice day.
Emphasis added, because we have to cut CO2 emissions as fast as we can. Carbon sequestration isn't guaranteed to be available in a few years, or guaranteed to be as cheap or as safe as nuclear (we'd basically be creating new potential "killer lakes"). Meanwhile nuclear plants, while not perfect, are much safer than coal plants, and only emit a few percent of the CO2 from equivalent coal plants.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. If you actually tried to copy and paste phrases from that conversation, you'd notice that I was explicitly saying that there had already been multiple independent empirical studies of the temperature record. Watts simply didn't do a thorough literature search before declaring himself to be the only person empirically studying the temperature network. If he were the first person to try to study the surface stations empirically, or if his "survey" added anything new to the sum of human knowledge, then I would agree with you because you're wrong to imply that I don't care about empiricism. So you can holster the Feynman quotes; I've already got quite a collection.
I'll add the rest of that comment to the perpetually-expanding list of accusations you've made that I haven't yet addressed. Again, this could take a while.
What's your point? I've already disagreed with those accusations against "the other side": I most certainly do not think you're an idiot. At worst, I think you're making mistakes while talking about a highly advanced subject that lies far outside of your own professional experience. Everyone does that. It’d be a different story if I were saying that you were pathetically wrong about your own life’s work
I think it's wrong to say that climate change contrarians are dishonest idiot dogmatists. They're just examples of the modified salem hypothesis. In other words, they're honest people who aren't necessarily idiots or steeped in dogmatism. They're just trying to lecture about a highly advanced scientific subject, while not noticing that their background (programming, engineering, etc) isn't sufficient to understand the nuances of that subject. Ironically, I said this in an attempt to try as hard as possible to avoid writing down the kind of insults you are, but you seem to determined to see this as an insult, while innocently wondering why calling someone a dishonest idiot dogmatist is offensive.
I think you need to keep trying. In the meantime, I'll start to address all the weird assumptions you wrote right after that statement, but I'll have to group them with all the other similar statements you've made that I haven't addressed. So this might take a while.
Again, I find it interesting that you only seem to remember writing "Watts contributed something with his surface station survey"... it's funny how you don't seem to remember writing "None of the issues surrounding energy production and global warming aren’t [sic] particularly hard to understand – the only reason it is so time consuming is that figuring out who is bullshitting on which point of contention takes a while. For example, the issues surrounding bad station data is rather complex. RC.org hand-waves the issue, saying that they have “taken it into their calculations”, but on this issue, it seems obvious that RC.org is bullshitting."
This comment is depressingly similar to the bizarre version of our conversation that you just posted. Remember when you said you could copy and paste links to make me look stupid? Remember that I just encouraged you to try do that? The key words here are copy and paste. When you try to actually copy and paste phrases from that conversation, you'll find that you were accusing scientists of bullshitting about temperature records, and that I was consistently saying that Watts's "survey" wasn't original and didn't support your repetitive accusations of bullshitting. That's still my position, and it's bizarre that you keep crowing about "dragging me kicking and screaming" to admit that Watts's work had any value. I still think his
Posted here by ShakaUVM.
Fascinating. I'll respond to this (and all your other accusations that I haven't yet addressed) whenever I get the time.
I finally looked at the gigantic wall of text you’ve erected in my honor.
Khayman, I find it hilarious you request comments be at “DH4 level or above, when you go and accuse me of being a Rush Limbaugh that apparently wants to draw and quarter climate scientists. (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2388172&cid=37183020)
I love how many quotes you have of mine that are cherrypicked out of context. For example, you state that “ShakaUVM claims that “intelligent design” is falsifiable science.” What I said is that it is *possible* to formulate ID as a falsifiable scientific theory, by restating it as a statistical interference with normal evalutionary processes. By cherrypicking that quote though, you’re attempting to libelously categorize me as an IDer (I’m not) or worse, a YECer.
To the ten people that actually read this blog, ignore Khayman’s cherrypicking. Here are my beliefs:
1) AGW is real, and a serious problem. (Yes, see, I’m just like Rush Limbaugh!)
2) Evolution is probably right, but it could be fun to scientifically test ID to see if there’s any evidence for it. We’ll need statistical tests to determine design *anyway* (as we move forward into a future with more and more bioengineering), so we might as well apply them to the historical record as well.
3) Climategate was mostly overblown hype by the anti-AGWers, but there were some serious issues discovered involving Phil Jones dodging FOIA requests so that AGW deniers couldn’t get access to the same data he shared with everyone else. Scientific inquiry needs a free exchange of data, and yes, this includes people you don’t like. He shouldn’t be drawn and quartered, but losing his chairmanship is appropriate, considering it could be argued he broke the law.
Note: the inquiry board agreed with me (the data should be free), which is in contrast to what Khayman and RC.org both said (they claimed it justified Phil’s actions), and the CRU recently did, in fact, make their data freely available.
4) For this and other reasons, Khayman (aka Dumb Scientist) and RC.org are biased sources of information. It’s not like I think they’re wrong in most cases, but they engage in partisanship. When RC.org reviews An Inconvenient Truth, it lightly brushes over the several major mistakes Al Gore made in the film, as well as the outright lies about the Drowning Polar Bear Myth. But when they criticize things made by AGW deniers, they’ll take them to task for failing to capitalize and punctuate every sentence correctly.
Khayman/Dumb Scientist engaged in a long, drawn out, teeth-pulling debate with me over if the Surface Station Survey was valuable or not. The cognitive dissonance was so strong in his head, that he couldn’t wrap his brain around the fact that even though 1) Watts may very well be a AGW-denying loon that 2) He might have something valuable to contribute to science.
I had to ask Khayman, over and over again, quote, “Look, let me simplify the whole issue down to one question: Politics aside, is it better or not to know the quality of your surface stations?”
Khayman could not give a straight answer to save his life, always dodging the question asked, answering one of two things: 1) Watts Is A Crazy, or 2) Even using the “good” stations from Watts, it doesn’t change the climate record.
This went on for several days, with me trying to get him to actually answer the question I asked, as opposed to making a non-sequitor (and non-sequitors they were). I even pointed out various climatologists that thanked Watts for his work. To the keen-eyed observer, it should be clear that Khayman/Dumb Scientist
Charming. That's why I posted the original comment at Slashdot as a reply to one of your comments, as I do with all the other comments I write... but that little detail hasn't stopped you from repeating the same charming and constructive criticisms. Again, read the original comment on Slashdot and let posterity know whether or not you regret your baseless attacks.
Compare your original comment to my reply, and look for evidence that I've accused you of wanting to murder climatologists or throw them in jail. In reality, I've already pointed out that you've accused climatologists of being fascinated with plans that will kill people... in fact, one of your comments implies that 6 billion people would die, which is closer to genocide than it is to murder.
Again, look for evidence that I've accused you of wanting to kill me and my "little dog, too".
Dear Rush Limbaugh, ShakaUVM, and many other climate change contrarians,
Last year, Dr. Xiaoping (Frank) Wu et al. published a paper which claimed that the present day mass trends (PDMTs) of regions such as Antarctica and Greenland had been overestimated in previous studies because their glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) corrections weren't large enough.
In that same comment, I explained that Dr. Wu's estimates of Greenland's mass loss rate conflict with several other GRACE estimates, measurements that subtract ice discharge from surface mass balance, laser altimetry, radar interferometry, and other empirical evidence regarding ice history since the Last Glacial Maximum. I even suggested some potential areas of improvement in Dr. Wu's algorithm, including the statement "I suspect this effective sensitivity kernel wouldn’t be smooth, and that the “GIA corrected” PDMT estimate is too small because (for instance) it overweights the mass gain in the interior and/or underweights mass loss on the coasts."
Then, at the GRACE science team meeting earlier this month, Xiaoping Wu revised his numbers. For Greenland, "GIA estimated" now has a PDMT of -144 +- 27 Gt/yr. For Greenland, "GIA corrected" now has a PDMT of -219 +- 33 Gt/yr.
After his presentation, I asked Dr. Wu what changed in his methodology to make his new numbers more closely match those of Velicogna, Chen, Luthcke, and all the other non-GRACE measurement techniques. He said that he expanded his sensitivity kernel to 0.5 degrees off the coast of Greenland because secular trends in the ocean are very small compared to land. Thus his new inversion doesn't underweight the mass loss (as much), because it's occurring primarily on the coasts.
So after Dr. Wu fixed one of the issues I mentioned, his "GIA corrected" PDMT increased from 68% to 93% of Velicogna's Greenland PDMT. His "GIA estimated" PDMT has increased from 44% to 61% of Velicogna's Greenland PDMT.
Rush Limbaugh, do you regret calling GRACE research a "sham" and a "hoax" (four times) based on numbers that are being corrected as we speak? Do you regret calling for climate scientists to be drawn and quartered because you fell for the overhyped and manufactured drama called climategate? Do you regret weaving that conspiracy theory into your attacks against me and my colleagues by saying that we "forgot to hide the decline"?
Last year, Dr. Xiaoping (Frank) Wu et al. published a paper which claimed that the present day mass trends (PDMTs) of regions such as Antarctica and Greenland had been overestimated in previous studies:
At the GRACE science team meeting earlier this month, Xiaoping Wu revised his numbers. For Greenland, "GIA estimated" now has a PDMT of -144 +- 27 Gt/yr. For Greenland, "GIA corrected" now has a PDMT of -219 +- 33 Gt/yr.
After his presentation, I asked Dr. Wu what changed in his methodology to make his new numbers more closely match those of Velicogna, Chen, Luthcke, and all the other non-GRACE measurement techniques. He said that he expanded his sensitivity kernel to 0.5 degrees off the coast of Greenland because secular trends in the ocean are very small compared to land. Thus his new inversion doesn't underweight the mass loss (as much), because it's occurring primarily on the coasts.
I took a picture of the slide in his presentation which contains these revisions, but it's illegible. When the GRACE meeting slides appear on the web (hopefully later this month), I'll share the address of these slides and the exact slide number so my report of his revisions can be verified.
Also, tidal power would get imperceptibly smaller because the Earth's slower rotation means the time between each high tide would increase. I'm neglecting the decreased kinetic energy of the Moon in a higher orbit.
By whom?
Technically true, but not because extracting tidal energy will cause the Moon to move closer to the Earth. In fact, the Moon would recede from the Earth even faster, resulting in an imperceptibly small decrease in tide heights, because lunar tide heights are proportional to the inverse cube of the distance between the Moon and the Earth.
Extracting tidal energy would cause the Moon to move away faster, so one could ask "how much potential energy would the Moon gain by moving away from the Earth by 1 km?" Well, G = 6.67x10^(-11) m^3 kg^(-1) s^(-2) and m1 = mass of Earth = 6x10^24 kg and m2 = mass of Moon = 7.3x10^22 kg.
The (current) average distance from the Earth to the Moon is r = 384,399 km. So the potential energy of the Moon in its current spot is -7.60007x10^28 J. (Gravitational potential energy is negative.) Moving the Moon 1 km away from the Earth raises its potential energy to -7.60005x10^28 J, an increase of 2x10^23 J.
But, as I pointed out, the Moon's gravitational potential energy isn't the source of tidal energy. The rotational kinetic energy of the Earth is. The Moon's ascent from Earth would be a byproduct of extracting tidal energy, not the source of that energy.
The lunar ocean tide M2 currently dissipates ~2.4 TW of power. The Moon is receding at a rate of ~3.8 cm per year which is slowing the Earth's rotation by ~2 ms per century.
Knowing that the rotational kinetic energy of the Earth is the source of tidal energy, we can approximate the Earth as a solid uniform sphere which has a moment of inertia of I = 2/5 m1 a^2, where a = mean radius of Earth = 6371 km. So the Earth's moment of inertia is 9.74x10^37 kg m^2. Since KE = 1/2 I omega^2, and omega = 2*pi/sidereal_period (currently 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.091 seconds), the Earth's rotational kinetic energy is currently 2.59001833x10^29 J. In 100 years, the Earth's sidereal period will be ~2 ms longer, at which point the Earth's rotational kinetic energy will be 2.59001821x10^29 J, a decrease of 1.2x10^22 J.
The lost rotational kinetic energy is converted into frictional heat on the ocean floor and continental boundaries, and some of it goes into raising the Moon's orbit. Thus we can perform a sanity check by verifying that the energy gained by the Moon is smaller than the lost kinetic energy of the Earth. If 1 km of lunar recession is worth 2x10^23 J, then using a linear approximation 3.8 cm of recession each year is worth 7.6x10^18 J of additional potential energy each year, or 0.24 TW. Each year, the Earth's rotational kinetic energy drops by 1/100 the amount it does each century, which means 1.2x10^20 J are lost each year, or 3.8 TW. (Note that this is close to the 3.7 TW reported by Munk and Wunsch.)
So the Earth's rotational kinetic energy is the source of tidal energy. It's decreasing faster than lunar potential energy is increasing, which is physically plausible. Roughly 6% of the lost rotational kinetic energy goes into raising the Moon's orbit. The rest is converted to heat by friction and turbulence.
+5 Interesting?
Anyone who follows that link will see my response:
No. PE=m*g*h is only an approximation to be used when g is approximately constant. This is useful if you're puttering around on the surface of the earth where g really IS 9.8 m/s^2, but you're applying it to a situation where g changes enormously. Try PE = -Gm1m2/r instead.
More importantly, later I explained that harnessing tidal power will actually move the Moon away from the Earth faster, not slower or even reversing it as you're implying it would. That would only be possible if the Earth rotated in the opposite direction to the Moon's orbital motion.
Thanks. Being unemployed in today's economy wouldn't be fun.
No. I've already discussed this. Harnessing tidal energy increases drag on the tidal bulges, which will move the Moon away from the Earth more quickly.
Fistbump, dude.