swansont

Calling them deniers or not isn't really the issue. The so-called skeptics have already made up their mind and have chosen an intellectually dishonest path of argument. Their minds aren't going to be changed. The underlying problem, IMO, is that it's not a fair fight. It's the observer of the discussion who can potentially be convinced, and the observer doesn't know that fight is unfair because they don't know that the two sides are using different rules. The AGW deniers are free to use deception in the form of logical fallacies; their credibility is measure in their ability to score rhetorical points, while the science crowd sticks to facts, because their credibility is measured differently. If they manufactured data, they would be outcast. So a denier is free to claim that e.g. we've been cooling since 1998 by cherry-picking data to support that conclusion, and a scientist can only present data that shows this to be false. The onlooker thinks the question is undecided. I blogged about this, in a more general sense, just this morning. http://blogs.scienceforums.net/swansont/archives/2820

Right. Cathodes give you negative charges. Anodes will give you positive ones. It's a lot easier to free up electrons, which is probably why there isn't much discussion on ARTs.

The equation that lets you find what state the electron is in, e.g. expected location, energy

How would a physicist go about solving it?

Yes. Many transitions emit radiation just like a dipole.

Sometimes you can get 2, but only under some circumstances. The 2S-1S transition in Hydrogen for example. Since the angular momentum is unchanged in the atomic states, you can't emit just one photon. Since there is no other decay channel open, you can see two-photon decays (each with opposite spins, so they add to zero), but the lifetime will be much longer than for other excited states because the transition probability is much lower. For a system that can decay with one photon, or a different way with two, the one-photon transitions will be the dominant decay.

But the water vapor isn't doing the things you claim it was doing. Your example of a spatial variation in concentration was a strawman, since we are discussing temporal variations. A threat of hypercapnia from atmospheric CO2 was never made. It was brought up as a rebuttal to your claim that CO2 could never be a pollutant, and your pursuit of this has ignored clarifying comments made by Phi and also by Sisyphus. (and a Tu Quoque fallacy as well) What I was doing was pointing out that your rebuttal was misplaced, as I explained above. Yes I am. What would be the point of reducing the bandwidth of your measurement. You suggested a 4000 year average, when the effect we are looking for is of a much shorter duration than that. You have a nanohertz signal, and you want an average that can't detect anything above a picohertz.

I was attempting to distinguish between the amplitude of the light signal (intensity) and the amplitude of the electric or magnetic field. "Amplitude" can apply to all three. You're going to see the quantum behavior more when dealing with bound/confined systems — frequency is not a continuous quantity for many of these, e.g. atoms which radiate/absorb at discrete frequencies. For a "photon-in-a-box" the supported cavity modes are discrete as well (standing waves); this tends to a continuous spectrum as the box becomes large. So if your light is coming from an atomic system or a cavity (or both, as in a laser), you have discrete frequencies from which to choose. Light from a blackbody is going to give you a continuous spectrum.

Even though you can't predict a location, since they just don't travel in classical trajectories, there is an oscillation frequency associated with the electrons. They are confined in a potential well with a certain energy. When they make transitions, they can be seen as acting like electric dipoles (or, more rarely, magnetic or electric quadrupoles)

The E&M fields oscillate at some frequency. However, unlike classical waves, the energy of the system is quantized and it requires no medium in which to propagate. So there is an amplitude of the fields, and there is an intensity which is proportional to the number of these quantized vibrational modes, which we call photons.

They are the same fracking thing! You have six. You also have a half-dozen. That is SIGNIFICANT! We'll read about it in the journal after you get it published. But I doubt anyone will hold their breath in the meantime.

onequestion banned at own request. Quit before being fired.

You need an infinite source for this to work. Physically impossible. For any finite system, there is a limit to how much power you can capture.

Broken record. Thread closed.

There's probably a very good reason for that: no scientific evidence that psychic phenomenon are real.

The object you're heating up radiates as well. The object can only heat up as long as the incoming power is greater than the radiated power. In the ideal case, it can only equalize.

So, are you going to answer the question? Is water vapor increasing with time, at a given location? Or is this a red herring? And in what way is this response not ignoring the point, too? No, I didn't jump in with a suggestion that we not only smooth out the noise but also the signal you're trying to measure by using a really long averaging time. What would be the point?

I don't think the spatial variation is the issue. It's the temporal variation at a particular location. The CO2 concentration at Mauna Loa, for example. Is water vapor showing the same kind of increase? This misses or ignores the concerns. The issue isn't whether humans can tolerate a change in temperature, it's the effects of that increase. Rising ocean levels, for example, would displace a lot of people, at a large cost. Desertification will yield areas unable to grow crops. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Cherry-picking will tend to do that. Exactly what using a rolling average does. So why don't you do that?

Hard to say without knowing exactly what was asked. Had I been asked the question I would have answered "yes" because I have anecdotal evidence of it being true, and that's probably what the poll is reflecting. The story says that the poll asked if scientists have heard the claims and then if they believed the claims to be true, i.e. do you find them credible. While this is still anecdotal, it's still not the same as religious belief — that comparison suffers from the fallacy of equivocation. The bottom line is that it's a poll, and no matter how much the pollsters like to dress them up by mentioning sampling statistics, they are often not particularly scientific. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Time spent doing science vs bureaucratic crap would be one measure. But it's my experience that the government doesn't do this kind of assessment.

You don't need anything to "maintain the momentum." A photon will have whatever momentum it possesses until it interacts.

This suffers from the same shortcoming as the "it's been warmer in the past" argument, though. Just because (if) it hasn't happened before isn't sufficient. It's not a smoking gun if there's a mechanism which would account for he warming. But there doesn't appear to be any mechanism other than CO2, as far as I am aware.

The existence of many threads on GW shows that counter-claims are being examined. Looking for conflicts of interest, because they do happen, is but one of the ways the claims are examined. A very broad claim with no actual backing to it, and one that is contradicted with even a cursory examination of GW discussions here. Strawman. The issue isn't saving the planet — the planet's going to survive just fine. It's the humans on the planet that most are concerned about. Where they are going to live and their accessibility to food and drinkable water, etc. Which is why data from virtually all of that graph is irrelevant and merely represents a distraction. Yes, CO2 has been higher in the remote past. Humans weren't alive then. So life existing then is anther strawman. Please explain how CO2 is the "basic fuel" of life, and how limiting it to pre-industrial values would be a bad thing (from the "life surviving" point of view) The "opposing voices" aren't going through the proper channels to voice scientific concerns. Anybody can write a book — they are published because someone thinks they can make money doing so. You are implying that not reading this book is a failure of skepticism. Why? I've read critiques of the book that say it's crap. Why should I spend time reading something that isn't from someone in the field? And no, climatology is not a subset of geology. Climatology is often paired with meteorology in atmospheric sciences, not geology. Calling this gerrymandering is just another example of a logical fallacy (guilt by association). It's also moving the goalposts, since it was your implication that only people outside of climatology would be able to falsify AGW. You have not supported this by showing that the climatologists are e.g. perpetrating fraud or are incompetent. Why must the criticism come from an outside source?

By this logic one can only be a skeptic if they reject something. That's a very odd interpretation of the definition. Skepticism is simply requiring evidence, not the rejection of all claims. One might be skeptical that we landed on the moon, but examination of the evidence shows we did, and examination of the counter-claims shows they are without basis. The moon-landing deniers are not skeptics. You don't actually know that it's not being treated skeptically (using the actual definition of the word, not yours). What you seem to be claiming is that a skeptic would reject AGW. What I and some other posters who disagree with that statement are countering with is that a skeptic who had not accepted AGW would have better, i.e. scientifically and logically sound, arguments against it. We're talking about CO2 here, right? That's the "basic fuel" of life? And since concentrations are 25% higher than they were 50 years ago, how is this limiting it? No, but he was proven wrong by other physicists, right? Not by a geologist.

Since only BA has chimed in, I'll guess (it's not like I know much about QCD) that it's because they have color charge.

It is vital to note that Severian is agreeing that an interpretation of QM is philosophy, not the theory itself. Also, I had agreed that you had (finally) made a single testable prediction, with regard to gravitation, namely that G was actually a variable that depended on the type of particles involved. It would be incorrect to say that you have a theory of particle structure until you have made testable predictions here, as well. You should probably expend some effort on seeing if data exist which support or refute this prediction.