How do blankets keep us warm

When I climb in, I use it to warm it up…the temp usually lasts all night. I do the same thing when I travel internationally as well. Works well for me.

Hi Suzanne That is a funny coincidence! But if if helps preheat the bed enough to sleep, why not? Hi Ethan Green! Thanks for sharing such amazing tips! I will use those warmer blankets for my cozy winter nights. That too with cotton and wool filling inside for sure! Keep writing informative stuff! All the best for your future posts :. Hi Sakshi Thanks for your kind words. I hope this next winter is warmer for you now:- Regards Ethan.

Hi there Unfortunately, heated bedding does have a historical reputation for being problematic. Or as you quite rightly point out — just keep it simple, throw on some extra layers and let your body heat do the work! Hi Kaily Multiple layers is always an option if you have extra bedding — if not, an extra layer can be bought inexpensively if necessary. Clutching each other only lasts so long, until the need for an appropriately comfortable sleep temperature wins through.

Cuddle up with water bottles, PJs, brushed cotton instead. Or a dog, which is notably missing from the list. The water bottle idea is smart and cheap. Hi Luna Is there any way you can get it fixed, or get a new heater? Do you just have that one heater in the bedroom and no central heating system?

How about getting your partner to go to bed 10 minutes earlier on your side of the bed, and then politely ask them to move over so you can enjoy the warm feeling they just made for you?

Put hand towel soaked thoroughly with water, wring it out, fold it and put it into a zipper gallon freezer bag open, place in microwave for minutes, carefully pull out and zip closed, put in an old pillowcase and tuck into the bed to warm your toes. Hi Shirley Thanks for your comment. This sounds like a DIY hot water bottle! Thanks for the tips. It feels nice and toasty within moments of getting in bed. Hi Melissa Thanks for sharing your thoughts — natural materials are often the best way to go.

Regard Ethan. Leave a hot water bottle under your bed sheets till you want to get in, and sometimes even put a fluffy blanket as your bottom sheet it makes me feel so much more comfortable and sleepy. I always have a great night sleep when I do these things hope it helps some of you guys have a lovely day xx.

Hi Lilly Thanks for your suggestions — both very good ones! I was freezing last night and searched for some suggestions for warming your bed. After reading ur suggestions I added a fleece blanket today as an extra bed sheet on top of my fitted sheet. Or, hasn't the earth been warming since the last ice age?

How did man do that one? Not to mention all the just plain bad science we have to deal with daily. Daily temps are up because nightly temps are up, in populated areas. What about the unpopulated areas? NASA has without trumpets blaring a thermal model that indicates the global temp increase is less than one third of what popular science claims.

So, who is correct? Conserve, recycle, re-use and give it up. Man is to infinitesimal to damage the earth, we can only destroy ourselves. Tristan 75 The energy going out can't decrease. I made an error in my analysis For the Venus system to work, some solar energy needs to make it to the surface. Not much does. Still, this is more than enough to power the adiabatic lapse rate.

Some energy will be transferred upward via radiation instead of adiabatic expansion, but not much, and it will be frequency specific. If we're talking about Global Warming, then CO2 emissions are the only issue.

Not exactly, coal generates slightly more C02 than oil. Natural gas about half as much. Just as importantly, you shouldn't over simplify, the fuel you choose has effects apart from GW, coal is generally worse than oil in terms of overall pollution, so I want to distinguish between oil and coal as a result.

Until now, I guess. I could keep going but you get the picture. Rather than being a drain, this kind of approach would most likely be a net benefit to the economy. Except for the lizard people running the government, and the fact that the truthers planted Obama's birth certificate in Roswell, I don't go much for conspiracy theories.

Take these for what they're worth, the photons they are written on metaphorically. Yes methane is also a green house gas. We do use it currently and it contributes to GW. So it's a step in the right direction. My guess is that reducing carbon emissions won't be via one big break through, but, lots of smaller steps. Even so a fusion powered flying car would be nice.

Hans well, there's your problem. This increase in temperature in turn increases the rate of energy out; the temperature will thus increase to eventually reach a new equilibrium where the rate of output once again equals the rate of input. Solar and wind are excellent replacements and, since the supply more closely matches demand, we don't need the overproduction of energy to have a load-match reserve to spin up on demand to anywhere near the same degree, reducing our "nameplate capacity" even further.

The only problem for the man-in-the-street with renewables is that they appear to be eco-hippy nonsens and that won't do: if they agree to these power sources, they'd be agreeing with eco hippies!!! Part of the reason is that we're moving away from the sun over the recent centuries. Another part is that it is a lesser effect than the location of the landmasses at aphelion and perihelion. No, we're leaving the last ice age and are due as in long past the midway point of transition to enter a new ice age.

The other reason why not is that the temperature doesn't rise "because we're leaving an ice age", the causation is "we leave an ice age because temperatures are increasing".

He didn't. However, there is evidence of species extinction millions of years before man. So how did man mange to make the Dodo extinct? Yes, indeed. However, you seem to have not only brought that bad science into your life, you're also ensuring its promulgation in your post. The actual figures don't accord to that either: the power of a bigger turbine goes up faster than the shadow does.

And how does that heat capacitor work? It radiates energy. To the earth and outside, whereas before, without a "capacitor", the earth just radiated outside. But we're putting energy into the earth's thermal resevior: it's called "the sun's radiation".

You may have noticed it, it's the big burny hot bright thing in the sky during the daytime. Why not? The earth was getting the sun's radiation before and now it's getting the sun's radiation AND the atmosphere's radiation. You just said that a sentence earlier, in plain old black and white! The closest I can render it into actual sense is: "where you do think the energy above that from the sun comes from? Therefore that extra radiated energy above that produced by the sun comes from the atmosphere surrounding the earth.

Remember, Venus is quite a lot closer to the sun than we are, and the images from the venera craft show quite a lot of daytime brightness:. In post 20 I asked the question what were the emotive forces that drive denial of climate change. Predictably the Atheist Fundamentalists tried to blame religion.

But knee jerk responses like this are not useful discussion. This book describes how corporations have mobilised contrarian scientists to sow doubt in the public mind on a variety of issues, the latest of which is climate change. The book devotes a lot of material to the climate change denialists and is important for understanding the reasons for public distrust of climate change.

You then inferred please correct if you make no such inference that religion could NOT be the reason why people deny AGW. If this is a problem for you, I would suggest that you take up my challenge and explain why AGW denial which has had senators in the USA say that AGW was false because God promised in the chapter about the Great Flood that there would be no more flooding.

You will need all the luck and ignorance you can find to manage that, but I wish you all the best in that endeavour. This book describes how corporations have mobilised contrarian scientists to sow doubt in the public mind". Maybe the problem you have, psmith, is that you asked for reasons why people deny AGW as merely a rhetorical device and do not, in actual fact, want to know why. I've heard both religious and non-religious individuals deny climate change; the religious ones will state something to the effect of "God gave us dominion over the Earth so we can do what we like.

I have scientist colleagues who also deny climate change, and their "rationale" seems to be that they don't want to have to change their behavior. Even many of those who do accept climate change science and predictions resist modifying their behavior, particularly if it involves giving something up, or making life less convenient.

No one wants to give up frequent air travel, which has a huge carbon footprint, if it's a significant component of their job, or if they just enjoy jetting around the globe for meetings and vacations. Public transportation is not a viable option for me, and I'm not willing to cycle the seven miles to work and back, because there are loads of traffic and no bike lanes and it's been eleventy hundred degrees here for the last several months.

So I continue to drive my old though well-maintained Honda to and from work each day. But I can see how my relatively short compared to others in this area commute is not sustainable in the long run, when everyone else is doing the same. If the quantity of heat radiated has to go up because the Earth's surface is receiving more heat from the Sun plus re-radiated from the atmosphere , then the temperature of the Earth has to go up to radiate more heat in the same amount of time.

The temperature of space is staying the same, the temperature of the Earth must go up. Seven miles is about as far as I'd be prepared to do a little further if it's fairly flat. And most people will manage a one-hour or even nearly 2-hour commute, so it seems like minutes if you're actually doing the work is acceptable, yes? Until americans realise that sometimes they HAVE to be told what to do. Not because they can't or won't do it, but that so many others will wait until someone else does before they do it, so everyone's in gridlock.

If they'd been less proud of a pioneer spirit, their lack in this regard might be more acceptable, but when one proclaims independence but reneges on the consequences, it's rather hypocritical. This isn't to say that any other first worlder isn't able to improve immensely, but the USA has a sort of hate-on for changing for the sake of others. An example is the resistance to using a "clothesline" to dry their clothes in the USA.

I use it when absolutely necessary i. I've run out and need a clean set of clothes in a hurry in winter, when it takes a couple of days to dry off. Stunned amazement that a "clothesline" can dry clothes in anything like an acceptable time is the response for the vast majority of americans. Almost no one denies the former, it's like evolution.

The current "debate" in any reasonable sense isn't about those basics, it's "how much" effect extra ingredients in the atmosphere have, how much other things like cloud changes can modify that, feedbacks, etc.

You should realize that. The Moon is colder on average integrated temperature over time over area than the Earth, even at same distance from Sun. Doesn't that tell you something? Mike: Analysis of gas bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice cores prove that the current atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are higher than they've been at any point in the past , years. Completely swamping any consideration of the so-called MWP and so-called LIA, each of which have not to my knowledge been demonstrated to have stretched beyond northern Europe anyway.

Oded: Consider this. What will happen to the price of oil in the near future? We have passed peak oil; we are in a global recession. If the economy picks up, and Brazil's, China's, and India's growing middle class continue to want middle class luxuries, what happens to oil as it gets more difficult to produce and the demand increases?

Now, please consider what happens to the price of wind and solar as the technology spreads, and demand increases - the economy of scale. As for nuclear, it is as expensive as ever. Nobody has been blocking nuclear development - not in the US anyway.

It's too expensive for sane investors to gamble on. The cheaper path means moving to renewables ASAP. And of course, this has been covered in some posts there is the price we all pay by a downgraded environment. Last month, in August, the US has already seen a record set on the price of damage done by weather events.

And that was before Irene I live in the border between wet and dry areas of the US; we have so far seen minimal effects of global warming here. But - ironically - the Texans are subsidizing, through drought and heat and loss of cattle and crops, the cheap gasoline that I burn in my daily commute to work.

I'd rather subsidize, through taxes, their transition to solar. They have lots of sun. The USA has been blocking nuclear development all over the globe. Iran, North Korea, etc. Heck, one complaint against Iraq having nuclear power was "They have so much oil! They don't need nuclear obviously, so therefore there is a sinister motive! Where and how can radiation be captured as radiation? It's the matter in the ocean where energy is accumulating.

The radiation can't be accumulating in the atmosphere. For radiation it's a system with multiple layers that differ in temperature. When adding layers, existing layers rise in temperature forced by the flux and preventing energy from accumulating.

Right, all in all the temperature of the effective layer has to go up. This layer is somewhere in Ta, and Ts does not change. That is what I said in the beginning. Wow, cast aside the dogmatism of Atheist Fundamentalism and follow the evidence. Read the Merchants of Doubt and be surprised. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have meticulously assembled the evidence and created a carefully reasoned case. We need to understand the reasons for opposition to climate change so that we can dismantle the objections.

Clinging to outdated arguments about religion might satisfy some argumentative instinct but it is wholly ineffective when dealing with the problems of climate change. No, radiation behaves the same for every layer to layer in the system.

I started with this one in particular because it's the heat source. Indeed that's it, it's the energy the ocean body absorbs and that holds thermal heat that. So you see Ts is not strictly set by a radiation balance. Hans, you seem hopelessly confused. Yes, the top of the atmosphere where the radiation released is no longer reabsorbed is the obvious place to apply a radiation balance between Earth and space.

Energy gets to that point from the Earth's surface by a combination of convection, conduction and radiation. Increasing opacity to IR does two things: 1: increases the height of the effective radiating layer, and so increasing the distance that convection and conduction have to work over; and 2: reduces the rate at which radiation can transfer energy from the ground to this layer.

So, the surface warms up - not because the atmosphere is absorbing all the energy, but because it's acting as an insulator reducing the rate at which the surface can shed energy. An analogy: a lightbulb does not generate energy.

It takes energy in this case electricity from outside, and converts it to heat which it radiates away as a combination of visible and infrared light. What do you think would happen to the temperature of the lightbulb filament if you were to wrap the bulb in reflective foil insulation? The atmosphere is not generating energy. It holds thermal energy, so again this prevents us from looking at the system as a pure radiative balance. Radiation by itself cannot accumulate. That is just what i'm pointing at.

Look at the last part 74, and it's not just the atmosphere but even moere the ocean. There's no need to worry about oil and natural gas running out, with peak oil already happened and peak gas probably already happened, and consumption of both skyrocketing as countries such as China and India industrialise to gain the 'good life' the West has enjoyed for so long because of the abundant cheap energy.

When the oil and gas runs out, we can just stick a lump of coal in the gas tanks of our cars, trucks and ships, and everything will be fine We started with blankets which keep you warm.

A blanket keeps you warm because the hotter air is kept around the body closely. The hotter molecules are bounced back from the blanket. There is an amount of energy loss involving radiation here, but it is not the main reason for keeping you warm if the temperature differences are not too great. Our body can compensate for the radiation loss.

It is not the refection or insulation of a blanket that keeps you warm. Suppressing convection is more important here. The slowing of transport of heat is not caused by a change of "speed" of any photons involved.

There is a mechanism at work here that translates molecular energy absorption photons to movement on macro scale. Photon exchanges are delayed that way by collisionless kinetics between molecules. T1 is the temperature of the earth. T2 is the temperature of the atmosphere. Therefore, the cooler atmosphere is warming the ground. Well, the ocean is cooler than the air, but you seem happy to consider that the ocean is warming the land here.

I did. Your statement "The radiation can't be accumulating in the atmosphere. It is accumulating in the atmosphere. This is called "air temperature rising". And doesn't have anything to disprove my statement.

You know you've got nothing so you're pretending to have answered when you have completely made stuff up. Yes, and it lets go of it through radiation, for example. And at the top, there's ONLY radiation to lose that thermal energy through. I get how an atmosphere traps heat-- heat trying to escape Earth to space is delayed, and scattered in random directions some back at Earth.

I don't really get how CO2 changes this. Is it somehow changing the ratio of heat radiated out vs back in, or is it just holding the heat longer before re-radiating? Key point: Wide range of wavelengths on the input side; narrow range of wavelengths on the output side. Now, let's say you surround that airless body with something that absorbs energy in the infrared range a lot better than it absorbs energy in the visible range.

If you do that, it's going to affect the output side a lot more than it does the input side, right? So with an infrared-specialized 'blanket' around your airless body, that airless body is going to get pretty much the same amount of energy input, but its energy output is going to drop.

Same energy in, plus less energy out, equals the airless body keeping more energy to itself, hence that airless body will get hotter. As it happens, CO2 is something that absorbs infrared-wavelength energy a lot better than it does visible-wavelength energy. So the more CO2 there is in Earth's atmosphere, the more infrared-wavelength energy gets trapped, hence the hotter Earth gets. Does that clarify things, BlackFlag? Anthropogenic global warming cannot be proven for a hundred different reasons.

The earth is not a laboratory and there are no controls for the experiment. I am a scientist and I know lots of other scientists who are just as skeptical. The science is not settled. Popular opinion on global warming seems fanatical. If we were truly objective, we would not quash opinions that we don't agree with but would instead try to present a scientific proof for our position.

It cannot be done. Venus: Bond Albedo 0. Earth: Bond Albedo 0. Wind generation always needs higher nameplate capacity than fuel-powered generators if it is going to replace them. Radiation is intercepted by CO2. When it's reradiated, it can go in any direction, including straight back. Without that GHG in the way, the radiation goes straight out.

The pressure cannot cause temperature to maintain. As any schoolboy scientist knows, when you increase the pressure on a body of gas, the volume decreases and that adiabatic contraction and expansion causes no change in temperature. You are NOT a scientist and your assertion that other scientists are similarly "skeptical" is false.

So the correlation is so good that storage schemes are necessary? Doesn't sound like quite good correlation to me. Asking other generators to vary their output doesn't sound like quite good correlation either. Pity that you couldn't actually think, but rather used your "gut instinct" rather than your brain. Nuclear power? Ask San Diego. Or France. So what do you think the average output of a wind turbine is compared with its nameplate? And the reliable output is less than the average.

While you gave no citation and here are yet again asserting that the citation is irrelevant. Did you even look at the Greenman Video?

He gives the names of the primary sources. And since wind is hugely over supplied, so what if we have to build twice as much nameplate power? You're getting nothing from by brain because you don't like the facts, not because there are no facts at all.

Space is not 'cold'. Not in the sense we mean it any way. There is no thermal radiation in space and planets do NOT radiate heat into space unless they have and are losing their atmosphere.

Mercury's side gets cold because the heat is absorbed by the planet and Mercury's day is very long so the dark side doesn't get hot while it radiates the heat inward. I'm sure the author is aware of this but I saw no explanation of this in the article and using the term 'radiates' may be confusing to a layman because the way it's used colloquially refers to heat transfer via motion convection.

Indeed heat is all objects in vacuum SLOWLY lose heat via electromagnetic radiation infra red for lower temps, visible light for medium to higher temps and ultraviolet for the highest energies. In other words to put my point into perspective, if you were launched into space without a suit and survived you would feel comfortable temperature wise and would feel 'cold at all'.

Which would only happen after your body heat was 'radiated' away as infrared light. By esiegel on August 30, In the pines, in the pines, where the Sun don't ever shine, I'll shiver the whole night through. Image credit: Origin unknown; retrieved from Running on Words. Image credit: Hive Studios and National Geographic. Image credit: T. Everth, retrieved from S. Image credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Image credit: Magda Wojtyra. More like this.

Cue the denialists in 7 posts my best estimate But it does make me wonder how much influence the oxygen catastrophe had on early climate. Hans, But Venus still gets heat, both from its core and from the Sun, it's just lousy at radiating it away. Hans, on cue, is the first idiot to turn up. PeterC: The two biggest errors of that type I hate for my stat students to make: "loose" instead of "lose" Using an apostrophe to say essentially "Look out, here comes an s" instead of its proper use Sorry for the off-topic comment Ethan.

Well, the challenge is on: will Hans admit to his mistake? Hans, Car. Hot summer day. Hans, You are doing the calculation for an object without an atmosphere and getting Ts. Dean Surely that should be "look out, here come's an s"? Tangentially First the global warming denialists, taught by the wonderful ExxonMobile funded denialists who were, cough, scientists, railed that global warming was a fraud.

TO 21 From your post I gather you're in favor of continuing on the current course of burning fossil fuel; actually oil, I hope you're not advocating coal. I think we can conserve energy and maintain a high standard of living and a powerful economy. It covers the earth. An earth that is in a colder universe, just as our pale pink bodies are in a colder atmosphere. If we blanketed the sun, we would not be able to get as much heat from the sun and we'd COOL. Any body above absolute zero radiates energy.

And that cooler atmosphere will radiate to the warmer earth. What happens when you increase the thermal energy input into a body, Hans? For most. I'm Against It! But the biggest single one is the desire to be blameless. They offer huge amount of energy, very cheaply" As long as you don't clean up. Tell me, how much is your life, and the life of your extended family, worth? How cheap is life to you? See also the reducing life expectancy in the USA.

The change isn't oil, it's science, and for life sciences here in particular. Also look at Fukishama. Look up the Stern Report. Problem solved. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences of the Roman Catholic Church issued this statement: We call on all people and nations to recognise the serious and potentially irreversible impacts of global warming caused by the anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants, and by changes in forests, wetlands, grasslands, and other land uses.

You asked what makes the people themselves deny AGW. The reason for a large number of them is Religion. To Bill, 24 Looks like you're mixing several different issues together in a confusing way.

See this report The Church of England has used a meeting of global faith leaders and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to launch an environmental strategy for the next seven years.

Note also that Catholics are by far the largest Christian denomination. They are by far one among hundreds. They are also ignored by those against evolution. So why is that? I say religion. He's merely the pope. Note too that their religion and the pope are not the same thing. That's why I'm having this discussion. I am very interested in the solutions. You've described the greenhouse effect. Holy shit! Juice is a fucking moron! Juice 43, Not being a climate scientist myself and not being interested in becoming one , I can only listen to what those who do the climate modeling professionally have to say.

Mike: The majority of papers during the 70's were actually about climate change and warming. Computer Models: You have a fine opinion, which has no scientific basis. JayK I trust your point about the 70s. So do you all think I am whacked? JayK: I read the article at www. Several things I would add: 1. It slows the transfer of heat absorbed by the earth's surface from radiating away into space 6.

You just prefer to point that garbage at the wrong target. Prove it's not changing the temperatures this time when it has done so in the past. Oh, that's right: flooded. The link I gave you earlier shows how the cost has gone down. So your requirements would be 10 trillion dollars. A one-off payment, mind. That's less than one fossil fuel company's turnover for a year! When only one option remains, there's no need to promote it directly. Heat doesn't transfer through the blankets very well, they keep the heat from getting out.

The colder the surroundings are, the more insulation you need to keep your body heat from escaping too fast, hence the blankets job is to slow down heat transfer, which prevents your body heat from being lost to the air around you.

That allows your own body heat to keep you warm. Snuggle-Up Blanket - Ultra soft fleece, both sides brushed and Waffle Blanket - Versatile Egyptian cotton blanket, adaptable yet stylish New Well-Tuff Seating Collection. LinkedIn Twitter Facebook.