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| La Vie est Belle |
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| Thursday, 17 April 2008 | |
Barry Cornell gets a lesson in global warming Have you noticed that when it’s really hot the British still tend to talk in terms of degrees Fahrenheit – “Whew, it’s in the nineties” – while on bitterly cold days they revert to Celsius and complain that it’s minus two or minus six, but never say “Brrr, it’s twenty eight outside”? I suppose this ambivalence reflects our attitude to Europe in general. After five years in France I still haven’t come to terms with expressing my car’s fuel consumption the French way, in litres per hundred kilometres, and instead go through a complicated mathematical conversion exercise to change it into good old miles per gallon. And all so that I can boast that my C3 gets 612 mpg (maths was never my strong point). My wife tells me I embarrass her in the supermarket, staring at the carrots and chanting in a stage whisper: “Two and a quarter pounds of jam, weighs about a kilogram”, or else examining a bottle of fruit juice and solemnly reciting “A litre of water’s a pint and three quarters”. I suppose anyone listening will deduce, correctly, that I am either an ex-teacher or a nutter. Or both. But back to temperature. My brother-in-law Malcolm has been staying with us. He is a scientist and therefore extremely knowledgeable about How Things Work. It was Malcolm who many years ago diagnosed the fault on my Mini as a “cracked vermiculite shroud”, and Malcolm who explained to me, over the course of a fortnight, Why We Have Sunsets. You know what I mean. Malcolm is Wikipedia on legs. Well I have learnt, by bitter experience, not to ask any questions which might give rise to a Malcolmised answer. If I want to know why water freezes, or why smoke rises, or why planes fly, I ask my wife, who in her role as an Infants Teacher was often confronted by such queries. She would simply say “It’s just magic”. This always seemed to satisfy her five-year-olds and of course it meant they – and she – didn’t have to learn National Curriculum Science. A generation of schoolchildren in County Durham have as a result grown into! adults who believe devoutly in the supernatural, mysticism and Paul Daniels. But I slipped up the other day. Malcolm and I were enjoying a beer on the patio and even though it was February it was a beautiful day, with warm sunshine and an almost scientifically blue sky. I glanced at the thermometer on the patio and casually remarked “Heavens, look at that: middle of February and it’s 88 degrees!” I knew instantly I’d messed up. Malcolm was out of his seat in what he would call a nanosecond and staring at my thermometer, a maniacal, scientific gleam in his eye. “No it’s not,” he said triumphantly. I cringed – I was going to pay dearly for my slip. “You see, Barry, your thermometer is in direct sunlight and is thus experiencing an effect called diathermancy – known to the man in the street as the greenhouse effect.” “Yes of course,” I interjected in a Midas-like attempt to stem the impending tide of scientific information. “How about another beer?” But Malcolm had started and he was going to finish. “Infra-red radiation from the sun is short-wavelength because it comes from a high-temperature source: the surface temperature of the sun is approximately 6,000 degrees Celsius.” Here he paused for dramatic effect and by way of an aside threw in: “The core temperature, incidentally, is thought to be between 14 and 20 million degrees, which is how it can maintain the fusion reaction between nuclei of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium, which is the process by which all stars produce their heat and light.” I stared, fascinated, at two lizards copulating, or arm-wrestling – it’s difficult to tell with lizards – in the warm/hot/boiling February sunshine. “Short-wavelength IR (yes, I’ll have another beer, thanks) can pass through the glass bulb of your thermometer, raising the temperature of the thermometric liquid – which is probably an alcohol stained with red dye because water would be no good due to its anomalous behaviour in the 0 to 4 degrees Celsius range.” I wondered about diverting him towards the reproductive system of lizards but thought better of it. And then I thought of maybe feigning a blood clot but thought better of that too. “The alcohol is now warmer than the ambient temperature…” He looked at me as if expecting a response and I was just about to mumble something about vermiculite shrouds (I’ve never forgotten that lesson), when he resumed “…so it tries to radiate IR to those cooler surroundings.” Can you believe it? The bloody lizards were at it again but this time there were three of them and a fourth looking decidedly frisky. Group arm-wrestling, I suppose you’d call it. “Because the alcohol is a low-temperature source, it radiates long-wavelength IR which does not pass so well through the glass.” What would John Cleese have done? Pass out? Die? Set about Malcolm with the garden rake? But Malcolm was warming, if you’ll forgive the pun, to his task. “In consequence, the temperature of the alcohol trapped within the glass enclosure rises.” Yes, I’d noticed my beer was getting warmer. But by now the whole conversation had become somewhat pointless, because the sun had set and it was getting decidedly chilly. My wife appeared with her sister. “Now what have you fellers been talking about?” “Well,” I volunteered, “Malcolm’s just explained why our thermometer isn’t accurate.” “Oh, why is that then?” Malcolm was there in a picosecond this time. “Well you see, Kath, your thermometer is in direct sunlight and…” I think I started to scream but managed to change it into a sort of friendly chuckle. “Basically, what Malcolm means, Kath, I think, is that it’s, er, well, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s, um, well, it’s magic!” |
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