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This article originally appeared on VICE Australia.It’s a classic prank, the old “lace the birthday cake with marijuana and serve…
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Laughing at those who laugh at science Chris Mooney had one of his usual good Point of Inquiry shows back in November that I just caught, an interview with Michael Gordin , who wrote The Pseudoscience Wars. Gordin considers the idiot Velikovsky to be one of the originators of modern pseudoscience
Should Eli Believe His Lying Eyes or Makarieva James reminds Eli of Makarieva et al in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics as well as featuring on several blogs. One can summarize the entire thing by noting that Makarieva claims that winds are formed when water vapor condenses decreasing the gaseous volume. Were this the major process, air would move inwards towards the area where the condensation occurred. Most others point out that the release of energy from the heat of condensation will blow the air outwards. That’s the summary There was an almost infinite amount of mathturbation about this including the original paper, and Dr. Makarieva was very, well, insistent. Eli OTOH is a member of the reality based community. The Rabett likes to look at what is going on and figure out what it means before turning the math crank. Recently Ms Rabett dragged Eli off into the mountains where he could actually watch the clouds form. He could tell you what happened, but in this world we have the video.
My "prediction": Tolkien was a wrestler Off topic, but still a prediction in that I don’t know the answer: Â I think Tolkien wrestled in his youth. When you read his description of armed combat, it’s pretty simple and somewhat vague, but when it becomes unarmed combat, suddenly every single motion gets described and punching takes a distant second place to grappling. Maybe it’s out there somewhere, but I’ve looked around and not read much about Tolkien’s athleticism – some brief mention of tennis and rugby at Oxford, but that’s about it.
The Egg Was First, No, the Chicken, No Never Mind An evergreen in Eli’s business is which came first exiting the ice age, the temperature or the greenhouse gas concentrations. Since the forcing is orbital changes, it is reasonable to expect at least some initial lag in the greenhouse gas and that includes water vapor, but the length of this lag has been an issue ever since Monnin, et al’s analysis of the EPICA Dome C core inferred a lag of 800 + 200 years. This has become an evergreen amongst the less serious, and indeed, there has even been considerable discussion by reasonable folk . Jeff Severinghaus provided an answer So one should not claim that greenhouse gases are the major cause of the ice ages. No credible scientist has argued that position (even though Al Gore implied as much in his movie)
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.
Too many takedowns to count for David Rose who doesn’t realize that short-term fluctuations in temperature tell you little about long term trends. The latest case is that according to one computer model, the temperature sequence ending in 2012 is close to the bottom edge of the statistical uncertainty range, a point where there’s only supposed to be a 5% chance that random variation produces a temperature below the modeled range.