http://news.discovery.com/tech/water-freezes-when-heated.html
Usually water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit and temperatures below that. But now scientists - reporting today in the journal Science -- have found a way to keep water in a liquid form at -40 degrees F. What's more, the scientists have found another way to make the water freeze when it's heated. It's a curious phenomenon to say the least, but the results could have implications for computer climate modeling.
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But the implications of the role of dust in water should be considered in climate modeling, Franz Geiger, a physical chemist at Northwestern University in Illinois, told NPR. Ice in the atmosphere forms on dust particles and dust particles can have different electrical charges. That could influence temperatures, so it's a variable that could be taken into consideration in computer models of climate.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/327/5966/672
Water Freezes Differently on Positively and Negatively Charged Surfaces of Pyroelectric Materials
Although ice melts and water freezes under equilibrium conditions at 0°C, water can be supercooled under homogeneous conditions in a clean environment down to –40°C without freezing. The influence of the electric field on the freezing temperature of supercooled water (electrofreezing) is of topical importance in the living and inanimate worlds. We report that positively charged surfaces of pyroelectric LiTaO3 crystals and SrTiO3 thin films promote ice nucleation, whereas the same surfaces when negatively charged reduce the freezing temperature. Accordingly, droplets of water cooled down on a negatively charged LiTaO3 surface and remaining liquid at –11°C freeze immediately when this surface is heated to –8°C, as a result of the replacement of the negative surface charge by a positive one. Furthermore, powder x-ray diffraction studies demonstrated that the freezing on the positively charged surface starts at the solid/water interface, whereas on a negatively charged surface, ice nucleation starts at the air/water interface.
In 1972, the late, world famous astronomer Carl Sagan and his colleague George Mullen formulated "The faint early sun paradox. " The paradox consisted in that the earth's climate has been fairly constant during almost four of the four and a half billion years that the planet has been in existence, and this despite the fact that radiation from the sun has increased by 25-30 percent.
The paradoxical question that arose for scientists in this connection was why the earth's surface at its fragile beginning was not covered by ice, seeing that the sun's rays were much fainter than they are today. Science found one probable answer in 1993, which was proffered by the American atmospheric scientist, Jim Kasting. He performed theoretical calculations that showed that 30% of the earth's atmosphere four billion years ago consisted of CO2. This in turn entailed that the large amount of greenhouse gases layered themselves as a protective greenhouse around the planet, thereby preventing the oceans from freezing over.
Mystery solved
Now, however, Professor Minik Rosing, from the Natural History Museum of Denmark, and Christian Bjerrum, from the Department of Geography and Geology at University of Copenhagen, together with American colleagues from Stanford University in California have discovered the reason for "the missing ice age" back then, thereby solving the sun paradox, which has haunted scientific circles for more than forty years.
Professor Minik Rosing explains, "What prevented an ice age back then was not high CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, but the fact that the cloud layer was much thinner than it is today. In addition to this, the earth's surface was covered by water. This meant that the sun's rays could warm the oceans unobstructed, which in turn could layer the heat, thereby preventing the earth's watery surface from freezing into ice. The reason for the lack of clouds back in earth's childhood can be explained by the process by which clouds form. This process requires chemical substances that are produced by algae and plants, which did not exist at the time. These chemical processes would have been able to form a dense layer of clouds, which in turn would have reflected the sun's rays, throwing them back into the cosmos and thereby preventing the warming of earth's oceans. Scientists have formerly used the relationship between the radiation from the sun and earth's surface temperature to calculate that earth ought to have been in a deep freeze during three billion of its four and a half billion years of existence. Sagan and Mullen brought attention to the paradox between these theoretical calculations and geological reality by the fact that the oceans had not frozen. This paradox of having a faint sun and ice-free oceans has now been solved."
Why bother? They keep coming up with this stuff and the popular press gobbles it up. They resolved a paradox that never even existed in the first place.Asgard wrote:much to the chagrin of the AGW crowd. lacking any incorporation of the electrical framework though, could these findings be open to further interpretation?
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