Recent content by Bored Wombat

The effect of the resulting CO2 in the atmosphere on the rate at which the Earth's thermal emissions escape into space is why burning hydrocarbons is affecting the global mean temperature. Not the thermal energy of the combustion.

The main differences will be the greenhouse effect and thermal conductivity; the proportion of the heat transfer through the gas to the glass is difficult to predict, because convection is so dependent on the shape and temperature profile of the container, but probably the dominant effect is the...

Quite right. 14.65 mW/(m.K) and Overestimate. Thanks for that: I thought that last time I'd had this discussion it had come out the other way, and was thinking that I'd made a mistake then.

The greenhouse effect has been understood for a century or so. I expect the scholarly papers from when this sort of thing was first investigated would not have been archived electronically.

The other thing that would affect this is that the thermal conductivity of CO₂ is 105 mW/(m.K), but the thermal conductivity of N₂ is 24 mW/(m.K) (at one atmosphere and 0°C). So you would get an underestimate of the greenhouse effect of CO₂, or even the CO₂ cooling faster if you get a...

Yeah, he's been seen on her spin off in cameos, but with (the original) K-9 getting his own show, not produced by the beeb, there are issues with over-using that character. And while I'm mentioning spin-offs, I must add that series two of Torchwood was kick-arse. The episodes by the Steven...

You don't even need exogenisis if that is what you want. The whole idea of exogenisis is to get from amino acid to reproducing cell. And that's a bacteria. A virus doesn't cut the mustard because it still needs to encounter a cell to live. The whole idea is that it increases the field of...

NASA reckons they found some bacteria that were quite happy after days in space on the outside of one of their ships. A virus could probably do much better. Of course a virus couldn't seed life onto a planet. I don't think that a human will colonise a barren rock and terraform it, but a bacteria...

I'm not sure that alien abductees are fantasy prone. They are much more likely to have experienced sleep paralysis than a random group, and I think that the experience is probably attributable to sleep paralysis plus false memory rather than fantasy prone and crackpot. But it could be either.

I think that if we hadn't hit the evolutionary dead end of trying to thread the brain through a pelvis at the beginning of life, we would have ventured to the stars. ... They do http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc" ... And there's no reason why they shouldn't. Afterall genetic...

I don't believe in class 2 aliens. They violate causality, and interfere with the arrow of time. (Notice that FTL travel is backwards time-travel for some observers.) Self-replicating nano-probes isn't that super optimistic, given that they only have to be built by one civilisation (Or...

I think that it is accepted that some of the methods were inappropriate. I think that it is more important that the results are correct, except for an estimation of the errors.

I don't think of heat as phlogiston nor caloric. But I do think of objects containing heat, which is an energy, and a function of temperature for a given substance of a given density and phase. What is wrong with this thinking?

If you go back further than the closing of the Panama isthmus, you get a very different climate. (Since that was the start of the ice age). I think that that shows that the planet can and does go into dramatically different states.

Isn't that what a tipping point is? The point between the start of one stable process and the start of a dramatically different one?