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Addiction may play a role in CCD. http://cen.acs.org/articles/93...

That's idiotic. Virtually no science paper about climate change even mentions nuclear power.

And those that do recommend nuclear power as the primary solution. For example: Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power - Because nuclear power is an abundant, low-carbon source of base-load power, it could make a large contribution to mitigation of global climate change and air pollution. Using historical production data, we calculate that global nuclear power has prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2-eq) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that would have resulted from fossil fuel burning. - http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...

“We find that CO2 emissions [during the Cretaceous] resulting from super-plume tectonics could have produced atmospheric CO2 levels from 3.7 to 14.7 times the modern pre-industrial value of 285 ppm.” http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/...

Until the past two centuries, the concentrations of CO2 ... had never exceeded about 280 ppm... Current concentrations of CO2 are about 390 ppm... http://www.acs.org/content/acs...

“We are talking about carbon dioxide levels 6 to 10 times the present carbon dioxide level. When you have high amounts of carbon dioxide in an atmosphere up to a certain limit, which is considerably higher than it is now, the result is green plants grow very much better... And it is precisely at this time that the recovery from the first dinosaur extinction takes place. When the super plumes come and carbon dioxide increases, and the oxygen correspondingly increases as a result of photosynthesis... And yet the super plumes did not last forever and they started to die at the end of Cretaceous.... In any event, large dinosaurs really required to be living in an oxygen tent. An atmosphere in the neighborhood of 35 percent oxygen would be considerably more compatible with large dinosaurs than one in the neighborhood of 28. And so this suggested to me that this was perhaps a significant reason for the first dinosaur extinction, and probably one of the major factors in the second, the terminal dinosaur extinction, other than the birds. It also neatly tied together all of the really bizarre features about the Cretaceous... The Cretaceous is clearly a green house period as opposed to the present ice house that we have... 72 percent of the world's petroleum supply comes from Cretaceous rocks. Well, the rich carbon dioxide of course provides for a much greater biogenic diversity... [The Cretaceous supported] 8 or 9 tropic levels, which cannot be supported today.” http://www.ucl.ac.uk/.../sloan...

“The earth is currently in an icehouse stage, as ice sheets are present on both poles and glacial periods have occurred at regular intervals over the past million years... Earth is more commonly placed in a greenhouse state throughout the epochs, and the Earth has been in this state for approximately 80% of the past 500 million years... Permanent ice is actually a rare phenomenon in the history of the Earth, occurring only during the 20% of the time that the planet is under an icehouse effect.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I found this link in the post. It looks pretty legit. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...

temperature had a bigger effect on particle emission than the extruder temperature.

http://pubs.acs.org/appl/liter...

This implies that a lot of particle emissions are coming from the bed/print interface. What would cause that?

I manage 6 of these machines all tucked into a not particularly well ventilated corner of a room at the makerspace. I'll be taking this seriously.

No, it's to with the fact that diesel engines emit a much higher level of particulates which is having a negative impact on health in very high density urban areas like Paris and London.

No, no they do not, and if you cannot keep up with the news (which we discussed here on slashdot!) then you should not make declarative statements. Gasoline engines produce more PM2.5 than diesels, and that's the stuff that cilia can't sweep out of your lungs and thus what's really harmful.

Gassers put out just as much soot as diesels, but it's the more dangerous kind of soot that you can't see. The fuel is also more volatile and all gassers spit unburned fuel until they enter closed-loop mode. They do that a lot faster these days, but it's still true. Diesels always run lean, they don't have that problem. They have the problem that since they run lean, they produce more NOx. You're upset because you can see the soot, but breathing gasoline does more damage to your lungs.

We're burning gigatonnes of carbon. CO2 levels are rising. Which part do you dispute? There have been lots of studies to determine this. See here, here, and here.

Determining what percentage of the CO2 is from burning fossil fuels is actually easier than you might think; the isotope ratio is much lower for carbon sources that haven't been in the atmosphere for millions of years. Humans burn about one cubic mile of oil per year. Do you really think that has no effect?

There's nothing more squirmy than listening to a Religious Libertarian explain why medicine regulations are evil and somehow there'd magically be fewer deaths or organ damage caused if the Invisible Hand were left unhindered.

I'd like to draw a line between Religious Libertarians and smug physicians and point out that *both* ends of the line cause unnecessary medical suffering.

The themes "do no harm regardless of cost" and "federal agency takes the blame for safety, but not the costs" have driven medical research to a standstill for the last 40 years.

There can be no medicines for afflictions that affect less than a billion people, simply because it takes $1.5 billion to bring a drug to market.

We're running out of antibiotics(*), we've already got diseases which are impervious to *all* antibiotics, and there are no new ones in the horizon.

Someone here (on slashdot) put this into perspective: peanuts would not be allowed under FDA rules.

Let's take peanuts as an example for discussion. Considering that they are easy to grow, and can be nourishing, can we outline an FDA procedure that costs less than $1.5 billion, and yet addresses the issues in a sane manner?

Let's divide this by a factor of 1,000: Can we get good safety regulations for peanuts for under $1.5 million?

I think we could. I'm not a Religious Libertarian, but from a purely mathematical standpoint it's obvious that letting people die because the treatment isn't known safe (absence of evidence is evidence of absence) is less efficient than the middle ground.

Probably more - I think more people die because we don't have working antibiotics than die from complications of supplements.

(*) Note that we've run out of antibiotics *not* because we keep feeding them to livestock, but because it's too expensive to make new ones. If we had 25 separate antibiotics and used them in a staggered pattern 5 years each (5 years of use, followed by 20 years of abstinence) we would never lack for working antibiotics.

The number of death associated to nuclear accidents is so small I would consider it a statistical fluke. In 2013, NASA calculated that "global nuclear power has prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas"

ABS filament for the FDM (melting plastic machine), methacrylates (and photoinitiator compounds, etc) for the stereolithography machine. The original paper in Enviromental Science & Technology Letters is available (with ACS paywall) here.

That's what they figured as well in the paper the published:

If monomers or short-chain polymers are indeed leaching out of STL-printed parts, additional photoinduced polymerization of the 3D-printed part might reduce the amount of these species leaching out of the printed part and thus reduce the toxicity of the part. To test this hypothesis, we exposed STL- printed parts to ultraviolet light ...this UV exposure treatment has a minimal effect on the appearance of the 3D- printed part. Embryos exposed to STL-printed parts that were UV-treated fared much better than embryos exposed to untreated parts

I guess the lesson here is don't stick stuff in your fish tank if you're not certain it's biocompatible...

Interestingly this isn't the first time this happened.. When they first started Isotopic dating there seemed to be no lab pure enough to get the lead out. Even water taken from the widdle of the ocean had the wrong lead isotope ratios. Eventually, years, they realized it was in the air from all the lead in gasoline. The gasoline companies had the guy's funding cut off to suppress this, and trotted out a bunch of "tobacco scientists" to ridicule the guy who discovered it. But eventually this too became fact. Now it's used in reverse, the isotopic ratio of lead is used to track gasoline spill origins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...

Well, here is the link then: Simple Process Creates Near-Perfect Mirrors Out Of A Metamaterial

and mine: Get Free Bitcoin

You might also want to take a look at this post (just came across it with a quick search), which notes that a mainstream projection (in Science Magazine) in 1981 has come in very close to actual warming, but a little lower. Or you could look at this post or this post about projections made in 1990 and 1999 which are also coming out right.

More fundamentally, I'd ask you to take a look at the basics of atmospheric modeling, and point out where you think the mainstream models are wrong. You could start with the American Chemical Society's section on "Atmospheric Warming", particularly the Single-Layer Atmosphere Model and Multi-Layer Atmosphere Model. These are pretty easy to understand, and the underlying principles are at least as well established as the other areas of science we rely on for our high-tech lives. If you can't be bothered to understand the basic physical processes involved, you have no business debating climate science.

You might also want to take a look at this post (just came across it with a quick search), which notes that a mainstream projection (in Science Magazine) in 1981 has come in very close to actual warming, but a little lower. Or you could look at this post or this post about projections made in 1990 and 1999 which are also coming out right.

More fundamentally, I'd ask you to take a look at the basics of atmospheric modeling, and point out where you think the mainstream models are wrong. You could start with the American Chemical Society's section on "Atmospheric Warming", particularly the Single-Layer Atmosphere Model and Multi-Layer Atmosphere Model. These are pretty easy to understand, and the underlying principles are at least as well established as the other areas of science we rely on for our high-tech lives. If you can't be bothered to understand the basic physical processes involved, you have no business debating climate science.

You might also want to take a look at this post (just came across it with a quick search), which notes that a mainstream projection (in Science Magazine) in 1981 has come in very close to actual warming, but a little lower. Or you could look at this post or this post about projections made in 1990 and 1999 which are also coming out right.

More fundamentally, I'd ask you to take a look at the basics of atmospheric modeling, and point out where you think the mainstream models are wrong. You could start with the American Chemical Society's section on "Atmospheric Warming", particularly the Single-Layer Atmosphere Model and Multi-Layer Atmosphere Model. These are pretty easy to understand, and the underlying principles are at least as well established as the other areas of science we rely on for our high-tech lives. If you can't be bothered to understand the basic physical processes involved, you have no business debating climate science.

It's not surprising they didn't know about the side effect given that they aren't even sure how it works to alleviate pain.

"Hydro doesn't release greenhouse gasses"

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...

http://www.climatecentral.org/...

etc etc etc.

This was known about when I studied civil engineering 30 years ago before moving across into electrical/electronics.

Back then the levels weren't known. They've proven surprisingly high.

On top of that, all the easy hydro sites are already tapped out.

A high output voltage and current of about 120 V and 65 microA, respectively, were observed from a nanopatterned PDMS-based WTNG, while an output voltage and current of 30 V and 20 microA were obtained by the non-nanopatterned flat PDMS-based WTNG under the same compressive force

Slashdot crowd, can you hear me? MICROAMPERS! How many decades you need to wear this crap to charge even a small battery? How many shitty articles like this do we need to understand that those korean morons will never come up with anything but insignificant incremental improvements?! How many times do we have to get depressed to realize that University of Wollongong, Australia, is nowhere near top-20 ozzie universities and has never done anything remotely important?

Careless manufacturing and reckless use of nano particle anything could be trouble in the future. But don't worry nothing will happen for 10 or more years

All ready being noted. Not 10 years down the track. Sunscreens as a Source of Hydrogen Peroxide Production in Coastal Waters

Conservative estimates for a Mediterranean beach reveal that tourism activities during a summer day may release on the order of 4 kg of TiO2 nanoparticles to the water and produce an increment in the concentration of H2O2 of 270 nM/day. Our results, together with the data provided by tourism records in the Mediterranean, point to TiO2 nanoparticles as the major oxidizing agent entering coastal waters, with direct ecological consequences on the ecosystem.

Actually, the inclusion of a pentagonal allotropic unit inside a carbon nanotube (just rolled up graphene) was one of the first laboratory examples of a pure carbon semiconductor.

WAAAAY back in 1997
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...

I guess our problem is that CS isn't a stepping stone to jobs in medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, or optometry. Look at the employment breakdown for jobs in "chemical engineering" and you see an 88% male dominated field. But please, tell us more about how we have gender problems.

The fact that CO2 absorbs IR under controlled conditions in your basement means essentially nothing.

Why? Propose a mechanism. If what you're saying is true, there has to be an effect to counter the CO2+H2O forcing. It has to be a large effect since the positive feedback is strong. That should make it easy to find. Go ahead, find the evidence, show us what we're missing.

... look at the increase over the last decade where warming has flatlined while CO2 substantially increased.

I am not aware that the warming has done any such thing, and most of the warmest years on record fall in the last decade. The multi-decadal trend is upwards, in close agreement with theoretical predictions.

Come back to us after you look up what percentage of the earths atmosphere is CO2...

Now here's a fact in search of an argument. Either you're disputing easily-observed facts about CO2, solar irradiance, and radiative physics, or you have to admit that CO2 causes warming. Specifically, all other things being equal, a doubling of CO2 results in about 4 W/m^2 of warming. Since I know you're not going to dispute basic laws of physics, we're back to the top of this post, where you find the term that makes a bunch of positive feedbacks go negative, but only on this planet, and only when it's convenient, and contrary to observations.

From the actual abstract:

Using fleet fractions from previous data sets, we estimated age-adjusted mean emissions increases for the 2013 fleet to be 17–29% higher for carbon monoxide, 9–14% higher for hydrocarbons, 27–30% higher for nitric oxide, and 7–16% higher for ammonia emissions than if historical fleet turnover rates had prevailed.

The article shows that the actual 2013 fleet is dirtier than the hypothetical 2013 fleet where the age distribution matches the 2007 fleet age distribution.

It does not show that the actual 2013 fleet is dirtier than the actual 2007 fleet. It's a question not addressed by this study, but I would be surprised if actual 2013 was dirtier than actual 2007.

The shortened URL resolves to http://cen.acs.org/articles/92...

Nobody's getting rick-rolled. This time.

A new study reports
molecular evidence

Because fuck using URL shorteners when they're unnecessary. It's better to know at least the domain that a link will take you to.

A new study reports
molecular evidence

Because fuck using URL shorteners when they're unnecessary. It's better to know at least the domain that a link will take you to.

Did the oil and gas companies need government money to get started?

Yes.

You'll need a (free) account to get the PDF.

The viral challenge the monkeys were exposed to was sufficient to cause 100% infection. The challenge was DESIGNED to do that.

You could always read the original paper
: A Single Dose Respiratory Recombinant Adenovirus-Based Vaccine Provides Long-Term Protection for Non-Human Primates from Lethal Ebola Infection
  http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...
is a link to the abstract, the full PDF requires a free registration

Actually, the dogs are probably "alerting" on the money itself.

If you don't want to be redirected, go here: http://cen.acs.org/articles/92/web/2014/09/Computers-Heat-Sink-Used-Slash.html Shortened URLs should be banned on Slashdot. Who types in URLs from a website? Just click it or copy+paste.

In addition to the computer and cell phone, the equipment and reagent costs for this new method are $41.50, far less than standard PCR equipment that costs about $19,000. The team hopes their low-cost method will allow diseases such as Chagas to be better monitored and treated in the field.

The takeaway is that PCR equipment sounds far more expensive than it needs to be. Not being a medical professional, I really hope they are more than just adjustable heaters. These guys are putting tiny test tupes into the fins of a CPU heatsink and giving it busy work to change the temperature. A cell phone app is used as the controller.

Clickable version of the link

The results have been replicated many times over. Most recently last month in this paper: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10... . Interestingly, this paper also found that media exposure is higher for those who are skeptical of a significant human influence on climate.

The 97% consensus paper has been replicated numerous times. The scientists own evaluation of the reviewed papers found an even stronger result. Just last month another replication was published: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...

Not sure how accurate this is, since it's from wikipedia, but the reference seems legit.

In 2008, a study of common cleaning products found the presence of carbon tetrachloride in "very high concentrations" (up to 101 mg/m3) as a result of manufacturers' mixing of surfactants or soap with sodium hypochlorite (bleach).[18]

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...

FTA:

"By mixing surfactants or soap with NaOCl, it was shown that the formation of carbon tetrachloride and several other halogenated VOCs is possible"

We've determined equilibrium temperatures in a simple example, so let's solve a more general example.

Jane's concerned that the enclosing plate is bigger than the heated plate. But Earth's mean radius is 6371 km, and the effective radiating level is ~7 km higher, so these surface areas are only ~0.2% different. Of course, in a thought experiment this difference can be made arbitrarily smaller. Despite Jane's protests, this doesn't change the fact that enclosing the heated plate makes it warmer.

More importantly, I treated the plates as blackbodies where absorptivity alpha = 1 and emissivity epsilon = 1. This is a reasonable approximation for plates made of carbon nanotube arrays (PDF) which have alpha = ~0.99955. But more conventional plates have alpha and epsilon considerably less than 1.

The next step is to treat the plates as graybodies where absorptivity and emissivity are independent of wavelength, so they appear gray. Kirchoff's Law states that absorptivity = emissivity for graybodies.

MIT calculates heat transfer between graybody plates using an infinite sum of emission, reflection and absorption. Using my variable names, their final expression is:

net heat flow = sigma*(T_h^4 - T_c^4)/(1/epsilon_h + 1/epsilon_c - 1) (Eq. 2)

(Again, Eq. 2 looks better in LaTeX, but hopefully this version is legible.)

At equilibrium, net heat flow equals the electrical input. Note that MIT's Eq. 2 reduces to my Eq. 1 for blackbodies where epsilon_h = epsilon_c = 1.

Suppose the plates and chamber walls are made of oxidized aluminum with emissivity = 0.11. In this case, Sage solves Eq. 2 for a constant electric input of 29.6 W/m^2, which is lower than before because aluminum doesn't radiate as well as a blackbody.

Using Eq. 2 and the same reasoning as before, fully enclosing the heated plate warms it to the same equilibrium temperature of 235F (386K). Fully exposing the plate to the cosmic microwave background radiation cools it to 13F (263K), which is lower than before because the CMBR is a blackbody and aluminum chamber walls aren't.

So even for graybody plates, MIT's mainstream physics refutes Dr. Latour's nonsensical claim that the enclosed heated plate remains at 150F. They also use this equation to explain how thermos bottles insulate drinks, and describe the same radiation shields used since at least

If you look up the properties of Formic Acid on any Chemistry site and review its compounds and decomposition state you'll see that it dissipates, breaks down, decomposes into Carbon Dioxide and Water.

Actually, here is a link to wikipedia that is actually correct in statement:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Otherwise, here is my source:

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...

See the main paragraph below the introduction in the scanned image.

You can't keep patents secret, that by its nature is contrary to the patent process. You have to disclose how the invention works.

The problem arises in what happens after a patent is acquired by another party and then by another. In some cases quite a few prior patent owners can fog up who actually owns it. In one personal case something I invented and was patented was owned by 8 different companies until it's wound up with the current owner. That's where the mystery comes in and Microsoft does have the right to not disclose any licensing deals with third parties. So it may have licensed to Google for $10 per device while Nikon for $1, but that's the nature of business, which is to make money. If that means inhibiting competition then that's all part of the game.

so close to zero we may as well say zero. But all IT tech together is using a measureable chunk of fossil fuel. All IT together is about ten percent of electrical consumption, and fossil fuel is used in two-thirds of all electricity production, and forty percent of fossil fuel use is for electricity. So 0.03 percent of fossil fuel use is used by IT tech.

Fossil fuels are used in ALL forms of electrical production. The difference is simply how direct the use is. Current Solar Cell technology for example, puts horrible amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere because of the processes used to mine and make the glass and silver in them. (Silver mining is terrible for the environment) It's still not as bad as coal (nothing is as bad as coal) but it's still bad.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/1...

And I'm even certainer you're dead wrong, AC. We don't even have realistic theoretical proposals for actual space-time-folding devices that would be of utility for space travel, and the most optimistic estimates of the energies required are in the ballpark of converting the mass of an entire planet to energy. Meanwhile, the current holy grail of energy generation is commercially viable fusion reactors, which we don't have, and which would be far from efficient enough even if we had them.

In comparison, printing a copy of someone on another planet isn't all that difficult. The only things you need are:
(1) the ability to freeze a human body to solid state and revive them after thawing (given current progress, this may become possible in a number of decades)
(2) the permission to destroy the originals (you'll always find a few volunteers)
(3) technology to (destructively) index all the atoms and bonds in a large solid organic body (slowly approaching the required resolution, though speed will still need to improve a lot)
(4) technology to build an arbitrary large organic body at cryo temperatures, presumably one atom at the time. This part is still the furthest out, but nanoscience and nanotech are advancing every day, and at least, there is no fundamental hurdle.

Sure, it will take many generations of technical progress, but if civilization doesn't collapse in the meanwhile, we'll eventually get there.(*) The same cannot be said about folding space-time in a way that is useful for space travel, which the laws of physics may very well have put out of reach of any baryonic life form. This is a bit of a disappointment for SF fans dreaming of a pan-galactic society, but that's how life is.

(*) Then again, once you have (1), you could just as well freeze someone, clad them in a few meters of lead to protect them against cosmic radiation, and shoot them to another planet along with the equipment to revive them. That would be way easier, faster and cheaper than the contrived scenario of printing someone new.

"a material in which the atomic organization and bond strength along two-dimensions are similar and much stronger than along a third dimension" REF: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/1....

And do you understand the difference between chemistry and biology?

DNA, the human genome, evolution, etc. are taught in Biology.

Chemistry, not so much.

If you don't want your kid's science teacher to lack knowledge then I would suggest reducing their work load in other areas. Implementing cutting edge discoveries into the curriculum isn't exactly a priority to administrators or a requirement of the standards.

You just don't know much about chemistry.

When I go to the American Chemical Society meetings, one of the largest sections is the Division of Biological Chemistry.

http://abstracts.acs.org/chem/...

What do you think chemists do all day? Add hydrochloric acid to zinc?

(Actually, if you wanted to find out what chemists do all day, you can read an issue of Chemical & Engineering News.)

There are high schools in places like Cold Spring Harbor, where the parents and the school board include many scientists, who understand science. They hire the best science teachers they can get, and they create a curriculum that will teach their kids what science is actually about.

They don't care about state and national tests because they know short-answer questions are bullshit. They want their kids to understand science, to become scientists or whatever else they want.

As I said, the Rockefeller University has a yearly seminar for high school students where they give presentations by Nobel laureates on the current developments of the field. That's what you teach high school students who are actually going to become scientists.

I suspect you're trolling me. Or else you know nothing about science. Or both.

Well regardless of how much time any teacher spends keeping up with their field, most of that is not going to translate into new curriculum.

Not too many ground breaking developments in grade 10 chemistry in that last few decades.

You're not a chemist. Right?

Human DNA was sequenced in 2003. Since that time, our understanding of the human genome has been turned upside down every year. Do you know what a histone is? Patients get DNA tests to find out which drugs their cancer will respond to and which drugs will just make them worse. Chemists are figuring out the shapes of proteins and designing drugs to fit. http://cen.acs.org/articles/92... Old theories of human evolution turned out to be right or wrong.

This is what chemists who are now in the 10th grade will be doing for the rest of their lives. And that's just biomedicine.

A science teacher has to understand all this new information -- too new for the textbooks -- and figure out what's important, what to teach, and how to teach it. First they need to understand it as a scientist would understand it, and then they have to figure out how to explain it to kids on their grade level. Not easy. That's a lot of hours, and it takes a good education. What you see in class is the tip of a very big pyramid.

I wouldn't want my kids to have a science teacher who didn't know what happened in chemistry in the last 10 years.

Nah - there's a process called a hazard analysis that should reveal the potential hazards of what somebody is doing. Why these aren't performed at an academic institution is a separate problem. The problem in academic institutions which doesn't exist in either corporate or government research labs is a lack of line management responsibility. The university culture generally allows for throwing a professor (or even a department) under the bus when something goes wrong and OSHA has allowed them to get away with it. In other areas it's been pretty clearly demonstrated that line management is responsible for safety.

For example look at NIST Boulder's plutonium incident - the director of the entire facility is who lost the job because it was his responsibility to have a lab safety program that was sufficient and effective. What is only just starting to wake up academic institutions is the fatal UCLA lab fire which the university was able to plead out of criminal charges, but the professor in charge has not. While the university had some pretty stiff penalties as part of the plea bargain - all of the accountability has come down on the professor and not the university management chain (i.e. with the criminal charges against the university, it should have landed at least at the VP level). I don't think universities will actually foster a safety culture until core administration accepts that the responsibility for doing so is theirs - and this is not likely to happen as long as a professor can be thrown under the bus (whether or not he or she deserves it) and administration escapes major personal (as opposed to institutional) penalties.

No you are wrong. Coal is crappy. Coal will produce more and wider spread radiation then nuclear ever will while also producing tons of carbon. Speaking of long term effects both Coal and natural gas produce many times the carbon of Nuclear.
Solar can not work for base load. Wind is a bit better but it still needs natural gas fired peaking plants to back it up. Simple truth is you are spouting the same FUD we hear all the time about nuclear.
The anti-nuclear people are as bad as the climate change deniers.

Here are some scientists that say you are wrong.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/03/...
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...

And a co founder of Greenpeace. http://www.wired.com/science/p...

Physicists sometimes have it easy. This kind of thing is akin that old joke about treating a cow like a sphere.
Look with the chemical origin of life, that it was governed by physics is not in debate.
What matters are the details, what came first; RNA world, life on a metallic surface, or some thing else?
I have this to toss at so-called astrobiologists who claim that life is spontaneous and easy.
If it is so easy why is there only one kind of life -- 20 amino acids, 4 DNA/RNA bases? To a bio organic chemist the "selection" of this chemical code is arbitrary. Why do we not live in an ecosystem with a shadow "alternative" biosphere? After all life existed for 3 billion years on this planet before even becoming multi-cellular. Plenty of time for chemical weirdos to develop a four base genetic code templating for D chirality beta amino acid chains with side chains made of silicon.
Step off physicists, this field belongs to chemists.

Also of interest:

"Redefinition of the kilogram: a decision whose time has come"
http://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/about/governance/committees/nomenclature/meetings/2007-fall-attachment-01a.pdf

Ampere pretends to be an SI base unit even though it is derived from kg

FTFY.

My emphasis added:

Nevertheless, because of the way they are deïned, three other base units of the SI call upon the deïnition of the kilogram, namely the ampere, the mole and the candela. Thus, any uncertainty inherent in the definition of the kilogram propagates also into these units.

* http://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/about/governance/committees/nomenclature/meetings/2007-fall-attachment-01a.pdf

and it is possible we are simply out of time, with regards to the funding for this sort of research.

That seems unlikely. The future is never as bleak as some would have you believe.
There have been a number of developments of late that suggest real progress is being made:

http://about.bnef.com/press-releases/cellulosic-ethanol-heads-for-cost-competitiveness-by-2016/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2013/09/04/same-moonshine-different-name-welcome-to-the-age-of-cellulosic-ethanol/

Somewhat dated:
http://www.nrel.gov/continuum/sustainable_transportation/cellulosic_ethanol.cfm

However, its still ethanol.
It may be wiser to take a look at other fuel stretchers as well.
Butanol is being looked at because it is less corrosive and also higher energy density than ethanol, almost approaching that of gasoline. (Exhaust smells like bananas).

Butanol trumps ethanol in several ways: Adding ethanol to gasoline reduces fuel mileage, but butanol packs almost as much energy as gas, meaning fewer fill-ups. Butanol also doesn't damage car engines like ethanol, so more of it can be blended into gas. And because butanol doesn't separate from gasoline in the presence of water, it can be blended right at the refinery, while ethanol has to be shipped separately from gas and blended closer to the filling station.

Even Zebra poop is helping, it yields a particular strain of Clostridium bacteria that can convert nearly any form of cellulose into butanol very efficiently.

Burned by itself, (B100) you might have a 10% mileage penalty. Mixed with gas it might not even impose any significant mileage penalty.
Its been found that the mileage penalty does not exactly vary in lock-step with energy density. (Theoretically ethanol should only see a 2 to 3% mileage penalty, but some claim 10%, especially on older vehicles). But to date, no one has done significant real world testing on Butanol + Gas blends.

Some links to Butanol stories:
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/04/12/the-fuel-that-could-be-the-end-of-ethanol/
http://farmindustrynews.com/blog/bio-butanol-can-be-produced-about-same-cost-ethanol-optinol-reports
http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/2013/april/cost-saving-measure-to-upgrade-ethanol-to-butanol-a-better-alternative-to-gasoline.html