On 2010/11/24, at 08:00 , Norman & Nancy Werling wrote: > The Sunday New York Times of November 14. 2010 featured an article entitled > Earth's Future in Glacial Ice by Justine Gullis from Tashlaq, Greenland. > > It began on page 1 and concluded on page 15 with a map of Greenland including > various charts and tables. One such table was for the Helheim Glacier on > Greenland's east coast showing water temperatures for the fall of 2008. Of > course, he used Fahrenheit with calibrations of 32º, 33 3/4º, 35 1/2º, 37 > 1/2º, and 39 1/4º. I've certainly never seen someone use calibrations of > degrees for temperatures in halves and fourths. > > I'm quite certain that scientists would have measured these in ºC. Obviously > when one works back the true measures in ºC would undoubtedly have been 0 ºC, > 1 ºC, 2 ºC, 3 ºC, and 4 ºC. > > Norman Werling
Dear Norman, The sad part of this "hidden metric" is that journalists and politicians will now try to use the complexificationised Fahrenheit data when they are making decisions about such things as "peak energy", "peak oil", "the greenhouse effect", "global warming" and "climate change". I don't know about politicians in the USA, but here in Australia we have a federal parliamentary committee formed to look at "Climate Change". I have been reading their public statements and it is clear that none of the committee members is clear that energy and power are two different physical realities as they use these words interchangeably. I have written to President Obama about this with no noticeable effect; perhaps I will persist! Their other problem is that they are unaware that energy is measured in joules, kilojoules, megajoules, gigajoules, etc. This leaves them wide open to lobbyists who can then obfuscate with the many different energy words listed in this document: See http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/ObamaEnergyPower.pdf With hindsight, I could, and perhaps should, have added this brief history of energy (currently in a draft article): ## Thomas Young first used the word, energy, in its modern sense in 1807. Before that it was referred to as vis viva, but few people understood what it was. Both Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) and Sir Isaac Newton, FRS (1643-1727) had written about energy referring to it as vis viva or by one of the names of the various forms of energy, such as heat or momentum. Gradually, the concept of energy became clearer and we now know that energy can occur in several forms, that these can be transformed from one kind to another, and most importantly, that energy is conserved through all of these transformations. There is no loss of energy – ever. I cannot explain this better than Richard Feynman, a famous physics teacher and Nobel Laureate, who said this about the concept of energy during a lecture at the California Institute of Technology in 1961: There is a fact, or if you wish, a law, governing natural phenomena that are known to date. There is no known exception to this law; it is exact, so far we know. The law is called conservation of energy; it states that there is a certain quantity, which we call energy, that does not change in manifold changes which nature undergoes. That is a most abstract idea, because it is a mathematical principle; it says that there is a numerical quantity, which does not change when something happens. It is not a description of a mechanism, or anything concrete; it is just a strange fact that we can calculate some number, and when we finish watching nature go through her tricks and calculate the number again, it is the same. The Feynman Lectures on Physics: Addison Wesley USA ## And perhaps I might have included some of these thoughts that I sent in a letter to two of our local politicians: http://metricationmatters.com/docs/EnergyPowerDistanceSpeed.pdf Cheers, Pat Naughtin Author of the ebook, Metrication Leaders Guide, see http://metricationmatters.com/MetricationLeadersGuideInfo.html Hear Pat speak at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lshRAPvPZY PO Box 305 Belmont 3216, Geelong, Australia Phone: 61 3 5241 2008 Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has helped thousands of people and hundreds of companies upgrade to the modern metric system smoothly, quickly, and so economically that they now save thousands each year when buying, processing, or selling for their businesses. Pat provides services and resources for many different trades, crafts, and professions for commercial, industrial and government metrication leaders in Asia, Europe, and in the USA. Pat's clients include the Australian Government, Google, NASA, NIST, and the metric associations of Canada, the UK, and the USA. See http://www.metricationmatters.com for more metrication information, contact Pat at [email protected] or to get the free 'Metrication matters' newsletter go to: http://www.metricationmatters.com/newsletter to subscribe.
