Traveling today to meet a friend of WUWT right about the time this post auto publishes.
Behave yourselves. Don’t make me come back here.
Traveling today to meet a friend of WUWT right about the time this post auto publishes.
Behave yourselves. Don’t make me come back here.
Time to be green without the attitude? Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Glad you have a friend Anthony . . . .
Nice to see you getting away a bit lately!
Thanks Willis for fill ing the gap – and then some.
As this is a science blog, I thought I would discuss Einsteins Twin Paradox, but in a way that deals with one of the most common misconceptions.
People often say that the Twin Paradox cannot possibly be right because the twin on Earth is moving relative to the twin in the spaceship with exactly the same relative velocity as the spaceship is to the Earth. They both see each other’s clocks moving slower. So how is it possible for one twin only – the one in the spaceship – to end up younger than the other twin?
Richard Feynman attempted to explain the paradox by saying that only the twin in the space ship feels accelerations, but with all due respect to Richard, I did not feel satisfied with that explanation, because it just subsitutes one question with another.
I got to thinking about the scenario from the point of view of each twin observing the clock of his other twin throughout the whole trip – out and return – and realised that there is a very subtle twist that breaks the symmetry.
When the spaceship twin looks back at Earth on his outward journey he sees his twins clock running slower, based on the fact that each pulse of light has to travel further to reach him than the previous one. Likewise, the twin on the Earth sees the spaceships clock running slower for the same reason. So far, symmetry is maintained.
Now, imagine the spaceship suddenly arrives at the destination and stops. What does he see of the clock back on Earth? Each pulse of light from Earth now travels the same distance to reach him as the last pulse, and seems to run at normal speed. But what of the Earth bound twin? What does he see?
If you said the same, you have just made the classic mistake. You have forgotten that at the moment the space ship comes to a halt at the distant star, the Earthbound twin is still seeing the spaceship as it was before it reached the destination. This must be so, because the light from the arrival event will take years to get back to Earth. In fact, if the spaceship then reverses direction and heads back towards Earth, to the Earth bound twin, the space ship will still appear to be heading on the outward leg, and the spaceships clock will STILL appear to be running slow.
Symmetry is then broken, because the Earth bound twin sees the spaceships clock running slower for a larger portion of the journey time than the space bound twin sees the Earths clock running slower. The space ship may be half way back to Earth before the Earth bound twin even sees the arrival, and halfway back to Earth before he sees the clock speed up.
So, for most of the journey, the Earth bound twin sees the space ships clock run slowly, and only speed up for a short part near the end. The space ship sees the Earths clock running slowly exactly half the trip, and speed up exactly half the trip. And because the Earth bound twin sees the space ships clock going slower for most of the trip, when his astronaut twin lands back on Earth, his clock will show less time has passed. And he must ergo be younger.
And that is the twin paradox explained.
Thank you for listening.
I had to laugh when I saw this.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23418533
Statistical standards at high impact journals like Nature recently found to be low. After MBH98, is anyone surprised?
Hot off the press. Another “model fail” post, this time about the relationships between modeled marine air temperature and sea surface temperature:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2013/02/23/cmip5-ipcc-ar5-climate-models-modeled-relationship-between-marine-air-temperature-and-sea-surface-temperature-is-backwards/
And a recent post about a few of the atypical ENSO indices monitored by the JMA:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/jma-monitors-a-couple-of-atypical-sea-surface-temperature-based-enso-indices-and-provides-climate-tendency-maps-per-index/
Last, on Monday, I posted the mid-February 2013 sea surface temperature update:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/mid-february-2013-sea-surface-temperature-anomaly-update/
Regards
Vince
The twin paradox?!
You’re right that acceleration isn’t the explanation, but it’s really simpler than that. If you travel along two sides of a triangle from A to B to C, the distance is different to travelling direct along the third side from A to C. Spacetime is peculiar in that the most direct route is actually the longest possible rather than the shortest (the Pythagoras rule for right-angled triangles has some extra minus signs in it), but apart from that it’s straightforward geometry.
Another way to see the symmetry is to imagine two people walking at the same speed across an open field. For each, the forward direction is ‘time’ and the sideways direction is ‘space’. But because they are moving relatively to each other, they are facing in slightly different directions. As each marches forward, they see the other drift sideways in ‘space’ and also fall slightly behind them in ‘time’. The other person sees exactly the same thing – the other is drifting the other way in ‘space’ and falling behind them in ‘time’. Both clocks appear to be going slower than the other, but that’s because each is using a different definition of ‘time’.
Similarly, if each carries a ruler to measure their own space, the other sees it shortened, because of the rotation of their coordinate system.
The twin paradox occurs because on the outward journey each sees the other running slower, then when the travelling twin turns around they switch to a coordinate system in which the other twin has jumped ahead of them. Then as they come back together again each sees the other’s clock slowed. Think of it again in the field. You march apart, and your partner falls behind. You turn around to march together again, and suddenly your partner is in front of you! You march towards them and start to catch up, but because you’ve travelled further, you’re still behind them when you cross their path.
It’s simple geometry that you can demonstrate easily to a bunch of schoolchildren out on the playing field. It’s just unfamiliar.
@ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/23/open-thread-weekend-16/#comment-1231335
Vince Causey: Paradox is the key word . . . just because a clock slows down does not mean that time has slowed down. . . . and even if someone ages slower, that does not mean time has slowed down either.
I don’t even think the twin paradox theory was Einsteins, (my memory could be mistaken) at the risk of quoting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox . . . the only question is it correct!
That’s why “time is relative” . . . . it’s why one day on earth is different than one day on mars. But, one rotation of mars is measured on our (earthlings) clocks. It’s kinda like transferring from base 2 to base 7 to base 10. A mathematically feat we learn in grade school and then promptly forget, because we don’t use it.
And so the Twin Paradox theory is a rabbit hole proposition, to confuse the us commoners. Kinda like please, oh please, define: NOTHING.
Having listened to the debate over Global Warming (GW) I would like to offer my take on it all, from a non-partisan, engineering perspective. I live pretty modestly by American standards, and it does offend me a bit to see suburbanites driving H2s and monster pick-ups they do not need. I can afford to drive an H2, but I have better uses for my money. I am all for conserving energy and oil because they are expensive, not because I believe in GW.
I notice that GW has morphed in to Climate Change (CC), which on its face is an admission that evidence for rising global temperatures is lacking. Now any change at all is “evidence”, and of course the climate is always changing everywhere. This smacks of religious faith; a believer sees her god acting everywhere because she was told that her god “drives the universe”. The invisible and the non-existent look a lot alike. To the believers, CC now drives all weather everywhere, even cooling is change, and so no matter what happens the believers feel correct. It is wrong to twist facts to suit theories, it is correct to twist theories to suit facts.
I often hear that “Weather is not climate” coming from the believers, but when I read their articles they often cite extreme weather to be the result of GW. Must there be extreme weather to do the damage claimed? Is it possible to have no extreme weather and still suffer the claimed ill effects of GW? This reminds me of pareidolia, looking for a cryptic sign from heaven, like a god face on a tortilla.
The claims strike me as “the end of the world” all over again. A look in to the history of end times prophesies shows them to be based on faith, not scientific fact. The media love to jerk everyone around, keeping them running scared, always buying more media to feed their morbid fantasies. Big scares mean big profits. At first we had the end of the world because of an asteroid, then it was global cooling, then it was the population explosion, then it was Mayan doomsday, then it was a volcano, then it was Y2k, then it was AIDS, then it was a comet, then it was nuclear war, then it was the last of the crude oil, then it was the flu, it is always something! This is business as usual for the fear mongering press. GW will always be the disaster that is always just around the corner, but never materializes.
The 2005 hurricane season and Katrina seemed to be the final nail in the coffin, but the next season was hurricane free, which had the faithful backpedaling like mad. Just remember, the computer models have many adjustable gains which can be tweaked to report whatever is needed to get the next federal study grant. And notice the hypocrisy from rich believers. They tell us that we need to sacrifice and cut back and go without, but they do not practice what they preach. They zoom around in private jets, easily pay huge electric bills, and drive in SUV motorcades. This reminds me of televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart preaching about living a pious life, then getting busted for hiring a hooker. If they believe then they should lead by example. Imagine everybody in the world flying around the globe preaching to everyone else to stop using so much energy. Reminds me of Multi-Level Marketing.
Some middle class people preach a “green” life style. But look past the claims; they use just as many lights and computers, drive cars, have kids, eat food, heat and cool their homes as those who don’t claim to be “green”. They proudly tell others how green they are for buying a few CF lights, recycling some plastics and buying a few products claiming to be “earth friendly”. In fact it is a form of auto-eroticism – feeling good without making a baby. It is the current fashion to pay lip service but not really sacrifice anything; it is a way to relieve some of the guilt.
GW claims remind me of Irving Langmuir’s description of Pathological Science, which are;
• The maximum effect that is observed is produced by a causative agent of barely detectable intensity, and the magnitude of the effect is substantially independent of the intensity of the cause.
• The effect is of a magnitude that remains close to the limit of detectability, or many measurements are necessary because of the very low statistical significance of the results.
• There are claims of great accuracy.
• Fantastic theories contrary to experience are suggested.
• Criticisms are met by ad hoc excuses.
• The ratio of supporters to critics rises and then falls gradually to oblivion.
Pathological science, as defined by Langmuir, is a psychological process in which a scientist, originally conforming to the scientific method, unconsciously veers from that method, and begins a pathological process of wishful data interpretation.
Another item that bothers me is this: If one area must cool while another warms, then what are the benefits of the cooling? The stories always presume that even a little warming is harmful, so by the same thinking a little cooling must be equally helpful. But we never hear about the good effects of localized cooling, this makes me suspicious of a scam.
Followed a source link from the wikipedia related to CO2, landed at the EPA… yay for NPOV…
So, could one of you Americans complain to the EPA about their webpage here…
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/causes.html
Find the text “Warmer periods coincide with periods of relatively high CO2 concentrations. ” near the graphic that shows past CO2 concentrations and temperature and tell them that they forgot to state that temperature rises 800 years BEFORE CO2.
Maybe those bureaucrats didn’t pay attention since Gore used the deception in 2007. Help them out.
Oh, and maybe they could explain ocean outgassing as well, equilibrium pressure and all that…
One of my favorite forms of humor is “bloopers”, innocent mistakes that end up funny. We had the Kermit Shafer albums when I was a kid. I just came across this on YouTube. Enjoy.
While we’re at Einstein…
Goedel was at the same university, Princeton, and as a birthday present he presented Einstein a solution of Einstein’s field equation – the Gödel metrik. It’s a weirdly rotating universe in which some light rays form closed loops, arriving where they started – allowing a form of time travel.
It is said that Einstein wasn’t that happy about the present…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_metric
On Sea Level Shenanigans
Real Science did a post on Hansen now predicting 8 meters of sea level rise! A graph depicted the idiocy of the prediction, going from a slight upslope of sea level (for Los Angeles) gains over the 20th century, to suddenly being ratcheted nearly straight up. Insane. The new prediction is laughable, but I also noted that that slight upslope of the past should actually be.. flat. My comment:
Yes [CheshireRed], that’s my reaction. Lol hilarious, a joke. It’s so funny though that I almost forgot to laugh. In fact that Los Angeles [sea level gain] line should be flat — flat out flat — since at least the 1960s, because people see, in person on beaches, that there has been no change. Not 15mm of change, no change. Santa Monica Beach… is the same as it was, in 1970. Up and down the CA coast (and the whole world, I’ve heard), it’s the same. Malibu, the same. Big Sur, I know, because I’m familiar with the (big) rocks of a particular beach, and I did a tide calibrated check: 1972 (I used to tidepool fish, and pay attention to the tides and tidepools) / 2010, the same, exactly. Yeah, the line should be flat, but the “data” says otherwise, there are “adjustments” for… what? No adjustments from reality. There’s been no change. Flatten that sea-level line out.
Regarding the organized crime aspect of wind/solar… note the quote at the end. I wonder if that good professor would be willing to entertain a few questions regarding that, among other things, to Bill McKibben….
Italian police seize alleged Calabrian mafia boss
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hinvgHJk_M8MUy1-Zxb6lO-NBVFw
In recent decades, the ‘Ndrangheta has become the largest and most feared of Italy’s four large organised crime syndicates, which include Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, the Camorra in the area of Naples and the smaller Sacra Corona Unita in the southeastern region of Puglia.
The arrests in northern Italy, aimed at the ‘Ndrangheta’s commercial interests, “confirm that northern Italy is the true theatre of operations for the ‘Ndrangheta,” anti-mafia prosecutor Alberto Cisterna told AFP.
Healthcare “is the sector they prefer, since it allows them to establish contacts with politics and with public administration,” Cisterna said.
The operation showed how the ‘Ndrangheta is organised in a vertical structure, in some ways resembling that of Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mafia, and not a horizontal one as earlier suspected, observers said.
“The ‘Ndrangheta still has its head in the heart of Calabria,” Antonio Nicaso, a ‘Ndrangheta expert and professor of the history of organised crime at Middlebury College in the US state of Vermont, told AFP
————————
Middlebury College/Mckibben
http://www.middlebury.edu/newsroom/experts/mckibben/node/25001
At the “Telegraph” website, an article about Scottish onshore wind farms possibly causing more CO2 emissions than they save over a 25 year lifetime. The reason is that many are built on peat bogs, a huge natural carbon store. The road building required for the wind farms causes the peat bogs to dry out, releasing massive amounts of CO2.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/9889882/Wind-farms-will-create-more-carbon-dioxide-say-scientists.html
From JoNova-
A doctor named Helen Caldicott, claimed on ABC that Monckton of Brenchley has a specific medical condition. Her unethical and wrong insinuation was that such a condition should preclude Christopher Monckton from engaging in the debate on climate.
Jo Nova writes with sharp irony:
“Caldicott is a doctor and also the co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, “an organization of 23,000 doctors”. [See her Bio http://www.helencaldicott.com/about/ ]
Perhaps she thinks it would be “socially responsible” to start a show where panels of doctors speculated on the medical conditions of celebrities they had never met?”
Quite rightly Christopher Monckton has written to ABC (as well as medical registration boards) making a number of points.
http://joannenova.com.au/
Last year when I mentioned this on an open thread I got some positive response. The eagle cam at decorah, Iowa has been activated. Watching it you get a teriffic view of a pair of Bald Eagles raising their brood. All the way from courting through egg laying through feeding to fledging. Try it and enjoy.
Decadal-Extent Complex Raised Cosine Wavelet Semiannual LOD Amplitude
http://imageshack.us/a/img692/5952/lodraisedcosine.png
New 2013 paper from Norway – but I said it in five years ago, in January 2008.
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/carbon_dioxide_in_not_the_primary_cause_of_global_warming_the_future_can_no/
I personally discovered the relationship between dCO2/dt and temperature in late 2007 and published the paper on icecap.us in January 2008. This dCO2/dt is the source of the 9 month lag in CO2 after Lower Troposphere temperatures, also demonstrated in my paper ( but the latter fact was previously noted by Kuo et al in 1990, Keeling et al in 1995, and Veizer in 2005 ).
The correlation between dCO2/dt and temperature is robust – all the data and calculations are available in Excel at icecap.
The evidence suggests that varying atmospheric CO2 is not a cause of climate change, it is an effect.
_______________________
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818112001658
Global and Planetary Change
Volume 100, January 2013, Pages 51–69
The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature
• Ole Humluma, b, , ,
• Kjell Stordahlc,
• Jan-Erik Solheimd
• a Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1047 Blindern, N-0316 Oslo, Norway
• b Department of Geology, University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS), P.O. Box 156, N-9171 Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway
• c Telenor Norway, Finance, N-1331 Fornebu, Norway
• d Department of Physics and Technology, University of Tromsø, N-9037 Tromsø, Norway
Abstract
Using data series on atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperatures we investigate the phase relation (leads/lags) between these for the period January 1980 to December 2011. Ice cores show atmospheric CO2 variations to lag behind atmospheric temperature changes on a century to millennium scale, but modern temperature is expected to lag changes in atmospheric CO2, as the atmospheric temperature increase since about 1975 generally is assumed to be caused by the modern increase in CO2. In our analysis we use eight well-known datasets: 1) globally averaged well-mixed marine boundary layer CO2 data, 2) HadCRUT3 surface air temperature data, 3) GISS surface air temperature data, 4) NCDC surface air temperature data, 5) HadSST2 sea surface data, 6) UAH lower troposphere temperature data series, 7) CDIAC data on release of anthropogene CO2, and 8) GWP data on volcanic eruptions. Annual cycles are present in all datasets except 7) and 8), and to remove the influence of these we analyze 12-month averaged data. We find a high degree of co-variation between all data series except 7) and 8), but with changes in CO2 always lagging changes in temperature. The maximum positive correlation between CO2 and temperature is found for CO2 lagging 11–12 months in relation to global sea surface temperature, 9.5–10 months to global surface air temperature, and about 9 months to global lower troposphere temperature. The correlation between changes in ocean temperatures and atmospheric CO2 is high, but do not explain all observed changes.
DOES ANYONE KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THIS, OR
WOULD CARE TO COMMENT ? (From The Times) :
Tom Whipple Science Correspondent
Published at 12:01AM, November 8 2012
The public needs to wake up and smell the coffee with regard to the issue of climate change, scientists said yesterday — or we might not have any coffee to smell.
Researchers at Kew believe that the wild arabica coffee bean, whose cultivated cousin is the basis of most of the coffee drunk around the world, could die out in the wild within 70 years. If it does, a main source of genetic diversity, essential in maintaining the health of the cultivated crop, will be lost.
“The recorded temperatures tell a very frightening story,” said Aaron Davis, head of coffee research at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He said that in Ethiopia, “between 1960 and 2006 the average temperature has gone up by 0.28 degrees a decade”. The result is that wild coffee, which is native to East African highland climates, is running out of places to grow.
Bill Illis — if you’re around — or anyone else who can answer:
Where can I find the Seattle 500mb = 500hPa GPH time series illustrated here?
Johnstone, J.A. (2008). Quasi-biennial synchrony of the extratropical troposphere and the solar magnetic field.
http://solar.physics.montana.edu/SVECSE2008/pdf/johnstone_svecse.pdf
The article flags up what appears to be a clue of substantial importance. Even if Johnstone’s speculation is completely wrong, it shouldn’t be too hard to crack the code of this wave.
Lewandowsky’s practice of ‘Punitive Psychology’ finds a cheerleader at the New York Times:
Unlocking the Conspiracy Mind-Set
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/21/unlocking-the-conspiracy-mindset/
John Bell, I appreciated your (I hope it was) stream of conscious rant.
Vince Causey says: February 23, 2013 at 1:28 pm
As this is a science blog, I thought I would discuss Einsteins Twin Paradox, but in a way that deals with one of the most common misconceptions. …
Nope.
Vince i think you are mixing up the relativity theories;
Special theory of relativity deals with inertial frames of reference
and general theory with accelerating frames. By your reasoning the earth twin will not “see” the traveling twin a long time after he arrives in his twin’s face.
Anthony,
James Delingpole has an interesting challenge that may interest your readers at http://bogpaper.com/2013/02/22/delingpole-on-friday-governments-cant-spend-their-way-out-of-a-recession-by-stimulating-demand/#comment-1251
The challenge is toward the end but it is,
“What we need to do is find a way of expressing, lucidly, entertainingly, persuasively, why it is that all those liberal-lefties who believe that it makes economic sense for government to go on spending at current levels are not just wrong but demonstrably wrong.
So that’s my challenge to you, Bogpaper readers. Especially those of an economic bent.”
And I urge folk to check out the comments by poster ‘dr’ and ‘david’.
It certainly gave me food for thought!
From Canada…
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/story/2013/02/18/sk-concerns-raised-about-carbon-business-2013.html
“A climate change initiative that’s one of Saskatchewan’s most prominent scientific projects has been embroiled for years in allegations of conflict of interest and financial waste, CBC has learned.
The Regina-based company known as IPAC-CO2 (the International Performance Assessment Centre for the Geologic Storage of Carbon Dioxide) was formed in 2008 to create international standards for carbon sequestration, which is the storage of carbon dioxide underground.
Millions of dollars from government and industry went into the venture, which is located at the University of Regina campus. Now a CBC investigation has discovered that some people running the company were in an apparent conflict of interest.
Among those who were asking questions about IPAC was Carmen Dybwad, who became CEO of the company in 2010.
She was excited to start at the project that’s right at the heart of the Saskatchewan government’s environmental plan. (…)”
@ John Bell,
That pretty much covers it, check out Bob Tisdale’s take on the same, he uses the sea surface temperatures for data, which most seem to agree is the best we currently have.
This whole scam is a rerun of soothsayers running amuck and taking advantage of modern education and bureaucracy.
Conditions were perfect when the scam started,academia & governments full of poorly educated, wrt to maths and science, self important people who will never ever admit to ignorance.
Weaned on the likes of Tiny Tim, nuclear war and fear of the future.
Awash in feel good social scienciness.
The fables of Chicken Little, The Emperors New Clothes and such were out of fashion and appeal to authority was at a societal peak.
We were rich, the housing bubble would never end,bankers were honest and our politicians had the nations best interests at heart.
Any more malarky I can sell you?
As evil,greedy people are destructive to everything they touch, this scam too is failing .
Its awful to be so sure that you are the only one who can run everyone lives better than they can.
Yet too stupid to realize your own is a mess.
Very early on, those who must lead us, for our own good of course, found out they could not get elected in sufficient numbers to hold control, so they seem to have planned this power grab.
Using fear, to stampede the “common folk” into granting the elites control.
The UN being promoted as central control for the global citizen.
Now I do not yet know how much is malice or how much stupidity but the UN,politicians,NGOs, government agencies and our media are in for a rough ride.
We are broke and bitter because these clowns did not do their jobs.
Any of those parties, if acting with integrity, could have exposed the nonsense inherent in CAWG, simply by asking to see the evidence.
Currently with the consensus myth destroyed, no evidence has yet been produced confirming any manmade warming, yet politicians continue to attempt policy restricting CO2 and no inquiries into how this scam managed to run for so long. Governments protect their own, not their citizens.
Now with CO2 emissions up= global temperature flatlining.
Still none of these groups is questioning their assumptions.
I believe that the Anthropogenic Weathers Scare was/is created by our government agencies, propagated by these agencies and is still protected by them.
This will become a history lesson in how bureaucracies can not be trusted, as they are similar in character to cancer, CAGW has been wonderful for agency budgets.
The only way voters get their interests protected, is by gutting government on a regular basis.
If not kept small and in fear of society, government becomes what we have now, a blind, grasping greedy master, with no clue what wealth really is.
Sop now we are poor again, poverty makes informed citizens and removes the overburden of waste and bureaucracy that has impoverished us.
Human nature does not change, so the cycles continue, but these current “leaders” we will attempt to evade the consequences of their actions, by creating an external enemy to focus our anger upon someone other than themselves.
Same old game Boom, Bust, Depression, war and repeat.
Same people get richer with each cycle?
@John Bell, I too appreciated your comment, but I didn’t find it to be a rant. Solid points. Definitely worth my time to read it. Thanks! I like the discussion of AGW and pathological science. And: “GW will always be the disaster that is always just around the corner, but never materializes.” That is certainly 100% true with sea level! See my post above.
Raspberry,
Einsteins’s paradox is not considered a paradox among the folks who operate the satellites overhead as satellite GPS clocks in orbit have to adjust precisely to what the theory of relativity dictates. I could be wrong though but I was left to believe by an article some years ago that our accuracy in chronology had long surpassed any doubt about relative time.
As for Holocene temps, I am trying to find articles from an either Scandinavian, Icelandic, Western Canadian or Washington State biologist who had found a thermometer in some type of mussels and, unlike Briffas trees, showed no divergence problem.
Then there is the forty plus graphs from Ice Age Now.
John another;
I am trying to find articles from an either Scandinavian, Icelandic, Western Canadian or Washington State biologist who had found a thermometer in some type of mussels and, unlike Briffas trees, showed no divergence problem.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/10/paleo-clamatology/
Lubos has just produced a nonlinear fit to the carbon dioxide curve at Mauna Loa:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2013/02/mauna-loa-carbon-dioxide-fit.html
A mere 6th-degree Fourier expansion with 12 parameters (6 for sines, 6 for cosines) fit by nonlinear approximation. Von Neumann’s elephant will not only be wiggling his trunk, but his ears, tail, and balancing on one leg simultaneously.
Kajajuk says:
February 23, 2013 at 6:32 pm
I don’t think I’ll have a chance to play with some of the math, but this is all in the realm of Special Relativity, IIRC. (A good test is the math – if it’s easy, it’s SR, if I don’t understand it it’s GR.)
I learned about the time dilation through the clock which was a photon bouncing between two mirrors and the path it takes. Short as view on the spaceship with the clock, longer from outside because the photon is traveling in a longer zig-zag path. I’m not sure if I can fit that into Vince’s description.
BTW, I think the first measurment of time dilation was in the 1960s when people flew an atomic clock around the world and it came back with a lagged count.
The GPS satellites in their 12 hour orbit make it easy to observe.
Note that a satellite orbiting the Earth is constantly accellerating toward the center of the planet, so acceleration may
still be important.
A false theory can be accepted because scientific facts can be misinterpreted or unnaturally forced to fit a dominant theory. ‘Handbook of Biblical Evidence,’ John Ankerberg & John Weldon
I have a question and sorry if I upset people by asking , so please don’t go “oh my god how stupid is this guy”
So here goes
Light leaves a star, on its travels it gets observed by two “people” but one of those (although both looking from my point exist at the same time) because he is behind a gravity source that “bends” light must see it at a different moment should he not?? I am not sure if I phrased it right but I compared it to 2 boats traveling the same speed going through a bend in a river the one with the straight track must arrive earlier than the one that has to bend?
Shortly after I posted some one referred me to an article that explained some of this, so thanks anyway there is some light at the end of the tunnel just not sure yet who is shining it
Mean while. from the BBC another “we’re all gonna die” scare story” Evidence from Siberian caves suggests that a global temperature rise of 1.5C could see permafrost thaw over a large area of Siberia’.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21549643
REx
Simply not true about Ethiopia. Here is the data in graphic form
http://www.rimfrost.no/
THere has been a slight cooling over the last 50 years
tonyb
Here’s something from the Sunday Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/9889882/Wind-farms-will-create-more-carbon-dioxide-say-scientists.html
It’s all to do with Scotland but could just as easily apply to other areas of the world.
James Bull
Vince Causey says:
February 23, 2013 at 1:28 pm
As this is a science blog, I thought I would discuss Einsteins Twin Paradox, but in a way that deals with one of the most common misconceptions.
As you accelerate towards a planet the light from your spaceship will blue shift. So the people on the planet you are travelling to will see you get faster and faster and feinter and feinter until you have blue shifted so much the light coming from your space ship will be in above the visible spectrum and they will not see you coming. As you decelerate you will slowly become visible to them.
Likewise the light from Earth will red shift until it is below the visible spetrum of those on the spaceship.
Not only that as you accelerate your mass will increase and time will slow down for you.
That’s my theory anytway!
Twins Paradox
The paradox assumes that light from the clocks is time but it’s not it’s just a record of an event.
Time is just an illusion. there is only the here and now.
Time is distance. Everywhere you see in the universe is in the past relative to you. So if you travel towards a planet you will be travelling into its future as you are in its past at the moment, and the planet you left will move into your past. Your local time will not change as it is relative to you.
Nullius in Verba says:
Thanks Nullius. I like your description of two people marching in the field. Space-time is a difficult concept, but your analogy does a good job of showing how time can lag behind.
DirkH,
“Goedel was at the same university, Princeton, and as a birthday present he presented Einstein a solution of Einstein’s field equation – the Gödel metrik. It’s a weirdly rotating universe in which some light rays form closed loops, arriving where they started – allowing a form of time travel.”
Yes, I’ve heard that mentioned. I believe in requires a closed universe though. Recent measurements to detect any curvature in the universe have failed to identify any. So that leads to the intriguing conclusion that we live in a flat, open universe which is infinite in extent.
Laurie Bowen,
“Vince Causey: Paradox is the key word . . . just because a clock slows down does not mean that time has slowed down. . . .”
Does it not? Think about it. The clock is just one particular measure of the rate of passing of events – in this case, the flashing of the numbers as they roll by on the clock. It is also the case that every other visible event appears to slow down for the same reason – the beard on the space traveller’s face growing slower, for example. If you can show by deduction that when the twins are brought back together the travellers clock shows a smaller elapsed time, then the travellers body would also show a smaller elapsed time. Therefore, in a real sense, time has slowed.
Also, one of the key tenets of relativity, is that any experiment conducted in any moving reference frame must yield the same result about the laws of physics. If the space traveller could conduct an experiment without looking outside his reference frame, and managed to observe the clock running slower, this would mean the laws of physics had changed within his moving frame. Because the laws of physics cannot be seen to have changed, every event must have slowed down by the same amount – the thought processess in the brain, the beating of a heart, the swinging of a pendulum. Therefore, time itself must be running slower.
Regards
vc
Mainstream Media and TV News is an Infomercial always trying to sell you the idea of Perpetual War. That is their Main Goal. Prove me Wrong!
Kajukuk,
“Kajajuk says:
February 23, 2013 at 6:32 pm
Vince i think you are mixing up the relativity theories;
Special theory of relativity deals with inertial frames of reference
and general theory with accelerating frames. By your reasoning the earth twin will not “see” the traveling twin a long time after he arrives in his twin’s face.”
I beg to differ. Suppose the space traveller was travelling back from a star 10 lyr away, at 1/2C. Let’s also imagine distance markers at convenient spacings. When he passes the halfway mark back to Earth, the Earthbound twin would observe this happening 5 years after the event, at which time the space ship would be 2.5 lyr from Earth. The Earth bound twin would see this event 2.5 years later when the space ship is 1.25 lyr from Earth. 1.25 lyr later he is 0.675lyr from Earth.
When he is very near the Earth, say just passing 1 light second away, the Earth twin would see him 1 second later. One can continue to shorten the distance, and it becomes clear that the time difference approaches zero. This reasoning applies to any approaching body at any speed – the light arrives before the body arrives.
Hope that helps.
manicbeancounter says:
February 23, 2013 at 3:28 pm
“At the “Telegraph” website, an article about Scottish onshore wind farms possibly causing more CO2 emissions than they save over a 25 year lifetime. The reason is that many are built on peat bogs, a huge natural carbon store. The road building required for the wind farms causes the peat bogs to dry out, releasing massive amounts of CO2.”
This is huge! Peat is one of the sacred cows in the UK. Garden companies have all but phased out peat in compost for ethical reasons – environmental groups have made using peat one of the worst sins. They say it takes hundres of years for peat to renew itself. Now, suddenly, Renewables UK (a lobby group for wind energy) have had a change of heart: “Peat can renew itself in just a year,” they say.
Here’s a question: when politicians say that we must limit global warming to 2K, against what baseline is that measured? Is it against freezing pre-industrial times, say 1750, or some recent 30-year period such as 1971-2000 or 1981-2010?
TIA,
Rich.
When one of the twins travels to Alha Centauri, as he approaches light speed, all lengths on Earth contract and the mass of the Earth grows infinitely…
Four approximate observations.
1. The satellite global temperature data rose between December 2012 and January 2013 by about 0.3 C.
2. The NOAA/NCDC data for the same period rose less than 0.2 C.
3. The daily temperature at 600 mbar started falling around Feb 7, and is now around the middle temperature for the 21st century.
4. A SSW event started at the beginning of January.
Is it possible that the SSW caused a transient elevation of temperatures at 600 mbar during January 2013?
Russian Deputy PM Dmitry Rogozin wants the UN to take over pondering what to do about the asteroid and meteor threat. Well, at least this threat is real and ever-present.
So, yeah, let’s hand it to the UN. So they can set up a committee (IPEE – International Panel on Extraterrestrial Events?); hold expensive global conferences; have 5-yearly reports half written by pre-grad students; employ oodles of bureaucrats; give more posts to kleptocratic third-world functionaries, and win a Nobel peace prize for nothing.
Or we could actually *do* something about it……
REPLY: The UN, where actuality goes to die. – A
Kelvin Vaughan says:
February 24, 2013 at 2:35 am
“Twins Paradox
The paradox assumes that light from the clocks is time but it’s not it’s just a record of an event.
Time is just an illusion. there is only the here and now.”
Well, it depends on your definition of time. Einsteins general theory has Time as part of the fabric of Space – Spacetime – and the two are inseparable. As you move through space you also move through time. To be exact, if you move 186,000 miles you would gain a second of time. If you could move at the speed of light, you would gain a second for every second of travel, so that your clock would stop.
I agree that there is only the here and now. Otherwise you would be able to jump backwards and forewards in time. Although you can travel into the future, you are not jumping into the future as in Doctor Whos Tardis, but simply contriving to make your time pass more slowly than the rest of us.
Nevertheless, certain aspects of time are real. Entropy increases from moment to moment in any closed system – the arrow of time – which makes the macroscopic world rather more time constrained than the quantum world, where time is reversible. Also, things move at predictable rates and this is a measure of the uniformity of time. If this were not so, physics would be impossible, as objects would move at random and unpredictable rates for no apparent reason.
When I look at myself in the mirror, I would love to believe that time is an illusion, but alas, the face looking back at me begs to differ.
I wish I had the patience displayed by many on this site, when dealing with Progressives and Alarmists, however I simply don’t. Last night I felt the need to blow off some steam, and wrote something called, “A Rant: The Silent Sun.” I likely deserve a scolding, but some may be amused:
http://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/the-quiet-sun/
davidmhoffer says:
February 23, 2013 at 8:19 pm
John another;
I am trying to find articles from an either Scandinavian, Icelandic, Western Canadian or Washington State biologist who had found a thermometer in some type of mussels and, unlike Briffas trees, showed no divergence problem.
===================================
David, put this in google: Sweden came up first
temperature reconstruction mussels
Just for your viewing pleasure Here is Mt. Etna:
We be ants…
Dirk,
Unfortunately there is no reasoning with the high priests at the EPA.
latitude;
David, put this in google: Sweden came up first
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The guy asked for articles, I knew of one, and provided a link.
People bust your chops for the strangest reasons these days while providing not a single link of their own to answer the original question.
John Bell says:
February 23, 2013 at 2:25 pm
John,
Well said. Unfortunately those in the media continue to confuse things. Watching the Match Play Golf Championships yesterday, one of the correspondants (I believe it was Jimmy Roberts) referred to the snow that delayed play the first day as “due to the climate that day”. Sad.
Now the only thing I would disagree with is this statement:
“I live pretty modestly by American standards, and it does offend me a bit to see suburbanites driving H2s and monster pick-ups they do not need.”
I really wish you had said “that I believe they do not need”. Small point but many of us cringe at the thought of someone else dictating what we want, need or should have.
Ric Werme says:
February 23, 2013 at 9:52 pm
BTW, I think the first measurment of time dilation was in the 1960s when people flew an atomic clock around the world and it came back with a lagged count.
As the clock was going round the world, one side of it would have travelled further than the other
therefor it would be different ages on either side.
Vince Causey says:
February 24, 2013 at 7:03 am
When I look at myself in the mirror, I would love to believe that time is an illusion, but alas, the face looking back at me begs to differ.
That’s just the wear and tare of life. You know your getting old when you see your father looking back at you.
[“Tare” of life? Is it always that taxing? 8<) Mod]
I need some help with this: More snowstorms should NOT be “what is expected” with global warming. Can someone here please provide the specific and correct details as to what is going on when excess water vapor in the atmosphere precipitates out as snow rather than as rain?
The context here relates to the weather events of recent large snow storms being, according to the alarmists, “exactly what they expect” (sure!) because of global warming. These newly arriving special pleadings contend that a warmer Earth causes more evaporation, more moisture in the atmosphere, and thus more precipitation, thus more snow in the winter. If we provisionally accept the increased moisture claim, the further implication seems to be that the only difference between snow and rain is like 31 degrees instead of 33 degrees.
We never see skeptics claiming that a heat wave (weather) is indicative of global cooling, but the alarmists don’t mind (or have to, I guess) claim a snowstorm indicates global warming; counterintuitive and convoluted. Exactly what is it that IS wrong with the alarmists’ argument? What physical laws are they invalidating this time?
I cannot find or get my mind around exactly what happens during an evaporation/condensation/freezing event (ocean water to snow), but I feel the “gotcha” must be the energies associated with the phase changes. With evaporation-to-rain, there are two exchanges of the same amount of latent heat of evaporation: one in, one out. With the evaporation-to-snow process, there is the additional heat of fusion that must be taken up by the surroundings when snowflakes form. The heat of fusion (or melting) is smaller than the heat of evaporation (or condensation), but still huge relative to heat that causes temperature changes. Those peaky phase changes. Further, the taking up of heat seems necessarily to be facilitated by a COOLER Earth, certainly not by a warmer one.
Popular presentations of weather treat evaporation, rain, and snow as something the atmosphere does because it “feels like doing it”. Dig deeper and your own intellect (even with a grounding in physics) may keep asking deeper questions. Simply as a matter of education, what is really going on? Thanks for any insight.
Dear Lance Wallace,
I beg to disagree that the Fourier expansion fit for the CO2 is an elephant. I have checked that by using the 20 years between 1974 and 1994, one gets a virtually identical shape of the seasonal CO2 as from the years 1994-2013 and this shape is very far from a simple cosine and shows quite some structure. A good theory of vegetation should be able to reproduce this function.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2013/02/mauna-loa-carbon-dioxide-fit.html?m=1
All the best
Lubos
Perhaps a small chink of light starting to be shone on the scam.?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2283558/How-MPs-pay-subsidised-eco-firms-set-insane-new-carbon-targets-send-heating-bills-sky-rocketing.html
One can but hope
John another says: February 23, 2013 at 7:09 pm
Raspberry, Einsteins’s paradox is not considered a paradox among the folks who operate the satellites overhead as satellite GPS clocks in orbit have to adjust precisely to what the theory of relativity dictates. …
Ric Werme says: February 23, 2013 at 9:52 pm
… BTW, I think the first measurement of time dilation was in the 1960s when people flew an atomic clock around the world and it came back with a lagged count. The GPS satellites in their 12 hour orbit make it easy to observe. Note that a satellite orbiting the Earth is constantly accelerating toward the center of the planet, so acceleration may still be important.
The GPS satellites operate in a rotating reference frame with regards to each other, and rotating frames have special rules. The adjustments they apply are to correct the Sagnac effect.
While you get the time dilation and mass increase, the speed of light is not constant in a rotating frame (nor even a speed limit), therefore you don’t need or get Lorentz contraction. Relativity of simultaneity doesn’t apply in the overall rotating frame either, as it would allow backwards time travel.
———————–
Vince Causey, Laurie Bowen,
Yes, time itself slows, but only as measured from someone else’s frame of reference. The twin who returns has to accelerate to do so, and acceleration moves you from one inertial frame to a different one. It is this change of reference frame where the twins’ time difference manifests itself.
@ Caleb ,thats a polite way of saying” its the sun stupid “.
Nice rant, civil too. I too was initially confused by Climatology (TM the religion) willingness to pretend that history never happened. For who in their right mind, would deliberately tell lies so blatant that any adult could refute? Past cycles of weather are writ large in our recorded histories,in the very stone underfoot, there is nothing new about todays weather, so what was going on?
I thought, they can’t be serious,this BS will never sell.
I forgot the 5 laws of human stupidity.
Progressives abandoned liberal as the name sank in public esteem.
Progressive debt, progressive reduction of wealth, progressive loss of freedom, that label will be abandoned soon enough, then they will call themselves internationalist or global citizen.
Course a parasite will let you call it anything you want, as long as it gets to feast at your expense.
A bit more about the source of the “Africa warms 3.5 degrees in 20 years” claim in the BBC’s Africa documentary here on my blog http://mygardenpond.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/more-about-the-bbcs-africa-temps/
It is time to vote for the 2013 Bloggies awards. The finalists have just been posted.
These finalists may be of interest to readers-
Best Australian or New Zealand Weblog-
Australian Climate Madness
Best Science or Technology Weblog-
ClimateAudit, WUWT, JoNova, Tallbloke’s Talkshop
Best Weblog about politics-
James Delingpole, GWPF, American Thinker
Weblog of the Year-
WUWT
Voting is open now, and closes on March 17.
http://2013.bloggi.es/
Lance Wallace says:
February 23, 2013 at 8:22 pm
“Lubos has just produced a nonlinear fit to the carbon dioxide curve at Mauna Loa:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2013/02/mauna-loa-carbon-dioxide-fit.html
A mere 6th-degree Fourier expansion with 12 parameters (6 for sines, 6 for cosines) fit by nonlinear approximation. Von Neumann’s elephant will not only be wiggling his trunk, but his ears, tail, and balancing on one leg simultaneously.”
He’s just analyzing the spectral composition of the seasonal signal after subtracting an exponential trend. The criticism is silly.
Anybody seen this, the Northern Hemisphere sets new all time cold record temperature.
-96.1F, Oymyakon, Siberia.
http://www.dailypaul.com/275815/northern-hemisphere-sets-new-all-time-record-cold-temperature-961-f-in-oymyakon-siberia?page=1
Vince Causey
Nullius in Verba
Laurie Bowen
Mike McMillan
John another
Kelvin Vaughan
and all others who may have commented on the Einstein’s Twin Paradox. As a mere down to earth engineer I was somewhat troubled by the Newton – Einstein gravity theories ‘conflict’. Just as an exercise I made an attempt to join two together, which appear to be possible if gravity field has a wave property ‘similar’ to an electromagnetic field spaning the cosmos.
Unintentional consequence is that there is no need for the existence of ‘dark matter’, the Universe may not expand for ever, i.e. fly apart, and gravitational wave can not be measured since its wavelength is equal to diameter of the existing Universe. Pretty fundamental if true but is it ? and if not, why not?
Here are details of my simple calculation
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/UC.htm
Don’t take it too seriously, but by all means have a go at it.
-96.1F was the record before (-71.3c) so not sure what to make of it of the claim above. (confusion)
Vince Causey says:
February 24, 2013 at 3:13 am
But these distances you speak of are relative, are they not. The moving twin ‘sees’ a contracted distance and the Earth bound twin ‘sees’ the proper length. The speed of light is constant no matter what the relative speed of the inertial frames (the second postulate of SR). The dilation of time happens as the length contracts, hence relative.
Isn’t the “paradox” that the difference in apparent aging of the twins is unintuitive, but is mute if you accept the consequences of Special Relativity.
You cannot combine Newton and Einstein in terms of gravity. Newton’s a priori assumption is that time is absolute as is space, but Einstein’s theory of relativity takes space and time as interrelated, hence space-time. The consequence of this is that an accelerating frame of reference is identically similar to a gravitational field.
In terms of relative motion Einstein becomes Newton when the speed (velocity) of the inertial frame is much much much less than the speed of light.
Kajajuk says:
February 24, 2013 at 2:12 pm
“Isn’t the “paradox” that the difference in apparent aging of the twins is unintuitive, but is mute if you accept the consequences of Special Relativity.”
The Earth moves away with light speed from the rocket so time on Earth comes to a standstill. In the rest of the galaxy as well. While the twin in the rocket is at standstill and therfore ages normally.
Kelvin Vaughan says:
February 24, 2013 at 2:35 am
“Time is just an illusion. there is only the here and now.
Time is distance. Everywhere you see in the universe is in the past relative to you. So if you travel towards a planet you will be travelling into its future as you are in its past at the moment, and the planet you left will move into your past. Your local time will not change as it is relative to you.”
———————————————-
Well said… the concept of time is abstracted from the observed persistence of existence of the eternal now, and is based on the measurement of relative changes of events in 3D space.
(and btw, 3D space is also a concept, one based on the measurement of finite volume abstracted from infinity),
A bit of Zen understanding is a great help to see that all concepts used to represent reality are not actually reality, merely mental constructs to stand for that reality, and that only when the mind is still and free from conceptualization will reality be directly present to the mind.
vukcevic says: February 24, 2013 at 1:48 pm
… the Universe may not expand for ever, i.e. fly apart, …
Thank you. I am much comforted.
——————————————
mfo says: February 23, 2013 at 3:34 pm
From JoNova-
A doctor named Helen Caldicott, claimed on ABC that Monckton of Brenchley …
Jo Nova writes with sharp irony:
“Caldicott is a doctor and also the co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, “an organization of 23,000 doctors”. [See her Bio http://www.helencaldicott.com/about/ ]
Perhaps she thinks it would be “socially responsible” to start a show where panels of doctors speculated on the medical conditions of celebrities they had never met?” …
Back in the early 1980’s Dr Caldicott landed in Moline, enroute to a town in Iowa for an anti-nuke/war/progress rally. No scheduled airline service to her destination, so she chartered a plane with us to take her there. She and I had an interesting discussion along the way, an anti-nuke crusader trying to explain her thoughts to a former B-52 pilot.
Bernie Hutchins says:
February 24, 2013 at 10:01 am
I need some help with this: More snowstorms should NOT be “what is expected” with global warming. Can someone here please provide the specific and correct details as to what is going on when excess water vapor in the atmosphere precipitates out as snow rather than as rain?
—
In order to get more snow out of air with a higher than normal water vapor content, there needs to be some way for the atmosphere to dump the extra increment of latent and sensible heat required to freeze the extra water vapor. This could be caused either by mixing with a cold polar air mass which has already been cooled by the ground polar regions cooling by radiating to space through the dry sinking airmass(remember, the majority of infrared re-radiation is from water vapor, not CO2), OR by radiating the excess heat from the cloud tops at the top of the storm, which would be above the majority of the atmospheric greenhouse gases any way.
In other words, it’s a sign of negative feedback if extra water vapor in the atmosphere leads to more snow instead of rain, that the extra energy being trapped by CO2 is still being efficiently removed from the atmosphere.
John Bell,
I have been aware of these since my teens, when I explored WIlhelm Reich’s Orgone Energy theory, and the earlier N-rays. These points particularly are clues to Pathological Science’
• The maximum effect that is observed is produced by a causative agent of barely detectable intensity, and the magnitude of the effect is substantially independent of the intensity of the cause.
• The effect is of a magnitude that remains close to the limit of detectability, or many measurements are necessary because of the very low statistical significance of the results.
• There are claims of great accuracy.
• Criticisms are met by ad hoc excuses.
ah, underline doesn’t work. I wanted to highlight critical phrases.
Vukcevic
if gravity field has a wave property
I see gravity as being a field potential, just like an electric field potential in semiconductor devices; on the macro level, and subject to the same quantumn mechanical-like behavior. I also am an engineer. Interesting, we both understand the perversity of inanimate matter.
Any Mass in this gravitational potential has a wave function, dependant upon its velocity, etc. If the wave function becomes the size of the object, then strange things happen.
davidmhoffer says:
February 24, 2013 at 9:08 am
latitude;
David, put this in google: Sweden came up first
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The guy asked for articles, I knew of one, and provided a link.
People bust your chops for the strangest reasons these days while providing not a single link of their own to answer the original question.
========
sorry, wasn’t busting your paranoid chops at all……..misread the post as if you were asking……tried to help out…..said articles…won’t happen again
RE: john robertson says:
February 24, 2013 at 11:01 am
I’m glad you enjoyed that rant, (and it was a rant.)
Ranting does blow off steam, but tends to alienate Alarmists. With you I imagine I’m merely “preaching to the choir.”
Alarmists exasperate me for exactly the reasons you describe, and I’ve been losing my temper for years now. I used to be “snipped” on Climate Audit, but really didn’t mind, for I understood I wasn’t truly contributing to the discussion. I hugely admired the way Steve McIntyre always kept his cool, and even learned a thing or two about not losing my own temper from him.
But as year follows year, and those Alarmist bald-faced liars keep right on spouting balderdash, my temper gets frayed all over again. So I started my own blog, where I don’t have to always be scientific and polite and reasonable.
I’m not trying to win any votes or sell any snake oil or seduce any blonds. I’m just telling it like it is, from where I stand in life. It is not science. It is self expression.
my two cents for this weekend…
The lack of a sea surface anomaly does not invalidate a causation to storms (i.e. Sandy), storms are generated by a temperature gradient between the sea surface and the air not by the “absolute” temperature of the ocean(s). Otherwise would there be any storms in the winter?
The evaporation/condensation cycle is not energy neutral. The evaporation happens at sea level modifying temperature (T) and pressure (P). The condensation happens above the evaporation at a dramatically different T and P.
I wonder if a dramatic increase in storm number and/or intensity would cause a greater slowing of the rotation of the Earth than usual; could that not be measured?
The climate records, from diverse sources, do suggest a lag between rising temperature and increasing concentrations of CO2. This suggests there is a global mechanism that releases carbon dioxide AFTER the temperature warms. Assuming all things constant (i.e. the mechanism has not been degraded by human activities) and assuming a reversible mechanism (i.e. cooling has a similar lag with removing CO2) then the loading of CO2 into the atmosphere would stress the mechanism, whatever it may be, to create a discontinuity on a global scale (i.e. the mechanism has a level of CO2 that leads a temperature increase before that temperature is attained), hence a long period of turbulence followed by a period of cooling to remove the CO2 after the attainment of the inflection point (i.e. the “point” where maximum CO2 concentration transitions into cooling). The climate records imply this inflection point is around 300 ppm about a 100 ppm ago. Therefore, “Global Warming” is a not very good term and “Climate Change” is to weak a term to label the turbulence…perhaps “Pervasive Weather Anomaly”. You heard it here first 🙂
Predicting sea level rise has got to be akin to arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. If glacial ice can deform the land then increasing oceanic mass will deform the ocean floor. Then what does sea level mean? And that is not even considering the gravitational effects between solid ice and liquid water let alone the possible consequence of a redistribution of matter to accommodate a new moment of inertia for the Earth. This change will not be nice and smooth but profoundly “quantal”.
I am no expert, but i decided to change my language to include less modal adjectives than i usually use since this has clearly annoyed people; so the tone is necessarily more arrogant. For this i apologize in advance.
It is too late anyways…
“…denial is no longer an acceptable response…”, because a critical mass of lobbyists made it so?
I never did get the whole paradox thingy…
So if you take the traveling twin as stationary then the Earth bound twin should experience time as dilated…hmmm
Thanks, that’s a banquet of food for thought!
Presuming that they have really discovered the Higgs bosun (“God particle”), the evidence says the universe really is likely doomed.
http://news.yahoo.com/higgs-boson-particle-may-spell-doom-universe-152236961.html
The universe is fundamentally unstable. After years of theories and speculations of the size of the universe heading towards infinity, “the further we look, the more of it there is”, with matter/antimatter being pulled into existence from vacuum…
We find it could all just go away. As if God woke up from the dream we all are in, the universe will end.
They say this could happen billions of years from now. But the end will propagate at the speed of light.
Since we, with our modern telescopes, are just now seeing the EM radiation from events that are billions of years old,
Could the universe have already started to collapse, the existence of everything known is ending, and we just don’t know it yet?
“””””…..Vince Causey says:
February 23, 2013 at 1:28 pm
As this is a science blog, I thought I would discuss Einsteins Twin Paradox, but in a way that deals with one of the most common misconceptions……”””””
I have never paid much attention to the “Twins paradox” Vince; mostly on the theory that there are no paradoxes.
But I found your description to be very readable; I might even understand it.
I believe the twins paradox (why twins) is just a variant of the Relativity “Clock paradox.”
I seem to recall in the late 50s early 60s, the Physics academic community was entertained by a great discussion of the “Clock Paradox” by two scientists, known simply as Dingle and MaCrae.
Each month, at the Physics Dept. staff meeting, someone was charged with describing the latest letter writing salvo, from Dingle and MaCrae about the problem. Don’t recall how long it went on, but our conclusion was that there was no paradox, but that Dingle and Macrae were each describing a slightly different problem, from the other, and neither could see that they were simply holding a conversation with themself.
But of course, one of the difficulties in the Relativity realm, is that the whole concept of simultaneity, and order of events, gets muddied up.
George
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
February 24, 2013 at 5:08 pm
“Presuming that they have really discovered the Higgs bosun (“God particle”), the evidence says the universe really is likely doomed.
…
For example, the mass of the new particle is about 126 billion electron volts, or about 126 times the mass of the proton.”
Gee whiz KD, this approximately the mass of the Tellurium atom. How could it hide for so long?
latitude;
sorry, wasn’t busting your paranoid chops at all
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Those were my grumpy chops.
The paranoid ones ask questions like
what do you mean by that?
what are you trying to imply?
why are you picking on me?
did someone put you up to this?
does your dog bite?
is that your dog?
funny story, but a friend of mine is a lawyer who was defending an insurance company. he hired a private investigator to follow the plaintiff and see if he was suffering the claimed injuries. At the trial, a psychologist testified that the plaintiff was suffering from paranoia as a result of the accident and believed he was being followed by someone. Under cross, my friend asks the psychologist if occurred to him that the plaintiff actually was/ being followed. The look on the psychologist’s face was priceless. Followed by the testimony of the private investigator which not only showed that the plaintiff was being followed, but included video of the plaintiff doing the exact work (shingling a roof) that he claimed he was no longer able to do.
Since then, the quip “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean nobody is out to get you” has made me laugh aloud out of proportion to the circumstance.
sorry I was grumpy.
Eric Simpson says:
February 23, 2013 at 2:59 pm
There’s been no change. Flatten that sea-level line out.
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The British Admiralty Charts from 300 years ago show no detectable change in sea levels either. Most of the world has never been resurveyed since then. That is a testament to how accurate the original surveys were in an age of wooden ships and iron men.
If scientists were really interested in discovering the truth they would simply consult the BA charts rather they relying on obscure proxies. Something that sailors do every day. If Sea Level Rise was occurring , then all the ocean charts would have a datum in the chart legend indicating the amount of adjustment required, as they have for magnetic declination.
But while charts all have an adjustment for the motion of the magnetic poles, and adjustments to bring them in line with GPS (WGS 84) none have an adjustment for global sea level rise. Why? Because you couldn’t get away with it because it would kill people if you falsified the charts.
For example, we sailed the remote Kingdom of Tonga in the Pacific using charts drawn by Bligh in 1773. The water depths are still accurate to 1 foot over 300+ years. While the charts do have an adjustment for need to be adjusted for lat and long to match GPS, they have no “global warming” or sea level adjustment.
Sea level rise has been measured to be an average of 11 mm in the last hundred years or so. Cited from my memory. Some places more and some places less. This is much much much less that the accuracy of those charts,
Early measurements of sea level rise based on tidal measurements done for a few hundred years suggested that the oceans where rising at a rate of 1.5-2.0 mm/yr. More recent measurements have the increase at about 3.0-3.5 mm/yr.
At this rate it will take, on the order, of a hundred years before those old charts will need adjustment, assuming the pacific plate near Tonga is not re-adjusted by a 9.0 earthquake. Consider investing in sonar equipment.
Kajajuk says:
February 24, 2013 at 4:35 pm
Predicting sea level rise has got to be akin to arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
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One of the great misconceptions is that the ocean basis are like swimming pools that hold the oceans. Reality is quite a bit different. The nonsense that the water is held within the ocean basins of fixed volume is no different than the fiction that rivers and lakes can exist independent of the water table in the surrounding soil. The ocean basins do not hold the oceans.
The oceans extend well below the bottom of the ocean basins and would drain towards the center of the earth were it not for the heat on the interior. Water cannot go further into the earth than the point at which it turns to steam at pressure. All the water is held in a layer above this point, and the oceans are simply where the land is lower than the water. Without a hot core, there would be no oceans on the surface of earth, the water would drain through the cracks in the earth towards the core. Likely this is what happened to Mars as it cooled, its oceans sunk towards the core.
The Higgs boson was hiding in with a bunch of strange quarks, the bottom got jealous when the beauty flirted with the top and then the up and down went to their anti, understandably the Higgs needed a break from all this drama and was spotted with a gluon making Z plus/minus.
ferdberple says:
February 24, 2013 at 7:34 pm
Very interesting. Any citations for the curious to consider for further reading?
Kajajuk,
You will find that Ferd Berple has extensive knowledge. His comments are always worth reading.
The twin Paradox is a consequence of special relativity. It does not exists in general relativity.
When you consider only speed you cannot tell which twin is moving and which twin is standing still. Thus they should have aged the same when arriving at a common future.
However, this paradox is physically impossible because they cannot arrive at the same future at the same time by traveling at different speeds. You must introduce acceleration to bring them back to the same reference frame. In an over simplification, the twin with the greater acceleration spends less time to get to the common future, and thus ages less.
I know the weekend is now over just about everywhere east of the Cook Islands, but here is still probably the best place to remark on this: with only four days left to go of the month of February, the sunspot number is bck down to 25. Once again, another very quiet month, and so close to the expected solar maximum..
Somebody’s lips are moving. That can mean only one thing.
http://www.newsmax.com/SciTech/White-House-scientific-research/2013/02/23/id/491663
Kajajuk says:
February 24, 2013 at 7:30 pm
Sea level rise has been measured to be an average of 11 mm in the last hundred years or so. Cited from my memory. Some places more and some places less. This is much much much less that the accuracy of those charts,
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BA charts are accurate to 1 foot within the 1 fathom lime. 11 mm/hundred years would be 33 mm over 300 years. Just over 1 inch of rise? I agree we could not detect this from the BA charts, but then again I’m pretty sure this slow a rise would not be reliably detectable by any other mechanism available 300 years ago.
If you meant to say 11cm/hundred years, then this just over 1 foot in 300 years, which is about the accuracy of the charts, and with this I would agree. 1 foot of sea level change over the past 300 years would be about the limit noticeable from the charts. But I also suspect that no once could measure sea level rise over the past 100 years to an accuracy of 1cm let alone 1mm.
However, if modern human beings cannot cope with about a foot of sea level rise over 300 years then we must surely have gone extinct 15,000 years ago when the oceans went up 300 feet, burying the evidence of early human civilization underwater. It could well be the reason we think civilization first started in the middle east after sea levels stabilized is because the oceans don’t give up their dead. Evidence on Crete that water travel was possible as much as 130,000 years ago during the previous interglacial suggests that ice ages wiped out the evidence for earlier civilizations. As the next ice age will do for our civilization.
DirkH says:
February 24, 2013 at 3:06 pm
The Earth moves away with light speed from the rocket so time on Earth comes to a standstill. In the rest of the galaxy as well. While the twin in the rocket is at standstill and therfore ages normally.
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A 1 g constant acceleration starship can reach almost the other side of the observable universe and return within a single human lifetime. The crew will have aged something like 70 years. The earth some 5-10 billion years.
For the crew on-board there will be no difference in apparent gravity than living on the earth. there will be a constant 1 g acceleration as experienced living on the surface of the planet.
Thus, there is a mechanism for humans to explore the universe without any need for warp drives. You cannot return home, but that is no different than many generations before that left their homes for the new world. They fully expected it to be a one way trip.
Kajajuk says:
February 24, 2013 at 7:53 pm
Very interesting. Any citations for the curious to consider for further reading?
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http://www.livescience.com/1312-huge-ocean-discovered-earth.html
http://www.livescience.com/1312-huge-ocean-discovered-earth.html
Previous predictions calculated that if a cold slab of the ocean floor were to sink thousands of miles into the Earth’s mantle, the hot temperatures would cause water stored inside the rock to evaporate out.
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This is the place inside the earth where hydrocarbons (fossil fuels ) are formed from fossilized CO2 (limestone) plus water in the presence of iron from the earth’s core.
steam + iron => hydrogen + iron oxide
limestone + heat => carbon + quicklime
iron oxide + quicklime => rock
hydrogen + carbon => hydrocarbons => fossil fuel.
Fedberple, pardon my untimely interruption to a far more intesting discussion!
5-10 billion years lived in just a lifetime? How sad to return home, and be looking for what you left behind amongst the high grade metamorphic schists and granitoids of some ‘recently’ eroded orogenic belt.
And how would you cope en-route, with the potential for high speed collisions between your ship and not just the various intervening items in your path when you started out, but with all those that came into being or vanished into the past as you zoomed forward in space and time, across a universe where the glacial music of the stars appeared from your viewpoint to have increased in tempo to a startling swirl, whilst big things popped into being and lived out their histories before you in a matter of apparent seconds?
You don’t see that on Caprtain Kirk’s big screen, do you? All those stars rushing towards the Enterprise, but he never goes: “Oh crap, we hit one!”
Back to work!
I think it is clear that civilization has been cyclic and not linear as has been presupposed to be. Wondering how many generations would it take to notice the precession of the equinoxes? And this was deduced by stone age people in central america and asia and mesopotamia? yah right!
A type of “maritime” archaic fits this and similarities of globally dispersed cultures. Genetic evidence limits the ‘out-of-africa’ migration to under 70,000 years. Implying an earlier ‘golden age’ of mankind before or during the last ice-age, not 130,000 years. This does not jive at all with the proclamations of the current science priesthood; on many levels.
I have stopped phrasing my prose to reflect my uncertainly or the inherent probability of reality, since that has annoyed several people. Now i write as if i am all knowing, knowing that is not true, and so learning by my mistakes. The post of ocean rise was based on a documentary i watched and i doubt tidal gauge recording goes back 300 years. No a foot of sea level rise will not wipe out humans let alone this current aggregate of humanity; it will have the empty cities in China populated.
Ancient ruins discovered off the coast of India, Japan, and the latest i do not recall the location, but it was land locked and appeared to have been buried on purpose 12,500 years ago. The pyramids at Gaza and the Sphinx were clearly not done by the Egyptians and the Sphinx was a remodeling of a much earlier statue of a lion. These all suggest the remnants of an earlier global civilization.
The energy needed to provide a 9.81m/s^2 acceleration of a spaceship boggles my mind. And sustaining it for any extended period of time, say a year, got me LMAO.
This technology would open up the solar system to greater scrutiny though.
There’s no relativity – there is one absolute reference frame. They used to call it ‘fixed stars’.
Global warming causes global cooling:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/02/germans-are-catching-on-to-global-warming-alarmism.php
Robert of Ottawa says:
February 24, 2013 at 3:51 pm
If the wave function becomes the size of the object, then strange things happen.
……
Indeed, bridges collapse, crystal glasses shatter and cosmos explodes, they call it big-bang if you believe in that sort of thing, I am not certain that I do.
Kajajuk says:February 24, 2013 at 10:16 pm
I think it is clear that civilization has been cyclic and not linear as has been presupposed to be. Wondering how many generations would it take to notice the precession of the equinoxes? And this was deduced by stone age people in central america and asia and mesopotamia? yah right!
I have thought it interesting that the Arthurian legend has Pendragon as his father and there is an allusion at least that Arthur is referred to as the Bear. I thought that an interesting allegory to the shift of the polar/guiding star, in precession, from Draconus to Ursa Minor..
As far as considering ourselves, today, the apex of evolution and civilization, we used to have larger brains, and knew that we did not understand things.
ferdberple says: February 24, 2013 at 9:06 pm
… A 1 g constant acceleration starship can reach almost the other side of the observable universe and return within a single human lifetime. The crew will have aged something like 70 years. The earth some 5-10 billion years.
No. You would get that result by integrating the Lorentz factor term, 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2), which gives a quarter sine wave up to light speed for an acceleration curve, but that isn’t correct. You have to integrate the addition of velocities term, (v+u)/(1+(vu/c^2)), which yields a much shallower curve. The correct rate has you dead and gone long before you reach even 1/3 light speed. I don’t have the integral handy, but it looks nothing like anything useful.
It’s easy to assume that acceleration slows at the same rate as mass increases and time dilates, which would have the space travellers watching their speedometer rise steadily up to near lightspeed for a brief time-dilated cruise, then steadily decrease as they decelerated into the destination, much as Newton would have guessed.
But since acceleration is an addition of velocities thing, the perceived and actual rates are going to differ. I’d often wondered if this difference, measurable by a slower than expected increase in stellar aberration outside the starship window, would be a clue to the absolute speed of the ship. That shouldn’t be allowed, but I haven’t done any math on the problem.
A derivation of the true acceleration formula is in the long out-of-print “Time and the Space-Traveller,” by Leslie Marder.
@ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/23/open-thread-weekend-16/#comment-1232783
Thanks for the input, fascinating.
All for naught though cause well before that acceleration could be attained the starship would disintegrate into a nasty shockwave as soon as the grains of interstellar dust rips apart the hull.
Pervasive Weather Anomaly announcements;
Old Man winter is not finished with the Northeast:
http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/warnings/report_e.html?qc67
Just the “tip of the iceberg”, so to speak, as this system started in the mid-west of USA and now is over the Northeast. “State of Emergency? again or still?”
The God’s must be crying…
“Nothing to see hear mate, just business as usual”, http://www.pm.gov.au/press-office/extra-disaster-assistance-flood-affected-communities
http://www.abc.net.au/rural/qld/content/2013/02/s3698735.htm
Is it still January? http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/month/qld/summary.shtml
“Odds favour a near average cyclone season for most Australians”, yeah that’s a relief…
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/ahead/tc.shtml
…think i’ll get a Fosters!
“Torn-a-doess?, what the hell is that?”. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/breaking-news/mini-tornado-hits-queensland-coastal-town/story-fn3dxiwe-1226562434151
http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2013/02/26/3698494.htm
Climate Change at it again!
“Extreme weather is often the result of climate change, according to scientists in Germany, who say they have found how greenhouse gases are helping to trap the jet stream and the weather patterns it brings.”
http://www.climatenewsnetwork.net/2013/02/climate-change-causes-wild-weather/
Pervasive Weather Anomaly continued:
Hailstorm in Louisiana? Six months to fix the backlog of damaged cars, i guess they forgot how much this happens and were unprepared.
http://www.wwltv.com/news/local/Hail-Storm-Victims-Fill-Local-Auto-Body-Shops-193416891.html
Hailstorm in Argentina, isn’t it summer there?
http://news.discovery.com/earth/weather-extreme-events/hail-storm-tees-off-argentina-130225.htm
Solar-Terrestrial Volatility Weaves
[Weaves? Or “waves” mod]
“[Weaves? Or “waves” mod]”
Either would do. They’re weaves of hierarchically bundled waves. “Weaves” was intended, but it looks like Bill renamed the file to “waves” before posting.