Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #652
9 hours ago Guest Blogger
The Week That Was: 2025-08-02 (August 2, 2025)
Brought to You by SEPP (
www.SEPP.org)
The Science and Environmental Policy Project
Quote of the Week: “The entire world we apprehend through our senses is no more than a tiny fragment in the vastness of Nature.” — Max Planck, The Universe in the Light of Modern Physics (1931)
Number of the Week: 50 to 100 km (30 to 60 miles) equals one divided by ten quadrillion in cm (or 1 divided by 4 quadrillion in inches)?
THIS WEEK:
By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
Scope: TWTW begins a third discussion of a paper by Howard Hayden on the difference between “climate science” and understanding the greenhouse effect. TWTW then discusses an announcement by the administrator of the EPA and a surprise report by the Secretary of the Department of Energy. TWTW then discusses comments by Judith Curry and Roy Spencer who worked on a new report by DOE. TWTW concludes with part of a statement published in the Federal Register.
*********************
A Few Notes (Part 3): Last week’s discussion of the paper by SEPP Director, Professor of Physics emeritus Howard “Cork” Hayden got into an introduction of the Greenhouse Effect as it is currently understood by Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) physicists such as Hayden. This enters into the field of Quantum Theory which is very different from classical physics.
According to the Britannica entry for Quantum:
“In physics, discrete natural unit, or packet, of energy, charge, angular momentum, or other physical property. Light, for example, appearing in some respects as a continuous electromagnetic wave, on the submicroscopic level is emitted and absorbed in discrete amounts, or quanta; and for light of a given wavelength, the magnitude of all the quanta emitted or absorbed is the same in both energy and momentum. These particle-like packets of light are called photons, a term also applicable to quanta of other forms of electromagnetic energy such as X rays and gamma rays. Submicroscopic mechanical vibrations in the layers of atoms comprising crystals also give up or take on energy and momentum in quanta called phonons.
All phenomena in submicroscopic systems (the realm of quantum mechanics) exhibit quantization: observable quantities are restricted to a natural set of discrete values. When the values are multiples of a constant least amount, that amount is referred to as a quantum of the observable. Thus, Planck’s constant h is the quantum of action, and ℏ (i.e., h/2π) is the quantum of angular momentum, or spin.” [Boldface added.]
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/08/04/weekly-climate-and-energy-news-roundup-652/
