With opportunities to spread disinformation about COVID and vaccines diminishing, CBS falls back on the old standby
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“Severe weather increases chances of turbulence, and due to climate change, these kinds of incidents will only continue to grow," Taylor Garland, spokesperson for the Association of Flight Attendants, told CBS News.
Citing the head of the stewardess's union as its expert, CBS blames air turbulence on global warming
Other scientists, albeit non-union, might beg to differ:
“When I meet God,” physicist Werner Heisenberg allegedly once said, “I’m going to ask him two questions: why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he’ll have an answer for the first.”
Although the quote is almost certainly fictional, it captures the sheer frustration many physicists feel about turbulence: the complex, chaotic, unpredictable flows in fluids.
This phenomenon surrounds us: swirling gases in the atmosphere disrupting our flights; the movement of rivers around rocks; the flow of blood through our arteries. We also see it on cosmic scales, explains quantum physicist Warwick Bowen from the University of Queensland (UQ), from gas flowing in galaxy clusters to the Great Red Spot – a massive cyclone on Jupiter.
…. “There’s a natural tendency in physics for structures that are large to break down into smaller structures and eventually disappear,” he says. “But it seems that in the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, that doesn’t happen – these large structures are stable over very long periods of time.”
And we still don’t know why. Turbulence has always been too complex to accurately analyse or even measure. Even after centuries of study, physicists have no general theoretical description of it – it’s been described as the last great outstanding problem of classical physics.
According to Bowen, who wrestles with very tiny turbulent systems in his lab in Brisbane, this gaping hole in theory is “kind of crazy”.
The most commonly used equations to describe fluid flow were first developed by Swiss polymath Leonhard Euler in 1757. But in the intervening 300 years, no one has managed to solve the equations to describe realistic conditions. They rapidly become unstable and intractably tangled, for the same reason it’s difficult to precisely predict the weather: very small changes have enormous effects, so an infinitesimal inaccuracy could throw off predictions of the system’s evolution.
“We don’t even know if there are unique solutions to the problem of turbulence at all, or whether it can be solved,” Bowen admits.
I know who I’d believe, but fewer Americans are going to look for information from people who might know something about a subject than will rely on the Dan Rather network.
