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
Jeff Alberts says:
July 31, 2010 at 6:36 pm (Edit)
CodeTech says:
July 31, 2010 at 12:49 pm
I do believe in Karma, and this is an awesome example of it…
Karma is a fanciful construct for poets and storytellers, but has no basis in reality.
================
Karma is a magical thinking label for the law of averages and regression to the mean.
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?
==============
Partly because, as prior posters have said, the south pole is tipped away from the sun at perhilion, but the south polar ice cap would not be nearly so stable if it were not significantly above the average elevation. Conversely, the Martian north pole is significantly below the average elevation, so the north pole always has higher atmospheric pressure and temperature than the south pole no matter what the season.
RockyRoad says:
July 31, 2010 at 9:39 pm
Yes, but that silly science can sneak up on anybody–even the most unobservant.
It happens to all of us. Einstein spent all of his time thinking about a problem until he knew he had it figured out good enough to go public. A good lesson to learn.
“If A equals success, then the formula is A = X + Y + Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut.”
— Albert Einstein
Venus is either about gravity and pressure, or it’s that force that pulls dogs gone bad.
“Magnetism is one of the Six Fundamental Forces of the Universe, with the other five being Gravity, Duct Tape, Whining, Remote Control, and The Force That Pulls Dogs Toward The Groins Of Strangers.”
~Dave Barry
Exactly.
Tsk Tsk says:
July 31, 2010 at 8:09 pm
Wow, I’ve used ideal gas with gravity
“Scientists tell us that the fastest animal on earth, with a top speed of 120 feet per second, is a cow that has been dropped out of a helicopter.”
But what will happen to the cow on Venus?
I’m fascinated with the differing conclusions about adiabatic pressure/ temperature arguments by people well versed in math and physics, which I am not.
To stir the pot a little more I throw in the following:-
From NASA http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/science/neptune_neptune.html
“Voyager also measured heat radiated by Neptune’s atmosphere. The atmosphere above the clouds is hotter near the equator, cooler in the mid-latitudes and warm again at the south pole. Temperatures in the stratosphere were measured to be 750 kelvins (900 degrees F), while at the 100 millibar pressure level, they were measured to be 55 K (-360 degrees F). Heat appears to be caused, at least in part, by convection in the atmosphere that results in compressional heating: Gases rise in the mid-latitudes where they cool, then drift toward the equator and the pole, where they sink and are warmed.”
So it appears that as long as there is a heat engine working, pressure causes warming.
Not that I believe everything on a NASA website, especially since the Miscolski affair!
Don’t ignore a Tim Lambert, as he’s one of the world’s most influential climate scientists. He’s so respected Realclimate sometimes references his dissembling and dishonesty.
When liquids or solids (like snow or rain) condense out of the atmosphere, they no longer are part of the atmosphere. They no longer contribute to atmospheric pressure.
Rain which falls in the ocean contributes to ocean pressure, not atmospheric pressure.
Snow which falls on a glacier contributes to the weight of the ice, it does not contribute to atmospheric pressure.
Only a gas can contribute to atmospheric pressure.
Mike McMillan
You are making a total straw man argument.
I said that gravity does not affect the “accuracy of the equation.” The ideal gas law does not make any attempt to explain what controls any of the variables, it simply defines their relationships. Sometimes pressure is caused by gravity. Sometimes it is caused by other things.
That is in no way contradictory or even related to what you are saying. Your attempt to set them up as contradictory is nonsensical.
Yes Mike,
This paragraph is obviously correct. If you don’t understand it., I can’t help you.
@ur momisugly justin ert, I believe that the greatest dangers facing the world are “Truth relativism” and “Secularism”, both of which are very liberal battle cries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messinian_salinity_crisis#Climate
Try throwing this in the mix. 😀
bob says:
July 31, 2010 at 10:14 am
…what I want to know is where did all the water on Venus go, why is there an excess of deuterium in the atmosphere, and where did all the CO2 come from?
Those are interesting questions, although perhaps deserving of a thread all of their own. The presence of water on Earth and its absence on Venus IS one of the major differences.
If the oceans did not exist on Earth, all the CO2 dissolved in them would instead be in the atmosphere. Plus, the processes that led to the creation of all the Carbonate rocks (chalk, limestone etc) would not have operated, so that all the CO2 sequestered in those rocks would also be in the atmosphere. In other words, Earth’s atmosphere would contain a very substantial proportion of CO2, much higher than today.
So, the crucial difference between Venus and Earth revolves around the presence of water here on Earth and its lack on Venus. I’ve seen various debates about the reason for this difference, but I am not sure that there is one convincing explanation.
Always enjoy reading posts like this. Or the ones discussing the Arctic Death Cycle. Always something to learn and nice to see opposing points of view (mostly) respectfully discussed. Despite what that silly lady from the NYT was told.
Just find it hard to understand why the temperature / pressure on Jupiter or some melting ice floes in the Arctic present convincing reasons why I’m warming Earth if I forget to switch off the TV standby light. Or why we need to build tens of thousands of wind turbines which basically don’t work and shut down coal and gas plants that do work.
Sorry if I’m being abstruse.
” bob says:
July 31, 2010 at 2:05 pm
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.”
Your calculation implies that Volume V and number of moles n are constant; so you are talking about a gas that is enclosed in a bottle. If you transport that bottle from Libya to Vostock, let it cool down (it is not insulated), then the pressure will drop from 1013 hPa to 562 hPa just as you say.
stevengoddard says:
July 31, 2010 at 5:06 pm
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.
“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.”
It’s a nearly correct paragraph. What it should say is “if there were no Sun (or other external or internal energy source) …”.
This is important when it comes to Jupiter. You said,
“It is over 20,000 degrees in the interior of Jupiter . This is because:
1. They get lots of sunshine 500 million miles away from the sun.
2. They are having a huge barbecue there.
3. The pressure is extremely high.”
You probably thought you were being humorous, but the correct answer is 2. The interior of Jupiter is heated primarily by processes such as radioactive decay, latent heat release due to phase changes, gravitational contraction (and, of course, the left-over gravitational energy from the original condensation of the planet). The lower atmosphere of Jupiter is also heated by the Sun; even though the optical depth is high, more sunlight still gets through than can escape again by radiation alone. The high pressure (or, more precisely, the high density) is a major factor in the operation of these mechanisms, but of itself it does not and cannot cause heating. It is passive; high temperatures need an active energy source. Like a barbeque.
“1. Pressure 2. Temperature 3. Number of gas molecules 4. Volume
That is four degrees of freedom. ”
PV=nRT has four variables, one constant, and therefore just three degrees of freedom.
stevengoddard says:
July 31, 2010 at 5:06 pm
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.
“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.”
It’s a nearly correct paragraph. What it should say is “if there were no Sun (or other external or internal energy source) …”.
This is important when it comes to Jupiter. You said,
“It is over 20,000 degrees in the interior of Jupiter . This is because:
1. They get lots of sunshine 500 million miles away from the sun.
2. They are having a huge barbecue there.
3. The pressure is extremely high.”
You probably thought you were being humorous, but the correct answer is 2. The interior of Jupiter is heated primarily by processes such as radioactive decay, latent heat release due to phase changes, gravitational contraction (and, of course, the left-over gravitational energy from the original condensation of the planet). The lower atmosphere of Jupiter is also heated by the Sun; even though the optical depth is high, more sunlight still gets through than can escape again by radiation alone. The high pressure (or, more precisely, the high density) is a major factor in the operation of these mechanisms, but of itself it does not and cannot cause heating. It is passive; high temperatures need an active energy source. Like a barbeque.
“1. Pressure 2. Temperature 3. Number of gas molecules 4. Volume
That is four degrees of freedom. ”
PV=nRT has four variables, one constant, and therefore just three degrees of freedom.
Kevin Kilty says:
July 31, 2010 at 7:19 pm
“Well, not exactly. The greenhouse-effect everyone worries about here on Earth assumes an atmosphere that is optically thin at visible wavelengths and optically thick at thermal wavelengths. Venus is optically thick in the visible for sure because we never see the surface. It must be optically thick at thermal wavelengths too. ”
The greenhouse effect arises from a difference in the optical depths for incoming and outgoing radiation. Anywhere there’s a difference in the two, you get greenhouse warming. The bigger the difference the bigger the warming. On Earth the difference is small (except under heavy cloud, the atmosphere is not optically thick either for sunlight or for thermal radiation). On Venus the difference is large. So Earth has a weak greenhouse effect and Venus a very strong one.
“… the business about cooling as it rises is not pertinent. It cools (going up) and heats (going down) along the same temperature curve, unless there is latent heat from some precipitation. ”
Quite. Or unless there is net warming from sunlight or a warmer surface, or net cooling from radiation.That’s why neither the adiabatic warming of sinking masses, nor the cooling of the rising masses, per se, are really pertinent. They’re not what warms the surface and lower atmosphere – it’s the incoming radiation that does that – the convection currents are what (along with some outgoing radiation) actually cools them.
Temperatures in Jupiter’s atmosphere are extremely hot, in spite of the very low amount of solar radiation. This is a function of atmospheric pressure, just like on every other planet.
http://juno.wisc.edu/Images/using/Instruments/MWR/MWR_Weighting_Function.jpg
So Tim Lambert misunderstands physical law and claims that everyone else is wrong. What’s new about that?
Ref – Jim Barker says:
July 31, 2010 at 9:27 am
“Its seems as the political thought content increases, the critical thought content approaches zero.”
_________________________
Non! Non! As the blood boils, ze brain she fries, ze thoughts approaches zero, and humans becomes like mad dogs and irishmen.
Top of the mornin’ to ye!
stevengoddard says:
August 1, 2010 at 7:08 am
“Temperatures in Jupiter’s atmosphere are extremely hot, in spite of the very low amount of solar radiation. This is a function of atmospheric pressure, just like on every other planet.”
It is a function of differences in optical depth for incoming and outgoing radiation. It has very little to do with pressure as such (pressure alone cannot heat an atmosphere) except that the more stuff you have, and the denser it is, the more easily you can block radiation, whether through clouds or aerosols or absorbing gases – or through clouds of locusts or flying elephants! With a suitable choice of materials – such as black aerosols and dark-coloured vapours like iodine, preferably in a mainly monatomic gas like neon, or high-level optically thick clouds that dissipate during the day and reform rapidly at night – I could design a planetary atmosphere that was hot at the base despite being quite thin. Where the pressure does come in is that the ratio of pressures relative to that at the radiating top of the atmosphere determines the convection-limited maximum temperature ratio (for given ratio of specific heats, which is itself a function of the atmospheric composition and density). Note that it is the ratios that matter here, not the absolute values. Gravity is also relevant, insofar as, for a given pressure or density, the depth of the atmosphere is proportionally greater the weaker the gravity.
Paul Birch
I made it abundantly clear that the Sun is the energy source. It is adiabatic heating/cooling as the atmosphere convects, which produces the temperature/pressure gradient. It has little or nothing to do with optics. Venus is very cloudy, but you see similar temperatures at 1 bar on Venus as you do on earth.
Paul Birch,
Why is it typically 100 degrees F cooler on the top of Mount Everest than it is at the same latitude in Saudi Arabia?
It has nothing to do with optics. They both receive the same amount of sunshine It is the pressure difference in the atmosphere.
Paul Birch,
“It is a function of differences in optical depth for incoming and outgoing radiation.”
The troposphere varies in temperature from -54 C at the top to +14 C at the bottom, in a straight line. (International Standard Atmosphere.) I suggest that the fact that it is a single straight line suggests that the reason the top of the atmosphere is so cold is the same as the reason the bottom of the atmosphere is warm. The same basic mechanism is behind both.
Perhaps you could comment on how optical depth differences explain the top of the atmosphere being so cold – more than 30 C colder than the effective radiative temperature?
Likewise, is the reason that mountain tops are so cold that they are not at the same optical depth? If air passes over a mountain range and down onto the plains on either side, how does the change in optical depth alter its temperature so quickly?
Thanks.