~QT~™

Preferably between the ages of 20 and 35. Thanks!

I'm looking for a well-known actor who could play the role of an American soldier who is young, intelligence, and reflective. I don't know actors/actresses very well, so any suggestions would be helpful! Thanks!

I used to be a regular in this section, but I haven't been very active for the past 3-4 years since I've been busy with school. Have any ground breaking studies been published during this time?

I'm debating this topic tomorrow, and I want to know what arguments to anticipate.

How do I find the exact value of these functions:

1. cos-1(cos 4π/5)

2. sin-1(sin 9π/8)

3. tan-1(tan 4π/5)

I'm geting the right values, just not the right sign. How do you know if they're negative or positive? Thanks!

Drawing a blank here. Please help.

I'm having all four of my wisdom teeth extracted on Friday. The tooth on the top right is impacted, and the roots of the two bottom teeth have grown into the nerve. (My dentist says this happens normally as the teeth mature, though.) I'll be conscious during the procedure but hopefully out of it since they're using IV sedation. What can I expect during and after the surgery? I have a somewhat low threshold for pain and a terrible gag reflex!

A steel drum in the shape of a right circular cylinder is required to have a volume of 100 cubic feet. Express the amount A of material required to make the drum as a function of the radius r of the cylinder.

The answer is A = 2πr^2 + 200/r

The remaining topics are:

1. Resolved: The United States ought to extend to non-citizens accused of terrorism the same constitutional due process rights it grants it's citizens.

2. Resolved: In the United States, possession of handguns ought not be an individual right.

3. Resolved: The use of eminent domain for private economic development is just.

4. Resolved: Estate taxes are just

5. Resolved: A just society ought to prioritize environmental concerns over the production of energy.

6. Resolved: In the United States, law enforcement ought to be required to have probable cause to search data an individual has stored on remote servers.

The remaining topics are:

1. Resolved: The United States ought to extend to non-citizens accused of terrorism the same constitutional due process rights it grants it's citizens.

2. Resolved: In the United States, possession of handguns ought not be an individual right.

3. Resolved: The use of eminent domain for private economic development is just.

4. Resolved: Estate taxes are just

5. Resolved: A just society ought to prioritize environmental concerns over the production of energy.

6. Resolved: In the United States, law enforcement ought to be required to have probable cause to search data an individual has stored on remote servers.

Over the past few years (and especially in the past six months) the jet stream seems to have been behaving anomalously. Does anyone have specific data on the evolution of the jet stream, and could its recent behavior be at all attributable to global warming?

Thanks!!!

How can I solve for x

This is an argument from an online debate I'm currently participating in. I plan on posting it tomorrow, so I would appreciate any quick suggestions or recommendations that you may have.

"Dr. Roy Spencer argues that previous studies have overestimated the Earth’s climate sensitivity. He presents two main pieces of evidence to support this argument:

1) Lag regression analysis of satellite data shows that net radiative gain precedes, and radiative loss follows temperature maxima. A simple forcing-feedback model appears to show that this is the behavior expected from radiatively forced temperature changes. However, only in the case of non-radiative forcing can an accurate diagnosis of the feedback parameter be made.

2) “There is a rather large discrepancy in the time-lagged regression coefficients between the radiative signatures displayed by the real climate system in satellite data versus the climate models.”

I will demonstrate that both of these arguments are likely incorrect, and Spencer’s resulting conclusions are physically unrealistic.

Regarding Spencer’s first argument:

I agree that Spencer’s lag regression analysis “supports the interpretation that net radiative gain precedes, and radiative loss follows temperature maxima”. However, this does not necessarily imply that the temperature variations during the relative time period were radiatively forced.

The simple forcing-feedback model Spencer used to draw this conclusion was much too simple. For instance, his model did not have the ability to simulate ENSO or the hydrologic cycle.

In addition, the model was likely tuned to give the result it gave. Spencer used an ocean mixed-layer depth of only 25 meters. However, it appears that mixed-layer depths of 100–200 meters are more appropriate for simple climate models. Spencer also used a lambda value of 3, much greater than the consensus value of about 1.4.

Notably, Spencer made no attempt to find out how sensitive his model fits were to these different parameter values. In fact, he never presented any error bars or uncertainties in his study.

As Dr. Andrew Dessler stated, “The argument made in these papers...is extremely weak. What they do is show some data, then they show a very simple model with some free parameters that they tweak until they fit the data. They then conclude that their model is right. However, if the underlying model is wrong, then the agreement between the model and data proves nothing.”

Regarding Spencer’s second argument:

Spencer claims to have demonstrated that, “There is a rather large discrepancy in the time-lagged regression coefficients between the radiative signatures displayed by the real climate system in satellite data versus the climate models.”

However, this argument does not withstand the slightest amount of scrutiny. As other scientists have pointed out, Spencer failed to account for decadal variability in the model simulations.

Clearly, climate model simulations for one decade will never precisely match model simulations for another decade. This is simply due to factors such as random fluctuations in ocean circulation within the climate models.

When scientists account for this decadal variability, they find that the satellite observations fall well within the range of simulations for most models. Thus, there is no fundamental discrepancy between the IPCC climate models and the satellite data.

The implications of Spencer’s paper are physically unrealistic:

As Spencer stated himself, “Since much of the temperature variability during 2000–2010 was due to ENSO, we conclude that ENSO-related temperature variations are partly radiatively forced. We hypothesize that changes in the coupled ocean-atmosphere circulation during the El Niño and La Niña phases of ENSO cause differing changes in cloud cover.”

However, energy budgets of the surface show that ENSO related temperature variations are not radiatively forced. Therefore, Spencer’s conclusions cannot be correct.

Moreover, Spencer’s conclusions imply that climate sensitivity is considerably lower than estimates from current climate models. However, numerous paleoclimate reconstructions do not support this. Therefore, past climate changes couldn’t have occurred if climate sensitivity were as low as Dr. Roy Spencer alleges."

Roy Spencer recently claimed that global warming is caused by chaotic variations in cloud cover associated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. To test this hypothesis, he fit the output of a simple climate model, driven by the PDO, to temperature data from 1900 through 2000. Spencer did obtain a somewhat reasonable fit, but only by using an ocean mixed-layer depth of 800 meters.

http://www.drroyspencer.com/research-articles/glob...

Several scientists have pointed out that this value is physically unrealistic. Oddly, Spencer himself seems to agree. As he stated in another blog post, “The model’s response to these radiative forcings depends upon how I set the model’s ocean mixing depth, which will determine how much the temperature will change for a given energy imbalance imposed upon the model. I found that a 70 meter deep layer provided about the right RATIO between the satellite-observed monthly radiative variations and SST variations.”

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/01/update-further...

However, if Spencer had used a mixed-layer depth of 70 meters in his original analysis, he would have found that the PDO could account for only a small portion of the observed global warming trend.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008...

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Roy-Spencers-Great...

Despite this rather obvious fact, Spencer still maintains that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is the main cause of the current global warming as well as historic climate changes.

How can Spencer continue to make these claims given his admission that the mixed-layer is only 70 meters deep? Moreover, how can other skeptics give credence to Spencer’s various theories when they contradict each other?

Dessler (2010) quantified the cloud feedback by relating changes in outgoing radiation to surface temperature anomalies. He concluded that clouds trap 0.54 ± 0.74 watts of additional energy as the surface warms.

Dessler also compared his results to eight different models. All of these models had very small error bars in comparison with his findings.

http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfiles/216/dessler10b.p...

Why could this be?

According to Dessler et al., relative humidity in the tropical upper troposphere tends to decline with increasing temperatures.

http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfiles/216/Dessler2008b...

Why is this so?

According to the IRIS hypothesis, precipitation efficiency during deep convection events will increase as the planet warms. This, in turn, will significantly reduce water vapor content in the upper troposphere. High cirrus cloud cover will then decrease, leading to an increase in ORL.

In a recent paper, Richard Lindzen made the following claim in support of the IRIS hypothesis:

“Lindzen and Choi [2009] studied variations in the outgoing radiative fluxes with respect to changes in the average tropical temperature in intraseasonal scales. A total negative feedback was deduced from the outgoing long- wave response of the tropics. If a strong positive water vapor feedback is realistic [e.g., Dessler et al., 2008], then the combined effect of water vapor feedback and lapse rate feedback must be more than compensated by a strong unknown process acting on modifying the longwave flux. This process cannot be distinguished from the bulk of the longwave response in the analysis by Lindzen and Choi [2009], but it most likely resides in the combined behavior of clouds and water vapor in the tropics. This leaves open the possibility that a negative feedback such as the iris is operating in the present climate.”

http://www.dgf.uchile.cl/~ronda/Geologia/ronandlin...

To me, it seems that the IRIS hypothesis cannot be correct. Dessler (2008) concluded that, “At all altitudes...global-average specific humidity was higher during the warmer periods, with the difference growing with altitude.”

http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfiles/216/Dessler2008b...

However, as mentioned previously, the IRIS hypothesis predicted that tropospheric water vapor content would actually decrease.

How can Lindzen continue to defend his IRIS hypothesis when he also supports Dessler's conclusions?