Markku's Science

  These are some of my personal musings on the topic: 1. Above all, eat healthy and try to control your weight. What that means in practice, is a bit controversial and I will return to that below. 2. Don’t smoke. It has been anticipated since the 1930s that smoking causes cancer [1] and it has now been confirmed beyond reasonable doubt. 3. Don’t take drugs. Don’t drink too much alcohol. Take vaccines, at least the ones recommended by your government. 4. Exercise. What kind of exercise is the best? They say that to live long, you need exercise which elevates the heart rate for long periods of time, i.e. aerobic training, i.e. cycling, jogging or at the very least, walking. But I have seen several headlines which say that for old people, muscle strength predicts very strongly non-morbidity and longevity. So, it seems that to live long, you need aerobic training, but to live even longer, you need strength training, e.g. gym of crossfit. Ideally, you would combine these two types of tr...

  What happens if we don’t stop burning the fossil fuels? Is it the end of the world? Nobody knows certainly but I wanted to tackle this question with another back-of-the-envelope calculation. Here’s what I found: First, let’s take the same starting point as in the previous post, the climate equation dT = aS - bT^4. If the world is in a thermal equilibrium, dT = 0 and aS = bT^4. From this, we may solve how emissivity b affects the equilibrium temperature. (Remember, the effect of CO2 comes through the emissivity in this model.) We have T = (aS/b)^0.25. Thus, we may conclude that the equilibrium temperature is directly proportional to the power -0.25 of emissivity. In practice, this means that every 1% decrease in emissivity increases the equilibrium temperature by approximately 0.25%. The next question is obviously, how much unlimited burning of fossil fuels affects the emissivity. This is now hardcore speculation, but I chose to model this by using emission spectra. Above, the fir...