Check out this report at The Raw Story:
Up yours, scientists.
That’s essentially the message sent by former politician Sarah Palin during a recent speech to the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, where she disparaged the work of thousands of the world’s top minds to the delight of a large crowd that laughed, clapped and cheered her on the whole way.
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I can’t read this. It’s infuriating.
This is par for the course for Palin. In fact, given some of the comments made here this is almost marginally sane. I’m pretty sure that she sees scientists are those nerdy kids back in highschool who she disliked. Sometimes it seems like the entire Republican party is stuck in 10th grade.
America – dumb as we want to be! Palin is proof positive.
Sarah Palin was correct to withhold judgement.
Climategate is a scandal of major scientific proportions, yet so many otherwise knowledgeable people are still in denial. Sarah should not be tweaking their noses although the same people think nothing about lies like “she hates science.”
Physicists are pressing the thermodynamic issues underlying glogal warming but their concerns are being ignored by many otherwise knowledgeable people who may not understand the thermodynamic issues.
Some people are not doing their homework but it is not Sarah Palin.
She also referred to Obama as a “community organizer” several times. Barak should start using “hockey mom” when talking about her. I like the term “half-governor”, too.
@4 Kimo
I’m sorry but I tried to parsing your comment many times, I still have no idea what you are trying to say. Would you mind rephrasing it?
People should stop putting that moron on the news; the rest of the world is laughing at us. Palin acts as though there’s some reward (a heavenly reward?) for having the brightest red neck.
I would just as soon we not elevate Palin any more with blog posts and comments about her latest pronouncements. BUT … if we do find good reason to write about her, I propose we consistently refer to her as Sarah Q. Palin. (Do we need to spell out what “Q” stands for?)
Palin doesn’t have a prayer of a chance understanding science (pun intended). I doubt there is much in this life she does understand, so she is therefore afraid of what she doesn’t understand and she lashes out. It is what ignorant fearful juvenile people like her do.
Gerry L. – Queef?
“Climategate is a scandal of major scientific proportions…”
No it isn’t. It was a smoke and mirrors show based on bad faith interpretations of out of context emails.
“Physicists are pressing the thermodynamic issues underlying glogal warming but their concerns are being ignored by many otherwise knowledgeable people who may not understand the thermodynamic issues.”
I’ve seen this claim cropping up more and more among the denialists, and I can’t help but suspect that it’s just more smoke and mirrors. So exactly who are these physicists and what are their claims about the “thermodynamic” “issues”?
Tyler, I’m guessing these claims about physicists, and “thermodynamic issues”, that plague evolution. When investigated, they aren’t really raised by physicists and there really aren’t any issues.
Climategate is to scandal as the HCR bill is to unconstitutionality. It just ain’t so, a faux outrage trumped up to make a point that doesn’t exist.
The scandal in climategate is that the media treated it as anything more than a bad joke. And, please, Nixon resigned in 1974. Do we still have to use “gate” as the scandal suffix?
Science, culture, philosophy, and empathy are all librul propoganda created by progressive marxist atheist freemason freethinker servants of the devil. They must be exorcised with the raw power of magical patriotic secessionist Queen Liberty anti-liberal Palin.
. . . in Fulton, Mississippi.
shorter Kimo:
“Glenn Beck just taught me a word: thermodynamics. Some day I’ll figure out what it means, but it’s supposed to make scientists obey your mental commands.”
BTW here in all its glory is their thermodynamic argument:
when you have black bodies heated up, they radiate in all directions, from their surfaces. in terms of a planet’s energy budget, you can disregard conduction and convection and focus on radiaton.
When you have two bodies, the hotter one is radiating more packets of photons at its surface (in all directions) If they’re near each other, the colder one is sending out less heat and therefore, on average, more radiant heat from the other body is striking it than radiant heat from it is striking the other one. And that’s it.
It’s related to the 2nd law because one way of expressing the 2nd law of thermodynamics is that statistically you don’t get net heating of a hotter body from a colder one.
But their thermodynamic argument, such as it is, and it’s been sanctified by real scientists who know better but have no scruples, such as Gerlich and Tscheuschner, is this:
First, you rephrase it to make it incorrect:
There can be no transfer of heat between a colder and a warmer body. So thinking of those photon packets as little arrows of heat radiating away from the black bodies, the colder one is not getting its net heating from statistical results of random absorption – no, what’s happening is that up to the moment of equilibrium, a Maxwell’s Demon of some sort prevents any radiation in the direction of the hotter body. Another Demon on the hotter body gradually turns off a tap on that body, so the radiation in the direction of the cooler body tapers off. At equilibrium, the pattern of radiant heat is normal in the hemisphere (assuming they’re spheres) away from each body, and zero at the equator and everywhere on the side turned to the other body.
Okay, with this unicorn husbandry manual as our physics guide, we turn to the so-called greenhouse effect. The sun’s rays come down and strike the earth and then are re-radiated as longer wavelength radiation. These in turn are absorbed by CO2 and water molecules, among others. This is all acknowledged by all parties, along with the fact that while clouds do a reasonable job reflecting incoming radiation, CO2 and water vapor don’t, whereas they do absorb longer-wavelength re-emitted radiant energy. Some of the skeptics even acknowledge limitations on the saturation argument for CO2, which IMO was at least a sane argument that took research to correct.
But where they part company with the consensus is when they say either the CO2 molecules are hotter or the Earth’s surface is hotter. By the 2nd Law of Thermodynamic Alchemy, if the CO2 is hotter, the Earth won’t radiate towards it. If the Earth is hotter, then there won’t be any radiation back (by the so-called Greenhouse Effect, which can’t exist). Only if you postulate that the CO2 molecules start out colder, are warmed by the Earth, reach equilibrium, then an X factor warms them more than the Earth, could they exhibit the Greenhouse Effect.
I think it’s probably really, really hard to believe, after all these years, and all the debunking of so much better arguments, and in a climate where most of the denialists have switched to delaying tactics like “wait and geoengineer,” that this could POSSIBLY be the argument, but, in fact, it really is.
BTW for purposes of analyzing radiation, it’s not a problem that the Earth is a sphere and the atmosphere is a shell around it, because you’re just adjusting to a specific point or region’s energy balance.
What’s at fault here is simply the alleged thermodynamic law, and the postulated model. In fact, no law says it’s entirely impossible for an ice cube to heat up a cup of coffee, it’s just vanishingly unlikely. And that’s consistent with all thermal and statistical physics situations. the other thing they do is play with the definition of heat, and say there’s no transfer of heat from A to B if B does not get hotter. The best way to deal with that is to say that energy is transferred both ways, and the net result is more heat in the colder body. There’s no reason to fixate on the term heat at all.
BTW if that’s a psychologically unsatisfying explanation, picture this:
You have a stove. It goes out, but is still warm.
In one situation, you put it in deep space and the temperature around it is as close to absolute zero as possible.
In another situation, you put it in the same place, but this time you put another stove, smaller, a little cooler, but still warm.
In which situation will the stove cool faster, or are they, as the skeptical thermodynamics has it, equal?
And if you think the stove will cool faster without another cooler stove near it, and you accept (by the 1st law, by the way) that energy is additive since matter/energy is neither created nor destroyed, then all you have to do is postulate you’re firing up the stove again, and decide in which conditions it will heat up faster – out in deep space with nothing around it and no heat sources, or with a cooler, but radiating heat source near it, and one which, furthermore, is being heated by it.
I need to share with you a comment that one of my friends on facebook made about this …
Jenny – ” “We should create a competitive climate for investment and for renewables and alternatives that are economical and doable and none of this snake oil science stuff that is based on this global warming, Gore-gate stuff that came down where there was revelation that the scientists, some of these scientists were playing political games.”
So she believes that yes, we need to look into alternative energy sources. She also thinks it’s important to make these changes afordable to our country. She is also pointing out that the science community is just as political as congress (I think she understates on how political and agenda driven the science community is) and that the liberal media has added “shock” factor to their reports on global warming science to get support from people for political reasons.
Way to go Sarah! You have the liberal media having to taking your words out of context to find anything wrong with them.”
Would you like to help me tell her where to stick it? 🙂
wow