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Author Archives: gymnosperm
A Brief History of Muddled Thinking about the Greenhouse Effect
We humans kick up a lot of dust and burn a lot of stuff. A concept developed in the 1970’s was the “human volcano”. There is a lot of truth in this analogy. Back then, despite dead wrong rants, the … Continue reading
Posted in Climate, Greenhouse Effect, Greenhouse Spectra, MODTRAN
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Berkeley Earth Absolute Temperature and the Remarkable Closeness of TMAX Lows and TMIN Highs
Bob Tisdale recently did a series of posts exploring the differences between using absolute temperature and temperature anomaly to understand the recent temperature evolution of our planet. Bob was interested in the extracted TMAX highs and TMIN lows, and showed … Continue reading
Posted in Climate
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Aerobic and Anaerobic Metabolism: A Symmetry
The symmetry between aerobic carbohydrate respiration and photosynthesis is widely appreciated. In the presence of Oxygen, many living things (including photosynthesizers) burn carbohydrates, producing useful energy and CO2. Photosynthesizing creatures, using the energy of sunlight, manufacture carbohydrates from CO2 for … Continue reading
Posted in Microbial Dark Matter
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Cold Smoke
Santa Rosa is comfortably away from the fires this year. Last year’s baptism cleaned out the tinder around here. Yet the Camp Fire has given us the peculiar combination of dense smoke and hard frost. A lot of the particles … Continue reading
Posted in Climate
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The Flat Universe Society
While it is clear that the earth is sort of round, rather like a baseball that has absorbed too many home runs, to the best of our understanding, the universe is flat. By flat, we do not mean that you … Continue reading
Posted in Climate
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Energy and Matter
An interesting upshot of Mr. Einstein’s famous equation is that in units of the speed of light, energy and mass are equal. Mr. Poincare once observed that mathematics is the exercise of making different things the same (equal), and sophistry … Continue reading
Posted in Climate
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Entropy and Watermelons
What is the entropy of a watermelon? This question is not entirely fair, because living things are singularities swimming upstream against the tide of entropy. We can’t merely count the ways the invisible molecules in a watermelon can be rearranged … Continue reading
Posted in God and Dice
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God and Dice
We don’t spend much time thinking about what God does for recreation these days, but the great scientists from Newton to Einstein who have framed our Western cosmology were often deeply religious men. It is understandable that when they found … Continue reading
Posted in God and Dice
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Entropy and the Grand Canyon II
We left off in the last post having boated 78 miles, about five days on a typical trip, and having encountered the last of the suite of three books that comprise the geological story revealed in the Grand Canyon. We … Continue reading
Entropy and the Grand Canyon
It has been our good fortune to row 280 miles of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon twice in the last seven months. This is rare for private boaters limited to one trip per calendar year and subject to … Continue reading
Posted in Geology, Grand Canyon, Paleoclimate, Paleogeography
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