Donation made also.

@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:

Light is actually photon based, not wave based.

I will have to partly disagree with you here. Light is an example of both. Light moves as a wave but when it is absorbed by something it becomes a photon. The wave kind of collapses into its photon counterpart.

@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:

I know waves are hard to define, but I'd be careful using a definition that requires a medium.

Well some types of energy do require a medium though. This is why there is no sound in space, because there is no medium compatible for sound waves to travel through. I understand what your saying though. The early philosophers were quite off in their ideas on certain things for sure and aether theory is certainly one of them. They were reaching for something but it was just too early so they made up this artificial construct to help describe their world.

@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:

The sun isn't actually our only source of heat.
You are right, it is not. I need to correct that. That was a mental lapse when I wrote that. It is at least 99% of our heat though.

@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:

But wait, didn't we just determine that you'd not looked into this at all yet and hadn't done even cursory research on the subject? Something is off here.

You determined this yes. It never came from me. I am just modest in what I say about myself. I have read and studied, astronomy, calculus physics 1 and 2, modern physics, computational physics, and astrophysics. I'll be the first to admit I don't know a lot. the more I study the less I realize I know about anything.

I also never said I was not aware of research that has been put out. I have read about this for a long time and I also talk to friends that are professors and a couple others that work in physics fields. Is anyone truly qualified to give an opinion on any of this? I am not sure. One thing I have gleaned from my many discussions of this and other topics is that media that have strong opinions on things usually have financial reasons behind it because not enough data has been collected for a long enough period of time. I tend to believe that. It makes no sense to be as absolutely sure of anything as we are with as little as we know about anything in our galaxy. I am just saying its my opinion that it isn't entirely accurate and there are probably financial reason behind so many people pushing the same thing. Money is about the only thing that truly unites people unfortunately.

@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:

crazy and counter-intuitive is true without doing even 30 seconds of research that it took to come up with solid research on it

Well this is the hard part. Astrophysicists don't even know what causes the Sun's magnetism for sure or how its internals work, or the effect dust clouds have, or how solar winds affect our atmosphere, or the effect of the Sun's rotation on everything around it. There are way too many variables to say for sure one way or the other.

@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:

but not doing any research.

I never said I did not do any research. I did say I have read a lot about this over the years. I have seen both sides of opinions and many of each.

@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:

@jmoore It seems that people are definitely taking this into account in the studies.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/SORCE/sorce_04.php

After reading that article, I agree they are taking it into account more than I thought. However it does seem to me that they are also saying the sun's effect is more than minor.

I'm not saying humans have no effect, its just my feeling that it is less than most people think. I could certainly be wrong but I am looking for more information either way. I enjoy reading about it and writing about this topic too. Here are a couple articles I wrote about the Sun's radiation and How the Sun Works. It is basic stuff but was accepted as some alternate course material here for beginning classes. Later I added some conceptual problems with a touch of math in it for exercises.

So like I said I'm definitely no authority but I have read a lot. I will read these again when I get home.

@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:

@jmoore said in Non-IT News Thread:

I have not seen any research that takes this into account,

Are you sure that they don't? I get this with research a lot... people say we are missing some factor, but often don't realize that we over-accounted for that factor to have ruled it out as much as possible.

Unless you have a model that shows why this is a factor, there's nothing to account for.

I will have to look around. I don't have a model obviously. This is just my gut feeling that I have. venus and Mars both used to have atmospheres I believe and they were burned away by the Sun. Neither had life that we know of. While Venus is pretty close to the Sun, Mars isn't that close. While I have not read anything that seems to take this into account, I certainly do not have time to read 24 hours a day lol. So sure I could have missed it.

After reading the article you quoted, our average temperature has only slightly gone up over the last century.
From article: "Over the past century, Earth's average temperature has increased by approximately 0.6 degrees Celsius (1.1 degrees Fahrenheit)."
While that is a change, it is very little.

@coliver said in Non-IT News Thread:

@jmoore said in Non-IT News Thread:

@coliver I am sure we are affecting it a little but I don't think its near as much as some think. Not sure I stated my opinion clearly or not before.

You may want to look at the mountains of research that disagree with your opinion, including the linked article. It's a fairly well known and accepted fact at this point that human activities are causing the current climate crisis.

Oh I am aware that my opinion is in the minority. I'm ok with that. I do understand the research, I just don't think we can have that universal opinion without having more data of all things involved. For example, the Earth has gone through the same thing climate-wise several times before humans were here. It goes back and forth between extremely hot and extremely cold constantly through its history. With that context, I just think its presumptuous to say we are mostly the reason for climate change. I might give it 10-20% but the rest of the climate change is the Sun itself in my opinion. I have not seen any research that takes this into account, it is all "the Earth is heating up and the correlation is increase in human population". I just think there are more variables in the situation.