“Why Scientists Disagree about Global Warming”

Scientist Asking Feds Prosecute Skeptics Bilked Taxpayers | The Daily Caller

 

I was interested if there were anything notable on the putative bad guy's website

http://www.iges.org/

But it would not open for me. Somebody might take a look.

Anyway, skeptics are on the straight and narrow because someone who vocally opposes them is not. Does that summarize the situation?

Back to the matter at hand, the disagreement I see among scientists (or better, as evidence can be read) is

a. Short-term risk from CO2 is so large that it needs to be strongly and quickly curtailed.
b. That short-term risk is minor, but there are many other sensible reasons to reduce fossil C burning in ways consistent with other goals.

Perhaps I over simplify. I certainly exclude positions outside scientific evidence, imminent global cooling, overwhelmingly positive benefits of higher CO2. Maybe others as well. But others here dedicate themselves thereto. Saves me some time...

 

Doesn't work for me either.

 

The Second Law of Thermodynamics CANNOT be opposed at a global (universal) scale. But it always is, by biologicals, at smaller scales. Biology (most useless abstraction) harvests external energy to temporarily reduce local disorder. do not know why, It is just something that popped up on this watery planet. Would be a vast presumption that it popped up nowhere else.

Yet here we are, as we are, Even if we cannot fathom 'why', there is 'is'. I can't see a path other than trying to advance the human enterprise. Maybe somebody else later will see things more clearly. How to to that exactly is what all the fuss is about.

 

We went pretty deep here, pretty fast. Take Earth as an example of biologically infested planet. Imagine a twin planet on which life never happened (this must be at least possible). Which one has higher entropy? How to measure it?

I know the answer we are 'supposed to' get, but likewise we are not supposed to reason rearwards from a presumed answer. So, I am not sure how to proceed. One interesting thought is how super-telescopes might detect 'lively' exoplanets. Atmospheric spectra showing O2 and maybe some other things. Which spectrum (dead or alive) contains more information? (negative entropy).

It is all the rage now that humans carry zillions of non-human cells around. This has been old news for many other critters for a long time. Difference is that our biology scopes have recently gotten a lot better. Life's complexity just might be beyond description.

 

I hope no-one is suggesting that biology violates the Second Law, even on a small scale.

That energy flow through the living item must be included in any thermodynamic calculations. If a free body diagram boundary is drawn around it, the life inside does not continue its organizing and living and reproducing if no energy (food input, heat and waste disposal output) flows across the FBD boundary.

 

While we are on (about) the same page here, I hope to coax fuzzy1 to say even more.

In a local sense any biological entity will reduce entropy and 'throw away' heat. I only ask to consider planetary scales. How might thermodynamics go differently on 'live' and 'dead' planets, and is there any chance to detect that over vast distances?

 

Wind breaks all wood at 42 meters per second. So I have read in a Physics journal. 42 popped up but just as a 'units thing'.

Wrong that we are nowhere past superstitions. We are far enough beyond to begin to see how far 'beyond' stretches.

 

We must be careful about mere local entropy reductions. Various non-biological processes do this too. We find examples from geological and meteorological processes, driven by various natural heat engines.

The comments I see are focused on spectroscopic observations, looking for chemical 'biomarkers' in exoplanet atmospheres. The catalog of known exoplanets is expanding very rapidly. The coming generation of larger optics, both in space and on the ground, should allow much more detailed observations. But agreeing how to distinguish biological markers from the other chemical signatures is probably still unsettled, and is certainly far beyond me.

As for non-spectroscopic approaches to find remote non-technically-advanced biology, I haven't yet put any real thought or reading into it.

 

There are two big problems with this. The first problem is the obvious one of detecting life base entirely upon earth chemistry. The subtile problem is detecting life with an alternative chemistry. There is a very strong push to explain all readings as some sort of physical process instead of life process. Read about the positive results of the first Viking landers and how NASA explained those as unusual chemical processes. NASA was probably right (the jury is not entirely settled on Mars being without life since inception however), but expect the "criteria" for life detection to change as soon as the criteria is met.