Slashdot Mirror

they'd better hurry up

We still have a very limited ability to burn hydrocarbons.

Earth has been both much cooler and much warmer than it presently is.

However the data we have indicates that it has never increased this rapidly before for this long, as it has since the beginning of the industrial era. This is the entire problem. The surprise here is not the earth warming, the surprise is a rapid shift away from the climate human life has become accustomed to.

There is nothing to indicate that these warming and cooling trends won't continue and there's nothing to indicate that had we never evolved on this planet (and thus never 'polluted') that the Earth wouldn't still be the temperature it currently is.

I am not sure what this sentence is trying to say. If you are trying to say there is nothing to indicate humankind's existence has not directly effected the climate, this is flat out wrong. There is, in fact, a mountain of both evidence and theory saying not only has specific human action effected the behavior of the atmosphere, but describing an exact process by which it happened.

This evidence has to be satisfied somehow. If not the hypothesis reached by scientific consensus, then how? Are you claiming you can explain the climate shifts if the human-produced increase in carbon dioxide levels that have accompanied them are just a coincidence? Are you claiming you can explain how, if our basic understanding of how carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere and what it does and is so fundamentally wrong that everything we know about climate models is false, jpw these things happen in truth? If your answer is that these things are unknowable, this isn't a good answer. Science is based on the assumption that we can, in fact, find some plausible explanation for natural phenomena if we only look. So far this assumption has held extremely well.

You can claim the evidence is insufficient but to claim the evidence doesn't exist...? This seems to say you aren't interested in whether the evidence is sufficient or not, but rather you simply desire to wish modern science away.

To attribute global temperature change to humans is egoism on our part.

Single species can, and have, drastically changed the earth's atmosphere before. Humans are still not history's biggest polluters, what the blue-green algae did is still worse.

Terraforming is not really that hard.

hurricanes

A poor example since a hurricane's strength is directly linked to the ocean temperature underneath it.

Surprised are we that the sun can have such a dramatic affect on our ozone layer?

I do not see anyone reacting with surprise to this except you, and the effect described here doesn't appear to be dramatic enough except on small timescales to even begin to explain the behavior of the ozone layer over the last century.

Check this
you need bigger wing span to generate more power, also the less complicated design, less maintenance time. With large number of small things... although they might be cheap enough not to care about that.

There are reasons behind the madness. Current administration has put more funding behind alternate fuels after Clinton cut funding so they are still playing catch-up. Facts following are from here.

It has been cheaper since the 50s to import oil than it is to mine our own (not to mention we have a reserve if others run dry). Oil only comprises of 40% of our energy use. The other 60% is our economy shifting away from this dependence. The dependence exists because...basically....half the worlds oil is in the middle east. It isn't a political issue like Kerry wanted to present it...its a matter of where the oil is physically and you can't do anything about that (see pie chart on link above).

I must have a very dull imagination, though: since there's already uranium scattered over Texas, the most exciting thing I can think of is that some uranium fuel might fall on someone and smash their house. I can't even figure out how that one would happen, either, since nobody would be bringing the fuel back down (when the reentry vehicle might fail over populated areas), they'd just be sending it up (when the launch vehicle might fail over ocean).

If its anything like my fridge, they'll find new life alright! But seriously, I think its funny how many "living fossils" were discovered by accident. Examples: ratfish, coelacanth, wollemi pine, etc.

How about having an orbit that lies along the same plane as all the 8 "major planets"?

How about having an orbit that has a low eccentricity and does not intersect the orbit of a "major planet"?

Kosmoi and earthsci.org have some good basic info.

In each of these cases Pluto would stand out as an exception.

The Nakhla meteorite you are referring to killed just one dog. Several people have been injured by meteorites. (I remember at least one local newspaper story of a guy who got a fist-sized meteorite through his windshield at 80 km/h, and was injured when he drove off the road.)

A meteor does not necessarily reach ground, it may burn entirely in the atmosphere. In contrast, a meteorite hits the ground.

In 1908 the Tunguska meteor injured several people, one of them died a few days later. Dozens of reindeer got killed, and they were 30 km away. I assume some wild animals closer to the site were also killed, but the site was searched only in 1920s so we have no record on that. The blast was equivalent to 15 Megatonnes, so only one dead human is really good luck.

A meteorite of not much larger mass could have caused far more widespread destruction. I could be off on my facts here, but I remember reading about a similar event taking place in Russia, devastating several many acres of open forest. Should it have impacted a city, the city would have been leveled.

I remember reading about a similar event taking place in Russia, devastating several many acres of open forest.
I believe you are referring to Tunguska?? That was a very devastating meteorite, Seismic vibrations were picked up at 1000km away!

What about the Earth's natural propensity toward cyclical global climate changes? I'm not saying humans are not contributing to global warming, but we've had several ice ages (and that mini ice age in the 1700's?) followed by globally warm periods. How about this passage from earthsci.org...

Global Warming in the Past From out study of glaciations in the past we know that climate can change as result of natural processes, both becoming warmer and colder than present. Although these climatic fluctuations appear to be caused by eccentricities in the Earth's orbit, it is interesting to note that during glaciations in the past the concentrations of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere were lower, atmospheric dust was higher, and the Earth's albedo was higher, all of these factors could have contributed to cooler climates. Similarly, during past interglacial episodes, the atmosphere contained less dust, higher concentrations of greenhouse gases, and the Earth had a lower albedo, all of which contribute to warmer climates.

Apparently, the Dr Rudolf Diesel ran his original engines on peanut oil

HH
--