Hard hitting global and local news
Eli Rabett Eli Rabett Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional.
The choices are Explicit Endorsement with Quantification: abstract explicitly states that humans are causing more than half of global warming. Explicit Endorsement without Quantification: abstract explicitly states humans are causing global warming or refers to anthropogenic global warming/climate change as a given fact.
More: Seven generations is a shared perspective with emergency planning
Eli Rabett Eli Rabett Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional. His colleagues are smart, but they have a curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves.
Tweet One of the useful things the Rabett used to do was to explain what happens to the energy when a molecule, say CO 2 (carbon dioxide) although you could also say H 2 O (water vapor) or CH 4 (methane) absorbs light. For the purpose of this post, the photon would be in the infrared region of the spectrum. This is an evergreen for two classes of bunnies Bunnies who don’t realize that the molecule can also emit light. This is a popular one amongst organikers and analytical chemists whose experience with IR spectroscopy is in an absorption spectrum for analysis of samples Bunnies who think that the only way that an excited molecule can get rid of the energy is to emit a photon.   For every CO 2 molecule there are roughly 3000 2500 other molecules in the same volume of air. When a CO 2 molecule collides with one of the other molecules, almost certainly an oxygen or nitrogen molecule, energy transfer occurs. Each CO 2 molecule can be described as having translational, vibrational and rotational energy and the same is true of the collision partner. Any collision can in principle change the amount of any of these forms of energy by any amount subject to conservation of energy and momentum. The probability of this happening depends on the relative translational energy of the collision, the relative orientation of the molecules, their distance of closest approach and the distribution of energy in each of the collision partners prior to the collision. The detailed study of such effects is called collision dynamics or molecular dynamics. Fortunately, we can take thermal averages over many of these variables, either theoretically or experimentally which makes life, theory and experiments much simpler and a hell of a lot less expensive and time consuming. That sort of thing usually goes under the rubric of reaction (when there is one) kinetics or energy transfer studies when there isn’t.
This week’s Science Friday had a segment with Lincoln Brower , an entymologist who studies the monarch butterfly. The monarch population is collapsing faster than the Arctic ice cap, with the area of their wintering grounds in Mexico going from 52 acres to less than 3 in twenty years. In Brower’s words “In previous years we had seventeen sites with colonies, this year eight of those sites had zero butterflies, and the rest of them had very few butterflies. Only one of the colonies had significant numbers. My worry is that they are winking out one by one and they may not be able to recover” There are several reasons for this, among them that the Oyamel forest is being thinned which exposes the area under the canopy and makes it harder for the butterflies to shelter from winter frost in the high forest. Monarchs have an absolutely crazy life cycle . Simplified, overwintering butterflies in Mexico (there are also populations in California) leave Mexico in late March and head for Texas, where they feed on milkweed and create a new generation. The new generation is short lived, and starts the migration north to the Great Lakes region and the east coast. They, in turn, lead to two other short lived generation, with the fourth and final one being the one that migrates back to Oyamel and overwinters. You can follow this on Journey North , a science activity for young and old. Monarch larvae are fussy eaters, depending on milkweed the way that pandas depend on bamboo. It is the only thing that they feed on in all stages of their lives. This has made them indirectly vulnerable to GMCs. The introduction of Roundup Ready crops has lead to broadcast spreading of Roundup, which kills everything EXCEPT the Roundup Ready crops, including the milkweed (and also nectar yielding plants which does nasty things for pollinators). This breaks the Monarch’s lifecycle
Exxon must hate your children because their business model depends on drilling for more and more of the fuels that cause climate disruption, even though fossil fuel companies have already discovered significantly more oil, gas and coal than scientists say we can safely burn . They are creating climate chaos every day — and they’re getting rich doing it..
Tweet One of the surprising things is that the sea is not flat, but there are places where sea level is lower than others, rising faster than others or slower. Mostly bunnies just look at the averages, but the money, just as with temperature and precipitation changes is local. Turns out that the northeast US coast, from Cape Hatteras on north up to Maine is the so called Northeast Hot Spot (NEH) and the rate of sea level rise since 1950 or so is three times the global. Sallenger Doran and Howd explore the " Hotspot of accelerated sea level rise on the Atlantic coast of North America ". Turns out it’s not all bad news because In the late twentieth century, sea levels were relatively low along the North American east coast, particularly north of Cape Hatteras8,9