Chemistry Feedback

CGH said...

I guess I'm grateful I remembered all that. (Of course, I'm old; when I was studying chemistry there were only 14 elements.) But I have to admit, I would have learned it a lot more easily with this kind of instruction.

Wow. You're a real trooper, still interested enough in chemistry after all these years to take a gander at an intro to organic chemistry on a blog. I've gotten a little tired of it and I just got out of school. I actually thought about writing an entire organic textbook this way. I suppose it probably wouldn't have been viable as a real textbook, since I would not want to actually go through all those tiresome details, definitions and equations, as that would have ruined all the fun. I probably would have just tried to sell it as a study-guide type of thing. Or not sell it, more likely. But I figured it would've helped me land a job as a professor having actually taken the time to write such a thing, even if it wasn't much of a success. I think it is very sad that most folks who end up studying the subject will end up with a head crammed full of facts but will have missed the big picture. That was really the whole point of that particular post. I think that if you understand that very basic principle, you've pretty much got 80% of the concepts in organic chemistry. Yes, you'll have to go through all the details, but that one, simple concept will explain about 80% of what you see. Per Mackay & Ben:

Good to see you getting back to your roots, but what brought on such a random (but very enlightening) post?

A couple of weeks ago, I put up a poll and asked what folks would like to see more of. Somebody responded "chemistry," so I obliged them. Part of the motivation for starting the blog was to have a place to post my thoughts and generate chunks of text that I might one day want to compile for some larger project. I'd had the idea in mind for awhile, and since I got the chemistry request, I just pounded it out. Fun stuff! Maybe I'll do another "chapter" soon. Right now, I feel a bit behind because I've been out of town for a couple of days, and a lot of important stuff has happened in the markets that I've not been able to post on. I'm one busy something-or-other these days...

Why I Do Not Believe in Global Warming

I was going to write a post about why I do not believe in global warming. I was going to write about how I did not think the phenomenon was even physically possible. I was going to say that of the various wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation that can be absorbed by carbon dioxide, only the IR absorbance was important, and that even at the low present concentrations, these absorbances would be completely saturated. Therefore, since the atmosphere is completely opaque to these wavelengths at this point anyway, any increase in carbon dioxide, even a drastic increase, would have little to no effect on the temperature of the atmosphere. I was going to say these things, and write a really cool post about the various bond stretches, bends and rotations, and a bit about the physical phenomena of how they work, when I went online to look up the values so I could write up the post and make a few back-of-the-envelope calculations. There I found that somebody has already beaten me to it. (For a look at the physics of the process, see here.) Fantastic analysis. Probably too many big words for most folks, but very thorough and convincing nonetheless, without getting into all the overbearing and naseatingly overdone academic language that makes me want to vomit. He found exactly what I was expecting from Beer's Law: the energy absorbance would increase rapidly, then flatten out as carbon dioxide concentrations increased, and present conditions would indicate that we are already so far up the curve that the energy response is flat. So it doesn't matter how much carbon dioxide we put out there. The effect is already saturated. I would also make another note: many anti-environmentalist types like to argue that carbon dioxide is so small a fraction of the atmosphere, that doubling it would still be a tiny change in concentration so it wouldn't matter. This is actually backwards! The lower the concentration, the larger the effect that results from a change. This is one reason that gasses like methane actually would matter a lot: their present concentration is so very small, that some of that radiation can still escape without being converted to kinetic (thermal) energy. Increasing the concentration would keep some fraction of this energy from escaping. So they were really arguing for the other side, its just that neither side really understood the physical phenomenon. At any rate, eventually we would suffocate ourselves with too much carbon dioxide, but that threshold is a very long way away. We are actually quite safe. Global warming is not real folks. Let's move on to the next manufactured crisis.