simov for the February 22, 1975 issue of the TV Guide and called "The Weath er Machine". It was reprinted as "The Big Weather Change" in "The Beginning and the End" a collection of Isaac Asimov essays.
book. You can get the book here.
ns of warm and cold. Sometimes the Arctic Ocean is open water and then it s upplies water vapor which falls on the surrounding land areas as snow. If t here is then a small drop in general temperature for a prolonged stretch of time not all the snow that falls each winter will melt each summer.
r its own weight to form glaciers. The glacier ice reflects Sunlight more e fficiently than bare ground does and cools the Earth further, so that still less of the snow that falls in the winter is melted, and the glaciers adva nce southward.
ean freezes over and the supply of water vapor is cut off. Less snow falls, so that the summer melting becomes more effective and the glaciers begin t o retreat. The retreat reduces the ice cover, allows the Earth to warm, and accelerates the retreat further. When it grows warm enough for the ice on Arctic Ocean to melt, it starts all over."
cycle without the human effect.
tarting around 450 thousand years ago. The present day is right at the poin t where the North Pole melts and turns on the Arctic Ocean's snow making ma chine.
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lt and the Arctic Ocean's snow making machine is still going to turn on. I think it would just change the period of the triangle wave. Instead of the Arctic Ice Cap returning in 100,000 years, it might return in a million yea rs or it might never return. We end up with stable halo of ice around the N orth Pole.
! Science! Science! Scary! Scary! Gives us $100 billion/year and we'll save you!" I think it's bullshit. You're not going to stop the North Pole from melting and the North Pole melting doesn't prove anything. That's just part of the natural cycle that's been going on for half a million years. I also think the bozos yelling, "It's colder and snowing more this winter! We've have nothing to worry about!" No, that's what happens when the North Pole m elts and it is going to get worse. What makes all this nonsense worse is th at we new about it 40 years ago.
s e sPretty much everything. The thermal equivalent of a ground might be the bac k-ground microwave radiation - anything that's radiating into a empty sky e quilibrates with that (as well as everything else in sight).
Anything you actually work with has a thermal capacity and a thermal resist ance back to local ambient. Heat pipes offer fairly low thermal resistance paths back to ambient, usually via a decent-sized heat-sink.
If you had an object immersed in a bath of a pure fluid heated to it's loca l boiling point the local ambient temperature would be pretty well defined, but there would still be a thermal resistance from the centre of the objec t to that local ambient.