Recent content by stuartmacg

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    What could the ancient-Greek approach reveal, using our hindsight?

    Only a bit of fun - to see how far you could plausibly get using their approach with hypotheses they could have come up with. I expect other folk could come up with other schemes. I enjoyed it anyway. Sorry if you are offended. I think it does no harm, can if fact be beneficial, to play with...
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    What could the ancient-Greek approach reveal, using our hindsight?

    The Greek reasons for atoms seem to be: Gets difficult to cut up small things: ?? If you keep dividing up forever you get infinite bits, and somehow this implies infinite matter:?? Dodgy at best. However they seemed to feel unlimited steps were unacceptable (e.g. Zeno), and thought...
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    Universal information: How much is enough?

    From a commercial point of view, the reasons for making high energy particle observations seem to be becoming small :-) - basically "they thought it was all finished in 1900 and look what happened". Humans - the information animals - have dominated the world by finding and exploiting good...
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    Universal information: How much is enough?

    A thought (it is probably as old as hills, but new to me): Physics advances by finding rules our observations obey. A good theory reduces the information needed to describe what has been observed. In each (most?) advance(s) we find that the universe actually contains (can be defined by) less...
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    What could the ancient-Greek approach reveal, using our hindsight?

    I saw a post on Quora recently, about Epicurus and his argument for the existence of indivisible atoms. The logic was faulty sadly. Could we, with modern knowledge of what there is, come up with ancient Greek style arguments - going from every day observations, without microscopes or...
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    Earth thermal feedback effects

    Thanks for the links. I'll work my way through this stuff.
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    Insights Frequently Made Errors in Climate Science - The Greenhouse Effect - Comments

    I don't distrust at all: I would just like to hear something more than silence on the subject, from those who have done the work.
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    Insights Frequently Made Errors in Climate Science - The Greenhouse Effect - Comments

    Thanks for the link, though it does not directly address the balancing effect of increased heat loss from revealed sea in the cold polar regions. I am just an uninformed chap who wanted an explanation for what seemed a counter intuitive process folk are talking about. Just curious. The link...
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    Insights Frequently Made Errors in Climate Science - The Greenhouse Effect - Comments

    I have been asking abut this for a while and not getting any answers. It does seem intuitively that if I were a 0C animal I would not get warmer by taking off my ice coat in the arctic, with -28C Greenland air temp for example. The low angle summer sun seems unlikely to offset the sunless...
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    Earth thermal feedback effects

    I made a foolish mistake: feedback effectively generates a geometric series, so if the result is to double the input, the feedback gain is 1/2, not 1. i.e. factor=1/(1-gain).
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    Earth thermal feedback effects

    Our replies crossed. The observed T and CO2 changes and (I am told) agreed direct CO2 heating effect together suggest that there is a purely thermal loop gain close to 1, required to amplify the CO2 "forcing" change from 0.5C to the observed 1C.
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    Earth thermal feedback effects

    I am not clear that that is so. A loop gain becoming >1 would generate exponential increases i.e. a "tipping point", in an otherwise linear system (e.g. microphone howl). Non linear, second order, effects are what would change the loop gain, and create stable "saturation" levels. What non...
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    Earth thermal feedback effects

    Looking at some apparently widely accepted data, I understand: - CO2 mass change => direct "greenhouse" heating is approx linear over ranges considered - Doubling CO2 (i.e. adding same again) would give 1C change for direct greenhouse. - CO2 change x1.5 since pre-industrial times (half added)...
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    I Comparing the formation of the atmospheres on Earth vs Venus

    Read Venus stats for first time yesterday. Could the spin rate at accretion time reduce Earth's atmosphere relative to Venus, or are there moon tidal effects, e.g. mixing and carrying heat to upper atmosphere allowing escape velocity losses, to explain the 100 fold difference? I have heard...
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    How does the loss of sea ice affect Earth's temperature?

    On reflection I can see there are effects due to the sort of photon maxwell demon operation of the atmosphere (greenhouse) which may justify the positive feedback assertion. Not totally fair to call it that, as its action is symmetrical and the asymmetry in photon energy on each side causes the...
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