Jack Frost Posted February 27, 2017 Share Posted February 27, 2017 Reviewing a significant number of studies regarding physics in general and man's contribution to global warming / climate change in particular, I have come to the conclusion that human understanding and comprehension are no where near the point of being able to grasp the complexities involved with such a dynamic and complicated system as earth's atmosphere. Scientists have theories but not a good, much less fundamental grasp, on the physical laws that govern the universe, including climate. The earth, the solar system and the galaxies are hurting through space at unimaginable speeds and for completely unknown reasons. And, of course, the science of AGW, which necessarily includes all of the above, is settled. Or maybe not. Read on and see if you believe that the state of man's understanding of quantum physics, earth's place in the solar system, galaxy and universe and the views of some very well respected scientists might lead to the conclusion that the religion may be settled, but the science certainly is not.... The Sun's Motion Our Sun is just one star among several hundred billion others that together make up the Milky Way Galaxy. This is our immense "island of stars" and within it, each star is itself moving. Any planet orbiting a star will share its motion through the Galaxy with it. Stars, as we shall see, can be moving in a random way, just "milling about" in their neighborhoods, and also in organized ways, moving around the center of the Galaxy. If we want to describe the motion of a star like our Sun among all the other stars, we run up against a problem. We usually define motion by comparing the moving object to something at rest. A car moves at 60 miles per hour relative to a reference post attached to the Earth, such as the highway sign, for example. But if all the stars in the Galaxy are moving, what could be the "reference post" to which we can compare its motion? The Sun travels with billions of other stars through the Milky Way Galaxy, which is thought to look much like the Andromeda Galaxy, pictured above. Image credit: NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (NASA-MSFC) Astronomers define a local standard of rest in our section of the Galaxy by the average motion of all the stars in our neighborhood4. (Note that in using everyday words, such as "local" and "neighborhood", we do a disservice to the mind-boggling distances involved. Even the nearest star is over 25 thousand billion miles (40 thousand billion km) away. It's only that the Galaxy is so immense, that compared to its total size, the stars we use to define our Sun's motion do seem to be in the "neighborhood.") Relative to the local standard of rest, our Sun and the Earth are moving at about 43,000 miles per hour (70,000 km/hr) roughly in the direction of the bright star Vega in the constellation of Lyra. This speed is not unusual for the stars around us and is our "milling around" speed in our suburban part of the Galaxy. back to top Orbiting the Galaxy In addition to the individual motions of the stars within it, the entire Galaxy is in spinning motion like an enormous pinwheel. Although the details of the Galaxy's spin are complicated (stars at different distances move at different speeds), we can focus on the speed of the Sun around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy5. It takes our Sun approximately 225 million years to make the trip around our Galaxy. This is sometimes called our "galactic year". Since the Sun and the Earth first formed, about 20 galactic years have passed; we have been around the Galaxy 20 times. On the other hand, in all of recorded human history, we have barely moved in our long path around the Milky Way. How fast do we have to move to make it around the Milky Way in one galactic year? It's a huge circle, and the speed with which the Sun has to move is an astounding 483,000 miles per hour (792,000 km/hr)! The Earth, anchored to the Sun by gravity, follows along at the same fantastic speed. (By the way, as fast as this speed is, it is still a long way from the speed limit of the universe—the speed of light. Light travels at the unimaginably fast pace of 670 million miles per hour or 1.09 billion km/hr.) An Artist's illustration of the Milky Way Galaxy Image credit: NASA / CXC / M. Weiss back to top The Hubble Deep Field image shows some of the most distant Galaxie in the Universe. Image credit: Robert Williams and the Hubble Deep Field Team (STScI) and NASA Moving through the Universe As we discussed the different speeds of our planet so far, we always needed to ask, "Compared to what are you measuring this motion?" In your armchair, your motion compared to the walls of your room is zero. Your motion compared to the Moon or the Sun, on the other hand, is quite large. When we talk about your speed going around the Galaxy, we measure it relative to the center of the Milky Way. Now we want to finish up by looking at the motion of the entire Milky Way Galaxy through space. What can we compare its motion to -- what is the right frame of reference? For a long time, astronomers were not sure how to answer this question. We could measure the motion of the Milky Way relative to a neighbor galaxy, but this galaxy is also moving. The universe is filled with great islands of stars (just like the Milky Way) and each of them is moving in its own way. No galaxy is sitting still! But then, a surprising discovery in the 1960s showed us a new way to think of our galaxy's motion. back to top The Flash of the Big Bang To understand this new development, we have to think a little bit about the Big Bang, the enormous explosion that was the beginning of space, time, and the whole universe. Right after the Big Bang, the universe was full of energy and very, very hot. In fact, for the first few minutes, the entire universe was hotter than the center of our Sun. It was an unimaginable maelstrom of energy and subatomic particles, slowly cooling and sorting itself out into the universe we know today. At that early time, the energy in the universe was in the form of gamma rays, waves of energy like the visible light we see, but composed of much shorter waves with higher energy. Today on Earth, it takes a nuclear bomb to produce significant amounts of gamma rays. But then, the whole universe was filled with them. You can think of these gamma-rays as the "flash" of the Big Bang -- just like fireworks or a bomb can produce a flash of light, the Big Bang resulted in a flash of gamma rays. But these gamma rays were everywhere in the universe. They filled all of space, and as the universe grew (expanded), the gamma rays expanded with it. When people first think about the expansion of the universe, they naturally think of other expansions they have experience with: how the American colonies eventually expanded to become the 48 states of the U.S. or how an exploding bomb might throw shrapnel in every direction. In these situations, the space into which the colonies or the shrapnel is expanding already exists. But the expansion of the universe is not like any other expansion. When the universe expands, it is space itself that is stretching. The galaxies in the universe are moving apart because space stretches and creates more distance between them. What does this mind-stretching idea of stretching space mean for our gamma rays? The gamma rays are waves of energy moving through space. As space stretches, the waves that are in space must stretch too. Stretched gamma rays are called x-rays. So as the universe expanded, the waves of energy filling space stretched out to become less energetic (cooler) x-rays. As the universe continued to expand, the same waves became ultra-violet light. Later they became visible light, but there were no eyes in the hot compressed universe to see them yet. (When we take the lid of a hot pressure cooker, the steam will expand into the room and cool down. In the same way, we can think of the waves of energy in the expanding universe as cooling down -- getting less energetic.) WMAP image of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation Image credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team Today, some 12 to 15 billion years after the Big Bang, there has been a lot of stretching. Space has expanded quite a bit. The flash of the Big Bang has stretched until it is now much longer, lower energy waves -- microwaves and other radio waves. But the waves have stretched with the space they occupy, and so they still fill the universe, just the way they did at the time of creation. Astronomers call the collection of all these stretched waves the cosmic background radiation6 or CBR. Physicists back in the late 1940's predicted that there should be such a background, but since no one had the equipment to find it, the prediction was forgotten. Then, in the mid 1960s, two scientists working for Bell Laboratories, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, accidentally discovered the CBR while helping to get communications satellite technology going for the phone company. After astronomers used other telescopes and rockets in orbit to confirm that the radio waves the two scientists had discovered were really coming from all over space, Penzias and Wilson received the Nobel Prize in physics for having found the most direct evidence for the Big Bang. There is thought to be a large concentration of mass in the in the direction of Leo and Virgo, since the galaxies near the Milky Way seem to be streaming in that direction. A portion of this section of the sky is shown in the image above. Image credit: ESO Moving through the CBR What, you might be asking yourself, does all this have to do with how fast we are moving? Well, astronomers can now measure how fast the Earth is moving compared to this radiation filling all of space. (Technically, our motion causes one kind of Doppler Shift7 in the radiation we observe in the direction that we are moving and another in the direction opposite.) Put another way, the CBR provides a "frame of reference" for the universe at large, relative to which we can measure our motion. From the motion we measure compared to the CBR, we need to subtract out the motion of the Earth around the Sun and the Sun around the center of the Milky Way. The motion that's left must be the particular motion of our Galaxy through the universe! And how fast is the Milky Way Galaxy moving? The speed turns out to be an astounding 1.3 million miles per hour (2.1 million km/hr)! We are moving roughly in the direction on the sky that is defined by the constellations of Leo and Virgo. Although the reasons for this motion are not fully understood, astronomers believe that there is a huge concentration of matter in this direction. Some people call it The Great Attractor, although we now know that the pull is probably not due to one group of galaxies but many. Still the extra gravity in this direction pulls the Milky Way (and many neighbor galaxies) in that direction. https://astrosociety.org/edu/publications/tnl/71/howfast.html https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/lorenz-g-del-and-penrose-new-perspectives-determinism-and-unpredictability-fundamental Scientists questioning the accuracy of IPCC climate projections These scientists have said that it is not possible to project global climate accurately enough to justify the ranges projected for temperature and sea-level rise over the next century. They may not conclude specifically that the current IPCC projections are either too high or too low, but that the projections are likely to be inaccurate due to inadequacies of current global climate modeling. David Bellamy, botanist.[19][20][21][22] Lennart Bengtsson, meteorologist, Reading University.[23][24] Piers Corbyn, owner of the business WeatherAction which makes weather forecasts.[25][26] Judith Curry, Professor and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.[27][28][29][30] Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus of the School of Natural Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study; Fellow of the Royal Society.[31][32] Ivar Giaever, Norwegian–American physicist and Nobel laureate in physics (1973).[33] Steven E. Koonin, theoretical physicist and director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University.[34][35] Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan emeritus professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the National Academy of Sciences.[36][37][38][39] Craig Loehle, ecologist and chief scientist at the National Council for Air and Stream Improvement.[40][41][42][43][44][45][46] Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics and CBE Chair in Sustainable Commerce, University of Guelph.[47][48] Patrick Moore, former president of Greenpeace Canada.[49][50][51] Nils-Axel Mörner, retired head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics Department at Stockholm University, former chairman of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution (1999–2003).[52][53] Garth Paltridge, retired chief research scientist, CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research and retired director of the Institute of the Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre, visiting fellow Australian National University.[54][55] Roger A. Pielke, Jr., professor of environmental studies at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder.[56][57] Tom Quirk, corporate director of biotech companies and former board member of the Institute of Public Affairs, an Australian conservative think-tank.[58] Denis Rancourt, former professor of physics at University of Ottawa, research scientist in condensed matter physics, and in environmental and soil science.[59][60][61][62] Harrison Schmitt, geologist, Apollo 17 Astronaut, former U.S. Senator.[63] Peter Stilbs, professor of physical chemistry at Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.[64][65] Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London.[66][67] Hendrik Tennekes, retired director of research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute.[68][69] Anastasios Tsonis, distinguished professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.[70][71] Fritz Vahrenholt, German politician and energy executive with a doctorate in chemistry.[72][73] Scientists arguing that global warming is primarily caused by natural processes scientists have said that the observed warming is more likely to be attributable to natural causes than to human activities. Their views on climate change are usually described in more detail in their biographical articles. Khabibullo Abdusamatov, astrophysicist at Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences[75][76] Sallie Baliunas, retired astrophysicist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics[77][78][79] Timothy Ball, historical climatologist, and retired professor of geography at the University of Winnipeg[80][81][82] Ian Clark, hydrogeologist, professor, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa[83][84] Chris de Freitas, associate professor, School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, University of Auckland[85][86] David Douglass, solid-state physicist, professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester[87][88] Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology, Western Washington University[89][90] William Happer, physicist specializing in optics and spectroscopy; emeritus professor, Princeton University[91][92] Ole Humlum, professor of geology at the University of Oslo[93][94] Wibjörn Karlén, professor emeritus of geography and geology at the University of Stockholm.[95][96] William Kininmonth, meteorologist, former Australian delegate to World Meteorological Organization Commission for Climatology[97][98] David Legates, associate professor of geography and director of the Center for Climatic Research, University of Delaware[99][100] Anthony Lupo, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Missouri[101][102] Tad Murty, oceanographer; adjunct professor, Departments of Civil Engineering and Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa[103][104] Tim Patterson, paleoclimatologist and professor of geology at Carleton University in Canada.[105][106] Ian Plimer, professor emeritus of mining geology, the University of Adelaide.[107][108] Arthur B. Robinson, American politician, biochemist and former faculty member at the University of California, San Diego[109][110] Murry Salby, atmospheric scientist, former professor at Macquarie University and University of Colorado[111][112] Nicola Scafetta, research scientist in the physics department at Duke University[113][114][115] Tom Segalstad, geologist; associate professor at University of Oslo[116][117] Nir Shaviv, professor of physics focusing on astrophysics and climate science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem[118][119] Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia[120][121][122][123] Willie Soon, astrophysicist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics[124][125] Roy Spencer, meteorologist; principal research scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville[126][127] Henrik Svensmark, physicist, Danish National Space Center[128][129] George H. Taylor, retired director of the Oregon Climate Service at Oregon State University[130][131] Jan Veizer, environmental geochemist, professor emeritus from University of Ottawa[132][133] Scientists arguing that the cause of global warming is unknown These scientists have said that no principal cause can be ascribed to the observed rising temperatures, whether man-made or natural. Syun-Ichi Akasofu, retired professor of geophysics and founding director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.[134][135] Claude Allègre, French politician; geochemist, emeritus professor at Institute of Geophysics (Paris).[136][137] Robert Balling, a professor of geography at Arizona State University.[138][139] Pål Brekke, solar astrophycisist, senior advisor Norwegian Space Centre.[140][141] John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, contributor to several IPCC reports.[142][143][144] Petr Chylek, space and remote sensing sciences researcher, Los Alamos National Laboratory.[145][146] David Deming, geology professor at the University of Oklahoma.[147][148] Vincent R. Gray, New Zealand physical chemist with expertise in coal ashes[149][150] Keith E. Idso, botanist, former adjunct professor of biology at Maricopa County Community College District and the vice president of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change[151][152] Antonino Zichichi, emeritus professor of nuclear physics at the University of Bologna and president of the World Federation of Scientists.[153][154] Kary Mullis, 1993 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry.[155] Scientists arguing that global warming will have few negative consequences These scientists have said that projected rising temperatures will be of little impact or a net positive for society or the environment. Indur M. Goklany, science and technology policy analyst for the United States Department of the Interior[156][157][158] Craig D. Idso, faculty researcher, Office of Climatology, Arizona State University and founder of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change[159][160] Sherwood B. Idso, former research physicist, USDA Water Conservation Laboratory, and adjunct professor, Arizona State University[161][162] Patrick Michaels, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and retired research professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia[163][164] Deceased scientists This section includes deceased scientists who would otherwise be listed in the prior sections. August H. "Augie" Auer Jr. (1940–2007), retired New Zealand MetService meteorologist and past professor of atmospheric science at the University of Wyoming[165] Reid Bryson (1920–2008), emeritus professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison.[166] Robert M. Carter (1942–2016), former head of the School of Earth Sciences at James Cook University[167][168] William M. Gray (1929–2016), professor emeritus and head of the Tropical Meteorology Project, Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University[169][170] Robert Jastrow (1925–2008), American astronomer, physicist, cosmologist and leading NASA scientist who, together with Fred Seitz and William Nierenberg, established the George C. Marshall Institute[171][172][173] Harold ("Hal") Warren Lewis (1923–2011), emeritus professor of physics and former department chairman at the University of California, Santa Barbara.[174] Frederick Seitz (1911–2008), solid-state physicist, former president of the National Academy of Sciences and co-founder of the George C. Marshall Institute in 1984.[166][175] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lookingnorth Posted February 27, 2017 Share Posted February 27, 2017 If we can't understand atmospheric dynamics, how do you think we forecast the weather? How do you think weather models work? Why did you use an article about the motion of the Sun and the Milky Way through the Universe to say science isn't settled? And in your list of climate change skeptics lots of the people you mentioned aren't even climatologists. Obviously we have a lot more to learn when it comes to any field in the sciences, but it's not like we know nothing or all opinions are equally valid. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jack Frost Posted February 28, 2017 Author Share Posted February 28, 2017 lookingnorth, thank you for your questions and very civil response. Whether you realize it or not, respectful questioning and discourse is very much appreciated. I hope this is common on the campus of OU but very much have doubts. Please allow me to address your comments / questions: If we can't understand atmospheric dynamics, how do you think we forecast the weather? How do you think weather models work? Please don't misunderstand. I am not implying that it is impossible to predict weather in the short term - although many in this forum would acknowledge the current state of the science and the difficulty in predicting "Day 10", much less "Day 3,010". In short, there are many articles elaborating upon the differences between "weather" and "climate" and I invite you to research them to hone your understanding of the differences. Why did you use an article about the motion of the Sun and the Milky Way through the Universe to say science isn't settled? Probably as a knee jerk reaction to the "Climate Deniers 101" video posted in another topic. Just kidding. The point is that the physics of earth's atmosphere and the potential factors that affect it and, necessarily, earth's climate are fundamentally unknown and therefore, in my opinion, it is the height of hypocrisy to claim the "science is settled". And in your list of climate change skeptics lots of the people you mentioned aren't even climatologists. Pet Peeve Alert. Please define the credentials that certify one to be a "climatologist". That "field of study", in my readings, appears to range from paleontologists to horticulturists. Respectable but not necessarily impressive from a climate science perspective. Personally, I find PhDs in atmospheric science and similar doctorates in the field of physics to be quite persuasive. Obviously we have a lot more to learn when it comes to any field in the sciences, but it's not like we know nothing or all opinions are equally valid. Agree 100%. Best of luck with your studies at OU! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jack Frost Posted March 12, 2017 Author Share Posted March 12, 2017 So many moving parts. The universe is indeed a fascinating place. Certainly not a place that I would bet money the science is settled...... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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