Open Thread Weekend

It is worth following Gowers’s Weblog and the minor revolution he has started in scientific publishing. Its ramifications reach well beyond Elsevier and concern the entire scientific publishing system.
As far as I can see no “climate scientist” has joined in so far, they seem to be perfectly satisfied with the current paywalled/pal-reviewed setup.
However, we clearly need a reform, and it is getting urgent indeed. Results of publicly financed research should remain publicly accessible all the time. In fact we do not really need “publishers” any more, just some public repositories, preferably with proper revision control and easy anytime public backup (like github). The role of former publishers should be restricted to quality control, provided as a service, presumably for a subscription fee (or even free of charge if it was a community effort or was financed on taxpayer’s money). Repositories should support filtering according to evaluation lists and backlinks to them. That’s it.
Former journals would shrink to URL lists with a quality score assigned to each item and, of course, these evaluation lists themselves were also subject to evaluation.

Genghis says:
February 19, 2012 at 2:01 pm
Just thinkiong of your experiment there, for a minute – couldn’t the tinfoil act as a supposed GHG?, especially if not in direct thermal contact with the metal bar. i.e. with a bit of an air gap – it may reflect 50% of the incoming radiation – but also it will reflect 50% of the outgoing radiation from the bar back (assuming it has equal reflectivity on both sides of the foil!). If so, would that mean that equilibrium temp is identical for both bars?

PaulID says:
February 19, 2012 at 3:03 pm
try this
http://www.biocab.org/Geological_Timescale.jpg

[Reply: Please email them and explain the problem. ~dbs, mod.]
===========
Done.
Updates will be added if needed.
I’m not holding my breath 🙂

Volker Doormann says:
February 19, 2012 at 2:20 pm
““How can 30% of nickel in Rossi’s reactor be transmuted into copper?”
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=473
”
More about the Widom-Larsen theory:
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Widom-Larsen.php

Has anyone seen that disease is the new climate change: http://www.independent.com/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/experts-fear-diseases-impossible-to-treat-7216662.html

Britain is facing a “massive” rise in antibiotic-resistant blood poisoning caused by the bacterium E.coli – bringing closer the spectre of diseases that are impossible to treat.
Experts say the growth of antibiotic resistance now poses as great a threat to global health as the emergence of new diseases such as Aids and pandemic flu.
Professor Peter Hawkey, a clinical microbiologist and chair of the Government’s antibiotic-resistance working group, said that antibiotic resistance had become medicine’s equivalent of climate change.

Eric (skeptic) says: February 19, 2012 at 9:27 am
I would like Doug Cotton (or anyone else) to provide an alternative explanation to why radiational cooling is more effective when there are no clouds
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It is well known that the moist adiabatic lapse rate in the atmosphere is less that the dry one. Clearly there can be more water vapour when there are clouds. So the atmosphere cools more slowly. This is basic physics.
However, it does not in general affect the rate of cooling of the surface.
The atmosphere is usually cooler than the surface at night and is also cooling faster even when relative humidity is high. So there is no feedback mechanism which adds thermal energy back into the surface in order to slow its rate of cooling. Any such mechanism would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. If you think it happens, then you explain how and why, and produce some evidence that is not a circular argument based on the greenhouse conjecture.
Even if radiation from the surface is reduced because the temperature of the first millimetre of the air is closer to that of the surface, this can be compensated for by the rate of thermal energy transfer by diffusion and evaporation etc. This “balancing act” happens all day long. Hence you cannot say that, just because the power of radiation leaving the surface is diminished that the whole net rate of cooling of the surface is reduced. It isn’t because no thermal energy can be transferred from a cooler atmosphere to a warmer surface.
In any event, this is weather not climate. On a worldwide 24/7 basis relative humidity tends to average out and has in fact been slightly declining this century as was advised in a recent WUWT article.
.

Doug Cotton says:
February 19, 2012 at 4:14 pm
I would make two points for this week’s Open Thread …..
[SNIP: This is already posted

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I’m truly sorry, but at first I had a technical problem and the post did not appear, and then I do think you will find that you snipped it on the “snow” thread which is understandable, I guess, even though the title of that thread referred to no effect of CO2.
I have felt obliged to respond to Eric (Skeptic) and William Connelly who have each been thread bombing with fairly similar posts on various threads, but I will try to keep to Friday open threads in future.
But if you can find this post actually accepted anywhere, or if you can recover it if not, I’d appreciate it being transferred to this thread as it made a new point regarding the thermal “momentum” of core and mantle thermal energy.

We need a cartoon from Josh for the ridiculous stance of Governor Jerry Brown in CA, who has demanded 30% of energy come from renewable sources. I was thinking a Junipero Serra Governor Brown whipping Californians to prostrate themselves before his Big Green God (preferably with a huge green pot brimming with $ nearby that says “Donations Not Voluntary.”)