Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

[Ravor]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

*chuckles* Best way to do that is simply to practice what you preach, pots and kettles man.

[bigbywolfe]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

Slightly off topic but the smokey smiley in every post is getting kind of annoying.

[Ravor]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

Fair enough, I'll do my best to attempt to restrain myself, at least a little. *winks*

[Christopher]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

I was just about to link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111021144716.htm which is to the same study.

 

BTW, that photo that comes with the CS story is gorgeous.

Interestingly is there there seems to have been a "up an down". but the trend weakened and the last "down" phase was only a "plateu" phase. Now it's going up without stop.

 

As for "droughts are nothing new"' date=' the logic is actually quite simple, you aren't allowed to use a series of events which has been happening since the very beginning of time itself as proof of man caused global warming. Show me an area which has never been affected by a prior drought and maybe I'll be impressed.[/quote']

Problems with your request:

The definition of a drought is not clear (in fact the local government decides what is a Drought)

The are wide differences in severity between "abundant rainfall" and "desert".

Even a small/short drought can have desatrous effects (wikipedia):

Although droughts can persist for several years, even a short, intense drought can cause significant damage[1] and harm the local economy.[2][/QUote]

Could you please provide an unambigious definition of "drought", "region" and the timeframe "in wich no former drought should be on record"?

 

Slightly off topic but the smokey smiley in every post is getting kind of annoying.

Indeed.

[Ravor]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

Problems with your request:

The definition of a drought is not clear (in fact the local government decides what is a Drought)

The are wide differences in severity between "abundant rainfall" and "desert".

Even a small/short drought can have desatrous effects (wikipedia):

 

Although droughts can persist for several years' date=' even a short, intense drought can cause significant damage[1] and harm the local economy.[2]

 

 

 

Could you please provide an unambigious definition of "drought", "region" and the timeframe "in wich no former drought should be on record"?

 

 

All very true, which is one of the many reasons why I simply roll my eyes when various droughts are heralded as being "proof" of man caused Global Warming. Hmm, as for showing me the proof I've asked for, I simply don't think you can because as far as I can tell there hasn't been anywhere which hasn't suffered a change in rainfall in ... oh let's see, we need a long enough timeframe to determine whether we are looking at natural events or something human caused but yet short enough that we don't get caught up in trying to discount the effects of the plates shifting.

[Christopher]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

This is not conversation. That is simply ridiculing.

 

When you do not want to face scientific facts that are verified by four different studies - one of wich made by the oponents of global warming - nothing I say will make you.

[lemming]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

Well, there's a small percentage of people who claim that the earth is flat. I'm willing to put those that deny climate change into the same category.

[Ravor]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

One of the things that I've learned over the years is this; always watch people who want to limit the scope of relevant data that is looked at. I mean seriously, the climate on this little dustball has been changing practically since we had an atmosphere, including cycles which appear to measure in the thousands of years but yet you only want to look at what appears to be the latest bit of change and make a causation claim using the tiniest sliver of time.

[SteveZilla]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

Well' date=' there's a small percentage of people who claim that the earth is flat. I'm willing to put those that deny climate change into the same category.[/quote']

 

There are two groups that I think are sometimes lumped into one. Those who question Global Warming (aka 'climate change'), and those who question that humans are the primary cause of Global Warming (aka 'climate change').

[Old Man]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

There are two groups that I think are sometimes lumped into one. Those who question Global Warming (aka 'climate change')' date=' and those who question that humans are the primary cause of Global Warming (aka 'climate change').[/quote']

 

Why wouldn't humans be the primary cause? The spectral absorption science behind the greenhouse effect is very well understood; it's been demonstrated in the lab. The amount of fossil fuels and forests we've burned, and the resulting CO2 emission amounts, are also well understood. The observed warming trends pretty closely match what we would expect given those two known quantities. Yet while skeptics spew all kinds of other supposed causes, plausible and implausible, they never try to explain why climate change is not caused by human carbon emissions.

[SteveZilla]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

*Note: This is the second generation of this reply. IE9 fu(&!ng crashed and ate the first one that was 3/4 done. This one was done rapidly from memory, so please pardon any abrupness.

 

Why wouldn't humans be the primary cause?

 

Because it might be possible that nature and not man (from solar output, to incompletely understood climate cycles, to possible over-estimation of any human contributions) is the primary cause.

 

The spectral absorption science behind the greenhouse effect is very well understood; it's been demonstrated in the lab.

 

I've heard that water vapor is many times as effective at trapping heat than CO2, yet I have not heard it mentioned by proponents of human-caused warming. They seem to focus (to my limited experience) exclusively on CO2. Why is that (serious question)?

 

The amount of fossil fuels and forests we've burned' date=' and the resulting CO2 emission amounts, are also well understood. The observed warming trends pretty closely match what we would expect given those two known quantities.[/quote']

 

Has there been:

1. An estimation of the total CO2 & water vapor that nature produces,

2. An estimation of the total CO2 & water vapor that humans produce,

3. An estimation of the total CO2 & water vapor that nature removes, and

4. An estimation of the total CO2 & water vapor that is, and has been, in the atmosphere?

 

Yet while skeptics spew all kinds of other supposed causes' date=' plausible and implausible, they never try to explain why climate change [i']is not[/i] caused by human carbon emissions.

 

Your wording here ("Spew", and "plausible and implausible") makes it seem to me that you are close-minded to those who don't accept human-caused warming. If someone is stating (spewing) a plausible *other* cause, that alone would show that humans aren't the primary cause, or at a very minimum are a joint cause.

 

NOTE: I intend to respond to McCoy's reply to my eariler post, but that will take more time than I have available at the moment. I'm not ignoring you, McCoy.

[Old Man]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

*Note: This is the second generation of this reply. IE9 fu(&!ng crashed and ate the first one that was 3/4 done. This one was done rapidly from memory' date=' so please pardon any abrupness.[/quote']

 

Switch to Firefox, you won't regret it. Especially if you install the NoScript and AdBlock extensions, as I have.

 

 

Because it might be possible that nature and not man (from solar output, to incompletely understood climate cycles, to possible over-estimation of any human contributions) is the primary cause.

 

Yes, it could, but then you also have to explain why we aren't seeing the expected warming from the increased atmospheric CO2.

 

 

I've heard that water vapor is many times as effective at trapping heat than CO2, yet I have not heard it mentioned by proponents of human-caused warming. They seem to focus (to my limited experience) exclusively on CO2. Why is that (serious question)?

 

Because H2O ppm are not increasing the way CO2 ppm is.

 

 

Has there been:

1. An estimation of the total CO2 & water vapor that nature produces,

2. An estimation of the total CO2 & water vapor that humans produce,

3. An estimation of the total CO2 & water vapor that nature removes, and

4. An estimation of the total CO2 & water vapor that is, and has been, in the atmosphere?

 

Well, yeah. We have estimations of CO2 produced by the burning of rainforests, we have very good models of human CO2 emissions, we have models of how quickly nature can scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere with oceanic sinking and vegetation growth, and we have direct records of atmospheric composition going back decades as well as indirect measurements from ice cores.

 

 

Your wording here ("Spew", and "plausible and implausible") makes it seem to me that you are close-minded to those who don't accept human-caused warming. If someone is stating (spewing) a plausible *other* cause, that alone would show that humans aren't the primary cause, or at a very minimum are a joint cause.

 

I say "spew" because the other suggested mechanisms are usually handwaving speculation that is rarely backed up with any real science. Sure, climate change could be driven by sunspot cycles, or cosmic rays, or atmospheric dust or whatever, but these mechanisms rarely account for the observed warming when you do the math. Whereas, if you burn x fossil fuels, you will put y tons of CO2 into the air, and you will expect to see z increase in global temperature due to the well understood greenhouse effect. And z does turn out to closely match the observed warming trend.

 

So again, if climate change skeptics want to suggest natural causes for the warming trend, great--but they must also explain why our expected figures for the warming caused by fossil fuel emissions are incorrect.

[Cancer]

Capsule summary: TL: DR.

 

1. An estimation of the total CO2 & water vapor that nature produces,

2. An estimation of the total CO2 & water vapor that humans produce,

3. An estimation of the total CO2 & water vapor that nature removes, and

4. An estimation of the total CO2 & water vapor that is, and has been, in the atmosphere?

 

I'll limit myself to CO2, but some of those can certainly be answered "yes". One is simple enough to do in a 101 class.

 

You can get the Mauna Kea CO2 data from that source, over the last 60 years or so. We know the total atmosphere mass, so you can turn ppMV into an absolute increase in the mass of atmospheric CO2 over the timespan of those data.

 

You can also accumulate from commerce data and national production figures the total world fossil fuel production. If you assume it's all been burned (pretty true of the coal, largely true for the petroleum: I don't know the breakdown between fuel and chemical use for that, but if you assume 50-50 split on that then you're still in the right regime), then you can convert the mass of carbon (about all of the coal, and about 5/6 of the petroleum) into a mass of anthropogenic CO2 over that interval. I think biomass burning is smaller than fossil fuel burning by at least an order of magnitude because industry doesn't consume wood as fuel on any significant level, and unburned wood doesn't put CO2 into the atmosphere. I completely omit the cooking of limestone to make lime for cement, which is IIRC on the order of a percent or two of the fossil fuel CO2, but it is another anthropogenic source of injecting fossil CO2 back into the atmosphere.

 

Multiply that tonnage of carbon by 44/12 to get the mass of CO2 put into the atmosphere. The result you get from that is within a factor of 2 or so of the increase in the mass of atmospheric CO2 over the time range of the Mauna Kea data. It is in the sense that atmosphere CO2 mass increase is smaller than the human CO2 production; the usual interpretation of that is that the oceans and biosphere can absorb some, but not all, of the anthropogenic CO2 as it is being produced.

 

Geologic CO2 production is almost entirely due to volcanism, and the overwhelming majority of volcanism on Earth is in the mid-ocean ridges. That is a very stable process: measured variations from decade to decade of the ocean floor spreading rate cannot be distinguished from zero. The showy sporadic explosive volcanic events on land which put so much SO2 and aerosols into the atmosphere are tiny in terms of their total CO2 output compared to the mid-ocean ridges. So there is no reason to believe that overall geologic CO2 production has varied significantly over the last 60 years.

 

(BTW, indirect indications that this idea is correct comes from the utter fail that happens to you if you try in a naive way to carbon-14 date anything that is younger than the Industrial Revolution and large-scale coal mining. New C14 is due to cosmic rays colliding with nitrogen and oxygen atoms in the atmosphere, and while there's a small modulation of the cosmic ray flux with solar activity, the lunar rock cosmic ray bombardment data is adequate to tell you that over long enough timescales the current average solar cosmic ray flux -- and thus C14 production in the atmosphere -- has been pretty much the same for times longer than the age of the human species.

 

Incidentally, in terms of its activity cycles, the Sun is pretty much the same as other stars of similar spectral type (that is, mass) and age around us. The chromospheric monitoring results in fact support the use of chromospheric activity as an indicator of age for stars (though you have to control for stellar mass), and you can get stellar age by other means from isochrone fitting and some other methods I know lots more about but are irrelevant here.

 

Fossil carbon is utterly devoid of C14, so it is very old in a C14-dating sense. And it has diluted the atmospheric carbon so that the proportion of C14 in atmospheric CO2 is rather lower than has been the average over the last hundred thousand years or more. Samples of material that were grown after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution have incorporated that "old" carbon, so stuff that grew since the mid-to-late 1800s gives you wildly old C14 ages if you don't include some large empirical correction terms.)

 

Over longer times ... that data comes from mineral analyses, and being an astronomer, I know approximately nothing about minerals and how to analyze them.

 

Now, that's CO2. H2O is much harder, because the atmosphere more or less never comes anyhere near to saturation of CO2, but it saturates with H2O all the time, all over the world. That tells me that coming up with a decent annual moving average of atmospheric H2O content is going to be very hard, and I have no idea how to go about that.

[McCoy]

Thread drift to Climate Change

 

*Note: This is the second generation of this reply. IE9 fu(&!ng crashed and ate the first one that was 3/4 done. This one was done rapidly from memory' date=' so please pardon any abrupness.[/quote']

Been there, done that, have the tire tracks.

 

Because it might be possible that nature and not man (from solar output' date=' to incompletely understood climate cycles, to possible over-estimation of any human contributions) is the primary cause.[/quote']

Possible. Several non-human activity causes have been and continue to be investigated. Solar output is and has been increasing, about 1% per thousand years IIRC. Sunspots and cosmic rays were investigated and found to have null effect. Milankovitch cycles, the 800 pound gorilla of climate change until 5000 years ago, are trying to take us to a new ice age. So far, there is as much if not more ecidence for the existance of the Invisible Pink Unicorn as a non-human related cause for the recent (5K YBP) climate change. But people will continue to look for them.

 

I've heard that water vapor is many times as effective at trapping heat than CO2' date=' yet I have not heard it mentioned by proponents of human-caused warming. They seem to focus (to my limited experience) exclusively on CO2. Why is that (serious question)?[/quote']

For the most part, the atmosphere on the average holds all the water vapor it can. As the global temperature increases, the amount of water vapor the atmosphere can hold increases. So while the temperature is going up, the water vapor adds to the other causes. When the temperature starts back down, the water vapor will slow the decline.

 

IMHO, fossil carbon is what many researchers concentrate on for several reasons. Among others

• there's
  
• there's currently more of it than any other (with the possible exception of water vapor)
  
• it has a long half life in the atmosphere
  
• it would actually be easier to control than most if not all of the others
  

 

Personally I think agricultural methane and ammonia are being underestimated. But while molecule for molecule they keep in more heat, they have a far shorter half life in the atmosphere (months vs decades).

 

Has there been:

1. An estimation of the total CO2 & water vapor that nature produces,

2. An estimation of the total CO2 & water vapor that humans produce,

3. An estimation of the total CO2 & water vapor that nature removes, and

4. An estimation of the total CO2 & water vapor that is, and has been, in the atmosphere?

Yes. As I said fossil carbon is easy to measure because it is totally depleated of C14. Ice core studies give us almost year by year percentages for the past 300,000 years. CO2 concentrations and C14 can be accurately measured. A sudden increase in CO2, drop in C14, and layer of volcanic ash indicates a natural increase in CO2. A gradual increase in CO2 and decline in C14 prior to 1954 indicates human use of fossil fuel. (Nuclear testing has doubled the concentration C14 in the atmosphere, most of it coming from the Castle Bravo shot on Bikini Atoll 1 March 1954.)

 

The ratio between O16 and O18 gives the ocean surface temperature that year, and water vapor in the atmosphere can be extrapolated from that. To a close approximation, human cause water vapor displaces natural water vapor.

 

Your wording here ("Spew"' date=' and "[i']plausible[/i] and implausible") makes it seem to me that you are close-minded to those who don't accept human-caused warming. If someone is stating (spewing) a plausible *other* cause, that alone would show that humans aren't the primary cause, or at a very minimum are a joint cause.

Yep, if. So far no one is.

 

NOTE: I intend to respond to McCoy's reply to my eariler post' date=' but that will take more time than I have available at the moment. I'm not ignoring you, McCoy. [/quote']

I understand time crunch, and patiently await.

[Christopher]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

What a lot of people fail to understand, is what fossil fuel really are:

They are C (Carbon) that got extracted out of the atmosphere Millions of years ago. In a way they are Solar Energy of that past times, stored in liquid or solid state*.

 

And now we burn that Carbon, turining it into CO² again. And at a much higher rate than what geological processes/nature does.

 

 

*Plants use Solar Energy to extract Carbon out of CO². Plants die and get burried in the Soil, thus "sealing" away that carbon and later becomming coal/oil.

[Zeropoint]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

Exactly. I'd rep you, but my rep stick is out of charges.

[Old Man]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

Not to rerail the thread, but they're planning to rerun the experiment to try and eliminate some possible causes of experimental error. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2395513,00.asp#fbid=GtmVbkv9Kpd

[Zeropoint]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

I SINCERELY hope that they confirm the FTL excursion, but I'm not going to get my hopes up.

 

Makes a good basis for a drive for a sci-fi game, though.

[L. Marcus]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

... This smells like a Radiation Accident just waiting to be sprung on someone.

[Old Man]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

Yeah... Waiting to be sprung on SCIENCE. I don't think the FTL result will be confirmed either, but just imagine if it is.

[Christopher]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

I SINCERELY hope that they confirm the FTL excursion' date=' but I'm not going to get my hopes up.[/quote']

Eitehr way, it will provide the human race with important information about physics.

[Lucius]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

Minds do change sometimes.

 

http://news.yahoo.com/skeptic-finds-now-agrees-global-warming-real-142616605.html

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary carries change for a paradigm

[Narf the Mouse]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

Minds do change sometimes.

 

http://news.yahoo.com/skeptic-finds-now-agrees-global-warming-real-142616605.html

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary carries change for a paradigm

Relevancy. Did you mean the "Space News" thread?

[Christopher]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

Relevancy. Did you mean the "Space News" thread?

No, I think he meant our Global Warming debate that happened while we waited for the news about the upcomming new verrification experiment.

[Cancer]

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

 

As I was told once, "Don't take any wooden neutrinos."