swansont

If I'm reading it right, it means "cubic" I think 1 m^3 would be the equivalent way of stating it.

It comes out of the equations, because you can't transform yourself into the photon's frame. An object traveling at c can't have a rest mass. The equations diverge. The momentum is E/c, and this relationship matches up quite well with experiment. There are other instances of experimental data that support the zero rest mass: from http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAndNuclear/photon_mass.html "It is almost certainly impossible to do any experiment that would establish the photon rest mass to be exactly zero. The best we can hope to do is place limits on it. A non-zero rest mass would introduce a small damping factor in the inverse square Coulomb law of electrostatic forces. That means the electrostatic force would be weaker over very large distances. Likewise, the behavior of static magnetic fields would be modified. An upper limit to the photon mass can be inferred through satellite measurements of planetary magnetic fields. The Charge Composition Explorer spacecraft was used to derive an upper limit of 6 × 10-16 eV with high certainty. This was slightly improved in 1998 by Roderic Lakes in a laboratory experiment that looked for anomalous forces on a Cavendish balance. The new limit is 7 × 10-17 eV. Studies of galactic magnetic fields suggest a much better limit of less than 3 × 10-27 eV, but there is some doubt about the validity of this method." There are a couple of references listed on that page. More, presumably, if you care to Google. Your demonstrated knowledge here begins and ends with E=mc^2, and you have the temerity to write this? I'm reminded of the line from the movie "Arthur." "I really wouldn't know, sir. I'm just a servant. On the other hand, go screw yourself." I mean, seriously. Do you expect any kind of reasonable exchange if you spout this kind of fallacy-ridden appeal to conspiracy, "it's a religion" strawman crap? Your request for justification of standard equations implies you've never even picked up a textbook on this. And yet you come here saying "it's all wrong," but you haven't made the effort to find out what you're arguing against.

Finding a pattern is not the same as finding the governing principle. Balmer, Paschen and Lyman series, etc. spectra were discovered before the Hydrogen atom was modeled, and that went through some iterations. Who are the "we" to whom you refer in that last sentence?

OK, thanks for clearing that up. I agree — the forcing tied to temperature increase fits scenario B, but the emissions converting to concentration and forcings doesn't work. The Mauna Loa numbers are increasing by about 0.4% a year. I'm not familiar enough with the model to know how separable the two issues are, but my naive assumption is that they are. The number that gets discussed often is the climate sensitivity, which is dependent on atmospheric concentration. Anyone know where all the "missing" CO2 is?

Option C. The resonator remains at rest, so the resonator's mass in indeed larger. You would see this if you had a standing wave inside the resonator. The interesting case is, as you mention, of small numbers of photons, or a single photon, where you might actually observe the recoil of the resonator as the photon reflects. In that case, the resonator has momentum, but this reverses itself at the opposite reflection. In the center-of-momentum frame, you should still observe an increase in mass; the object has more energy and no translational kinetic energy (the average of p goes to zero for times long compared to 2d/c). A resonator is too massive to actually do this and observe the difference, but something that you can do is mass spectrometry on atoms, and if a nucleus is in an excited state, it will have a different mass. And scientists have observed this. I'll try and find a link. edit: found one, blogged about it "Discovery of a Nuclear Isomer in [sup65[/sup]Fe with Penning Trap Mass Spectrometry,” by Block, et. al.

Wrong equation. [math]E^2 = p^2c^2 + m^2c^4[/math]

Math is not binary. Planck's constant is not immeasurably small. ( I have a vague recollection of determining it in modern physics lab a few decades ago). Those are errors of fact. Science is not a religious belief system. That's just a smear tactic. Hutchison effect and ZPE possess all the hallmarks of quantum snake oil. The burden-of-proof ball is in your court.

How is it you can derive atomic closed shells and nuclear closed shells from this principle, and yet, they do not have the same values?

Setting up an experiment to measure the photon's rest mass does not necessarily imply that it has one. Measuring zero is usually a very tough experiment, and getting a smaller upper bound is worthy of publication.

Tying QM into the mind — "At the heart physics, is the phenomena of the mind." Surely, that is speculative.

Could've been worse. One could say that in prison, for example.

You have to go to the source — the scientific papers — or someone who can legitimately interpret them, i.e. scientists working in that field. Newspaper articles are bad, in general, since they suffer from the temptation to sensationalize things, and reporters often can't separate the wheat from the chaff. Op-eds are a mixed bag, but generally, the argument there isn't science — too much political argument to score points, rather than present science. (I've discussed the difference in those argument styles before, most recently here) Blogs have to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. You can look at the arguments and evaluate them similar to creationism arguments — the tactics are remarkably similar. Look for the ones relying on peer-reviewed science and looking at the whole breadth and depth of the material, as they are probably making decent points. If it's a rebuttal argument, they will be pointing out the flaws I am about to list: The ones using logical fallacies, appeals to conspiracy, using selected evidence (cherry-picking), and making sweeping statements that are not backed up by any science, and often from some false authority — those are the denialists. ———— Now, as to the cases you've presented, they've been discussed here before. The warming that happened starting around 1915 occurred right after some significant cooling, largely induced by volcanic activity. Some of the warming, perhaps upwards of half, was due to a reduction in the volcanic material in the atmosphere (AFAIK, from both large eruptions and general volcanic activity). Some amount was due to CO2, though at a lower rate than later in the century, and some was solar; these latter two making roughly equal contributions The choice of ~1915 would be an example of cherry-picking, since it's choosing the coolest point on the graph. Temperatures can't help but be higher at a later point. The other is the claim that we've been cooling since 1998. It's not true, but 1998 was a very hot year. Again, selecting that data point skews the analysis because it was a fluctuation, this time on the high side. Since we're interested in trends and not fluctuations, one should look for analyses that use averages (five year, ten year or even longer) to ensure the noise isn't a distraction.

You can only have motion in one direction at a time — velocity is a vector. If the vector has y and/or z components, then one option is to re-define your coordinate system. Some problems don't lend themselves to that, though, so you'd have to use the generalized transform in Atheist's link.

You've claimed this before, here in post 37, but were rebutted in post 46 by ChrisC. This seems to show a decreasing slope of emissions rate in the 1990's. Were the forcing increasing exponentially or linearly? Do you have a cite that shows an exponential increase of the forcings?

I think the main issue is that you are quoting Steven Milloy from junkscience, and he's lying. Hansen's predictions stem from the paper he co-wrote ( http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/1988/Hansen_etal.html ) and published that year. In it he give three scenarios, to reflect different changes in greenhouse gases. The scenario that has the ~0.34 ºC increase is scenario A, which has an exponentially increasing radiative forcing. Since those conditions were not present in the 90's, it's dishonest to characterize that as Hansen's prediction. Scenario B had a linear increase in the forcings, which is the best match to what actually happened, and this predicted a temperature increase of between 0.10 - 0.15 ºC. http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/04/hansen-has-been-wrong-before.html http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/hansens-1988-projections/

At current concentrations, that atmosphere is already close to being opaque at the CO2 absorption bands at 4 and 15 microns. http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showpost.php?p=397344&postcount=77 So outgoing light gets absorbed and then re-radiated; some goes out to space and some gets directed back toward earth. Instead of radiative cooling to the 3K reservoir of space, you are radiating into a much warmer atmosphere, meaning less energy is transferred away from the earth.

What was the bet? To win, place, show, or be euthanized?

It's not that surprising, IMO. There are always going to be people who are convinced for the wrong reason, in both directions. One danger is if such a person becomes a spokesperson — it's like the video Penn did when he interviewed a bunch of environmental activists, and found that none of them (the ones whose footage was aired, anyway) could make a cogent argument abut the science.

It's called climate sensitivity, and it does have a predicted value of around 3 ºC for a doubling of CO2.

There is a car. If someone gets in the car, puts it in "drive" and steps on the gas, it goes forward. If they put it in "reverse" and step on the gas, it goes backward. If they do nothing, it sits still. Since I can't predict what the driver will do, using this logic, I can conclude that I know nothing about how a car works. Somehow, I am not convinced that the logic is valid.

http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/Nature/rahmstorf_etal_science_2007.pdf http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/hansens-1988-projections/

As I recall, your one example of political pressure was from GW Bush on behalf of the oil industry, a source that would like nothing better than a result of "it's all natural and there's nothing we can do about it." So, how about some concrete examples? Are the results from peer-reviewed journals being corrupted when collated by the IPCC? Any science to present?

Not a biologist, but — if your body doesn't metabolize it, it doesn't have any dietary calories.

Not after seeing some of the anti-relativity and anti-QM cranks or discussions with creationists. Being earnestly and sincerely accused of censorship is old hat. Why don't we look at some of those queries? You've accused the IPCC of being political and of scare-mongering, but have provided no specifics when prompted. You've repeatedly implied that the science — not just the reporting of it — has been politicized and can't be trusted, without supporting it. You made a claim about the temperature of the last decade which was incorrect. When called on this, you attempted to dismiss the data by claiming they were unreliable even though the magnitude of the error was too small to make any substantial difference. You used a strawman argument to downgrade global warming from theory to hypothesis, and made a blanket statement that it cannot make verifiable predictions. I don't see any scientific questions being raised.

"Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade" (quoted from the Nature abstract) has now become a decline?