ClimateBook

Why does the WaPo insist on calling these "drug boats"? There is no proof whatsoever that they were involved in drug running, and certainly nothing that would pass judicial muster. They are just "boats," which Trump decided to blow up.

"straightforward"? I dunno, but I'll try out the argument next time I'm sitting next to a stranger on a transatlantic flight, leading with "Did you know that Scientific American says nobody knows why this plane stays in the air?"

But your statement at the top of the post is interesting: What is "straightforward?" Fluid dynamicists would consider the circulation and shed vorticity argument "straightforward" and have done for the better part of a century. But can anything that involves "vorticity" be considered

of airfoils, aided by a bit of cutting-and-trying in wind tunnels. But nothing in 3D turbulent fluid dynamics is ever really "straightforward," and there is always some new angle to explore. That absolutely does not me that "nobody understands why planes stay in the air."

we know where lift comes from and have for nearly a century. To reiterate:(1) Lift requires circulation around an airfoil. (2) That circulation is generated by shedding vorticity into the wake, (3) For decades, the Kutta condition gave a good enough prediction of circulation to allow design

The "stupid" referred to the article, and specifically the headline, not the post itself. Far be it from me to criticize someone just for flagging an article they found interesting. The headline on the article is just clickbait, toying with the meaning of "explain." The plain fact is that

And we are so happy to have Breakthrough Listen based at Oxford now, so we can be part of that excitement!

"The reason that I say [Big Car is] an existential threat, and it still is, is that cars kill an exorbitant number of people. There's no other industry in the world that kills the number of people that cars do that are allowed to call it an 'accident.'" —David Obst

my thesis advisor Sheila Widnall eventually became secretary of the air force.

and by Kelvin's Circulation theorem the vortex tube that generates lift can't just terminate -- it has to go somewhere, and where it goes is into the wake.

Though I've worked on Earth and planetary sciences for almost all of my career, my PhD is actually from MIT Aero/Astro, and

predictable amount of circulation was to use the Kutta condition for non-singularity at a sharp trailing edge. Now, with numerical methods, more general wing shapes can be treated, and also 3D effects. Those contrails you see are wingtip vortices shed because the wings are of finite length

Oh boy this is really stupid. It's been known since the early 20th century that lift is generated when there is circulation around a wing. Circulation is generated by shedding opposite-signed vorticity into the wake by boundary layer detachment. In the old days, the only way to design a wing with a

Without restrictions on CO2 emissions. increasing parts of the globe will cross that threshold, and heat deaths will soar. Even short of the threshold, morbidity -- lethargy, reduced performance, kidney failure -- sets in. Plus, this affects livestock as well. Will we have to air condition cows?

This is a good article. But note that regardless of the present balance of deaths from cold vs. heat, irrefutable thermodynamics says that when wet bulb temperature exceeds about 40C, mammals die outdoors within hours, because they can't lose heat.

McCarthyism ended with the accusation "Sir, have you no shame?" Sadly, nobody has the courage to speak those words to power anymore.

petrostate countries suffer killer heat waves if they are too stupid to help the essential project of decarbonization.

I think it's time to abandon the idea that all countries should be part of COP. History shows that the petrostates contribute nothing but obstruction. They aren't going to do anything to decarbonize, so let's just kick them out and get on with the work of the willing countries. Let the hot

"Splitternya" what a wonderful word. I don't think English has a word for a shiny brand new think that is nearly so evocative.

British slang likes to truncate, but have an "s" at the end. For example, obviously becomes "obvs," not that I'd say that myself.

gases disappears in a matter of decades, except N2O which takes maybe a century or two. CO2 will persist in quantities that will keep the climate hot for thousands of years.

See that big light-blue wodge? That's CO2. This graph makes it clear that CO2 is everything, and the rest of the gases are just a sideshow. What the graph doesn't tell you is that CO2 is even more important than the graph indicates, since the radiative forcing from the rest of the significant

... use of fossile fuels would be a .. well... COP out.

This is the correct action. The time for compromise is over. Compromise with the petrostates has just resulted in continued inaction in the past. A COP resolution without a commitment to phase out fossil fuels is not worth anything, and relying on "negative emissions" to allow continued...

reflecting aerosols, making policy implications of BC control ambiguous. But there's really no need to invoke climate as a reason for reducing BC emissions. Health effects alone justify abatement. There may be climate co-benefits, or maybe not. Regardless, so far as climate goes, it's CO2 first.

But black carbon is still a very short lived pollution. It will go away almost instantly when we stop burning fossil fuels (apart from the BC caused by wildfires). It does not accumulate in the atmosphere like CO2 does. Further, most industrial BC sources are accompanied by sources of

First time I've met somebody with the surname "Kankaanpää." I've actually got friends from there, or more precisely Niinisalo.

I do eat bugs sometimes, but so far my main encounter has been cricket tacos, done especially well at a taqueria in Brooklyn.

Nobody is telling you how to eat. The issue is whether plant-based foods like "Beyond Burgers" can use linguistically accurate terms to tell people what they can do with their product -- i.e. fry it up and put it in a bun, drown it in ketchup, etc. A sausage is a sausage, regardless of insides.

Or how about truth in advertising, e.g. " Cow corpse burgers," or "Chicken corpse burgers"?

This feed is a great example of why Bluesky is the "Cool Kids" table.

If you are still teaching at Harvard, you haven't "stepped away from public life."

RESIGN RESIGN RESIGN. --T.S. Eliot