This is a simple model of sea level heights that may be appropriate for very introductory level students studying climate change.

For this model I will assume that the ocean consists of two parts: the surface ocean and the deep ocean. The surface ocean is uniform in depth, temperature, and salinity. The depth of the surface ocean is 500 meters. The average initial temperature of the upper ocean is 14C. The deep ocean is everything else, and is assumed to not change.

The volume of water in the ocean is given by the equation: V=A*d, where A is the surface area of the ocean and d is the depth of the ocean. We also know that the mass of an object is equal to its volume multiplied by its density; m=V*ρ. We can solve these equations for d, the depth of the ocean.
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Since it’s 10:45pm and I’m just getting home from work, I’m just going to post this pointer to an article written by Pat Buchanan recently. But since I wouldn’t be commenting on it, I needed a great title. I think pretty good.

The global-warming hucksters
By Pat Buchanan

We are told global warming was responsible for the hurricane summer of Katrina and Rita that devastated Texas, Mississippi and New Orleans. Yet Dr. William Gray, perhaps the nation’s foremost expert on hurricanes, says he and his most experienced colleagues believe humans have little impact on global warming and global warming cannot explain the frequency or ferocity of hurricanes. After all, we had more hurricanes in the first half of the 20th century than in the last 50 years, as global warming was taking place.

A big hattip to MT.

Someone asked me this the other day. I said “probably”, but on second thought, I should have said “maybe”.

The color of a sunset is a manifestation of the same mechanism that causes the sky to be blue. The atmosphere is made up of gases. The most abundent of these gases is nitrogen, which has a diameter of about 3 Ångströms. Since the Ångström unit isn’t SI, let’s convert for our international colleagues. 1 Ångströms is equal to 10E-10 meters. That’s pretty small. Wikipedia gives a table of the size of some objects relative to each other. For comparison, the width of an average human hair is about 80 µm (8E-5 meter).

Objects this small don’t react with light (radiation) in the same way large objects do. A mirror, for instance, “reflects” the light such that the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflectance. This is called geometric optics. For extremely small objects (relative to the wavelength of light), geometric optics fails. The radiation doesn’t just bounce off the nitrogen particle like it would off of the mirror. Instead it undergoes Rayleigh scattering - names after Lord Rayleigh.
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