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You seriously think that surface conditions have an effect on "the global geodynamo" (the Earth's core)? The wandering of the magnetic poles isn't the result of mysterious changes thousands of miles below the surface; in general it's caused by variations in the Earth's wobbling as it spins on its axis. According to this, the relatively recent acceleration of pole movement is the result of a water deficit in India and the Caspian Sea region.

The magnetic poles have reversed many times in Earth's history. According to this, over the last 20 million years a pole reversal happens every 300,000 years or so. It's been 780,000 years since the last one, so maybe we're overdue.

Unfortunately, as of late articles about astronomy have been overrun with unnecessary injection of LIFE!!!!! It's no more than an attempt to make it more "sexy" - read clickbait - to the average reader and many online sites (ala The Daily Galaxy) have grabbed that flag with ferver. And, as demonstrated with this very example, they are shoddy in their use of language because of it.

Thank you for insighful answer.
I tried to look for some 'reputable' sources talking about importance of gas giants, but best thing I was able to find so far is something like http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_..., with "Two NASA astronomers recently suggested[...]" "life-bearing planets may be rare" and other quite vague statements.

Forbes is a blank to me also. However you could read this http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_...

Last year it was discovered that a cosmic web of dark matter existed and that the regular matter of course fell into the web due to gravity. Where the gravity is highest (at the nexus of the web filaments) they knew there was more matter based on observations.

Last year it was discovered that a cosmic web of dark matter existed and that the regular matter of course fell into the web due to gravity. Where the gravity is highest (at the nexus of the web filaments) they knew there was more matter based on observations.

Nuking the poles would release enough CO2 to start a warming process. This would cause more frozen CO2 to be released from the ground. Eventually you would start releasing water vapour. The initial kick from the thermonuclear bombs would likely start other feedbacks in the system.

Show me calculations, not seat-of-the-pants assumptions. Because here's a factually supported assumption: if the CO2 and water vapor froze out of the atmosphere to start with, pushing it back into the atmosphere isn't going to reverse the feedback loop that caused those gases to freeze out in the first place. Nevermind that, for millions-to-billions of years, what has remained in the atmosphere has been lost to space so that your near-surface reserves are likely far less than those that were present Mars crossed its tipping points.

Where is the extra CO2 and water going to come from to generate a net positive feedback?

Er, just trolling for mod points, and I guess I know my audience for the most part... I was really just looking for a nice place to link to that funny image, and your post sounded smart (though TBH I didn't really understand what position you were arguing for or against, but I agree with the statements you made).

But just to explain my AGW analogy... should we be worried about asteroids enough to spend money on asteroid interceptors, even though any kind of payoff is likely only once every 70,000 years or so? Should we be worried about climate change enough to spend money on trying to cram more people onto Earth, or just let the natural cycles of mass extinctions and famine run its course?

The fine article is somewhat silly, because first they complain about how bad at statistics people are, but then go through the math that the odds of anyone dying due to asteroids are 1 - in 70 million per year.

assuming our world’s population remains level at 7 billion indefinitely into the future

which is
1. a bit ridiculous that the population will hold steady at 7 billion the forseeable future, not that it matters because humans have difficulty relating to any population above a couple hundred.
2. over enough millennia, even with those odds, we'll see definitely see something. Probably not in our lifetimes, but likely on a civilization scale of 10,000 years.
3. Yes, TFA mentions that most of the solar system debris has already been absorbed by Jupiter and the like, but seems to ignore some other million-year scale cycles for encountering space debris http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_...

Are people fear-mongering? Definitely. Is any effort we make to tackle the miniscule risk of asteroid impacts or climate change wasted? No. Are historians in the distant future going to look back on our culture and and say "silly fools, they wasted so much time and effort worrying about X that they didn't notice the real issues piling up to destroy their civilization" no matter what we do? Hell yes.

100% of galaxies have supermassive black holes near them.

Not quite.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_...

So four galaxies around the same age had nearly the same mass by sheer random probability

That's one possibility. Funny thing about science, though, is that it isn't just going to shrug and say "Eh. Probability." and ignore something interesting.

"We looked at 1% of the universe and didn't see something like this so it must be impossible" is not valid science.

No, it's not. But then no-one's saying that.

lol. Are you suggesting the assumption that a gravity modeling software that would work the same for apples on Earth, rockets to Venus, the moons of Jupiter and rovers on Mars and the orbits of exoplanets is just so stupid beyond belief....
Isaac Newton and every physicist in history can only mock you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

You can be sure that there are climatologists working hard on universal software of climate change. The more examples of planets you have to test your software the better you understand the problem.
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Yes, but if it's a question of belief (and it always is until the evidence arrives, if it ever does) my little finger tells me our understanding of gravity is just plain wrong. I read similar things sometimes from theorists who argue dark matter may not exist. It's interesting. I love contrarians. I wish the scientific establishment would nurture them more.

Do you even follow current science events? You're a moron. http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_...

While it has been widely accepted in recent years that Dark Matter fixes the standard model. Increasing problems suggest that Dark Matter might not actually exist.

This could lead to the acceptance of alternative cosmologies that have been bubbling up for years. Try these links:

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_...
http://vixra.org/pdf/1404.0123...
http://www.researchgate.net/pu...

And the very assumption that complexity = difficulty is unrealistic as well.

That has got to be one of the stupidest things I have ever seen written. So your claim is complexity makes things easier? Wow. But I'm the ignorant one. Do you even know what the word means?

See, we have these great things called tools. And tools let us do things we couldnt normally do. Things like lift things heavier that we could normally lift, or see things we couldnt normally see.

So we have these tools which means at this moment in time we understand everything there is to know about the universe. Ok, now you're making sense. I get it.

And it is the science you trust that takes your voice into a little hand-held box and teleports it hundreds of miles away so you can talk to your mom once a day.

Once again the level of ignorance is astounding. You seem to have no concept of what science is even about. Here is a hint. It has absolutely nothing to do with trust. Amazingly it has nothing to do with how often I talk to my mother either.

Anyway, we absolutely have the means to experiment on climate. It is very easy to fill a clear conatiner with methane and another with air, put it in the sun for an hour and see what happens.

No, we absolutely do not. Your experiment is so lacking as to be pointless. Climate is literally billions of types of interactions each of which has a significant affect on the overall system. What happens in a couple containers filled with gasses is about as significant as the affect of my pissing in the ocean would be. We don't even know what we don't know. The complexity of what we do know is way beyond our ability to model. Hell we can't even measure much of it to any degree of accuracy. They take a core sample from one or 2 spots and then try to conjecture the entire worldwide atmospheric conditions going back 100,000 years from that. We have too little information and there is so much more we have no information about because we don't even know what to look for or measure. Add to that the period of time we have any kind of accurate data for is extremely limited. Going back more then 50 years is all pretty much conjecture. Also no where did I say anything is impossible. I said we don't know nearly enough right now.

I am going to publish my data and see if else sees the same data" -that was just my made-up scenario. But that is exactly what you want from the scientific community.

No, it absolutely is not. Nor is is it scientific method. Scientific method requires that you actively try and find faults with your law or theory. Climate science seems to have turned into science by consensus. It's settled. Anything contrary to the conventional wisdom is looked upon as either something to disprove or twisted to fit current theory.

And lastly, if all you see is scientific studies reinforcing the theory that mankind is affecting the climate, why is it so hard to beleive? Scientists were right about alot of other things right?

The problem is no one seems to be actively trying to disprove it. That is the whole of scientific method, actively looking for things that don't fit your theory. Science is far more often wrong than right. Hell, it seems they don't even have gravity figured out yet and that's something we can do quantitative experiments with.

Just the idea that anyone can think any science is settled shows an absolute ignorance of what science is.

While it is true that we don't know for sure how many galaxies there are in the Universe, 170 billion is likely low balling it a bit too much. The most widely accepted estimate stands at 500 billion - but still, this is murky water. A good article on how that number was arrived at can be found here:

500 Billion --A Universe of Galaxies: Some Older than Milky Way

The reason for why the comet appears to be so huge is the massive coma around the core as well as the tail originating from the core and scattering like a bowwave from a ship it extends and expands the further away it is from the source. The sudden seemingly increase in size of the tail when ISON re-appears above the sun comes from the sudden change of direction and the new direction how the ejected material is forced away from the core by the solar wind.

Most comets have a nucleus (the center of a comet) that is less than about 6 miles (10 km) wide. The size of a comet changes depending on how close it is to the sun. As a comet gets closer to the sun, the ices on the surface of its nucleus vaporize and form a cloud called a coma around the nucleus that can expand out to 50,000 miles (80,000 km). A tail also forms on a comet as it approaches the sun. Comet tails can be over 600,000 miles (1 million km) long.

An awesome gif indeed. A little closer to home is ....

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2013/12/image-of-the-day-a-spectacular-meteor-streaking-through-the-aurora-borealis.html

I think the argument that the author is trying to make is that the scope of new work is more tightly focussed than before. There have been relatively few new 'fundamental' discoveries in physics, compared to refinements and increasing precision.

Agreed, the is what he is talking about, but was it not always thus?

When Mendel was laying the foundations of Genetics, the idea of DNA was unknown.
He was working at the edge of knowledge, with no possible way forward.
He described WHAT happened but could not even approach the HOW.

Now, DNA pretty much defines Genetics as a science. We understand the HOW somewhat better.
At least we know where to look.

There must be more questions that we aren't even beginning to answer. WHY, for one (Why dna, Why here)
WHERE for another. Did DNA originate here? If we find life on mars, will it have DNA?
Or will it be totally different?

"To the best of our knowledge, the original chemicals chosen by known life do not constitute a unique set; other choices could have been made, and maybe were made if life started elsewhere many times."

Paul Davies.

Lots left to do.
Science doesn't know everything. Science Knows it doesn't know everything. Otherwise, they'd Stop!.

And, again, the whole point zooms past you. There were never two human beings on the planet. Never. Not once. Ever.

You keep repeating this like a creed. For you, it is an act of faith, and you seem convinced that just repeating that like a broken record will make it more true. But since that "fact" is the core of the discussion, that's precisely what you need to prove.

I claim that this "fact"of yours is patently false, because it is so easily falsified with myriads of counter examples. There was a time where a single person on Earth knew relativity, and then he taught others and relativity became part of humanity.There was a time where a single person on Earth knew how to do fire, and then he taught others and fire became part of humanity. There was a time when a single person on Earth knew how to send an e-mail, and then he taught others and e-mail became part of humanity. There was a first blue rose. And so on.

On the other hand, I cannot think of a single part of our human heritage that appeared all over the place at once. Whether it's physical like skin color or cultural like cave painting, we always observe a starting point followed by contamination.

So what is there really behind your statement that there were never two human beings on the planet? The fact that proto-humans lived in tribes? The fact that the hypothetical first human had to mate with non-humans, and was therefore not so different from them? Or the fact that you don't know how to define "human" precisely enough to be able to pinpoint that first human?

The Catholic church claims that there were only two people at one point,

It's not the Catholic church, it's the Bible, so it's all Muslims, all Jews, all Christians including non-Catholic.

though they claim that these could have been drawn from a group of proto-humans.

I, not the church, claimed in this thread that based on modern science, we know the first human was drawn from a group of proto-humans, and then taught the second human to be human (because what makes us human is largely social and not genetic). And I find it reasonable to believe that the second "human" in this transmission chain was the mate of the first one. I am not sure that this hypothesis is true, but it's definitely the most plausible scientific hypothesis that I can derive from the theory of evolution and observation of knowledge transmission. It's not derived from the Bible, however, it does match the account in the Bible relatively well.

If you want to claim that there were always multiple humans, you need to blur the definition of human. With a blurred definition, you blur the boundary in space and time. With a crisp definition, the first human becomes unique. The Bible chose a crisp definition, the knowledge of good and evil.

the Catholic church requires that this bit of Genesis be interpreted LITERALLY. And this point is LITERALLY false.

Again, you seem to think that by repeating and SHOUTING your creed, you will make it more credible.

But no, the Catholic church does not require literal interpretation of Genesis, on the contrary.

And no, the existence of a first human is not false, if we define humanity based on any kind of knowledge or sapience, as I tried to demonstrate time and time again. It is highly likely to be true because all our experience with science, knowledge, genetics or epidemics is that there is always a "patient zero". At that point, I am tempted myself to say that is't my own point that zooms past you, and I'm very sorry that I can't get it across. If there are "patient zero" or "inventor zero" for everything we know, then logically there has to be a "human zero". Claiming that we "know" otherwise in all caps is not going to address this argument.

Or just a few lightyears away in the center of our own galaxy.

God bless Slashdot, where ~26,000 light years is considered close.

Oh, sorry, I forgot to give that in standard units: Sagittarius A* is approximately 2*10^18 James Madison Memorial Building widths (ie. largest building in the Library of Congress complex) distant. I apologize for my initial faux pas.

So, what are these people up to?

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/05/-crunching-the-cosmos-will-intelligent-computers-trump-human-einsteins.html

I love all the CS majors with their NP-hard, can't do that theorems. Back when I was working at Boeing, we had a system that could take plain English engineering documents, parse them into a knowledge base and generate automated system tests. It was originally written by a couple of flight controls (mechanical) engineers. Part of my job was to maintain it. Every damned CS guru that came by told us that natural language recognition was too difficult a problem to solve. Except that we had been doing it for years.

Awaiting a CS major to jump in and start screaming at me in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

Its actually a massive rotating bar:
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/12/the-center-of-the-milky-way-is-a-massive-rotating-bar-of-stars.html

I can't find the link I was after but here is a similar one

I wouldn't use the word belief. Its just my observations and I'll be happy to change it given evidence. Without some external "magical" process the simplest explanation is that thought occurs within the brain. Thoughts appearing, without the processing of external inputs or internal feedback, sounds very similar to divine inspiration, and we are back at god. What do I have against god? Once god is used as an explanation it is no longer possible to have a reasonable conversation or argument.

While I have seen babies born, I can't speak about your personal experiences. However, The womb is not the dark silent cave you may imagine. There is plenty of inputs for the brain to start processing. I would rather search for the reason behind your second child's anger rather than believe it was due to an unexplainable spontaneous emotion.

... but the Chinese are actively doing it - as seen here in 2007.
Sometimes we to just shut up and do it else we'll have deja vu like solar energy or nuclear power

... but the Chinese are actively doing it - as seen here in 2007.
Sometimes we to just shut up and do it else we'll have deja vu like solar energy or nuclear power

Some more links. http://www.nanogallery.info/news/?id=8697&slid=news&type=anews http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/01/faster-than-the-speed-of-light-pulsars-seem-to-prove-yes.html

Methane has a GWP of 33 in the latest reports, not 20, over 100 years. It has a GWP of 72 over 20 years.

One cubic meter of methane hydrates at the sea floor expands to over 164 cubic meters of natural gas at the surface.

The methane being released from the world's oceans is estimated at 14 teragrams (about 15.4 tons) a year, half of which is from just the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. Researchers are pretty sure the reason it's matching the rest of the oceans is because the type of methane hydrates that we've been talking about are releasing gas and becoming increasingly unstable.

It seems some researchers blame releases from methane hydrates below the seas and below melting permafrost for past rapid warming trends. This is said to be the sort of warming feedback loop that carbon dioxide by itself probably couldn't trigger.

Do note the dates of some of these articles. This is recent reporting.

The short-term effects of methane are very important.

For one, you and I probably won't be worried about it personally in a century. For another, when you have methane estimated in the billions of tons in little sections of the ocean and it seems that a little warming gets that all released, things start to compound rapidly.

This rusty aging theory, that the reason people age is due to accumulated damage, is under serious scrutiny at this point.

Its really simple: (1) Evolution has no reason to further improve on designs after successful reproduction, (2) lots of old people competing for the same food supply is not good for reproduction.

There are clams that live to 400, turtles that are engaging in reproduction over 100 years old and trees that live for 5000 years.

In fact, aging in humans is rapidly accelerated in the following disorders, all genetic: Werner's (WS), Cockayne, and Hutchinson-Gilford's.

You might want to update yourself here:

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/05/is-aging-an-acc.html

I myself think that death when we experience it from aging is a desirable genetic trait, and to defeat aging we will have to learn more about epigenetics and clever gene promotion and expression.

Or you can continue to believe in biological rust and tattered telomeres, which of course is junk science.

Why would robots poison each other? http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/01/will-robots-evo.html Scientists Show Robots Evolving to Exhibit Good & Evil "Even more amazing is the emergence of cheats and martyrs. Transistorized traitors emerged which wrongly identified poison zone as food, luring their trusting brethren to their doom before scooting off to silently charge in a food zone - presumably while using a mechanical claw to twirl a silicon carving of a handlebar moustache."

You're all wrong. The correct answer is a flying cube.

So according to you, the Bush government, that was pretty clearly anti-Global Warming in its policy agenda, completely suppressed any pro-Global Warming research in the USA. In fact, Bush political apparatchiks did try to control reports on studies performed by US government climate scientists, but there was still a lot of research funded and conducted that contradicted the government's ideological position, in spite of the political influence. So you're wrong twice: about which way the political influence affected Global Warming research in the USA, and about the extent to which opinions contradictory to the politically-preferred scenario were suppressed.

Well, there's a problem with that theory.

Sunspots are at a near-historic low. See this NASA graph at http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml for a bit of an understanding. The 11yr sunspot cycle that was supposed to peak around 2012 isn't there. See http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/06/the-sunspot-mys.html for speculation.

The holes may be old Osborne I's, connected via acoustically-coupled modems, that are sucking the life away from the magnetosphere. Adam Osborne would have been proud.

This actually is a phenomenon known as the overview effect. Space travelers often report a transcendental sense of connectedness.

For those of us in the cheap seats, LSD can do this too.

Apparently motivated by his recent trip into space and perhaps has found a higher purpose while orbiting so high above the earth.

This actually is a phenomenon known as the overview effect. Space travelers often report a transcendental sense of connectedness.

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum,
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on,
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
- Augustus de Morgan, A Budget of Paradoxes

While I haven't heard of a virus hijacking another virus, I have heard of researchers hijacking viruses to do good things.

It's probably the "overview effect". Some people get a mild version of it looking out of an airplane window, or even just looking up at the stars. From what I gather, it's like meditating. Dozens of astronauts have been similarly affected, though Mitchell seems to be the most vocal.

Actually, many people would disagree with you that there is enough clean water for everyone. Many places in the US are supposedly running out of clean water. Take a gander at this page.

40,000 sun masses isn't big. Look at this baby: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/03/18-billion-suns.html That black hole is as big as some galaxies, and it is still happily gobbling up additional suns. Good we are nowhere near it.

All NASA has to do is say they found indicators of [terr'rists | oil | bin Laden's hideout | WMDs ] on Mars and they're good to go.

And for a manned facility, they can pitch Mars as the next Gitmo. Think of the security!

Well, unless you are a creationist see Mystery of Antarctica's 15-Million Year-Old Lake.

Recent observations that time appears to be slowing could in actuality be showing that the computational load required for simulating our region of space-time is increasing, thereby causing events propagated from distant automata to appear to be running faster than what we consider realtime.