World famous atmospheric scientist Mikey Mann thinks that water vapor makes the air more dense. So why does water vapor rise, and nitrogen vapor migrate horizontally?
One might expect that an atmospheric scientist would understand the simplest fundamentals of the physics of the atmosphere. Severe storms often form when cold dry air wedges under a mass of warm moist air. The warm, moist air is less dense and gets forced rapidly upwards.
I worked in a geochemistry lab as an undergraduate at ASU. One day we had a safety inspection and “Mad Hank” poured a flask of liquid nitrogen into a sink full of water, a few seconds before the inspectors arrived.
This is their hero. They protect this Mann with reckless abandon. In this case it really is reckless not to speak up against Mann. Regardless of how many grant $s this issue pulls in, at some point some of these vaunted professors are going to have to take a stand against utter ignorance.
Maybe water vapor just makes Mikey more dense.
Leave Mikey ‘Piltdown’ Mann alone!
🙂
The vaporized liquid nitrogen sinks because when it is cold, it is denser than air. At a molecular weight of 28, N2 has almost the same average molecular weight that air has (29) and thus close to the same density at the same temperature. Water, on the other hand, has a molecular weight of 18, making it less dense than air at the same temperature and pressure, giving it buoyancy.
Not that I am trying to defend Mann, just wanted to set the science straight.
Just like the article says.
Ah, I was concentrating on the first paragraph and the pictures. You are correct, my bad.
I’ve observed over the years that activists will defend any claim individual or claim no matter how absurd (or pass over it in silence if it is really stupid) so long as the individual has the ‘correct’ views or the claim is supportive in some way of those views.
Honestly, this whole blatant mistake by Mann should be enough for any reasonable person to question anything he’s ever said regarding science. Not only did he get a very basic, fundamental physical science problem wrong (so fundamental that I’d put it on a freshman gen chem exam), but he went out of his way to showcase his wrong answer on the internet as a correction to a layman’s actually correct answer. The pure arrogance and self-assuredness to do such a thing should be a huge red flag on any of his science. I guess he’s devoted himself to a non-hard science so he can get away with that, because who cares about empirical evidence and reproducibility, right? No serious physics or chemistry for him. Note that the layman’s answer is correct, though the effect of AGW is negligible so he shouldn’t have brought it up anyway.
-Scott
“I guess he’s devoted himself to a non-hard science so he can get away with that, because who cares about empirical evidence and reproducibility, right?”
Lol, and not even that now….. even the dendro people are criticizing now….. http://suyts.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/persistence-paying-off-mann-still-delusional/
Just a curiosity question: according to his bio, Mann got a degree in applied mathematics and physics in 1989. Has he ever published anything in the field of maths or pure physics? You know, in an actual hard science where is some semblance of actual peer review?
(Not a field like ‘palaeoclimatology’ which probably has something like 7 ‘experts’ in it and nobody outside that ‘field’ has the interest to check their claims.)