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1 SoCaroLion  Feb 27, 2015 5:32:18am

This just in: Scientists have also confirmed that 15 minutes could save me 15% or more on car insurance. Everyone knows that. And I thought everyone knew carbon dioxide causes a “greenhouse effect” by trapping the sun’s radiation. I think I learned that during middle school science classes in the mid 80’s. Seriously, the “results” of this “study” read as if it was performed by a dimwitted high school jock who just experienced his first educational epiphany after he mixed vinegar and baking soda in a paper mache volcano his mom built for him.

I did not realize that the general scientific principles of the greenhouse effect were in doubt. How much Federal grant money did these scientists receive to conduct this study? Seriously, if it was more than $50, we’re being ripped off.

2 Jayleia  Feb 27, 2015 7:19:28am

re: #1 SoCaroLion

*looks at random selection of Right-wing media*

You have a strange definition of “everybody”.

3 SoCaroLion  Feb 27, 2015 7:59:57am

re: #2 Jayleia

With all due respect, if you’re going to imply that my opinion is not my own, I will infer from your response that you are admitting to being ignorant of simple scientific principles most students learn in elementary school.

My original point was generally apolitical: Why do we need yet another scientific study to further prove already proven science?

4 CriticalDragon1177  Feb 27, 2015 8:24:08am

Thanos,

So it basically confirms what we already knew. Yet of course the climate change deniers will insist this is some kind of fraud.

5 b_sharp  Feb 27, 2015 9:55:50am

re: #3 SoCaroLion

Because there is a huge portion of the US that doesn’t accept the link between CO2 and CC.

6 Thanos  Feb 27, 2015 10:01:31am

This is the first time the net change has been directly observed and measured at large in the atmosphere at this level over time in specific spots. We have lab experiments, indirect observations, and satellite measures and tons of other proofs, but this is indisputable direct and measured observation. This didn’t take a lot of money, and in no way is it a waste.

7 iossarian  Feb 27, 2015 10:28:24am

re: #1 SoCaroLion

I did not realize that the general scientific principles of the greenhouse effect were in doubt. How much Federal grant money did these scientists receive to conduct this study? Seriously, if it was more than $50, we’re being ripped off.

The review process for federal grant funding is not some cockamamie scheme for ripping off “the taxpayers”, much as some people would like to believe that.

8 lostlakehiker  Feb 27, 2015 10:41:06am

re: #1 SoCaroLion

This just in: Scientists have also confirmed that 15 minutes could save me 15% or more on car insurance. Everyone knows that. And I thought everyone knew carbon dioxide causes a “greenhouse effect” by trapping the sun’s radiation. I think I learned that during middle school science classes in the mid 80’s. Seriously, the “results” of this “study” read as if it was performed by a dimwitted high school jock who just experienced his first educational epiphany after he mixed vinegar and baking soda in a paper mache volcano his mom built for him.

I did not realize that the general scientific principles of the greenhouse effect were in doubt. How much Federal grant money did these scientists receive to conduct this study? Seriously, if it was more than $50, we’re being ripped off.

Unfortunately, while it is immediate from basic known physics that CO2 is going to have a greenhouse effect, it isn’t quite as simple to work out just how significant that effect will be, much less how it will play out in a world that has water vapor as another major greenhouse gas, that has weather, cloud cover, and surface albedo as other variables that can affect temperatures, and so on. Just to work out what happens in a pure O2,N2,CO2 atmosphere is tricky. You have to think of the atmosphere as composed of many layers, each communicating by IR with the others, and do some fairly heavy calculus lifting.

And then there’s the philosophical side of it. There’s always the types who insist that OK your gravity theory seems to work here in England but how do we know it applies to France too? General rules in science are not axiomatic. They’re assertions about what has so far turned out to be true by several different experimental checks in several different contexts, and where if there are logical breakdowns and contradictions in the theory, they seem to concern remote conditions and not be relevant to the cases at hand.

Scientists are apt to want to check things. I well remember in college having argued with a physics professor who had just taken us through the Berkeley physics text’s demonstration that electromagnetic radiation was a consequence of relativity plus electrostatics. And I said, so by the same token, if a mass accelerates, there will be “gravitomagnetic” radiation, right? And he said, that’s not known. And I couldn’t think of any way it could have been checked. I didn’t know anything about neutron stars, for instance, and when it came to ordinary stars, the effect would probably have been too weak to be observable with any instruments anybody was likely to have any time soon.

OK, so that time there wasn’t any experimental evidence whatever for the claim. But where was his faith in relativity? If it was actually correct, then we didn’t need no stinkin experiments. The exact same logic that he’d just used to show how all that Maxwell stuff was inevitable given static electric charges accelerating, and given relativity, applied word for word to gravity waves. Done.

So of course I ended up in mathematics. It’s OK that physicists and scientists generally are keen to check their theories against reality. Even when it’s really pretty clear what those checks are likely to reveal.

9 Jayleia  Feb 27, 2015 7:03:07pm

re: #3 SoCaroLion

The point remains that a large portion of the population does NOT believe that CO2 is increasing, and if it is, it’s not due to humans, and if it is due to humans, it can’t effect climate, and if it can, the data is just being made up because its cold today…

10 John Vreeland  Feb 27, 2015 9:11:54pm

Since the connection between CO2 and trapped heat is easy to display in a high school earth science class, this study did not really demonstrate anything we don’t already know. Like dropping a brick to demonstrate gravity, it would only have been interesting if it failed to demonstrate what we expected.


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