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Some Scientific Problems (Geophysics)
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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Thank you for your assistance.

I'm sorry if I came across as being unusually orthodox on this issue, but unfortunately that couldn't be helped.

One of the labs I'm responsible for (though my own particular discipline is electrickery) performs UKAS accredited humidity calibration... and if I allowed myself to believe the relationship between evaporation, dew point, temperature and relative humidity is not what I thought it was... I'd be bolloxed.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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It is very good of you to reveal the source of your bias, Chad. You are officially excused duty on this issue.

Still while I have your attention, here's another little poser you can clear up (or sit out from). The atmosphere, we are told, can hold less water vapour as it gets colder -- hence rainy mountain slopes on one side and rain-shadows on the other. So why doesn't it rain every night when the atmosphere always gets colder. As far as I know it doesn't even rain more at night than during the day. Which, if true, is surely an absurdity.
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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Actually, I'm pretty sure it does rain more at night, but it's difficult to tell in Manchester.
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Brian Ambrose



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Mick, not that it makes any difference, but I was going to say that you very much over-egged the height of the current atmosphere - sure, there may be tiny bits of stuff 200 miles out, but the only stuff worth talking about in this context is up to 5 miles-worth. And even then the air is too thin to breath and too cold to hold much water vapour. And it doesn't correspond to your box in other ways, such as the temperature differential between ground level and 5 miles up, which you would not predict from your experiment.

I'd suggest the effective atmosphere which would correspond to your box is more like 2 miles - that's 1/100 of yours, which makes it... 10mm, which, uncannily, is the number I guessed. Yes, that does make one realise that the atmosphere is a very thin skin over the ocean.
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Mick Harper
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Mick, not that it makes any difference, but I was going to say that you very much over-egged the height of the current atmosphere - sure, there may be tiny bits of stuff 200 miles out, but the only stuff worth talking about in this context is up to 5 miles-worth.

Obviously I knew all that, I was leaning over in your direction. And I wanted to head off any arguments about it being a 'closed system'.

And even then the air is too thin to breath and too cold to hold much water vapour. And it doesn't correspond to your box in other ways, such as the temperature differential between ground level and 5 miles up, which you would not predict from your experiment.

Sigh. Brian, I spent about twenty-seven dozen posts getting you to apply whatever inputs you thought corresponded to the real world. Remember?

I'd suggest the effective atmosphere which would correspond to your box is more like 2 miles - that's 1/100 of yours, which makes it... 10mm, which, uncannily, is the number I guessed.

Fine. I adopt your even better figures from my point of view with alacrity!

Yes, that does make one realise that the atmosphere is a very thin skin over the ocean.

But apparently not nearly enough to puncture your colossal serenity in the rightness of the orthodox model (which I say again is based on laboratory experimentation going back to Robert Hooke or whoever). Sisyphus, where art thou now?

The two of you should, in the quietude of your next maudlin stew, reflect on the fact that you are excellent revisionists but only in areas that don't impinge on your technical training.

Brian, address the "it's night but it ain't raining" problem which Chad has so 'carefully ignored'. It is the other half of the "laboratory model" but this time, in AE terms, it goes back even more powerfully to James Watt and his kettle. Try not to regurgitate the official line without reflection.
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Brian Ambrose



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Yeah Mick, I remember. You wanted inputs that corresponded to the real world, real world inputs to a model that doesn't correspond to the real world. You'll need a better model, or a better argument. And I can assure you that I am neutral in the matter, having no technical training or any other attachment which might be impinged upon. As always, I learned a lot in this discussion.

Your question about why doesn't it rain all the time/mostly at night is a good one. I can say that because I also thought of it during the proceedings. I would try to answer it but I suspect that orthodoxy will have got there before me, and for all my reflection, I will be told I have merely regurgitated the official line. Sigh.
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Mick Harper
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More careful ignoral then. If you don't know the official line you cannot regurgitate it. You can come to the same conclusion, which is quite a different matter.
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Brian Ambrose



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Yeah, it's careful ignoral. I'm terrified of what I might find out. You got me. No more, please, arghh! I admit it, I'm really a weatherman.
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Mick Harper
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Neither of you seem to take any of this very seriously but I've got a book to write and some 'hard' science to enter into the lists, so you'll forgive me if my peevishness occasionally shows.
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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Noticed the mist hanging over the river, yesterday (frosty) morning... this, together with morning dew (and the way your glasses mist over when you enter a warm room after coming in from the cold) is exactly how you would expect moist air to react to a drop in temperature.

It's when you get up to cloud level that things become mysterious. Is it the conditions at that altitude, or the clouds themselves that are at the root of the mystery?
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Brian Ambrose



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From a quick google, it looks like the anecdotal evidence (and therefore untouched by orthodoxy) is that it does indeed rain more at night - quite a few people have noticed it and questioned why it should be so.

But we (you) ought to differentiate between rain and humidity, although of course they are linked. It doesn't ever rain out of a humid atmosphere (all you get is condensation). To state the obvious, rain comes from clouds. Why do water molecules clump together to form clouds? I assume because they are, or get, electrostatically charged. Then, when conditions are right (ignoral here) the clumps fall down.

So the design seems to be that the air gets humid, some of the water gets returned to the ground at night as condensation (rather more so than the sea because the sea doesn't cool as much, which is why pools have to be topped up in summer). Rather than allowing the air to completely saturate, the system clumps together excess water into droplets, and into water storage systems we call clouds.
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Mick Harper
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What I need to know is the Official Reason. We can all observe that both evaporation and condensation take place at the saucer-of-milk level and the kettle-steam level but what is 'mysterious' is the absolute nature (or not) of the process.

A saucer of milk always evaporates to nothingness, given time, so why is the ocean not 'always evaporating to nothingness' given time. No pun intended, but it's sauce and gander. Nothing can stop the milk save (presumably) the air above it becoming saturated but apparently the ocean stays constantly at 'sea-level' despite the air above it not being in the least saturated.

Now it is just the same with condensation. If it is a physical law that when air gets colder it cannot hold as much water vapour then it should be applying all the time. It is not enough, as Brian says, that it rains slightly more at night (or even 'gets more humid'), it ought to be bucketing down every night because the entire atmosphere gets colder every night. All of it, every night. Good grief, you can't get more optimal conditions. I don't mind a bit of special pleading to account for why it didn't rain last night, but I demand the Official Reason why it hardly ever rains last night.

Just like the oceans and the lack of any saturation in the atmosphere, it is not the physical processes that I object to, it is the glaring lack of overall consistency when the real world obtrudes. I contend it is because neither evaporation nor condensation applies (as we understand them) when it comes to the Gaia-scale.
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Brian Ambrose



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A saucer of milk always evaporates to nothingness, given time, so why is the ocean not 'always evaporating to nothingness' given time.


It doesn't rain in your kitchen.

it ought to be bucketing down every night because the entire atmosphere gets colder


I thought I'd addressed this. Just making humid air colder does not result in rain. For rain you need clouds.
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Boreades


In: finity and beyond
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I expect that we've all seen some articles or other that threaten dire results and doom because we're about to run out of reserves of something or other.

I've stumbled on an excellent article on why these threats are always empty fallacies, because of the very basic failure to understand the difference between a reserve and a resource.

The No Breakfast Fallacy.
Or, why the Club of Rome was wrong about us running out of resources.

http://www.adamsmith.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/The-No-Breakfast-Fallacy-ONLINE.pdf

The scene is an early morning current affairs radio show. Very important people talk to the nation here.

Evan Humphries (for it is he): “Mr. Worstall, why is it that your new report shows that soon all will be dead?”

Worstall: “Evan, it’s 7 am. Currently there is food in the fridges of the nation for breakfast. But in two hours time that will be eaten, gone, there will be no more. Therefore everyone will die because NO BREAKFAST.”

Sorry, might I just rerecord that?

Worstall: “Evan, mineral reserves are disappearing at an alarming rate. Official figures show that within 30 years most of them will be used up and there are no more reserves. Industrial civilisation will crash, billions die, because NO MINERALS.”

In that first instance we would agree with Worstall: eating breakfast does mean no breakfast in the fridge. We’d also agree that Worstall is mad because we understand that there is a vast industry dedicated solely to replenishing that breakfast before 7 am tomorrow.

etc
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Boreades


In: finity and beyond
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Peak Oil Indefinitely Postponed

The U.S. Geological Survey has made its largest discovery of recoverable crude ever under parts of West Texas, the federal agency announced Tuesday.

A recent assessment found the “Wolfcamp shale” geologic formation in the Midland area holds an estimated 20 billion barrels of accessible oil along with 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 1.6 billion barrels of natural gas liquids. That’s three times higher than the amount of recoverable crude the agency found in the Bakken-Three Forks region in the upper midwest in 2013, making it “the largest estimated continuous oil accumulation that USGS has assessed in the United States to date,” according to a statement.


Add that to the list of "Great moments in failed predictions".

Like Paul R. Ehrlich's dire predictions.

In 1968, Paul R. Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb and declared that the battle to feed humanity had been lost and that there would be a major food shortage in the US. “In the 1970s … hundreds of millions are going to starve to death,” and by the 1980s most of the world’s important resources would be depleted. He forecast that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980-1989 and that by 1999, the US population would decline to 22.6 million. The problems in the US would be relatively minor compared to those in the rest of the world. (Ehrlich, Paul R. The Population Bomb. New York, Ballantine Books, 1968.) New Scientist magazine underscored his speech in an editorial titled “In Praise of Prophets.”


And India was a basket case.

Ehrlich wrote in 1968, “I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971, if ever.”. Yet in a only few years India was exporting food and significantly changed its food production capacity. Ehrlich must have noted this because in the 1971 version of his book this comment is deleted (Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource, Princeton: Princeton Univesity Press, 1981, p. 64).


And a gem:

“By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Paul Ehrlich, Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971.


https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/19/great-moments-in-failed-predictions/
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