Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT speaks at EIKE in Germany on Models vs. Measurements in April 2014, the video was just recently made available on YouTube.
His conclusion: Real science in any case it is not what many climate modelers present as science. It’s more a kind of religion. Watch the video lecture below, it is well worth your time. (h/t to Bernd Felsche)
When I was in engineering school in the late 70s/early 80s, we were taught to say Kelvins, not degrees Kelvin. I too regularly use Centigrade instead of Celsius. I don’t remember what the professors used at that time.
MikeB says:
June 14, 2014 at 9:35 am
Greg says:
June 14, 2014 at 7:51 am
Well, you are partially right Greg in that the names of SI units should always be written in small letters, e.g metre, second, watt etc. Kelvin with a capital ‘K’ is wrong. However, the plural form is metres, seconds, watts, kelvins etc. The abbreviations for these units are m,s,W and K respectively.
For unit values more than 1 or less than -1 the plural of the unit is used and a singular unit is used for values between 1 and -1.
The point that Latitude is making is that Lindzen (whom I admire) gets it wrong throughout his presentation. He speaks of ‘degrees Kelvin’ which used to be acceptable but has not been part of the SI convention for about 50 years.
It merely reflects the historical development of the terms – and some pointless, rigid, OCD mental habits that are strongly encouraged in SI, but do not in any form improve communication or clarity. Consider Lindzen’s age, then consider the age of those he studied under. Clearly they would have not had the same considerations that are current now. In fact, my own physics and chemistry teachers alternated between “kelvin” and “degrees kelvin”, which was correct up through the sixties. They also consistently referred to “Celsius” as Centigrade more than two decades after the scheme was renamed after as Swedish Astronomer who advocated a “similar scale” – in fact exactly backwards from the centigrade system. The “C” would be more sensibly name for Christin who really developed the scheme we use. I still have to “remember” to use Celsius, but I “know” what centigrade is.