Wednesday, January 31, 2024
Tuesday, January 30, 2024
The Tide of Science (Climate Change)
It seems to me that this does not rule out positive feedback from water vapor. As I have mentioned, there is widespread disagreement on the feedback from clouds. The alarmists think that the feedback is positive, and the skeptics think that the feedback is negative. Even if the feedback is positive, we don't know to what extent. To get a runaway greenhouse we would need a feedback of 1 or greater. That would be a disaster. However, the figures I have seen have been around 0.6, which means that for every extra degree of warming, you get another partial degree of positive feedback.
I agree with the skeptics on this. Warming produces clouds. Clouds reflect sunlight back into space and make the Earth cooler.
Monday, January 29, 2024
Friday, January 26, 2024
Wednesday, January 24, 2024
4.5 Billion Years in 1 Hour
@john2001plus
2 minutes ago
Rather than proceed at a constant rate, it would have been better to spend less time at the beginning and much more time on the details that come later. Human and mammalian evolution would have made great topics to explore.
A scientific view of the greenhouse effect
Why do some molecules absorb infrared radiation and not others? What is the mechanism for absorbing infrared radiation?
Some molecules are very stable in their electron configuration, so they don't absorb photons because it would take too much energy to knock an electron out of its normal orbit. This is why glass is transparent when other materials are not.
The CO2 molecule can bend and twist making its electrons more exposed to photons. When an infrared photon hits it correctly, the energy of the photon is absorbed which knocks one of the electrons to a higher orbit. This is not the preferred state of the electron, so three nanoseconds later the electron falls back to its ground state. However, it has to give up the energy it absorbed, so it emits an infrared photon. Because of the random nature of quantum physics, the infrared photon is emitted in a random direction. So the primary effect of CO2 in the atmosphere is to take infrared photons that were traveling up and away from the Earth and send some of them back down. CO2 is very good at scattering infrared radiation.
The direct effect of CO2 in warming the atmosphere is not huge. Climate Alarmism depends upon as-of-yet unproven positive feedback models. There are many feedbacks positive and negative, and these are not fully understood. Climate scientists admit that they do not yet fully know how to factor in the feedback from clouds, and there is widespread disagreement over clouds. The alarmists are claiming positive feedback while the skeptics are claiming negative feedback.
Tuesday, January 23, 2024
Sunday, January 21, 2024
Friday, January 19, 2024
Wednesday, January 17, 2024
Giant Structure Found Lurking in Deep Space Challenges Understanding of The Universe
We are not seeing these structures edge on, but perpendicular to our line of sight. They are facing us. That is a remarkable coincidence, although there could be many structures like this that are at a different angle and we don't see as clearly.
Tuesday, January 16, 2024
Fwd: Pitfall of Extrapolation
FYI.
On Mon, Jan 15, 2024 at 12:14 AM Albert wrote:
Hi John,Sometimes you run into something that's interesting but you realize that most of your friends either don't care or don't get it. Well, this YouTube video was one of those interesting things. You're the only person I could think of who would find it interesting. I have to start looking for some more smart friends or at least curious friends. lol
On Tue, Jan 16, 2024 at 7:53 AM John Coffey <john2001plus@gmail.com> wrote:
I saw this one.I am pretty mathematical. I found it interesting, but not enough to figure out the reason.
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: John Coffey <john2001plus@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Jan 16, 2024 at 8:11 AM
Subject: Re: Pitfall of Extrapolation
To: Albert
From: John Coffey <john2001plus@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Jan 16, 2024 at 8:11 AM
Subject: Re: Pitfall of Extrapolation
To: Albert
I was dumb enough to watch the full video here:
This involves math slightly above my level and lacks relevance to my life.
Sometimes math goes so far down the rabbit hole that it feels like naval gazing.
I often thought that I should have been a math major. It would have been more interesting to me than my biology major and fits in well with computer programming.
Monday, January 15, 2024
Sunday, January 14, 2024
Friday, January 12, 2024
Wednesday, January 10, 2024
Tuesday, January 9, 2024
Iconic Black Hole Pioneer Disproves The Existence of Singularities
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnlIjiyhAWE&t=281s
A singularity is a large star that has collapsed down to zero volume. I have always thought that this would be impossible, and many physicists have also questioned it. It means that if we calculate the density we would get a divide by zero error, or infinite density. I think that infinite anything is absurd.
Last year I heard about a new model of physics that as a side note claimed that matter has a maximum density, which means that if true then Black Holes do not have zero volume. The problem with this is that we might need another force that we don't know about yet to enforce this maximum density. We also don't have a good way to test this, and we may never really know what happens inside a Black Hole.
I heard one idea which is that as a star collapses to almost zero volume, gravity would trend toward infinite strength because gravity is inverse to distance, which means theat time dilation also would trend toward infinite. This means that collapse would never finish because time local to the singularity would almost stop.
A singularity is a large star that has collapsed down to zero volume. I have always thought that this would be impossible, and many physicists have also questioned it. It means that if we calculate the density we would get a divide by zero error, or infinite density. I think that infinite anything is absurd.
Last year I heard about a new model of physics that as a side note claimed that matter has a maximum density, which means that if true then Black Holes do not have zero volume. The problem with this is that we might need another force that we don't know about yet to enforce this maximum density. We also don't have a good way to test this, and we may never really know what happens inside a Black Hole.
I heard one idea which is that as a star collapses to almost zero volume, gravity would trend toward infinite strength because gravity is inverse to distance, which means theat time dilation also would trend toward infinite. This means that collapse would never finish because time local to the singularity would almost stop.
There was another theory from last year that Black Holes consume matter but emit Dark Energy, which would explain the accelerating expansion of the Universe. However, the current theory is that Dark Energy is simply a property of empty space.
Sunday, January 7, 2024
Saturday, January 6, 2024
Friday, January 5, 2024
xkcd: Earth Temperature Timeline
https://xkcd.com/1732/
For the last 40 million years, atmospheric CO2 has been in sharp decline. Because of this, the climate for the last million years was very cold and dominated by mass glaciation. Technically, we are still in the Pleistocene ice age which started 2.6 million years ago.
Due to changes in Earth's orbit, called Milankovich cycles, we get a brief warm period every 100,000 years, lasting just 10,000 to 15,000 years. We are at the tail end of one of these warm periods.
The Earth is halfway between its maximum tilt 12,000 years ago, which melts glaciers, and its minimum tilt which allows glaciers to grow.
All of civilization arose during this brief warm period. The YouTube site, Kurzgesagt, refers to now as year 12,024 of the human era.
Tuesday, January 2, 2024
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