WC is not a climatologist. You already knew that. But WC has read pretty widely in anthropogenic climate change. And it seems pretty clear that humankind is making tropical cyclones – hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons – worse, in at least four different ways. More Heat for a Heat Engine. Cyclones are heat engines. The mechanism…
Famously, some 97-98% of peer-reviewed climate science papers confirm the existence and impacts of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). In at least three separate studies that arrive at that number. One of those studies involved review of almost 12,000 papers. By any measure, the overwhelming consensus among scientists is that the planet is warming dramatically and…
WC bets you didn’t know that the federal government not only has the power to create hurricanes and control their intensity, but can also aim the hurricanes at places they want to punish. At least that’s the claim of conspiracy site State of the Nation.1 WC has subscribed to the Sagan Standard since Carl Sagan…
As WC mentioned a while ago, he chased the solar eclipse. And caught it! Now it’s not as if WC was the only one to take photos. Or write about it afterwards. The internet is saturated with photos and prose, ranging from pretty good to pretty dreadful, extolling the 2017 North American Eclipse. The best…
Despite hurtful criticism of WC’s attempts to explain quarks, and Randall Munroe’s brilliant upstaging of those lame efforts, WC returns to the subatomic bestiary, with news about neutrinos. Neutrinos occupy the third row of the table of fermions. Because they are electrically neutral – by definition having no electric charge – there are only three…
Back in the early Pleistocene, when WC was just a pup, stuff was made of protons, neutrons and electrons, collectively atoms. It didn’t get any smaller than that. Along came Murray Gell-Mann and his crowd of physicists, who developed the Standard Model of physics, creating a whole new bestiary of subatomic particles. There’s dozens of…
The Western Snake River Plain is a desert now. Sagebrush, bitterbrush and rabbitbrush growing on layers of ash and loess, which in turn lie on thousands of feet of basalt, congealed lava. It’s a desert, and a few minutes there in the summer will remove any doubts you might have that it is a desert.…
