P.S.: I have NO idea how close we are to the point at which the atmosphere becomes essentially opaque to long infra-red. I doubt, however, that the scale is linear. Probably logrithmic.
Logarithmic is correct! Excellent back of the envelope physics. This was derived by Arrhenius; it's been known for over a century now. In fact, if you assume (as you did) an infrared-opaque atmosphere (a "greybody"), this is easy to derive from the adiabatic lapse rate (by defining an effective altitude at which the planet emits infrared, which moves upward as gas is added to the atmosphere).
This is why climate sensitivity is usually expressed in degrees of warming per doubling of carbon dioxide-- it's logarithmic.
So yes: once we've doubled the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we get to put in twice as much to get the same increment of temperature next time, and four times as much to get the same increment of temperature the time after that.
1) easy, CO2 is a pretty shitty greenhouse gas water is much more important.
Water is indeed a very good greenhouse gas. It also condenses out of the atmosphere, in the form of rain. Carbon dioxide does not. As a result, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has a long-term effect. The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, on the other hand, goes in and out of the atmosphere on a short time scale, driven primarily by the temperature-- warmer air holds more water than cold air.
The infrared absorption of carbon dioxide is measured, by the way. It's not something made up.
2) we've been coming out of an ice age for 10,000 years,
Correct-- or, more correct, we are out of the ice age.
that this remains unexplained
Fifty years ago it was unexplained. It's pretty well understood now.
leaves any "blame the humans" nonsense as laughable.
The fact that there causes of climate variation other than human input does not imply that human input doesn't also have an effect. As was pointed out, the effect is small, about 0.7C so far. But it is real.
3) no, you dont, see one and 2
The theory matches the data. If you have another theory, you have to both explain why the theory based on actual measured facts, like the absortion of infrared by carbon dioxide, isn't true, and you also have to explain why we see rising temperature anyway
like the sea rising... panicing about a few mm when in many places it changes on a meter scale every day.
Huh? I'm not panicking. I do, however, believe that it is important to not dismiss the science because you don't like the conclusions.
4) Warming is much better than cooling.
I agree. That is, however, no reason to dismiss the science.
On a global scale, indeed: 0.7C is a small variation. The Earth has had larger variations before, and this is not unusual on a geological scale (although to be fair, its happening at a faster time scale than most of the climate changes in the past.) However, 0.7C pretty much validates the models. If the anthropogenic greenhouse effect is not real, you need three things: (1) You need to find an explain an explanation for why the radiative forcing does not increase temperature (2) You need to find a hitherto-unknown effect that is causing the warming that we measure, and (3) You need to find an explanation for why the amplifier that amplifies effect (2) to be large enough to increase the temperature doesn't also amplify the greenhouse effect. (and, contrawise, you need to explain why whatever effect it is that cancels out the greenhouse effect, (1), does not also cancel out effect (2).)
While 0.7C may be small, you should also note that we are continuing to put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The wait until the car drives off the cliff before thinking about putting on the brakes theorem.
See, it's this kind of "we've got to do *something* now!" thinking that's so destructive to rational thought.
So, instead you're adopting a position of "any possible action would be be expensive, therefore no problem exists?
Is this what you call "rational thought"?
If the proposed "fixes" for climate change were minor and otherwise insignificant then nobody would mind. But they are not. The proposed changes will be costly, both in terms of real money and in terms of people's quality of lives.
So, here's a solution. Rather than discussing other possible solutions and looking for ideas that won't be costly in terms of real money and quality of life... let's just attack the science, which doesn't cost much.
If you want someone to make a drastic change in their lives, you need drastically good evidence.
And we have drastically good evidence... except, when people make deliberate point of ignoring all evidence presented that disagrees with the position they've already taken, no amount of evidence, however good, can convince them.
Here's a question for you, by the way. What's your opinion of Murphy's Law? Do you read it as "anything that can go wrong will go wrong," or do you have an alternate version, "when something can go wrong, we can count on some hitherto-unknown phenomenon cancelling out the known effect to make everything come out right."?
Limo owner wants a defense in case something illegal happens or damage occurs.
Partiers want protection from each other - that no one will publish pictures so they can party freely.
Diffuse but relatively bright UV, implemented with either UV fluorescent tubes or UV LEDs should do the trick. Fit your own cameras with UV filters. Regular cameras will work, but will be affected by a strong 'white haze'. The bright but diffuse UV should not be harmful to eyes for shorter intervals. Be careful about that, however.
UV??? wouldn't be my first choice. If it's bright enough to haze the image in a camera, it's bright enough to be dangerous if you look into the source-- and if you're doing this without clear warming, you can expect at random some people will be looking at the source.
The problem with UV is that, in any wavelength that's not absorbed by air, you're still only getting one electron per photon on the CCD detectors. So, since the photons are so energetic, it is terribly energy inefficient as a way to overexpose a CCD. You have to pump out a lot of UV to overload a CCD, and that's dangerous.
IR is much better choice-- the photons are low energy, so you're in the opposite regime. Use a wavelength of about 1 micrometer, and you can't see it, but the CCDs can.
Other than that solution, I think you're out of luck.
Beware of nicer cameras which might be fitted with a UV filter. They are common.
Yes, that's another flaw. Most professional-level photographers keep UV filters on their cameras just as a matter of course.
If the fire "didn't originate in the battery, the charging system, the adapter or electrical receptacle," then the fact that the car was a Tesla is pretty much irrelevant, since those are the things that make a Tesla distinct from any other kind of car. So, this seems to have been a fire in which the car parked in the garage happened to be a Tesla, rather than something specifically Tesla related.
Um, it's saying high-ranking officials in the Obama administration, not that President Obama is high-ranking.
That's what he intended to say, yes. And if they'd phrased it the way you suggest ("officials in the Obama administration") it could have been clear. But they wanted to load in adjectives.
This was a faux-pas regardless of the political party involved (is the FBI linked to a particular party?).
Yes, I'd say. But the writer wanted to make it crystal clear by making sure he put in in Obama's full name and title-- not "Obama administration," but the "President Barack Obama administration."
What puzzles me is the fervor with which the article repeats the word "Obama", even where they have to rather stretch grammatical rules to work it in ("high-ranking President Barack Obama administration officials spent years covering it up." Nice to know which President Obama: the high-ranking one, not the low-ranking President Obama.).
This started in 2004, five years before Obama took office in 2009. So I'd say that they ought to give Bush a bit of the blame; at least, say, for the first five years spent covering it up.
So we get that little bonus. We inveted your language. We get that little bonus. France invented your democratic process. They get that little bonus. Scotland invented the TV, they get that little bonus....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo_Farnsworth I think the mormon's invented the useful TV....
But, actually, Scottland has a decent claim. From that universal reference source, Wikipedia (and if you don't like what they say, write something else!): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_television
"On March 25, 1925, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of televised silhouette images in motion, at Selfridge's Department Store in London.[7] AT&T's Bell Telephone Laboratories transmitted halftone still images of transparencies in May 1925. On June 13 of that year, Charles Francis Jenkins transmitted the silhouette image of a toy windmill in motion, over a distance of five miles from a naval radio station in Maryland to his laboratory in Washington, D.C., using a lensed disk scanner with a 48-line resolution.[8][9]
However, if television is defined as the live transmission of moving images with continuous tonal variation, Baird first achieved this privately on October 2, 1925. But strictly speaking, Baird had not yet achieved moving images for his scanner worked at only five images per second, below the threshold required to give the illusion of motion, usually defined as at least 12 images per second. By January, he had improved the scan rate to 12.5 images per second.[citation needed] Then on January 26, 1926 Baird gave what is widely recognized as being the world's first demonstration of a working television system, to members of the Royal Institution and a newspaper reporter from The Times, at his laboratory in 22 Frith Street, Soho, London.[10] Unlike later electronic systems with several hundred lines of resolution, Baird's vertically scanned image, using a scanning disk embedded with a double spiral of lenses, had only 30 lines, just enough to reproduce a recognizable human face.
In 1927, Baird transmitted a signal over 438 miles (705 km) of telephone line between London and Glasgow..."
Farnsworth's first demo was September 1927, by the way, so all of this precedes his public demo.
anti-bellum would be "against war," which would be a good name for a pacifist party, but not so good for the Republicans, who are in general a pro-military, pro-war organization. You're thinking "antebellum," before the war; in the U.S., usually referring (with nostalgia) to the slave-holding south before the Civil War.
Hmmm. What message are they giving here? Parabellum, n Definition: a type of semiautomatic pistol or machine-gun; also called Luger, also written parabellum Etymology: Latin 'for war'
The phrase he seems to be looking for is "we need scholarships for engineering students".
Absolutely not. Scholarships pay schools, not students.
Many scholarships pay living expenses.
We need to make it so that students who are studying needed professions end up with something in their pockets besides massive debt.
Huh? They end up with massive debt because of loans to pay tuition, which is expensive. If students had scholarships, they wouldn't need to take out loans to pay tuiton, and wouldn't end up in massive debt.
But how many slashdot stories about fusion reactors, methanol fuel cells, or flying cars has actually been more than investor fleecing vaporware?
These are not actually Dirac monopoles. These are magnetic quasiparticles that behave in a way that simulates Dirac monopoles.
The Ars Technicha article has the best explanation: http://arstechnica.com/science... Emphasis mine: "Since we can't seem to find one, though, some researchers decided to emulate monopole behavior using an analogous quantum system. They used a Bose-Einstein condensate: a collection of very cold atoms that behaves like a single quantum system."
Calling it a "spending increase" for NASA is a bit strongly worded. What it is, is that the 2013 sequester is not repeated in the 2014 budget-- it's still a cut from the funding from before the 2013 sequester.
His math is bogus, double counting compensation.....
Not to mention this sentence: "According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2012, the average salary for an application software developer was $93,000, with only 90% of such developers making more than $139,000 in salary."
If 90% of such developers make more than $139,000 in salary, it is mathematically impossible for the average salary to be less than $125,000.
(well, on the assumption that salary is non-negative number, it is mathematically impossible).
...Now it's 5 years later are still using the old OS because it would cost another $1million to upgrade the custom code and get new equipment that doesn't use parallel ports for data transfers.
In general, changing the OS breaks some stuff that used to work. It's always best to wait until the people willing to be drive the software first have found workarounds to the problems.
Or you can call support, which will tell you "Oh, that doesn't work with the new operating system."
Electronics exposed to the vacuum of space, will still be bolted to the ISS somehow, so can use the structure as heatsink.
Well, sort of. Electronics bolted to the ISS can conduct waste heat to the structure, but the heat still needs somewhere to go-- what you're just saying is that it can use the thermal conductivity of the ISS structure as a heat pipe, and the structure of the ISS as a radiator. Which is theoretically true, but there's only a limited amount of heat you can get rid of that way.
Electronics inside the ISS can use air cooling in addition to that.
Again, air "cooling" can move heat around, but it still has to go somewhere, which ultimately means it needs to be radiated to space.
Slashdot Mirror
P.S.: I have NO idea how close we are to the point at which the atmosphere becomes essentially opaque to long infra-red. I doubt, however, that the scale is linear. Probably logrithmic.
Logarithmic is correct! Excellent back of the envelope physics. This was derived by Arrhenius; it's been known for over a century now. In fact, if you assume (as you did) an infrared-opaque atmosphere (a "greybody"), this is easy to derive from the adiabatic lapse rate (by defining an effective altitude at which the planet emits infrared, which moves upward as gas is added to the atmosphere).
This is why climate sensitivity is usually expressed in degrees of warming per doubling of carbon dioxide-- it's logarithmic.
So yes: once we've doubled the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we get to put in twice as much to get the same increment of temperature next time, and four times as much to get the same increment of temperature the time after that.
1) easy, CO2 is a pretty shitty greenhouse gas water is much more important.
Water is indeed a very good greenhouse gas. It also condenses out of the atmosphere, in the form of rain. Carbon dioxide does not. As a result, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has a long-term effect. The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, on the other hand, goes in and out of the atmosphere on a short time scale, driven primarily by the temperature-- warmer air holds more water than cold air.
The infrared absorption of carbon dioxide is measured, by the way. It's not something made up.
2) we've been coming out of an ice age for 10,000 years,
Correct-- or, more correct, we are out of the ice age.
that this remains unexplained
Fifty years ago it was unexplained. It's pretty well understood now.
leaves any "blame the humans" nonsense as laughable.
The fact that there causes of climate variation other than human input does not imply that human input doesn't also have an effect. As was pointed out, the effect is small, about 0.7C so far. But it is real.
3) no, you dont, see one and 2
The theory matches the data. If you have another theory, you have to both explain why the theory based on actual measured facts, like the absortion of infrared by carbon dioxide, isn't true, and you also have to explain why we see rising temperature anyway
like the sea rising... panicing about a few mm when in many places it changes on a meter scale every day.
Huh? I'm not panicking. I do, however, believe that it is important to not dismiss the science because you don't like the conclusions.
4) Warming is much better than cooling.
I agree. That is, however, no reason to dismiss the science.
On a global scale, indeed: 0.7C is a small variation. The Earth has had larger variations before, and this is not unusual on a geological scale (although to be fair, its happening at a faster time scale than most of the climate changes in the past.)
However, 0.7C pretty much validates the models. If the anthropogenic greenhouse effect is not real, you need three things:
(1) You need to find an explain an explanation for why the radiative forcing does not increase temperature
(2) You need to find a hitherto-unknown effect that is causing the warming that we measure, and
(3) You need to find an explanation for why the amplifier that amplifies effect (2) to be large enough to increase the temperature doesn't also amplify the greenhouse effect. (and, contrawise, you need to explain why whatever effect it is that cancels out the greenhouse effect, (1), does not also cancel out effect (2).)
While 0.7C may be small, you should also note that we are continuing to put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
They've been doing this on solar cells for a while.
http://energy.sandia.gov/wp/wp...
http://www.solexel.com/Interso...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
The wait until the car drives off the cliff before thinking about putting on the brakes theorem .
I think it's actually the "at least show me that there's a cliff, and where it is so I can decide if I should stop or turn" theory.
OK. Here: Working Group I Report: The Physical Science Basis
The wait until the car drives off the cliff before thinking about putting on the brakes theorem .
See, it's this kind of "we've got to do *something* now!" thinking that's so destructive to rational thought.
So, instead you're adopting a position of "any possible action would be be expensive, therefore no problem exists?
Is this what you call "rational thought"?
If the proposed "fixes" for climate change were minor and otherwise insignificant then nobody would mind. But they are not. The proposed changes will be costly, both in terms of real money and in terms of people's quality of lives.
So, here's a solution. Rather than discussing other possible solutions and looking for ideas that won't be costly in terms of real money and quality of life... let's just attack the science, which doesn't cost much.
If you want someone to make a drastic change in their lives, you need drastically good evidence.
And we have drastically good evidence... except, when people make deliberate point of ignoring all evidence presented that disagrees with the position they've already taken, no amount of evidence, however good, can convince them.
Here's a question for you, by the way. What's your opinion of Murphy's Law? Do you read it as
"anything that can go wrong will go wrong," or do you have an alternate version, "when something can go wrong, we can count on some hitherto-unknown phenomenon cancelling out the known effect to make everything come out right."?
Limo owner wants a defense in case something illegal happens or damage occurs.
Partiers want protection from each other - that no one will publish pictures so they can party freely.
Diffuse but relatively bright UV, implemented with either UV fluorescent tubes or UV LEDs should do the trick. Fit your own cameras with UV filters. Regular cameras will work, but will be affected by a strong 'white haze'.
The bright but diffuse UV should not be harmful to eyes for shorter intervals. Be careful about that, however.
UV??? wouldn't be my first choice. If it's bright enough to haze the image in a camera, it's bright enough to be dangerous if you look into the source-- and if you're doing this without clear warming, you can expect at random some people will be looking at the source.
The problem with UV is that, in any wavelength that's not absorbed by air, you're still only getting one electron per photon on the CCD detectors. So, since the photons are so energetic, it is terribly energy inefficient as a way to overexpose a CCD. You have to pump out a lot of UV to overload a CCD, and that's dangerous.
IR is much better choice-- the photons are low energy, so you're in the opposite regime. Use a wavelength of about 1 micrometer, and you can't see it, but the CCDs can.
Other than that solution, I think you're out of luck.
Beware of nicer cameras which might be fitted with a UV filter. They are common.
Yes, that's another flaw. Most professional-level photographers keep UV filters on their cameras just as a matter of course.
Nice to know... there are still humans around!
Nice to know, but is this new?
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...
If the fire "didn't originate in the battery, the charging system, the adapter or electrical receptacle," then the fact that the car was a Tesla is pretty much irrelevant, since those are the things that make a Tesla distinct from any other kind of car. So, this seems to have been a fire in which the car parked in the garage happened to be a Tesla, rather than something specifically Tesla related.
Um, it's saying high-ranking officials in the Obama administration, not that President Obama is high-ranking.
That's what he intended to say, yes. And if they'd phrased it the way you suggest ("officials in the Obama administration") it could have been clear. But they wanted to load in adjectives.
This was a faux-pas regardless of the political party involved (is the FBI linked to a particular party?).
Yes, I'd say. But the writer wanted to make it crystal clear by making sure he put in in Obama's full name and title-- not "Obama administration," but the "President Barack Obama administration."
What puzzles me is the fervor with which the article repeats the word "Obama", even where they have to rather stretch grammatical rules to work it in ("high-ranking President Barack Obama administration officials spent years covering it up." Nice to know which President Obama: the high-ranking one, not the low-ranking President Obama.).
This started in 2004, five years before Obama took office in 2009. So I'd say that they ought to give Bush a bit of the blame; at least, say, for the first five years spent covering it up.
I've given up on the internet.
Posting "I've given up on the internet" on the internet wins today's oxymoron prize.
So we get that little bonus. ...
We inveted your language. We get that little bonus.
France invented your democratic process. They get that little bonus.
Scotland invented the TV, they get that little bonus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo_Farnsworth
I think the mormon's invented the useful TV....
Well, partly. Much as I love Philo T. Farnsworth:
inventors.about.com/od/tstartinventions/a/Television.htm
But, actually, Scottland has a decent claim. From that universal reference source, Wikipedia (and if you don't like what they say, write something else!):
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_television
"On March 25, 1925, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of televised silhouette images in motion, at Selfridge's Department Store in London.[7] AT&T's Bell Telephone Laboratories transmitted halftone still images of transparencies in May 1925. On June 13 of that year, Charles Francis Jenkins transmitted the silhouette image of a toy windmill in motion, over a distance of five miles from a naval radio station in Maryland to his laboratory in Washington, D.C., using a lensed disk scanner with a 48-line resolution.[8][9]
However, if television is defined as the live transmission of moving images with continuous tonal variation, Baird first achieved this privately on October 2, 1925. But strictly speaking, Baird had not yet achieved moving images for his scanner worked at only five images per second, below the threshold required to give the illusion of motion, usually defined as at least 12 images per second. By January, he had improved the scan rate to 12.5 images per second.[citation needed] Then on January 26, 1926 Baird gave what is widely recognized as being the world's first demonstration of a working television system, to members of the Royal Institution and a newspaper reporter from The Times, at his laboratory in 22 Frith Street, Soho, London.[10] Unlike later electronic systems with several hundred lines of resolution, Baird's vertically scanned image, using a scanning disk embedded with a double spiral of lenses, had only 30 lines, just enough to reproduce a recognizable human face.
In 1927, Baird transmitted a signal over 438 miles (705 km) of telephone line between London and Glasgow..."
Farnsworth's first demo was September 1927, by the way, so all of this precedes his public demo.
feel free to write to dictionary.com with your critique.
anti-bellum would be "against war," which would be a good name for a pacifist party, but not so good for the Republicans, who are in general a pro-military, pro-war organization.
You're thinking "antebellum," before the war; in the U.S., usually referring (with nostalgia) to the slave-holding south before the Civil War.
Hmmm. What message are they giving here?
Parabellum, n
Definition: a type of semiautomatic pistol or machine-gun; also called Luger, also written parabellum
Etymology: Latin 'for war'
Absolutely not. Scholarships pay schools, not students.
Many scholarships pay living expenses.
We need to make it so that students who are studying needed professions end up with something in their pockets besides massive debt.
Huh? They end up with massive debt because of loans to pay tuition, which is expensive. If students had scholarships, they wouldn't need to take out loans to pay tuiton, and wouldn't end up in massive debt.
The phrase he seems to be looking for is "we need scholarships for engineering students".
But how many slashdot stories about fusion reactors, methanol fuel cells, or flying cars has actually been more than investor fleecing vaporware?
These are not actually Dirac monopoles. These are magnetic quasiparticles that behave in a way that simulates Dirac monopoles.
The Ars Technicha article has the best explanation:
http://arstechnica.com/science...
Emphasis mine:
"Since we can't seem to find one, though, some researchers decided to emulate monopole behavior using an analogous quantum system. They used a Bose-Einstein condensate: a collection of very cold atoms that behaves like a single quantum system."
It's a quip-- of course I know that ARM stands for Amalgamated Regional Militia.
"AMD Announces First ARM Processor"
So, how fast CAN it process an Adjustable Rate Mortgage?
Calling it a "spending increase" for NASA is a bit strongly worded. What it is, is that the 2013 sequester is not repeated in the 2014 budget-- it's still a cut from the funding from before the 2013 sequester.
His math is bogus, double counting compensation.....
Not to mention this sentence:
"According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2012, the average salary for an application software developer was $93,000, with only 90% of such developers making more than $139,000 in salary."
If 90% of such developers make more than $139,000 in salary, it is mathematically impossible for the average salary to be less than $125,000.
(well, on the assumption that salary is non-negative number, it is mathematically impossible).
...Now it's 5 years later are still using the old OS because it would cost another $1million to upgrade the custom code and get new equipment that doesn't use parallel ports for data transfers.
In general, changing the OS breaks some stuff that used to work. It's always best to wait until the people willing to be drive the software first have found workarounds to the problems.
Or you can call support, which will tell you "Oh, that doesn't work with the new operating system."
Electronics exposed to the vacuum of space, will still be bolted to the ISS somehow, so can use the structure as heatsink.
Well, sort of. Electronics bolted to the ISS can conduct waste heat to the structure, but the heat still needs somewhere to go-- what you're just saying is that it can use the thermal conductivity of the ISS structure as a heat pipe, and the structure of the ISS as a radiator. Which is theoretically true, but there's only a limited amount of heat you can get rid of that way.
Electronics inside the ISS can use air cooling in addition to that.
Again, air "cooling" can move heat around, but it still has to go somewhere, which ultimately means it needs to be radiated to space.