What Keeps Climate Scientists Up At Night

October 5, 2013

Posted by greenman3610
Filed in Crock of the Week

7 Comments »

7 Responses to “What Keeps Climate Scientists Up At Night”

kingdube Says:

October 5, 2013 at 7:21 am
Idiots wringing their hands. How motivating is that?

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- wottsupwiththatblog Says:
  
  October 5, 2013 at 8:43 am
  According to Wikipedia, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority. One tendency is :
  
  2. fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
  
  Reply
  - Marc Hellé Says:
    
    October 8, 2013 at 10:54 am
    Yep, the Dunning-Kruger effect means that dumb people think they’re smart, and that smart people think they’re dumb… Dumb people tend to overestimate their skills and intelligence, and really intelligent people underestimate themselves. It’s not really new, but Dunning and Kruger won a Nobel prize for it, in 2000 or so.
    
    Reply
- redskylite Says:
  
  October 5, 2013 at 10:18 am
  Why do you call them idiots mate, they are mostly bright young researchers at various Australian Universities, do you have a distaste for all academia, or is it just climate related issues, have a look at this young researcher talking about Higgs Boson – is he an idiot too ?
  
  Reply
  - Engineer-Poet Says:
    
    October 5, 2013 at 12:50 pm
    He thinks they’re only as smart as he is.
    
    Reply
neilrieck Says:

October 5, 2013 at 12:46 pm
Here is the balanced burn equation for gasoline from Wikipedia.

“2 C8H18 + 25 O2 → 16 CO2 + 18 H2O”

After blowing the dust off the dust from my secondary school chemistry book I determined the following (units have been converted to non-metric values for discussion purposes):

Burning 6 pounds of gasoline (~ one U.S. gallon) produces 18 pounds of carbon dioxide gas and 8.5 pounds of water vapor. This seems counter-intuitive until you realize that the additional mass comes from oxygen in the atmosphere. It might be more obvious to all if the resultant material were visible to the human eye. Now try to imagine what 18 pounds of carbon dioxide looks like.

Many deniers claim that CO2 is good for plant growth. Since photosynthesis consumes CO2 and produces O2 you would expect CO2 levels to be falling and O2 levels rising but the reverse is happening (O2 levels have dropped every year since the Scripps Institution of Oceanography began continual atmospheric measurements in 1990).

On top of this bad news, it now appears that high CO2 levels make it more difficult for plants to absorb nitrogen which is necessary in the production of protein.

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Another Week in the Ecological Crisis, October 6, 2013 – A Few Things Ill Considered Says:

October 10, 2013 at 6:20 am
[…] 2013/10/05: PSinclair: What Keeps Climate Scientists Up At Night […]

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