Slashdot Mirror

Depending on the geographic situation, there can be seconds to minutes for the most descruction seismic waves to hit you (surface waves travel about 3 miles a second). That might give you enough time to shut down computers, natural gas feeds, subways, etc. A conference last month reviewed progress in this area. Mexico probably has the best situation because its west coast quakes take about six minutes to reach Mexico City which has been mostly constructed on "mud". Southern California is less lucky, because it can be right over the quake. Japan and Taiwan are inbetween with cities about a minute from major faults. The Mexican system even puts text warn on TV like tornado reports, according to the abstract.

The traditional alarm methods listen to several stations in order to block out non-earthquake events and triangulate the location. But this takes 2-5 minutes waiting for enough information. Some research is going towards single-station, first couple second analysis, which may be useful for Los Angeles.

He appears to have no knowledge of the foundations of the scientific consensus regarding physical climatology and the evidence which supports it, though. On the other hand, unlike you, Crichton does acknowledge that such a consensus does exist. He posits this as a problem in and of itself.

Of course, sometimes truth does emerge from science, and consensus tends to follow rather quickly. People proposing a non-heliocentric solar system model, for instance, haven't gotten much scientific attention since Copernicus worked out the basics.

As always, anyone with a genuine interest in climate change on policy-relevant time scales should actually bother to look at the IPCC reports. Recently the American Geophysical Union has weighed in with an official position, unanimously approved by its governing council, if you'd like to see a brief overview.

Claimer/Disclaimer: I build computer models of climate dynamics and statistics. I am funded by NSF to keep doing so.

It is difficult to quantify the physics of worst-case scenarios. It is vercy difficult to quantify the economic or environmental risk of the likely as well as the worst-case scenarios. On the other hand it is not difficult to show that the last fifteen years have followed the course of the predictions of 15 years ago. Nor is this surprising. The underlying physics of the anthropogenic greenhouse forcing is well understood and based on classical physics.

Consensus can be pernicious, but it's usually a better bet to go with the consensus than against it.

F = ma is a consensus opinion, for instance.

Global warming skeptics seem to think the political pressures are in the direction of exagerrating the problem. This may be true in some countries, but is hardly true in the present configuration of the United States. Keeping this context in mind, the official position of the American Geophysical Union on climate change is worth considering, perhaps even as much as the opinions of a science fiction writer.

While at the conference, be sure to attend:

ExxonMobil Morning Mixer for Students: Wednesday, 10 December, Yerba Buena Ballroom Salon 9, San Francisco Marriott, 6:30-8:00 A.M

A complimentary breakfast will be held in honor of all graduate and undergraduate students registered for the meeting. Students will have the opportunity to hear an overview of AGU programs that serve its student members, meet with AGU leadership and representatives from ExxonMobil, and network with other students and future colleagues attending the meeting.

(don't believe me?)

Another poster has answered this below..

Is this true? (Hopefully using the right term...I mean itemized lists with roman numerials, numbers, letters for each part)

If you mean "itemized" or "enumerated" lists then yes there is a limit it appears you can go 5 deep.

The following will give a "Too deeply nested" error. Due to the "sub sub sub sub sub sub item"

N.B. It it not very pretty due to having to get past the "comment compression filter"...

\documentclass{article} \begin{document} \begin{itemize} \item Item \begin{itemize} \item Sub item \begin{itemize} \item Sub sub item \begin{itemize} \item sub sub sub item \begin{itemize} \item sub sub sub sub item \begin{itemize} \item sub sub sub sub sub item \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{document}

As with many aspects of LaTeX however if you find it doesn't do something it probably means it's not prudent (from a structural perspective) to do it anyway. For example if you really need that level of deep reference you may well be better off with part,chapter,section, subsection, ... . . .,itemize etc... Ironically I tried posting this reply with some deep nesting, slashdot posts are limited to three levels deep! ;-) Of course if you wish to you can always override the builtins with your own "super list" or something.

Also, can ya'll post some good links to a newbie learning LaTex..and some good reference sites that have all the tags layed out with good explanations?

Sure, below are a list places I would reccomend starting, you havn't said if you use Windows, *nix or Mac so i've added both (sorry if you are a Mac man you'll have to Google yourself).

• Editing:
• • *nix If you are a *nix user I would reccomend the following editing combination.
  • XEmacs
  • AucTeX. A sophisticated editing mode for LaTeX
  • preview-latex. Places the rendered equations and images directly in the editor window making "equation tuning" and other tasks a snip.
• Windows
• • WinEdt. A very sophisticated text editor for Windows. Its forte is LaTeX. It is not free, but well worth the money.

• Learning resources:
• • Getting started
  • Good overview
  • A list of symbols
  • The not so short introduction to LaTeX2e
  • Tips and tricks
  • BibTeX help.

• Other random stuff
• • dvipdfm. For converting the output of LaTeX into PDF (highly recommended)
  • Prof. Knuth's home page(The author of TeX).
  • CTANThe Comprehensive TeX Archive Network. Here you will be able to download packages, utilities and tools that do not come by default in your LaTeX distribution.

-ed

The mechanism behind magnetic field reversals is poorly understood. I haven't seen any statistical analysis, but I would be interested to know if magnetic field reversals can best be modeled as periodic or as random, with some sort of variation about an expected value. It may be more accurate to say that the probablility of a reversal in any given year is increasing, rather than saying we are "overdue". Or maybe that is just splitting hairs.

Does this mean that this treatment would also pull out any bacteria in the body that contains magnetite?

You are unlikely to have any of that kind of bacteria actually in your body. Here is a quick little discussion of them.

A paper of hers from 2001 presents information on the Mount Pinatubo eruption. An abstract of the paper discussed in the ABC story is also available.

If you really want to be objective about these issues try to look beyond the smoke and mirrors.

At least, this statement is not incorrect...

A recent study by Arctic researchers showed that the polar ice cap isn't just shrinking in terms of land mass [bbc.co.uk], it's shrinking in terms of depth too [bbc.co.uk], by 4cm a year.

All that water's going somewhere, and that somewhere is the oceans. Global sea levels are rising, and you only have to look at the situation in Tuvalu in the Pacific [bbc.co.uk] or Venice, Italy [veniceinperil.org] to see that the threat of rising tides isn't a myth.

Elementary physics will tell you that the artic ocean ice caps could fully melt without raising the sea level by one centimeter: Whether the artic ocean is in a solid or liquid state does not change the underwater volume (remember Archimedes ?). This is quite fortunate, because otherwise the sea level would drastically change between the northern hemisphere winter and summer, precluding much of the seaside activity many of us enjoy sometimes. The problem with the Venice lagoon has to do with centuries of mishandling the water flows in the local area and nothing to do with global climate changes.

Contrary to popular belief, most serious oceanographers believe that a global warming would rather lower the sea level than raising it: The most influential water tanks that could have an impact on sea level are the antartic and groenland continental ice caps. If those melted then sea level would rise, and vice versa. It happens that those regions have very little precipitations because clouds very seldom go up to these latitudes. Because the area is (and will stay) still very cold, the melting in fact barely compensates the accumulation of water on these continental ice caps. Hence, the ice there is not renewing itself a lot. A global warming would increase the evaporation at the equator, push the clouds at higher latitudes, and augment the precipitations on top of the continental areas. Hence water would keep accumulating on the land, therefore lowering the global sea level. QED.

Now, this is not to say that human-induced climate change is not dangerous and that we should not take drastic measures to limit the various activities (including farting ;-) that could have an impact on climate. It's just that if you read very informed litterature, you'll find that no one can in their earnest say whether or not human activities will or will not have a drastic impact on our planet's ecosystem.

The best seems to try to stay as informed as possible and not let false Cassandras monopolize the discussion.

Actually, we have data that goes at least 100,000 years back

According to this paper, the half-life of excess CO2 in the atmosphere is somewhere around 31 years. The lifetime of an average CO2 molecule is somewhat longer, ~100 years.

With no atmosphere, there is no shockwave. Sure, the debris from the explosion would eventually hit you, but no one would seriously try to call actual matter hitting you "sound."

I repeat: Explosions in space have no shockwaves. A nuke detonated 10 feet over the surface of the moon would amount to little more than a small dust cloud a few feet in diameter (if anything) when the remaining atoms slammed into the surface. It would be nothing compared to a similar detonation on Earth.


Uhhh... Fantastic science there dude. So let me get this straight... a 10 to 100 MEGA ton weapon explodes 10 ft away from the moon and a small dust cloud a few feet in diameter is all that happens. AN EXPLOSION IS THE RAPID EXPANSION OF GASES!!!! For the love of god think before you open your mouth again. 1 Mega ton = 1 million tons of TNT (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/MuhammadKalee m.shtml). That is not 1 mega ton = 1 million tons of force(units are wrong any way), but the force of 1 million tons of TNT exploding... A nuke does not need air around it to cause damage. It does not need air to create a shock wave; it provides it own super heated gases from the explosion. [W]hen the remaining atoms slammed into the surface... a nuke does not totally turn to energy. The bomb casing and a large portion of the radioactive material still remain to be flung about at incredible speeds. Come on paint chips in space are a real hazard to the space shuttle and they are only moving at a ~22K miles an hour (a href=http://www.wstf.nasa.gov/Hazard/Hyper/debris. htm>http://www.wstf.nasa.gov/Hazard/Hyper/debris.h tm.

How do you account for phenomena such as solar wind (http://science.msfc.nasa.gov/ssl/pad/solar/sun_wi nd.htm)? Basically the sun (a huge nuclear reaction) is spraying atoms into space as it "burns". Even the moon has a thin atmosphere (http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/prrl/prrl9826.html).

It is science fiction, not science fact. Hell all the cop dramas out there totally ignore the laws of this country. Does everything need to line up with realty to make a good show. HELL NO! Look at all the crap "reality" TV shows. Let watch the "realty" sci-fi show. You get to watch shuttle telemetry reading for 3.5 hours! YAY! You guys must be really bored with your lives if you sit around debate the science of TV and movies. LIGHTEN UP AN LIV A LITTLE.

Friendly

It's already been proven that there is NO global warming,

In what universe? Seriously, you may have issues with the political implications of global warming, you may have issues with the implementation of damage-control policies before a true consensus of the scientific community has been reached, but that statement is just plain wrong.

I don't have any doubt that it is repeated ad nauseum in hysterical screeds by the likes of Rush et al, but you would do yourself some good by attempting to understand the opinions of people who actually know what they are talking about.

Here are some starters:

The US Global Change Research Information Office

The American Geophysical Union

The Union of Concerned Scientsts

The Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research

UCS Debunking of the 'Skeptical Environmentalist'

globalwarming.org's constantly updated list of scientific references

I could go on but I won't. There's still lots of debate, and this is as it should be, but global warming has not been "disproved" except in the minds of politically motivated ideologues.

Geologists have been measuring micro-motions of the earth since GPS started in the early 1990s. There are thousands of talks on the subject here .

It could very well be that high levels of CO2 will _decrease_ the warming. [link1] & [link2]

(PS: I do not consider there to be any "greenhouse gases" since no one really knows the net effect of having them in the atmosphere)

(ps: There were lots of people on FidoNet who considered me stupid ;) I like to think of it as them being wrong and me right .. ehrm .. )

this is such a bunch of tripe!

First of all.. if we were to take the encylopeadia Britannica and stack all the books up.. then the thickness of each page would represent more than 100,000 years of the earth's history. This means that the last ice age which ended about 10,000 years ago and was at peak 18,000 years ago would be within 1/5 of the thickness of the last page.

There were 8 ice ages in the last 2 million years and that is within the last 20 pages.

Within the last 2,000 years (2% of the thichness of the last page) there have been several warming and cooling periods denoted by such names as the little ice age and the medieval warm period . Crocs were in the themes during Roman times... (little warmer).

look here to see a chart showing global temperature over the last billion or so years. This is the paleomap project an they have done increadible work.

Check out the university of Carleton, Tim Patterson has an excellent course on climate change and this is being broadcast on TLC as well.

On Chris Scotese's web site you will see that for 90% of the history of the planet for the last 650 million years or so, the earth was about 20 degrees warmer than now. If you look at the miocene maps you will see that 14 Million years ago the planet was warmer.. and a lot wetter..

BTW... the time scale on Chris's chart is not linear. If the chart is re-scaled it tells the same story but is even more dramatic. (We leave the re-scalling to the student as an excersize).

Look here if you want to know why Britian is so keen on renewable energy and specifically look at these charts which show the decline rate of North Sea oil production. Britain will become an oil importer within 2 years. The decline rate of North Sea oil production is more than 15% per year. The chart shows how feilds deplete. You can see how the big plays are drilled first and last the longest... and thereafter smaller and smaller fields are brought online until they give up and stop drilling. This is where Britian is now. One of the stats is that Britian has about 250 barrels of oil per capita. That is it! On to renewable because the oil resource is gone.

The real issue of climate change is this. Water in the atmosphere is far more significant than CO2. Firstly H2O is at a far greater level so the question becomes... how would we express the level of H2O in the atmosphere? Secondly there is uncertainty in the measurements. Thirdly, irrigation and agriculture increase the H2O levels. Most of that water pumped onto the fields will evaporate and plants do transpire!

CO2 levels are in the range of 0.036% and this of course is a plant nutrient.

So we are left with adding 2 numbers for instance.

H2O = 0%-4.0% +/- what? a percent?
CO2 = 0.036% +/- 0.0005

You can see these numbers here in table 7a-1.

Since the warming response is most likely due to the weighted "sum" of the CO2 and H2O and all the other green house gasses of course, then we need to "add" the H2O levels to the CO2 levels. Well - the numbers are in the preceeding paragraph and I don't know how to add them. We don't even have a good handle on the uncertainty of the H2O levels... but, My guess is that irrigation and agriculture have increased the H2O substancially.

So - we end up with the anaolgy to the encyclopeadia. Almost all of the data for climate modeling has been collected in the last 100 years and this represents 1/1000'th of the thickenss of the last page of the stack of books. Meanwhile all the other pages are basically ignored. The geological history of the planet shows that the planet is usually (90% of the time) about 20 degrees warmer than now. So most likely the planet will warm back up. But we don't know when and we might get another ice age or several before this happens. Anyone for 10,000 feet of ice over Toronto? Who votes for palm trees in the artic circle?

I have lots of respect for the type of work Levison is doing. However, in order to start it you have to have pretty firm beliefs about the origin of the solar system (an event we did not see directly - nor have we seen other solar systems form; the process is slow so we won't.)

What his work is really showing is that either: (a) one (or more) of his assumptions in his simulation is wrong or (b) there were not so many comets in the early solar system. I think this is why Levison says he is trying to prove his prior work wrong (e.g. he is looking for potential errors in his assumptions.)

Here is a poster on early solar system abundance of small comets. In this example, they count craters on Europa, a moon of Jupiter, to get an indication of how many there were in the early solar system.

An example of an simple statement which, although unlikely to be true, has to worry Levison in the back of his head somewhere, would be along the lines of: at some time in the past, our solar system passed through a debris field which created many of these craters, thus the large number of craters, but it only happened once (or very, very rarely) and this is throwing off our counting.

Such projects can putter along for years but have the potential to return fabulous results. Its the kind of project graduate students are interested in, but worried they cannot get a solid thesis project out of. It is also tough to fund such projects in America these days. Thus I have respect for these people, and wish them good luck.

Before you start calling names, better check out what you write, kiddie.

Uranium is one of the less rare elements, but maybe you looked at the wrong place ("earth's crust", does that include water?)
The mistake you made is by looking at the top 10 only: those account for 99% of the total mass, but last time I counted there were >100 elements, and U is not in the bottom half.

Uranium is much more common than gold, silver or platinum, but nearly all of the world's natural supply is found in solution form in sea water at a concentration too low for economic extraction.

Sea water contains 3.2 micrograms of uranium per liter (naturally, not as a result of dumping nuclear waste ;-)
For comparison: that's 20 times more than copper, 100 times more than iron, 1500 times more than silver and 6000 times more than tin, but much less than Na and Cl ;-)

Not looking at just water alone, the earth crust contains 40 times more uranium than silver.

(Some numbers: here - I used other sources too)

There's really no reason that Science or Nature couldn't be done with TeX. The Journal of Geophysical Research, for example, is typeset entirely in TeX, but looks just as good as any other publication (thanks to the wizards at TeXnology). TeX/LaTeX + BibTeX are very, very powerful tools *if* you have the right templates set up. (Hint: don't use the default fonts!)

You can prove anything in a computer simulation. Whether it will happen or not is a totally different story, but for sure you can get funding if you tweak your variables properly. In geek terms, look at most video games where I can take a rocket blast and still survive, even though my hitpoints are lowered. Sure games are not true simulations, but neither are true simulations perfect, or often even close. It's a focus on one specific item with all the variables included to prove only that point. Believe the simulation worked; don't believe the simulation is correct.

All of a sudden some scientist picks something up, then a few more jump on the bandwagon, and then by the time we see the article, the whole theory is written in stone, even though the article contains very little fact -- for all we (the readers) know it could be pure speculation. The article makes bold statements and doesn't quote any proof. So take it with a huge grain of salt. How do we know that "Gauthier Hulot of the Paris Geophysical Institute" isn't regarded in his field with the same amount of controversy as the Drs. Igor and Grichka Bogdanov who are physicists that supposedly "don't know how to do physics" ?

And then the article mentions Hollywood!?! Yah, that sheds a lot of creditable light on the whole theory. Now are we are either: dealing with a Hollywood film house that picked up the idea from scientists, or scientists who want to ride on the tails of pop culture?

But we all love this dramatic stuff about the world ending, so it's no wonder that everybody -- whether scientist or check-out attendant, mathemetician or word perfect user -- jumps on the bandwagon. Enjoy your drama as we have all done here at slash/dot., but seek proof and fact before believing it will actually affect your real world. There are too many "important" people out there that believe they know what they are talking about or have agendas. It's hardly possible to spend all the needed time (as a reader outside the scientific fields) to gather the facts, proof, and knowledge needed in a world overloaded with information both true and false. Just find a couple articles from scientists that refute one another. That will help to provide a more balanced perspective. For example, read this message board for some real discussion about the theory at hand, instead of discussion about a newspaper article.
For example, you can get some real facts about Field Intensities During Polarity Transitions and Excursions linked from Message #15 in the discussion board.

The articles and theories are very important, but they still exist to be proven wrong, especially when they are relatively new.

Aurorae aren't the only things "regular" folk see. Six million people in Quebec lost power because of a solar storm. Commercial and military institutions lose satellites fairly frequently due to solar storms. Most of the people in the US lost pager service for this reason.

These issues are a high priority for NASA, NOAA, and the Air Force. Lots of good data have come from SOHO, WIND, and ACE, but these are either nearing the end of their lives or they are done. STEREO should provide the next round of very good data. Just about any spacecraft that measures the solar wind contributes to understanding space weather, and some missions are designed with that as their primary mission. There are also ground-based programs that make very valuable observations. A good page with some space missions can be found here.

Aurorae aren't the only things "regular" folk see. Six million people in Quebec lost power because of a solar storm. Commercial and military institutions lose satellites fairly frequently due to solar storms. Most of the people in the US lost pager service for this reason.

These issues are a high priority for NASA, NOAA, and the Air Force. Lots of good data have come from SOHO, WIND, and ACE, but these are either nearing the end of their lives or they are done. STEREO should provide the next round of very good data. Just about any spacecraft that measures the solar wind contributes to understanding space weather, and some missions are designed with that as their primary mission. There are also ground-based programs that make very valuable observations. A good page with some space missions can be found here.

Give me a break. The relationship between greenhouse gases and global temperature is ambiguous at best.

Wishful thinking on your part here. The relationship between greenhouse gases and global temperature is quite well known.

Why did the average global temperature go DOWN between 1920 and 1987 despite a 40% increase in "greenhouse gas" emissions at the turn of the century?

Wrong.

The average global temperature started to increase in the 1920's. This site on reconstructing global tempertures from the American Geophysical Union has a graph showing tempertures from 1961 to 1992 showing a steady increase.

Do you want to ignore the fact that the "hole" in the ozone has shrunk to half the size it was 2 years ago?

Because CFC's were cut out (think back to the Montreal Protocol). Interesting the alarmists turned out to be the conservatives who complained about the damage that the phase out would do to the economy.

Do you not remember that 40 years ago, environmentalists like yourself were more concerned about global freezing than they were about global warming?

As an aside, can you name a single peer reviewed scientific publication from that time period which is about this global freezing? I'm just wondering because their are hundreds on global warming, but nobody can cite one on global freezing, and I'm beginning to suspect that the comparisons between the two are just pure propaganda put forward by greenhouse skeptics who have lost the scientific battle, and are now stuck just playing the propaganda game.

The simple fact is that "global warming" is nothing more than a hypothesis that is backed up by ambiguous and contrary facts. There has been no conclusive evidence proving this idea, so why to you treat it as a proven theory?

Scientific theories are never proved. So global warming will always be a hypothesis.

However, the simple fact is that the vast majority of the worlds climatical scientists support this theory.

Hmmmm, well if the ocean level continues to change at ~2 mm / yr, then it will only take 1,200 years before the water goes up enough to cover the Miami airport at 8 feet above sea level.

Oh really? That contradicts existing information to-date, and doesn't speak about what has happened in the last 23 years that we have a satellite temperature record for (and that shows no warming whatsoever).

You should really change your peusdoscience source.

Global warming is a accepted scientific theory. Whereas the warming-skeptics gave up on science a long time ago, and have reduced themselves to a PR agency.

For a good overview of the science behind global warming, this link gives a pretty good overview (with links to the peer review lit.).

I also applaud you for posting this. The pettition you refer to has not received enough attention (see also). But even more important is to look at the data.

-- MarkusQ

The average metal concentration of sea water is:

Cu: 150 ng/kg = mg/tonne

Au: 0.02 ng/kg = mg/tonne

Pd: 0.04 ng/kg = mg/tonne

Rh: 0.08 ng/kg = mg/tonne

Metal prices, in rough numbers:

Cu: 0.64 us$/lb = 1.410 us$/kg

Au: 278 us$/oz = 8.90 us$/g

Pd: 360 us$/oz = 11.60 us$/g

Rh: 1600 us$/oz = 51.50 us$/g

So the in-situ value of these four metals are:

Cu: 1.3*10^18 t * 150 mg/t / 10^6 * 1.4 $/kg = 2.73*10^14 us$

Au: 1.3*10^18 t * 0.02 mg/t / 1000 * 8.9 $/g = 2.31*10^14 us$

Pd: 1.3*10^18 t * 0.04 mg/t / 1000 * 11.6 $/g = 6.03*10^14 us$

Rh: 1.3*10^18 t * 0.08 mg/t / 1000 * 51.5 $/g = 53.56*10^14 us$

So the insitu value of these 4 metals exceeds US$64,000 Trillion! Who needs a freaking space program to supply metals to earth?

-AD

for example, that article contradicts this report which also refers to an article in the Jan. 1, 2001 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters

No. It's both.
Quoting from the above link:

Power systems in areas of igneous rock (gray) are the most vulnerable to the effects of intense geomagnetic activity because the high resistance of the igneous rock encourages geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) to flow in the power transmission lines situated above the rock.

There are 765kV lines in the midwest that are 100s of miles long, but they don't have significant problems with geomagnetic storm induced voltages. Similar lines in Canada, where there exists areas of igneous rock, had problems in 1989 during the last solar cycle.

Indeed, most of the problems with these magnetic storms occurs in the transformers. Transformers are non-linear devices and the DC voltage offset created by the storms force the transformers out of the linear part of their operating curves (saturation). This causes all kinds of problems, including localized heating of the transformer core and harmonic currents.

There were, however, some problems. First, the dinosaurs didn't die off in a few years; they became extinct over a period of millions of years. Second, there was never any palaeoecological evidence of such a "winter" found. Thus, although there definitely was a large impact around the time of the dinosaur extinction, the hypothesis that it's dust caused the extinction could not realistically have been true. Moreover, there's an alternative hypothesis: massive extended flood-basalt volcanism from the Deccan Traps, in India.

Alvarez, however, was a Nobel prize winner. He used the power that gave him to discredit anyone who questioned him. He launched major attacks in the media. And he pressured the chairpeople of academic departments to fire departmental researchers who tried to show the flaws in the hypothesis. Some careers were severely damaged. Read all about it, and the science, here.

The impact crater was eventually found, in Yucatan, Mexico. Research has shown, however, that the amount of dust injected into the atmosphere, by the impact, was far too small to have forced cosmic winter. With Alavarez dead, there is now at least some reasoned debate. Recent work by Sharpton at the U of Alaska speculates that the impact might have vaporized enough rock to make the atmosphere very acidic--and that this might have led to long-term ecological changes that forced dinosaur extinction. (This research was presented at last month's meeting of the American Geophysical Union; abstracts available online via http://www.agu.org/meetings/waisfm00.html.)

Maybe, in the end, it will turn out that Alvarez was right. Or maybe not. For the integrity of the scientific process, though, it makes no difference. A powerful scientist used his political power to squash any scientific debate.

__________________________________
"... the microkernel approach was essentially a dishonest approach aimed at receiving more dollars for research. I don't necessarily think these researchers were knowingly dishonest. Perhaps they were simply stupid. Or deluded." --Linus Torvalds on kernel research by Computer Scientists (in Open Sources)

There were, however, some problems. First, the dinosaurs didn't die off in a few years; they became extinct over a period of millions of years. Second, there was never any palaeoecological evidence of such a "winter" found. Thus, although there definitely was a large impact around the time of the dinosaur extinction, the hypothesis that it's dust caused the extinction could not realistically have been true. Moreover, there's an alternative hypothesis: massive extended flood-basalt volcanism from the Deccan Traps, in India.

Alvarez, however, was a Nobel prize winner. He used the power that gave him to discredit anyone who questioned him. He launched major attacks in the media. And he pressured the chairpeople of academic departments to fire departmental researchers who tried to show the flaws in the hypothesis. Some careers were severely damaged. Read all about it, and the science, here.

The impact crater was eventually found, in Yucatan, Mexico. Research has shown, however, that the amount of dust injected into the atmosphere, by the impact, was far too small to have forced cosmic winter. With Alavarez dead, there is now at least some reasoned debate. Recent work by Sharpton at the U of Alaska speculates that the impact might have vaporized enough rock to make the atmosphere very acidic--and that this might have led to long-term ecological changes that forced dinosaur extinction. (This research was presented at last month's meeting of the American Geophysical Union; abstracts available online via http://www.agu.org/meetings/waisfm00.html.)

Maybe, in the end, it will turn out that Alvarez was right. Or maybe not. For the integrity of the scientific process, though, it makes no difference. A powerful scientist used his political power to squash any scientific debate.

__________________________________
"... the microkernel approach was essentially a dishonest approach aimed at receiving more dollars for research. I don't necessarily think these researchers were knowingly dishonest. Perhaps they were simply stupid. Or deluded." --Linus Torvalds on kernel research by Computer Scientists (in Open Sources)