Recent content by billiards

I don't think it "addresses the inaccuracies of prior climate models". It looks at variance in an ensemble of prior climate models with known ECS parameter to establish a relationship which is then used to estimate the true ECS parameter.

Interesting article evo, thanks for bringing it up. My reading of it is that the ECS parameter is now more confidently known in such a way that the 66% confidence interval is now tighter than it was in the previous IPCC report. In fact the maximum likelihood value of ECS is about the same...

Ah, you misunderstood me then, it simply was meant as an exclamation of how cool and counterintuitive it was.

Please clarify your point.

This is another fascinating example of how intuition can lead you in completely the wrong direction. When an Ice Sheet melts sea level drops locally? No way!

You would also need to know the composition. Often a pyrolite composition is assumed for the Earth's whole mantle. You might want to look at some equations of state the Birch-Murnaghan equation of state is often used in geophysics. You may want to see how some open-source software can help...

Dave I know you know and by no means was challenging your clearly very high intelligence! :smile: I just wanted to make sure, for the record, that no one came away with the misunderstanding that the mantle was in any way not a solid. It's a common misconception. I remember, I was taught in a...

BTW, interesting topic and nice study... I will report back once I've had time to read the actual paper. EDIT: added a brief report. Ok so the seismology is very convincing. There is definitely something down there right at the base of the Iceland plume, and that something is definitely...

The mantle is solid dave! Otherwise how would shear waves go through? It's not rigid, and deforms visco-plastically, but it is solid!

No worries @jim mcnamara -- here's a starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithospheric_flexure

I dunno, sounds pretty cool to me! It's not just any fault: it's a fresh -- seismically active -- fault!

The wavelength is simply the spatial extent of the gravity anomaly. A gravity anomaly that spreads over a large area has a large wavelength. If the lithosphere were infinitely strong then a load would not cause a local depression (and hence a localised "short wavelength" gravity anomaly) but...

In terms of the "light" element in the core. It is important to reiterate that we are talking about ~5%. Nobody doubts that 95% is made of iron and nickel.

Because we make a model of the Earth that includes a solid core and predict when and where the energy from an earthquake would arrive. Then we look at seismic recordings of all the earthquakes that have ever got recorded and we see that our model fits the data (it predicts what we observe)...

Very interesting subject. My criticism would be that it seems bit circular. They use their model to show that the Earth is not as expected if the preexisting hypothesis is true. Then they use the same model to support their alternative hypothesis. At least that's my understanding...