Putting Sir Isaac Newton on the right path
Short story by Christopher Bowring
When lay global warming skeptics point out to alarmists that the recent seventeen year period of steady global temperatures invalidates their climate models which predicted runaway global warming, there is often a standard response.
‘How can you, global warming (or climate change) denier, who have no experience of climatology, dare to argue with me, a renowned expert in my field of science?’ Let us return to the England of the seventeenth century to see what is wrong with this rebuttal.
I am in Grantham in Lincolnshire. It is a sunny day. A respectable looking man in a wig is sitting under an apple tree. It is Sir Isaac Newton. I greet him. He smiles back, but looks agitated. ‘What is wrong?’ I ask. ‘I have made a wonderful discovery,’ he replies. ‘I call is my Law of Gravitation’. ‘What does it say?’ I enquire.
‘It says that any two bodies in the universe repel each other with a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distance apart’. ‘Really?’ I respond. ‘But that is nonsense!’ ‘Nonsense?’ explodes the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. ‘Nonsense? How can you, a nobody, a nonentity, dare to question the mind of the greatest living scientist in the world?’
‘Sir, I refute your law quite simply’. And with that I take an apple from the tree and drop it on Sir Isaac’s head.
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strike says:
November 29, 2013 at 11:42 pm
Jean Meeus says:
November 30, 2013 at 12:00 am
The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:
November 30, 2013 at 1:08 am
The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:
November 30, 2013 at 5:01 am
etc.
I try this every couple years, to no avail, so I suppose this is just beating a dead horse, but:
The High School and Engineering School physics I was taught (in the 60s & 70s) stressed the distinction between extensive properties and intensive properties of matter. Perhaps it is now considered “forbidden knowledge” in the post-normal science age.
Whether we were dealing with gases, solids, or radiant spectra, it was NEVER correct to simply compute an arithmetic average of Temperatures. Which is to say – it gives the WRONG (physically unreal) answer.
Now, in the case of the earths atmosphere (a gas),
a.) please specify the exact conditions under which the ideal gas law may be ignored (i.e. disregarding volume and pressure and latent heat of evaporation) and a simple arithmetic average of random temperatures will produce a correct result.
b.) do these conditions actually obtain on our planet?
wrt “average wealth/income”: when adequately defined, wealth or income are extensive properties of individuals and groups; the analogy with temperatures (an intensive property) therefore fails. So yes we “can” average temperatures or telephone numbers for that matter, but in either case the result has no physical reality or meaning.
You should continue your dialogue with the warmists by asking questions. For example ask how their experts explain the hiatus. And if they answer ask how their experts explain the mechanism used when the missing heat goes to the deep waters? Some numbers, maybe?
Easy questions are also revealing. What is the global average temperature? What happens if it rises to super hot 17 C. Are we toasted? What will be different? OK. Every Canadian knows the there is too hot in the USA. But what about Siberia, Greenland, Alaska and so on. What is the optimum temperature for mankind?
Most of the modelled warming is not coming from CO2 but from the chain-reaction of warmings created by CO2 at first and after that by consequences of that warming. If there is no measurable warming, does the heat created by the secondary effects exist or not?
Reliably & precisely taking earth’s average surface temperature to tenths or hundredths of a degree is theoretically possible but practically impossible. Adequate coverage with the same instruments all properly sited (in cities or out?), placed & maintained at the same distance above ground level, recording highs & lows each day & retrieving these readings may never be practical. What degree of coverage would be adequate? One station per 10,000 square kilometers? That would require 51,000 such stations, including in the Himalayas & somehow stationary at the North Pole. But my county covers just 8368 km², yet includes snowy mountains, river valleys, semi-arid plateau & sandy sage desert.
CRUTEM4 relies upon 5583 stations, with the US hugely overrepresented (1064 v. 213 in Russia).
Satellites & balloons too have limitations, but fewer than surface stations.
“The fact is that you could travel much of the world in just a pair of trousers (pants in the US!), a shirt, and a jacket.”
But isn’t that just the point how useless an average temperature is? A value does exists but it is of little practical use. No traveler to the US in their right mind would pack for the “average US temperature” (let alone a world average) and there is not one, national average weather report that we consult each day. The range of temperatures is just too great for the average to have any meaning. Looking at other metrics, such as an upward trend in areas that have little natural variation in temperature, would seem to have much more value to me, a layman.
I suspect the initial parable where “… any two bodies in the universe REPEL each other …” has been confused with another law and entity. The force described is not of the “Law of Gravitation ” but the “Law of Levitation” and this was not Sir Newton but an earlier incarnation of Captain Hubbard. In this modern time the science of Levitation Theory studies continues by those scientists who study science and the technologists implement the science in Clearwater Florida. Recently the great quantities of man made CO2 levitating into the greenhouse repel the efforts of scientists to levitate and only through the efforts of the technologists to remove the weighty physical monies from those seeking levitation are they able to ascend to the heavens similar to the balloonists tossing ballast overboard and relying upon the less dense hot air to propel their upward journey. All hail bop.
Global average temperature is useful when comparing planets!
But, on earth regional averages are much more useful.
Does it matter it global average temperatures rise, *IF* that rise occurred due to a rise in the regional temp in, say, Australia and Japan?
Would the change in global average temperature have any influence to me located on the south coast of the UK, or you where you are?
Average regional temperatures could indicate how a region may respond to any change.
Even ‘out of region’ temperatures are of interest but surely global average temperatures, due to sparse sampling and the wide area, are, for what they are currently used for, useless.
Ferdperple says:
“This is what separates superstition from science. Superstition relies of positive examples to establish belief. Science relies on negative examples to establish truth. No matter how many positive results are published in leaned journals it doesn’t prove anything. However, a single negative result can prove a whole body of scientific theory and teaching, going back almost 2000 years to be wrong.”
Amen Ferd. In my mind, this is one of the keys to help the CAGW believers understand what is wrong with their thinking. They need to be able to differentiate between superstition and science, the difference between superstitious thinking and scientific thinking. Unfortunately, when one is driven by hatred and mistrust of Big Oil the fossil fuel companies as many AGW believers probably are, this can be a difficult if not impossible thing to do. The superstitious CAGW belief can be very hard to let go of when your emotions are a big driver of your thinking and your acceptance of superstition more than any healthy respect for science can cause you to abandon it.
I have an older brother who is a firm diehard believer in CAGW, and I have had several rounds of argument with him on the subject. I might try to get him to understand the difference between superstition and science, but all he would probably do is discount the contrary CAGW evidence as contrived and paid for by Big Oil. I have decided that it is a waste of time trying to get him to understand why he is wrong. It would only damage our sibling relationship, and I don’t want to do that.
Badly worded sentence in previous post:
When your emotions are a big driver of your thinking and play a large role in your acceptance of CAGW, letting go of it can be a very hard thing to do. Those emotions make it much easier for you to embrace CAGW than any healthy respect for science would cause you to abandon it.
You can’t fool a climate scientist who would explain that the mass of the particulate matter in the column of air above the apple is greater then the mass of the particulate matter in the column of air beneath the apple thereby driving the apple towards Sir Isaac Newton’s head and in so explaining save Sir Isaac’s original hypothesis.
My sin-tax (syntax) may be different than yours.Enough so that i question (skeptical) of a lot of things.
Like what i refered to above”Why Hot Water Freezes Faster Than Cold—Physicists Solve the Mpemba Effect”
https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/d8a2f611e853
Some ‘established science’ is always up for grabs and reality can be strange.
My take on the ‘mpemba effect’ may be that warmer water is less dense than cold, so,more space between molecules ,so less molecules more volume ,expanding ‘gas’ ,faster phase change.
How’s that for ‘comment science’.
PS-I also think the cold atmosphere probably dominates the system.Where does all that ice at the poles come from any way?
PSS-14°C or 57.2°F(average temp of planet according to some) is fairly cold like my basement walls (54°F) when it’s 38°F outside. With those temps. i want to turn the heat up but i have to think of the ‘skyrocketing costs’.
(inside 68°F with heat on,maybe i should lower that ?)
Does it take a child to point out that the Emperor has now clothes?
Correction:
Does it take a child to point out that the Emperor has NO clothes?
Lol, Jimbo I preferred the first one, as the Emperor has “Now clothes” as in trendy and fashionable, but he is wearing none. Or how about “No Now clothes” or even “ Now No clothes or even Know No Now clothes. Silly? Yes very.
Sorry I could not sleep and I have been having a chuckle over some of the posts. I even visited the “The Four Fundamental Forces” to brush up.
Hmm back to the sack for me.
Well, I’m no climatologist but … (Sounds like a good entrée to a joke)
When this nonsense first was propagated, back in the early ’80s, I was curious. It could be possible. But, being a history buff, I realized that “climate” has many moods and specifically it had been warmer in the past, before it became colder and warmer, etc.
Being an engineer, I could not buy into the “positive feedback” so essential to the scare, as the direct CO2 warming is, even to the warmistas, inadequate to create panic. As an engineer, I understand feedback, and clearly there are no positive feedback mechanisms operating on the Earth, otherwise we would have all fried or frozen billions of years ago.
BTW It’s cold here in Ottawa!
Samuel C Cogar November 30, 2013 at 9:50 am
The greatest transfer of energy from Sun to Earth is via the oceans, which absorb the entire visual spectrum, and reflects the IR, as I understand. Any SCUBA diver will explain the relationship between light and heat in the oceans.
I rebut arguments from authority this way:
Me: “Do you consider yourself a scientist?”
If the layperson says “yes”, my response is “Then you of all people should know how science is done.”
If the layperson says “no”, my response is “Well I am one. And as a scientist I will tell you how science is done.”
And then I go on to explain how science works and why the seventeen-year trend kills the global warming hypothesis.
Yet superstition is still going strong, often promoted by many on this blog, and by billions of people around the world. No amount of reason and countless negative results seem able to quell it.
I ♥ all here, well, maybe some less. I got my GED when I was 16. (better than George Clooney) Scored 60 in science in ’79’. Spent 12 years cooking, thermodynamics 501. Spent 7 years as a salesman. Worked with pressures over 70,000 PSI. water pressure. As an observant ‘layperson’, political science sucks. Please, allow me to try to learn here. I know, I’m a rude, crude, socially un-acceptable, freak who got off his leash, but,
BS is BS.
Prove your wrong or, prove your right and I might listen to you. Otherwise, STFU!
♣
People individually are getting smarter and BS will no longer be held high in transit. (unless it’s dangerous.)
Store
High
In
Transit.
😉
You missed Bowring’s use of “repel” in his example.
You need to give your GED back.
@The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley, November 30, 2013 at 5:01 am
Yes, Big Jim, of course there is a mean global temperature. And you can calculate it by any one of half a hundred different statistical methods and get fifty different answers.
And every single one of them will be useless as an indicator of anything important.
Computer climate models don’t input global temperature as a variable. Nor do they derive it as a first-level output. Researchers just look at the scenario they have just generated, say “Wow, that looks scary! What’s the global temp?” and then take a mean of the local temperatures. So they have a single figure they can present to the IPCC and say “We mustn’t go above 2 degrees.” Or three. Or five. Or whatever.
It’s advertising, not science.
I’m sorry, You’re. My English is worthless.
I do not understand all the physics and if c02 can cause significant warming.
But I do know if models fail to predict what they are suppose to then there is a big problem with the science. The sooner we face up to it the better.
@RogerKnights
“You missed Bowring’s use of “repel” in his example.”
No I didn’t, please elaborate.