Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
The CERES data has its problems, because the three datasets (incoming solar, outgoing longwave, and reflected shortwave) don’t add up to anything near zero. So the keepers of the keys adjusted them to an artificial imbalance of +0.85 W/m2 (warming). Despite that lack of accuracy, however, the CERES data is very precise and sensitive.
As an example of what that sensitivity can reveal about the climate system, consider Figure 1, which shows the upwelling (outgoing) longwave (LW) and reflected solar shortwave (SW), month by month, for 13 years (N=156). Since these are individual CERES datasets, their trends and values should be valid.
Figure 1. Upwelling longwave (shades of blue) and upwelling reflected shortwave (shades of red) for the globe as well as the two hemispheres separately. Cyclical seasonal variations have been removed.
Now, there are several very curious aspects to this figure. The first and most surprising issue is that the hemispheric values for shortwave, and also the hemispheric values for longwave, are nearly identical from hemisphere to hemisphere. Why should that be so? There is much more ocean in the southern hemisphere, for example. There is solid land at the South Pole rather than ocean. In addition, the underlying surface albedos of the two hemispheres are quite different, by about 4 watts per square metre. Also, the southern hemisphere gets more sunlight than the northern hemisphere, because the earth’s orbit is elliptical.
So given all these differences … why should the longwave and shortwave in the two hemispheres be the same?
The next thing of interest is the stability of the system. The trends in all six of the measurements are so tiny I’ve expressed them in W/m2 per century so that their small size can be appreciated … if the trends continue, in a century they may change by a watt or two. Note that despite the small spread of the measurements, none of the trends are significant.
The next thing of interest is that in addition to the values being similar in both hemispheres, the trends are also quite similar. All of the trends are very slightly negative.
Finally, despite the great difference in the size of the LW and SW signals (240 vs 100 W/m2, Figure 1), the size of the variations in the two signals are quite similar. Here is a boxplot of the three pairwise comparisons—the anomaly variations in global, and northern and southern hemisphere.
Figure 2. Boxplots of the variations in the longwave and reflected shortwave shown in Figure 1, for the globe (left panel), the northern hemisphere (center panel) and the southern hemisphere (right panel).
Since these are boxplots, we know that half of the data lies inside the colored boxes. This means that half of the time, the longwave and the shortwave are within ± one-half watt of the seasonal value. Plus or minus one-half watt half the time, and within a watt and a half for 95% of the time, for a total of 156 months … this to me is amazing stability.
Given the myriad differences between the northern and southern hemispheres, my explanation of this amazing stability is that a) the temperature of the planet is regulated by a variety of threshold-based processes, and b) the set-point of that regulation is controlled by globally consistent values for the physics of wind, water, and cloud formation.
Now, there certainly may be some other explanation for this amazing stability and symmetry of the climate despite the large differences in the geometry and composition of the two hemispheres. That’s my explanation. If you have a better one … bring it on.
Best regards to all,
w.
NOTE ON DATA AND CODE: I’ve turned over a new leaf, and I’ve cleaned up my R computer code. I’ve put all the relevant functions into one file, called “CERES Functions.R”. That file of functions, plus the data, plus the code for this post, are all that are required to duplicate the figures above. I just checked, it’s all turnkey.
DATA: CERES 13 year (220 Mbytes, has all the CERES data in R format.)
FUNCTIONS: CERES Functions.R (Has all the functions used to analyze the data.)
CODE FOR THIS POST: Amazing Stability CERES (Has the code to create the figures and calculations used above.)
Without any objection,a website dedicated to global temperatures and their causes seen this memorable explanation –
“Sun comes up, it gets warmer. Sun goes down, it gets cooler again. Sun comes up, that’s one day finished – which is not exactly one rotation of the Earth on its axis.”
Funny,funny,funny !.
I personally consider this phenomenon a hostility towards the fact that one day/night cycle and one rotation keep in step with one 24 hour day through a clear mistake at a definite moment in history (late 17th century) and suddenly there is this 1465 rotations/1461 days imbalance.
It is not an insult,it is a fact that it is impossible to take people who are hostile to basic facts seriously and God knows there was enough time to get familiar with the original principles where Sirius acts as an orbital marker for the Earth and the number of days/rotations coincident with the Earth’s return to the same orbital position as that star is seen just far enough to one side of the Sun to be seen due to the orbital motion of the Earth. I have to go to one of those off-color websites to get the image –
http://danmary.org/tiki/show_image.php?id=30
Trust me,websites don’t recover from the trauma of being found in possession of a hideous ‘fact’ like the one which tries to mess with the principles of a 24 hour day and the rotation of the planet.Despite the riff-raff not seeing the point or some other vapid excuse or insult ,people do actually know something is really wrong.
“The first motion, named nuchthemeron by the Greeks, as I said (I, 4), is the rotation which is the characteristic of a day plus a night. This turns around the earth’s aids from west to east, just as the universe is deemed to be carried in the opposite direction.”Copernicus De Revolutionibus.
“A flow in a fluid isn’t an energy transfer mechanism. It just relocates existing energy.
===
And why should this energy decide to “relocate”.
As always, systems do this in order to end up in a lower energy state. So it is not an energy neutral “relocation” as you suggest.”
It isn’t the flow that transfers energy from one molecule to another. That transfer from one unit of mass to another is achieved by radiation or conduction. Individual molecules within a flow can gain or lose energy via work done with or against gravity but that is not an energy transfer process between molecules.
Gary Pearse says:
January 7, 2014 at 11:23 am
While you are correct about the mechanisms being slow, and about energy going into and out of storage, the numbers are small compared with the total flows. For example, there are twenty petawatts or so just being continuously transported from the tropics to the poles.
Rough numbers? Global biomass is estimated at 560 billion tonnes of carbon. Lets suppose that greening increases that by 5%, call it 30e+9 tonnes of carbon. Carbon has about 33 megajoules per kg, that’s about 1e+21 joules. Let’s triple it for good measure, we’ll say 3e+21 joules is stored in increased greenery. Now, lets assume that the greening has been going on for fifty years or so … that gives us an energy storage of 5e+18 joules per month over that time. Might be more, let’s double it, call it 1e+19 joules per month.
Now consider that the planet receives about 0.7 * 340 ≈ 240 watts/m2 continuously from the sun. This is about 30e+22 joules per month … and the monthly storage in greenery is 1e+19 joules, about three-thousandths of one percent (0.003%) of the energy coming in.
Good question, right idea, trivially small changes.
w.
Again , I’ll bring up the idea that the mechanism that balances the system is the atmospheric pressure. That, and the tendency of all things to want to equilibriate throughout the system.
The atmosphere is always striving to get that nice equal pressure/temperature gradient, but the rotation of the Earth, and the different energy transfer rates over sea and land does not allow it to ever reach that stage.
It would be ironic if Trenberths missing heat was due to a flourishing forest in Yamal.
Take a square meter of ground with an average power from insolation of 250 Watts. There are 3 x 10^7 seconds in a year, or 750 x 10^7 = 7.5 x 10^9 Joules incident on this square meter over a year. Wood has an energy density of roughly 5000 kW-hour/m^3 = 18 x 10^9 Joules/m^3. So 100% conversion would yield roughly 1/2 a cubic meter of net new-growth hardwood per square meter of the Earth’s surface. To rebalance the radiation imbalance would require roughly a millimeter of NET growth of hardwood-density biomass per square meter of surface.
I think it is unlikely that the Earth produces anything like this. Deciduous growth and cropland and grassland make basically no net contribution — the leaves, grass, crops produced are constantly being eaten or otherwise decaying and are turned back into bioenergy (and thence to heat). Lots of commercial timberland has the same problem — sure, you grow a tree for 20 years but then you cut it down and burn it, or use it to make furniture — all of which simply lags the time until its energy store is released. Actual forests probably do have a small net cooling effect (vegatative ground cover has a number of net cooling effects, this is one of them)
but probably not enough to account for the missing heat. Note well that much of the Earth’s surface area is near-desert or desert scrub or icepack or mountaintop and doesn’t contribute anything like a millimeter a year. Note well that the oceans cover 70% of the Earth’s surface.
Which leads us to the more interesting question — what is the energy conversion rate of sunlight into long term biological energy stores in the ocean? In the warmer surface waters an entire ecology is supported by sunlight, lives, dies, and sifts down to the depths as a constant biological “rain”. How much bioenergy is deposited, unconsumed, on the sea bottom per square meter per year? I do not know the answer to that question. I don’t even have a particularly good way to visualize or estimate it. 1 mm/year/m^2 of land surface is pretty easy and I can relate it to things like an estimated increase in the mass of a tree per year, but how many unconsumed algae or plankton die and fall to the deep ocean floor per square meter per year? My guess is “not nearly enough” but surely there is empirical evidence.
rgb
Paul Marko says:
January 7, 2014 at 11:24 am
Good question, Paul. The problem is the short span of the CERES data. The expected change in forcing from changes in CO2 is on the order of a doubling (3.7 W/m2) by the end of the century. This works out to 0.04 W/m2 per year, or a variation of half a W/m2 over the period of record. This is at the lower end of detectability in the CERES data … but let me mull that question over. Might be some way to winkle that one out of the data.
w.
This is like climate by way of Simcity –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity_(2013_video_game)
Pity the wider population don’t realize that a con became a game.
And let’s think about erosion of rocks.
Rocks are formed within the Earth under immense pressure. This is not a solar effect.
Once these rocks are lifted and exposed, (also not a solar effect) basic physic says that it must take the same amount of energy to break them down and return them to there starting point.
A considerable amount of this work IS done by solar energy.
(If there’s typos, sorry, having eye issues at the moment)
It’s not often I read a thread and learn things on two different topics at the same time. I can’t contribute to the CERES data discussion, but I can comment on the other topic
It had never occurred to me previously that there’s a difference between a day and a rotation, but the links Gerald previous provided explained it quite well. So thank you!
Not that it’s particularly relevant to my life, but I’ve always been keen to make sure terms used in a discussion are clearly defined, because I’ve seen too many arguments that have come down to two people using two different definitions for the same term. This is another such case.
The quote above makes that clear. The term “rotation” used by NASA refers to a sidereal day. That is, the amount of rotation required to have a ‘fixed star’ return to its same position in the sky. The term “day” is common used to refer to a solar day. That is the amount of rotation required to have the sun return to its same position (ignoring altitude) in the sky.
Because of the movement of the Earth in its orbit, these two similar terms are not synonymous, though casual usage will result in people using the two interchangeably. This appears to be the problem in this discussion because in the context of what Gerald has been saying, the two terms can not be used interchangeably.
Gerald’s point appears to be that it is the ‘daily rotation’ which impacts on temperature rises and falls. I would say that, assuming that ‘daily rotation’ means a day, then this is correct. It is the rise and fall of the sun (as viewed from a fixed point on the Earth) that is the primary driver of temperature fluctuations on a daily basis.
However, as defined above, ‘rotation’ is not the same as ‘daily rotation’ because the reference points (fixed stars vs the sun) are different. I would personally say that ‘rotations’ have no significance when it comes to climate science, while ‘days’ (or ‘daily rotations’) do. The 1465 rotations that Gerald mentions are irrelevant to climate science — it’s the 1461 days in the same period of time that matters because they’re based on a reference point that is significant to climate science: the Sun.
The major field of science where ‘rotations’ are important would be astronomy. For almost every other field of science, unless there is an astronomical component, they would not be relevant and it would be ‘days’ that matter (if that is significant at all).
So, I’ve learned something from this secondary discussion. I’m not sure I’ll ever find a use for this new knowledge, but it’s still nice to know.
rgbatduke says:
January 7, 2014 at 11:55 am
But, do we not know that number?
The center of the Atlantic Ridge is a “rain depth” = 0.0 depth at time = today.this_year.
By the time that new seafloor has reached the edge and been consumed (Pacific side) into a trench, or built up( Atlantic side) to a known depth of mud of the continental shelf, is not almost all that biological “mud” a stored sunlight energy record? Now, you get some Mississippi mud and Amazon mud on top of the ocean biologics and carbonates, but aren’t those also predictable?
Re: Gerald Kelleher,
A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.
Sir Winston Churchill
Clearly, some variation of the JH would explain your surprising observation. Hence, I think it important to introduce this possibility although I think the JH is unlikely and I know you think is impossible.
I completely disagree, Richard.
Look, the only things that affect the upwelling SW radiation are:
a) TOA insolation
b) Albedo
c) Absorption.
One can get all fancy and talk about one layer or multilayer models, but basically sunlight comes in (dominantly SW) and is net reflected off of the system or is absorbed. Absorbed sunlight comes off as upwelling LW. I don’t even care WHERE the sunlight is reflected — it could be off of the surface of the Earth, off of clouds, off of ice. Most of the upwelling SW radiation is from reflection, most of the upwelling LW radiation is from heat absorbed from the SW radiation.
Jelbring’s hypothesis, in addition to not explaining about a zillion things, violating various laws of thermodynamics, and being directly falsified by planetary observations (all of which I’ve worked through in detail on other threads) would explain at most uniformity in upwelling LW radiation, but that’s not the point I made. It is the symmetry in upwelling SW radiation that is surprising, and that has nothing to do with the temperature.
The problem here is that it gives me a headache to try to even estimate what the cause is — especially for seasonally adjusted data. Is the seasonal adjustment one that forces the two to be equal? It easily could be. In that case it isn’t any surprise that everything is equal, the equality is due to the internal normalization applied to the dataset. One would have to look at the unadjusted data, which one has to hope to hell shows more upwelling SW radiation in the SH summer than there is in the NH summer, but presumably has less upwelling SW radiaiton in the SH winter than there is in the NH winter and figure out why/how the averages work out to be so close to the same. This has to be factored into the fact that GAST supposedly countervaries with the orbit — warmest in NH summer (aphelion) and coolest in SH summer (perihelion). If upwelling SW radiation is the same, how can one possibly explain this?
This is what models are “for” — to allow one to compute the actual integrals over the five or ten relevant variables for even the simplest toy models. But it is too difficult for me to solve in my head.
rgb
Graeme W
The funny thing is that recently they jettisoned the ‘solar vs sidereal’ junk for an equally dumb and non cyclical reference –
“At the time of the dinosaurs, Earth completed one rotation in about 23 hours,” says MacMillan, who is a member of the VLBI team at NASA Goddard. “In the year 1820, a rotation took exactly 24 hours, or 86,400 standard seconds. Since 1820, the mean solar day has increased by about 2.5 milliseconds.” NASA
They did this for a specific reason that will emerge next year when they try,once again,to promote the idea that their erroneous ‘leap second’ junk tied to a rotating celestial sphere conclusion for daily rotation correlates to a rotating Earth.
Not a single sign of responsibility in any subject and pertaining to any insight that creates both the calendar system,the timekeeping averages of the 24 hour day and the Lat/Long system out the great planetary cycles.
These people ‘learning’ the solar vs sidereal junk just as the jokers in the empirical community have junked it already so they can rewrite history once more.
A flow in a fluid moves energy one from one location to another but does not transfer energy from one molecule to another.
I was referring to an energy transfer mechanism as one which moves energy from one unit of mass to another.
But, since the fluid molecules are uniformly displaced as they move around in convection, transferring energy from one place to another is indistinguishable from transferring it between molecules. Suppose we start with a liter of warm air near the ground that convects up to the ceiling. It is replaced by a liter of cooler air from the ceiling that is convected to the ground. At which point, since in statistical mechanics the molecules don’t have any particular labels, we have accomplished exactly the same final state as one we might have achieved by transferring the mass between molecules.
Which is nearly beside the point. The real point being that energy transfer is always relocating existing energy, is it not? So that when you state in any context that it is not, it is, in fact, an oxymoronic (self-contradictory) statement. Convection transfers existing energy (say) between two reservoirs. So does conduction. So does radiation. In general all three are active at the same time — convecting air mixes and conducts heat to the air it mixes with, and the whole air mass warms or cools due to radiation as well. All three are important on the same timescales for various parts of atmospheric dynamics. Latent heat transport as an add-on to convection matters as well.
rgb
Gerald Kelleher says:
January 7, 2014 at 12:29 am …
Vague and yet obscure, with areas of dense fog.
Gerald Kelleher,
You would do well to look at your ‘NASA fact’ until you understand it, for it is not in error. Here are some more facts you evidently have not considered, or else misunderstand completely.
1) The Earth rotates approximately 361 degrees (not 360) in 24 hours.
2) The time interval from noon to noon still averages 24 hrs.
3) The Earth is not flat.
4) The Earth orbits the sun in 365.2422 days.
5) Your fixation on Uranus is irrelevant.
6) Our present understanding is not founded on voodoo.
7) Daily temperature fluctuations are not tied to sidereal time.
8) The notion that a complete orbit counts as a rotation is not “mindnumbingly dumb.”
9) Nobody is saying that 366 rotations drags us out of step with the solar day (except you).
Steven Moshersays: “Longwave is easy…Over time of course it all eventually exits the atmosphere at the ERL. the effective radiating level. As that C02 increases the ERL moves up to a higher colder height. When the ERL is raised, the system loses energy less rapidly as fundamental physics says it must.”
Easy? Is the ERL independent of a wavelength? CO2 may be distributed uniformly in the atmosphere (are you sure it does not freeze out high enough), but I would expect H2O vapor concentration to vary steeply in freezing conditions. Why is the higher atmosphere colder? Do you actually compute its temperature? I guess we are taking some extreme simplifications here. Nothing against it, but it does not look like an easy fundamental physics.
Slacko
There is no such thing as 361 degrees,it is a notion designed by people who can and will create any assertion to serve a purpose or conclusion and particularly mathematical modelers.
There is only the 1461 rotations that fit inside 4 orbital circumferences of the Earth and the 24 hour average is created out of the observed variations for each noon cycle. The aaverage is then transferred to ‘constant’ rotation via the Lat/Long system.
There is no room whatsoever for any deviation from the fixed reference that created the necessity of the extra day/rotation known as the leap day which relies solely on the first appearance of Sirius to one side of the central Sun due to the orbital motion of the Earth.
Let Willis account for supporting the notion that over the next 1461 days the temperature at his location will not react to the 1461 rotations which cause the temperature to rise and fall if he wants his 1465 rotations for the same period. That is where your ‘fact’ leads to and it is devoid of common sense,responsibility,intelligence and all those things which make us uniquely human.
The change of time from an astronomical definition to an atomic one is for a good reason. Science and technology requires standardized units. Since the length of day is not constant, it can’t be used for fine-level scientific work. A definition of time that is constant was required. This also impacts on technology, where real-time computer systems need to be able generate events at specific times. This requires a definition of time down to very fine levels, and it is at those fine levels that the problems of the inconsistencies from an astronomical definition arise.
For casual use, this doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter for climate science, either, as a general rule because climate science works with events that have a very coarse time-frame.
So the matter you’re talking about, while interesting and relevant in certain fields, is not something that impacts on climate science.
As I said in my original posts, it gets back to definitions. For casual use, people can use a definition of a day that means one apparent rotation of the sun in the sky, and divide that into 24 hours, and similarly divide the planet into latitudes and longitudes. For fine level scientific work, a more formal and precise definition of time is required that varies slightly from the astronomical one. The astronomical definitions are unworkable for certain fields of science and technology. It’s as simple as that.
All that is necessary to achieve the observed symmetry between the hemispheres is for the configuration of the convective circulation to be slightly different in each hemisphere.
Slight variations in the sizes, positions and intensities of the main convective cells are all that is needed.
Whenever the mix of conduction and radiation becomes out of line with the radiative balance between Earth and space the convective circulation changes to provide an equal and opposite thermal response.
Since there are restrictions in the free flow of energy between hemispheres I would expect the circulation response to be slightly different in each hemisphere.
The fact of symmetry is evidence in support of such a proposition.
They did this for a specific reason that will emerge next year when they try,once again,to promote the idea that their erroneous ‘leap second’ junk tied to a rotating celestial sphere conclusion for daily rotation correlates to a rotating Earth.
Gee, do you get the feeling that you keep pursuing the same non-sequitor, over and over again?
There is no grand conspiracy here. There isn’t a physicist in the world who does not understand precisely what a second is. There isn’t an astrophysicist in the world who does not understand precisely what all of these ideas are well enough to teach them in their sleep. Outside of that, nobody cares! Nobody seriously cares about leap seconds, leap years, and so on. Those are introduced in order to maintain an adequate correspondence between the calendar year, the human synodical day, and the standard second.
Please get it through your head — the second itself is the invariant standard here. I could care less about precisely how many seconds there are in a single inertial-frame rotation of the physical Earth, and whether or not this is the same as the number of seconds in the time the Sun takes to go from its maximum elevation above the horizon on one day to the maximum on the next, or the number of seconds it takes for a given fixed star to cross a meridian. In general, all three are not constants which is why physicists do not use them as the basis for clocks anymore.
That’s why they aren’t pretty numbers. A mean sidereal day, at 23 h 56 m 4.0916 s is not the same as a solar day, and due to nutation, is not constant. An actual solar day varies over an interval of almost 50 seconds over the course of a year, and a mean solar day or synodic day is derived from averaging over many such varying cycles and at this point is superceded by the standard day, 86400 seconds. The number of days in a year is 365.242199, which is not precisely 365.25 and for that matter the length of a year is not constant as orbital tidal resonances constantly speed the Earth up or slow it down a bit in its moderately eccentric orbit.
One can look up all of these numbers, they are clearly explained in any number of textbooks, nobody uses them stupidly in real science (that I know of) — NASA doesn’t compute orbits using days of any sort, they use the standard second (duh!). Obviously. Climate models use standard seconds and days AFAICT, but this is irrelevant as long as the axial inclination and eccentricity are computed using the same standard clock (as I’m fairly sure they are). Indeed, it would be dumb to use sidereal days because they don’t have the correct meridional modulus to describe the daily cycle of insolation.
So one last time — could you PLEASE provide SOME reason to have brought this entire topic up in this discission in the first place or drop it? Seriously. This is stupid. Nobody cares. Even the people that might have cared — who didn’t know about synodic vs sidereal time at the beginning, for example — no longer care. Now they know far more than they ever wanted or likely needed to, and none of it matters to anything at all they are likely to have to calculate. Those of us who might have to calculate something where it does, we know how. So LEAVE IT.
rgb
Willis, I think you’re moving in the right direction. I suspect that the reason the hemispheres are so uniform is because the atmosphere is the primary radiator, not the surface. I would suggest that the primary method of heat transfer from the surface to the TOA is convection, especially the movement of water vapor.
rgbatduke:
Thankyou for your reply to me at January 7, 2014 at 12:19 pm.
Obviously, I was not clear. This probably resulted from my hesitancy to mention the Jelbring Hypothesis when what I was saying clearly relates to his notions.
The important point I was trying to make was – as my important points usually are – near the start of my comment. I quoted you, then I wrote
[n.b. bolding as in the original: RSC]
That was my real point: i.e.
the ‘coincidence’ could be that the hemispheres’ behaviours don’t match to each other but each matches to something else.
If that possibility is true then there has to be some effect which over-rides all the differences between the hemispheres.
But the only such effect published in the literature of which I know is the Jelbring Hypothesis (JH) and – as I said – I was aware of the likely response to any mention of the JH. My concern at this induced me to follow my statement (which I quote above) by overstating the matter and saying
Clearly, at that point I should have said
There would be no puzzle if something like the Jelbring Hypothesis (JH) were true.
You dispute what I did – mistakenly – say and I agree your dispute.
Importantly, I am grateful that your quote of me did not stress my error but quoted my saying
[emphasis added: RSC]
That “some variation of the JH” would be some kind of overall adjustment of the radiative, conductive and convective behaviours in the atmosphere in response to something else (Jelbring asserts the “something else” to be gravity and atmospheric density). Jelbring says such adjustment determines surface temperature. Whether or not he is right about temperatures: the possibility exists that such adjustment may modify radiative fluxes.
Indeed, you say (and I agree)
But it does have to do with clouds which form in response (among other things) to temperature.
And you continue
Again, I agree. Indeed, your saying
“The problem here is that it gives me a headache to try to even estimate what the cause is — especially for seasonally adjusted data. Is the seasonal adjustment one that forces the two to be equal? It easily could be. In that case it isn’t any surprise that everything is equal, the equality is due to the internal normalization applied to the dataset.”
Could be understood to be agreement with my having said to Willis
And I stand by my saying
Because my real point was that the ‘coincidence’ could be that the hemispheres’ behaviours don’t match to each other but each matches to something else.
In conclusion, I again thank you for your response to my post and I offer especial thanks for your drawing attention to my mistaken choice of words which obscured my meaning.
Richard
Graeme W wrote
“For casual use, people can use a definition of a day that means one apparent rotation of the sun in the sky, and divide that into 24 hours, and similarly divide the planet into latitudes and longitudes. For fine level scientific work, a more formal and precise definition of time is required that varies slightly from the astronomical one. The astronomical definitions are unworkable for certain fields of science and technology. It’s as simple as that.”
I have heard that propaganda many,many times but ultimately your views lead to being out by 4 rotations from the principles which tie the 24 hour days to the 1461 rotations inside 4 orbital circuits to the nearest rotation. Fine scientific levels of work indeed !, when the most immediate experience of planetary temperatures is the day/night cycle and you have intellectual difficulties with the single rotation that causes it,then the term ‘cult’ surfaces as it is the only human condition that lacks sense or reason.
So,we can say 99.9% of WUWT contributors can’t correlate one rotation of the Earth with one day/night cycles in those 1461 times it takes to cover 4 orbital circuits of the Earth.Take some consolation that your opponents are not much better.
Slacko
, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Radians have a specific meaning and are “natural” units. Degrees are absolutely arbitrary.
are perfectly well defined, and hence angles of greater than 360 degrees, however arbitrary the units themselves might be in terms of divisions of a circle, are perfectly well defined. So far you do nothing but spew forth racist-elitist straw men and mathematical and physical irrelevancies. I recognize this syndrome, as we get it fairly regularly here, most usually from people like Joe Postma and other PSI persons.
There is no such thing as 361 degrees,it is subhuman notion and designed by people who can and will create any assertion to serve a purpose or conclusion and particularly mathematical modelers.
There is only the 1461 rotations that fit inside 4 orbital circumferences of the Earth and the 24 hour average is created out of the observed variations for each noon cycle. The average is then transferred to ‘constant’ rotation via the Lat/Long system.
There is no such thing as 360 degrees, or degrees at all. They are a stupid (although common) dimensionless unit. There is only
There are not 1461 rotations fitting inside 4 orbital circumferences, because the year is not exactly 365.25 days long. By the time you find some integer fraction that works, you will conclude that there is nothing at all relevant or significant about the number of rotations per revolution. It is a pure accident that it is even as close as it is to a quarter integer.
I also don’t understand your “subhuman” reference. That kind of language smacks of Nazism and the worst kind of racism. Your assertion that it is “designed by people who can and will create any assertion to serve a purpose” is pure nonsense, conspiracy paranoia. It is nothing of the kind.
If you want to talk proper mathematics and the measurement of angles, angles greater than
rgb