From the ‘I’m not a scientist but I play one in Vanity Fair” department comes this ridiculous tweet from writer Kurt Eichenwald.
Via Wikipedia: no mention of climate or weather skill:
Kurt Alexander Eichenwald (born June 28, 1961) is an American journalist who serves as a senior writer with Newsweek, a contributing editor with Vanity Fair and a New York Times bestselling author of four books, one of which, The Informant (2000), was made into a motion picture in 2009. He was formerly a writer and investigative reporter with The New York Times and later with Condé Nast‘s business magazine, Portfolio. Eichenwald had been employed by The New York Times since 1986 and primarily covered Wall Street and corporate topics such as insider trading, accounting scandals, and takeovers, but also wrote about a range of issues including terrorism, the Bill Clinton pardon controversy, Federal health care policy, and sexual predators on the Internet.
Of course, that makes him highly qualified (in Alt-climate world) to say things like this:
Rightfully, since he didn’t show any work, he’s being flamed in replies to that tweet.
— B'sC'sSoxPats-Yup! (@RedDFredDFla) September 5, 2017
Dr Ryan Maue was quick to weigh in:
https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/905097503963533312
UPDATE: Eichenwald’s ego explodes:
Then, oh never mind, blame it on Fox news!
Was it the same “climate change equation” that predicted the 12-year hurricane drought? Oh wait, there wasn’t one. Never mind.
It just gets worse and worse. The tagline of this column is “fighting pseudoscience.” It’s like they think 1984 was an instruction manual.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2017/09/05/houston-weve-got-a-problem-its-called-global-warming/#664f73681380
They DO think it’s a manual!
Yes, even college kids and high schoolers think 1984 is an instruction manual. They do not in any way understand it was a warning. Worse yet, 1984 has no solution presented, so it’s an instruction manual for a society that becomes eternal and cannot be changed, at least to the thinking of the younger generation and poorly educated.
Sheri: Hollywood has always amazed me in that regard – half-a-century they’ve been adapting and telling these sorts of cautionary tales, and now they’re enacting them.
Jeez! and its only Tuesday!
After a holiday. They need something big to catch your attention on a day like that!
Step up, shout ‘bullshit’, and be prepared to be attacked by those who call you a denier. Sigh. It was bullshit anyway, of course.
LOL! Eichenwald is deleting tweet and going ‘Full On John Podesta’ on twitter with rants!
https://mobile.twitter.com/kurteichenwald
IN THE DEMOCRATIC ECHO CHAMBER, INCONVENIENT TRUTHS ARE RECAST AS PUTIN PLOTS
https://www.google.com/amp/s/static.theintercept.com/amp/in-the-democratic-echo-chamber-inconvenient-truths-are-recast-as-putin-plots.html
MORE INSIDIOUS AND subtle, but even worse, was what Newsweek and its Clinton-adoring writer Kurt Eichenwald did last night. What happened — in reality, in the world of facts — was extremely trivial. One of the emails in the second installment of the WikiLeaks/Podesta archive — posted yesterday — was from Sidney Blumenthal to Podesta. The sole purpose of Blumenthal’s email was to show Podesta one of Eichenwald’s endless series of Clinton-exonerating articles, this one about Benghazi. So in the body of the email to Podesta, Blumenthal simply pasted the link and the full contents of the article. Although the purpose of Eichenwald’s article (like everything he says and does) was to defend Clinton
He seems to misunderstand DACA and healthcare as well.
OK, where will Irma make a landfall, and when?
Sorry , the magic formula only gives intensity and timing to 100% accuracy, I’m still working on track predictions. 😉
The climate change equation can only formulate things that happened already.
A simple linear extrapolation shows that Irma will not need to make landfall — by the end of the week, wind speeds will reach 300 mph, as the storm wall reaches inland simply by expanding. Within another week, wind speeds over 500 mph will scour Gaia’s enemies from North America, followed the week after by the rest of the Earth, which will eventually be torn apart by Irma’s planet-girdling >1200 mph winds sometime next month.
Just had to drive that SUV, huh?
It’s just a question of where Irma happens to be. Winds on Venus gust at 250 mph and 740 K, but Neptune’s winds blow nearly supersonic at 1300 mph and 55 K. The cooling sulphuric clouds on Venus slow Irma down. /sarc
Bang on the SW tip of Florida, Sunday morning.
It will be very very bad.
Then it will rip up the east coast before wandering off into the Atlantic.
The public will be told it’s all about climate change, and enough will believe it to make Trumps position almost untenable.
It will set science back a generation.
Science has already been set back a generation, as has education in general. Perhaps more than one lost generation.
Like with the British Royal Family, some suggest it might now be a good idea to skip a generation.
The stupid, it burns. I’m ok with stupid and even ignorant. What really burns me it the willful and blatant lies. This smuck is not stupid or ignorant. He’s part of the problem that needs to be addressed with lampposts and hemp. Give it time folks. Give it time.
So where is the evidence of his prediction? Did he make it public or just write on the back of an envelop yesterday and bring it out ?
Timing “100%” ? OK let’s see it .
Maybe he would like to share his magic “climate equation” for public inspection. He certainly need to given credit for all this hard work !
On any given day there exists some prophet of doom strutting around with a sign predicting some impending catastrophe, and eventually one will be correct, but this is no rationale for the correctness or prognostication abilities.
How often in the past has this buffoon been incorrect? One correct guess out of many is not a sign of reliable guessing.
“One would expect that a soothsayer would not be able to look another soothsayer in the face without laughing.”
…. and I have invented a way to turn shit into gold. It works 100% of the time when there is a major storm brewing.
Sorry, Greg. He beat you to it!
I read that he used the Clausius-Clapeyron equation to predict the hurricane. Is this possible?
Kurt probably thinks Clausius-Clapeyron was a Roman emperor or a venerial disease.
Or a Roman Emperor witha venereal disease?
Clausius The Clap
Dickus Maximus?
did you mean Coles Maximus ?
That would be David Appell. Kurt is a good writer.
This creep looks like a psychopath. A cold menacing stare like he’s about to pull someone’s fingernails out very slowly and enjoy every minute of it.
Oddly enough, if you can track down the thread on Twitter where he brings up tentacle p0rn (while talking to his ‘adult son’, lol) you will be amused for hours reading the massive amount of flames sent his way.
He just needs a little more self inflation to look exactly like Michael Mann!
@Kurt Eichenwald ✔ @kurteichenwald
Can you please give us the names of the remaining storms, their intensity and timing, for 2017?
Cliff
Yes, just using the old National Enquirer model: print 1,000 predictions, trumpet the one you got kinda right.
In this case, at least the National Enquirer actually printed their predictions.
This drip apparently is trying to take credit for predicting something without actually showing that he did.
BTW, DON’T search for his name and “tentacle”…I warned you.
National Enquirer? Pfft ….. the best rag on the newsstands was the Weekly World News, by far. Whilst the National Enquirer wasted valuable money on unnecessary things like coloured ink, the WWN instead devoted its ink budget towards getting the scoop on the really important news of the day, like Bat Boy and killer snails in Texas. Quality reporting if ever there was such a thing!
Tentacle Porn!?! WTF!?!?!
I should have heeded your warning.
I made the mistake of looking up his name and tentacle. Looks like my first comment got lost in moderation… I should have heeded your warning. I think I’m scarred for life.
Whenever someone yells, “don’t look”, half the people will automatically look.
He is a NYT “journalistic scientist” who may claim Nobel Laureate status at any time. Stay tuned.
Maybe he can borrow Micky M. prize for a while?
I was pretty impressed with Ryan Maue, too.
He’s a hurricane scientist . . if there is such a thing.
Ooops, I should retract that because it reads a little snarky.
Apparently Ryan Maue is one.
RYAN IS ONE OF THE BEST
Wow, think of all the lives he could save. He has a moral obligation to share his amazing gift. If he doesn’t, I’m sure alarmists will be outraged. (Extreme sarc)
So this guy is…
And he writes this?
Maybe someone stole his identity.
Well, sounds like it.
You can see how the jetstream pushes in the eastern US.
http://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/real-time/mtpw2/product.php?color_type=tpw_nrl_colors&prod=conus×pan=24hrs&anim=html5
Is there any chance that jet stream will push Irma northward and out over the Atlantic?
[Yes, there is a chance that will occur. But disaster sells newspapers, TV time, and web-counted clicks on web sites. Also, “gloom and disaster-doomed” scenarios do encourage some people to prepare for potential disasters. Several models – but not all! – predict paths that stay east of FL. .mod]
I really have no idea what Irma is going to do but I’ll wing it and say that looking at nullschool it appears most likely that it will pound Jamaica and Cuba and then run aground in Central america. At least I have the cojones to post my prediction before it happens! You folks are my witnesses!
It seems to me that rather south.
Hurricane IRMA
As of 18:00 UTC Sep 05, 2017:
Location: 16.9°N 59.2°W
Maximum Winds: 160 kt Gusts: N/A
Minimum Central Pressure: 926 mb
Environmental Pressure: 1010 mb
He is 100% correct that when you apply the climate equation of H=Harvey I= Irma, then Irma would be the next tropical storm/hurricane.
I predict the next after Irma is Kurt.
This is what happens when climate scientists make brazenly unsupported statements of climate doom. It pushes science further into the post normal where heartfelt opinions are valid and where the butcher, the baker, the candlestickmaker… are welcome to participate. They do stick, come what may, to the CO2 heating formula that was handed down on a clay tablet by acolytes of Maurice Strong. Notice that no mainstream CliSci or fawning fake news outlets are calling bull to this. Heck, even the florist or the seamstress is qualified to call BS on such stupidity.
Maybe that’s Eichenwald’s point. He just left the sarc tag off his tweet.
So what is his prediction for Hurricane Betsy?
The U.S. has got to get control of the use of marijuana. It has reached epidemic proportions.
Pot makes sperm swim around in circles, not hurricanes.
clockwise or anti clockwise or does it depend on the hemisphere?
maybe it depends on the hemisphere on which the variety is cultivated
I also made prediction, according to the prevailing ‘scientific consensus’ it was only 97% accurate.
/sarc
Satellite loops of Irma can be seen here:
http://www.eldoradocountyweather.com/satellite/goes/tropical-atlantic/tropical-west-atlantic-vis.html
Wow! I hadn’t seen this before, Anthony, but you have scored with the appellation “Alt-Climate world”! What a great counter to the term “denier”!
‘Ctrl-Climate’ world? (otherwise known as Ctrl-C)
Shift happens.
A meta-joke.
Hmmm…this could be an idea for Josh.
The Climate Seancetist Keyboard.
It would not have a “Pause” key.
The “Num Lock” key would be replaced by the “Num Adjust” key.
The ‘Delete” key would be extra large for dealing with FOAI request.
Of course, every key would be a “Hot Key”
IE “Shift+G” would move the goalpost.
(The “Esc” key would be a “No Esc” key and a slider which would self-adjust to be nearer or farther depending where the “Shift-G” sit the goalpost for dthe next “tipping point”.)
And “C+O+2” would melt the computer’s Gaia-board.
Thank You, Dr. Maue!
That was not a ‘shot across the bow’.
It was straight through the boiler room!
Eichenwald is a dweeb with a litany of a-hole journalistic accomplishments…a real jerk.
12 years ago I predicted that some know-nothing boob that writes for one or more rags that are popular on the Upper West Side would make an assertion so offensive to the nature of human knowledge that it was beyond ridicule …
I’m 100% right
I’m impressed ! Truly a prophet 🙂
I assume that by “Midwest” he means the US Midwest.
That means he must have rubbed his crystal balls counter-clockwise rather than clockwise as Mann “et al” seem to be doing.
(SORRY! Sorry! Sorry. sorry. 😎
Predicting that sort of thing could keep you really busy!
I just love the sizzling retorts and comments about Eichenwald’s absurdity. If I were the least bit intelligent, I would write at least one as well, but I ain’t got it.
Looks like he dumped the tweet. Not surprising.
100% accurate? Eichenwald should remember that 97% is the green blob tag for BS stats.
Yup! “Im deleting my hurricane tweet because idiots arent getting point. Climatologists use math to calculate. Math works. Idiots use fox news.
73 replies 124 retweets 631 likes”
Suspicion confirmed. He was being sarcastic/ironic. Much more ironic than he realized. Who’s the idiot, Kurt? I think we all know the answer. Math works, but you have to know all the underlying physics, otherwise you just have mathematical wanker models that soon go off the rails…as has happened with virtually all of your twee “climate models.” Ignorance is no excuse, Kurt. Get out of your bubble or shut up.
If he would have claimed it was a satire of Michael Mann’s claim about preictictimg Harvey it would have been spot on funny.
“predicting Harvey”, sorry but I had a ‘convfefe’ moment.
A journalist who doesn’t know mean from median but can do maths with “formulas” that don’t exist and get resukts that are transparently fabricated.
Sounds like Kurt fits right in with the consensus.
You folks are being way to cruel to our dear Kurt Eichenwald and very disrespectful of his true abilities. So, I’m going to set you straight and describe what I think I’ve seen with my own eyes:
The other night I was at a seance, and alone amongst the five of us only Eichenwald was able to connect with the dead. In fact, he actually connected with General Ulysses S. Grant who informed him that history was mistaken and that it was actually Grant himself who surrendered to Robert E. Lee.
But, that’s not all. Later, Eichenwald showed us that a Ouija board genuinely does work (as opposed to ungenuinely). He asked the board questions, for which everybody in attendance knew the answers (and we absolutely knew the answers since the events had already occurred), and gosh dang it, the Ouija board got every question right.
Ok, there was one question, but only one, that despite Kurt’s psychic presence, the Oujia board simply could not answer. One of the attendees asked if any of Kurt Eichenwald’s girlfriends had ever faked their orgasms.
Jeez, Tom. That question’s even worse than asking a lady her age 😉 😉
Kat ( female person of color / red
I seem to recall another harebrained journalist who made very wild claims on this august blog not so long ago. He was simply looking for PR too.
Make 100 predictions, but don’t tell anyone about them.
When one of them is correct, run to the front of the line and proclaim your brilliance.
…and to the front of the marathon race from a side road.
please, at least Ms. Ruiz made no pretensions about actually knowing anything, recall the “what’s an interval?” comment during the interview with Kathy Switzer
Nice Ruiz reference. That lady lives on forever.
The LEFT crying wolf again…
I, in fact, was 100% correct on the coming hurricanes, predicting the end of the ‘cane drought in 2013:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/01/hurricane-season-begins-with-a-new-record-hurricane-drought-for-the-usa/#comment-1323734
I posted this on the Ryan Maye thread.
Before pounding on Kurt too much, please understand he does have some medical issues. Google Kurt Eichenwald Tucker Carlson and you will see. Its probably not morally right to attack him. Of course Newsweek is open game.
Grandma always said “If you can’t say something nice about someone, then it’s best to just say nothing at all.”
So, for Grandma’s sake, all I’ll say about Mr. E is well just bless his pea-picking little heart.
LOL! Heh, I just can’t stop laughing. This guy is hilarious.
Oh, wait, it gets better! He’s actually serious! Oh my stomach is hurting from laughing so hard!
Stop! I can barely breathe……..heh. What a numbskull.
He says he used this equation.
Which I doubt predicts hurricanes and probably doesn’t have real-time data for either.
But I like the simplicity of that equation. There´s no co2 in there, so it is probably more correct than most of climate science.
But I like that bullshit-measuring device even more, it seems sturdy. Look at how the needle bends, it can handle a lot of bullshit, unlike me. Where can I buy one?
What on earth does “L” stand for?
…and don’t say “Spanish for ‘The'”.
loser?
L is ‘latent heat ‘ or “energy released or absorbed, by a body or a thermodynamic system, during a constant-temperature process.” – says somewhere or another
L is the latent heat of evaporation of water, (in this instance) .
I guess by now everyone has twigged that this character has taken his terminology for a standard thermodynamic equation for equilibrium between phases. from a book of that eminent climate scientist , Maurice Salby , p112 of Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics.
Of course a hurricane is hardly equilibrium , so need to refer to Houghton ‘s use of the equation in calculating the vertical distribution of saturated air , and then Coriolis comes into play .
So it would be interesting if this journalist could tell us how he manged to proceed from the equilibrium equation to a violently rotating body of water saturated air. I am sure that he could teach us a lot.
Specific latent heat, apparently.
Straight out of Wikipedia.. All this means is that warmer air will hold more moisture. To give another example of the stupidity of his tweet, it would be like saying that you calculated a nuclear bomb with a formula that was 100% accurate and then saying the formula you used was E=mc^2.
Excellent. Wish Maue would have said something to that effect in his tweet.
Nice… except my old pompous prof would say “Air doesn’t actually hold water, it coexists with it”. We would roll eyes. Technically he was right I suppose
Should have guessed! The authoritative Wikipedia!
I’m pretty sure that its used somewhere in hurricane modelling but surely even a writer could pick that you need a lot more – or at least one more equation with time in it! If you’re even that innumerate, at least a good journalist would know that NOAA just spent $44.5M on a computer upgrade for its modelling. There would be some serious questions to be answered if the calculation could be done on paper with a basic Cassio.
This site is frequently informed of the antics of journalistic or political activists who manage to convince politicians and the media that they could and should take the place of professional scientists in the corridors of power especially on the subject of climate change.
Each time I read about them a little ditty comes to mind: form WS Gibert :
“Stick close to your desks and never go to sea
And you all may be Rulers of the Queen’s Navy”
Of course eventually the day came when the King’s navy faced its most dangerous encounter for 100 years at Jutland in 1916 . A battle that was almost lost , causing Admiral Beatty to complain :” something wrong with our ships today” . Yes all those years of desk sailors displacing professional navy men as satirised by Gilbert .
We get rid of professional scientists and replace them with Oreskes and Klein and this fellow at our peril.
And William Henry Smith was known as “Pinafore Smith” to his dying day.
In addition to his interest in tentacle porn, there is this:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kurt-eichenwald-case-texas-grand-jury-says-gif-deadly-weapon-n736316
Thanks to him, an animated gif was considered to be a deadly weapon.
And, finally, this:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/2007/03/eichenwalds_weird_checkbook_journalism.html
Pretty bad when Slate isn’t on your side
All this reminds one of the quote of the year:
‘When you are dead, you do not know that you are dead.
All of the pain is felt by others.
The same thing happens when you are stupid.’
Hey Eichenwald, you know your mouth and ego is writing checks that this equation can’t cash, right? Hurricanes are hardly in equilibrium. My Differential Equations teacher would have given me an F if I had popped this one out on a test.
Perhaps he can give us answers to questions Science hasn’t thought of yet?
Why do we need climate scientists when under-educated journalists will do?
An excellent question.
A writer for the usual suspects… which is how they became the usual suspects
Isn’t this the guy who’s wife claimed somebody online tried to kill him with a pulsating gif file ?
test
Tentacle pr0n is mainstream. I saw it with my kids on Galaxy Quest.
One of the funniest movies ever.
I watch it every time it shows up on the TV. Great visuals until the end…the space ship looks like a toy. But the rock monster…uh…rocks!
Lol some of the acting was too campy but it was still a funny movie
It was supposed to be campy.
If you have ever read any of the backstage gossip from the original Star Trek show, it’s even funnier.
“I’m deleting the hurricane tweet because you idiots aren’t getting the point”
Well he got that part right.
Pretty funny he calls Maue the idiot.
I think the problem was the “idiots” did get the point. It was the author who didn’t understand what point he made.
Way back when I was doing thermodynamics problems we always defined the variables in our equations. I am guessing that P is pressure, T is temperature ..but is L the latent heat? Is delta S the change in entropy? What units is he using? Looks like just another journalist in way over his head.
P is vapor pressure.
He predicted it AFTER it had already appeared. He’ll wait to see where it’s track takes it and then he’ll claim he ‘predicted’ that as well… to 100% accuracy. Twit.
weathernerds.org has a good spaghetti graph of the models and it appears the europeans are having it hit SC or out to sea (higher prob) than hitting FL. But we shall see.
And I predicted WWII before I was born…
Post hoc clairvoyance.
Regarding Kurt Eichenwald’s challenge, I’ll take a stab at it.
[quote]The Clausius–Clapeyron relation characterizes behavior of a closed system during a phase change, during which temperature and pressure are constant by definition.[/quote]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clausius%E2%80%93Clapeyron_relation
[quote]In thermodynamics, a closed system can exchange energy (as heat or work) but not matter, with its surroundings.[/quote]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_system
Hurricanes are not closed systems under this definition. For one thing, they both gain and lose matter continuously, receiving matter in the form of moisture gained from ocean evaporation, and ejecting matter in the form of rain. Further, neither temperature nor pressure are constant in a hurricane.
The Clausius-Clapeyron equation gives the derivative (local slope) of the curve demarking phase transitions on a pressure-vs-temperature diagram (see example below) for a particular material. It is applicable to describing the phenomena of evaporation and raindrop formation, which are both phase changes that happen in hurricanes. But the hurricane as a whole doesn’t meet the conditions for the equation, so the equation doesn’t make any predictions about any hurricane as a whole.
The Clausius-Clapeyron equation is part of a description of a material property (specifically, how a material, which in the case of a hurricane would be water, behaves regarding phase transitions); it’s not part of a description of the size, intensity, or any other overall aspect of a hurricane as a whole. Hurricanes come in all different sizes and intensities; the phase transition of water between vapor and liquid, which this equation applies to, happens the same way in all of them.
By the way, if Kurt Eichenwald thinks that somehow “global warming” had anything to do with the strength of Hurrican Harvey, what were his predictions for the previous seven named storms of the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season? Or did global warming suddenly increase right after Hurricane Gert petered out in mid-August?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Atlantic_hurricane_season
I’m sorry, where I wrote “see example below,” I was going to try to attach the generic phase change diagram from the wikipedia page I cited, but then I couldn’t figure out how to do the attachment/link. If you want to see the diagram just go to the wiki page I linked.
My equation, no error.
Crackpot is the word you are looking for.
This is the science paper he saw and thinks it’s the track of hurricane Irma
http://ksuweb.kennesaw.edu/~mkim57/C1211&1212Lab/11_CCE_Drvn1.jpg
I predict more climate craziness and it can be predicted with 100 percent accuracy by rising CO2 along. That is until an ice age causes extinction. Extreme suppression of interglacial trends and indicators is also required.
Why is it that so many of these climate change alarmists have German names?
i.e. Hansen, Schmidt, Mann, Schneider, Rahmstorf, Steig, Romm, ect.
Many times this type of article and much of science itself reminds me of my statistics classes in college. There was a class for psych majors (required) that taught what a P value was and that it showed the results of the experiment were likely not from chance. (In those days, they didn’t say “caused by”.) However, I wanted to know why the statistics worked, so I took the calculus-based statistics course also, to understand how the math actually worked. I had a second major in Chemistry, so was already taking calculus. Most psych majors believed they understood the whole P value and statistics ideas. Yet they had no idea whatsoever if the process they used was appropriate to the situation, if there was a better or more appropriate statistic, that more than one statistical procedure could be used and different results would occur, etc. They just learned to plug in numbers and redo the experiement until the numbers worked or change the statistic applied. I see that over and over again in many sciences now (the most notable being the skeptic versus realists diagram at the infamous nonskeptical science site). Just find an equation that gives the desired answer.
At a PBS NewsHour “Did climate change make recent extreme storms worse?” online comment section, a guy with the user name “Sequoia sempervirens” hurled the Clausius-Clapeyron equation at me right after he called me a paid denier. It’s the #1 comment now ( http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/climate-change-make-recent-extreme-storms-worse/#comment-3495266892 ), since comments upvoted to Best status rise to the top. Leaves me wondering two things: is Sequoia sempervirens and Kurt Eichenwald the same guy, or is the Clausius-Clapeyron some kind of new talking point tool created for AGW fanatics to use in order to make them sound like they are really smart?
Mann mentioned the equation in his pathetic explanation as to how climate change certainly made Harvey worse, and it has spread like wildfire. Instead of hurling “97% consensus,” they throw-out “Clausius-Clapeyron.” They don’t have to understand it or know how to apply it. They just say it makes hurricanes worse and can defer to Mann if necessary.
“He was formerly a writer and investigative reporter with The New York Times…”
‘Nuff said…
BTW, a little background, for those who might care.
This equation that he’s mis-using was discovered during the Age of Steam. In the mid-1800’s steam was the Big Thing. People had been building steam engines since the 1700’s and by the 1800’s they were being used to power many things and had become important. Industrial economic development, railroads, ships, all were being powered by steam. The development of the science of thermodynamics was in part driven by the desire to figure out how to build better steam engines. A nation that had better steam engines would have more efficient factories and faster Navy ships. So some of the top scientists were working on what is now considered classical thermodynamics. Clausius and Clapeyron were among them.
What’s the deal with a “closed system” in the above definition?
“In thermodynamics, a closed system can exchange energy (as heat or work) but not matter, with its surroundings.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_system
Something that fits that definition is … a steam engine! Another thing that can fit the definition is a benchtop experimental apparatus in a scientist’s laboratory. But let’s go with the steam engine and you’ll get the point.
The steam engine takes in energy as heat from the fire under the boiler. It puts out work when high-pressure steam from the boiler pushes a piston in a cylinder, and the piston turns a crank which makes a shaft turn. This is called “shaft work,” a term also used for lame humor by sophomore geek engineering students. Finally, the engine outputs waste heat when the low-pressure steam coming out of the cylinder goes to a condenser, where the steam gives up its remaining heat and condenses back to liquid water. This is then pumped back into the boiler. Thus there is a closed loop for the matter involved (water) but with energy going in and out in the forms of heat and work. Hence, a “closed system” under the definition. Note again that a hurricane doesn’t fit this definition.
A couple of minor points: Nowadays steam engines use turbines instead of pistons to turn the shafts. Otherwise all the above still applies. Sometimes nuclear energy is used instead of fire to heat the boiler. Also, in all practical engines, there are occasions to open the system. The main one is the safety valve on top of the boiler, which opens if the pressure gets too high, letting out some steam (matter). Likewise, the operator of the engine, (think old-time locomotive engineer) can manually open the valve, which toots the train whistle. He may do this to lower the pressure in the boiler, or just for signalling. Water lost in this way has to be made up by water from a reservoir tank.
What about the business of constant temperature and pressure?
“The Clausius–Clapeyron relation characterizes behavior of a closed system during a phase change, during which temperature and pressure are constant by definition.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clausius%E2%80%93Clapeyron_relation
There are two parts of the steam engine where phase change occurs: the boiler and the condenser. In the boiler water changes from liquid to gas (steam, water vapor), in the condenser it changes from gas back to liquid.
Think of a well-operated train running on a straight and level track at constant speed. The engineer is keeping an eye on the boiler pressure and temperature gauges, and telling the fireman when to occasionally shovel a little more coal into the fire under the boiler. He’s keeping the pressure and temperature as constant as possible so as to maintain the constant speed of the train. As for the condenser, it’s rejecting the waste heat to the ambient air outside, which is “constant” for practical purposes, until the weather changes. Likewise the pressure in the condenser is approximately constant while the engine is running steadily at constant power output. In the practical situation of an operating engine in the 1800’s, all of these “constant” parameters are actually jittering around slightly all the time, but they’re close enough to constant to make the idealized math applicable enough.
As mentioned above, the benchtop apparatus for the scientist studying these phase transitions is also built to meet the criteria for constant temperature and pressure, and more accurately so than an operating engine would be. The scientists like Clausius and Clapeyron were figuring out the exact relationship between phase transition and heat energy under different temperature and pressure conditions for various substances, water the most important of them.
I hope that helps de-mystify the whole thing a little. It’s a complicated subject but for some of us it helps to relate it back to its humble origins in the science of steam engines.
this guy sounds like a bull farmer
Kurt Eichenwald, you have a degree in political science. You’ve spent most of your career in journalism, not science.
You admit that you are not a scientist.
Regardless of your lack of scientific credentials and experience, tell me, by what means and by what criteria did you decide that the Clausius–Clapeyron “equation” – by the way, it’s a relation, not an equation, a hint that you don’t know what you’re talking about – was the correct “equation” to use for predicting hurricane Irma’s intensity, growth, and timing?
Oh, by the way, have you ever been suckered by anyone, perhaps by Michael Mann? No, you wouldn’t be, now would you. You’ve got a degree in political science!