A Republican, Scott Wagner. Running for governor of Pennsylvania. Has some novel explanations for climate change.
I haven’t been in a science class in a long time, but the earth moves closer to the sun every year–you know the rotation of the earth,Wagner said.We’re moving closer to the sun.
But…but…but the Earth is moving around the sun in an elliptical orbit — its distance from the sun varies over the course of a year (and seasons are a product not of that, but of the axial tilt). What does the rotation of the earth have to do with its orbit around the sun?
He hasn’t been in science class in a long time, and I suspect he didn’t understand it even when he was taking classes.
We have more people,he said.You know, humans have warm bodies. So is heat coming off? Things are changing, but I think we are, as a society, doing the best we can.
Yes, heat is coming off, but it’s not enough to affect global temperature.
If he really believes that, is he one of those rare conservative Republicans who is going to endorse birth control and family planning to prevent climate change? That would be nice, but for some reason I’d rather this klutzamaboob did not get elected.
Sometimes, people who want to downplay global warning come with pseudoexplanations that are so much worse than the real deal.
& warning = warming. Phone = bad.
Yes, and it’s closer to the Sun in the *winter*. In the northern hemisphere, that is. Which should set off all kinds of alarms in people with a functioning brain: how could seasons be opposite in the 2 hemispheres if it was Earth’s distance from the Sun that mattered?
No, silly, we just have to shoot more people. Duh!
I’m always astonished when some public figure seems to assume that the standards expected for discussing science in public are somewhere down at the level of responsibility held for teenagers hanging around in the basement rec room talking crap off the top of their heads while sipping booze stolen from their parents’ refrigerators. I know I shouldn’t be surprised, but still.
Well, you shouldn’t be even remotely surprised that the orbit is decaying very slowly…. What you should be saying here is that true facts like that are not false but irrelevant, since that cannot explain the observed changes in the climate over the time periods we’re talking about. Even if you feel the need to include it as a very minor factor in your calculations of what all sorts of different contributions are doing to the climate, it makes no sense whatsoever to bring it up in this way, because climate change would still be a real problem for us that we would need to address somehow. If monkeys flying out of my ass were a cause of climate change, then that changes nothing about whether or not climate change is a problem that we need to address.
If our orbit were literally an ellipse, as in the purely spatial mathematical object which you won’t find anywhere in real physical space, then presumably a thing like that would not change over time if you ever did find any such thing (but again, you won’t). It’s at least true enough that ellipses don’t need to be in a space that has a time coordinate. Representing it that way is a convenient and excellent approximation for nearly every practical application that you can think of, since as a matter of fact, we found out a long time ago that our orbit happens to be very stable…. So when you put it in those terms, you obviously can’t draw all of the same conclusions from it about how the world actually works. It’s a model that simplifies things a hell of lot more than they ever really are, so you can try to understand things a little better than you did and perhaps do something interesting or worthwhile with that knowledge, but at the same time you shouldn’t be taking it that seriously.
Uh‽ Did he just imply that human beings are perpetual motion machines?
Maybe when the heat is converted to work, he just forgot to mention that some of it ends up as useless Republicans?
The earth is actually moving away from the sun. Link.
The way things are going right now, I’m starting to think it wouldn’t be so bad if we just spiraled all the way in . . .
.
Just another version of . It boggles my mind that so many ignoramuses think we should pay attention to whatever comes after the .
Walker impresses me with his speculation. Most Rethugs would just say “goddiddit”.
As Rob noted above, the Earth is moving (very slowly) away from the Sun on average. However, the Sun is also getting (very slowly) brighter, and that effect dominates. So in about a billion years or so, the Earth’s oceans will boil due to the increased temperature.
That has absolutely nothing to do with our current situation, though.
There are more people, and so when the Earth rotates the increased weight sort of swings the whole planet around closer to the sun. Hey, it’s physics.
I’ve never taken a physics class, but…
Rob Grigjanis, #8:
Interesting stuff. It’s worth noting that the authors themselves express a healthy amount of skepticism about it toward the end of that section. Anyway, I certainly took it for granted that we’re going the other way, but I figured that we haven’t been doing careful observations long enough for it to be noticeably different from stationary.
consciousness razor #7:
Could be a clue to the nature of dark energy? Lots of little Republicans (Republicons?), packed into tiny little extra-dimensional thought-bubbles.
“Republicans (Republicons?), packed into tiny little extra-dimensional thought-bubbles.”
WHAT kind of bubbles? Those do not exist for those people. I will also have to express amazement that the more people excuse did not include that making the Earth heavier causing it to sink towards the sun.
cr @14: Looking into it a bit more, I’m not so sure we can say it’s either increasing or decreasing. This paper casts doubt on the 2004 determination of 15 cm/year increase. Let the astronomers sort it out.
In his defense, the Sun is getting brighter every year. It’s about 30% brighter now than it was when life first appeared (link).
As a matter of fact, if I take that 30% and assume that the Earth is 6,000 years old, I get an increase of about 0.5% in Solar intensity per century, or about 7W/m^2/century, equivalent to a radiative forcing change of a little more than 1 W/m^2/century. This is, in fact, very close to the claimed anthropogenic forcing from greenhouse gas emissions. See? Creationism explains climate change!
Then you should probably leave it at that and not say another word. Unless your goal is to come across as a blithering, lying moron who’s just pulling out shit directly from their ass, that is.