The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #157162   Message #3709233
Posted By: Steve Shaw
16-May-15 - 06:45 AM
Thread Name: BS: What amazes you?
Subject: RE: BS: What amazes you?
Well, there a fluffy little cumulus cloud in the sky over my house. The parameters that needed in to be in place in order to achieve its precise conformation are many and complex. The air temperature at different levels, the relative humidity and dew point, the intensity of the insolation of the ground in relation to the simultaneous radiative cooling, the albedo of the surface, the soil moisture content, the saturated adiabatic, unsaturated adiabatic and environmental lapse rates, the surface wind speed and direction, atmospheric turbulence, gustiness, the effects of wind shear, boundary layer physics, any shade provided by higher clouds, the topography on the ground and the presence of irregularities and obstructions to air flow, and stuff I've forgotten. And there's a lot going on in that cloud. Upcurrents, downcurrents, turbulence, evaporation and condensation, release and trapping of latent heat, heat exchange with the surrounding air via conduction, convection and radiation, the ever-changing dynamics of shade and insolation, coalescence of droplets around nuclei, electrostatic effects, and stuff I've forgotten. It's amazing. It's unique. There has never been a cloud exactly like it and there will never be another exactly the same. There are billions of possible combinations of conditions, but as I saw that cloud as a snapshot of its short life all the conditions were just so and they will never come together in that way again. But it's not magic. Actually, it's quite ordinary. It was a very pretty cloud, but no planning, fine-tuning or higher power was needed in its manufacture. There is no reason, except in the minds of the delusional, that there is anything particularly special about a set of conditions coming together. For all we know, millions of times before they might not quite have come together in just the right way, so this could just be our lucky day. Like that egg and sperm getting lucky.