Tuesday, July 31, 2018
Saturday, July 28, 2018
Climate Sensitiviy
Very few people actually deny that the earth is getting warmer and that man is the cause. The real issue is the Climate Sensitivity to a doubling of CO2, and there is widespread disagreement over what that is. The IPCC gives a range of 1.5 to 4.5 degrees celsius, with them giving an average number of 3 degrees. The skeptics are on the low end of that scale, and some people are claiming it is actually higher with predictions going from 6 to 12 degrees.
It is important to note that the CO2 response is logarithmic. You have to keep doubling it to get the same effect.
The polar ice caps need a 5 degree increase to start melting. I have seen three different sources claim that it would take 5,000 years for the polar ice caps to melt, meaning that we have some time to deal with this problem. According to one source, most of our fossil fuels will run out by the year 2100, and the last one, coal, runs out by 2150. By the year 2100 we will only double the CO2 from the current level, reaching 800 parts per million. If we run out of fossil fuels then we are not going to get much higher than 800 parts per million.
There are strong reasons to think that nuclear fusion will be practical in my lifetime, which is to say in the next 20 to 30 years. We might see it in 10 years. It could make the whole argument mute.
I have repeatedly looked at the data for both CO2 and temperature from 1880 to the present. For some reason a lot of people refer to 1880 as a starting point, and I have had a hard time finding consistent data prior to that date.
In the last 138 years, the average global atmospheric temperature has gone up 1 degree celsius. That is an average increase of less than a 1/100 of a degree per year. The level of CO2 increase is around 43%. The relationship is not linear, but logarithmic, which means that if I were to multiply these figures I would get a Climate Sensitivity that is slightly too high. Still, if I do just basic math, I come up with a Climate Sensitivity of 2.33 degrees celsius, which is well within the range of what some climate skeptics have been saying all along.
Friday, July 20, 2018
Fwd: Liver disease deaths spike among young Americans
the study -- published Wednesday in the BMJ -- found that deaths in the United States due to cirrhosis rose 65% and deaths from liver cancer doubled from 1999 to 2016. In that period, cirrhosis-related deaths increased for every ethnic group and for both men and women.
From 2009 to 2016, the greatest increase in death rate from cirrhosis was among people 25 to 34
Tapper cited a rise in binge-drinking among young people to account for the increase in cirrhosis-related mortality
Wednesday, July 18, 2018
Saturday, July 14, 2018
Wednesday, July 11, 2018
Voyager: The Farthest in Space.
I watched this documentary on Netflix streaming. I really enjoyed it. Maybe it airs on PBS occasionally.
I have a deep interest in physics
I watched this video twice to try to understand it. I will probably watch it a third time. The math is way beyond my level. If I were to work hard enough, maybe I could learn the mathematics, but it wouldn't be worth the effort.
Since I like physics so much, maybe I should have made that my profession. However, I think that I like computer programming even more. In the very early days of micro-computers, back in the 1970's, I seemed to have a talent for programming in the same way I had a talent for chess.
I think that my interest in physics comes from wanting to understand how the universe works. However, there are subtleties in the physical universe that are too deep for anybody but a physicist to understand.
Tuesday, July 3, 2018
Beyond the Higgs: What's Next for the LHC?
This may not interest anybody as much as it does me, but I like it when one video explain
s
all of physics: Sunday, July 1, 2018
Fwd: Active Antarctic Volcano
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet lies atop a major volcanic rift system, but there had been no evidence of current magmatic activity, the URI scientist said. The last such activity was 2,200 years ago, Loose said. And while volcanic heat can be traced to dormant volcanoes, what the scientists found at Pine Island was new.
"You can't directly measure normal indicators of volcanism — heat and smoke — because the volcanic rift is below many kilometers of ice," Loose said
But as the team conducted its research, it found high quantities of an isotope of helium, which comes almost exclusively from mantle, Loose said.
"When you find helium-3, it's like a fingerprint for volcanism. We found that it is relatively abundant in the seawater at the Pine Island shelf.
"The volcanic heat sources were found beneath the fastest moving and the fastest melting glacier in Antarctica, the Pine Island Glacier," Loose said. "It is losing mass the fastest."
He said the amount of ice sliding into the ocean is measured in gigatons. A gigaton equals 1 billion metric tons.
https://today.uri.edu/news/
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