12 October 2008

Question Place 3

Have questions about science, especially if some relating to oceanography, meteorology, glaciology, climate? Here's a place to put them. For that matter, about running as well. Maybe I'll answer them here, and maybe (as happened back when with Dave's note back in May, or Bart's in September) they'll prompt a post or three in their own right.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm curious to know your views on this new paper.

Robert Grumbine said...

It'll take a bit of time to make a good reading of it. The abstract invites certain spinners to have a field day. The content looks different. I'll invite folks to look it up, Steve's 'here' is a valid link, but more clearly:
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/41/15815.abstract?etoc.

You read it yourselves while I do my reading, and I'll post in the next few days and you can add your thoughts.

Anonymous said...

I have a fundamental question on units.

In many papers on feedback, see figure 1 in this one for instance
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/reference/bibliography/2006/bjs0601.pdf

Units are expressed in W/m^2/K. Shouldn't it be K/W/m^2? If it's the first one, wouldn't a lower number mean a bigger effect?

Anonymous said...

Bob, further to my email, can you correct my poor understanding here, please?
http://fergusbrown.wordpress.com/

Robert Grumbine said...

Folks, I shared a few thoughts on Fergus' blog. If you take a look there, you'll see some things that I'll be taking up at more length here in a bit.

Steve: The post is up now. Interesting paper.

Bart: Units are a good thing to look at and make sure you understand where they came from. In your science and engineering classes, they're an excellent tool for deciding whether you divided instead of multiplies, or whether it's even possible to add the numbers. I'll give you an answer on the question in a bit, when I've figured out how to make it intuitively clear to someone else. It's intuitive to me, but that's after ... a while ... working in the area.