Domain: geotimes.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to geotimes.org.
Comments · 17
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Re:It's about time
Absolute rubbish! This 'story' goes alllll the way back to 2007 when they realized the measurements were incorrect. Goddard is recycling old news to spread FUD. He's an idiot for not doing the proper research!
Read it here http://www.geotimes.org/aug07/... -
Re:Of all the things to go extinct...
...why not mosquitos?!!! The most vile, annoying creatures to ever to roam the earth!
Seems you need some education about mosquitos and "vile creatures". Mosquitos are far from vile - they are actually a VERY IMPORTANT part of the ecosystem. Without the little mosquitos, you would have less food to eat never mind all the birds and other critters that would go extinct as mosquitos are their core diet.
If you want "vile creatures" that serve no purpose but to be parasites and generally vile, please consult the following photos of some real vile creatures. Enjoy and be happy that mosquitos are the most vile thing you have to deal with.
http://www.geotimes.org/june08/feature_salt2.jpg http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jYoQxXygln4/T4b1e9A8eVI/AAAAAAAAAfw/55tk8GXFD-0/s1600/Roundworms+1.jpg
http://www.gearfuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Guinea-Worms.jpg
http://www.stanford.edu/class/humbio103/ParaSites2006/Loiasis/Images/loa_loa_eye.gif
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Re:Science =! Public Policy
Grow up.
http://www.physorg.com/news162795064.html
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/06/james_hansen_abusing_the_publi.html
http://www.geotimes.org/aug07/article.html?id=WebExtra081607_2.html
http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/2007/09/hansen_frees_the_code.htmlBut since you're convinced Hansen is on the up-and-up (or simply preprogrammed to agree with him because of which political side you're on), I doubt the truth will change your mind.
After all, you're one of the same greenpeace retards who stops us from having a sane Nuclear power policy (and thus forces us to burn coal and oil).
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Re:Fat - CO2?
What is most feared is a runaway greenhouse effect, in which there simply isn't enough re-uptake of CO2 to counterbalance the domino effect, thus heat and kinetic energy keep going up and up. Ocean levels will most certainly rise, and at an increasing rate, which will lead to the increasing loss of coastal regions, large-scale loss of property, displacement of millions of people throughout the world, and various related crises.
Actually, the absolute worst case effect is if the increase in temperature & acidification of the oceans causes all of the methane hydrate stored at depth in the oceans to be released all at once (where methane is 100x more effective at causing greenhouse effects than CO2). There is some historical evidence that indicates that this has occurred in the past, and is correlated with mass extinction events (although the article that I linked to seems to be a little skeptical.
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Re:deniers come out in 3 .. 2 .. 1 ..
Does the Gulf Stream actually have much of an impact on North America?
Pretty darn likely. (Neat picture, BTW).
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Re:Millions of dollars?
Bits and pieces of the moon come up for sale every once in a while. Sometimes legitimate, usually less so. A couple of links on the subject
http://www.geotimes.org/sept02/NN_moon.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0617/p14s02-stss.htmlmention a Sotheby's auction of (very small) Russian rocks; the "Goodwill Rocks" which the United States gave to each country in the world which have sometimes ended up "for sale;" and a short length of adhesive tape with moondust stuck to it. I also recall reading of a bag used to carry some Apollo mission's moon rocks from some point A to point B - the bag was sold as surplus, and the owner realized that the black dirt inside it was legally acquired moon dust.
Taken together, there's some ability to determine the going price. A million dollars a gram (as the CS Monitor article suggests) seems a bit high to me, but it is in line with these other sales and attempted sales.
TSG
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Re:Simplest solution of all...
Where? And how do you plan on making them grow? There is a lot of open space in Africa, but a large amount of it's not fit for trees.
And if your solution is to water them, it instantly becomes infeasible. Plus you need to make sure that poor people don't cut them down and burn them, farm the land, or sell the timber.
Not to mention that trees might not fix the problem. -
Re:i've got a bad feeling about this...
And many people were duped about global warming. Suddenly they will have to "recalculate" the thickness of polar ice sheets which of course won't be reported. Such as this: http://www.geotimes.org/aug07/article.html?id=WebExtra081607_2.html. As far as predicting things, right now we do not have the tools to really get a handle on global warming. But you can bet some people will get rich off it, like selling elixirs to naive people, but they will drink it down because it makes them feel good.
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Peer review, or clique acceptance?I think the idea is interesting, and a good way for people publishing papers to help a peer review group understand what they are looking at, but at the same time the quote The formulaic, technical style of scientific writing, the heavy jargonization and the need for careful elaboration often renders reading papers a laborious effort. struck me. Scientific method has always been the fundamental difference between science, fact, and belief. What I've found over the years is that there is more bad science in peer reviewed papers now than there was. In this day of the word processor and CYA get funded politics, there is a lot more to read, but less meat on the bone (so to speak). That being said there is still a LOT of good science going on, and I wouldn't step back to the days of carbon paper and typewriters for a second. For example - When I taught physics, drawing a conclusion from a graph or statistical results, but failing to provide an equation or the work or all of the data that one used to come up to such a conclusion resulted in a failing grade. Period. Yet peer reviewed articles by Mann, or the recent GISS fiasco point to a failure of peer review. These articles should have never made it to print.
Video and Audio presentations should go with each paper to a reviewing publication if it helps reviewers and laymen. More importantly the reviewers need to be able to remember their primary motivation. To be skeptical in the name of science.
cluge
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Re:They almost have the right idea
I'm not losing sleep over moonquakes. Remember the network was sensitive enough that it was detecting these quakes anywhere on the Moon. Reading up, it appears that they detected thousands of small quakes (the 28 quakes are a special high risk category called "shallow moonquakes"). One also has some risk from nearby meteorite impacts. But at a count, it appears that there were seven quakes between 5 and 5.5 magnitude over a five year period. That's extremely low frequency compared to Earth, but each quake propagates much further (its energy isn't absorbed by water or a highly fractured crust). Still you're talking a magnitude 5 quake every year Moon-wide. If we make the assumption that the frequency of quakes is inversely proportional to the energy of the quake, then magnitude 6+ should occur around once a decade, and magnitude 7+ about once a century, Moon-wide.
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Re:Not just Sweden
I like the methan hydrate where it is, deep down at ocean floors. We better not dig that up and disperse it in our environment.
Hear hear! It's bad enough that this might be pursued as yet another massive source of carbon, the methane hydrate itself is thought to hold the potential for catastrophic climate change: http://www.geotimes.org/nov04/feature_climate.html
Leave it alone, we have enough problems. -
deep injection wastes cause earthquakes
I grew up in Leadville, Colorado. Just up the canyon was a pair of angry, grumpy old miners whose hobby mine had collapsed during an earthquake. In a Monty Python-esque manner, they rebuilt it and it collapsed again during an earthquake, and they realized that it was exactly one month after the first collapse. They rebuilt it AGAIN and it collapsed again during an earthquake... one month later. So they started tracking earthquakes. One or more small earthquakes each month, like clockwork. Other people were doing the same thing, and finally tracked it to Rocky Mountain Arsenal, which was dumping wastes (according to rumor, tens of tons of nerve gas) by injecting them into a 5000 meter deep well. Let me make that clear: they were pumping some of the deadliest toxins known into the ground, and causing earthquakes. How messed-up is that? Here's a page about other deep injection-caused earthquakes. A number of geologists have made the case that we should start doing this on purpose to trigger small earthquakes and relieve the fault line strain that later produces a big earthquake, but the liability concerns for suits from injuries received in a small, intentional earthquake are too great. I think John McPhee talked about this in his book "The Control Of Nature." If he didn't, he should have.
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Re:Doom and Gloom
Actually, we are not "still coming out of the last ice age". Were this a "normal" interglacial period, we would be well into the cooling phase of the next ice age. By the early part of the 20th century we had modified the Earth's atmosphere sufficiently to prevent it from entering another glaciation. The substantial increase in CO2 since has moved us off the scale entirely.
There is now a wide spread thawing of Siberian lakes http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18725
1 24.500 that may add billions of tons of methane to the atmosphere. Methane is a much more potent green house gas than CO2. There are more such positive feedback loops to come -- if the ocean warms sufficiently, deep sea methane hydrates will thaw and release enormous quantities of methane into the atmosphere (trillions of tons of methane are locked up in such methane hydrates). Such a release of methane into the atmosphere will cause a catastrophic increase in temperatures. Some paleontologists believe that precisely such releases of methane were the final acts in processes of global warming that caused the marine mass extinction at the Paleocene/Eocene boundary and the much larger mass extinction at the end of the Permian.http://www.geotimes.org/nov04/feature_clim ate.html.But of course all Bush lovers and libertarian ideologues know that the melting Arctic ice is just a socialist plot. After all, we know that government regulation is always bad, so if a problem requires government regulation to solve, that problem must not actually exist.
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Re:Water City
The idea has already been proposed in Jordan and Israel, and if it weren't for the Intifada and other elements of regional instability, might already have been implemented.
As for Libya, the Qattara Depression is about 7,000 square miles in area. For comparison, the Mediterranean Sea is about 970,000 square miles. -
Re:Great
Studies (with all aircraft grounded for 3 days) after September 11 2001, showed noticeable climate differences during those days. These show that (a) at least some of the effects are reversible (b) relatively small changes can have a relatively big impact on the climate relatively quickly.
Here is one news article about this, there are lots more out there just waiting to be searched for. -
Re:amazingly cool
[There is no justification for the "was never like Titan life" assertion.]
Of course there is. There is not the slightest evidence that Earth-based life was ever in any way adapted to living at -200C in hydrocarbon lakes.
Absence of evidence is not the same as evidence to the contrary. There was no evidence that life would exist around hydrothermal vents either, and most biologists would have considered the idea preposterous until it was actually found: after all, people thought they had lots of good reasons to think that enzymes couldn't possibly work at those temperatures. And, in fact, there is evidence that bacteria can live in hydrocarbon lakes and break down long, saturated hydrocarbons into methane.
Lipid cell membranes. Mitochondria. Its all water-based!
Quite to the contrary: biochemistry happens a lot in non-polar environments; water just makes up most of the mass of a cell because there happens to be a lot of it around. A biochemistry in which most of the mass of the cell is non-polar, with a few polar pockets, seems no more implausible than a biochemistry in which most of the mass of the cell is polar, with a few non-polar pockets. (It will be interesting to see what the composition of the bacteria living in oil is.)
Exactly! That is why Titan is not going to reveal that much about the Solar System as a whole.
Well, I'm glad you have it all worked out by ESP; NASA should just hire you instead of sending useless probes to moons just because they have the completely mistaken belief that doing so tells them something about the composition about the original solar system.
Seriously: would you care to explain why you think that Titan does not preserve the environment of the early solar system (except for temperature)? For Io, Europa, and all the other moons, we know why. But Titan seems to have enough of an atmosphere, seems to be far enough from the sun and Saturn, to have preserved its original environment, as evidenced by the fact that it still has hydrocarbons on its surface. The only thing it is is cold--not so cold that all the stuff has frozen, but cold enough for it not to escape. -
Fire the Department of the Interior's IT staff...
The FAA is under the auspices of the US Department of the Interior, aren't they? You know, the same department that was ordered by a court to take ALL of their systems off line because they were apparently unable to secure them? TWICE? (No, wait, the latter link says THREE times, most recently March 2004...!)
Is there some secret plot to make them look bad, or is the Department of the Interior riddled with incompetence? I certainly don't feel real secure about the safety of our airlines right now - and it's got nothing to do with "terrorists"...
(Not to say that terrorism isn't a real concern, but I'm somewhat less worried that their intentional plots will slip through observation by the authorities than "accidental" screwed up software being deployed by the FAA...)