Greg Gutfeld is the guy on Fox’s The Five who supposed to provide jokes that are intentionally funny. More often I find him humorous when he’s not trying to be funny.
CREDIT: Fox News
Last week during a discussion on climate change on The Five, he asked, "Isn't fossil fuels the ultimate renewable energy? It's renewed once. It used to be a dinosaur. Now it's fuel. How is that not renewable?"
Notice how the other four completely ignore Greg.
Now forget the fact that dinosaurs are extinct; petroleum doesn’t even come from dinosaurs. Both petroleum and natural gas was formed by the decomposition of phytoplankton and zooplankton many millions of years ago. Coal on the other hand was formed by the decay of terrestrial plants during the Carboniferous Period 360 million years ago.
Can someone explain to me what is so difficult to understand about petroleum, natural gas, and coal being non-renewable energy sources?
UPDATED: Aug. 5 So when I ran across this post on the FaceBook page, Freedom From Atheistic Scientism. I was intrigued, because the man behind this page, Kirk Hastings, cited an article in the journal Science. If you're not familiar with Science, it and Nature are arguably the two foremost journals in science.
I was at home and didn't want to run to the college library, so I used our online library resources to download a copy of "The Solar System's New Diversity." (R.A. Kerr, Science, vol. 265, 1994, p.1360-1362)
CREDIT: Science
I must have spent an half of an hour trying to find anything that resembled the alleged statement. I was really confused until I realized something.
Now when I first started writing this piece, I was going to start with a few verses like Exodus 20:16 or Matthew 19:18, but then I realized that we all know, no matter what our religious beliefs or non-beliefs are, that lying is unethical. Don't most of us feel a twinge of guilt for even telling harmless, little white lies?
So I engaged Kirk Hastings.
First he tells me I'm wrong. So I want to make sure that he and I are writing about the same article. I even offer to trade copies with him. Furthermore, in an effort to track down the origin of the statement, I found two sites that have it verbatim, and these are the only two sites with these words. I'm not too surprised to find the Center for Scientific Creation and Sound Doctrine.
Both of these sites have the identical passage - not just the statement in question, but the entire text of the pages are the same. Neither one attributes it to Kerr or to anyone else.
So I see two possibilities:
Kerr did say it, and Kirk has the wrong article, though this implies that the authors of the two web sites plagiarized the excerpt, and in academia, this is perhaps the most egregious form of lying.
Kerr did not say it, Kirk is bearing false witness, and either Center for Scientific Creation or Sound Doctrine is the original author.
Kirk once again claims that Kerr writes those words in that particular article, and notice he writes that contesting the truth of his claim is "pointless nit-picking."
I'm just amazed with Kirk's comment here. He can't admit that he falsely attributed those statements to Kerr, so he transfers the responsibility to me for not accepting it as authentic. Truly mind blowing.
Kirk then throws two other statements at me. Why? Maybe he realized that he cannot defend his ascribing the passage to Kerr and wants to divert the conversation.
Kerr has been a science journalist for Science since 1997 and has a Ph.D. from the University of Rhode Island in chemical oceanography. Now I'm not appealing to authority here, but sometimes credentials do count.
Usually what happens at FaceBook pages like Freedom From Atheistic Scientism,* one gets banned after pointing out the errors, but as of noon Aug. 4, I'm still allowed to comment. I'm puzzled. No lie.
I've been banned!
* I've been banned at The Question Evolution Project, United Seekers of Truth, and True Dinos.
Let's deal with some of Mr. Stojanowski's comments made on Getting Crankier.
Only the latitudinal movement is relevant to angular momentum.
But again, the latitudinal movement of Pangea, and its remnants, during the past 350 myrs is what is important, not just the dispersal movement after its breakup.
No. Any change in I, a body's moment of inertia (the distribution of its mass about a rotation axis), is relevant to angular momentum.
…it was the displacement of the core elements, an action which would increase the Earth’s AM to balance the reduction of AM from Pangea’s center of mass moving closer to the spin axis as it moved to a higher latitude.
… an action which would increase the Earth’s AM to balance the reduction of AM from Pangea’s center of mass moving closer to the spin axis as it moved to a higher latitude.
Let's apply Mr. Stojanowski's hypothesis to the problem. In his work, he claims that the Earth's core was displaced by 1000 km in the equatorial plane. (see his Fig. 3 to the left). He also references a paper in Geophysical Research Letters* in which he claims they show movement of Pangaea's center of mass. More on the center of mass later. Figure 3(a) in this article (shown below) does show variation in a parameter the authors label D. The authors are attempting to quantitatively estimate the "asymmetry of continental surface." To calculate D, the authors use the first moment of the distance to the equator with respect to the surface area. This is not the center of mass.
However, let's use Mr. Stojanowski's assumption that the two are the same and apply the conservation of angular momentum to his model. See the previous article for a brief introduction to this principle.
The first term on the left hand side of the equation below represents the core 1000 km from the Earth's axis in the equatorial plane. The second term represents the Earth minus the core and the continents, and the third term is Pangaea. The term on the right hand side is Earth today.
We need a few more numbers before we can calculate. The mass of the core is about 1/3 of the Earth's mass. We'll use Mr. Stojanowski's number of 1000 km for rc. The last quantity required is the distance from the axis to Pangaea. Here we'll use his assumption that D is the center of mass. From Figure 3(a) in the Geophys. Res. Lett. article, D is about 100 km south of the equator. We use a bit of elementary geometry and trigonometry to find the distance from the axis to Pangaea; rp = 6370 km. Plug away. In the meantime, let's recap. I've used the conservation of angular momentum and Stojanowski's model and numbers. We find that the consequence of his model is that the Earth rotates once every 16.6 hours. This contradicts what we know the length of the day; then it was about 23 hours long.
His assumptions in his calculation are:
1. Pangea’s center of mass was located on the equator 250 myr.
2. Today, the continental crust is distributed uniformly across the globe.
Based on the above assumptions, in both cases, the center of mass of continental crust is on the equator. Therefore, the moment of inertia in both cases must be the same, meaning the angular velocity must also be the same to conserve AM.
Yes, I did assume in Getting Crankier that the center of mass stays on the equatorial plane. However, as I clearly showed in my first attempt, the moment of inertia is not the same over 250 million years. There I modeled Earth 250 mya as a sphere and a object (Pangaea) located 6371 km from the axis. And my calculation clearly demonstrates that the angular velocity must change as a result of conserving momentum. I mentioned above that I would say something about the Earth's center of mass, but I ran across another blog that has dealt with this issue quite well. Ed Brayton** blogged at Dispatches from the Creation Wars, and on Dec. 27, 2010, guest blogger W. Kevin Vicklund wrote New Explanation for Dinosaur Extinction? Revisited. He shows how bad Mr Stojanowski's figure of 1000 km is for the core offset. The short version is that if the Earth is to rotate about its axis then the Earth's center of mass must remain at the Earth's geometric center. Mr. Stojanowski's model doesn't do that. If the core moved as he claims, the Earth would have precessed like crazy.
Yes, surface gravity at the poles is less than at the equator based on difference in distance to the Earth’s center of mass. This is evident from the inverse square law (relative to distance) postulated by Newton. It’s exactly why surface gravity on Pangea changed when the Earth’s core elements moved off-center and away from Pangea, moving the Earth’s center of mass further away from Pangea.
No. The effect is due to the centrifugal term in Newton's 2nd law as I explained in the previous post. If you want to use Newton's law of universal gravitation to find the magnitude of the gravitational field near the Earth's surface, here's what you do.
The polar radius is 6357 km, and the equatorial one is 6378 km, only 0.3% larger. Use these to calculate the gravitational field, and you will quickly see that the equatorial field is only 0.6% smaller. Mr. Stojanowski may counter that his model yields a value 8% smaller for Pangaea, but as I and Mr Vicklund have shown, that core motion he postulates violates what we know about the Earth's rotation.
Mr Stojanowski. Should you reply once again, I ask that you back up any claims with physics, mathematics, and numbers.
*Plate tectonics may control geomagnetic reversal frequency, F. Pétrélis, J. Besse, J.-P.Valet, Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 38, issue 19, October 2011.
Mr. Anonymous, who may or not be John Stojanowski, left two comments on my recent post, Feeling Cranky. To recap, Mr. Stojanowski has a hypothesis that the dinosaurs became extinct because the gravitational field of the Earth increased and that increase was caused by movement of the Earth's core accompanied by the shifting of the planet's crust.
The first comment:
Notice how he slyly calls into question my credentials, but I'll let that go. I do know how angular momentum works, and I seriously question Mr. Anonymous's understanding, not just of angular momentum, but of the meaning of the word latitudinally.
Watch this animation of the spreading of Pangaea.
There seems to some movement of the underlying tectonic plates northward and southward (latitudinal motion), but the greatest change in seen longitudinally; that is eastward and westward.
Be that as it may, let's examine our understanding of angular momentum which is conventionally denoted not by AM but by
Angular momentum is conserved, that is, it stays the same, when there are no unbalanced torques acting on the object. Mathematically it can expressed thusly,
Here's an excellent example of this principle.
Here when the figure skater starts her spin she is spinning relatively slowly. Then as she pulls her arms and leg in, she spins much faster. The Greek letter omega in the equation above represents the spin rate. The I in the equation is called the moment of inertia and describes how the mass is distributed around the rotation axis. When the skater pulls her arm in, she is distributing her mass closer to the spin axis, and her rotation rate increases. There's no "compensating action."
I can show with a simple model how the spreading of Pangaea could affect the length of the day. First, let's suppose the entire supercontinent is located at the equator. Second, let me suppose that the continental crust is now uniformly distributed across the globe. [Note: those simplifications are not necessary; they just make the work relatively easy to follow and make the calculations possible to do in a minute or two.]
Now here's the data (1):
Now we can plug in all the numbers and calculate what the Earth's the rotation rate should have been 250 million years ago.
You can see that the rotation rate is less than it is today by a factor of 0.995. We conclude then that that day should have been 1.005 times longer than now - about 7 1/2 minutes.
Oops. We know that 350 million years ago, one day lasted less than 23 hours.(2) Mr. Stojanowski's angular momentum hypothesis disastrously gives the wrong direction of change.
By the way, Mr. Anonymous, I am not a geologist, so can you explain what effect your oscillating core would have on the convection currents in the mantle, and what effect those changing currents would have had on driving plate tectonics?
The second comment:
Again with questioning my credentials. Oh well. Rotational dynamics is usually covered in an undergraduate third year classical mechanics course. All physicists learn early in their career how to do physics in a rotating reference frame. Here's what we derive, essentially Newton's 2nd law in a rotating reference frame.(3)
One consequence of this is that the Earth is not spherical, but it bulges outward at the equator, and we drop something it drops straight down, perpendicular to the Earth's Surface. However, straight down is not the same as pointing to the center of the Earth.
Mr. Anonymous is curiously unaware of the size of the Earth's rotation rate. He appears to say that the Earth has a high spin rate. As I can show from Newton's 2nd Law, the rotation of the Earth has about a 0.05% effect. The gravitational field is about 0.05% larger at the poles than it is at the equator.
If Mr. Anonymous cares to respond again, perhaps he would be so kind as to provide some mathematical and physical details. I think I'm qualified enough to handle them.
1. The numerical data can be found in any physics, astronomy, or geology book with the exception of the continental mass. That estimate comes from Mass and Composition of the Continental Crust Estimated Using the CRUST2.0 Model, Peterson, B. T.; Depaolo, D. J., American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2007, abstract #V33A-1161. Any introductory physics text will have a chapter or two on rotational dynamics at this level.
2. See for example, this article at Scientific American. 3. For those you have completed an introductory calculus-based physics sequence, as well as a differential equations course, see a standard classical mechanics textbook such as Symon's Mechanics, or Thorton and Marion's Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems. Graduate level students can consult Goldstein's Classical Mechanics.
Jose Canseco, former Oakland A outfielder, was the first to hit 40 home runs and steal 40 bases in major league baseball. He must now be a professor of physics, paleontology, and geology. I can't find where.
He has recently take to Twitter to explain the changes in the strength of the gravitational interaction and the effect it has had on animal physiology. He then hypothesizes that the reason the gravity has intensified over the millennia because the Earth's core shifted.
I look forward to reading the peer-reviewed articles. I understand Derek Jeter, Roger Clemons, and Ryne Sandberg will be doing the reviews.
Pompei and Herculaneum were destroyed in 79 C.E. when Mt. Vesuvius erupted.
CREDIT:Vesuvius National Park
From Wikipedia:
Ring Lady - "The skeletal remains of a young woman killed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. The skeleton, unearthed from the ruins of Herculaneum in 1982, was named the "Ring Lady" because of the emerald and ruby rings found on the woman's left hand. Two gold bracelets and gold earrings were also found by the woman's side."
Here is a view of Mt. Vesuvius from the International Space Station on Jan. 1, 2013. At bottom right of the photo is the outskirts of Naples. Between 4.1 and 4.7 million people live in the greater metropolitan area. By the way, this is an active volcano.
In the 14th James Bond film, A View to a Kill, Nazi-created Max Zorin (played deliciously by Christopher Walken) plans to take complete control of the world's microchip market by destroying Silicon Valley. His diabolical plot is to flood the valley by triggering a massive earthquake. How does he cause this earthquake. He sets out to lubricate both the San Andreas Fault and the Hayward fault by draining San Andreas Lake into the faults, and then set off a explosion that actually triggers the geologic event. This movie is bad on many accounts - the only Bond film worse in my opinion is Moonraker, but I remember when I saw this movie in 1985, I thought the movie makers were taking much too much artistic license with the science. Lubricating faults? Bah! Now comes conclusive evidence that fracking causes earthquakes. From Wikipedia:
Hydraulic fracturing is the propagation of fractures in a rock layer caused by the presence of a pressurized fluid. Hydraulic fractures form naturally, as in the case of veins or dikes, and is one means by which gas and petroleum from source rocks may migrate to reservoir rocks. This process is used to release petroleum, natural gas (including shale gas, tight gas, and coal seam gas), or other substances for extraction, via a technique called induced hydraulic fracturing, often shortened to fracking or hydrofracking. This type of fracturing, known colloquially as a 'frac job', creates fractures from a wellbore drilled into reservoir rock formations.
In August 2011, a scientist with the Oklahoma Geological Survey thought it reasonable to conclude that "the strong correlation in time and space as well as a reasonable fit to a physical model suggests that there is a possibility these earthquakes were induced by hydraulic‐fracturing."(1) Then in November, the oil and gas company Caudrilla Resources reported that "most likely, the repeated seismicity [in Lancashire, England] was induced by direct injection of fluid into [the] fault zone."(2) Just this past month, on the advice of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Gov. Jahn Kasich ordered an immediate moratorium on fracking operations. This was after a 4.0 magnitude earthquake struck the Youngstown area.(3) The latest research by the United States Geological Survey to be presented at the April meeting of the Seismological Society of America indicates that "the seismicity rate changes described here are almost certainly manmade," and that "a naturally-occurring rate change of this magnitude is unprecedented outside of volcanic settings or in the absence of a main shock."(4)
DAMN YOU, MAX ZORIN!!!
Aside from the earthquakes, flaming faucets in Pennsylvania are allegedly linked to fracking. You've probably already seen the video. References: 1. Austin A. Holland, Examination of Possibly Induced Seismicity from Hydraulic Fracturing in the Eola Field, Garvin County, Oklahoma, Oklahoma Geological Survey Open, File Report OF1, 2011. 2. C.J. de Pater and S. Baisch, Geomechanical Study of Bowland Shale Seismicity, Cuadrilla Resources Ltd, November 2011. 3. Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Executive Summary: Preliminary Report on the Northstar 1 Class II Injection Well and the Seismic Events in the Youngstown, Ohi, Area, March 2012. 4. W.L. Ellsworth, et al., Are Seismicity Rate Changes in the Midcontinent Natural or Manmade?, Seismological Society of America, April 2012.
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