Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I had the great pleasure of being invited to give a presentation at the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (DDP) conference this weekend in Knoxville, Tennessee. It was a very interesting and professionally run conference, and I offer my thanks to Dr. Jane Orient 
for her invitation, and to her team for the doing endless logistic work that such a conference entails in a most efficient and nearly invisible manner.
The conference featured a host of fascinating speakers, and the city itself was most pleasant and interesting. I came with a stack of Powerpoint slides and a presentation on climate science. But then I thought “Wait a minute, these are doctors, not climate scientists”, and I ended up putting them aside and speaking for an hour with the main theme being the ancient medical admonition, “First do no harm”.
One of the first people I met carried around a portable CO2 meter. We were indoors at the reception dinner in a large banquet hall, and here is the CO2 concentration:
About 800 ppmv … it gave me a better understanding of why ground level CO2 is not necessarily a good measure of the background levels.
One of the best parts for me of such conferences is that I get a chance to meet my heroes. When I began studying climate science I soon identified the scientists that I thought were doing interesting and outstanding work … but I never imagined that I would meet them, much less get a chance to speak at a conference with them. Dr. Fred Singer, the dean of skeptics, was at the conference, and paid me the compliment of quoting some of my scientific results in his speech. I’ve met him several times before, he’ll be 90 this year, still sharp, still funny. I also got a chance to share a meal with Dr. Art Robinson, the originator of the Oregon Petition. He turns out to be a most interesting man, a PhD biochemist who is doing fascinating research on the diagnosis of the state of a persons health by using mass spectrometry to analyze the trace molecules in their urine. He was most complimentary, and said that my presentation was “absolutely perfect”. I felt quite honored.
It was a very eclectic collection of speakers, including a man whose work is the identification of the various types of ebola viruses, and the kinds of precautions necessary for dealing with the disease. He showed slides of him in Africa in a full moon suit, and spoke of how the hospitals often deal with the ebola patients without even gloves, because the hospitals are too poor to buy them and their stocks have run out in the current medical emergency. Given the recent and continuing ebola outbreak in Africa, it was most timely.
And unlike the ICCC9 conference where I spoke a few weeks ago and the talks were limited to twelve minutes (and unavoidably so given the number of noted speakers), we each got an hour to talk about our subject, which was a great boon.
I ended up speaking on how increases in the cost of energy for any reason are the most regressive tax imaginable. If you make very little money, for example, you pay no income tax. But the poorer you are, the larger a percentage of your expenses goes to energy costs (primarily heating, cooling, and transportation), and there is no exemption for those at the bottom of the heap. My message was, if you think CO2 is a problem, fine, but when you fight it first do no harm … and while increasing the price of energy is an inconvenience for many people, for the poorest of the poor it can mean impoverishment, sickness and death. So fight CO2 if you must, but if you increase energy prices to do it, you are actively harming the poor. I’ve requested the video of the speech, I’ll post it up on youtube when I get it. My speech stole shamelessly from my writings, and it’s nothing I haven’t said before, but it was the first time I’d put it into a one-hour speech. It was very well received.
In between sessions, I wandered around downtown Knoxville. It’s an old city, with a marvelous “Market Square”. Ironically, the huge building across the street is the offices of the TVA, the “Tennessee Valley Authority” which did so much to relieve poverty in the area by providing cheap electricity for the local people. The TVA building, fittingly, has a long lovely fountain symbolic of the renewable hydropower that the Authority provides …
There is also a display of old machinery in the foyer of the TVA building which you can see from outside. It’s all from the time when such machines were works of art. One that caught my eye was a “flyball governor”, first invented by James Watt of steam engine fame. As someone who holds that the climate is regulated not by feedback but by a governor system, it was of great interest, and is a stunning example of the genre:
When the pulley-driven wheel turns, the vertical shaft with the four steel balls (one unseen behind) suspended on flexible spring steel blades spins as well, and the balls are driven outwards by centripetal centrifugal force. This pulls the upper brass ring downwards against the adjustable tension of the spring at the upper right, and controls a valve which regulates the amount of energy entering the system … a most elegant version of an ancient design.
The Market Center is the showpiece and heart of the city. It’s a long open space, and every time I went there it was full of people and something was going on—jugglers, Shakespeare plays in an outdoor theatre …
.. a magician, people break dancing, newspaper sellers, a variety of street musicians, it went on and on. Outdoor cafes ring the Market Square, and the people of Knoxville have turned the outdoor cafe into an art form … now that’s outdoor eating in comfort.
There is only one statue in the square, and contrary to my expectation when I saw it from a distance, that it would be something honoring Civil War heroes, to my surprise it honors heroes of an entirely different kind:
One of the inscriptions on the pedestal was particularly moving …
” … the monstrous injustice of including educated women with felons and lunatics as persons denied the right of suffrage”, indeed. We forget the cost it took to purchase the rights and freedoms we take for granted.
Knowing that if you build a fountain kids will want to play in it, the Market Square also has a fountain specifically designed for kids, with benches nearby for the parents to watch the joy …
There is a museum on the corner of the square, featuring a complete reproduction of an apothecary shop, with reminders of how far medicine has advanced in the last 150 years.
The maids in the hotel who came in to clean my room were great. One was a very large black woman. When I told her I was there to give a speech, she said proudly “I just gave my very first speech myself”. I asked for the details, and she said it was at the drug rehab center where she used to live. I asked her what she’d told them. She said “I told them you can’t just sit around for the rest of your lives drawing government money and using it to buy drugs. You have to get up and stand up and make something out of your lives” … words to live by. She said the management of the rehab center wanted her to go speak to other groups, and I applauded her resolution to do so.
The next day another maid told me she’d been upset when she saw the word “Climate” on some paperwork in another guest’s room, she was all upset about the idea of a climate conference … but then she read a bit more and realized it was skeptics, not alarmists, and after that everything was fine again. So I guess the word is getting out.
One of the best parts of the conference was after it was all over. Everyone was eating dinner, when a loud buzzing went off all around the room, including on my hip. I looked at my phone … tornado alert, take shelter now. I’ve never lived in tornado country, so I followed the example of the locals in the hotel who did … well … nothing. It started pouring down rain, a torrential downpour, lots of wind. When that cleared, I went outside to look for the tornado. I walked up on the hill behind the hotel to get a good view. It’s part of a long ridge, and a sign said that during the war the Union troops (locally called “Federal troops”, I noted) erected ten forts with batteries of artillery during the siege of the town. I could see why, it overlooks the whole city. The sky was chaotic …
… but no sign of a tornado. As soon as I got back to the hotel, the rain and wind started up again, and in a half an hour it was dark, and the sky was full of lightning. I watched the storm from my 11th floor hotel window, I could see the window glass flexing in and out with the force of the gusts. And the lightning was everywhere, cloud to cloud, cloud to ground …
From the news tonight:
Tornadoes were also reported in Tennessee and West Virginia Sunday afternoon and evening. Just north of Knoxville, Tenn., near the Kentucky border, the Claiborne County emergency manager reported that 10 homes had been “completely destroyed.”
A most fitting end to a most diverse and interesting conference. Lightning and wind have picked up again as I write this, here’s the radar from my phone. Knoxville is the blue ball in the middle, the storm is moving southwards, and the lighting is getting amazing again.
Anyhow, that was my weekend. My thanks again to the DDP for putting on a good show. After three hours sleep I’ll fly out tomorrow at 4:35 AM, home for one day to see the good lady, and then off again Wednesday to Vancouver Island, where I’m signed on as first mate on a fishing boat delivery to southern Oregon.
My best to all, keep up the struggle, I’ll post when and as I can.
w.
Uffff. Fantastic piece by Willis. came to the comments section with the idea of congratulating him for it. Here I go:
Thank you very much Willis, for an excellent article, very interesting and entertaining and which I fully support, entirely.
But then I read the comments that were already here, and I need to add something more.
I fully agree with your governor hypothesis, but like to many here, it took me long to actually understand what you meant by the difference between a governor and a feedback, despite I am a Telecom Engineer. And because I didn’t really understand what you meant, I disagreed with you in the beginning, And I know, after reading lots of absolutely excellent essays from you, that you are a brilliant fellow, with a logical mind and very methodical reasoning who are very rarely wrong about anything, especially if it is something close to your personal experience. So when I find myself in disagreement with you, I know it is very possible and probable that it is me who is wrong. But how can I find out what is it that I got wrong, unless I expose here my opinion, different from yours, for you or others to reply and perhaps learn from the exchange, or allow the corresponding clarifications? The fact that I have a different opinion does not mean that I am trying to lecture anyone, or that I consider myself superior in any way to the person I am disagreeing with. And if this is true for me, it is probably true for others. There’s no need to take it personal.
Willis, if only you could understand some day that someone who disagrees with you and exposes his disagreement is not necessarily, and I cite several of your sentences in this thread, telling things “quite paternalistically”, or pretending to have “infinite wisdom”, and do not deserve some of your comments like “nit-pickers are out in force today”, “sick of folks blithely assuming”, “your pathetic attempts to prove it at my expense”, “busting me”, “pathernalistic admonition”, “go whimper about”, “want to lecture me”, “paternalistic didactic attempts to endlessly attack me in the guise of”. It is, in 90% of the cases, just people who need things to be clarified to them, because what one says is always clear for himself but not necesarily so for his readers and there are always better ways to express ideas.
Someone here considered that he was being “bullied out” by the use of that language, and that was exactly my impression when I read the responses that you gave. Nobody here who has disagreed with your concept of what a governor is, has addresssed you in the way that you have replied to them, let’s just keep things calm and relax a bit. If you think that a guy doesn’t merit a response, don’t respond or respond with a link to previous explanations and that’s all that is needed.
Sorry for the pathernalistic attempt to lecture you.
Nylo says: “I fully agree with your governor hypothesis, but like to many here, it took me long to actually understand what you meant by the difference between a governor and a feedback, despite I am a Telecom Engineer.”
Great, maybe you can explain what I’m missing. W seems very sure there is some fundamentally important difference that needs to be recognised but I don’t get what it is. If you have a better understanding maybe your explanation will click where Willis’ doesn’t.
Willis: “And a governor is a system that controls the feedback, usually in the form of regulating the setting of the throttle, to maintain a system at a certain level.”
So what is this “system” in climate? In Watts’ device it is a human machine constructed to achieve control of the control variable by applying a feedback to the energy input.
Now I assume you are making a creationist argument, so what is it in climate?
I would have thought that anything that happens as a climate reaction to a change in energy input and in turn affects the energy input, has to be a feedback in engineering terms. There is no governor “system”, just physical effects changing other physical variables. Whether it’s linear , non-linear, or inverse srq law, +ve or -ve, all physical effects can be expressed as a function or the “forcing” causing them. If they then turn round and modify the forcing that causes them ( directly or indirectly ) this is a feedback.
I’m not trying to “school” you or take you for a fool. I think your personal experience and knowledge of tropical climate has brought up a significant and relevant point and I’m trying to reconcile scientific/engineering language with the way you are using the terms and understand the distinction you are trying to make when you say it is not a feedback.
If it just boils down to saying that evaporation and convection are feedbacks and TS is a “governor” that uses those feedbacks, I don’t see that as being anything more than semantics and does not really change anything in the understanding of how TS stabilise tropical SST.
Is your point that a governor “clamps” SST to a fixed value whereas feedbacks just reduce changes?
What is it in the way TS affect SST that you see as NOT being a feedback? What are the essential TS effects that proves it is NOT a feedback but something else ( whatever we then call it ) ?
Greg Goodman: “Great, maybe you can explain what I’m missing.”
After observing one of the many such “governor” sessions I used mentally reducing his description to math, i.e., to something less impressionistic, as a subject to think about during a two-hour bike ride. That doesn’t mean I thought we had achieved a mind meld, but it seemed the attempt might move the ball forward. By the time the ride was over I concluded, perhaps erroneously, that any model of the system to be controlled, which would need to be part of the demonstration, would cause too much controversy to make the results a worthwhile contribution to the community. So I didn’t put anything on paper.
I say “perhaps erroneously” because if Nylo does have the math in mind maybe sharing it would help other readers.
George E Smith ; “Well hysteresis is used to describe quite a few things; but I can’t say I have encountered it with regard to “feedback systems.”
One example I had in mind is positive feedback applied to a op-amp or comparator circuit.
This will cause it latch up to one extreme or the other until the input drops significantly below the point at which the comparator would normally flip. This introduces a hysteresis into the response to the input.
Another is Willis’ tropical storms. It takes a certain SST to trigger but once started, positive f/b amplify the effect running it up to a self continuing system, ultimately bounded by the stronger -ve feedbacks that prevent it reaching explosive proportions.
Once underway SST will be cooled by the storm but can drop below the triggering level without the storm abating because of the +ve f/b. The latching and hysteresis is analogous to electronic cct.
Joe: “I say “perhaps erroneously” because if Nylo does have the math in mind maybe sharing it would help other readers.”
I’m not after some heavy maths derivation, just a verbal explanation of why the physics of TS is NOT a feedback. It looks like feedbacks to me. It seems that this must just be a case of different use of terminology. It is that difference that I’m trying to understand and clarify.
Greg Goodman: “It seems that this must just be a case of different use of terminology.”
Oh, I’ve taken it as given that what he means is something you or I would consider feedback. That’s why I see little point in discussing this at the terminology level. Everyone thinks his own definition is the correct one.
Joe Born and Greg Goodman:
I hope this helps.
I understand Willis’ ‘governor’ to be a trip-switch. Normal feedbacks occur but when some criteria are reached then the ‘switch’ operates and an additional mechanism starts so the total system is altered. And the ‘switch’ may not be tripped back to cease the additional mechanism at the same settings as it operated.
So, there are two systems; one with the additional mechanism and one without it.
And each system has its own feedbacks.
Anyway, that is what I understand.
Richard
@wes Spiers
This is great! And I thought no one was reading…
“Pedantry is necessary in physics and often required for stubborn students who refuse to open their text book. Acceleration never results in force, centrifugal or otherwise. It’s force that results in acceleration.”
The motion imparted by the rotation of the link causes the ball to accelerate away from the vertical axle. This is centripetal acceleration, yes? The link is mechanically attached to the ball so there is a pull exerted on the link by the ball as it is forced to change direction and remain ‘in orbit’. The pull opposes tendency of the ball to continue on its original tangent. I don’t think there is any doubt there is a force involved and it is centrifugal in nature; the function of a centrifuge takes advantage of this force which arises from centripetal acceleration.
” And besides, in rotational motion, there is no centrifugal force or acceleration.”
There is both centrifugal force and acceleration involved in the elements of a system which rotates about a centre which can be witnessed by spinning up a flywheel until it explodes. The strain that causes this is the result of forces which are centrifugal in nature and which are induced by centripetal acceleration on its elements.
Were this not so, it would not be possible to calculate the exact orbital velocity of a satellite whereby the acceleration due to gravity is exactly balanced by the centrifugal force ‘outward’ of the orbiting object. If the object were not travelling as quickly, say, stationary, it would be necessary to apply an upward force on it with, say, your hand, exactly equal to the force provided by the acceleration of gravity at that altitude (called the weight). The now stationary object, attracted by the acceleration of gravity, would continuously exert a force on your hand. If you throw it forward fast enough (horizontally) the centrifugal force substitutes the force provided by your hand. It the velocity is just right, the object will remain at the same altitude indefinitely as the centripetal acceleration provides the centrifugal force necessary to hold the object aloft.
This generalization does not apply to Bizarro World which is cube-shaped and where different physics applies. (That is an anti-CAGW hint.)
Crispin in Waterloo says:
July 28, 2014 at 7:25 pm
Thanks for that, Crispin. Let me stop you there because I think you’ve misunderstood me, and I’d like to clarify it..
Emergent phenomena only operate in the here and now. They don’t operate on a daily or hourly basis. They are born out of current conditions, minute by minute, and when those conditions no longer hold, they dissipate and disappear.
The main emergent phenomena involved are the tropical cumulus and buoyant thunderstorms. It is the timing of the emergence of first the cumulus and then the thunderstorms in the daily cycle that regulates the temperature. If the cumulus form an hour earlier, that makes a difference on the order of 400 W/m2 over that hour.
So no, there’s nothing that “kicks in about 8 months later”. The action of those temperature control mechanisms is immediate.
All the best,
w.
If SST is higher, TS starts (say) an hour earlier in the day and reduce the solar input 400 W/m2 over that hour. Less solar input reduces SST.
In what way is that NOT a negative feedback?
@richardscourtney
“Normal feedbacks occur but when some criteria are reached then the ‘switch’ operates and an additional mechanism starts so the total system is altered. And the ‘switch’ may not be tripped back to cease the additional mechanism at the same settings as it operated.”
I agree conceptually. My explanation above about inherent properties of a system (which I treated as a ‘material’) tries to show that there are special circumstances in which the switch is tripped, after which the return to baseline conditions (as we experience them) does not switch it back because the ‘frequency’ of the perturbing force is not exactly correct. This leads to a system temperature that can increase or decrease in steps, which can have an enthalpy change that is measurable and ‘permanent’. This very much goes against the radiative greenhouse gas argument where everything is seen to be taking place in an unaltering continuum of ‘smooth feedbacks’. Not only are step changes observed, both in heat content and temperature, there is really no physical justification for claiming they are forced by CO2, let along anthropogenic CO2 because they are not following the CO2 level. The correlation coefficient is terrible.
Pumped at the ‘right’ frequency, a system becomes resonant and ‘flips a switch’ either up or down. Until the system is pumped (up or down) again at the right frequency, it remains in the flipped state. Maybe there are dozens of flipped stable states.
The debate becomes literally a static v.s. dynamic view of the system’s properties. GCM’s calculate the change in a small volume per small unit of time, iteratively, based on the known physics. Fine, but doing that will not reproduce and frequency-based changes that are induced dynamically in the system as such changes do not arise from incremental change based on what happened a few minutes ago.
There is a material called “D30” which is rubbery and becomes hard if it is hit at the right frequency (half-wave speed of deformation). Calculating the position of and stress on each molecule each microsecond over a period of time during an impact will not reveal this Max Tan Delta property because it is not manifested except under particular E”/E’ ratios. A computer simulation would say it always acts like foam rubber which is not true. I now realize the modelers have a very, very long way to go before they can given us useful predictions of climate.
Doctor Jane Orient – that name sounds familiar.
A gutsy lady, working for individual freedom.
Note what the Guardian says about the DPP group: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors_for_Disaster_Preparedness
why am I not surprised.
Note the connection with OISM, hoster of the Oregon Petition, http://www.oism.org/pproject/, in which 31,000 or more persons with science degrees support that humans are not to blame for climate problems (my words).
Nylo says:
July 29, 2014 at 9:42 am
Nylo, Greg continues to bust me for not doing something that I’ve already done. There is no satisfying him. It is not that he has a different opinion. I’ve dealt with lots of folks with different opinions, I expect that and I have no problem with it … but if you think that’s Greg’s game, I invite you to reconsider that opinion.
Let me review the bidding. Greg said:
“Totally incapable” … that is not a “difference of opinion”, Nylo. That is an attack combined with a total misrepresentation.
Now, to open the bidding, Greg had said
OK, fair question. To which I replied:
Now, recall that this is Greg’s distinction, one with which I publicly agreed. A governor is not feedback. It is a specialized system which controls the amount of feedback, in Greg’s terminology a “feedback controller”, which provides either negative or positive feedback as needed.
So I said yes, I agree, the difference is a governor is something that controls a feedback.
Ignoring the fact that I’ve agreed with him, Greg has gone on and on, and now, all this way down the line, up jumps Greg and starts attacking me with the accusation that I’m “totally incapable” of giving him the “key distinction” between a feedback and a governor.
I’m sorry, Nylo, but that’s not what you called a “different opinion”. That’s an ugly attack and a total misrepresentation, and it gets old real fast. Nor is this the first time I’ve gone through this kind of endless claims and accusations with Greg, without learning anything of value.
You continue:
I agree wholeheartedly that in 90% of the cases that is true. And if you look at my responses, in those 90% of the cases I respond in kind.
In this case, as I clearly show above, it is not true. In fact it is paternalistic nit-picking and an attempt to bust me and the other things I said. So no, I’m not going to pretend it’s a scientific exchange. When a man asks me a question and I agree with him, I don’t expect further accusations. When that happens, it means he’s one of the other 10%, that not-so-pleasant 10% which you yourself admit are NOT simply asking for a scientific discussion of the issues, but have an entire other agenda.
To “bully” someone you have to have some way to threaten them. “Give me your lunch money or I’ll do nothing” doesn’t work, you have to have a threat. But I cannot threaten anyone in any way. Not only can I not threaten them, I cannot interfere with them in any way either. I can’t stop them from saying whatever they want, whenever they want, and in as much detail as they want. No threat, no bullying.
So when someone claims that I’m “bullying” them, in my book that is very revealing. It means they’re out of actual scientific arguments, so to try gain sympathy they’re claiming I’m threatening and bullying … and yes, you’re right in quoting me, I do call that pathetic whimpering a tactic to try to gain support. And given your response, it is a successful tactic …
Here’s my problem, and if you have a solution I’m all ears. If I do what you say, if I let Greg get away with his accusations, people believe him. And if he repeats them enough, people start believing that I’m, in his words, “totally incapable” and all the rest.
But when I stand up to that kind of attack, folks like you don’t like me calling a spade a spade. I kinda like your idea to just answer with a link, but that’s both vague and kinda wimpy. So I just tell the truth as best I know it, and I have to accept that not everyone will like it.
I’m not sure if you can understand what it’s like to live a life out loud as I find myself doing these days. I’ve grown much more mellow over the time I’ve been doing it, but I won’t put up with attacks disguised as science.
Finally, I do my best to try to discourage unpleasant behavior. Not always successfully. If you try this game, you soon find what I’ve found … I have no power. I can’t stop anyone from having their say. It’s the ultimate democracy, anyone is free to attack my intelligence, my morals, my ethics, my ideas, my past actions … and they do. I do my best to encourage people to attack my ideas, that’s the heart of science. And I do my best to discourage personal attacks on my intelligence, past actions, and the like.
All I have to defend myself and discourage the personal attacks are my words. And so I will, for example, describe a person who claims that I’m “bullying” them as whimpering to try to gain sympathy. I’m not a bully in any sense, NOR CAN I BE, because I have no threats that would make it possible to bully anyone. So I use my wit and my words instead. If you have a better way to discourage that kind of pathetic play for sympathy, or those kinds of personal attacks, let me know.
You may not like the way I do that. But I learned early on, no matter what position I take, someone will tell me I’m wrong. Heck, some positions that I take, half the commenters tell me I’m wrong … and the other half just as strongly say I’m right. So all I can do is tell the truth as I see it.
Nylo, I regret that Greg has fooled you in this, but I assure you that I can tell the difference between a “different opinion” and an attack based on a misrepresentation. I’m happy to discuss the former, and not interested in people who tell me that I’m “totally incapable”.
Finally, my thanks to you for your comment regarding the head post. Knoxville was a good and interesting place to visit, I wanted to do it justice. Please bear in mind that the man who wrote the head post is the same man who told someone to stop whimpering about being “bullied”… I’m a complex man, neither good nor bad. I’m not politically correct, I don’t bow to the consensus, and if someone attacks me, I tend to defend myself.
And if you read over my work, you will find that I give like for like. People who put out scientific ideas and questions and comments and reasonable objections get the same in return. People coming in to attack me get the same in return. Perhaps someday I’ll be totally enlightened and just let people attack me … until then all I can do is call it as it happens.
Your comment, as always, is appreciated.
w.
I apologize for using the word “bullied”. “Blustered” would have been more appropriate.
Disaster preparedness is something critical, but in a bit of irony another blog suggested people move to the Pacific Northwest since global warming will affect it the least. Perhaps, but you have the 9.0 earthquake about due (which will lower the coastal land more than the sea might be raised), and some volcanoes – Ranier will pull a St. Helens some day. After the megaquake it should be safe enough to rebuild on the new coastline away from the volcanoes.
“””””…..Crispin in Waterloo says:
July 29, 2014 at 7:39 am
@george e
“But if I hit a piece or steel (ordinary battleship plate) with a steel hammer, but not hard enough to deflect either beyond the region where Hooke’s law applies, both surfaces recover immediately, to their pristine original condition, just as they do if I apply the strain and remove it in a 10 minute sinusoidal cycle.”
I have an example of the hammer and steel that is well known: the sinking of the Titanic. The direct cause was the ship hitting an iceberg and ripping open like a zipper along the riveted joints. The background explanation was that the rivets were made from steel slag and had wonderful and appropriate properties at room temperature. An impact of a high frequency (being hit by a hammer just as you describe) had a response (energy lost v.s. energy returned) with a low ratio (Tan Delta). However dropping the temperature of the rivet to 4 Deg C produced a completely different operating paradigm, something you did not anticipate in your example. That is the point of the climate response comparison……”””””
Well, I would caution against asserting “what I did not anticipate” in anything I write.
One thing I have learned, is that no matter how much detail, I put in ANY writing, I can always anticipate, that somebody will “assume” that I did not anticipate whatever is bugging them, since that is not included in my writing. But no, I didn’t think it worth mentioning that the Titanic was sunk by bad climate; whether true or not. And my example of hammer and steel, was nothing more than applying a compressive force to both surfaces, well within the limits of Hooke’s law linear elasticity, but doing so in a fraction of a second. The fact that it rings like a bell, is prima facie evidence, that the materials are operating completely within the linear elastic range.
Now with a lead plate, it wouldn’t ring as nicely.
I could simply just state my position, and leave everyone to falsify it on whatever ground (s)he wants to.
But back at your Titanic; a correct cause, but an incorrect analysis.
The failure of the Titanic steel plates, had nothing to do with anyone hitting a rivet at 4 deg. C. As I recall, the ship’s rivets were all in place before the ship left port; so nobody was doing any riveting when the ship struck the iceberg.
The Temperature induced failure of the steel plates, was entirely a consequence of the binary alloy phase diagram. That would be the Iron (Fe) / carbon (C) binary phase diagram.
You can look for it in : ” The Constitution of Binary Alloys.’ Volume one, on pages 353-365.McGraw Hill. It is by far the longest entry in the entire set, as the Fe-C phase diagram, is just about the most complex one that exists. Certainly the most studied.
As someone who has designed and worked with highly sensitive control systems I have no problem with the way Willis has described the process. I don’t expect lay people to get their heads around the minutia of open loop let along closed loop systems while avoiding unarguably benign discrepancies in esoteric terms. It might be best for folks to think of feedback in terms of sign, magnitude, and phase rather than trying to pinpoint a specific mechanism. Unless you can intelligently discuss poles and zeros on a Nyquist diagram a bickerfest regarding system response is probably best avoided. The flyball description was completely adequate for the purpose of the article.
@ur momisugly Crispin in Waterloo
“Centifugists” are in good company. Newton himself, in his 20’s, started out thinking that way. It was only after he was older (and wiser?) that he realised his mistake. Some say Hooke tipped him off, but Newton denied this, vehemently. In fact, it was Newton who coined the term “centripetal”. You can read all about it in Newton’s book “Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica”. If your Latin is up to it, you can read it in the original. My Latin is a tad rusty, so my copy is an English translation.
To save time, I again urge “centrifugists” to get hold of their kids’ physics textbook. Halliday, Resnick and Walker have nice coloured diagrams in their treatment, and Giancolli issues the following Caution: “There is no real centrifugal force” and shows a diagram of what happens “when the string breaks” and also mentions that sparks fly tangentially from the edge of a grinding wheel.
Then there is the magnificent “khancademy.org” which is doing it’s best to put all science teachers out of work.
dp: ” Digital systems like I worked with at Johnson Controls learn about building temperature response to energy input and outside/inside air temperature. The information is used to determine when to turn on the system prior to workers beginning their work day. It also anticipates when it can back off at end of shift.”
Apropos the the nomenclature discussion: There are no doubt circles in which the feature described in the just-quoted passage, too, would be called “feedback.” Yet I had clients who referred to the analogous approach in disk drives as “feed-forward.” I find that nomenclature prejudices depend heavily on the context in which the user first heard the term. Although nomenclature matters, it is more important that people define the way in which they use terms than that they choose terms others may consider correct.
This difficulty doesn’t just afflict discussions of feedback, of course. A not-insignificant contributor to the errors Robert G. Brown made here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/24/refutation-of-stable-thermal-equilibrium-lapse-rates/, for instance, arose from a failure to keep track of the “temperature” definition he was using.
@wes [Spiers]
All noted. Many thanks.
@Crispin in Waterloo
“I” before “E”, except after “C”.
Spiers, not Speirs. 🙂
Greetings from Toronto
[Except in “Caneida”, as in “neighbor” and “weigh”. 8<) .mod]
@george e
>Well, I would caution against asserting “what I did not anticipate” in anything I write.
I agree with you there. Sorry if brevity and the need to earn a living weakens my thoughts though usually I am not accused of brevity.
>One thing I have learned, is that no matter how much detail, I put in ANY writing, I can always anticipate, that somebody will “assume” that I did not anticipate whatever is bugging them, since that is not included in my writing. But no, I didn’t think it worth mentioning that the Titanic was sunk by bad climate; whether true or not. And my example of hammer and steel, was nothing more than applying a compressive force to both surfaces, well within the limits of Hooke’s law linear elasticity, but doing so in a fraction of a second. The fact that it rings like a bell, is prima facie evidence, that the materials are operating completely within the linear elastic range.
Yes it is. Something I had trouble with conceptually when looking into this (and I am sure as heck no expert on materials except maybe how to cut them) was the idea that an impact has a ‘frequency’. That was not intuitive. Fortunately I have a genius standing by to assist and one of the white boards in my office is covered with charts of T plotted on E’:F axes with little notes and arrows. It is interesting that when a metal, vibrated at a particular frequency starts to operate in a non-elastic manner, across a narrow band. Apparently this is not a very predictable phenomenon and that is why the DMA was invented to look for them. I also did not know that a creep test demonstrates the same effect. I think these materials guys want to take over the world.
>Now with a lead plate, it wouldn’t ring as nicely.
Well, perhaps at a certain frequency it would ring really well – even if you demonstrated a tendency to dampen vibration, there are frequencies at which it suddenly stiffens and refuses to cooperate/behave. The ‘property’ of dampening ‘naturally’ disappears for a while.
>But back at your Titanic; a correct cause, but an incorrect analysis.
Great – I love to read alternative ideas.
>The failure of the Titanic steel plates, had nothing to do with anyone hitting a rivet at 4 deg. C. As I recall, the ship’s rivets were all in place before the ship left port; so nobody was doing any riveting when the ship struck the iceberg.
Well that is certainly not what I saw in the programme dedicated to examining the rivets. These things were new at the time, made from slag. They quickly became unpopular. To our great fortune, one of the original rivets was sitting for a century on a desk in the USA and analysis showed that it had exactly the properties anticipated by the metallurgists: it changed in just the way they described when cooled, resulting in a very different behaviour compared with the ‘test conditions’.
I have not researched the failure of the plates – didn’t hear of it – and while it certainly may have been an additive cause, the reports of survivors and the photos of the ship on the bottom do show the rivets ripped open ‘sounding like a zipper’. Can you tell from the pictures if that is true?
>The Temperature induced failure of the steel plates, was entirely a consequence of the binary alloy phase diagram. That would be the Iron (Fe) / carbon (C) binary phase diagram.
>You can look for it in : ” The Constitution of Binary Alloys.’ Volume one, on pages 353-365.McGraw Hill. It is by far the longest entry in the entire set, as the Fe-C phase diagram, is just about the most complex one that exists. Certainly the most studied.
That is well known, I agree. As it happens, I have a First Edition McGraw Hill Mechanical Engineering Handbook which contains thousands of lost items such as the telegraph wire sizes stated in “Ohms per ton-mile”. I have a son with a Masters degree in using phase diagrammes to create new allows, in particular bulk glassy alloys – metals with no crystal structure – based on Yt, Bo and Fe. He predicted several and created one with a working temperature range of 111 C which was at the time more than 50% wider a range than any discovered to date. In that range they are machinable. My point is that even for the single property of being a bulk glassy alloy, having a good phase diagramme doesn’t give reliable results. As for latent properties that will appear under dynamic conditions, it is virtually hopeless. Even so there are many complicated diagrammes plotting all sorts of things to try to make the search easier. There are those who claim there is no such thing as a crystal-free metal! Skeptics are everywhere. Because they have no crystal joints they have tensile strengths of 3-5 GPa and very non-typical dead straight stress-strain plots. Like shape memory alloys, they find their way onto space craft.
Can we get to the topic of something in the atmosphere being influenced by particular resonant frequencies that would cause a large jump in the effectiveness of a heat vent? I am trying to raise the point in principle and to provide enough info to stimulate thinking about it. I may fail of course.
There is a centuries-long suggested relationship between solar activity and global temperature. A causal mechanism has proven elusive. Willis looked hard. If the solar cycle is long, happening to coincide with or directly caused by the decrease in activity, perhaps the atmosphere’s response to a 13-15 year ‘push’ is to open wide the parasol of cooling known as clouds. When pushed every 8-11 years the response may be to fold it away or just ‘do nothing’.
I don’t mind being wrong – most paths do not lead to a viable light bulb. Inventors gotta try a lotta stuff. The solar system is full of resonances. Maybe the climate control knob has one too.
@wes
@Crispin in Waterloo
“I” before “E”, except after “C”.
Spiers, not Speirs. 🙂
Greetings from Toronto
Obviously not noted. I am trying too hard to get George e or anyone else to discuss frequencies. Maybe I can convince Tallbloke a frequency is a cycle.
>[Except in “Caneida”, as in “neighbor” and “weigh”. 8<) .mod]
OK that was funny.
Do you know how Canada got its name?
Explorer: "Greetings O native person!"
Original resident: "How's it goin' eh?"
Explorer: "What is this place, your great country that stretches from sea to shining sea, called?"
Original resident: "Cnd."
Explorer: "Huh? Cnd? How to you spell that?"
Original resident: "Well, you just write, C eh? N eh? D eh?"
Explorer: "Got it. Thanks."
Having specified and purchased numerous “speed governors” over the years, mostly provided by the premier governor manufacturer in the world, Woodward Governor Company (Woodward, Inc), the package generally accepted in the industry as “the governor” includes a speed sensor (mechanical or electronic), a feedback package (either mechanical, pneumatic, hydraulic or electronic) that enables the user to adjust “droop” (feedback sensitivity) and an actuator to automatically effect throttle, steam valve, wicket gate or blade pitch movement in response to speed variations.
That’s the package and that is what is generally referred to as “the governor”. Exotic enhancements can include overrides in the feedback loop to mitigate system upsets and instability of various defined origins. But the fundamental elements of a speed governor as defined by the industry include a speed sensor, a feedback mechanism and an actuator to effect speed correction.