IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

Ban of drop side cribs - John Dunn Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

In today's Newsday, we read "Nassau lawmakers vote to ban drop side cribs", December 21, 2009 by Celeste Hadrick. This article describes a terrible example of government by hysteria.

 

The URL for this article is:

 

http://www.newsday.com/long-island/nassau/nassau-lawmakers-vote-to-ban-drop-side-cribs-1.1665846

 

We have the horror of eleven babies who died in drop side crib accidents arising from breakage of life-critical parts that were made of plastic. Such parts should have been made of nothing less sturdy than galvanized steel, but because of "value engineering" decisions, those parts were inadquate to their purposes and babies died.

 

That need NOT have happened.

ICE-AGE Re-Visited--Carl Schwab

In the 1970s and '80s the scientific community had a lot of interest in understanding the Ice-Ages and what caused them. As opposed to worrying about Global Warming the larger concern was how to prevent the next Ice-Age. At the time ice core sampling was understood (although technique needed refinement) and plans made to take core samples in Antarctica because core samples from Greenland barely covered the 125,000-year period of the last Ice-Age.

Included in this blog are two sets of curves that show graphically temperature, carbon dioxide, dust and ice volume estimates as measured in Antarctica. From inspection these curves cover 4 complete Ice-Age cycles. We are near the end of a warm period. The temperature scale is at the Antarctica sites but the range of about 11 C is important because it covers the depth of an Ice-Age to the peak of a warm period. Only 11C!! The warm periods are about 10,000 years while the cold period is about 100,000 years. During these cold periods the landmasses away from the Polar Regions will be covered by snow/ice fashion in what I call the "window shade" effect.

The Missing Piece - Jerry Brown

I watched the Julia Slingo videos. I sure prefer her presentations to Al Gore's. She's clearly a competent scientist and I don't doubt what she says.

It wasn't my intention to blame the current temperature rise on the Milankovitch cycles. As she says, they're too slow to explain the current temperature changes. But, they play an essential part in the thermal equilibrium of the planet. So, I think it's important to understand their role. After all, assuming that we manage to get past the CO2 crisis, some future scientists are going to have to figure out how to keep them from causing another ice age.

One of the features of the diagram that really surprised me was the magnitude of the greenhouse effect. It dominates the equilibrium process. That's where the largest heat flows are and that, in turn, explains why all the numerous and subtle feedback mechanisms are so powerful. It took a bit of study before I appreciated that fact (I tried to make it easier for others by adding annotations to the Wikipedia diagram to show how it all balances out). The climatologists, including Slingo, don't explain this. Maybe they think it's too technical for their audiences. But, for me, it was a critical missing piece.

Math - John Dunn - President, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Please take a look at these two URLs regarding math. One is comedic from Ma & Pa Kettle, but the other one is, I think, absolutely horrifyhng.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfq5kju627c&feature=related 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr1qee-bTZI&feature=related    

Met Office - Dick LaRosa

Immediately after I read Jerry's mention of Milankovitch cycles, I came across an email notification about a You Tube question-and-answer session. The UK Met Office Chief Scientist, Prof. Julia Slingo, answers some questions about Climate Change. She explained that axis tilts, precessions, etc. did have a profound effect on the Earth temperature, but that was very slow and long ago. Milankovitch, etc. cannot account for the present rapid changes.

She also explained that, long ago, Earth temperature affected the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, but these were very slow changes. The present rapid changes are different and require a different explanation. The URL is

www.metoffice.gov.uk

Global Warming for Engineers - by Jerry Brown

Most of the media presentations on global warming begin with images of icebergs calving off glaciers and Kenyans hoeing drought plagued corn fields. Then there will be a discussion of how greenhouse gases trap heat and raise the planet’s temperature, followed by quotations from scientific reports, proving that human activity is increasing the levels of these gases which will in turn lead to a catastrophic increase in temperature. They also talk about the carbon cycle, its sources and sinks. But, there is never any discussion of the most fundamental physics of this problem – heat flow.

As I watched a recent docudrama on this subject it occurred to me that it should be possible make a fairly simple schematic that captured the essentials of the heat flow. On average, what comes in from the sun must be balanced by what goes back out into space. So, I looked around a bit on the Internet and sure enough, Wikipedia had a neat little diagram, tucked away in a corner of their entry on global warming. I used the information from it to make the one which you see will see below.  It simplifies a few details. But, it’s essentially the physics 101 version of the story.

The Politicization of Climate Science - by Jerry Brown

In my opinion, the global warming issue has become so politicized that it is almost impossible for laymen to sort fact from fiction. For many, it has become a political litmus test that has nothing to do with science - liberals must profess the faith, conservatives must abjure it. Even among scientists where reason ought to prevail, many of them have developed a "save the world" syndrome that is leading them astray. Global warming is only one of many serious problems we are facing. Overreacting to it could literally starve many of the world's poorest people. Under reacting has consequences that have been amply dramatized in the media. So, objectivity in the science is vital.

The recent email scandal is a good illustration of the effect of politicization. The worst thing about it is that it is putting a cloud over all the data on global warming, including much that is probably sound. The scientists who allowed this to happen (the political shading of data, not the hacking of the emails) should get taken down several notches by their peers.

Climate Change - Dick LaRosa

I read the 12/9 post by Carl on our blog and then I found an email notification of a RealClimate.org post that reproduces an editorial appearing in 56 newspapers in 45 countries using 20 languages. Most of the newspapers put it on their front page. RealClimate.org refers to it as The Guardian's Editorial. It is somewhat of an answer to Carl's post. Here is the URL:

www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/the-guardians-editorial/

What's The World Made Of?--Carl Schwab

The point of this note is to raise the view that man's effect on the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere should be questioned and not just accepted because a politician says so.

According to the chemistry references the number of elements are 96 well defined another 20 possible. When you look at an "Abundance of Elements" chart the abundance, measured in mass, is inversely related to the atomic number of the element.

This is true to such a degree that the four simplest atomic structures make up 99.5% of the earths mass with the remaining near 100 making up less than 0.5%!!! It is the 4 simplest elements I want to comment about. These 4 elements are hydrogen, helium, oxygen and carbon.

That's it—these 4 elements comprise 99.5% of our world mass. BTW the one that causes a double-take is helium; it is true but not part of our discussion.

Hydrogen and oxygen are easy because that is H2O, water and hydrogen is all around since it combines easily with carbon and many other elements. Carbon and oxygen combine easily to form CO2 which is stable and is the result of combustion at high temperatures. But also carbon and oxygen can combine at much lower temperature. Considering the fact that carbon and oxygen comprise about 1.5% of the earths mass then throughout the world long history as the earths temperature varied there had to be a
mechanism to maintain a balance between the two.

Now here I am talking time periods measured in thousands, millions and billions of years.

There is a major group of scientists that believe the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is very much related to the earths temperature i.e. if the temperature rises the amount of CO2 will increase and conversely if the temperature decreases the amount of CO2 will decrease. But throughout the earths history the amount of CO2 has lagged the earth temperature.

The earth temperature is pretty stable but it has varied several degrees decade to decade and studies of ice cores, etc show this correlation. Just now for political reasons a group want to claim that the CO2 can cause the earth temperature to rise and claiming "Doomsday" unless we stop using oxidation of carbon as an energy source. If you think about this a bit this would require a "runaway" condition and if true would have happened 100s if not 1000s of years ago.

An aside: Most living organisms are based upon carbon and at death the decomposition produces mostly CH4 and CO2. While CO2 is blamed for the greenhouse effect, in fact CH4 and H2O vapor can be worse offenders.

The recent flurry of concern about the validity of the temperature data is understandable because the cause/effect of CO2 is so slight that you need timelines based on centuries or more. Shorter timelines are at best speculations and NOT hard science."Cap and Trade" is at best a political ruse—at worst it really hurts the economy.

Legacy Software, 32-Bits vs 64-Bits by John Dunn

I got a little surprise the other day, not one to my liking at all.

 

As some of you know, I still like to use GWBASIC from DOS 3.3 and Paintbrush from Windows 3.1 for all kinds of reasons that have arched some number of eyebrows. An older PC purchased late last year uses "Windows Vista Home Premium Edition" and although the GWBASIC wouldn't work on it, at least the Paintbrush program worked.

 

Later, I tried to load Paintbrush onto a newer machine, also with "Windows Vista Home Premium Edition" and there, to my dismay, it did NOT work. I found out why.

 

The first machine had a 32-bit version of the operating system, but the second machine has a 64-bit version. That means that at least some old software which works fine on the one, may NOT work on the other. I don't know if Paintbrush is the only old program to exhibit this behavior, but there is a cautionary tale here if you are trying to bring older programs to later machines.

 

Also, I understand that the new Windows 7 uses 64-bits.

 

John Dunn  -  Ambertec, P.E, P.C.