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The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

climate.gov

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Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#271

Post by oriolid »

bee_rider wrote: post #167
djtango wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up during the F to C transition in the UK and F is not intuitive. 0 = ice 100 = steam That is pretty intuitive if you ask me. And for gravy comfortable room temp is about 25

Fahrenheit is sort of intuitive if you think of it as somehow, impossibly, a percentage scale. 0C/32F is still decently comfortable anyway. 0F is, like, not at all comfortable. 100C is dead. 100F is the most unbearably hot temperature that isn’t immediately deadly.

It's missing one important distinction: Below 0C: Freezing, probably slippery, not raining water. Above 0C: not freezing, probably not slippery, rain comes as water. They are as uncomfortable as you make them.

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#272

Post by arunabha »

transcriptase wrote: post #161
ketzo wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were a bunch of headlines last week about DOGE firing half of NOAA then rehiring them. I don’t think you should consider anywhere sacrosanct.

To be fair there have been a bunch of headlines about a great many things, like office closures without mentioning the minor detail that the offices haven’t been used in years, the workforce is remote, and there is no impact on service delivery or staffing. Doesn’t stop journalists from dancing around the implication if it makes the orange man and mars man look bad though.

I think you're trying to impart a political motive where it can be argued that none existed. I understand that your mind is made up, however consider that the whole initial effort by DOGE was clearly poorly planned and resulted in a lot of chaos.

For a journalistic perspective, when events are moving fast, you report what is known at a given time.

Hindsight is always 20/20 and no doubt there are some cases like you point out. However, are you sure that those are the only cases? The fact that the govt is scrambling to hire back fired people would suggest otherwise.

The desire to impute political bias to everything is not a useful way of viewing the world.

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#273

Post by AnthonyMouse »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #159
defrost wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fissile waste has been a health problem even before first mining uranium in the DRC well before WWII. Hanford has a standing legacy problem of fissile waste from both weapons and energy work. * https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c... * https://www.icanw.org/hanford_s_dirty_secret_and_it_s_not_56... Human activity aside, every valley with a substantial amount of granite rock about the planet po…

I read this as just an attempt to rationalize fissile waste issues as "more of the same". Maybe you truly feel comfortable doing that, maybe you see it as something else. I, in contrast, view the development of fission-based nuclear mechanisms (whether for explosives or for power generation) as a distinct break with the past, and a point in human history where an entirely new problem was brought into being. And not j…

> I, in contrast, view the development of fission-based nuclear mechanisms (whether for explosives or for power generation) as a distinct break with the past, and a point in human history where an entirely new problem was brought into being.

Radiological material that decays after tens of thousands of years is not a unique new problem, for three reasons.

First, half life is inverse to radioactivity. The longer the half life, the less radioactive it is. There are isotopes with a half life of a billion years. Human biology requires potassium and natural potassium is radioactive, but it doesn't kill you because the half life is so long.

Second, the material with ten thousand year half lives doesn't actually have to be stored for ten thousand years. Nuclear reactors convert elements into other elements. You put it back into a reactor and it turns it into something with a shorter half life. Meanwhile that process produces energy with which to generate electricity. It's absurd that we're not already doing this.

And third, the half life is a red herring. Traditional long-standing toxic waste from industrial processes doesn't have a half life because it persists forever. Plutonium is toxic for thousands of years; heavy metals are toxic until the sun burns out. The fact that it eventually decays is an advantage that propaganda has turned into a problem.

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#274

Post by JSteph22 »

weakfish wrote: post #154
zdragnar wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, there's only one meeting room at the Pentagon.

Should he be in _any_ pentagon meetings? I mean, the admin is trying to deny he has any official role beyond advisor, and he’s not US born.

Given how game changing Starlink has proven to be for military operations, he probably should.

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#276

Post by Gerardo1 »

chneu wrote: post #232
ketzo wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were a bunch of headlines last week about DOGE firing half of NOAA then rehiring them. I don’t think you should consider anywhere sacrosanct.

Most of those people are silent quitting or refusing to go back to work. This applies across the board to these firings/rehirings. Why would anyone go back to work for real when you know you're just gonna be fired again?

> Most of those people are silent quitting or refusing to go back to work.

Come on, you know you can't just throw that out. Support your claim.

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#277

Post by timeon »

timschmidt wrote: post #59
NortySpock wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 is hot. 20 is nice. 10 is cold. 0 is ice. Not hard to remember for converting Celsius to how humans typically perceive temperature.

My problem isn't remembering the scale, it's that Fahrenheit offers me double the effective resolution and descriptive accuracy without awkward decimal points in the numbers used. I like my room at 73F, not 72F or 74F, and I can feel the difference. That's 22.77C. :-/

I like my room exactly at 21C. Any F number is Greek to me.

Remembering is more about what you are used to here.

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#278

Post by jMyles »

mistrial9 wrote: post #254
idiotsecant wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The food pyramid is notable because it was so wrong for so long, which is very unusual. Most gov agency science is actually quite good .

sorry - the US Federal Forest Science has been a dumpster fire in the Sierra and other areas.. arrogant, wealthy, immovable and it turns out, dangerously misguided plus very willing to enforce their worldview. In another comment there are bitter words about the nature of Monarchy, but it appears that it does not require a Monarchy to get things badly, seriously wrong.

Indeed.

In case you've not read it, I suggest this brilliant compilation of interviews about fire management practices of indigenous nations in California; the degree of documented anthrogensis is much higher than I imagined prior to reading.

https://tendingthewild.com/tending-the-wild/

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#279

Post by anthk »

AngryData wrote: post #125
Supersaiyan_IV wrote: post #37

Doing climate research in Fahrenheit in 2025 gives me second hand embarrassment.

Why? Celsius is just as arbitrary a choice as Fahrenheit. It brings nothing extra to the table. You might as well complain that tapered pipe threads are in US inches or that astronomers use AUs and light seconds rather than meters.

In Science, global standards matter. Such as Metric and Celsius.
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