In the New York Times:
For science that’s accessible but credible, steer clear of polarizing hatefests like atheist or eco-apocalypse blogs. Instead, check out scientificamerican.com, discovermagazine.com and Anthony Watts’s blog, Watts Up With That?
Of course, we can’t have that, now the howling begins. Some context below.
More from the New York Times Virginia Heffernan:
Clearly I’ve been out of some loop for too long, but does everyone take for granted now that science sites are where graduate students, researchers, doctors and the “skeptical community” go not to interpret data or review experiments but to chip off one-liners, promote their books and jeer at smokers, fat people and churchgoers? And can anyone who still enjoys this class-inflected bloodsport tell me why it has to happen under the banner of science?
Hammering away at an ideology, substituting stridency for contemplation, pummeling its enemies in absentia: ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd. Though Myers and other science bloggers boast that they can be jerky in the service of anti-charlatanism, that’s not what’s bothersome about them. What’s bothersome is that the site is misleading. It’s not science by scientists, not even remotely; it’s science blogging by science bloggers. And science blogging, apparently, is a form of redundant and effortfully incendiary rhetoric that draws bad-faith moral authority from the word “science” and from occasional invocations of “peer-reviewed” thises and thats.
Under cover of intellectual rigor, the science bloggers — or many of the most visible ones, anyway — prosecute agendas so charged with bigotry that it doesn’t take a pun-happy French critic or a rapier-witted Cambridge atheist to call this whole ScienceBlogs enterprise what it is, or has become: class-war claptrap.
This is all about Pepsigate. See Heffernan’s column The Medium
h/t to Tim Lambert of Deltoid, hosted by Scienceblogs who couldn’t bring himself to reference anything else here at WUWT with his collection of supposed gotchas, only the one point where he was sure he could get a dig in:
Heffernan reckons that Whats Up With That presents credible science. This is a blog that argues that Venus is hot, not because of the greenhouse effect, but because of the high pressure in the atmosphere (so hence Jupiter and Saturn are the hottest planets right?) . Look:
If there were no Sun (or other external energy source) atmospheric temperature would approach absolute zero. As a result there would be almost no atmospheric pressure on any planet -> PV = nRT
Only if there was no such thing as gravity.
Umm, Tim, can you tell me what gases on Venus remain in a non-solid state at temperatures approaching absolute zero? What happens to solidified gases like dry ice (Frozen Carbon Dioxide) in a (planetary) gravitational field? Here’s an experiment to help you get the answer:
1. Acquire some dry ice
2. Go outside
3. Toss it upwards into the atmosphere
4. Observe
The point that was being made in that article by Goddard is that with no external energy source (the Sun) Venusian atmospheric gases would contract and eventually freeze at near absolute zero and cling to the surface of the planet, thanks to gravity.
PhysLink agrees:
Question
What will happen to the gas at absolute zero temperature (0 K)?
Asked by: Rohit
Answer
First of all, the gas will no longer be a gas at absolute zero, but rather a solid. As the gas is cooled, it will make a phase transition from gas into liquid, and upon further cooling from liquid to solid (ie. freezing). Some gases, such as carbon dioxide, skip the liquid phase altogether and go directly from gas to solid.
…
First off, 0K can never be achieved, since the amount of entropy in a system can never be equal to zero, which is the statement of the second law of thermodynamics. This can be nicely illustrated by your question:
Using the state equation for an ideal gas:
PV = nRT
T, the thermodynamic temperature will be equal to 0, so the product of the molar gas constant R (8.31 J/mol/K) and the amount of moles n, will also be zero.
Therefore the product of PV must be zero also. the pressure of the gas must be zero or volume of the gas must be zero
As an example, look at the Ice Caps of Mars, still well above absolute zero but below the freezing point of Carbon Dioxide:
From Wiki:
The polar caps at both poles consist primarily of water ice. Frozen carbon dioxide accumulates as a thin layer about one metre thick on the north cap in the northern winter only, while the south cap has a permanent dry ice cover about eight metres thick.[62]
As we see in the Physlink description, a planetary wide near absolute zero temperature (if the sun blinked off), all the rest of Mars atmosphere would be bound to the surface as a solid too. The result: no atmosphere and no atmospheric pressure.
UPDATE: As is typical anytime somebody not on the team that gets a voice or mention, those who deal in mudslinging and angry rhetoric swarm in to squash it and convince the writer of the “wrongness” of it all.
Here’s a comment from Virginia Heffernan after she’s had the treatment here. Note the number of angry labels preceding her response.
Virginia Says:
I’m grateful for all the replies. Nice to meet you here, David.
I get the sense that Pepsigate was the last straw – or not the first, anyway – for at least some of the dissenters from ScienceBlogs. Out of curiosity: Did no one quietly resign over PZ Myers’s Mohammad cartoons? Or question whether they wanted to be part of a network to which he’s the main draw?
In my experience, legacy media types, who do kick up furors over stuff like Mohammad cartoons, nonetheless see *debate* over ad-ed breaches as common, especially now because of the confusion what old-media road rules mean in digital times.
With notable exceptions, blogging, as a form, seems to me to have calcified. Many bloggers who started strong 3-5 years ago have gotten stuck in grudge matches. This is even more evident on political blogs than on science blogs. In fact, after being surprised to find the same cycles of invective on ScienceBlogs that appear on political blogs (where they’re well documented), I started to think the problem might be with the form itself. Like many literary and art forms before it (New Yorker poetry, jazz, manifestos) blogs may have had a heyday – when huge numbers of people were inspired to make original contributions – before, seemingly all at once, the moment is gone. Some people keep doing it, and doing it well, but the wave of innovation passes, and the form itself needs new life. (Twitter? Tumblr?)
I have no training in science. My surprise at ScienceBlogs was akin to the surprise a scientist who might feel if he audited a PhD seminar on Wallace Stevens. Why aren’t they talking about “Anecdote of the Jar”?! Why are they talking about how “misogyny intrinsic to the modernist project”? I saw political axe-grinding bring the humanities almost to a standstill in the 1990s. I thought science was supposed to be above that!
One regret: the Watts blog. Virtually everyone who emailed me pointed out that it’s as axe-grinding as anything out there. I linked to it because has a lively voice; it’s detail-oriented and seemingly not snide; and, above all, it has some beautiful images I’d never seen before. I’m a stranger to the debates on science blogs, so I frankly didn’t recognize the weatherspeak on the blog as “denialist”; I didn’t even know about denialism. I’m don’t endorse the views on the Watts blog, and I’m extremely sorry the recommendation seemed ideological.
All best,
Virginia Heffernan
If PV=nRt works on Venus, how come it doesn’t work on earth?
The temperature extremes on earth are 183 K for the coldest and 330 K for the hottest.
Using the ideal gas law equation, that would mean if it was 1 atm in Libya, then it would be .55 atm in Vostok.
The actual highest recorded extremes of pressure are 1086 mb to 870 mb.
If the ideal gas law worked that way then there would be one heck of a wind blowing between the two.
Since there isn’t, that use of PV=nRt is nonsense.
” Paul Birch says:
July 31, 2010 at 1:05 pm
…adiabatic heating … only happens where air masses sink, and is inevitably offset by the corresponding cooling of the equal and opposite rising masses”
That is not true in the case of a moist wind going up one side of a mountain (wet-adi.), rain at the top, and dry wind coming down the other side (dry-adi.).
Bob,
How’s about big nuclear powered SUV’s…
Mike
OT: Hey, it appears that Mars’ southern polar region is colder than the northern one just like ours is. Why?
[EDIT: The south pole of Mars is at a pretty high altitude, while the north pole is significantly below average. Much as Antarctica is mostly above sea level and the Arctic is an ocean basin. – Mike]
Wasn’t there some allegation over in comments (not content) at the Register that Steve Goddard I were the same person? And that neither one of us actually exist? Or something like that.
From my own perspective, I think I disagree with the above premise. But, as an interested party, I cannot rely on my own experience. And it remains a fact that neither of us has ever been seen in the same room.
(If /when this issue is resolved, I’d appreciate it if someone let me know.)
Lambert was pwned…will not be back I predict.
Jeff,
Quicker than I am – both went to the same place…
On a serious note, I thought that science was the discipline that tried to figger things out…
This happens, then that happens, therefore this is a possible link between them.
When several possible links are proposed, evidence gathering begins.
CO2 is going up and so is the indicated temperature – link?
Cities have lots of asphault and concrete the indicated temp is going up – link?
software engineers are messing with the observed data – link?
ETC.
The point is that I think science is being done here and on several other internet sites – bringing together alternate or opposing views. To that end, Anthony, kudos…
More than my tax dollars are paying for…
Mike
Lambert is a nut – and his blog is occasionally used as a source by Connolley at wikipedia despite their personal friendship.
Ironically, Venus’ atmosphere is a lousy model for CAGW.
Here’s an example for a 1 layer model,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealized_greenhouse_model
and this gives an example for a n layer model
http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/hafemeister.cfm
Plugging in the figures for Venus:
Veenus’ atmosphere has about 90 times the pressure of earth’s atmosphere, Venus’ gravity is about 10% weaker, so Venus’ atmosphere is about 100 times as dense as earth.
Venus temperature with clouds and wthout a greenhouse effect would be about
230 K. The actual temp is about 730 K, giving a multiplier of
730/230 = 3.17
Temperature is roughly proportional to the 4th root of the wattage flux, so
Venus’ atmosphere multiplies that surface flux by
(3.17)^4 =100.98, so Venus’ CO2 gives the equivalent of a 100 layer atmosphere,
Venus’ atmosphere is just about 100% CO2, and is 100 times as dense as earth’s.
Earth has about 0.04% CO2, so Venus has about 250,000 times as much CO2 as earth.
Venus’ 250,000 as much CO2 as earth gives Venus 100 atmospheres per this equation from my second link:
T0 = [(1 – a)so/4s]1/4 and Ts = (n + 1)1/4T0, (18)
Then earth’s CO2 would have the effect of
100/250,000 of an atmosphere multiplier effect or about
100/250,000 * 240 watts = 0.096 watts.
Assuming CO2 on earth has an effect of 30 to 40 watts, as indicated by theory,
saturation of bands plays a major part in keeping Venus from being a lot hotter in
simplistic theory than in practice.- amc
In the early stages of a new technology like the internet, there are apt to be many voices. Over time, readers come to discern the quality of the product, and brand names will be established. A few sites will emerge dominant as the new media. These sites will be the boutiques published by not by professional journalists (with WUWT an expection to the rule), but by (often retired) industry professionals. Whereas the New York Times will remain department store of journalism, with generalists covering many areas superficially, boutique websites will cover one area exhaustively. And because it’s so easy to switch from website to website, the boutiques will gut the department store new outlets over time.
Some of these new websites will cater to emotion, so to reason. Both can be viable models. For example, Keith Olbermann at MSNBC and Bill O’Reilly over at Fox both make a living catering to strong emotions, albeit on opposite sides of the political spectrum.
Other blogs will strive to be impartial, fair and informative–just plain, good news sources in the traditional sense. For these blogs, the key is to be comprehensive, open and relatively neutral in tone, with argument, to the extent possible, based on factual data. There may be an ideological predeliction, but data and analysis exist independent of–and take priority over–ideology. When people want to actually know what’s going on, rather than the official party line, they will seek out these sites.
To me, WUWT falls into this latter camp, and I think that’s why its readership continues to grow. It remains, I believe, the best climate website overall, with less stridency and the most content and educational value in the business.
George Turner says:
July 31, 2010 at 1:50 pm
“Given the thick clouds, Venus isn’t so much like a green house as it is a house-house with shingles on the roof. Very little light gets through the clouds, and as far as I know the surface illumination would meet the meteorological standards for any form of daylight here on Earth.”
Actually, ordinary houses are warmed by the greenhouse effect too. Sunlight gets through the windows, but it’s harder for the heat to escape. The difference is that in houses there is also thermal insulation that blocks conduction through the walls and roof too, which isn’t relevant in greehouses (or planetary atmospheres). “Very little light” is not no light; it is still sufficient to heat the Venusian surface. I’m not aware of any meteorological standard that surface illumination has to meet; it can get pretty black under a thundercloud.
“As for adiabatic heating, air is heated as a mass of air descends, so air lower down becomes hotter than it was up above. The air eventually rises and cools, but the cooling takes place as it rises, so this cooling doesn’t lower the air temperatures near the surface. It’s basically a constantly running heat engine with a compressor and an expansion orifice, like an air conditioner, heat pump, or refrigerator. The hot, high pressure side stays perpetually hotter than the cold side, establishing a fixed temperature difference between the two points. Then, somewhere, you connect a point on the circuit to the external environment which then sets the absolute temperatures everywhere else in the circuit.”
You’ve got cause and effect backwards. The circulation is cooling the surface, not warming it. The driver for the “heat engine” is not the pressure, it’s the sunlight reaching the surface (plus a bit of geothermal heat from the planet’s interior).
“As long as the adiabatic heat engine runs (strong vertical atmospheric circulation) the temperatures at low altitudes must be hotter than the high altitude temperature.”
Yes, but the circulation only runs because of the sunlight reaching the lower levels. If no sunlight penetrated the top of the clouds, the atmosphere would be isothermal, and stably stratified.
“It’s no coincidence that the temperature profile of Venus below the clouds almost exactly matches the adiabatic lapse rate, which would otherwise be rather inexplicable.”.
It’s not a coincidence, it’s a consequence of sufficient sunlight reaching the lower levels, or more accurately, a sufficient difference in the optical depths for incoming and outgoing radiation. Once there is sufficient net incoming radiation to raise the temperature to the adiabatic limit, convection commences, maintaining the adiabatic temperature profile. Lapse rates above the adiabatic rate are not sustainable, but lapse rates below that rate are not unusual. Dense atmospheres don’t always have an adiabatic temperature profile; only dense convective atmospheres. Dense atmospheres can also have both convective and radiative regions (this is an important consideration in stellar atmospheres, for example).
Alexej Buergin says:
July 31, 2010 at 2:06 pm
” Paul Birch says:
July 31, 2010 at 1:05 pm
…adiabatic heating … only happens where air masses sink, and is inevitably offset by the corresponding cooling of the equal and opposite rising masses”
“That is not true in the case of a moist wind going up one side of a mountain (wet-adi.), rain at the top, and dry wind coming down the other side (dry-adi.).”
Sure it is. In this case you just have to include the latent and sensible heats of the water vapour/precipitation. There can be no overall heating of the surface from this cause. Local heating, yes, but somewhere else is then being cooled by evaporation.
Kevin says:
July 31, 2010 at 2:12 pm
OT: Hey, it appears that Mars’ southern polar region is colder than the northern one just like ours is. Why?
IIRC it’s because Mars is closer to the Sun in the Northern summer. It’s not permanent. Every so often they’ll switch over as the perihelion and rotation axis precess.
Okay, let’s keep this on the NY Times or sharing a sentence with SciAm, I sure hope this doesn’t turn into a rehash of Venus, etc.
Oh dang. Too late. Oh – its “all about Pepsigate” – I’d rather rehash Venus, so I won’t complain. 🙂
I’ll drop Virginia a note after reading some of the other stuff and tell her why I like WUWT most days.
thegoodlocust says:
July 31, 2010 at 2:29 pm
Connolley at wikipedia
If Virginia Heffernan wanted to do an exposé on politics in science she could base it on William Connolley.
Poor Virginia! How did she not know that WUWT is part of a well-oiled machine on the wrong side of history? Is she really falling back on the old “I only read it for the pictures” excuse? I’m glad for her sake that she recanted now. WUWT is a “gateway blog”; next she would watch Glenn Beck with the sound off because he’s cute. Then maybe turn it up and find out his voice isn’t too bad either. Next thing you know, she can no longer get an outside table at Pinkerton’s and somehow her e-mail keeps dropping off the best distro lists. You have to nip these things in the bud.
Bob,
There are four degrees of freedom in the ideal gas law. You can’t solve for one without knowing or constraining the other three. You need to understand basic algebra.
CodeTech says, July 31, 2010 at 12:49 pm
The “peer reviewed” “science” in nutrition and medicine is in just as bad shape as in climate issues, if not worse.
You have no idea how true that statement is. After almost 20 years as a nutritionist, I don’t even bother reading papers any more. Most of them are total junk, paid for by the drug companies and the food companies to keep us fat and on medications for the rest of our lives.
“You are familiar with the mathematical idea of “approaching a limit?””
Yes. Yes, I am.
If you extend the ideal gas law beyond its domain of applicability, then as the temperature approaches zero, the volume tends to zero and the pressure remains a constant: mg/A. With zero volume, PV=nRT is satisfied. An ideal gas cannot condense or freeze.
In practice, once V falls below the volume of the atoms themselves, V can no longer be reduced any further and something has to give. What happens is that the gas ceases to be a gas, and the atmosphere loses both pressure and volume that way. It loses pressure because the atmosphere left now has less mass. Eventually, when there is no atmosphere left, the weight of atmosphere is zero and so is the atmospheric pressure. The pressure at the bottom of the solid crust of frozen Nitrogen/Oxygen is still 1 bar, of course.
It’s a minor point, that doesn’t detract from the excellence of the rest of the post. Pay no attention to Lambert.
Tim Lambert said: “Here’s the thing. Science works. Antibiotics work. And we know they work not because of any “bad-faith moral authority” by scientists but because they collected evidence and conducted experiments and drew conclusions that survived review by their peers.”
Apply this logic to history. “History tells us about the past. We know this, not because of belief in any “faith based history” from old books, but because historians have collected evidence and conducted investigations and drawn conclusions that survived review by their peers.
What historian would pretend that the collection of evidence and peer review was a sure-fire guarantee of correctness? We all know it is a “best guess” exercise, subject to massive revisions.
Yet rather too many science fanboys seem to think collection of evidence and surviving peer review alone is a guarantee of truth, despite well supported hypothesis in the past being overturned.
Alexej Buergin says:
July 31, 2010 at 10:04 am
Actually, the “ideal gas” is not a law, but one of the best examples of a model.
Another good model is the Einsteinian celestial mechanics of the solar system.
CodeTech says:
July 31, 2010 at 12:49 pm
“…..There are foods that I used to eat as a child in the 60s and 70s that are either no longer available or have morphed into a mere shadow of their former glory. Children today are NOT getting proper, required nutrition during their critical growing phase, since they are being robbed of fats and sugars by well meaning but ignorant people.
Are people healthier? No.
Am I obese? No. The opposite, in fact.
I smoke, I drink, I eat fatty and salty foods, I don’t get a lot of exercise, and yet at 46 I do exceptionally well at all the traditional indicators of health: blood pressure, heart rate, endurance, strength, etc. Stick that in your “peer reviewed” junk-science food war record book.”
Woot! Me, too! 2 packs/day and usually pick up a twelve pack on the way home from work. BP is still fine. HR is good. Respiration is WNL. lol My cholesterol is at the optimum.(I knew the egg bs was just that, never did slow down on the fried, over-easy) Weight is good, though I do seem to be getting a little soft in the middle. And I can still outwork most people half my age. I’ll be 46 in 2 months.
Yes, I too, lament the loss of taste in our food. It never ceases to amaze me how easily things are banned in this world because they may be unhealthy. As you pointed out, anything in excess could be unhealthy, but when they start mandating behavior, for our own well-being, they seem to think we’ll all be immortal if we just don’t ..smoke or drink or eat wrong foods, or eat real butter, or if we don’t swim without a lifeguard, or…ect.
In the words of Fredrick the Great, “Rascals! Do you want to live forever?” What the heck are you going to do if your body is healthy at 95? By then, for most, if dementia hasn’t already taken your mind, your senses will be dwindled to almost nothing so communication will be next to impossible. You’re still going to have to lay in some nursing home getting fed blended up food through a syringe and have the nurses aid once a shift check your diaper to see if your soiled or not, if they really care about the job. They can keep it. I’ll try to live, while others try to set longevity records for existence.
Kevin says:
July 31, 2010 at 2:12 pm
OT: Hey, it appears that Mars’ southern polar region is colder than the northern one just like ours is. Why?
It’s axis of rotation is tipped over more or less the same amount as earth’s axis.
It appears that a whole cottage industry has developed out of misquoting, misinterpreting and just plain lying about this obviously correct paragraph from the Venus article.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/08/venus-envy/
Timmy banned me from his blog for refusing to apologize for using Google, no lie.