From Tom Nelson: Huffington Post: Carbon dioxide could ruin wifi connections for your kids
Climate Change Effects: Things Global Warming Just Might Ruin For Your Kids
[Scroll down at the link above: The alleged CO2-induced wifi problem is #26 of 53]
Here’s the claim:
A 2011 report from the U.K.’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs found that climate change could affect certain infrastructure, like wireless internet. The Guardian reports, “higher temperatures can reduce the range of wireless communications, rainstorms can impact the reliability of the signal, and drier summers and wetter winters may cause greater subsidence, damaging masts and underground cables,” according to secretary of state for the environment.
And, the Earth could be visited by a race of super intelligent Wookie like creatures riding in flying saucers…demanding they be taken to the leader, and some HuffPo denizen offers up Al Gore.
I think the chances are greater of lightning hitting a car traveling down the road than a direct causation of widespread WiFi failure due to global warming aka climate change.
WiFi in Death Valley is just a thing of the past. Kids won’t know what WiFi.
BS.
Dr. Brown: Has it been a rough day sir? Take a deep breath, this sort of idiocy isn’t worth your health. You haven’t been grading undergraduate intro physics papers have you? Those can cause short tempers and hair pulling by lecturers (and occasional belly laughs)! BUT I fully agree with your BS detector going off-scale high in this case.
So, rgb, now tell us what you *really* think. 🙂
Humans are clearly responsible for 100% of climate change, as the Great Guru Joe Biden so sagely informed the world in 2008 while being out-debated by Sarah Palin.
Well, genus Homo did appear at the start of the Pleistocene glaciations about 2.4 million years ago, so Biden might be right, except for the prior 4.55 billion years, of course. And naturally there were more humans at the start of the Medieval Warm Period than during the Little Ice Age, so obviously all the CO2 our ancestors exhaled & our high body temperature must have cause the warming, then the cooling after the Black Death killed so many of us in the 14th century, not to mention the wars of religion in the 17th.
Now our population is back up again to new heights. Time for us all to quit breathing, or at least exhaling.
The definition of fear, for Canadians: Global Warming could delay the start of Hockey season, and increase the temperature of cold beer, simultaneously. The horror!
Billy Liar says:
September 27, 2012 at 2:39 pm
Couldn’t be a part of the reason that many recently constructed roads have had to be ripped up & resurfaced recently? Notably the A1 Ferrybridge and Wetherby bypasses.
Also of note, the A1 North of junction 49, Dishforth, was closed because of insufficient drainage. The drainage problem is also notable on the M60E around Manchester. Do these people take no note of our historic climate?
Also of note is building on historic flood plains then wondering why they flooded! There’s a reason the village I was born in was built on a hill!
DaveE.
Well, it makes a change from impending apocalypse and doom to dodgy wireless connections.
I can’t wait for the day that Defra says that increasing temperatures (what increasing temperatures?) will lead to trains running 10 seconds late due to expansion of railway lines by 2millimetres per 200 mile stretch
Simple 1/R^2 or 1/R^3 attenuation, depending on whether you have a line or point source.
As a long time RF engineer I can state without any reservation whatsoever, that AGW causing problems with Wi-Fi is Bull-Pucky.
There is no calculation possible that would influence a 2.4 or 5.8 GHz radio wave with even twenty degrees of temperature variation. The only thing in the atmosphere that influences RF propagation at those wavelengths is water vapor and that only is really of interest above 10 GHz.
thats it….I’m going to compile some idiocy, print it out, and put in a time capsule for relatives yet to be born, so they can have a few beers and laugh awhile at the pure ridiculous of this generation of people.
In a hundred years global warming has warmed the plannet 3-5oC, dont you suppose that WIFI 802.11 b/g/n standards will be a little dated?
Really? Really? So, as with snow(http://michellemalkin.com/2010/12/20/children-snow/), the kids of the future won’t even know what wifi is/was.
Whenever the loons make such a statement, the following should always be posted.
The funny thing is, this story is even too alarmist for the extreme-alarmist inventor of WiFi, the Australian CSIRO.
I bet they’re kicking themselves now wishing they’d thought of it first.
I am sorry, I cannot post a polite reply to this post, this latest piece of Warmista BS, being as I earn my keep by electronic engineering.
From P Wilson on September 27, 2012 at 4:18 pm:
Shouldn’t happen, as the warmer air will be less dense thus less air friction thus the trains can go faster on the same energy which should compensate for the longer tracks.
Unless they’re real sticklers for staying at a certain speed. Which would likely be tracked by GPS, except the less-dense air will let the electromagnetic signals that check positions between the satellites travel faster, so to the GPS system the world would have gotten smaller, so the faster speeds will appear slower than they actually are. So it should all even out.
Except now they’re introducing the Google-designed driver-less cars. And if the GPS difference leads the vehicles to think they’re going slower than they actually are, that could lead to accidents. So global warming could cause more traffic accidents!
P Wilson said @ur momisugly September 27, 2012 at 4:18 pm
I can’t wait for the day that Defra says that increasing temperatures (what increasing temperatures?) will lead to trains running 10 seconds late
Would anyone in the UK notice a train arriving 10 seconds even later?
Sorry, couldn’t resist 🙂
Only partial credit (of course, since the math is correct); but downgraded only b/c no mention or direct address was made about ‘the ‘lost’ energy of propagation’ (the ‘attenuation’) terminology which gets directly to the heart of the trick question …
(Don’t take this lightly; many people including those in wireless, including not just a few engineers, take this ‘loss’ for being actual loss of some of the signal due to ‘path attenuation’ rather than a 1/R^2 function of distance and RF ‘signal spread’ in two dimensions.)
.
I would make the argument that global warming ensures we will have wifi for the foreseeable future. Why, you ask? Well consider what would happen to wifi during a glaciation. Attenuation of signal through solid ice is considerably worse than through saturated, warm air. Wifi equipment is unlikely to be functional after it has been crushed under a 1 mile thick sheet of ice. For that matter, YOU are unlikely to be functional after being crushed under a 1 mile thick sheet of ice. The advance of glaciers will also scour all above ground (and some buried) infrastructure linking wifi hotspots.
See? Warm is better than cold.
The reduction of E field (V/m) in the far or Fraunhofer region is dominated by the 1/R term. While in the near or Fresnel region all three terms have to be considered 1/R, 1/R^2 and 1/R^3.
There are some applications where antenna temperature (Ta) is a factor like radio astronomy for example, just not for WiFi where the increase in thermal noise will not be notice by the receiver sensitivity or RSSI.
I bet that the S/N of the WIFI signal is probably affected by the percent change of the transmission media as a function of degrees Kelvin.
This means that if the average global temperature is somewhere around 14.0°C or 287.15°K, a 1.0°C to 3.0°C change in the average global temperature could have the effect of a 0.35% to 1.0% increase in the noise level.
Frankly, running your microwave oven will cause at least an order of magnitude greater problem with WIFI operation than the worst case projected for the end of the world.
Opps .. is a function of the square-root of the change in temperature, which make it even smaller
So, let me get this straight: By their reasoning Wi-Fi doesn’t work in the South, the Tropics, the Deserts of the world, the Rain Forests, anywhere it rains a lot (temperate zone), and places where it’s prone to ground instability (Sorry Florida – no Wi-Fi for you!)…
So that leave, um, San Diego?
Maybe we need to build better Wi-Fi equipment… (But I’m sure I just did a cross country trip and had working Wi-Fi pretty much everywhere even in Florida and the frozen mountains…)
Just for curiousity, is the anyone in science or academia in the UK who isn’t stark raving bonkers? Inquiring minds want to know.
Hehe. WiFi works quite well in the American South, where we have 3 seasons: Rainy, Summer, and Dry. We regularly survive high temps in the 40c range, low temps in the -10c range, air that is 10% water, air that is 1% water, air that has enough ozone in it that you can smell it, plus we get the occasional earthquake, tornado, hurricane, blizzard, drought and flood. 🙂
I think global warming was supposed to be responsible for a hotspot at about the same altitude planes fly at. That would be handy! If it were true…