Physical Realizations of Oxymoron
A Climate Scientist pleads for ( understanding / belief / sympathy / faith / acceptance ) and taking politics out of science by writing an Editorial Opinion column about politics, and while stating:
“Overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is heating the planet, shrinking the Arctic ice cap, melting glaciers and raising sea levels. It is leading to more widespread drought, more frequent heat waves and more powerful hurricanes. [ My bold ]
A two-fer; injecting politics into science and making statements not supported by science.
Americans are Fully Committed to Protecting the Environment
So long as it doesn’t make too much noise.
For me, this situation speaks volumes.
Google Ads
Where are those Google Ads coming from ? Or, more nearly correctly, from where are those Google Ads coming?
Update: Today, this morning, September 3, 2010, I’m not seeing any ???
Do-it-Yourself at RealClimate.Org
This post at realclimate.org is very strange. The phrase do-it-yourself is in the Title for the post and repeated once in the first sentence. Searches show that the phrase does not appear anywhere else in the post.
What a strange way to write about anything. The alleged subject does not appear in the discussion.
Entropy
Here’s some recent info on a topic that arises from time to time.
I ran across this issue of Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, May 12, 2010; 365 (1545):
Theme Issue ‘Maximum entropy production in ecological and environmental systems: applications and implications’ compiled and edited by Axel Kleidon, Yadvinder Malhi and Peter M. Cox. doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0018
Full papers are available at no cost.
While tracking down more free articles I found this review:
Axel Kleidon, “Nonequilibrium thermodynamics and maximum entropy production in the Earth system: Applications and implications” Naturwissenschaften (2009) 96:653–677. DOI 10.1007/s00114-009-0509-x
This paper:
G Grinstein and R Linsker, “Comments on a derivation and application of the ‘maximum entropy production’ principle” 2007 J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 40 9717. doi:10.1088/1751-8113/40/31/N01
reports errors in these recent papers by Dewar:
Dewar R 2003. “Information theory explanation of the fluctuation theorem, maximum entropy production and self-organized criticality in non-equilibrium stationary states” J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 36 631. doi: 10.1088/0305-4470/36/3/303
Dewar R C 2005, “Maximum entropy production and the fluctuation theorem” J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 38 L371. doi: 10.1088/0305-4470/38/21/L01
Many Links Broken
Moved to top.
I have discovered that all links to posts and documents internal to this site are broken. I had to move the site from its previous server to the present location and the URLs to site-internal locations all point to the previous server. URLs to external servers still work, so long as those servers are still up and running and the specific item is still available.
If you’re trying to get copies of papers at the links, you’ll have to do a search to find the original location.
I’ve also noticed that funny characters have popped up in the text again as they did when the original site had problems.
If a post has a URL that links to a previous post you’ll have to track down the previous post and open it directly.
I have a day job now and don’t have time to fix these problems.
Nouns to Verbs: Verbizing Nouns
In a past life I worked for a company the president of which could change any noun into a verb by adding the -ize suffix. I was recently reminded of this when I ran across this brand new ( for me ) verbized noun; analogize.
We generalized ( hehe ) the concept and applied it to the case of someone appearing at your office door wanting to discuss work-related issues as follows; Come in and chairize yourself.
Computational Physics or Process Model
Here’s a zeroth-order cut at differentiating a computational physics problem from working with a process model of the same physical phenomena and processes.
A computational physics problem will have no numerical values for coefficients appearing in the continuous equations other than those that describe the material of interest.
Process models can be identified by the fact that given the same material and physical phenomena and processes, there is more than one specification for the continuous equations and more than one model.
Some processes models are based on more nearly complete usage of fundamental equations, and fewer parameterizations, than others.
Added March 21, 2010
The necessary degree of completeness for the continuous equations, and the level of fidelity for the parameterizations, in process models is determined by the dominant controlling physical phenomena and processes.
Added July 6, 2010
The sole issue for computational physics is Verification of the solution.
Process models will involve many calculations in which variations of the parameters in the model are the focus. None of these parameters will be associated with properties of the material. Instead they will all be associated with configurations that the material has experienced, or nearly so, at some time in the past.
Scientists Create Their Own Communication Problems
Scientists urge Senate action on global warming
In a move to shore up credibility for climate change science, American scientists and economists are asking the Senate to enact immediate legislation to reduce emissions related to global warming.
Two thousand US economists and climate scientists, including eight Nobel laureates, are sending a letter Thursday to the Senate urging lawmakers to require immediate nationwide cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions tied to global warming.
. . .
“We call on our nation’s leaders to swiftly establish and implement policies to bring about deep reductions in heat-trapping emissions,” the scientists write in the letter. “The strength of the science on climate change compels us to warn the nation about the growing risk of irreversible consequences as global average temperatures continue to increase.”
Only the last blockquote is in the letter. But the summary by the writer of the article seems to me to be correct.
Oh, and their own creditability problems, too.
IPCC Peer-Reviewed Literature
This post over at Roger Pielke Jr.’s place, Gray literature in the IPCC, A guest post by Andreas Bjurström is reassuring information for me.
I’ve read ‘peer-review’, ‘peer-reviewed’, and ‘peer-reviewed literature’ just about as many times as I’ve read ‘science’, ‘the science’, and ‘scientists’. I was beginning to doubt the validity of my own, merely engineering related, publication record. I was becoming depressed and thinking that I was unworthy of commenting and that I should follow only the advice of Peer-Reviewed Scientists.
But now I see that my publication record, and all the engineering literature that I have worked with, is more nearly completely peer-reviewed than the real-world standard set by the IPCC. The technical documentation for almost all engineering literature falls under the first column on the left at the post, plus technical reports from the middle column. I will argue that if these technical reports are in any way associated with organizations performing work for government / public agencies, they have been peer-reviewed. And actually reviewed in much more depth than that typical peer-reviewed journal reviews.
Additionally, I think that I can say that the engineering literature is on a much firmer foundation than the IPCC when it comes to peer-review. I have never, for example, cited, ‘articles in the daily papers and magazines’, or lectures, or audio/visual media, or blogs, or preprints, or e-prints. And I’m certain that I’ve not seen these cited in any of the engineering literature that I’ve used in my work. I have, however, cited technical reports from the middle column.
This information is yet another example that certain buzz-phrases have been over-utilized in The Climate Science Community to the extent that they have become, as jstults has noted, merely words and have no real meaning.
Maybe I’ll start working on a Climate Science Bingo scoring pad.
Models Methods Software 