Hard hitting global and local news
Hard hitting global and local news
Tweet An argument I’ve seen more than once from climate inactivists sometimes comes in the form of a question, "what is the ideal average global temperature," as if the question has a deep implication. In mid-gallop from "there’s no warming; the warming is all natural; humans have little contribution," this is the step, "the warming gets us to a better temperature anyway," before they move on to "the overall negative effect isn’t that bad; it’s too soon to take action; it’s too late to take action." The first naive thought would be that places like Alaska should welcome some warmth, and a lot of the world’s land mass is polar. What they miss is how melting permafrost results in sinking roads and buildings, forests die because insect pests survive mild winters more easily, and coastlines disappear with the loss of sea-ice protection from waves.
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Tweet The European Parliament last week rejected a fix to their cap-and-trade system that would have set a bottom floor to the price of carbon, a floor that likely helped keep California’s system functioning through a tentative start to a better shape (so far).
In the preceding post Eli pointed en passant to an article by EO Wilson where he let the cat out of the bag For many young people who aspire to be scientists, the great bugbear is mathematics. Without advanced math, how can you do serious work in the sciences? Well, I have a professional secret to share: Many of the most successful scientists in the world today are mathematically no more than semi-literate
Tweet Some news and rumors still seem to spread more by word of mouth than online. One of them for me is the issue of potential misuse of solar tax credits in the US, as opposed to feed-in tariffs done elsewhere. Solar tax credits are transferable and cost-based – the higher the cost of the system, then the greater the tax credit that can be sold to other businesses
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.